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Photographer Matt Emmett specializes in shooting abandoned buildings and other structures. There’s something eerie about knowing that these locations that exude total stillness and silence were once inhabited and lively, but there’s also a beauty and a crumbling majesty to many of the places he shoots.
January 25, 2017 – 7:00pm
European officials have arrested 75 individuals for allegedly trafficking stolen art and archaeological treasures, in a sweeping operation that dissolved an international crime ring, NBC News reports. More than 3500 artifacts and pieces of art were recovered, including a marble Ottoman tombstone, rare coins, and Byzantine/post-Byzantine artifacts.
Led by Spanish and Cypriot police, the operation—dubbed Operation Pandora—involved Interpol, the World Customs Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and 16 other European countries. The transcontinental investigation was launched last fall, and arrests began in November.
Officials recently announced that Operation Pandora was a success. According to Europol, 3561 cultural objects were seized, nearly half of which were archaeological objects. Five hundred of them were discovered in Murcia, Spain; 19 had been stolen from the city’s Archaeological Museum in 2014. Officials also recovered artifacts in Greece, UNESCO says—including the aforementioned Ottoman tombstone and post-Byzantine icons of Saint George and other saints—and tracing “suspicious online advertisements” led to the seizure of over 400 ancient coins, all from different periods.
It’s unclear why officials didn’t announce the arrests until this month, NPR reports. As for the recovered objects, a full inventory hasn’t been issued yet, but officials have said that most of them were seized from warring nations.
“The aim of Operation Pandora was to dismantle criminal networks involved in cultural theft and exploitation, and identify potential links to other criminal activities,” Europol said in a news statement. “Moreover, there was a special focus on cultural spoliation, both underwater and on land, and the illicit trafficking of cultural goods, with a particular emphasis on conflict countries.”
As Europol explained in the statement, cultural spoliation is the act of taking goods by force, particularly in times of war.
Check out some of the recovered artifacts below:
All photos courtesy of Guardia Civil
[h/t NBC News]
January 25, 2017 – 6:30pm
Salary negotiations can be the most intense, anxiety-riddled part of landing a new job. But if you’re only thinking about your next paycheck when making a counter offer for a new job, you’re doing your wallet a huge disservice. Want to make radically more in the future than you do today? Start by kicking these salary mistakes to the curb.
Religion, politics and money used to be the trifecta of taboo topics—but not so for younger generations. “People were raised not to talk about money, but there’s been a huge generational shift around salary disclosure,” says Cara Silletto, founder of HR firm Crescendo Strategies.
The explosion of social media and crowdsourced salary sites like Indeed.com and Glassdoor.com plays a part, but even IRL talks about money are more common now than they were 10 years ago, she says. “Young women in particular have embraced this evolution of transparency as a way to empower themselves and advocate for fair pay.” Knowing your pal two desks over brings home 25 percent more bacon might light your fire to ask for a raise or job hop for more opportunities. Get gabbing.
We’ve all been there: A job application asks for your desired salary, and you hesitate, wondering if writing down your lowest acceptable salary might give you a better shot at being considered. “Definitely do not put down the lower number,” says Ryan Kahn, founder of The Hired Group and author of How to Get Hired. Sure, looking like you’re super cheap might indeed get you interviewed, but many companies will then base their offer on that lowball figure. In other words, prepare to get paid less than you’re worth. “Instead, give a range of what you’re truly comfortable with,” he says.
Sometimes, maximizing your long-term earning potential can mean taking a step back to make a giant leap forward. Switching fields, for instance, usually entails starting in a junior position that might pay just a fraction of what you’re earning now. But if senior positions in your new career pay dramatically more than what your current industry will ever pay, enduring a pay cut can be well worth it.
Yes, the dollars and cents that show up on your paycheck each month are important. “But salary is not the end-all, be-all of a job offer,” says Kahn. Are there stock options or equity on the table? Will the company pay for your professional development courses or give you a crazy high match for retirement savings? If you’re too fixated on negotiating the salary number, you might overlook some serious perks (or pitfalls) in terms of building your overall wealth.
Maybe a recruiter reaches out on LinkedIn or you apply to a job posting, then only once you’re nailing down the interview time do you learn the salary range is lower than you’d like. Don’t bail, says Kahn. “A lot of people have the immediate reaction of turning down the interview, but it’s always possible that you’ll win them over and they’ll consider you beyond the role they’re hiring for,” he says.
Dazzle them with your expertise and experience, and the org might pull budget from other departments to offer you a more sizable salary or keep you in mind when a more senior position opens up. That strategy can be a long-shot, Kahn says, but “they’re not going to know how much value you have unless you show up.”
January 25, 2017 – 6:00pm
The amount of plastic in our oceans—and thus in our seafood—is rising. The authors of a forthcoming study say Europeans alone ingest about 11,000 microscopic pieces of plastic apiece every year. And unless we make some very big changes, that number could reach 780,000 pieces per person within a few decades.
Microplastics, also known as microbeads, are popular additives to a wide range of personal care products, from face wash to toothpaste. We rinse them off and send them down the drain, where they head out into the water supply. And there they’ll stay, absorbing chemicals, until something or somebody comes along and eats them.
Studies have found that fish that consume microbeads are smaller than others. They reject real food in favor of more plastic. Their eggs are less likely to hatch, and hatchlings are less likely to escape predators.
Researchers at the University of Ghent in Belgium have been studying the effects of microplastics on shellfish like mussels, oysters, and clams, all of which are filter feeders. The average mussel sucks in and spits out about 20 liters of water per day. Most of the plastic particles in that water will be filtered and sent back out into the ocean. Most, but not all; lead researcher Colin Janssen says the mussels they examined had an average of one tiny plastic fragment apiece.
Janssen and his colleagues say the same process occurs in humans who consume shellfish. About 99 percent of the microplastic will pass through your system. That still leaves 1 percent to stay in the body, and we don’t yet know what that means for our health.
“We do need to know the fate of the plastics,” Janssen told Sky News. “Where do they go? Are they encapsulated by tissue and forgotten about by the body, or are they causing inflammation or doing other things? Are chemicals leaching out of these plastics and then causing toxicity? We don’t know.”
Experts estimate we’re currently dumping one garbage truck’s worth of microplastic into the ocean every minute. By 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the sea [PDF]. We’ve started to take some steps—in 2016, Congress voted to ban microbeads altogether—but we’ve still got a lot of work to do.
“We have to do something about it,” Janssen said. “We have to act now.”
January 25, 2017 – 5:30pm
YouTube
The oldest known goldfish lived to be 43.
Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
When museums house exhibitions on the Titanic, they normally don’t include an interactive element. A new building planned for Niagara Falls, Ontario will go beyond timelines and artifacts in order to bring visitors into the Titanic on the night it sunk.
As Global News reports, the local group Lex Parker Design Consultants Ltd. hopes to open a new museum called “Experience Titanic.” The ocean liner-shaped building will contain several rooms modeled after ones on the original ship, including a boiler room, an engine room, a third-class cabin, and a first-class cabin. Boarding passes with personal information about actual passengers will be distributed, and as the exhibit progresses, guests will learn more about each person.
In addition to showing how the ship would look after leaving its port, the team also wants to recreate the moment that tragedy struck. “We’ll put you on the deck of the ship just as it hits the iceberg,” project leader David Van Velzen told Global News. Audio clips would simulate the sound of the incoming iceberg, while a refrigerated wall would capture how it felt outside during the event.
Lex Parker Design isn’t the first group with the idea to offer an immersive Titanic experience. Australian billionaire Clive Palmer has been attempting to build a seaworthy Titanic replica for years (though some authentic elements would hopefully be left out from that voyage). If you’re interested in experiencing the Titanic without leaving land, the new museum is expected to open in the spring of 2018.
[h/t Global News]
January 25, 2017 – 5:00pm
For all of its benefits as a space-saving medium of convenience, digital storage still has one glaring asterisk: Files can be corrupted, leading to partial or total loss of information. Depending on the digital format used, there’s also a natural life expectancy to deal with. If an optical disc (like a DVD) is scratched, it inhibits retrieving information. If it’s a solid-state medium like a flash drive, continual rewriting can degrade the memory.
With that in mind, the team behind the historical archive Rosetta Project is going analog. They’ve created a tiny (.78 inch) wearable disk that houses 1000 pages of 1000 different languages still in use as of 2016. The files are visible to the naked eye and don’t require a digital deconstruction—just a microscope with magnification capability of at least 500x.
The first text on the disk is the “Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” rendered in 327 languages, beginning with Abkhaz.
The coin consists of a glass plate embedded with tiny bits of nickel that contain written examples of the languages. A laser is used to write the data onto the nickel. If all goes well, the disk is expected to last another 10,000 years—long enough to provide a historical relic for some future or alien civilization.
If you’d like your own, Rosetta will be happy to supply you with one after you’ve made a $1000 donation toward their archiving efforts.
[h/t Gizmodo]
January 25, 2017 – 4:30pm
The entertainment industry lost one of its most empowering voices today when Mary Tyler Moore passed away at the age of 80. The actress, who rose to fame on The Dick Van Dyke Show, later helped to define the “modern woman” as the star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran from 1970 to 1977.
In the years since, she has been an outspoken advocate for a variety of social, charitable, and political causes, including animal rights, and has never been shy about expressing her opinions on making the most of the cards life deals you. Here are 15 of her most memorable quotes.
“I knew at a very early age what I wanted to do. Some people refer to it as indulging in my instincts and artistic bent. I call it just showing off, which was what I did from about three years of age on.”
“My grandfather once said, having watched me one entire afternoon, prancing and leaping and cavorting, ‘This child will either end up on stage or in jail.’ Fortunately, I took the easy route.”
“Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.”
