9 Most Outrageous Outlaw Heroes

Nine fascinating people who lived their lives outside the law to become popular heros.

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Via: Oddee

Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read

So how do you decipher an unknown script? There are two minimum requirements. First, there has to be enough material to work with. Secondly, there must be some link to a known language. It helps enormously if there is a bilingual inscription or identifiable proper names - the Rosetta Stone (see image), for example, is written in both ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, and also contains the name of the Ptolemy dynasty. If there is no clear link, an attempt must be made to relate the concealed language to a known one.

Most of the undeciphered scripts featured here have been partially deciphered, and well-known researchers have claimed that they have deciphered some much more fully. Further progress is possible for most of them, especially if new inscriptions are discovered, which fortunately happens fairly often.

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Via: New Scientist

7 Famous People That Died During Sex

We've warned you in the past about the dangers of sex - including everything from The 9 Girls You'll Regret Hooking Up With In A Bar to the 10 Signs Your Prom Date Is Not Going To Have Sex With You. But today, we'd like to share some truly cautionary tales in the form of a list of 7 Famous People That Died During Sex. Give it a read and if you happen to be a Pope, you might want to be extra careful from now on.


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Via: Whip It Out Comedy

Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says

If you think having loads of money, fetching looks, or the admiration of many will improve your life — think again. A new study by three University of Rochester researchers demonstrates that progress on these fronts can actually make a person less happy.

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Via: Science Daily

Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive

How pushing a thought out of consciousness can bring it back with a vengeance.

It sometimes feels like our minds are not on the same team as us. I want to go to sleep, but it wants to keep me awake rerunning events from my childhood. I want to forget the lyrics from that stupid 80s pop song but it wants to repeat them over and over again ad nauseam.

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Via: PsyBlog

Animals can tell right from wrong

Animals possess a sense of morality that allows them to tell the difference between right and wrong, according to a controversial new book.

Scientists studying animal behaviour believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans.

Until recently, humans were thought to be the only species to experience complex emotions and have a sense of morality.

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Via: Telegraph

How Neanderthals met a grisly fate: devoured by humans

One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.

The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

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Via: The Guardian

How Neanderthals met a grisly fate: devoured by humans

One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.



The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.



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Via: The Guardian

Fossil Ida: extraordinary find is 'missing link' in human evolution

Scientists have discovered an exquisitely preserved ancient primate fossil that they believe forms a crucial "missing link" between our own evolutionary branch of life and the rest of the animal kingdom.

The 47m-year-old primate – named Ida – has been hailed as the fossil equivalent of a "Rosetta Stone" for understanding the critical early stages of primate evolution.

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Via: The Guardian and Revealing The Link

Meet Dr. Ecstasy

At the turn of the last century, there were only two psychedelic compounds known to man: cannabis and mescaline (which is what makes peyote so popular with shamans and hippies). By the 1950s, scientists had developed or uncovered LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) and about 15 more compounds you’ve probably never heard of. These days, we’re well into the hundreds, thanks in large part to the work of an organic chemist named Dr. Alexander Shulgin and many years’ worth of experimentation (much of it on himself) in a tiny lab in his backyard in Northern California. (Pictured above: Shulgin and his wife, Ann.)

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Via: Mental Floss

Secrets of Pirates, Shanghai

Pirates get a bad rap. They were cut-throat, drunken maniacs, sure, but what they did have was great benefits. Compared to other sailing outfits, pirates often had better food, better pay, better sleeping arrangements (all still horrible of course) than other soldier or merchant vessels. Pirates at least had a democratic decision-making system. Comparatively luxurious, the pirate ships often had plenty of people willing to join them. Not so for your standard military or merchant ships. Sailors regularly jumped ship, and after a few days stay in a port, a ship could be shorthanded by half a dozen men. This is where the “Pirates’ House” came in. Besides beer, food and wenches, the “Pirate House” did a brisk trade in something else; they found new sailors for the ships. Rather than going to all the trouble of convincing people of what a nice life it was at sea (people knew better) they simply kidnapped them.

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Via: Curious Expeditions

Dogs have souls, but you already knew that

DENVER — For centuries, humans have imagined they are the only animals with morals. But humans are not alone in the moral arena, a new breed of behavior experts says.

Natural historian Jake Page said some scientists are acknowledging what pet owners have told their canines all along: "Good dog."

Dogs are full of natural goodness and have rich emotional lives, said animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

A dog's code of ethics is on display daily in parks, backyards and family rooms.

"We're not trying to elevate animals," Bekoff said. "We're not trying to reduce humans. We're not saying we're better or worse or the same. We're saying we're not alone in having a nuanced moral system."

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Via: The Seattle Times

Giant Lizards Pose Threat in Florida

Nile monitor lizards, which can grow up to 6 feet long, are plaguing the west coast of the Sunshine State. The non-indigenous animals, which were introduced to the area as pets, are causing potentially deadly roadblocks at an airport and threatening the survival of native species.

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Via: AOL News

Meditation increases brain gray matter

Push-ups, crunches, gyms, personal trainers -- people have many strategies for building bigger muscles and stronger bones. But what can one do to build a bigger brain? Meditate.

