The military's unsung Native American heroes

The Military's unsung Native American Heroes. They make up a proportionally huge number of veterans and those actively serving.
Native people account for about 2 percent of the American population. But in recent years, America's first citizens have been serving in the military at the highest rate of any ethnic group in the U.S. per capita, according to the Department of Defense.

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Via: The Week

ScanPyraminds

The Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest in all of Egypt, was built more than 4500 years ago as the final resting place of the 4th Dynasty pharaoh Khufu (a.k.a. Cheops), who reigned from 2509 to 2483 BCE. Modern Egyptologists have been excavating and studying it for more than a century, but it's still full of mysteries that have yet to be fully solved. The latest discovery, detailed in a new paper in the journal Nature, reveals a hidden void located with the help of particle physics. This is the first time a new inner structure has been located in the pyramid since the 19th century.

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Via: Mental Floss

"JFK Assassination Records Collection Act stipulated that all records that had been withheld, either partially or in full, would be released to the public 25 years later, on October 26, 2017.

"Well, the time has come to open up the files, and there is plenty of intriguing content in the 2800 newly released documents to sift through. (At the last minute, the government withheld 300 more documents, which will have to undergo classified review over the next six months.) Here are five things we’ve learned so far—not all about the assassination itself—from the documents."
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Via: Mental Floss

Searching for the Identity of San Francisco’s Mysterious Mummified Girl

 

On May 9, 2016, as construction crews were renovating a home in the city’s posh Richmond district, they struck something with their shovels. Under the garage floor was a tiny coffin made of lead and bronze, its most prominent feature a pair of glass windows that allowed workers to peer inside. They saw the preserved remains of a three-year-old girl. She was dressed in white, with ankle-high shoes, and grasped purple flowers that’d also been woven into her hair. A rosary and eucalyptus seeds had been carefully set atop her chest. There were no markers indicating who she was or when she died.

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Via: Atlas Obscura

Oldest known Bible goes online

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The world's oldest known Christian Bible goes online Monday -- but the 1,600-year-old text doesn't match the one you'll find in churches today.

Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.

The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections -- some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.

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Via: CNN

Wikipedia entry for Codex Sinaiticus

Five Myths about America’s Origins

As students of American history, most children learn about the heroes of the Revolutionary War, the discovery of the American continent, and other stories that illuminate the courageous people who contributed to the formation of the United States. In learning about Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, we’re regaled with stories of their personal valor—how Washington chopped down his cherry tree, how Columbus proved the flat-earthers wrong, and how Franklin discovered electricity in a lightning storm.

We learn all these quaint and quixotic stories, despite the fact that not one of them is true. George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree; geological evidence from his boyhood home shows that no cherry trees have ever grown there. A preacher looking to sell books propagated the story. As we prepare for our country’s 233rd birthday, we should think about the fact that many of the stories sold as historical fact would be better categorized as sheer fiction.

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Via: Divine Caroline

The Rand Corporation: The Think Tank That Controls America

If you think the Internet came out of Silicon Valley, that NASA planned the first satellite to orbit Earth, or that IBM created the modern computer—think again. Each one of these breakthroughs was conceived at RAND, a shadowy think tank in Santa Monica, California.

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Via: Mental Floss

The 16 Members of the U.S. Intelligence Community

With 16 agencies and organizations working both independently and together to collect, analyze, and disseminate information in the interest of protecting U.S. national security, it’s difficult to keep track of who exactly does what among the 16 members of the Intelligence Community. Just ask President Barack Obama. During his recent trip to the burger joint Five Guys, C-SPAN cameras caught Obama asking a man who works at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to explain what the NGA does. Here’s the answer to that question and a rundown of the 15 other members’ main responsibilities.

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Via: Mental Floss

Mistaken Identities and Executions: 6 Murderers Who Didn’t Do It

What do you do when you’ve just hanged someone for murder, and then their “victim” pops up alive and healthy a few towns away?

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Via: Mental Floss

Quick Study: Pirates!

Even before sacking the U.S.-flagged Maersk, high-seas thieves had been plenty busy hijacking loaded ships in sparsely patrolled waters. Here, the Reader's Digest Version of why this centuries-old scourge is back—and its human and financial toll.

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Via: Readers Digest

7 Civil War Stories You Didn’t Learn in High School

For many American historians, the Civil War is the climax in the story of how the United States came to be what it is today. But you knew that. For mental_floss readers, it’s also a source of some bizarre and surprisingly cool trivia.

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Via: Mental Floss

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mathematics of war

Sean Gourley from TED Talks.