July 31, 2017 Why We Are All Addicts We tend to imagine that we can only become addicted to a few sorts of things. But real addiction is about using something, anything, to keep our real emotions, fears and hopes at bay. There are many more addicts among us than we think.
July 26, 2017 Pablo Escobar's Narco Hippos Hippos are known to live in Africa, but there’s a thriving wild population six and a half thousand miles away in Colombia; a place that they would never be if it wasn’t for one thing...cocaine. In the 1980s, Colombia was gripped by a violent drugs war and notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar was the head of a cartel and an empire worth an estimated 30 billion dollars. Escobar's lavish property, Hacienda Napoles, boasted its own private safari, complete with a selection of exotic animals, illegally smuggled into the country. When Escobar died, his hippos broke free and multiplied, leaving Colombian authorities with a rather puzzling and dangerous new species to deal with.
July 25, 2017 Weird Syntax: Part I. "How Dare You” "How dare you" is common enough to seem normal, but a closer look at it's syntax reveals something strange. Why is it not "How do you dare”?
July 24, 2017 Military Operations That Would’ve Changed Everthing In the quest to end a war or conflict as quickly as possible, ingenious battle plans are drawn up all the time. Sometimes, these plans fall by the wayside, for one reason or another. Whether the cancellation was good or bad for civilization, it makes one wonder what would have happened if it was seen through to the end. Here are ten such war plans that could have changed history completely, had they not been abandoned during the blueprint stages.
June 20, 2017 One Year, One Tree A beech tree kept under observation for a year reveals the four seasons unfolding around a crossroad of smells, signals and messages left behind by the wildlife of the Apennines, Italy. One tree one year, from the Forest Beat of Italy’s Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise. Founded in 1922, the national park helps to preserve the Marsican brown bear and the Italian wolf, and helps protect native fauna and flora in the central Apennine Mountains.
July 19, 2017 People in Denmark Are Much Happier Than in the US Last week, in Denmark, Malthe and Lærke Knudson had a baby girl they named Emma. That same day, the Robinsons—Dale and Beth—had a little baby in the United States. They called her Rachel. Right now, they’re just two little babies keeping their parents awake at night. But Emma and Rachel were born in countries that have very different priorities, and that’s going to lead to pretty different futures. It all boils down to this: Though Danes pay a lot more than Americans in taxes and government fees, they get a whole lot more back in social services: Almost three times as much! As a result, Americans end up spending twice as much out-of-pocket for those social goods and services. Let’s see how that plays out over their two lives.
June 18, 2017 I Can't Show You How Pink This Pink Is Tom Scott can show a brighter pink. He can show a more saturated pink. But he can't show you this pink. Not quite.
June 17, 2017 The Seas Strangest Square Mile This square mile of water in the Lembeh Strait has some of the strangest and most unique marine life on the planet.
June 14, 2017 Richard D. Wolff - What is Politics? In this educational video Professor of Economics Emeritus (University of Massachusetts), Marxist economist and founder of Democracy at Work, Richard Wolff, defines politics and the ideologies that are expressed within it.
July 13, 2017 Cars Of The Future from 1948 This Popular Mechanics short was released theatrically on May 21, 1948 and featured "streamlined marvels on wheels.”
July 12, 2017 Le Clitoris Women are lucky, they get to have the only organ in the human body dedicated exclusively for pleasure: the clitoris! In this humorous and instructive animated documentary, find out its unrecognized anatomy and its unknown herstory.
June 11, 2017 FRACTAL The ingredient based explanation for supercell thunderstorms cites moisture, wind shear, instability and lift as the reasons for their formation. Chad Cowan, the maker of this video, prefers to focus on the big picture. Supercell thunderstorms are a manifestation of nature's attempt to correct an extreme imbalance. The ever ongoing effort to reach equilibrium, or entropy, is what drives all of our weather, and the force with which the atmosphere tries to correct this imbalance is proportional to the gradient. In other words, the more extreme the imbalance, the more extreme the storm.
July 10, 2017 The Squid and the Whale: Evidence for an Epic Encounter Happy Cephalopod Week! One of the most famous dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History depicts a battle between two gigantic animals: the sperm whale and giant squid. But unlike most dioramas in the Museum’s halls, this scene has never been witnessed. Paleontologists Neil Landman and John Flynn explain how we know that this encounter does happen--and whether we humans will ever catch it in real time.
July 7, 2017 Kelan Phil Cohran on His Time with Sun Ra's Band In this 20 minute Interview for the Great Black Music Project, Kelan Phil Cohran talks about his time with Sun Ra's band in the 1950s.
July 6, 2017 Spider With Three Super Powers Known for eating other spiders, Portia is a genus of the jumping spider that is able to leap up to 50 times her own body length. Captured by stunning close up footage, we get to witness this amazing spider use its super powers to dine on prey three times her size.
July 5, 2017 The Most Famous Dog Who Ever Lived Enough about humans and more about some creatures that matter, you no doubt were saying in your mind. So here's a story on pets. This is the story of Hachiko, who is likely the most famous dog in human history. But what is it about this dog that convinced the world to take notice? Chris Hadfield went around Japan to tell the story of the loyal dog who unwittingly saved his breed. Say hello to Hachiko, a very good dog.
July 3, 2017 Why The Government Shouldn't Break WhatsApp Encryption backdoors - breaking WhatsApp and iMessage's security to let the government stop Bad Things - sounds like a reasonable idea. Here's why it isn’t.
