Notices by Flipboard Culture Desk (culturedesk@flipboard.social)

John "Bud" Benson Wilbur had an illustrious career in civil engineering. But @annaleen first encountered him in a 1952 essay for the Technology Review in which he imagined the distant-future world of 1977. Newitz writes for the New Scientist about what we can learn from his ideas (registration may be required).

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#History @histodon #Engineering #Science #Futurism

How important is beauty to scientists? Most conversations about this revolve around the things we can see or hear, like photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, or the way physicists perceive some equations as elegant. Sociologists Bridget Ritz and Brandon Vaidyanathan spoke to thousands of scientists about the subject, and discovered they're also motivated by a third kind of beauty: The aesthetic experience of understanding itself. "In our surveys and interviews, when asked where they find beauty in their work, scientists regularly pointed to times when they grasped the hidden order, inner logic or causal mechanisms of natural phenomena," write Ritz and Vaidyanathan for Aeon. "These moments, one UK physicist told us, are ‘like looking into the face of God for non-religious people – how you can look at something and think, oh my God, that’s how things actually work, that’s how things are!’"

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#Beauty #Science #Research #Physics #CellPhotography #Aesthetics #Philosophy

If you want to glimpse into a world without modern medicine, just pick up a Victorian book. In the first half of the 19th century, between 40% and 50% of children in the U.S. didn't live past the age of five. Kids were dying of diseases that are now preventable by vaccination, treatable with antibiotics, or out of the picture thanks to better sanitation, as well as from consuming unpasteurized milk or contaminated foods. @TheConversationUS looks at how this shows up in classic fiction, periodicals and personal writing. "These Victorian stories commemorate a profound, culturally shared grief. To dismiss them as old-fashioned is to assume they are outdated because of the passage of time. But the collective pain of a high child mortality rate was eradicated not by time, but by effort," writes Andrea Kaston Tange, a professor of English.

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#Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon #Literature #PublicHealth #Disease #DiseasePrevention

It's a question many of us might have been mulling, for no particular reason: Are we in the wrong timeline? @georgemusserjr writes for @SciAm about the scientific possibility of alternate timelines — what supports that they're real, and the fundamental puzzle that underpins them: What does it mean to be possible, but not actual?

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#Science #SpeculativeFiction #SciFi #ScienceFiction #SchrodingersCat #Philosophy #DarkestTimeline #ParallelUniverse

Our brains have to work hard when we watch movies — to observe what's happening on screen, interpret the dialogue and follow the plots. Now, Popular Science reports on MIT research into how different movies show up on MRI scans. The team used a previously collected dataset including whole-brain scans from 176 adults who watched 60 minutes' worth of clips. "When the film’s content was difficult to follow or more ambiguous like during 'Inception,' activity was heightened in executive control brain regions. However, during more easy to understand scenes, the brain regions with specific functions — such as language processing — were the most dominated," writes Laura Baisas. See the second link for the full study in the Cell Press journal "Neuron."

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#Movies #Cinema #Film #Neurology #Science #MRI

As Martina Canchi Nate walks through the Bolivian jungle, red butterflies fluttering around her, a team of journalists has to ask her to pause — they can’t keep up. Martina, 84 years old, is one of 16,000 Tsimanes (pronounced “chee-may-nay") — a semi-nomadic indigenous community living deep in the Amazon rainforest, north of Bolivia’s largest city, La Paz. Scientists have concluded that the Tsimanes people have the healthiest arteries ever studied, and their brains age more slowly than North Americans and Europeans. The BBC examines what Tsimanes consume, what they don’t, and what the rest of us might learn from them. https://flip.it/qkbnqO
#Culture #Health #Lifestyle #Diet #Humans #Bolivia #SouthAmerica #AmazonRainForest

More than one billion animals are kept as pets around the world. But bioethicist Jessica Pierce says that might not be great for our furry, feathered and scaly friends. In this story for @time, she discusses the potential harms of pet ownership, including whether it's ok to buy and sell animals and use them for our own gratification, the anguish of captivity, and the climate impacts of pet-keeping. She also posits a new way forward, in which human-animal ties are mutual and freely chosen. It's a very thought-provoking article; tell us in the comments what you think.

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#Lifestyle #PetOwnership #Pets #Ethics

A beluga can change the shape of its "melon" (the bulbous mass on its head) at will. Could this be used as a form of communication? A new study indicates that it might. Here's a story from @hakaimagazine with a six-panel comic illustrating the five different melon shapes and in what contexts some are used.

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#Science #Animals #Nature #Communication #Language #Comics

What's better for the environment: A paper book, or an e-reader? NPR spoke to industry experts about the rise of digital reading, how the publishing industry is reducing waste, and whether using a fossil-fuel-derived plastic e-reader is a better option than a paper book. The short answer, according to professor Mike Berners-Lee (yes, he is his brother): It depends.

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#Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon #Reading #Environment

Microbial art — the process of creating living paintings with bacteria — has been around for nearly 100 years. It was first created by Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin in 1928 and was also an amateur artist. Atlas Obscura looks at this blend of art and science, some of the skilled folks who make it, and the potential health risks if it's not done carefully.

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#Art #Science #Culture #Microbes

Environmental historian Vicki Szabo and her team of archaeologists, historians, folklorists and geneticists are trying to figure out medieval Icelanders' attitudes to blue whales. Did they revere them as their protectors? Did they hunt them for food? Was it both? @hakaimagazine@sciencemastodon.com's Andrew Chapman reports on the work of this multi-disciplinary team, and what their findings might tell us about historical and modern whale populations.

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#History #Science #EnvironmentalHistory #Scandinavia #Iceland @histodons

For more stories like this, follow @hakaimagazine@flipboard.com.

How did vitamins come to be called after letters of the alphabet? National Geographic's Erin Blakemore looks at the history and discovery of these vital dietary components, and why vitamin K bucks the naming trend.

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#Science #History @histodons #ScienceHistory #Vitamins #Nutrition

Does sci-fi shape the future? Tech billionaires from Bill Gates to Elon Musk have often talked about the impact of novels they read as teens, from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" to Iain M. Banks' "Culture" series. Big Think's Namir Khaliq spoke to authors including Andy Weir, Lois McMaster Bujold, @cstross and @pluralistic about how much impact they think science fiction has had, or can have.

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#Books @bookstodon #Fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #Tech #Technology

Researchers analyzed thousands of English-language songs released between 1970 and 2020. After examining a data set of 353,320 songs, they concluded that lyrics have become more personal, straightforward, and charged with negative emotions. One cultural psychologist posits that the simplification of lyrics may be down to the excess of choice provided by apps and streaming platforms. “When people are faced with lots and lots of choices, they tend to prefer things that are easier to process and more straightforward,” Michael Varnum told Scientific American. Here's more, from Smithsonian Magazine.

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#Music #Entertainment #Lyrics #Research #Science #SocialScience

For more stories like this, follow @Smithsonianmag's Arts & Culture Magazine, @arts-culture-Smithsonianmag.

Why do kids love dinosaurs? Science writer and amateur paleontologist Riley Black writes for Atmos about dinomania — her own, and society's, which she traces back to the 1914 animated short "Gertie the Dinosaur." "The fact that they are extinct makes them safe and child-appropriate — the logic goes — and so dinosaurs can do no harm," she writes. "If dinosaurs are so safe, though, why do we spend so much time imagining them chasing us down and eating us?"

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#Dinosaurs #Palaeontology #Paleontology #Fossils #PopCulture #JurassicPark #Children #Parenting #Lifestyle

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author of "Thinking Fast and Slow," died today at age 90. Here's a tribute to him from NPR. "Danny was a giant in the field," said Eldar Shafir, a professor at Princeton. "Many areas in the social sciences simply have not been the same since he arrived on the scene."

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#RIP #InMemoriam #ThinkingFastAndSlow #Psychology #Economics

A total solar eclipse will move across the U.S. on Monday, April 8. People who are blind or visually impaired will be able to experience it as they grow colder and hear birdsong change along with the dimming light, but much of the effect is visual. Planetary scientists Cassandra Runyon and David Hurd have written a guide called “Getting a Feel for Eclipses,” which has tactile graphics that illustrate the paths of the 2017, 2023 and 2024 eclipses. They write for @TheConversationUS about why they made it, and how it works.

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#Blindness #VisualImpairment #Accessibility #LowVision #Sight #Eclipse #TotalEclipse #SolarEclipse

For more stories like this, follow @ConversationUS's Science & Technology Magazine, @science-technology-us-ConversationUS.

The United States Department of Agriculture has updated its gardening map, which shows plant hardiness zones, for the first time since 2012. The new map indicates around half the country is warmer. Civil Eats talked to scientists, gardeners and other experts about the history of the map and what the changes mean for growers on the ground.

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#Gardening #Lifestyle #Science #ClimateChange #Agriculture

A "medical freedom" momfluencer is using a clip from "The Brady Bunch" to rally her followers against the MMR vaccine. In the episode "Is There a Doctor in the House," all the Brady kids get measles and enjoy a few days off school. Cases of measles are on the rise in the U.K. and U.S. and Natasha Crowcroft, who advises the WHO on MMR, says the disease's seriousness shouldn't be dismissed since even healthy kids in high-income countries with good healthcare have a one in 1,000 chance of dying from it. “If I said one in 1,000 people who eat this yogurt would get a severe allergy, that product would be off the market,” she told Salon.

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#Misinformation #SocialMedia #Nostalgia #TheBradyBunch #Health #Measles

How do you translate astronomical data into music? Composer Sophie Kastner has been collaborating with NASA scientists to do exactly that. The result is a composition titled "Where Parallel Lines Converge," which is based on the information from an image of the center of the Milky Way. Learn more about the process and listen to the music here.

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#Music #Astronomy #Science #Culture