“You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.”
“Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you’re really strangers.”
“Don’t be looking for perfection. Don’t be short-tempered with yourself. And you’ll be a whole lot nicer to be around with everyone else.”
“I’m not an actress who can create a character. I play me.”
“I’ve had the fame and the joy of getting laughter—those are gifts.”
“Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow.”
“I’m an experienced woman; I’ve been around … Well, all right, I might not have been around, but I’ve been … nearby.”
“The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They’re superficial and I like articulate comedy.”
“Worrying is a necessary part of life.”
“Three things have helped me successfully go through the ordeals of life: an understanding husband, a good analyst, and millions of dollars.”
“There are certain things about me that I will never tell to anyone because I am a very private person. But basically, what you see is who I am. I’m independent, I do like to be liked, I do look for the good side of life and people. I’m positive, I’m disciplined, I like my life in order, and I’m neat as a pin.”
“Having a dream is what keeps you alive. Overcoming the challenges makes life worth living.”
January 25, 2017 – 4:00pm
Art biennales are typically splashy affairs, but as The Guardian reports, the organizers of the Biennale de La Biche want to make a less showy impression. The art fair—which opened earlier this month, on January 6—is billed as the “world’s smallest contemporary art biennale,” as it’s held on a tiny, disappearing island off the coast of Guadeloupe in the southern Caribbean Sea. Rising sea levels will eventually swallow the land, and the art will fall into the ocean.
Founders and curators Alex Urso and Maess Anand recruited 14 participating artists, who all donated small works to the biennale. According to Artnet, Urso and Anand packed the art into a suitcase, flew it to the Caribbean (without purchasing insurance), and displayed it in a makeshift “gallery”—an abandoned wooden shack on the island. They didn’t even need permission to use the speck of land, named Ilet La Biche; locals told Urso “there was no point,” he says.
The biennale is titled In a land of. “This sentence, suspended and imprecise, wants to be a suggestion, an incentive to grasp the essence of the island as a geographically isolated place, but above all, a spot distant from all the limits and conventions of the contemporary art system,” Biennale de La Biche’s website explains. “Moreover, the location is a transitory place, because it is slowly disappearing: due to the rising sea levels, the island is in fact gradually submerging, and in a few decades, it is destined to disappear.”
Biennale de La Biche may be interpreted as a political statement about global warming, but Urso tells Artnet that his main goal is for the event to convey themes like ephemerality and uncertainty, and “to push all the artists to somehow to relate to the idea of an unknown place.”
There’s no way to know whether anyone’s actually visiting Biennale de La Biche, as Urso and Anand simply left the art there and traveled back to their home country, Poland. However, local artists in Guadeloupe have reportedly expressed interest in the event, and Urso and Anand are already tentatively planning a follow-up biennale, to be held two years from now.
Check out some photos of Ilet La Biche below, or visit Biennale de La Biche’s website for visiting information.
[h/t The Guardian]
January 25, 2017 – 3:30pm
Storing someone’s urine for up to 10 years would normally be considered unusual behavior. If you’re the International Olympic Committee (IOC), though, it’s just business. The organization maintains a library of liquid waste so they can re-test athlete samples for prohibited substances.
That’s exactly what the IOC just did with Nesta Carter’s pee. The Jamaican runner won a gold medal for the 4×100 meter relay in 2008, along with teammates that included the decorated Usain Bolt. Unfortunately, Carter’s urine tested positive for a stimulant called methylhexanamine. As per IOC policy, the entire team’s medals for that competition will be officially considered stripped.
But what happens to the actual medal? Is it shipped back? Does the Olympic Committee hire a repo man?
The fate of Bolt’s hardware can be predicted based on a past case history. In 2007, five-time Olympic medalist Marion Jones came under fire for using performance-enhancing substances during the 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia. After her admission, the IOC stripped her of the medals and asked that they be returned.
Why not demand? Because the organization has no actual legal recourse to seize or repossess them. Athletes return them voluntarily, based on the spirit of fair play.
Jones’s attorneys met with the IOC and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency at a conference in Austin, Texas, where their client’s medals were turned over. The prizes were then forwarded back to IOC headquarters. Other athletes who have faced similar circumstances were free to simply mail their medals back.
Once the medals are back in the IOC’s possession, they’re free to either keep them in a vault—as in the case of the 1972 U.S. Olympic basketball team that refused to accept a controversial decision that left them with silver—or reallocate them to the athlete who would have placed if not for the stripped athlete’s cheating ways. That’s what happened in 1988 when Carl Lewis was awarded the gold medal that originally went to Ben Johnson, who failed a drug test.
As for Bolt: When he learned last year that giving back his medal might be a possibility owing to Carter’s failed test, he appeared to have accepted it. “If I need to give back my gold medal I’d have to give it back,” he told The Guardian. “It’s not a problem for me.” Then again, that might be easier to do when you’ve got eight more at home.
Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.
January 25, 2017 – 3:00pm
