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This Artist Knits the Most Beautiful Animal “Pelts”
Textile artist Ruth Marshall’s work makes viewers do a double-take. She crafts gorgeous animal pelts out of yarn.
Professional astronomers are responsible for 13 billion years’ worth of discoveries about our universe, but the cosmos is a big place, and at-home stargazers have been staring at the sky with a keen eye for a long time, too. These examples of weird and wonderful planetary phenomena—with an asteroid and comet in there too for good measure—were all first spotted by amateur astronomers, and prove that you don’t have to be a pro to make some stellar discoveries.
When amateur astronomers discovered a plume-like cloud on Mars, scientists were at a loss for an explanation. Mars has clouds, of course, but to form at such a height was unheard of on Mars or Earth. Scientists later correlated the phenomenon with a coronal mass ejection from the Sun. Studies continue, but the plume and its solar cause might help unlock the mystery of the vanished Martian atmosphere.
Tatooine has nothing on planet PH1, which has four suns (of sorts). The planet, discovered by amateurs, orbits two stars. Eighty billion miles away, those two stars are, in turn, orbited by two more stars.
While processing Voyager 2 images of Neptune, amateur astronomer Rolf Wahl Olsen discovered what appears to be a hexagon-shaped storm. More work needs to be done to confirm the phenomenon (perhaps in conjunction with some future mission there), but such a storm would not be without precedent: Jet streams near Saturn’s north pole form a hexagon as well.
In 2010, amateur scientists worked with the Cassini spacecraft team to go storm chasing on Saturn. As the spacecraft’s Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument picked up evidence of possible storms, the information would be relayed to amateur astronomers, who would study Saturn for visual evidence. Discoveries would then be relayed back to the Cassini team for possible imaging and further study. (Yes, the ammonia-ice blizzards of Saturn could be seen by home stargazers here on Earth.)
In 2008, Richard Miles, a British amateur astronomer, discovered the then-fastest-spinning object in the solar system. Asteroid 2008HJ completes one rotation every 42.7 seconds, and falls under a class of celestial objects called “super-fast rotators,” for obvious reasons. Dwarf planet Haumea is now considered the solar system’s fastest spinner.
Photos of Jupiter taken by amateur astronomers in 2010 revealed the disappearance of one of its famous red stripes. Jupiter’s mystifying weather means that its bands sometimes fade and its great red spot changes in size.
In 1933, actor and amateur astronomer Will Hay discovered a “white spot” on Saturn. It wasn’t the first instance of such a spot being observed, but Hay’s study was perhaps the most famous. The spots were once thought to be signs of collisions by foreign bodies, but are now thought to be related to the planet’s turbulent weather (see #4).
Cryovolcanoes are just what they sound like: volcanoes that erupt ice as opposed to lava. They are well-known features of such moons as Enceladus (one of Saturn’s satellites), and in 2015, were spotted by amateurs on Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann.
In 1953, an amateur astronomer named Leon Stuart witnessed what appeared to be an explosion on the Moon. He took a picture of it, and in the process became “the first and only human in history to witness and document the impact of an asteroid-sized body impacting the Moon’s scarred exterior,” according to NASA. Fifty years later, planetary scientists proved Stuart’s discovery to be a legitimate instance of space weathering.
In 1779, amateur astronomer William Herschel, using a telescope of his own design, discovered what he first thought was an oddly behaving star and later thought was a comet. As it turned out, Herschel had inadvertently built one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, and his comet was, in fact, the first new planet to be discovered since antiquity: Uranus.
February 10, 2017 – 4:00pm
5 Ways the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Books Stretched the Truth
Generations of readers fell in love with the “true story” of the Ingalls family’s pioneering lifestyle, as depicted in the “Little House” books—only things didn’t always go down in real life exactly as they did on the page. Here are five ways Laura Ingalls Wilder stretched the truth in her telling of her family’s tale.
Whether it’s a technical issue or an overbooked plane, a lot of factors can get between you and a stress-free flight. Air travel is especially unpredictable during snowstorm season, with up to tens of thousands of flights getting canceled in the U.S. each winter. If you find yourself the victim of a cancellation, there are a few important tips to remember to make sure you receive the maximum amount of compensation.
