Anthropologists have long studied how rituals bind practitioners together. From African tribes moving rhythmically around a fire to the scripted kneeling and standing by Catholics during Sunday mass, participants deepen group identity through ritual. But ritual also spills over into business and social situations. “The great thing about ritual is that anywhere humans are, a ritual will be there,” says Nicholas Hobson, a psychology and neuroscience researcher at the University of Tor ...read more

Incest is generally not a good idea because children born of closely related parents can end up with genetic diseases. But some amount of genetic similarity between parents can actually be evolutionarily advantageous, as genes that evolve together tend to work best with each other in a given environment. So how do people select "optimally similar" mates? Well, these scientists hypothesized that mating with a distant relative might satisfy both ends: the relationship would be distant enough ...read more

PLUS: a gallery of other compelling images from the mission I'm always looking for cool imagery to use here at ImaGeo, and today I stumbled on this photo. It's of a fjord in southern Greenland, taken during Operation IceBridge's final flight of the 2017 Arctic campaign, on May 12, 2017. Fractured sea ice floats between the towering cliffs, with a glacier visible in the far distance at the head of the fjord. NASA posted the image here today. I've done some modest processing to correct ...read more

The image is modest, belying the historic import of the moment. A woman on a white sand beach gazes at a distant island as waves lap at her feet — the scene is titled simply "Jennifer in Paradise." This picture, snapped by an Industrial Light and Magic employee named John Knoll while on vacation in 1987, would become the first image to be scanned and digitally altered. When Photoshop was introduced by Adobe Systems three years later, the visual world would never be the same. Today, p ...read more

Regular readers will know that I have an interest in plagiarism. Today I discovered an amusing case of plagiarism in a paper about plagiarism. The paper is called The confounding factors leading to plagiarism in academic writing and some suggested remedies. It recently appeared in the Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association (JPMA) and it's written by two Saudi Arabia-based authors, Salman Yousuf Guraya and Shaista Salman Guraya. Here's an example of the plagiarism: a 2015 paper by ...read more

But with the monster El Niño of 2015/2016 far back in the rear-view mirror, temperatures in 2017 are running somewhat lower than last year NASA has come out with its monthly analysis of global temperatures, and the results are notable, if not terribly surprising: Last month was the second warmest April in 137 years of modern record-keeping. Last month beat out April of 2010 by just a small amount to achieve that distinction, according to the analysis by NASA's Goddard Institu ...read more

Artificial intelligence is already helping determine your future – whether it’s your Netflix viewing preferences, your suitability for a mortgage or your compatibility with a prospective employer. But can we agree, at least for now, that having an AI determine your guilt or innocence in a court of law is a step too far? Worryingly, it seems this may already be happening. When American Chief Justice John Roberts recently attended an event, he was asked whether he could forsee a day ...read more

West Antarctic glaciers might now be melting fast enough to quiet the back and forth over a controversial climate finding. For years, scientists have debated whether heavy inland snowfall on the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet — Earth’s largest — balances out the rapid melting in West Antarctica. Given enough snowfall, the continent might not yet be contributing to sea level rise. Most research shows the melt rate is so high that the continent is indeed losing ice. But in ...read more

Nothing welcomes spring as deliciously as an asparagus dish. But are you a little lost which is the freshest bunch on the shelf? How to best store them? Other ways to cook them besides oven roasting? City Kitchen's got you covered. Where asparagus is a springtime treat, bananas are a year-round breakfast luxury. Unfortunately, its perennial availability puts it at risk for extinction. Asparagus is Sweetest in Spring – The New York Times: City Kitchen Humans Made the Banana ...read more

With the summer approaching, so are the mosquitoes. Now a UN-backed global platform will align citizen scientists from around the world to track and control these disease-carrying species. By Yujia He Mosquitoes are an annoying and unavoidable part of the warmer season. Their constant buzzing follows you whenever you step outside of your house, and the females feast on your blood to produce their offspring. In many parts of the world, mosquitoes bring not just annoyance but also disease ...read more