1. Your Favorite Children’s Books Translated Into Latin
Everything’s better in Latin. Including, or maybe especially, things you already pretty much know by heart in English, like your favorite children’s books. As sometime Latin scholars ourselves, and as general lovers of word play, we enjoy these translations for both their entertainment and academic value. But if you are a student of Latin, don’t forget the most important rule, passed down through generations of Latin scholars: Semper Ubi Sub Ubi.
2. 21 Scathingly Witty Insults By Famous People
3. Michelangelo’s David ‘could collapse due to high-speed train building’
The statue is riddled with tiny cracks, particularly in the ankles of the boy warrior, and could collapse as a result of vibrations from the 1.4 billion euro project, which is due to start in the summer.
The threat of serious damage being done to one of the world’s most famous statues has prompted calls for it to be moved to a purpose-built museum away from the construction work.
4. Alexander Graham Bell’s Delightfully Weird Sketchbooks
fect of a potent pain-relieving drug, a brain imaging study at Oxford University has shown.In contrast, positive expectations of treatment doubled the natural physiological or biochemical effect of the opioid drug among the healthy volunteers in the study.
6. 10 Cliches That are Older Than You Think
7. When did we become so enamoured of unpleasantness?
More importantly, when did we start automatically accepting it as truth, particularly in literature? The world is, of course, often quite unpleasant, and any brainlessly pain-free book purporting to show truth can and should be dismissed as unrealistic contrivance. But while contrived cruelty may seem more artful than contrived sentiment, it’s still contrivance.
8. 9 Spectacular Sculpture Gardens
9. Defense lawyers swear by gimmick of having defendants wearing glasses at trial
Accused felons hoping to beat the rap are increasingly using the “nerd defense” - wearing glasses at trial to come off as less menacing to the jury.Defense lawyers swear by the gimmick, believing the right spectacles can make a sinister-looking murder suspect seem like a perfect gentleman.
“Glasses soften their appearance so that they don’t look capable of committing a violent crime,” said veteran lawyer Harvey Slovis, who coaches clients on what to wear in court.
10. 10 Coolest Future City Concepts
11. Researchers convince people they have three arms—then threaten one with a knife
A knife-wielding researcher is bearing down on your right hand—or is it your hand? You see three arms in front of you, and you can feel your palms dampen with fear-induced perspiration. But is it your right hand the kitchen knife is plunging toward, or a false, rubber right hand?
12. Image of the Week: The Book Surgeon
Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.
13. Sleeping Giants: 12 Sky-High Abandoned Buildings
14. New research suggests our brains delete information at an ‘extraordinarily high’ rate
The mysteries of the brain may be virtually endless, but a team of researchers from two institutes in Göttingen, Germany now claim to have an answer for at least one question that has remained a puzzle: just how fast does the brain forget information? According to the new model of brain activity that the researchers have devised, the answer to that is one bit per active neuron per second. As Fred Wolf of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization further explains, that “extraordinarily high deletion rate came as a huge surprise,” and it effectively means that information is lost in the brain as quickly as it can be delivered — something the researchers say has “fundamental consequences for our understanding of the neural code of the cerebral cortex.”
15. Infographic of the Week: How long do animals live?
16. South Korea is about to build the largest ship in the world
Starting in 2013, the largest cargo ships in the world will be rolling off the assembly line and onto the water. Shipping and oil drilling company Maersk has just ordered the largest ship in the world to be built by Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuiling and Marine Manufacturing. It will be a cargo ship that’s 400 meters long, a much larger version of the already-vast ships pictured here.
17. List of former atheists and agnostics
18. Who’s the guilty poodle?
19. 13 Most Famous Trains in the World’s History
20. What we do better without other people around
In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at worst, and are often presumed to be suffering from social anxiety, boredom, and alienation.But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking.
21. World’s Top 10 Cleanest Cities
22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
23. Researchers document the first case of ‘beat deafness’
The Go-Go’s had a 1982 hit record with “We Got the Beat,” but a 23-year-old man named Mathieu never got their message. Researchers have identified Mathieu as the first documented case of beat deafness, a condition in which a person can’t feel music’s beat or move in time to it.Mathieu flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody, unlike people who don’t dance particularly well but generally move in sync with a musical beat, according to a team led by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Isabelle Peretz, both of the University of Montreal. What’s more, Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune, the researchers report in a paper that will appear in Neuropsychologia.
24. Top 10 Lesser Known Jimmy Stewart Movies
25. Herring Break Wind to Communicate
In polite society, flatulence is often a social faux pas—especially when issued deliberately. But in the world of fish, group “raspberry-blowing” sessions appear to perform an important social role.This intriguing idea comes from scientists who discovered that herring create a mysterious underwater noise by farting. Researchers suspect herring hear the bubbles as they’re expelled, helping the fish form protective shoals at night. It’s the first ever study to suggest fish communicate by breaking wind.
26. 12 Delicious Edible Insects
27. Better Book Titles of the Week - Henry David Thoreau: Walden or Life in the Woods
28. How-To of the Week: Make Nice Smelling Cleaning Products at Home
29. More Reasons to Be Nice: It’s Less Work for Everyone
30. 10 Most Notorious Mafia Bosses on Earth
31. Would government be better if some politicians were chosen at random?
We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an “efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.
32. 10 Greatest Works of Graffiti Guerrilla Marketing
33. Inception remade as a 60-second Victorian woodcut animation
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