An Orangutan observed eating medicinal plants and rubbing their juice on his wound. Very cool, but the claim that this is the first such case observed by scientists is absurd; I have written about this myself several times.
Lump of Tyrian purple dye found in Cumbria, England.
Kevin Drum complains about the belief that women's health care is somehow slighted, when there is now a lot of evidence that this is not so.
Spitalfields Life chronicles Beltane among east London's neopagans.
Vox reviews recent developments in longevity research.
Major article titled "Frequent Disturbances Enhanced the Resilience of Past Human Populations" published in Nature. It argues, by estimating long-term human populations from the amount of datable charcoal, that over time societies that experience regular catastrophes get better at surviving them. Interesting but I am not impressed because I don't think the archaeological data is good enough. As I have explained here before, estimating the size of human populations from archaeological data is very hard, even for 600 years ago, so I find these long timelines unpersuasive. (NY Times, Nature)
Among the African objects kept in Belgian museums is the skull of Lusinga Iwa Ng’ombe, who was killed in 1884 resisting Belgium's conquest of the Congo. Seems to me like maybe that should be repatriated? On the other hand, he is said to have been a slave trader. (NY Times, wikipedia, Royal Museum for Central Africa)
Iron Age necropolis found near Rome.
Before he created The Twilight Zone, Rod Sterling was a paratrooper in WW II, and a story he wrote about combat in the Phillipines is now being published. Like many others, Sterling started writing about the war to get it "out of his gut."
Dmitri Alperovitch, who predicted Putin's invasion of Ukraine, says Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan within four years.
Sam Bankman Fried was sent to prison after the FTX crypto exchange collapsed, for various actual financial crimes but really because he was thought to have lost billions of his customers' money. Now it turns out that they will get almost all of it back, and some investors will make a profit.
What did Assyrian artists mean when they carved, repeatedly, a lion, eagle, bull, fig tree and a plow on various temple walls?
Another nuclear power plant went into service this month in the US. Meanwhile wind energy production declined last year for the first time since the 1990s. Right now developers much prefer solar, and big plans for offshore wind have been scaled back or abandoned.
Fewer and fewer childred read for fun.
Fictional portrayals of palentologists Richard Owen, who was a very controversial figure in 19th-century Britain.
Ben Pentreath on tulips in his garden, with a trip to Copenhagen.
The ideology of Putin's Russia from Austrian Youtuber Kraut, 54 minutes but very intelligent and sophisticated.
Videos on Twitter/X of Russian tanks covered with extra armor to deter drones, which people are calling Turtle Tanks. It strikes me that in peacetime armies often buy lightly-armored vehicles saying they have superior mobility, but when a war starts the soldiers all start bolting on extra armor.
Crazy thread analyzing how many infantry fighting vehicles and APCs Russia has pulled out of storage since the war started: more than 4,000. On the other hand, they still have 10,000 left, although nobody know what their conditions is.
2 comments:
It argues, by estimating long-term human populations from the amount of datable charcoal, that over time societies that experience regular catastrophes get better at surviving them. Interesting but I am not impressed because I don't think the archaeological data is good enough. As I have explained here before, estimating the size of human populations from archaeological data is very hard, even for 600 years ago, so I find these long timelines unpersuasive.
There's also survivor bias. How many societies experienced regular catastrophes, up until one of those regular catastrophes destroyed them?
Fewer and fewer children read for fun.
When society allows libraries to come under attack (as they have been for well over a decade in this country) readership becomes imperiled.
It's not technology. Radio didn't kill reading. Television didn't kill reading. Video games didn't kill reading. Home computers didn't kill reading. The internet didn't kill reading. Tablet computers and social media aren't killing reading either.
It's organized right-wing opposition to libraries which is killing reading. Ask any librarian in the country. They've been trying to sound the alarm for years.
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