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"[R]ecently, Caleb Everett, a linguist at the University of Miami, made a surprising discovery that suggests the assortment of sounds in human languages is not so random after all. When Everett analyzed hundreds of different languages from around the world, as part of a study published today in PLOS ONE, he found that those that originally developed at higher elevations are significantly more likely to include ejective consonants. Moreover, he suggests an explanation that, at least intuitively, makes a lot of sense: The lower air pressure present at higher elevations enables speakers to make these ejective sounds with much less effort. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"[H]e found that 87 percent of the languages with ejectives were located in or near high altitude regions (defined as places with elevations 1500 meters or greater), compared to just 43 precent of the languages without the sound. Of all languages located far from regions with high elevation, just 4 percent contained ejectives. And when he sliced the elevation criteria more finely—rather... more... - Amira

"[Brent] Tully, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy (...) has mapped the universe in detail out to a distance of about 100 million light years. To put that in more human terms: Columbus’s maps of the New World described a land 3,000 miles from home, but Tully’s map extends 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles out. No wonder he is often referred to as a cosmic cartographer. By filling in the details, Tully has made it possible to discern the true structure of the universe: clusters of galaxies arranged into enormous filaments, bound together by invisible strands of dark matter, and tremendous lonely voids where galaxies are sparse." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. (...) The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley. (...) “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” - Amira

Linguists beware: dictionary, squib, nerd: These Are Among The Words That Make The NSA Think You’re A Terrorist http://au.businessinsider.com/nsa-pri... - Amira

Retouching : Alexis Persani Photography & conception : Léo Caillard - www.leocaillard.com - Amira

"The newest addition to human anatomy is just 15 microns thick, but its discovery will make eye surgery safer and simpler. Harminder Dua, a professor at the University of Nottingham, recently found a new layer in the human cornea, and he's calling it (can you guess?) Dua's layer. Dua's layer sits at the back of the cornea, which previously had only five known layers. Dua and his colleagues discovered the new body part by injecting air into the corneas of eyes that had been donated for research and using an electron microscope to scan each separated layer. The researchers now believe that a tear in Dua's layer is the cause of corneal hydrops, a disorder that leads to fluid buildup in the cornea. According to Dua, knowledge of the new layer could dramatically improve outcomes for patients undergoing corneal grafts and transplants." - Amira

"Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world. (...) Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. Comets contain a variety of simple molecules, such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide, and an impact event with a planetary surface would provide an abundant supply of energy to drive chemical reactions." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Closed access article form the ACS. Figures. - OMG 404 Joe

"The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." -- Glenn Gould - Amira from Bookmarklet

Why news is to the mind, what sugar is to the body... MUST READ, concentrate if you must :-) then diet. I'm starting today. Dobelli's paper articulates how I've been feeling lately (bloated), especially with yummy Android apps like Flipboard, Pulse, Currents, and Bloomberg. His arguments are reasonable and perceptive. \\ The German version is here: http://dobelli.com/... includes FAQS in English. - Adriano

So true... This is why lately I went back to the old habit of reading more books rather than newspapers. - Amira

another must read: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o... by Stef Lewandowski. - Adriano

"Yevgeny Khaldei loved to document everyday life juxtaposed against images of war: he photographed a sunbathing couple next to a destroyed building, a traffic director next to a sign with German towns written in Russian, etc. However, the above striking image differentiating the killing machines and the nature grace of the reindeer was not ‘natural’." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We construct a machine that knows its own code, at the price of not knowing its own factivity." Abstract: "It is well known that a suitably idealized mechanical “knowing agent” capable of logic, arithmetic, and self-reflection, cannot know the index of a Turing machine that represents its own knowledge. See Lucas [7], Benacerraf [2], Reinhardt [10], Penrose [8], Carlson [4], and Putnam [9]. However, the proofs always involve (in various guises) the machine knowing its own factivity: that the machine satisfies K(K → ). We will relax this requirement and explicitly construct a machine that knows its own code. The construction resembles that of [4] and [6]. Our result should be compared with that of Carlson [4], who showed that a truthful knowing agent can know its own truth and know that it has some code, without knowing which code. A machine can know its own factivity as well as that it has some code (without knowing which), or it can know its own code exactly but not know its own... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Right now we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous. (…) Constant turmoil occurs in modern human societies and what I’m suggesting is that turmoil is endemic in the way human advanced social behavior originated in the first place. It’s by group selection that occurred favoring altruism versus individual level selection, which by and large, not exclusively, favor individual and selfish behavior. We’re hung in the balance. We’ll never reach either one extreme or the other. (...) I’ve also felt very strongly that we needed a much better understanding of who we are and where we came from. We need answers to those questions in order to get our bearings toward a successful long-term future, that means a future for ourselves, our species and for the rest of life. (...) We have a kind of resistance toward honest... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