As Business Insider recently shared, the most important step to take after your flight gets canceled is to contact the airline directly. No matter which company you’re dealing with, you should be guaranteed two contractual rights in the event of a cancellation: The airline must either find you a seat on their next available flight to your destination or refund the remaining value of your ticket. Airlines sometimes provide extra assistance in addition to these basic rights, so make sure to ask about what you’re owed. The reason for the cancellation also makes a difference—for example, airlines are usually more accommodating when the fault lies with them rather than outside forces like the weather.
After speaking with your airline, check to see if your credit card offers special protection in such scenarios. Chase Sapphire, Chase’s United Airlines Explorer card, and some Citibank American Airlines Advantage cards include built-in emergency funds to use on a hotel if an airline leaves you stranded. Cardholders are usually given between $300 and $500 to spend.
Travelers flying to or from Europe may be able to receive more money than their canceled flights were worth. According to the EU’s air passenger rights policy, customers dealt canceled flights traveling within the EU, from EU-based airports, or on EU-based airlines are eligible to receive €600 (about $666) in compensation plus the cost of meals and lodging. The provision may not apply to shorter flights or trips canceled “due to extraordinary conditions.”
If keeping tabs on your passenger rights seems like a lot to juggle, there are websites that can help you. Refund.me and Airhelp.com are two resources that will fill out your paperwork for you and retrieve the maximum amount of whatever you’re owed (keep in mind these sites do claim part of the money they get back, sometimes as much as 25 percent).
A smart way to avoid all this hassle is to book through an airline that’s less likely to cancel your flight in the first place. According to Travel + Leisure, ExpressJet, Delta’s Comair, and AmericanEagle are the worst offenders in this department.
[h/t Business Insider]
February 10, 2017 – 8:22pm
For a very long time, extraversion (also spelled “extroversion”) was considered the healthy default. It was considered perverse or pathological to avoid crowds or to crave time alone. Fortunately, introversion is far more accepted these days. People self-identify as introverts in their online dating profiles. You can buy “Go Away, I’m Introverting” T-shirts and coffee mugs.
You might be an introvert. You might be an extravert. But it’s more likely you’re an ambivert: that is, somewhere in between.
That’s because extraversion is not an all-or-nothing identity; it’s a spectrum. Psychologists count extraversion—that is, the quality of finding energy and gratification outside of oneself—among the “Big Five” dimensions of personality (along with conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to new experience, and neuroticism). Each of us is extraverted to some degree, just as we’re conscientious or neurotic. That degree could be zero (although it probably isn’t). Very few people are 100 percent anything.
Personality psychologist Robert McCrae spent his career examining and testing the Big Five model. In a 1992 study [PDF], McCrae and his collaborator found that many people (around 38 percent) fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum for all five traits, including extraversion.
Adam Grant is a management expert at the Wharton School of Business. In 2013 he conducted a study on 340 call center employees. Since these are people who talk on the phone for a living, you might assume that the majority of them would be extraverts. But two-thirds said they were neither extraverted nor introverted—rather, somewhere in-between. And, more surprising still, these ambiverts outperformed extraverts on their sales calls.
Why? Grant theorized that it’s because phone calls are about more than talking. Sales reps also have to listen. Ambiverts are naturally comfortable doing both, he wrote, which means that they’re “likely to express sufficient assertiveness and enthusiasm to persuade and close a sale, but are more inclined to listen to customers’ interests and less vulnerable to appearing too excited or overconfident.”
Many people who self-identify as introverts or extraverts do so after taking a personality test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Despite its lack of scientific support, the MBTI has become immensely popular, in part because every test result is flattering. It’s a little like a horoscope: We can find ourselves in our readings, but there’s no science to back it up. The MBTI also perpetuates the myth of the all-or-nothing identity, labeling each test-taker as either an introvert or an extravert.
Look, we’re not going to tell you that you can’t be one extreme or the other. But the human experience is rich and complex. Isn’t it better to be flexible?
Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.
February 10, 2017 – 3:00pm
Laurinemily via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.5
by Katie Oliver
Beliefs about the way visual perception works have undergone some fairly radical changes throughout history. In ancient Greece, for example, it was thought that beams of light emanate from our eyes and illuminate the objects we look at. This “emission theory” [“a href=”https://web.archive.org/web/20111008073354/http://conference.nie.edu.sg/…” target=”_blank”>PDF] of vision was endorsed by most of the great thinkers of the age including Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy. It gained so much credence that it dominated Western thought for the next thousand years. Of course, now we know better. (Or at least some of us do: There’s evidence that a worryingly large proportion of American college students think we do actually shoot beams of light from our eyes, possibly as a side effect of reading too many Superman comics.)
The model of vision as we now know it first appeared in the 16th century, when Felix Platter proposed that the eye functions as an optic and the retina as a receptor. Light from an external source enters through the cornea and is refracted by the lens, forming an image on the retina—the light-sensitive membrane located in the back of the eye. The retina detects photons of light and responds by firing neural impulses along the optic nerve to the brain.
There’s an unlikely sounding quirk to this set-up, which is that mechanically speaking, our eyes see everything upside down. That’s because the process of refraction through a convex lens causes the image to be flipped, so when the image hits your retina, it’s completely inverted. Réné Descartes proved this in the 17th century by setting a screen in place of the retina in a bull’s excised eyeball. The image that appeared on the screen was a smaller, inverted copy of the scene in front of the bull’s eye.
So why doesn’t the world look upside down to us? The answer lies in the power of the brain to adapt the sensory information it receives and make it fit with what it already knows. Essentially, your brain takes the raw, inverted data and turns it into a coherent, right-side-up image. If you’re in any doubt as to the truth of this, try gently pressing the bottom right side of your eyeball through your bottom eyelid—you should see a black spot appear at the top left side of your vision, proving the image has been flipped.
In the 1890s, psychologist George Stratton carried out a series of experiments [PDF] to test the mind’s ability to normalize sensory data. In one experiment he wore a set of reversing glasses that flipped his vision upside down for eight days. For the first four days of the experiment, his vision remained inverted, but by day five, it had spontaneously turned right side up, as his perception had adapted to the new information.
That’s not the only clever trick your brain has up its sleeve. The image that hits each of your retinas is a flat, 2D projection. Your brain has to overlay these two images to form one seamless 3D image in your mind—giving you depth perception that’s accurate enough to catch a ball, shoot baskets, or hit a distant target.
Your brain is also tasked with filling in the blanks where visual data is missing. The optic disc, or blind spot, is an area on the retina where the blood vessels and optic nerve are attached, so it has no visual receptor cells. But unless you use tricks to locate this blank hole in your vision, you’d never even notice it was there, simply because your brain is so good at joining the dots.
Another example is color perception; most of the 6 to 7 million cone photoreceptor cells in the eye that detect color are crowded within the fovea centralis at the center of the retina. At the periphery of your vision, you pretty much only see in black and white. Yet we perceive a continuous, full-color image from edge to edge because the brain is able to extrapolate from the information it already has.
This power of the mind to piece together incomplete data using assumptions based on previous experience has been labeled “unconscious inference” by scientists. As it draws on our past experiences, it’s not a skill we are born with; we have to learn it. It’s believed that for the first few days of life babies see the world upside down, as their brains just haven’t learned to flip the raw visual data yet. So don’t be alarmed if a newborn looks confused when you smile—they’re probably just trying to work out which way up your head is.
February 10, 2017 – 2:30pm
Thanks to the Norman Conquest and the vogue for all things continental during the Renaissance and beyond, anything from a quarter to a third of all the words in the English language are said to be able to trace their immediate origins back to French. That said, the majority of French words in English have been present in the language for so long now that they scarcely register as French words today, like question (13th century), continue (14th century), and pedigree (originally another word for a genealogical diagram, 15th century). Other French loanwords—surveillance, legionnaire, reconnoiter, etiquette, and accompany, to name a few—are more obvious, but even these are now so naturalized that their French pronunciations have long since disappeared.
And then there are those words that have found their way into English dictionaries, but remain quintessentially French—and there’s a lot more to this last group than just pâtés, crèmes brûlées and coups d’état. Add some je ne sais quoi to your vocabulary with these little-known French loanwords.
First used in English around the turn of the 19th century, to do something à contre-coeur is to do it reluctantly, or against your will or better judgment; it literally means “against your heart.”
A form of the French word apercevoir, “to perceive,” an aperçu is a telling insight or a quick, revealing glimpse of something.
Literally a “back-thought,” arrière-pensée is another word for what we might otherwise call an ulterior motive.
Arriviste has been used in English since the early 1900s. It essentially means “arrival” or “arriver,” but is typically used specifically in the sense of someone intent on making a name for themselves, or else a brash, conspicuous newcomer yet to fit into their new surroundings.
Derived from a French word meaning “wait” or “expectation,” attentisme is another word for patience or perseverance, or else what we’d more likely refer to as “the waiting game.”
English speakers have been using the French loanword badinage to refer to witty, playful banter since the mid-1600s. Much less well known is the word for someone who indulges in precisely that: namely, a badineur.
Bienséance is an old word for decorum, propriety, or social decency, first borrowed into English in the 17th century. At its root, bienséance derives from an old French verb, seoir, meaning “to be suitable for” or “to be appropriately situated”—which is also the origin of séance, which literally means “a sitting.”
A bouffage is a satisfying meal or feast. According to the bilingual Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), it means “any meat that (eaten greedily) fills the mouth and makes the cheeks to swell.”
Derived from a French verb meaning “to sketch,” a croquis (pronounced “cro-kee”) is a quick drawing or rough draft of something to be improved on later.
The French verb déboucher means “to clear” or “unblock,” or by extension, “to uncork a bottle.” Derived from that, the English verb debouch means “to move from an enclosed space to an open one,” and in that sense has been used typically in reference to military maneuvers since the early 1800s. The derivative noun débouché can ultimately be used to refer to any opening, outlet, or exit where debouching can take place—or, figuratively, a gap in the market for selling a new product.
Derived from a verb meaning “to agitate” or “to move,” in French an émeute is a riot, or more broadly, chaos or disruption. It has been used in English to refer to a social uprising or disturbance since the late 1700s.
The adjective farouche comes to us from a French word with a similar meaning, which itself probably derives from a Latin word meaning “living outside.” Because of the timid behavior of wild animals, however, in English farouche tends to be used to mean “shy” or “socially reserved,” and by extension, “sullen” or “ill-humored.”
Froideur is the French word for coldness, but in English is used more figuratively to refer to a “cooling” or “chilling” of a relationship—and in particular a business or diplomatic one.
A gobemouche is an especially credulous person. It literally means “fly-swallower.”
Jusqu’au bout essentially means “to the limit” or “to the very end” in French. Derived from that, the term jusqu’auboutisme emerged in France during the First World War to refer to a policy of absolute unwavering perseverance—that is, of continuing to fight until the bitter end or when a full and lasting conclusion to the conflict could finally be reached. The term first appeared in English in that context in a newspaper report in 1917, but its meaning has steadily broadened and weakened since then: nowadays, feel free to use jusqu’auboutisme to refer to any dogged determination to see something through to its final conclusion.
For some reason, in 18th century French the word macédoine—which literally means “Macedonia” or “Macedonian”—came to refer to a medley of chopped fruit, and ultimately a random assortment or mixture of unrelated things; it was in this latter sense that the word was first borrowed into English in the early 19th century and has remained in albeit infrequent use ever since. One theory claims that this word alludes to the supposed melting pot of peoples and cultures that were all once united under Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire—but in truth, no one is entirely sure where this term comes from.
Derived from an old French verb meaning “to celebrate” or “to marry,” a noceur is a party-animal, or someone who habitually stays up late and into the early hours.
