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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/This-image-taken-in-2000-by-the-Hubble-Space-Telescope-and-released-by-NASA-reveals-the-black-hole-powered-core-of-a-nearby-active-galaxy.-AFP-Photo.jpeg

A team of physicists has found evidence to support an idea long theorized by philosophers and stoners alike that the universe might actually be one big holographic projection.

Theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed in 1997 that gravity is the result of vanishingly small, vibrating strings that that exist in nine dimensions of space and one of time.

If that were the case, then the universe would essentially be a hologram – a simpler, flatter cosmos without gravity – that is perceived much the same way that Plato described in his Allegory of the Cave.

“The work culminated in the last decade, and it suggests, remarkably, that all we experience is nothing but a holographic projection of processes taking place on some distant surface that surrounds us,” wrote physicist Brian Greene, of Columbia University. “You can pinch yourself, and what you feel will be real, but it mirrors a parallel process taking place in a different, distant reality.”​
 
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/120513_Mehr_KidsRoom_605.jpg
“More than 80 percent of American adults think that music improves children’s grades or intelligence,” said Samuel Mehr, a Harvard Graduate School of Education doctoral student working in the lab of Elizabeth Spelke. Instead, Mehr found that music training had no effect on the cognitive abilities of young children.


Children get plenty of benefits from music lessons. Learning to play instruments can fuel their creativity, and practicing can teach much-needed focus and discipline. And the payoff, whether in learning a new song or just mastering a chord, often boosts self-esteem.

But Harvard researchers now say that one oft-cited benefit — that studying music improves intelligence — is a myth.

Though it has been embraced by everyone from advocates for arts education to parents hoping to encourage their kids to stick with piano lessons, a pair of studies conducted by Samuel Mehr, a Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) doctoral student working in the lab of Elizabeth Spelke, the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology, found that music training had no effect on the cognitive abilities of young children. The studies are described in a Dec. 11 paper published in the open-access journal PLoS One.

“More than 80 percent of American adults think that music improves children’s grades or intelligence,” Mehr said. “Even in the scientific community, there’s a general belief that music is important for these extrinsic reasons. But there is very little evidence supporting the idea that music classes enhance children’s cognitive development.”​
- read the full article Muting the Mozart effect (from The Harvard Gazette)​
 
evesdream said:
Those Victorians. They couldn't smile in photos, but they were so full of sentimentality and emotion. Some of the pictures made me laugh, but it's pretty touching the amount of trouble they went through to capture pure memories of their children and other loved ones.
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Yuck Yuck Yuck

It was the longer exposure time needed to capture the image.
 
http://www.kuzeydoga.org/images/kurtvericili.jpg

Wolves are being tracked for the first time in Turkey by KuzeyDoga Society and University of Utah, with the support of National Geographic Society, the Christensen Fund, the Whitley Fund, and Turkey’s Directorate of Nature Conservation and National Parks. Since October 2011, cutting edge GPS/GSM/UHF/VHF transmitting collars have been placed on wolves that are among the most difficult animals to be safely caught and released. These transmitters send the GPS co ordinates of the wolves as SMS messages to our cell phones, which means we get text messages from wolves. The data have enabled us to calculate home ranges of wolves for the first time in Turkey. We will also use these data to estimate wolf populations in the region. According to one estimate, Turkey has 7000 wolves, but this is likely to be an overestimate. We are already finding that wolves use much bigger areas than thought, sometimes exceeding 5000 square kilometers. This means that there are fewer wolves in Turkey than previously thought.

Until now, eight remote-tracking collars and three radio collars have been placed on on wolves caught by the KuzeyDoga team in the Sarikamis-Allahuekber Mountains National Park of Kars in eastern Turkey. The first two collared wolves were named “Kuzey” and “Doga”. The transmitters on the collars use a SIM card to regularly send their GPS coordinates as SMS messages to KuzeyDoga’s scientists by using cell phone network coverage. The transmitters have the latest GPS/GSM/UHF/VHF technology, obviating the need for satellite transmitters. The wolves can be tracked “near real-time” with the detailed data obtained from the transmitters. If needed, the transmitters can send the locations of the wolves as SMS messages every hour. If there is no cell phone coverage, the wolves can be tracked with “old-school” VHF antenna and receiver and the data can be downloaded from up to a kilometer away using a UFH or VHF downloading unit. The collars are programmed to fall exactly one year after capture.
​
- read the full article Turkey’s Wolves Are Texting Their Travels to Scientists (from National Geographic)​
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/12/money-dollars.jpg

Fashion comes at a price. But who knew that it would claim our entire system of money?

