Science 2.0

Where do the Jewish people come from? This is a question that anthropologists, historians and theologists have studied for millennia.

According to mythology, the Judaeans descended from three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs (Cave of Machpelah) in Hebron – a city in the Palestine region and a world heritage site located in the southern West Bank, 19 miles south of Jerusalem.

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The worst effects of the UK’s housing crisis include rising levels of homelessness, and growing numbers of people being housed in unsafe or overcrowded conditions. According to the charity Crisis, 59,890 households were accepted as homeless in England in 2017. And according to recent statistics, 27% of privately rented homes and 13% of homes in the social housing sector are not classed as “decent”.

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The Federal Court of Appeal decision that halted construction on the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion has thrown Canada into a tizzy.

While British Columbia First Nations and environmentalists are celebrating a rare court victory on this project, industry representatives, trade unions and many other First Nations who supported the expansion feel the decision is a nightmarish intervention in plans that were many years in the making.

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Though sexual assault and dating violence in the academic and cultural world focuses most heavily on men, among teens there are more Asia Argento's than Twitter recognizes.

In recent findings, 5.8 percent of boys and 4.2 percent of girls said they had experienced dating violence in the past year. The good news is that dating violence among teens has declined overall, from 6 percent of teens reporting dating violence in 2003 down to 5 percent in 2013.

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A fully 3D printed array of light receptors on a hemispherical surface is the first significant step toward creating a "bionic eye."

The project began with a hemispherical glass dome to show how they could overcome the challenge of printing electronics on a curved surface. Using a custom-built 3D printer, they started with a base ink of silver particles. The dispensed ink stayed in place and dried uniformly instead of running down the curved surface. The researchers then used semiconducting polymer materials to print photodiodes, which convert light into electricity. The entire process took about an hour.

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Two teams have announced the fifth and most prominent way that the Higgs boson - "the God particle" as it was once called - decays into other particles called bottom quarks. This pathway is the last to be detected of the five main signature pathways that can identify the Higgs particle.

Quarks are tiny constituents of protons, which themselves are some of the building blocks of atoms. The bottom quark is one of the six types of quarks that make up the menagerie of particles in the "standard model" that explains matter and their interactions

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Three new species of fossil primates have been named, residents of San Diego County from a time when southern California was filled with lush tropical forests.

The three previously unknown omomyoid primates lived 42 million to 46 million years ago. The researchers named these new species Ekwiiyemakius walshi, Gunnelltarsius randalli and Brontomomys cerutti. 

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People who go on low carbohydrate diets often report that they lose weight. And they do, because it is a crash diet. But as a long-term solution that and other fad diets are unsafe, as shown in a large study presented today at the European Society of Cardiology today.

The study prospectively examined the relationship between low carbohydrate diets, all-cause death, and deaths from coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease (including stroke), and cancer in a nationally representative sample of 24,825 participants of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) during 1999 to 2010.

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Some researchers, clinicians, professional organizations, and health charities have been waging a war on sugar, calling for dietary recommendations to be changed and even for a sin tax on sugar, all claiming it will reduce obesity and cardiovascular diseases. In 2014, the World Health Organisation even recommended that adults and children reduce their daily intake of free sugars to less than ten percent of their total energy intake. 

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Tafamidis meglumine (trade name: Vyndaqel®) was approved in November 2011 for the treatment of transthyretin amyloidosis in adults, a rare disorder ("orphan disease") caused by a defective gene and is associated with progressive nerve damage. Now it has been shown to improve survival and reduce hospitalizations for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, a rare heart condition, according to research presented at ESC Congress 2018 and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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In countries that have embraced centralized energy and migrated away from individual cooking with dung or wood, both public health and the emissions have improved. So why not pay for all developed countries to switch? The World Bank wanted to do that half a decade ago but it became political; countries like the U.S. agreed only to contribute if they used solar or wind, which are not viable even in America much less in a poor nation. It was another case of wealthy countries with plenty of energy passing their guilt along to Africa and Asia.

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I am writing this as someone who has given my time voluntarily to help Wikipedia for a decade, doing my best to improve their encyclopedia, mainly in areas of science, astronomy, and microtonal music. My work ranged from fixing minor errors through to contributing several new articles.

As a result of a sudden unexpected action taken against me by another editor a few days ago, I am now indefinitely blocked from any editing of Wikipedia. This has happened to many good faith editors there. It happens so easily. I think this is a major issue with Wikipedia that gets too little attention. Few even know that this is going on. Here is what I see now if I try to edit my own user page on Wikipedia

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I am now indefinitely blocked from any editing of Wikipedia after a decade of voluntary work as an editor helping to improve the encyclopedia. This is something that has happened to many editors there, and I think it is a major issue with Wikipedia that gets too little attention. Few even know that this is going on. Here is what I see if I try to edit my own user page on Wikipedia

It is the same if I try to edit any page there except my own talk page. I am permitted to do that

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I have worked on Wikipedia for ten years now, doing my best to improve the encyclopedia, mainly in areas of science, astronomy, and microtonal music. My work ranged from fixing minor errors through to contributing several new articles.

As a result of a sudden unexpected action taken against me a few days ago, I am now indefinitely blocked from any editing of Wikipedia after a decade of voluntary work as an editor helping to improve the encyclopedia. This is something that has happened to many editors there, and I think it is a major issue with Wikipedia that gets too little attention. Few even know that this is gong on there. Here is what I see if I try to edit my own user page on Wikipedia

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On September 4 to 8 the city of Mantova, in northern Italy, will be brimming with writers and readers. The event is called "Festivaletteratura" and brings together authors and consumers of books of all kinds, in a week-long kermesse with interviews, debates, public lectures, and the like. 

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The Bahama Nuthatch, native to a small area of native pine forest on the island of Grand Bahama, was feared extinct after Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but researchers are pleased to announce that the little-known bird is still out there.

But there may be only two left, they worry.

The Bahama Nuthatch has a long bill, a distinctive high-pitched squeaky call, and nests only in the mature pine trees of the Caribbean island. There may have been a sharp decline in its estimated population, from a believed 1,800 reported in a survey in 2004 to just 23 being seen in a survey in 2007, but it is hard to be sure.


Credit: Matthew Gardner, University of East Anglia

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In the 1800s, critics of evolution insisted there had to be fossil evidence for everything, which neglected the idea that fossilization is already difficult, finding the fossil is even more difficult, and something like an eye will not fossilize at all.

But detractors who insisted they would not accept evolution until they found a "missing link" between modern humans and ancestral primates would be moving the goalposts once again, because a fossil of an ancient hominin individual from Siberia had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. 

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Ray tracing has been a hot topic since...well, at least 350 B.C. in the western world, when Aristotle described his camera obscura and wrote that the eye is 'a darkened chamber awaiting light.' Da Vinci was fascinated by it, as was Descartes. And of course Einstein wanted to understand light quanta.

In the 1990s, software and hardware companies began to tout it, but like Atari Jaguar's claim it was a 64-bit machine because it had two 32-bit processors, it was a lot of marketing.

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Version 2 of a thick textbook on particle and astroparticle physics is out, and you should have a look at it (well, at least if you're seriously interested in the topic!). The book, titled "Introduction to Particle and Astroparticle Physics" (not a very imaginative title, admittedly, but at least a faithful one) has a more descriptive subtitle: "Multimessenger Astronomy and its Particle Physics Foundations". It is authored by Alessandro de Angelis and Mario Pimenta, two acknowledged experts of the field. 

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At the time of writing, 436 people have died following an earthquake in the Indonesian island of Lombok. A further 2,500 people have been hospitalized with serious injuries and over 270,000 people have been displaced.

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