Orage (which is pronounced more like collage or mirage than forage or porridge) is a French word for a storm or tempest. It has been used in that literal sense in English since the late 15th century, but nowadays tends only to be used more figuratively to refer to any wild or tempestuous situation.
A derivative of a French verb meaning “to jest” or “quip,” a plaisanteur is a witty talker or storyteller.
Bonheur is the French word for luck or good fortune, while the prefix porte– (derived from the verb porter, meaning “to carry”) is used to form words implying some sense of holding or bearing something. Put together, that makes a porte-bonheur a good luck charm, or else an amulet or talisman carried to protect against misfortune. Likewise …
… a porte-monnaie is a purse or wallet.
Money—and in particular a tip or gratuity—intended only to spend on drink is a pourboire.
Derived from an Old French verb meaning “to speak for” or “to speak on behalf of,” the word pourparler was borrowed into English from French in the early 1700s to refer to a casual discussion that takes place before a more formal meeting or negotiation. In modern French the plural, pourparlers, is equivalent to what English speakers would call “talks.”
Borrowed into English in the late 19th century, pudeur is bashfulness or reticence, or else a feeling of shame or embarrassment.
A rastaquouère (pronounced “rasta-kwair”) is an overbearing or ostentatious outsider, and in particular one that is viewed with suspicion or curiosity by the locals, or else who tries to ingratiate themselves into the local area. The term dates back to mid 19th century France, where it originally referred to members of a wave of nouveau riche Mediterranean and South American traders and businessmen who arrived in Paris in the mid-1800s, but failed to fit in with the city’s stuffy upper classes. At the word’s root is an insult for a contemptible person in South American Spanish, rastracuero, which in turn combines the Spanish words for “drag” or “dragged,” and “leather” or “animal hide.”
First used in English in the 15th century and seemingly independently borrowed again in the 1700s, réchauffé literally means “reheated,” and in a literal sense is used to describe a premade reheated meal, or else a dish made from leftovers. In both English and French, however, réchauffé can also be used figuratively to describe rehashed, unoriginal, derivative literature or ideas.
Derived from a French word for someone who is late in arriving or paying a bill, as a noun retardataire means “a person whose work or interests appear old fashioned, stuck in the past, or stubbornly resistant to modern change,” but more specifically the word is often used to refer to a contemporary artist who produces work in an old-fashioned or earlier genre or style. As an adjective, it can be used to describe anything or anyone out of touch or behind the times.
Borrowed into English in the early 1900s, a simpliste is someone who holds a naively over-simplified or blinkered view of something.
The French verb soigner, meaning “to care” is the source of the adjective soigné (“swan-yay”), which has been used to describe anything or anyone meticulously well-presented or well-groomed, or showing extreme attention to detail, ever since it was borrowed into English in the early 1800s.
Souffre-douleur literally means “suffer-sorrow,” and has been used in English since the mid 19th century to refer to someone who is obliged to listen to or share in another person’s troubles or problems. Rather than just refer to friends or companions sharing one another’s misfortunes, however, in particular souffre-douleur refers to anyone whose lowly position or employment involves them having to put up with listening to their superiors’ personal problems.
February 10, 2017 – 2:00pm
Wikimedia // Public Domain
In the 20th century and beyond, several research programs explored the ability of apes to communicate with human sign language, including primate celebrities such as Washoe the chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky, and Koko the gorilla. Charles Darwin himself wondered if human language might have evolved from the musical cries of our ape-like ancestors, asking in one of his Notebooks: “Did our language commence with singing … do monkeys howl in harmony?”
But before Washoe, Nim, and Koko—and even before Darwin—the famed British explorer, ethnographer, and writer Sir Richard Francis Burton made an eccentric attempt to bridge the communications gap by starting a residential school for monkeys and trying to learn the language of their calls and cries.
Burton owed the success of many of his explorations to an extraordinary ability to learn foreign languages. During a life of military adventure and travel in the far reaches of the British Empire, he is said to have learned to speak more than 20 languages with fluency, including Turkish, Persian, Hindustani, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Pashtu. He famously staked his life on his Arabic in 1853, when he entered the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina (then forbidden to Europeans) in disguise as a pilgrim on the hajj.
