The Original Thriller
Desert Kites
Scientists Have Cracked the Origins of ‘Desert Kites,’ Massive Prehistoric Patterns That Were Carved into the Middle Eastern Desert
Three studies confirm the long-held hypothesis that the structures were hunting traps.
In the 1920s, British Royal Air Force pilots over the Middle East recorded the first sightings of what they dubbed desert kites—massive patterns carved into rocky land, often resembling the famous flying toy.
Archaeologists have since debated the purpose of these enigmas, which appear across geographies and eras, dating back to the Neolithic Period (10,000–2,200 B.C.E.) in Jordan, the early Bronze Age (3,300–2,100 B.C.E.) in Israel’s Negev Desert, and the Middle Bronze Age (2,100–1,550 B.C.E.) in Armenia. Some thought they were cultural cornerstones. Still more posited they were pens for domesticating animals.
Three recent peer-reviewed papers confirm popular hypotheses that the desert kites actually served as mass hunting traps, allowing early desert dwellers to kill entire herds of game at once. While they were active, the kites funneled gazelle and ibex down tapered, wall-lined paths which ended in massive pits or sudden cliffs where creatures were trapped and killed. The kites’s particular placement, length, and shape generally demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of landscapes and animal behaviors.
Highway To Meth
Little House on the Prairie—With Meth
Opinion by Judith Shulevitz
In the many decades that have passed since Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books became the most widely read, most beloved account of the American frontier experience, a revisionist view has emerged, not just of what these days is called settler colonialism but of her father, Charles—that is, Pa, the fiddler with the twinkling eyes.
As portrayed by Wilder’s biographer Caroline Fraser, Charles Ingalls was a feckless man, if a loving father. He dragged his wife and daughters out of Wisconsin and “a comfortable, established home with plowed fields and a productive garden,” in Fraser’s words, and then from bad to worse: a house illegally built on Native American territory from which they are expelled; a farm in Minnesota prey to apocalyptic locust swarms; a hotel in Iowa next to a saloon, where a man tried to force his way into the young Wilder’s room; and finally the Dakota Territory. Scientists at the time had warned that the Great Plains were arid and infertile and sure to drive small farmers into bankruptcy, but the government, urged on by the railroads, lured people there anyway, giving away homesteads, unleashing land rushes, creating the conditions that laid waste to the prairie ecosystem. When Pa died in 1902, he had nothing to leave his widow and blind daughter but the house they lived in.
A century and some years later, Donald Trump wins the presidential election, and the journalist Ted Conover lights out for the territories—well, for southern Colorado, parts of which have indeed become a barren land. An earlier magazine assignment sent him to that part of the state to write about South Park, the real town of TV-show fame, “a place nearly devoid of people that was overlaid with dirt roads from a moribund 1970s subdivision.” After the election, Conover feels compelled to go back. He heads for a settlement not far from South Park in the San Luis Valley, sometimes called the flats, where a transient population lives in one-room shacks or trailers, many without plumbing, electricity, or internet. “The American firmament was shifting in ways I needed to understand,” he writes in his new book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge. “These empty, forgotten places seemed an important part of that.”
Oldest DNA
DNA from 2m years ago reveals lost Arctic world
Breakthrough pushes back DNA record by 1m years to time when region was 11–19C warmer than today
Two-million-year-old DNA from northern Greenland has revealed that the region was once home to mastodons, lemmings and geese, offering unprecedented insights into how climate change can shape ecosystems.
The breakthrough in ancient DNA analysis pushes back the DNA record by 1m years to a time when the Arctic region was 11-19C warmer than the present day. The analysis reveals that the northern peninsula of Greenland, now a polar desert, once featured boreal forests of poplar and birch trees teeming with wildlife. The work offers clues to how species might adapt, or be genetically engineered, to survive the threat of rapid global heating.
Prof Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen, said: “A new chapter spanning 1m extra years of history has finally been opened and for the first time we can look directly at the DNA of a past ecosystem that far back in time.”
The fragments are 1m years older than the previous record for DNA sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone. “DNA can degrade quickly but we’ve shown that under the right circumstances, we can now go back further in time than anyone could have dared imagine,” said Willerslev.
No More Men
Men are slowly losing their Y chromosome, but new sex gene discovery in spiny rats brings hope for humanity
By Jenny Graves, La Trobe University
The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene.
The good news is two branches of rodents have already lost their Y chromosome and have lived to tell the tale.
A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows how the spiny rat has evolved a new male-determining gene.
Balloon Dogs
Firemakers
from The Washington Post via MSN
Ancient human relative used fire, surprising discoveries suggest
Story by Mark Johnson
Explorers wriggling through cramped, pitch-black caves in South Africa claim to have discovered evidence that a human relative with a brain only one-third the size of ours used fire for light and cooking a few hundred thousand years ago. The unpublished findings — which add new wrinkles to the story of human evolution — have been met with both excitement and skepticism.
South African paleoanthropologist and National Geographic explorer Lee Berger described finding soot-covered walls, fragments of charcoal, burned antelope bones and rocks arranged as hearths in the Rising Star cave system, where nine years earlier the team uncovered the bones of a new member of the human family, Homo naledi.
Control of fire is considered a crucial milestone in human evolution, providing light to navigate dark places, enabling activity at night and leading to the cooking of food, and a subsequent increase in body mass. When exactly the breakthrough occurred, however, has been one of the most contested questions in all of paleoanthropology.
Skywriting Renaissance
from the LA Times via Yahoo! News
Why are skywriting messages all over L.A. lately? We have answers
by Ronald D. White
On a lightly breezy afternoon, Carlos Shihady and Maram Shehada stood together at the Point Reyes Lighthouse, where the rocky land juts a finger out into the Pacific, and watched “Carlos ❤️ Maram 12 17 2022” appear in the sky.
It was a grand save-the-wedding-date gesture to share with family and friends via social media, marking a high point in a harrowing journey for the couple, long separated by war and pandemic.
With both finally in America together, it had taken more than a month of planning to get to this moment: a squadron of airplanes, so high they couldn’t be seen, forming words with computer-choreographed puffs of vaporized liquid that could be seen for miles.
“The clouds parted in time and I think I was just standing there with her and saying, ‘Oh, my God, look at the writing,'” Shihady said. “It was a special moment for us to announce this date because of all that we went through, you know, with COVID, with Syria.”
A full-on craze in the early days of aeronautics, skywriting faded over the decades. The messages didn’t have the staying power of other forms of advertising, blowing away in the wind, and, at best, were preserved on low-resolution photographs and video that were rarely shared with anyone except immediate friends and family.
But social media and our insatiable promotional hunger have pushed the throttle on the old-timey art form.
Toyah & Robert
Hopewell Mysteries
The US’ 2,000-year-old mystery mounds
Constructed by a mysterious civilisation that left no written records, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are a testament to indigenous sophistication.
Autumn leaves crackled under our shoes as dozens of eager tourists and I followed a guide along a grassy mound. We stopped when we reached the opening of a turf-topped circle, which was formed by another wall of mounded earth. We were at The Octagon, part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a large network of hand-constructed hills spread throughout central and southern Ohio that were built as many as 2,000 years ago. Indigenous people would come to The Octagon from hundreds of miles away, gathering regularly for shared rituals and worship.
“There was a sweat lodge or some kind of purification place there,” said our guide Brad Lepper, the senior archaeologist for the Ohio History Connection’s World Heritage Program (OHC), as he pointed to the circle. I looked inside to see a perfectly manicured lawn – a putting green. A tall flag marked a hole at its centre.
The Octagon is currently being used as a golf course.
All of these all these prehistoric ceremonial earthworks in Ohio were created by what is now called the Hopewell Culture, a network of Native American societies that gathered from as far away as Montana and the Gulf of Mexico between roughly 100 BCE and 500 CE and were connected by a series of trade routes. Their earthworks in Ohio consist of shapes – like circles, squares and octagons – that were often connected to each other. Archaeologists are only now beginning to understand the sophistication of these engineering marvels.
Jaco
Goodbye Cruel Worldism
THE PEOPLE CHEERING FOR HUMANITY’S END
A disparate group of thinkers says we should welcome our demise.
By Adam Kirsch
Painting by Reynier Llanes. Home, 2022 (mixed media on paper, 70 x 59 inches).
“Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”
With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences. Foucault’s central idea was that the ways we understand ourselves as human beings aren’t timeless or natural, no matter how much we take them for granted. Rather, the modern concept of “man” was invented in the 18th century, with the emergence of new modes of thinking about biology, society, and language, and eventually it will be replaced in turn.
As Foucault writes in the book’s famous last sentence, one day “man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” The image is eerie, but he claimed to find it “a source of profound relief,” because it implies that human ideas and institutions aren’t fixed. They can be endlessly reconfigured, maybe even for the better. This was the liberating promise of postmodernism: The face in the sand is swept away, but someone will always come along to draw a new picture in a different style.