“There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary’s bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said,“I wasn’t there; therefore, I’m not positive that it happened or didn’t happen; but of one thing I’m certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters.” - Amira

"As Marion Shurtleff was on her way out a bookstore in San Clemente, Calif., she remembered that she had meant to buy a few extra Bibles for her Bible study group. Shurtleff, 75, asked an employee if the store had used Bibles and he pointed her in the right direction. There were four or five versions, so she quickly picked two, paid and left. She noticed later on that one of the Bibles had some folded yellow papers inside but thought nothing of them until about two months later when she found herself with some free time and decided to take a look at the papers. What she found floored her." - Amira

"I opened it up and on the inside facing page...I started shaking," Shurtleff told ABCNew.com. "There was my name and my telephone number and I recognized my handwriting." There were three pages of thin yellow paper with a Girl Scout essay written in pencil. Shurtleff wrote it 65 years ago when was 10 years old. (...) Covington is more than 2,000 miles away from San Clemente. (...) She... more... - Amira

See also: The Things Found in Books | Flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups... - Amira

"Radio Tarifa was a Spanish World music ensemble combining Flamenco, Arab-Andalusian music, Arabian music, Moorish music and also influences of the Mediterranean, of the Middle Ages and of the Caribbean. The name of the ensemble comes from an imaginary radio station in Tarifa, a small town in the southernmost Spanish province of Cadiz, Andalusia, the nearest part of Spain to Morocco. Instead of simply fusing musical styles as they currently exist, Radio Tarifa goes back in time to the common past of those styles, back to before 1492 when the Moors and Jews were exiled from Spain. This invented style sheds light upon the real styles of Spain, most notably flamenco although the band rejected all musical purism, preferring to mix arrangements of traditional compositions with their own melodies and combining instruments from Ancient Egypt, classical Greek and Roman times with modern saxophones and electric bass." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"Scientists -- and parents -- have long wondered why we don’t remember anything that happened before age 3. As all parents know, no matter how momentous an event is in a toddler’s life, the memory soon drifts away and within months there isn’t even a wisp of it left. Now a new study shows that “infantile amnesia” may be due to the rapid growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for filing new experiences into long-term memory. (...) Frankland suspected that memories actually got filed away into long-term storage, but that the hippocampus lost track of where they’d been stacked during the rapid growth phase that takes place in the first few years of life." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Interesting...!! - Harold Cabezas

Claus Narr (d.1515), the court jester, in reply to the Elector of Saxony Johann Friedrich I, who was lamenting that he had 'lost the day': "Tomorrow we will all diligently seek for the day you have lost, and no doubt we shall find it again". - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Writing a novel (or a story, for that matter) is confusing work. There are just so many characters running all over the place, dropping hints and having revelations. So it’s no surprise that many authors plan out their works beforehand, in chart or list or scribble form, in order to keep everything straight. After the jump, you’ll find a mini collection of those planning papers, so you can take a peek into the process of some of your favorite authors, from James Salter to J.K. Rowling." - Amira

"Physicists have dreamed up some bizarre ideas over the years, but a decade or so ago they outdid themselves with the concept of Boltzmann brains – fully formed, conscious entities that form spontaneously in outer space. It may seem impossible for a brain to blink into existence, but the laws of physics don't rule it out entirely. All it requires is a vast amount of time. Eventually, a random chunk of matter and energy will happen to come together in the form of a working mind. It's the same logic that says a million monkeys working on a million typewriters will replicate the complete works of Shakespeare, if you leave them long enough. (...) However, if we can demonstrate that the universe has a finite lifespan, that would deny Boltzmann brains the infinite time they need to outnumber us. String theory might be able to help (...)." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"According to string theory, there may be a large number of universes. All of these universes are believed to come into existence through a process called eternal inflation, in which at least one universe continually expands at an incredible rate, while others form and grow within it like bubbles. This pool of universes has been dubbed the multiverse. Many of these other universes could... more... - Amira