That's the finding from a group of researchers at UCLA who used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people who meditate. In a study published in the journal NeuroImage and currently available online (by subscription), the researchers report that certain regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger than in a similar control group.

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Via: PhysOrg.com

Top 15 strangest conditions of the human mind

The human mind is a tremendous thing - there are so many facts revealed about it, and so many things which still remain an enigma for us. Science is struggling to explain such strange developments, but still unable to describe their actual origins. Although majority of us are already familiar of a few mental conditions on this list, several others are very strange, unfamiliar and beyond the boundary of logical domain. Here is a collection of top 15 strangest conditions of the Human Mind.

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Via:Mind Cafe

Rules for Time Travelers

With the new Star Trek out, it’s long past time (as it were) that we laid out the rules for would-be fictional time-travelers. (Spoiler: Spock travels to the past and gets a sex change and becomes Kirk’s grandfather lover.*) Not that we expect these rules to be obeyed; the dramatic demands of a work of fiction will always trump the desire to get things scientifically accurate, and Star Trek all by itself has foisted half a dozen mutually-inconsistent theories of time travel on us. But time travel isn’t magic; it may or may not be allowed by the laws of physics — we don’t know them well enough to be sure — but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed. And sometimes it’s more interesting to play by the rules. So if you wanted to create a fictional world involving travel through time, here are 10+1 rules by which you should try to play.

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Via: Discover Magazine

The science of voodoo: When mind attacks body

The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects. The term "nocebo", which means "I will harm", was not coined until the 1960s, and the phenomenon has been far less studied than the placebo effect. It's not easy, after all, to get ethical approval for studies designed to make people feel worse.

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Via: New Scientist

Surprise! Daydreaming Really Works the Brain

Got a tough problem to solve? Try daydreaming.

Contrary to the notion that daydreaming is a sign of laziness, letting the mind wander can actually let the parts of the brain associated with problem-solving become active, a new study finds.

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Via: Live Science

The Ten Most Revealing Psych Experiments

Psychology is the study of the human mind and mental processes in relation to human behaviors - human nature. Due to its subject matter, psychology is not considered a 'hard' science, even though psychologists do experiment and publish their findings in respected journals. Some of the experiments psychologists have conducted over the years reveal things about the way we humans think and behave that we might not want to embrace, but which can at least help keep us humble. That's something.

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Via: Brainz

Words to live by

At the age of 97 years and 4 months, Shigeaki Hinohara is one of the world's longest-serving physicians and educators. Hinohara's magic touch is legendary: Since 1941 he has been healing patients at St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo and teaching at St. Luke's College of Nursing. After World War II, he envisioned a world-class hospital and college springing from the ruins of Tokyo; thanks to his pioneering spirit and business savvy, the doctor turned these institutions into the nation's top medical facility and nursing school. Today he serves as chairman of the board of trustees at both organizations. Always willing to try new things, he has published around 150 books since his 75th birthday, including one "Living Long, Living Good" that has sold more than 1.2 million copies. As the founder of the New Elderly Movement, Hinohara encourages others to live a long and happy life, a quest in which no role model is better than the doctor himself.

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Via: The Japan Times

“Happiness is Love,” Researcher Concludes

George Vaillant has been overseeing a longitudinal study of men’s lives for more than 40 years. The study focuses on the personal and professional lives of men selected in the late 1930’s, and its participants include luminaries like John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee (editor of The Washington Post), along with 266 less well-known men. Vaillant has come to a conclusion after four decades of observing these men’s lives: “Happiness is love. Full Stop.”

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Via: Mental Floss

16 Victims of the Church of Scientology

For the past 56 years the Church of Scientology has blazed a path of headlines and mystery across the globe. Once existing only as the idea held by a single man, the Church has grown into a multinational, highly organized institution in record time. There is little doubt that trends in the 60's and 70's of both counter-culture and new-age thought contributed to the break-neck speed of the Church's growth, allowing its numbers to swell worldwide to figures that cannot be accurately counted, but are said to number in the millions.

Despite the great successes the CoS has enjoyed over the last half-century, the ubiquitous Church has been embroiled in scandal since its inception. At the heart of every matter of contention lies the bottom dollar. Though self-described as a religious ministry, the CoS tries to operate more like a not-for-profit international charity, and has repeatedly been accused of actually being a for-profit business. Criminal activities, both proven and alleged, span the entire length of the Church's short lifespan. Here we take a look at 16 victims of the most egregious offenses allegedly committed by the Church of Scientology to date.

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Via: Brainz

Top 10 Greatest Mysteries in Science

This project began two years ago when we asked several several scientists from various fields what they thought were the greatest mysteries.

From their input, we wrote about 14 big enigmas. None have been solved since. So last month, we asked you to rank the list.

What follows, backed by more than 8,000 of your votes as of May 7, 2009, are 10 of the greatest mysteries facing science today. No. 1 was, as we had figured it might be, a clear winner with 20 percent of the vote (No. 2 got 16 percent).