But the image of humanity can be redrawn only if there are human beings to do it. Even the most radical 20th-century thinkers stop short at the prospect of the actual extinction of Homo sapiens, which would mean the end of all our projects, values, and meanings. Humanity may be destined to disappear someday, but almost everyone would agree that the day should be postponed as long as possible, just as most individuals generally try to delay the inevitable end of their own life.
In recent years, however, a disparate group of thinkers has begun to challenge this core assumption. From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. The revolt against humanity is still new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the coming years and decades it has the potential to transform politics and society in profound ways.
A Cameron Perspective
Inside James Cameron’s Billion-Dollar Bet on ‘Avatar’
The director on spending a decade of his life — not to mention hundreds of Disney’s millions — to make ‘Avatar: The Way of Water,’ the long-awaited second film in his ambitious and risky franchise: “There’s skepticism in the marketplace. Can anybody even remember the characters’ names? We’ll see what happens after this film.”
A few years ago, after James Cameron finished the first Avatar film, his kids called a family meeting to deliver some notes on his parenting. Some of the kids, who today range in age from 15 to 32, had attended the MUSE school in Calabasas that Cameron’s wife, Suzy Amis Cameron, founded in 2006. At MUSE, students are encouraged to provide feedback to their teachers, and now the Cameron brood was emboldened to apply that same technique at home.
Cameron is known in the film business for getting what he wants when he wants it, from release dates to budgets to the right to mount elaborate oceanic expeditions on a studio’s dime. The director admits he has sometimes brought his hard-driving style home, and there are moments when his fathering has resembled the Robert Duvall character in The Great Santini, the relentless Marine colonel patriarch. “I’m on a rules-based universe, and the kids weren’t into it,” Cameron says. “They said, ‘You’re never around half the time. And, then, when you come home, you try to make up for it by telling us all what to do. And Mom’s really the one that’s been making all the rules the whole time while you’ve been off shooting. So you don’t get to come home and do that.’” (The Camerons have three children together and one each from a previous marriage — his to Linda Hamilton, hers to Sam Robards.)
Cameron says he took the kids’ note, that he tries to listen more and control less. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s valid,’” he says. “I realized I was wearing the mantle of responsibility of a parent and overcompensating for the time I wasn’t there.”
Perhaps more than any new camera system or giant media merger, the humbling experience of parenting teenagers has had the greatest impact on how Cameron made his latest movie, both in the choice of subject matter and in the way he managed his cast and crew.
In Avatar: The Way of Water, which Disney will release Dec. 16, Cameron takes the stakes to the home— albeit an alien home, where Mom and Dad are blue and 9 feet tall. “I thought, ‘I’m going to work out a lot of my stuff, artistically, that I’ve gone through as a parent of five kids,’” Cameron says. “The overarching idea is, the family is the fortress. It’s our greatest weakness and our greatest strength. I thought, ‘I can write the hell out of this. I know what it is to be the asshole dad.’”
Man Of The Year Gone
When Time’s ‘Man of the Year’ Meant Something
Subjects of the magazine’s annual story were once viewed as secular saints—or, on occasion, devils.
By Lance Morrow
Time magazine’s Man of the Year selection once was a bigger deal. So, for that matter, were the Academy Awards and the presidency. It was a different time.
During my 40-year career at Time, I wrote seven Man of the Year cover stories. It was called Man of the Year in those days but Time by no means excluded women from consideration. In 1976 I did the Women of the Year story about outstanding women in various fields. A man wouldn’t get that assignment today. It would have to be written by a woman.
In earlier generations, Wallis Simpson, who caused King Edward VII to leave the throne, became Woman of the Year in 1936. A year later, Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong May-ling, were Man and Woman of the Year. The title officially changed to Person of the Year in 1999—an ideological smudging that I find a little prissy. I suppose it can’t be helped.
In the old culture, appearing on Time’s cover was a secular version of being beatified by the Catholic Church. To be Man of the Year was equivalent to being canonized a saint—or perhaps winning a Nobel Prize. Maybe better. Time stipulated, however, that the Man of the Year might be a devil. It was the person who had most affected the course of the year’s events “for good or ill.” Thus, Hitler was named in 1938 and Stalin in both 1939 and 1942. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was Man of the Year in 1979.