"René Aubry is a French composer born in 1956. He is a multi-instrumentalist known for blending classical harmonies with modern instrumentation. Aubry has composed for choreographers such as Carolyn Carlson, Pina Bausch and Philippe Genty." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We now know that the founders of the first advanced European civilization were European," said study co-author George Stamatoyannopoulos, a human geneticist at the University of Washington. "They were very similar to Neolithic Europeans and very similar to present day-Cretans," residents of the Mediterranean island of Crete. (...) The Minoan culture emerged on Crete, which is now part of Greece, and flourished from about 2,700 B.C. to 1,420 B.C. Some believe that a massive eruption from the Volcano Thera on the island of Santorini doomed the Bronze Age civilization, while others argue that invading Mycenaeans toppled the once-great power. Nowadays, the Minoans may be most famous for the myth of the minotaur, a half-man, half-bull that was fabled to lived within a labyrinth in Crete." - Amira

See also: Minoan civilization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

minoan bull leapers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - ufuk

"This is the culmination of Rick Aschmann's years-long "hobby" of collecting dialects. It's a comprehensive and detailed map of the dialects (and sub-dialects!) of English-speakers in Canada and the United States. (...) Aschmann's site is a veritable font of information on English dialects. There's the Dialect Information Chart which tells you which vowel sounds can be found in what dialect and each dialect's "unique features." Like Mat-Su Valley Alaska, which has the unique feature of being "strongly like North Central" but with some "main Alaska dialect" mixed in. If that doesn't mean anything to you, there's a helpful parenthetical there: "See Sarah Palin." Aschmann bases his map and dialect information on the Atlas of North American English, his own research created the names of some of the dialects and made adjustments to their borders." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"On December 7, 1938, a BBC radio crew visited Sigmund Freud at his new home at Hampstead, North London. Freud had moved to England only a few months earlier to escape the Nazi annexation of Austria. He was 81 years old and suffering from incurable jaw cancer. Every word was an agony to speak. Less then a year later, when the pain became unbearable, Freud asked his doctor to administer a lethal dose of morphine. The BBC recording is the only known audio recording of Freud." - Amira from Bookmarklet

In heavily accented English, he says: "I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of... more... - Amira

"This object was in common use in medieval libraries, even though very few survive today. It’s a bookmark - and a smart one for that matter. As with our own bookmarks, it tells you where you are in the book: the rope was attached to the binding and placed between two pages. The reader subsequently pulled down the marker along the rope to the line where he had stopped reading. Since an open medieval book often presented four text columns, the reader then turned the disk to indicate in which column he had left off. In this case we read “4” in medieval Arabic numerals - the column on the far right. So this tiny piece of parchment marks it all: page, column and line. That’s what I call smart. Source unknown, likely 13th or 14th century." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Astronomers have found a planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62. This five-planet system has two worlds in the habitable zone — the distance from their star at which they receive enough light and warmth for liquid water to theoretically exist on their surfaces. (...) Kepler-62e is 60 percent larger than Earth, while Kepler-62f is about 40 percent larger, making both of them “super-Earths.” They are too small for their masses to be measured, but astronomers expect them to be composed of rock and water, without a significant gaseous envelope. As the warmer of the two worlds, Kepler-62e would have a bit more clouds than Earth, according to computer models. More distant Kepler-62f would need the greenhouse effect from plenty of carbon dioxide to warm it enough to host an ocean. Otherwise, it might become an ice-covered snowball. “Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions. Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly,” said Harvard astronomer and co-author Dimitar Sasselov." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Thank you, @Amira!! :) - Harold Cabezas

Bernadette Roberts: “Through past experience I had become familiar with many different types and levels of silence. // There is a silence within, a silence that descends from without; a silence that stills existence and a silence that engulfs the entire universe. There is a silence of the self and its faculties of will, thought, memory, and emotions. There is a silence in which there is nothing, a silence in which there is something; and finally, there is the silence of no-self (…). // If there was any path on which I could chart my contemplative experiences, it would be this ever-expanding and deepening path of silence.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

