from The New York Times

Bill Cunningham, Legendary Times Fashion Photographer, Dies at 87

By JACOB BERNSTEIN

First Thought Films/Zeitgeist Films

Bill Cunningham, who turned fashion photography into his own branch of cultural anthropology on the streets of New York, chronicling an era’s ever-changing social scene for The New York Times by training his busily observant lens on what people wore — stylishly, flamboyantly or just plain sensibly — died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by The Times. He had been hospitalized recently after having a stroke.

Mr. Cunningham was such a singular presence in the city that, in 2009, he was designated a living landmark. And he was an easy one to spot, riding his bicycle through Midtown, where he did most of his field work: his bony-thin frame draped in his utilitarian blue French worker’s jacket, khaki pants and black sneakers (he himself was no one’s idea of a fashion plate), with his 35-millimeter camera slung around his neck, ever at the ready for the next fashion statement to come around the corner.

Nothing escaped his notice: not the fanny packs, not the Birkin bags, not the gingham shirts, not the fluorescent biker shorts.

In his nearly 40 years working for The Times, Mr. Cunningham snapped away at changing dress habits to chart the broader shift away from formality and toward something more diffuse and individualistic.

At the Pierre hotel on the East Side of Manhattan, he pointed his camera at tweed-wearing blue-blood New Yorkers with names like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Downtown, by the piers, he clicked away at crop-top-wearing Voguers. Up in Harlem, he jumped off his bicycle — he rode more than 30 over the years, replacing one after another as they were wrecked or stolen — for B-boys in low-slung jeans.

In the process, he turned into something of a celebrity himself.

[ click to continue reading at NYT ]

from The Telegraph

Mamma Mia! listening to Mozart lowers blood pressure…but ABBA has no impact

By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor

Mozart’s Symphony No 40 in g minor lowered blood pressure 

Relaxing to a soothing Mozart symphony can lower the blood pressure as much as cutting salt from the diet or exercising, a new study has shown.

But for people concerned about their heart, it might be wise to stay clear of ABBA, which has no impact at all.

Scientists in Germany played Mozart’s Symphony No 40 in g minor, dances by Johann Strauss and songs by ABBA to 60 volunteers, monitoring their blood pressure before and after the experiment.

They found that Mozart lowered systolic blood pressure (the pressure in blood vessels when the heart beats) by 4.7 mm Hg, Strauss 3.7  mm Hg but the Swedish pop group made no significant difference.

Diastolic blood pressure (when the heart rests between beats) also fell by 2.1 mm Hg for Mozart and 2.9 mm Hg for Strauss.

[ click to continue reading at The Telegraph ]

from The Atlantic

A New Origin Story for Dogs

The first domesticated animals may have been tamed twice.

by ED YONG

Katie Salvi

Tens of thousands of years ago, before the internet, before the Industrial Revolution, before literature and mathematics, bronze and iron, before the advent of agriculture, early humans formed an unlikely partnership with another animal—the grey wolf. The fates of our two species became braided together. The wolves changed in body and temperament. Their skulls, teeth, and paws shrank. Their ears flopped. They gained a docile disposition, becoming both less frightening and less fearful. They learned to read the complex expressions that ripple across human faces. They turned into dogs.

Today, dogs are such familiar parts of our lives—our reputed best friends and subject of many a meme—that it’s easy to take them, and what they represent, for granted. Dogs were the first domesticated animals, and their barks heralded the Anthropocene. We raised puppies well before we raised kittens or chickens; before we herded cows, goats, pigs, and sheep; before we planted rice, wheat, barley, and corn; before we remade the world.

“Remove domestication from the human species, and there’s probably a couple of million of us on the planet, max,” says archaeologist and geneticist Greger Larson. “Instead, what do we have? Seven billion people, climate change, travel, innovation and everything. Domestication has influenced the entire earth. And dogs were the first.” For most of human history, “we’re not dissimilar to any other wild primate. We’re manipulating our environments, but not on a scale bigger than, say, a herd of African elephants. And then, we go into partnership with this group of wolves. They altered our relationship with the natural world.”

Larson wants to pin down their origins. He wants to know when, where, and how they were domesticated from wolves. But after decades of dogged effort, he and his fellow scientists are still arguing about the answers. They agree that all dogs, from low-slung corgis to towering mastiffs, are the tame descendants of wild ancestral wolves. But everything else is up for grabs.

Some say wolves were domesticated around 10,000 years ago, while others say 30,000. Some claim it happened in Europe, others in the Middle East, or East Asia. Some think early human hunter-gatherers actively tamed and bred wolves. Others say wolves domesticated themselves, by scavenging the carcasses left by human hunters, or loitering around campfires, growing tamer with each generation until they became permanent companions.

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic ]

from The Conversation

Why high school stays with us forever

by Frank T. McAndrew
Cornelia H. Dudley Professor of Psychology, Knox College

Sometimes, conformity can lead to cringeworthy moments – bad hairstyles among them. John Philip Green/flickr, CC BY

For better or worse, many of us never forget high school: the unrequited romantic crushes, chronic embarrassment, desperate struggles for popularity, sexual awakening, parental pressure and, above all else, competition – social, athletic, academic.

There’s even an entire genre of entertainment that revolves around high school. “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Mean Girls,” “Heathers,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” all revisit the conflict and angst of these years.

What is it about this period of our lives that makes it seem more meaningful and memorable than any other?

My research experience as an evolutionary psychologist leads me to believe that many factors interact to make our teenage memories so vivid. But the main driver is the collision between the hardwiring of our brains that took place across several million of years of evolution and the odd social bubble created by high school, which poses an unprecedented social challenge to our prehistoric minds.

