via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
The appendix has evolved in different animal species at least 29 times, according to this SciShow video, which means it probably serves a function. Scientists who studied appendixes in animals have come to the conclusion that it is a part of the immune system. In humans, the appendix is full of immune cells, including T cells, B cells, and natural killer cells, and good gut bacteria.
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via Interesting Literature
‘Blue and Green’ is a pair of short sketches – each only one paragraph in length – which appeared in Virginia Woolf’s 1921 collection, Monday or Tuesday. These two sketches are less ‘stories’ in the traditional sense than impressionistic prose-poems; nevertheless, below we reproduce both ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’, and attempt a short ‘summary’ of each.
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via Unesco Courier by Jordi Busqué, photojournalist based in South America
No more than four people are allowed to be on the structure simultaneously.
Every year in the first week of June, the inhabitants of Peru’s Quehue district gather to restore the rope suspension bridge that connects the two banks of the Apurímac river. This centuries-old secular Andean tradition has been inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2013.
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NOTE: There are no images that show the depth underneath the bridge.
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via Ancient Origins by Ed Whelan
Entrance to the Aleppo Citadel Source: Shariff Che'Lah / Adobe Stock
A quick look up of Aleppo on any search-engine will bring up hundreds of articles about the conflict in Syria and sadly the name has become a byword for the horrors of war. The country though, has a long, remarkable history and is home to many outstanding archaeological and historical monuments. The Citadel of Aleppo, which played an important role in the history of the region for centuries, is one of the most famous.
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via 3 Quarks Daily by Azra Raza: Kelly Grovier in BBC News:
Every age invents the language that it needs. Posterity will determine what it says about our own era that we have felt compelled to craft such words and phrases as ‘defriended’, ‘photobomb’, ‘flash mob’, ‘happy slapping’ and ‘selfie’. When our forebears in the 1850s found themselves at a loss for a term to describe the new cultural phenomenon of holding seances to summon souls from the great beyond, it was a little-known writer, John Dix, who recorded the emergence of a fresh coinage: “Every two or three years,” Dix wrote in 1853, “the Americans have a paroxysm of humbug … at the present time it is Spiritual-ism”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Dix’s comment is the first published use of the word ‘Spiritualism’, in the sense of channelling voices and visions from an invisible realm. Despite Dix’s suggestion that Spiritualism was likely a fleeting fad (“a paroxysm of humbug”), the modern psyche had well and truly been bitten by the bug. Before long, the existence of spirits with whom it was possible to communicate in the here-and-now was being passionately investigated as plausible by everyone from the leading evolutionary scientist Alfred Russel Wallace (who was eventually convinced) to the celebrated novelist and champion of empirical deduction, Arthur Conan Doyle (who needed little persuading).
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via the Big Think blog by Paul Ratner
The TESS satellite captures rare images of a cataclysmic event in a faraway galaxy.
- TESS, a NASA planet-hunting satellite takes images of a black hole shredding apart a star.
- This phenomenon, called a tidal disruption event, is very rare.
- The star was the size of our sun.
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via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson
Over at Hackaday, the user sjm4306 has posted some pretty cool projects in the past, including a Nixie-tube clock and a tiny IV-21 VFD clock.
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via Ancient Origins by Nathan Falde
Abstract illustration of high energy particle. Credit: LanaPo / Adobe Stock
The IceCube Observatory carries the distinction of being the most remote astronomical facility on Earth. Anchored deeply in the ice of Antarctica, in the very definition of the middle of nowhere, the IceCube installation features a high-tech particle neutrino detector designed to search for one of the most elusive particles in the universe.
Neutrinos are the subatomic cousins of electrons. They’re ghostly shadows with no electric charge and an infinitesimal mass. They avoid interactions with matter, which makes them extremely difficult to detect.
Nevertheless, we are swimming in an invisible soup of them every moment of our lives. They are one of the essential elements of creation and have been here since the start. Many astrophysicists believe that dark matter is comprised of primordial neutrinos left over from shortly after the Big Bang, which if true would make them the most common type of particle in the universe.
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via Interesting Literature
‘I am no poet,’ the scientist Michael Faraday once said, ‘but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.’ Although they’re often viewed as being at odds – such as in John Keats’s famous worry about Isaac Newton unweaving the rainbow through explaining the colour spectrum – science and poetry have often been bedfellows. Since the metaphysical poets such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell some four hundred years ago, whose work incorporated scientific ideas, poets over the last few centuries have engaged with scientific discoveries, questions, and ideas. Here are ten of the very best poems about science, technology, and machinery.
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posted by S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily: Leila Sloman in Scientific American:
Golden ratio is one of the most famous irrational numbers, which run on forever and cannot be expressed accurately without infinite space. Now scientists have proved a conjecture about how to use fractions to approximate them. Credit: Getty Images
Most people rarely deal with irrational numbers—it would be, well, irrational, as they run on forever, and representing them accurately requires an infinite amount of space. But irrational constants such as π and √2 – numbers that cannot be reduced to a simple fraction – frequently crop up in science and engineering. These unwieldy numbers have plagued mathematicians since the ancient Greeks; indeed, legend has it that Hippasus was drowned for suggesting irrationals existed. Now, though, a nearly 80-year-old quandary about how well they can be approximated has been solved.
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