"IBM scientists using a special microscope they invented to move atoms around on a surface. The movie, titled "A Boy and His Atom," consists of nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action and tells the simple story of a boy named Atom who dances and plays with an atom. By drawing viewers in with the film (a technological marvel that will no doubt be passed around far and wide), IBM then uses an engrossing behind-the-scenes clip to tell its larger story—about how the company has worked at the nanoscale for decades to explore the limits of data storage, among other things with real-world applications. (...) Today's electronic devices need roughly 1 million atoms to store a single bit of data. But IBM researchers have shown that only 12 atoms are actually needed to store one bit. The implications for data storage are astonishing—it means that one day, every movie ever made could be stored in a device the size of a fingernail." - Amira from Bookmarklet

he dalloslar he. bu kafayla olur o is 100 yila. - kunthar

"When people look slowly at a piece of art they make discoveries. (...) One day each year – April 27 in 2013 – people all over the world visit local museums and galleries to look at art slowly. Participants look at five works of art for 10 minutes each and then meet together over lunch to talk about their experience. That’s it. Simple by design, the goal is to focus on the art and the art of seeing. In fact, Slow Art Day works best when people look at the art on their own slowly and then meet up to discuss the experience (though some hosts decide to do the discussion right in the gallery)." - Amira from Bookmarklet

“Better living through data? When a pioneer of data collection and organization turned his analytical tools on himself, he revealed the complexity of automating human judgment and the difficulty of predicting just what is predictable. (...) The question is, what’s the space with all possible models that you can imagine using? A good way to describe that space is to think about computer programs. (...) I’ve discovered that very simple programs can serve as remarkably accurate models for lots of things that happen in nature. In natural science, that gives us a vastly better pool of possible models to use than we had from just math. We then see that these may be good models for how nature works. They tell us something about how nature is so easily able to make all this complicated stuff that would be very hard for us to make if we just imagined that nature worked according to math. Now we realize that there’s a whole different kind of engineering that we can do, and we can look at all of these possible simple programs and use those to create our engineering systems." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"This is different from the traditional approach. (...) As we accumulate more data, there will certainly be patterns that can be seen, and things that one can readily see that are predictable. You can expect to have a dashboard—with certain constraints—showing how things are likely to evolve for you. You then get to make decisions: Should I do this? Should I do that? But some part of... more... - Amira

"[Thomas] Jefferson’s language emphasized the requirement of newness, or novelty, and bespoke the necessity of an inventive step. It also implied that products made by nature, which were held to belong to everyone, were not to be removed from common possession. Thus products of nature such as the naturally occurring elements in the periodic table or the creatures of the earth, being neither new in the world nor made by man, were taken to be ineligible for patents. So, tacitly, were laws of nature, natural manifestations, abstract ideas, and thought. (...) Judge Moore did acknowledge that Myriad’s patents “raise substantial moral and ethical issues” about the allowance of property rights in “human DNA—the very thing that makes us humans, and not chimpanzees,” and she allowed that BRCA DNA “might well deserve to be excluded from the patent system.” But she considered such a “dramatic” destruction of property rights properly the province of Congress, not the courts. Against this strict... more... - Amira

"A famous example cited in numerous briefs in the current appeal involved Dr. Jonas Salk's development and invention of the polio oral vaccine in 1952. When his life-saving treatment was announced, he said the people would "own" the vaccine, adding "Could you patent the sun?" -- http://www.cnn.com/2013... // A ruling from the court is expected in June. // See also: Biological patent, Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"Rubén González was a Cuban pianist and member of the group Buena Vista Social Club and Estrellas de Areito. González was born in Santa Clara, Cuba. He learned to play the piano at the music high school of Cienfuegos. He studied medicine but abandoned his studies due to financial difficulties. He began playing with groups in Las Villas. In 1940, he moved to Havana, where he played in the charangas of Paulina Álvarez and Paulín, with Arsenio Rodríguez, Kubavana and Senén Suárez and in the big bands Siboney and Riverside. (...) González retired in the late 1980s. (...) After Ry Cooder insisted on meeting him, Rubén González (who up to this point had not owned a piano in approximately 11 years) started a second career in 1996 under Ry Cooder's wing. It was this same year when the solo album Introducing...Rubén González was recorded and released. The next year, Ry Cooder produced the Grammy winning Buena Vista Social Club, featuring González, Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Orlando... more... - Amira

"atNight project aims to constitute a first step towards the construction of nightscape image, a necessary first contribution to the (re)definition of the nigh-time identity. We have taken the opportunity to explore the potential of city's representation techniques -by means of data visualization and cartography- to generate an interpretative model of nocturnal landscape as a common framework for collective thought. (...) atNight is a research project based on the (re)definition of the term "nightscape"." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Considering landscape in a broad sense, the research aims to build bridges between different technical and humanistic disciplines The research explores night urban landscape as a sensitive and cognitive relationship between people and their environment. The project focuses on the aesthetical process of identification of citizenship with their territory to emphasize the role of night in... more... - Amira