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Via: Live Science

African tribe populated rest of the world

The entire human race outside Africa owes its existence to the survival of a single tribe of around 200 people who crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago, scientists have discovered.

Research by geneticists and archaeologists has allowed them to trace the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia. From there they went on to colonise the rest of the world.

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Via: Telegraph.co.uk

The Fibonacci sequence w/pics after the jump

Leonardo of Pisa gave us another interesting, if less known gift of mathematics. If you have never heard of the Fibonacci sequence, don’t worry. To be honest, the sequence sees little publicity these days outside of a Dan Brown novel and the occasionally nerdy conversation which may or may not involve warp core propulsion mechanics. However, the Fibonacci sequence is an amazing bit of numbers that ties nature and mathematics together in surprising ways. From deep sea creatures to flowers to the make-up of your own body, Fibonacci is everywhere.

The Fibonacci sequence starts with the number 1. Each additional number is the sum of the two numbers preceding it. For example 1+0=1, 1+1=2, 2+1=3, 3+2=5, 5+3=8 and so on. At first glance, this series might look like the idle musings of a bored person before Tivo was invented, but it goes much further than that. Pause whatever live broadcast you’re watching and take a look at the following examples.

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Via: Environmental Graffiti

Physicists Prove That Vampires Could Not Exist

If you've ever read Salem's Lot (or seen the lame Starsky and Hutch-era miniseries adaptation starring David Soul), then you know that after a vampire decides to settle in your town, the undead begin to multiply at an alarming rate (he bites two friends, who bite two friends, and so on, and so on…).

Fortunately, our best minds are on the case. Physicists Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi's paper "Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality" offers a full explanation.

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Via: io9

Solving the Mystery of the Biggest Natural Explosion in Modern History

On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky exploded over a remote region of central Siberia. A fireball as powerful as hundreds of Hiroshima atomic blasts scorched through the upper atmosphere, burning nearly 800 square miles of land. Scientists today think a small fragment of a comet or asteroid caused the "Tunguska event," so named for the Tunguska river nearby. Now, a controversial new scientific study suggests that a chunk of a comet caused the 5-10 megaton fireball, bouncing off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun. The scientists have even identified a candidate Tunguska object—now more than 100 million miles away—that will pass close to Earth again in 2045. Is there a hidden, but powerful, danger inside the seemingly harmless comet?

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Via: Popular Mechanics

Irish student's Wikipedia hoax dupes newspapers

An Irish student's fake quote on the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia has been used in newspaper obituaries around the world, the Irish Times reported.

The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died in March.

"I didn't expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised about," he said.

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Via: PhysOrg.com

How David Beats Goliath

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases.

What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

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Via: The New Yorker

Hobbits 'are a separate species'

Scientists have found more evidence that the Indonesian "Hobbit" skeletons belong to a new species of human - and not modern pygmies.

The 3ft (one metre) tall, 30kg (65lbs) humans roamed the Indonesian island of Flores, perhaps up to 8,000 years ago.

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Via: BBC News

Newton was wrong!

"Maybe Newton was indeed wrong", declares Professor Dr. Pavel Kroupa of Bonn University´s Argelander-Institut für Astronomie (AIfA). "Although his theory does, in fact, describe the everyday effects of gravity on Earth, things we can see and measure, it is conceivable that we have completely failed to comprehend the actual physics underlying the force of gravity".

It would not be the first time that Newton's theory of gravitation had to be modified over the past hundred years. This became necessary in three special cases: when high velocities are involved (through the Special Theory of Relativity), in the proximity of large masses (through the theory of General Relativity), and on sub-atomic scales (through quantum mechanics).

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Via: EurekAlert.org

Things in the Skull and Bones Society’s Tomb

I’m sure you’ve all heard of the uber-top-secret-this-message-will-self-destruct Skull and Bones society at Yale. The Bushes have been members since way back when; other Bonesmen include an illustrious list of other presidents (William Howard Taft), high-up business executives, Supreme Court justices, politicians and journalists. We know that their headquarters is called “The Tomb” and it houses many secrets, but a few of those have been uncovered thanks to the intrepid journalism of Alexandra Robbins, who managed to get more than 100 Bonesmen to speak to her about the Stonecutters, errr, Skull and Bones. Here are 10 of the things that may (or may not) lie within the walls of The Tomb.

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Via: Mental Floss

Evidence of the 'Lost World' -- did dinosaurs survive the end Cretaceous extinctions?

The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago, has no less appeal now than it did when it was written a century ago. Various Hollywood versions have tried to recreate the lost world of dinosaurs, but today the fiction seems just a little closer to reality.

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Via: PhysOrg.com

The mathematics of war

Sean Gourley from TED Talks.

Mission Impossible: The Code Even the CIA Can't Crack

The most celebrated inscription at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used to be the biblical phrase chiseled into marble in the main lobby: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." But in recent years, another text has been the subject of intense scrutiny inside the Company and out: 865 characters of seeming gibberish, punched out of half-inch-thick copper in a courtyard.

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From Wired.com