Origins of alcohol consumption traced to ape ancestor

The taste for alcohol may be an ancient craving. The ability to metabolize ethanol — the alcohol in beer, wine and spirits — might have originated in the common ancestor of chimpanzees, gorillas and humans roughly 10 million years ago, perhaps when this ancestor became more terrestrial and started eating fruits fermenting on the ground.

-Science News
 

What is Media Manipulation?--A Definition and Explanation

If you don’t know, you should. Because media manipulation currently shapes everything you read, hear and watch online. Everything.

-Forbes

Graphic: Anatomy of a Stoning in Iran

We look at the brutal practice of stoning in Iran. This method of execution is still practiced in certain countries, where it is used to punish adulterers and other criminals. The graphic below looks at how a stoning occurs in accordance with the exact language of the Iranian Penal Code.

-National Post

Revealed: al-Qaeda's 22 tips for dodging drones

Al-Qaeda's list of 22 tips for dodging drone attacks - including at least one believed to originate with Osama bin Laden - has been found hidden inside a manila envelope in a building abandoned by Islamists in Mali.

-The Telegraph

The Evolution of 'Star Trek' (Infographic)

On Sept. 8, 1966, an American science fiction icon was born. The “Star Trek” television show lasted only three seasons, but spawned a lasting legacy that has stretched across decades and led to four spinoff live-action shows, a cartoon series and a dozen feature films.

Gene Roddenberry and his team set their show aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, a sophisticated starship with a competent crew of professional astronauts.

A pilot episode starring Jeffrey Hunter was rejected by the NBC TV network as “too cerebral” for a general audience. The show was retooled with William Shatner in the starring role of Captain James T. Kirk. Leonard Nimoy was featured as the alien officer Spock.

-Space

Island Of The Dolls: Mexico’s Creepiest Places

The Island Of The Dolls (Isla de las Muñecas), located in the vast network of canals that lies to the south of Mexico City, near Xochimilco is one of the creepiest tourist attraction in Mexico. Here, among the branches and dead trees hang hundreds of old, mutilated dolls.

-Amusing Planet

Hong Kong's human battery hens: Claustrophobic images show how slum families squeeze their lives into the tiniest apartments

They are barely bigger than a toilet cubicle.Yet these depressingly cramped spaces serve as a kitchen, living room, dining room, bedroom, pantry and everything in between for their cooped-up inhabitants. Those unfortunate enough to live in these urban slums range from the elderly and unemployed low-income families and singletons. Their location? Hong Kong. One of the richest cities in the world.

-Mail Online

Capturing the Elusive Indoor Cloud

Many artists have been accused of having their head in the clouds.

For Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde, the expression has an entirely different meaning.

Mainly a sculptor, Smilde creates clouds in indoor spaces and then uses photography as a means to capture their transient lives.
 

Using a combination of “frozen smoke” and moisture, the Dutch artist is able to create the clouds indoors that last just long enough to be photographed. The process leading up to the creation, however, can be labor intensive with shoot preparations lasting a few days.

 

-Slate 

Top 35 des photos de couples qui donnent envie de ne jamais trouver l’amour

« Chéri je t’aime si fort, immortalisons notre amour…» . C’est à ce moment-là que l’on plaint beaucoup le photographe, qui manifestement n’a pas son mot à dire, ou n’ose pas, ou consent (et là, c’est pire). C’est dans ces cas-là qu’on se dit qu’heureusement, l’amour est aveugle. Un guide des idées à ne pas avoir quand on planifie des photos de couple.

-Topito

La Mélody du strip-tease

Les éditions Ego comme X publie pour la première fois en France «Mélody», récit culte et autobiographique de la vie d'une danseuse érotique dans le Montréal des années 80.

-Libération

Haunting images rusting gurneys operating tables patients subjected terrifying Nazi style experiments

From rusting gurneys to haunting 'operating' chairs, these crude and terrifying medical apparatus have been left to decay inside some of the world's abandoned asylums. They shed new light on one of the darkest eras of medical history when patients were subjected to Nazi-style experiments in the misguided aim of finding a cure. From the UK to the U.S., these once-grand, but often mysterious institutions have been brought to life once more in a new collection of photographs that serve as reminder of the dark goings-on inside.

-Mail Online

Midget Bar Fight

Blackfeet country

Walter McClintock graduated from Yale in 1891. In 1896 he traveled west as a photographer for a federal commission investigating national forests. McClintock became friends with the expedition’s Blackfoot Indian scout, William Jackson or Siksikakoan. When the commission completed its field work, Jackson introduced McClintock to the Blackfoot community of northwestern Montana. Over the next twenty years, supported by the Blackfoot elder Mad Wolf, McClintock made several thousand photographs of the Blackfoot, their homelands, their material culture, and their ceremonies.

-Retronaut

The years with GALERIA URBAN FORMS - In Lodz, Poland

Urban Forms Gallery is the main project of the foundation. It is a permanent street art exhibition in a public space in Lodz. As for now, it consists of 21 large format paintings, murals, created directly on the side wall elevations of buildings placed in the city centre. They form an artistic trail open to everyone: citizens and tourists. As taking care of the high artistic value of the whole undertaking is fundamental, we invite artists who are world leaders in creating street art in public spaces.

The gallery is situated in a unique architecture of Lodz city centre with blank walls along main streets. It also refers to cultural heritage in the form of numerous and well preserved advertisement murals created between 1960 and 1980. Because of this, Lodz becomes an important centre of street art in Poland and in the world.

-Street Art Utopia

The ice tunnels of the French Alps

These breathtaking photographs show climbers scaling a treacherous tunnel made entirely from ice to make their way out of a cave carved in a frigid glacier. The brave explorers look as though they are on the verge of sliding down the swooping sides of the cave - a vertiginous drop of more than 20m onto jagged ice. Braving freezing temperatures and a dangerous ascent, Alexandre Buisse clung to supports screwed directly into the walls of ice to photograph his friends scaling the Mer de Glace glacier in Chamonix, France.

-Mail Online

The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots

Here's a scene that will be familiar to anyone who's ever taken an introductory economics course. The professor has just finished explaining that in economics, "efficiency" means that there are no possible gains from trade. Then some loudmouth kid in the back raises his hand and asks: "Wait, so if one person has everything, and everyone else has nothing and just dies, is that an 'efficient' outcome?" The professor, looking a little chagrined, responds: "Well, yes, it is." And the whole class rolls their eyes and thinks: Economists.

For most of modern history, inequality has been a manageable problem. The reason is that no matter how unequal things get, most people are born with something valuable: the ability to work, to learn, and to earn money. In economist-ese, people are born with an "endowment of human capital." It's just not possible for one person to have everything, as in the nightmare example in Econ 101.

-The Atlantic

A Room With a View (From Above)

Photographer Menno Aden likes to look down on his subjects, but in about the least pretentious way possible. To him, it’s just another way of seeing someone’s personality.

-Slate

Meet the 23-year-old squatter who's moved into palatial $2.5MILLION waterfront mansion in Florida - but there's NOTHING neighbors or cops can do about it

Andre Barbosa can safely say that he has one of the nicest homes on the block in Boca Raton, Florida. But the 23-year-old Brazilian national does not own or even rent the palatial $2.5million estate legally - he is a squatter.

-Daily Mail