The wonder of breasts
Our culture is obsessed with breasts, yet we know remarkably little about them. But their secrets are starting to be unravelled, and nothing is more astonishing than breast milk
Car story -
[video]http://www.youtube.com/embed/bz-nO6WvOYw?rel=0[/video]
Great, great story !!! Thanks for that. I was afraid the old boy would cark it in the end.
What a great story of family love. Thanks Mr Burns. Fantastic.
A World built on Slavery
By Juan Cole | Feb. 24, 2014 |
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(By Greg Grandin)
Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble — as many as 300,000 died — when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been “under the heel of the French” but they “got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’”
A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne.
Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property — their slaves (that is, themselves) — or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80% of the government budget was still going to service this debt.
John McNally's top 10 true or false science facts
Does a Polo mint really light up when broken in half? Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction… here are 10 of the best crazy science "facts" – see if you can tell the true from false!
John McNally
theguardian.com, Thursday 27 February 2014 20.00 AEST
My latest book Infinity Drake and the Sons of Scarlatti is the first in a new series of adventure thrillers in which the hero, Finn, gets caught up with his mad scientist uncle in a secret race to destroy an escaped bio-weapon – the Scarlatti Wasp – before it destroys life on earth.
Just another day in the life of an average 12-year-old. But… a pitiless trillionaire terrorist sabotages the project and Finn gets shrunk to 9mm and finds himself way behind enemy lines with a couple of soldiers and bunch of weapons – missing, presumed dead.
The thrill-a-minute consequences contain some stunning action and some stunning science. But how much of that science is fiction and how much fact? Check out my top 10 true or false crazy science "facts" and see how if you know the difference between them!
"The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary.
A school dropout from a poor family in southern India has revolutionised menstrual health for rural women in developing countries by inventing a simple machine they can use to make cheap sanitary pads.
Arunachalam Muruganantham's invention came at great personal cost - he nearly lost his family, his money and his place in society. But he kept his sense of humour. " http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26260978
Additional comment and context in this article http://www.alternet.org/want-change-world-build-better-maxi-pad
The Wright Brothers: Even More Badass Than You Thought
For his new book, The Wright Brothers, *Pulitzer Prize winner David *McCullough pored over newspaper articles, photographs, and more than 1,000 letters to create a gripping account of Wilbur and Orville's quest to fly.
No one paid attention to the Wright brothers when they first started working on their airplane. Why do you think that was?
The fact that they were so ignored is astonishing. Ignored by the press, by serious scientific magazines, by the federal government, and by the newspapers right in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Nobody even bothered to go out and take a look. They did it all themselves. They didn't have any foundation backing them. They didn't have the facilities of some institution or corporation. They didn't have political contacts, or an angel funding their experiments. They were paying for it out of their own relatively meager earnings from a bicycle shop, and giving up a hell of a lot in life in order to do it. They were determined to succeed, and they did.
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