Since American money was consolidated into a single system of currency in the late 1800s, U.S. dollars have been printed on a unique cotton blend paper. That paper has been supplied by a single company, Crane, for more than a century. And Crane relied on scraps of denim sold in bulk by the garment industry for its cotton.

The company bleached and processed the unwanted fabric, then rewove the fibers into the George Washingtons and Benjamins that graced our wallets. About 30 percent of Crane's cotton came from leftover denim, making it one of the largest single source of the fibers, according to Jerry Rudd, managing director of global sourcing. The rest of the cotton came from a hodgepodge of other textile wastes.

But something strange began to happen in the 1990s: Denim became tainted.
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The stretchy fabric commonly known as spandex (and trademarked as Lycra) had been invented in the 1960s for use in women's lingerie. By the 1990s, the fashion world had discovered that blending it with denim created a curve-hugging -- and yet still forgiving -- fit. It never looked back.​
- read the full article How tight jeans almost ruined America’s money (from The Washington Post)​
 
I got a new $100 the other day and thought it was fake... like that foreign stuff. It has holograms, and watermarks, and colors... It's kinda pretty. I may frame it and hang it on the wall.
 
Started reading about polymer money and asked myself, "Why doesn't the U.S. switch away from paper bills?" Then I found a quote in this article:

Some are skeptical about the advantages of plastic money, including Douglas Crane, vice president of Crane and Co., the Massachusetts family company that is the exclusive supplier of the paper that U.S. currency is printed on. Crane doesn’t think the polymer bills are so hard to fake, and he says that Mexico’s switch to 20- and 50-peso polymer notes hasn’t been very successful. “They have a very high counterfeiting problem on the 50-peso note,” he says.​

:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

and another

:rolleyes:
 
REFUGE

18 Stories From the Syrian Exodus

About This Project

In October, Washington Post photographer Linda Davidson and I set off for Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon to report on the Syrian refugee crisis, one of the largest forced migrations of people since World War II.

Our goal was to document the size and complexity of the crisis, showing its effects on the lives of individual refugees as well as the lasting impacts on the countries hosting them.

We broke the crisis down into 18 personal stories of a wide range of refugees.

Linda and I interviewed and photographed widows and orphans, the wealthy, the wounded, children and the elderly, those surviving in camps, and those suffering in urban slums. To capture the full range of refugee life, we witnessed a birth and a wedding, classrooms and operating rooms, and we visited a cemetery where families mourned not just for their dead, but for the fact that they are buried in foreign soil.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/syrian-refugees/story/refuge/
 
Phelia said:
Isn't it wild?? But you know, I actually only read that article because Laurel posted it in here! :D

Basically, if I ever do anything cool or post anything interesting, the credit belongs to Laurel.
Click to expand...
Always and forever.
 
http://newshour.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/2013/11/14/roshan_recording_blog_main_horizontal.jpeg

CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- Walk the halls of Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, and the school doesn't appear out of the ordinary. You'd find the typical smells and the sprawling nondescript interior, as well as the persistent challenges confronting many American public high schools serving mostly low-income students.

Yet, there's a stark difference in the way instruction is delivered. Clintondale is the nation's first completely flipped school, meaning teachers record lectures for students to watch online outside of class, and what was once considered homework is now done during classtime, allowing students to work through assignments together and ask teachers for help if they run into questions.

In 2010, with more than half of the school's ninth graders failing math, science and English, principal Greg Green decided to adopt the flipped approach, a blended learning model that also relies heavily on outside videos like the popular Khan Academy and Ted Talks.

"We were desperate for change," said Green. And, he suggests, change has come.

Clintondale ranked among the worst 5 percent of all schools in the state of Michigan prior to the flip. But since then, the principal says failure rates for students have declined from 52 percent to 19 percent, and standardized test scores have risen steadily.​
 
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/files/2013/12/4933269629_5718f728a1_z.jpg

Everybody seems to be looking for a little peace and quiet these days. But even such a reasonable idea can go too far. The quietest place on earth, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota, is so quiet that the longest anybody has been able to bear it is 45 minutes.

Inside the room it’s silent. So silent that the background noise measured is actually negative decibels, -9.4 dBA. Steven Orfield, the lab’s founder, told Hearing Aid Know: “We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark – one person stayed in there for 45 minutes. When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.”​
- read the full article Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes (from Smithsonian Magazine)​
 
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2013/12/constantino/acd6ebadd.jpg

Ten years ago, when I started my career as an assistant district attorney in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, I viewed the American criminal justice system as a vital institution that protected society from dangerous people. I once prosecuted a man for brutally attacking his wife with a flashlight, and another for sexually assaulting a waitress at a nightclub. I believed in the system for good reason.

But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed – shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings – I often wondered if there was a side of the justice system that we never saw in the suburbs. Last year, I got myself arrested in New York City and found out.

On April 29, 2012, I put on a suit and tie and took the No. 3 subway line to the Junius Avenue stop in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. At the time, the blocks around this stop were a well-known battleground in the stop-and-frisk wars: Police had stopped 14,000 residents 52,000 times in four years. I figured this frequency would increase my chances of getting to see the system in action, but I faced a significant hurdle: Though I’ve spent years living and working in neighborhoods like Brownsville, as a white professional, the police have never eyed me suspiciously or stopped me for routine questioning. I would have to do something creative to get their attention.

As I walked around that day, I held a chipboard graffiti stencil the size of a piece of poster board and two cans of spray paint. Simply carrying those items qualified as a class B misdemeanor pursuant to New York Penal Law 145.65. If police officers were doing their jobs, they would have no choice but to stop and question me.

I kept walking and reached a bodega near the Rockaway Avenue subway station. Suddenly, a young black man started yelling at me to get out of Brownsville, presumably concluding from my skin color and my suit that I did not belong there. Three police officers heard the commotion and came running down the stairs. They reached me and stopped.

“What’s going on?” one asked.

“Nothing,” I told them.

“What does that say?” the officer interrupted me, incredulously, as the other two gathered around. I held the stencil up for them to read.

“What are you, some kind of asshole?” he asked.

I stood quietly, wondering whether they would arrest me or write a summons. The officers grumbled a few choice curse words and then ran down the stairs in pursuit of the young man. Though I was the one clearly breaking a law, they went after him.​
- read the full article I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System (from The Atlantic)​
 
Laurel said:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/files/2013/12/4933269629_5718f728a1_z.jpg

Everybody seems to be looking for a little peace and quiet these days. But even such a reasonable idea can go too far. The quietest place on earth, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota, is so quiet that the longest anybody has been able to bear it is 45 minutes.

Inside the room it’s silent. So silent that the background noise measured is actually negative decibels, -9.4 dBA. Steven Orfield, the lab’s founder, told Hearing Aid Know: “We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark – one person stayed in there for 45 minutes. When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.”​
- read the full article Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes (from Smithsonian Magazine)​
Click to expand...


You have no idea how much I'd want to be there, and be pissed off at myself when I moved.
 
Laurel said:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/files/2013/12/4933269629_5718f728a1_z.jpg

Everybody seems to be looking for a little peace and quiet these days. But even such a reasonable idea can go too far. The quietest place on earth, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota, is so quiet that the longest anybody has been able to bear it is 45 minutes.

​
Click to expand...

It is ONE of the world's quietest places. Anechoic chambers are rare but they exist in many research facilities. Back in the 1970s I was responsible for a building which had an anechoic chamber. Although mounted on vibration-deadening springs, a railway that ran underground 400 metres away caused enough detectable vibration to affect the most sensitive tests.

The really sensitive tests had to be scheduled around the railway timetable, or in the early hours of the morning when the trains weren't running.

When my company wanted to move its facilities, siting the new anechoic chamber was one of the most difficult problems to be considered because we also had heavy machinery that could produce ground-shaking vibration, heavy trucks, and a large number of vehicle movements. What we needed was a long thin site on stable geology and the anechoic chamber sited as far away from the machinery and traffic. The cost was prohibitive. After a long search we decided to stay where we were and keep buying railway timetables.
 
http://assets-s3.rollingstone.com/assets/images/embedded/1000x600/floridamurder-3-600x400-1387297042.jpg

You could tell it was going to be a huge party because almost nobody had heard of the kid who was throwing it. Word was that his name was Tyler Hadley, he attended Port St. Lucie High, and, most crucially, his parents were out of town. Where exactly Tyler's parents had traveled, or how far, no one seemed to know.
[...]
Tyler's friend Markey Phillips missed the party because he was visiting his grandparents in Chicago that weekend, but he had hung out with Tyler two nights earlier, playing video games and watching television at Markey's house. Tyler had "seemed pretty fine" that night. But two weeks before that they had been hanging out at Markey's house when Tyler blurted out, in the middle of a conversation, that he "wanted to kill his parents and have a big party after." Nobody had ever done that before, Tyler said — throw a huge party with the bodies still in the house.

"That's crazy," said Markey. He figured Tyler was trying to make a joke. Nobody ever took Tyler seriously when he talked about killing his parents.​
- read the full article Tyler Hadley's Killer Party (from Rolling Stone)​
 
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