I have been reading the book Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction by David C. Catling where he discusses the possible conditions under which life might be able to originate and replicate, and the likelihood of those conditions existing on other planets in the universe. It turns out that life can exist under conditions that to us humans seem extremely hostile. Organisms have been found on Earth under conditions of extreme heat (thermophiles) or cold (psychrophiles) or high acidity (acidophiles) or basicity (alkaliphiles) and other parameters and such organisms are collectively referred to as extremophiles.
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Within the last few years, the full scale of the addition to prescription pain killers has burst into public consciousness and it is being referred to as an epidemic. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist focused on addiction care and author of the book Drug Dealer, MD, agrees that “the commonly cited causes of the epidemic — doctors hoping to treat previously untreated pain conditions, pain patients demanding better treatments, and big pharma pushing opioids on the market — contributed to the vast overprescription of opioids. That let the pills flow not just to patients’ hands but to their family, their friends, and the black market.”
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We like to think that long distance travel times are getting shorter as modern technology enables planes to travel faster. But via Andrea James I came cross this fascinating video explanation put together by someone who looked at old flight schedules from fifty years ago and found that travel times are actually longer now than they were back then. Why is this? Part of the reason is that the increased congestion in the air and at airports means that there is longer time spent waiting for clearance and taxiing on the runways than was the case before.
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I wrote a month ago about the finding of 45 specimens of fossils of deuterostomes that date back to 540 millions years ago, the earliest from the Cambrian period. These form part of the fascinating search for LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor that we all share, even though the search might never actually yield it because when we go back far enough, the ‘tree of life’ that could point to a unique organism could become a ‘web of life’ where such an entity ceases to be identifiable.
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According to the information on the YouTube website that had the video below, this impressive robot was made by Boston Dynamics:

Handle is a research robot that stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4 feet vertically. It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge. Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.

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The myth that Columbus proved that the world was round is not something that I encountered in my education in Sri Lanka. It seems to be a largely American creation, likely for all the reasons that cartomancer and jkrideau list. My first experience with hearing it was when one of the undergraduates in my class casually inserted it as an element in the argument he was making about something else, if it was the most obvious thing in the world. I stepped in to question him and was astounded in the ensuing discussion to find that quite a few members of the class believed the same thing. They said that they had learned it in elementary school.
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One of the things that really annoy me is when some people say that it was Columbus who proved that the world was round. Not only did the peoples of the Mediterranean region know that it was round nearly two thousand years before that, one of them Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276 BCE – c. 195/194 BCE) did a remarkably accurate job of calculating the circumference of the Earth.
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A couple of recent posts on tea (see here and here) generated lively discussions about the many myths surrounding how to make a good cup of tea. I have also in the past mentioned that there are a lot of similar myths surrounding wine, compounded in that case by an order of magnitude greater level of pretentious vocabulary surrounding the topic. One thing I have noticed is that people who fancy themselves as connoisseurs of tea or wine or anything else refuse to be swayed by studies that suggest that the fine distinctions they claim to detect have no objective basis. Persuading them otherwise seems to be harder than persuading religious believers that there is no god.
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It has long been known that infants, long before they can talk, are sensitive to issues of fairness and some have probed to see if that is true for other animal species as well. A recent study looked at capuchin monkeys and dogs and found that they too seem to make what looks to us like moral judgments.
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