Sacred Flow
For many Hawaiians, lava flows are a time to honor, reflect
By JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER
HONOLULU (AP) — When Willette Kalaokahaku Akima-Akau looks out at the the lava flowing from Mauna Loa volcano and makes an offering of gin, tobacco and coins, she will be taking part in a tradition passed down from her grandfather and other Native Hawaiians as a way to honor both the natural and spiritual worlds.
Akima-Akau said she plans to take her grandchildren with her and together they will make their offerings and chant to Pele, the Hawaiian deity of volcanoes and fire, who her grandfather used to pay reverence to as a kupuna, a word that can mean ancestor.
“This is the time for our kupuna, for our people, and for our children to come and witness what is happening as history is being made every day,” she said, adding that today’s experiences will be added to the next generation’s stories, songs, dances and chants.
For many Native Hawaiians, an eruption of a volcano like Mauna Loa has a deep yet very personal cultural significance. For many it can be an opportunity to feel a connection with creation itself through the way lava gives birth to new land, as well as a time to reflect on their own place in the world and the people who came before them.
Sight & Sound 2022
from indiewire
‘Jeanne Dielman’ Tops Sight & Sound’s 2022 Poll of the Best Films of All Time
Other films to land in the top 10 include “In the Mood for Love,” “Beau Travail,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Vertigo,” and “Citizen Kane.”
By Wilson Chapman and Christian Blauvelt
Another decade, another Sight & Sound poll. On Thursday, the British magazine unveiled the 2022 edition of its long-running critics’ poll on the greatest films of all time, with “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” taking the top spot — the first film from a female director to achieve the honor since the poll began in 1952.
Directed by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman and released in 1975, “Jeanne Dielman” is a three-hour, 20-minute film following the title character (Delphine Seyrig), a single mother and prostitute, as she carries out a monotonous daily routine that slowly breaks apart and collapses. Since its premiere, the film has been highly acclaimed as a landmark of feminist cinema. Previously, it ranked 36 on Sight & Sound’s 2012 edition of the poll, where it was one of only two films in the top 100 from a female filmmaker; the other, “Beau Travail” by Claire Denis, is now ranked at number seven.
Read below for the rest of Sight & Sound’s top 100 list.
The Critics’ Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time
1. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
3. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. “Tokyo Story” (Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)
5. “In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai, 2001)
6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. “Beau travail” (Claire Denis, 1998)
8. “Mulholland Dr.” (David Lynch, 2001)
9. “Man with a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
10. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951)
11. “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
12. “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
13. “La Règle du Jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939)
14. “Cléo from 5 to 7” (Agnès Varda, 1962)
15. “The Searchers” (John Ford, 1956)
16. “Meshes of the Afternoon” (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943)
17. “Close-Up” (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)
18. “Persona” (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
19. “Apocalypse Now” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
20. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
21. (TIE) “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)
21. (TIE) “Late Spring” (Ozu Yasujiro, 1949)
23. “Playtime” (Jacques Tati, 1967)
24. “Do the Right Thing” (Spike Lee, 1989)
25. (TIE) “Au Hasard Balthazar” (Robert Bresson, 1966)
25. (TIE) The Night of the Hunter” (Charles Laughton, 1955)
27. “Shoah” (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
28. “Daisies” (Věra Chytilová, 1966)
29. “Taxi Driver” (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
30. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (Céline Sciamma, 2019)
31. (TIE) “Mirror” (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
31. (TIE) “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963)
31. (TIE) “Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
34. “L’Atalante” (Jean Vigo, 1934)
35. “Pather Panchali” (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
