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
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine