A unit of De Beers unearthed one of the world’s largest diamonds in Botswana earlier this month.
The 1,098-carat diamond is believed to be the third-largest gem-quality stone ever mined. It’s worth a jaw-dropping $100+ million. 80% of the income through sales will be passed on to the state to “be used to advanced national development in the country,” according to the Botswana Government.
President Mokgweetsi Masisi revealed the palm-sized stone to the public on Wednesday.
This afternoon Botswana's president announced that they discovered the 3rd biggest diamond in the world. pic.twitter.com/jrqeBggIiW
The government receives as much as 80% of the income from Debswana's sales through dividends, royalties and taxes.
Production at Debswana fell 29% in 2020 to 16.6 million carats while sales fell 30% to $2.1 billion as the pandemic impacted both production and demand pic.twitter.com/bK4JwUDG8c
The world’s largest stone remains the 3,106 carat Cullinan stone discovered in South Africa in 1905. It was cut and placed into the British Crown Jewels where it remains to this day.
Photographer Todd Anthony took pictures of Bolivia’s indigenous female wrestlers for his new project, Flying Cholitas.
This unique group of athletes wear more than stylish dresses and beautiful petticoats — they come together to demonstrate pride in their history.
Once colonized by the Spanish and rejected as lower-class citizens, pejoratively known as “cholita,” they have since embraced the name to symbolize their persistent fight against subjugation and hierarchy.
Symbolizing the culmination of strength, power, and beauty, the cholitas will not be denied in activism nor aesthetics.
They are renowned for their extraordinary abilities, diving to depths of over 70 m with nothing more than a set of weights and a pair of wooden goggles (Schagatay, 2014) and spending 60% of their daily working time underwater (Schagatay et al., 2011).
They’ve evolved to harbor extreme breath-holding capabilities with up to 13 minutes underwater. Even without weights, the Bajau can stay negatively buoyant enough to walk across the sea bottom as one does on terra firma.
Archaeologists uncovered the body of a wealthy 40-year old man and his young slave in Pompeii, 2,000 years after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Excavations at the suburban villa Civita Giuliana, a suburb outside Pompeii, discovered the bodies covered in a bed of 6.5-foot ash.
Researchers believe that the two men survived the initial eruption from Mount Vesuvius, only to succumb to a massive and more destructive cloud of scorching ash while seeking shelter in a cryptoporticus.
The skeletal remains follow last year’s discovery of another Ancient Roman man crushed by a flying rock during Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 A.D.
Iceland’s government, in partnership with the country’s tourist agency Promote Island, will allow anyone in the world to scream into an app and broadcast it into the nation’s vast wilderness.
Let it all out on a speaker in Iceland
All one needs to record a loud scream, wail, or shriek — whatever they want to get off their chest — at lookslikeyouneediceland.com and their frustration will play on one of the seven speakers situated around Iceland’s vacant countryside.
Looks like you’ve been through a lot. It looks like you need to let it out. It looks like you need Iceland. Record your scream from anywhere in the world at https://t.co/sTLs7Fafhi and we’ll release it in Iceland. You’ll feel better, we promise! #LetItOutIcelandpic.twitter.com/YFoZeMIMNi
To mark Spain’s lifting of lockdown restrictions, Barcelona’s Liceu Opera House reopened for the first time in three months with a performance to 2,292 potted plants.
The three classical musicians performed Puccini’s “Crisantemi” to “reaffirm the value of art, music and nature” after Covid-19 lockdowns.
Even more, the plants will be donated to the city’s healthcare workers.
You love to see it! Watch the full performance below.
A report issued in Nature reveals that staying inside is the leading cause of myopia.
The finding refutes the myth that nearsightedness is the result of intense reading sessions and screen activity.
Myopia is prevalent in East Asian countries, where the focus on studying means staying indoors rather than benefiting from the outside environment.
According to another study in journal Lancet, 90% of young adults in China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are nearsighted compared to 30% in Britain.
Outdoor light is beneficial to the eyes because it triggers the release of dopamine in the retina.
One myopia researcher recommends spending at least three hours a day in natural light, even if means sitting under a tree.
But what scientists really needed was a mechanism: something to explain how bright light could prevent myopia. The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development. The best evidence for the ‘light–dopamine’ hypothesis comes — again — from chicks. In 2010, Ashby and Schaeffel showed that injecting a dopamine-inhibiting drug called spiperone into chicks’ eyes could abolish the protective effect of bright light 11 .
An early human painting of a lion from the Chauvet Cave in Southern France
Neanderthals were great hunters but poor artists.
According to a study done by UC Davis psychology professor Richard Coss, Neanderthals used basic spear hunting techniques to capture tame prey.
Meanwhile, Homo Sapiens developed the ability to throw spears as a result of chasing more elusive game in the open grasslands of Africa.
Homo Sapiens were also careful planners, sharpening their hand-eye coordination by drawing out hunting scenes on cave walls.
43,900-year-old hunting scene found on island cave of Sulawesi, Indonesia (Science News)
Such artistry not only made modern humans better visualizers and hunters, but it also helped them develop smarter brains.
Historian and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari also argued that while Neanderthals might have had larger brains and finer tools than their fellow Homo Sapiens, they lacked the cognitive abilities for language.
Homo Sapiens developed rounder skulls and bigger parietal cortexes that allowed them not only to translate visual images but share stories through word of mouth.
In 1911, Swedish film company Svenska Biografteatern recorded its trip to New York.
Fortunately, the footage survived and most recently was speed-corrected (slowed down) and reproduced with the ambient audio of street sounds of car horns, horses, and police whistles to give us a sense of the environment back then.
There’s also a color version of the 8-minute long video restored via neural networks, featuring 60 frames per second and 4k image resolution.
Some observations:
Notice all the people wearing hats
The streets look a bit empty compared to today’s zoo
Cable powered trolleys
The kids go nuts when the camera is on them. Nothing’s changed!
Treadmills were originally torture devices, meant to break the mind, body, and spirit of English prisoners.
Two hundred years ago, the treadmill was invented in England as a prison rehabilitation device. It was meant to cause the incarcerated to suffer and learn from their sweat.
Groups of prisoners were forced to walk 6 hours a day, pumping out water, milling corn powering the mills, thus the term “tread-mill.”
Treadmills evolved into a mechanism for punishment to prevent poor people from committing crimes to take advantage of the necessities in jail.
via twitter
via twitter
Britain banned treadmills in 1989, seeing their punishment no longer useful.
An 1885 British Medical Journal article called “Death on the Treadmill,” chastized Durham Prison for the treadmill-induced death of a prisoner with heart disease. Its overall high death rate—one fatality a week—prompted the conclusion that “[t]he ‘mill’ is not useful, and has proved itself occasionally injurious.”
Having banned treadmills in 1828 to adopt a “collective industry” where prisoners became factory workers, America revamped the treadmill as an exercise machine.
It resurfaced in 1913 with a U.S. patent for a “training-machine.” In the 1960s, the American mechanical engineer William Staub created a home fitness machine called the PaceMaster 600. He began manufacturing home treadmills in New Jersey. (He used it often himself, right up until the months before his death at the age of 96.)
As this article points out, treadmills are the top-selling training equipment in the US but still come with all the baggage (injuries and boredom) that prisoners endured in England.