36. (TIE) “City Lights” (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
36. (TIE) “M” (Fritz Lang, 1931)
38. (TIE) “À bout de souffle” (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
38. (TIE) “Some Like It Hot” (Billy Wilder, 1959)
38. (TIE) “Rear Window” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
41. (TIE) “Bicycle Thieves” (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
41. (TIE) “Rashomon” (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
43. (TIE) “Stalker” (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
43. (TIE) “Killer of Sheep” (Charles Burnett, 1977)
45. (TIE) “North by Northwest” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
45. (TIE) “The Battle of Algiers” (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
45. (TIE) “Barry Lyndon” (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
48. (TIE) “Wanda” (Barbara Loden, 1970)
48. (TIE) “Ordet” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
50. (TIE) “The 400 Blows” (François Truffaut, 1959)
50. (TIE) “The Piano” (Jane Campion, 1992)
52. (TIE) “News from Home” (Chantal Akerman, 1976)
52. (TIE) “Fear Eats the Soul” (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
54. (TIE) “The Apartment” (Billy Wilder, 1960)
54. (TIE) “Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
54. (TIE) “Sherlock Jr.” (Buster Keaton, 1924)
54. (TIE) “Le Mépris” (Jean-Luc Godard 1963)
54. (TIE) “Blade Runner” (Ridley Scott 1982)
59. “Sans soleil” (Chris Marker 1982)
60. (TIE) “Daughters of the Dust” (Julie Dash 1991)
60. (TIE) “La dolce vita” (Federico Fellini 1960)
60. (TIE) “Moonlight” (Barry Jenkins 2016)
63. (TIE) “Casablanca” (Michael Curtiz 1942)
63. (TIE) “GoodFellas” (Martin Scorsese 1990)
63. (TIE) “The Third Man” (Carol Reed 1949)
66. “Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty 1973)
67. (TIE) “The Gleaners and I” (Agnès Varda 2000)
67. (TIE) “Metropolis” (Fritz Lang 1927)
67. (TIE) “Andrei Rublev” (Andrei Tarkovsky 1966)
67. (TIE) “The Red Shoes” (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger 1948)
67. (TIE) “La Jetée” (Chris Marker 1962)
72. (TIE) “My Neighbour Totoro” (Miyazaki Hayao 1988)
72. (TIE) “Journey to Italy” (Roberto Rossellini 1954)
72. (TIE) “L’avventura” (Michelangelo Antonioni 1960)
75. (TIE) “Imitation of Life” (Douglas Sirk 1959)
75. (TIE) “Sansho the Bailiff” (Mizoguchi Kenji 1954)
75. (TIE) “Spirited Away” (Miyazaki Hayao 2001)
78. (TIE) “A Brighter Summer Day” (Edward Yang 1991)
78. (TIE) “Sátántangó” (Béla Tarr 1994)
78. (TIE) “Céline and Julie Go Boating” (Jacques Rivette 1974)
78. (TIE) “Modern Times “(Charlie Chaplin 1936)
78. (TIE) “Sunset Blvd.” (Billy Wilder 1950)
78. (TIE) “A Matter of Life and Death” (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger 1946)
84. (TIE) “Blue Velvet” (David Lynch 1986)
84. (TIE) “Pierrot le fou” (Jean-Luc Godard 1965)
84. (TIE) “Histoire(s) du cinéma” (Jean-Luc Godard 1988-1998)
84. (TIE) “The Spirit of the Beehive” (Victor Erice, 1973)
88. (TIE) “The Shining” (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
88. (TIE) “Chungking Express” (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)
90. (TIE) “Madame de…” (Max Ophüls, 1953)
90. (TIE) “The Leopard” (Luchino Visconti, 1962)
90. (TIE) “Ugetsu” (Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953)
90. (TIE) “Parasite” (Bong Joon Ho, 2019)
90. (TIE) “Yi Yi” (Edward Yang, 1999)
95. (TIE) “A Man Escaped” (Robert Bresson, 1956)
95. (TIE) “The General” (Buster Keaton, 1926)
95. (TIE) “Once upon a Time in the West” (Sergio Leone, 1968)
95. (TIE) “Get Out” (Jordan Peele, 2017)
95. (TIE) “Black Girl” (Ousmane Sembène, 1965)
95. (TIE) “Tropical Malady” (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
The Hand of Woman
A Woman’s Name Uncovered in the Margins of a 1,200-Year-Old Medieval Manuscript Provides a Fresh Clue About Its Real Significance
The discovery is a rare example of the involvement of women in medieval book culture.
While studying a rare medieval manuscript in Oxford’s Weston Library, PhD student Jessica Hodgkinson noticed something unusual: a series of small, barely visible indentations at the bottom of page 18. Together, the marks spelled out the name Eadburg, the abbess of a female religious community in Kent during the 8th-century.
The inscriptions, which state-of-the-art 3D recording technology discovered a further 14 times in one form or another throughout the volume, is rare evidence of women in medieval England owning, using, or creating manuscripts. So began Hodgkinson’s detective work into a highly educated woman who lived 1,200 years ago.
The Siegfried & Roy Saga
The Original Tiger Kings
At the peak of their fame, they were arguably the most famous magicians since Houdini.