In the 1840s, Burton was a junior officer in the army of the British East India Company, stationed in the province of Sindh, now in Pakistan. According to his wife, Isabel (née Arundell), who published a version of his journals after his death in 1890, Burton was drawn to the chatter of the wild monkeys in the streets of the city and decided to try and learn what they were saying.
In The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton [PDF], Isabel described how Burton moved into a house with a troop of monkeys and set about trying to learn their language. “He at one time got rather tired of the daily Mess, and living with men, and he thought he should like to learn the manners, customs, and habits of monkeys,” she wrote, “so he collected forty monkeys, of all kinds of ages, races, species, and he lived with them.” His goal, Isabel wrote, was “ascertaining and studying the language of monkeys, so that he used regularly to talk to them, and pronounce their sounds afterwards, till he and the monkeys at last got quite to understand each other.”
Burton also issued the monkeys with honorary titles and monkey-sized costumes that he thought suited their characters: “He had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and one tiny one, a very pretty, small, silky-looking monkey, he used to call his wife, and put pearls in her ears,” Isabel explained.
The dinner table provided opportunities for teaching etiquette: Burton presided over the meals, all served by Burton’s servants. “They all sat down on chairs at meals, and the servants waited on them, and each had its bowl and plate, with the food and drinks proper for them,” Isabel wrote. “He sat at the head of the table, and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a high baby’s chair … he had a little whip on the table, with which he used to keep them in order when they had bad manners, which did sometimes occur, as they frequently used to get jealous of the little monkey, and try to claw her.”
Burton repeated the monkeys’ sounds over and over until he believed he understood some of them. According to Isabel, Burton learned to identify up to 60 monkey “words,” which he recorded in a “monkey vocabulary.” But around 1845, he moved on from Sindh and his monkey school, on his way to what became more famous adventures: visiting the forbidden city of Harar in what is now Ethiopia; getting speared through the cheek by Somali warriors (surviving with the scars to prove it); and seeking the source of the Nile in East Africa. Although Burton had hoped to one day return to his animal language research, his journals of his time in Sindh and his monkey vocabulary were destroyed in 1861 after a fire at a London warehouse where his belongings were being stored. Sadly, many of the details of his experiments have been lost to history.
Burton’s experiments seemed fairly bizarre to his contemporaries, but they might seem less so today. More than 150 years after his efforts, scientists look to our primate relatives for clues to the origin of human language. One recent study found that macaque monkeys have all the physical organs necessary to produce human-like speech; what they lack is our brainpower. “If they had the brain, they could produce intelligible speech,” Princeton neuroscientist Asif A. Ghazanfar told The New York Times. No doubt Sir Richard Francis Burton would have been among the first to try and write it down.
February 10, 2017 – 1:30pm
Sand artist @sudarsansand sets Guinness record with world’s tallest sand castle https://t.co/0hq0M1KtYt pic.twitter.com/paU4fzP3pg
— Times of India (@timesofindia) February 10, 2017
Sudarsan Pattnaik puts all other beach architects to shame. The Indian sand artist just broke the record for the world’s tallest sand castle, The Times of India reports.
Pattnaik isn’t new to the sand castle game—he’s a professional who runs his own school dedicated to sand art. He recruited 30 students from his Sudarsan Sand Art Institute to assist on the four-day construction project that broke the record. The intricate castle stands more than 48 feet and 8 inches tall, and is inscribed with the words “World Peace.” The castle will be on display for two days.
Guinness World Records officials were on hand to confirm his win. The previous record-holding sand sculpture was 45 feet 10 inches, built in 2015 in Miami by the Sand Sculpture Company and Turkish Airlines. It took 19 people and two weeks to complete that structure, making the speed with which Pattnaik built his castle even more impressive.
[h/t The Times of India]
Banner image courtesy of iStock.
February 10, 2017 – 1:15pm
Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss garlic-flavoured chocolate bars, Komodo dragon puberty and and why you don’t want to french kiss a frog.
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