In other words, the world that we evolved to be successful in (a small, stable group of interrelated people of various ages) is very different from the holding pen full of teenagers brimming with hormones that populate our world during the high school years.

[ click to continue reading at The Conversation ]

from Billboard Magazine

Ruth B’s ‘Lost Boy’ And The Story Behind The Year’s Strangest Hot 100 Hit

by Elias Leight

Ruth B’s “Lost Boy” is easily the most unusual song on the Hot 100: when it cracked the top 50 earlier this month, it was the only unadorned piano ballad on the chart’s top half, no small feat. It’s also the only song on the chart inspired by a more than century-old play.

That play is Peter Pan, first staged in 1904 and currently enjoying something of a moment in pop music. Last summer, an album with the same theme was released to accompany the musical Finding Neverland, but despite contributions from Nick Jonas, Jennifer Lopez, and Zendaya, nothing cracked the Hot 100. But Ruth B’s out-of-nowhere success — she was an unknown without a record deal before “Lost Boy” — suggests that the problem was with the execution rather than the concept.  And Peter Pan’s appeal transcends genres: while “Lost Boy” climbs the charts, country listeners are warming to Kelsea Ballerini’s “Peter Pan,” No. 28 and climbing on the Hot Country Songs chart.

That secret other world has spawned a thousand spinoffs, and the Peter Pan character in the TV show Once Upon A Time is the one who inspired Ruth B to write her hit. After watching an episode, she headed downstairs to her keyboard. “I was in a Peter Pan headspace,” she remembers. “I sang that first line out of nowhere.”

Ruth is a fan of the app Vine — especially after a spontaneous decision to post a loop of her singing the chorus to Drake’s “Hold On We’re Going Home,” which led to a large increase in followers. She’d never written a song before the first line of “Lost Boy,” though, so she was hesitant to promote it on the app. “I initially didn’t even want to post it because it was a little bit cheesy,” she says. “But it kept ringing through my head.”

She eventually posted it, and the reaction was immediate: people wanted more. She started to add lines in Vine-able increments. “I would finish studying, come down stairs, and add a line to the chorus,” she explains. “In a week, I had a chorus, so I decided I should turn this into a full song and take it to YouTube.”

The result, built six seconds at a time, is a beatless piano ballad. Chords hang in the air, never pressing on top of each other. Ruth occasionally climbs into falsetto, but the track doesn’t have much movement or drama. Although it’s about finding friends, Ruth sings alone, and this isolation is emphasized by an echo effect. Her Neverland is a place of complete liberty — “lost boys like me are free” — and the singer avoids taking sides in the frequently violent squabbles that divide the island’s characters in the original story: “Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Wendy darling, even Captain Hook/ You are my perfect storybook.”

But a perfect story, even one with the long term resonance of Peter Pan, doesn’t guarantee a national hit. That’s where major label radio promotion comes in handy. The tale of “Lost Boy” seesaws between old and new media — while there’s a nostalgia inherent in the idea of not wanting to grow up, the most up-to-date technology played a crucial role in the track’s formation; though Vine helped “Lost Boy” bubble up, old-school radio power gave it a key boost.

The radio clout was corralled in part by Lee Leipsner, EVP and head of promotion at Columbia Records. He has been at Sony music for 22 years; before that, he spent five years at Mercury records. On the phone, he has the enthusiasm and fervor of a lifelong salesman, and an arsenal of statistics to support his points. “It never gets old breaking records,” he tells me.

[ click to read full article at Billboard ]

from New Scientist

Real sea monsters: The hunt for predator X

By James O’Donoghue

(Image: Christian Darkin/Science Photo Library)

EACH summer, a team from the University of Oslo in Norway go hunting for monsters on the island of Spitsbergen. They carry guns in case they get menaced by the world’s largest living land carnivore, the polar bear. But it is not bears they are after. They are searching for much bigger quarry, the most formidable predators that ever lived.

Step back 150 million years and Spitsbergen was covered by a cool, shallow sea swarming with marine reptiles. The creatures died out and their fossils became part of an island stuffed full of bones. Nowhere else in the world are so many marine reptiles found in one place.

For a few short weeks the sun never sets and temperatures soar to just above freezing. Knowing that before long the ground will be frozen solid, the researchers dig like crazy. “It’s like a gold rush, there are so many fossils waiting to be found,” says team leader Jørn Hurum. “The site is densely packed with skeletons. As we speak there are probably more than 1000 skeletons weathering out.”

Hurum’s Arctic discoveries are part of a remarkable renaissance in interest in the marine reptiles of the Mesozoic era, 251 to 65 million years ago – including this week’s announcement of a colossal new marine reptile from the “Jurassic coast” of Dorset in southern England. We now know more about this group of creatures than ever before.

Marine reptiles were among the first vertebrate fossils known to science and were key to the development of the theory of evolution. In the late 18th century the massive jaws of a lizard-like beast were found in a mine in Maastricht in the Netherlands. Later named Mosasaurus, the creature helped convince scientists that animals could become extinct, a radical concept in its day. In the early 19th century, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs discovered by legendary fossil hunter Mary Anning around Lyme Bay in south-west England helped establish the science of palaeontology. Marine reptiles were among the best-understood extinct creatures of the first half of the 19th century and played a major role in the intellectual debate nurturing Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Yet they faded from view as their terrestrial relatives moved to centre stage. It took nearly a century for marine reptile research to emerge from the shadow cast by the dinosaurs. “Scientists thought they knew all there was to know,” says plesiosaur expert Leslie Noè of the Thinktank museum in Birmingham, UK. “The idea was that they weren’t worth studying. Nobody would say that now. Our understanding of marine reptiles is phenomenally greater now than it was even 10 years ago.”

[ click to continue reading at New Scientist ]