By Chris Jones and Michael J. Mooney
Siegfried & Roy photographed at their residence in Las Vegas, Nevada, 1991 (Mark Seliger / AUGUST)
The last survivors of a lost empire live behind the Mirage, in Las Vegas, out back by the pool. On a good day, Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden will draw more than 1,000 visitors, the $25 adult admission fee justified mostly by the palm shade and tranquility it offers relative to the mania outside its walls. There are also long summer stretches when it’s 100 degrees and things get a little grim. During a recent visit, only a few families strolled through, surveying the five sleeping animals on display: three tigers, a lion, and a leopard. The Secret Garden ostensibly operates as an educational facility. “Look, a lion,” one young father said to his son, while pointing at a tiger.
Yet residual magic remains. The best time to visit is late afternoon, just before closing, when the heat has started to subside and the sleeping cats stir. If you’re lucky—in this city built on the premise that you, against all odds, will be lucky—a tiger will roar when you’re standing nearby. A tiger’s roar is more than audible. You feel it in your chest, in your teeth, in the prickles of your skin. And if you turn to look at its source, you might catch a tiger’s gaze, its haunting eyes staring into yours, tracking your every move, knowing what you’re about to do before you do it.
At the peak of their particular and possibly extinct brand of celebrity, Siegfried & Roy were arguably the most famous magicians since Houdini. They were without question the most famous German magicians performing with a large collection of apex predators. Depending on when you enter and exit their story, it’s either triumphant or tragic, surprising or inevitable. It can serve as a testament to the power of lies, including the ones we tell ourselves, or a cautionary tale about fiction’s limits, especially when fact takes the form of a fed-up tiger. Now it’s about to reach its sad, instructive conclusion, the way so many modern fables end: with a corporate takeover.
[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic ]
Mondrian Piet
A Piet Mondrian Painting Has Been Hanging Upside Down for More Than 75 Years
The work, first exhibited at New York’s MoMA, might have been accidentally mislabeled or turned over in a crate.
By Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
An abstract art piece from Dutch painter Piet Mondrian has mistakenly been hanging upside down for the past 77 years.
Mondrian’s 1941 New York City 1, consisting of multi-colored taped lines, has been held at Germany’s Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s art collection since 1980. It was first exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1945.
However, a press conference for the Kunstsammlung’s new Mondrian exhibition included the surprising revelation that New York City 1 was displayed incorrectly by both institutions, as reported by German publication Monopol.
A photograph taken of Mondrian’s studio shortly after his death in 1944 pictured the artwork oriented opposite of how it has ben exhibited, said curator Susanne Meyer-Buser, who researched the museums’s upcoming Mondrian show. The placement of tape on the unsigned painting also indicates the piece was hung incorrectly.
Cuprate Crystals
The High-Temperature Superconductivity Mystery Is Finally Solved
An atomic-scale experiment all but settles the origin of the strong form of superconductivity seen in cuprate crystals, confirming a 35-year-old theory.
by CHARLIE WOOD
FOR DECADES, A family of crystals has stumped physicists with its baffling ability to superconduct—that is, carry an electric current without any resistance—at far warmer temperatures than other materials.
Now, an experiment years in the making has directly visualized superconductivity on the atomic scale in one of these crystals, finally revealing the cause of the phenomenon to nearly everyone’s satisfaction. Electrons appear to nudge each other into a frictionless flow in a manner first suggested by a venerable theory nearly as old as the mystery itself.
“This evidence is really beautiful and direct,” said Subir Sachdev, a physicist at Harvard University who builds theories of the crystals, known as cuprates, and was not involved in the experiment.
“I’ve worked on this problem for 25 years, and I hope I have solved it,” said J. C. Séamus Davis, who led the new experiment at the University of Oxford. “I’m absolutely thrilled.”
The new measurement matches a prediction based on the theory, which attributes cuprate superconductivity to a quantum phenomenon called superexchange. “I’m amazed by the quantitative agreement,” said André-Marie Tremblay, a physicist at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and the leader of the group that made the prediction last year.
Curderburger
Culver’s Curderburger Offers An Absurdist Glance Into An Untapped Meat Substitute: Cheese
Culver’s (in)famous Butterburger might be the best fast food burger out there. After all, its roots lie smack-dab in the middle of Wisconsin’s Burger Belt, a strip of burger goodness that runs between its two biggest cities, Milwaukee and Madison. The stretch of I-94 that runs between Wisconsin’s political and cultural capitals has given birth to some truly spectacular burgers. Local hits like Kopp’s, the Village Bar and Bubba’s all sit just off the well-worn interstate, but Culver’s is undoubtedly the Belt’s crowning achievement.
