Vishay Singh

Author Vishay Singh

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Author Vishay Singh

And humans appear to have adapted those uses to their needs. At Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa, where ochre use was already complex about 100,000 years ago, different types of ochre were rubbed, ground or crumbled depending on the intended application and the individual rock’s hardness, which varies widely. One of the obstacles to resolving how and why the rocks were used is in their very nature. “Ochre use by definition is destructive,” Zipkin says. “Generally wh ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

11. As for the Hope Diamond’s “curse”? Sorry, it was a made-up marketing ploy. On the topic of making things up, the first recorded attempt at synthesizing diamonds was back in 1880, when Scottish chemist J.B. Hannay heated sealed wrought-iron tubes that had been filled with a mix of oils and lithium. 12. Alas, the tubes were prone to exploding. Think of it as the first diamond boom! that was also a bust. 13. In 1955, however, labs at General Electric built on earlier research ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

(Credit: Turi et al., eLife, 7:e32399, 2018) You probably see a cylinder when you look at the illusion above. But how our brains translate two intersecting sheets of moving dots into a 3D image reveals telling differences in visual perception that could perhaps help diagnose autism spectrum disorder. It’s been shown that people with autism are better at picking out the details of complex images, at the cost of understanding what all those details mean when put together. This can mea ...read more