Bringing a buttery ‘Sconnie postcard to every town it graces, a trip to Culver’s is like a trip to the Burger Belt. Solid burgers aside, its menu offers a few tasty treats that can be tricky to come by outside of the Dairy State, including cheese curds and frozen custard. None of this is necessarily anything new. After all, Culver’s has been around for a while now, and curds and custards have been beloved treats in my neck of the woods for decades.
Map Of The Stars
The World’s Oldest Map of the Stars, Lost for Thousands of Years, Has Been Found in the Pages of a Medieval Parchment
The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus catalogued the coordinates of the stars. Now, his efforts have finally been uncovered.
Scholars have discovered part of the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus’s long-lost star catalogue of the—believed to be the first map of the stars—in a manuscript from a Greek Orthodox monastery in Egypt.
The historic document, which comprises 146 folios, comes from St. Catherine’s in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and the majority is now in the collection of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
A new study published this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy reveals that it is palimpsest manuscript, in which the original ink had been scraped off to reuse the parchment for a new project—and that traces of the original writings can still be deciphered, revealing what appears to be a reference to Hipparchus’s ambitious project to map the stars, including star coordinates.
Astronomy historian James Evans told the journal Nature that it was a “rare” and “remarkable” find.
Fungi’n In Jamaica
Psychedelic mushrooms expand Jamaica tourism beyond sunshine and reggae
By Kate Chappell and Brian Ellsworth
TREASURE BEACH, Jamaica, Nov 24 (Reuters) – A new group of Jamaican resorts is promoting tourism that offers mystical experiences and stress relief through “magic mushrooms,” as the Caribbean nation seeks to develop a niche industry in natural psychedelics.
While mushrooms containing the psychoactive compound psilocybin remain illegal in most parts of Europe and the United States, Jamaica’s government has never outlawed the hallucinogenic fungus and is now cultivating investors in efforts to build up its psychedelics industry, which according to one estimate could be worth $8 billion globally by 2028.
Addams Family Pinball
The Wild History of the Beloved Addams Family Pinball Machine
It was the most popular game ever when Bally released it in 1991, and collectors clamor for the machines even now.
by MARAH EAKIN
FOR MORE THAN 80 years, the Addams Family has enjoyed a delightfully macabre existence. First introduced via a single-panel cartoon in The New Yorker in 1938, Chas Addams’ creepy clan has spawned multiple entertainment properties, including a surprisingly short-lived 1960s TV series, two beloved live-action movies from the ’90s, two recent animated kids films, an upcoming Netflix series based on the life of young Wednesday Addams, myriad books and collectibles, and even a Broadway musical starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth as Gomez and Morticia Addams.
To game lovers, though, the best of all that ephemera is The Addams Family pinball machine. Released in March 1992 by Bally Games and inspired by the 1991 live-action movie of the same name, The Addams Family is, to this day, the most popular and widely sold pinball machine of all time, moving more than 20,000 units. That’s a marvel not just because other “hit” games at the time were selling between 8,000 and 14,000 units, but because back then most pinball games were being sold to coin-op distributors or arcades rather than private collectors.
Matrixality
Is our universe one big virtual reality? How to test if we’re really living in a computer simulation
By Melvin M. Vopson, University of Portsmouth
Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be – allowing matter to clump together rather than being ripped apart.
A common answer is that we live in an infinite multiverse of universes, so we shouldn’t be surprised that at least one universe has turned out as ours. But another is that our universe is a computer simulation, with someone (perhaps an advanced alien species) fine-tuning the conditions.
The latter option is supported by a branch of science called information physics, which suggests that space-time and matter are not fundamental phenomena. Instead, the physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information, from which our experience of space-time emerges. By comparison, temperature “emerges” from the collective movement of atoms. No single atom fundamentally has temperature.
Good, Doggie.
What petting a dog can do for your brain
By Sandee LaMotte, CNN
On one side of the room sits the cutest life-size stuffed animal you’ve ever seen. On the other side rests a real dog — same size, shape and even the same name as the stuffed version.
You get to sit next to both of these fluffy friends and pet their fur. Guess which one will make your brain light up?
If you guessed the real dog, you’re right. Stuffed animals, as cute and cuddly as they may be, just don’t supercharge our frontal cortex, the part of the brain overseeing how we think and feel, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.
“We chose to investigate the frontal cortex because this brain area is involved in several executive functions, such as attention, working memory, and problem-solving. But it is also involved in social and emotional processes,” said study lead author Rahel Marti, a doctoral student in the division of clinical psychology and animal-assisted interventions at the University of Basel in Switzerland, in an email.
Fenn’s Auction
Forrest Fenn’s Famed Treasure Chest, a $2 Million Hoard Discovered After a 12-Year Hunt, Is Heading to Auction
The trove includes gold pieces, coins, jewelry, and other artifacts.
Ever wondered what was really in that 42-pound treasure chest that late antiquities dealer Forrest Fenn once buried in Wyoming’s Rocky Mountains? Wonder no more: 12 years after he sent the public on a treasure hunt, and two since it concluded, the once-hidden hoard is going on sale with Heritage Auctions.
Bids opened on Friday on 476 individual lots featuring gold pieces, coins, jewelry, and other artifacts—once collectively valued at $2 million. The auction ends December 12.
Born in 1930 in Temple, Texas, Fenn started collecting arrowheads at age nine and flew in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. Though possessing no previous experience, he transitioned into antiquity dealing from his Santa Fe base from 1972, counting Gerald R. Ford, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Cher as clients.
In 2010, Fenn buried a treasure-filled bronze chest at an undisclosed location in Wyoming and launched a nationwide hunt for the case by leaving clues about its burial spot in his memoir. According to Heritage Auctions, Fenn “saw the treasure hunt as a fitting farewell to a life well lived” as much as an incentive for the public to get out and adventure into nature.
An estimated 350,000 people sought the treasure. Some even perished. It was found in 2020, and the successful hunter, a medical student named Jack Stuef, reluctantly identified himself that December.
“I thought that whoever found the chest would be absolutely hated,” Stuef said. “I put an end to something that meant so much to so many people.”
Toad Lickers Not Welcome
US: National Park Service Warns People To Stop Licking Toad That Causes Hallucinations
Story by Basit Aijaz
The US National Park Service is warning people to stop licking toads in the wild, due to their gland-secreted psychedelic substance that can create a hallucinogenic experience.
In a Facebook post, the National Park Service (NPS) urged people to refrain from licking the Sonoran desert toad, also known as the Colorado river toad.
The agency said the creature is far from harmless, as it contains a potent toxin that can make people sick if they touch it or get the poison in their mouth.
“These toads have prominent parotoid glands that secrete a potent toxin. It can make you sick if you handle the frog or get the poison in your mouth,” the National Park Service advised.
Minks On The Run
Some 10,000 mink loose, missing after vandalism at northwest Ohio farm
The Van Wert Sheriff’s Office said the suspects destroyed fencing and approximately 25,000-40,000 mink were released.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Vandalism freed thousands of mink at a rural northwest Ohio farm, leaving an estimated 10,000 of the small carnivorous mammals unaccounted for Tuesday evening, the local sheriff said.
So many minks were killed crossing a nearby road that a plow was brought in to help clear the carcasses away, said Van Wert County Sheriff Thomas Riggenbach.
The property owner initially estimated 25,000 to 40,000 mink were released from their cages at Lion Farms, Riggenbach said. But he said employees at the farm were able to corral many of the ones that remained on the property, which is less than 15 miles from the Indiana state line.
Tonga’s strange volcanic eruption was even more massive than we knew
Tonga’s strange volcanic eruption was even more massive than we knew
BY MAYA WEI-HAAS
Crimson hues flushed across the early morning skies over the Kingdom of Tonga as Grace Frontin-Rollet spotted a pair of small rocky islands from the bow of the RV Tangaroa. Though the scene was picturesque, a tinge of sulfur in the air reminded the marine geologist what she and a team of scientists had traveled for six days over rough waters to see. In the expansive gap between the two bits of land, hidden on the ocean floor, lay the crater of a massive volcano that erupted just months before in one of the largest and strangest blasts ever seen.
“I don’t think the scale of what had happened hit us until we reached the site,” says Frontin-Rollet, who is from New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).
In December 2021, the volcano—called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai after the two islands that sit on its rim—awoke in a series of tantrums that turned into outright turmoil on January 15, 2022. The peak unleashed a blast so loud it was heard in Alaska, some 6,000 miles away. But much of what happened that day has remained a mystery, until now. Scientists, including the team aboard the RV Tangaroa, are finally putting together the pieces, and the picture that has emerged is mind-boggling.