Secrets of the Creative Brain As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study. He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. While mental illness clearly runs in the Vonnegut family, so, I found, does creativity. For many of my subjects from that first study—all writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—mental illness and creativity went hand in hand. Compared with many of history’s creative luminaries, Vonnegut, who died of natural causes, got off relatively easy.
The theft of Native Americans' land, in one animated map American society has a remarkably short memory when it comes to past injustices, which is why there are somehow still people who think that Washington's professional football team should continue to be named after "the scalped head of a Native American, sold, like a pelt, for cash." University of Georgia historian Claudio Saunt is looking to correct that, at least in the case of Europeans' violent seizing of Native Americans' land. To supplement his new book, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, Saunt created an interactive map showing the decline of Indian homelands from 1776 to 1887. Along with Slate's Rebecca Onion, he turned that map into a GIF, showing just how rapidly European-Americans took what amounted to over 1.5 billion acres: Source: Rebecca Onion and Claudio Saunt Blue areas were American Indian homelands, red ones reservations.
Louis Del Monte Interview On The Singularity Quanah Parker Quanah Parker (ca. 1845 or 1852 – February 23, 1911) was Comanche/English-American from the Comanche band Noconis ("wanderers" or "travelers"), and emerged as a dominant figure, particularly after the Comanches' final defeat. He was one of the last Comanche chiefs. The US appointed Quanah principal chief of the entire nation once the people had gathered on the reservation and later introduced general elections. Quanah was a Comanche chief, a leader in the Native American Church, and the last leader of the powerful Quahadi band before they surrendered their battle of the Great Plains and went to a reservation in Indian Territory. Early life and education[edit] Quanah Parker's mother, Cynthia Ann Parker (born ca. 1827), was a member of the large Parker frontier family that settled in east Texas in the 1830s. Nadua and Nocona's first child was Quanah (Fragrance), born in the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma. Career[edit] On the reservation[edit] Marriage and family[edit] Death[edit]
How safe is eating meat? 17 August 2014Last updated at 19:28 ET Dr Michael Mosley ate around 130g of meat a day to research the effects on his body There have been a lot of news reports about the health risks of meat eating, but are they justified? Dr Michael Mosley has been investigating the truth behind the headlines for BBC Horizon. I like eating meat, but what was once an innocent pleasure is now a guilty one. If you believe the headlines, regularly indulging in a steak or a bacon sandwich raises your risk of heart disease and cancer. The threat to health comes not from eating white meat, like chicken, but from red and processed meat. Despite the negative headlines, on average Brits still eat about 70g of red and processed meat a day, with a quarter of men eating almost twice as much. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote I decided to go on a high-meat diet to see what effects doubling my intake to around 130g a day would have” End Quote I visited numerous experts, finding out what they themselves eat.
Tecumseh Tecumseh (/tɛˈkʌmsə/; March 1768 – October 5, 1813) was a Native American leader of the Shawnee and a large tribal confederacy (known as Tecumseh's Confederacy) which opposed the United States during Tecumseh's War and the War of 1812. Tecumseh has become an iconic folk hero in American, Aboriginal and Canadian history.[1] Tecumseh grew up in the Ohio Country during the American Revolutionary War and the Northwest Indian War, where he was constantly exposed to warfare.[2] With Americans continuing to encroach on Indian territory after the British ceded the Ohio Valley to the new United States in 1783, the Shawnee moved farther northwest. In 1808, they settled Prophetstown in present-day Indiana. With a vision of establishing an independent Native American nation east of the Mississippi under British protection, Tecumseh worked to recruit additional tribes to the confederacy from the southern United States.[2] Family background[edit] Early life[edit] Frontier conflicts[edit]
The Most Astonishing Wave-Tracking Experiment Ever : Krulwich Wonders... Claude Monet /The Metropolitan Museum of Art I'm standing on a beach and I see, a few hundred yards out, a mound of water heading right at me. It's not a wave, not yet, but a swollen patch of ocean, like the top of a moving beach ball, what sailors call a "swell." "Hi, I'm from New York. Yes, I'm asking a wave to tell me where it was born. His name is Walter Munk, now in his 90s and a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. His equations said that the swells hitting beaches in Mexico began some 9,000 miles away — somewhere in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean, near Antarctica. "Could it be?" He decided to find out for himself. Professor Munk was not the first scientist to study swells. But, as I learned from Gavin Pretor-Pinney's The Wavewatcher's Companion, when breezes start to blow, "tiny ripples dance across the surface, each no higher than a centimeter or so." As the wind stiffens, the peaks grow even taller, troughs even lower ...
Native History: The Day Tecumseh’s Prophecy Rocked the World This Date in Native History: Earthquakes and eclipses of the sun were among the deeds attributed to Tecumseh and his brother, but legends surrounding Tecumseh are as great as the truths, said Shawnee Second Chief Ben Barnes. “It is hard to know without proof or specific oral history just exactly what happened” on August 11, 1802 he said. There is evidence that Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa, were prophets and visionaries who may have changed history had there been a little more help from the British, and more faith from certain tribes. As for help from the Creator, or “Master of Life,” the evidence follows. Tenskwatawa was a victim of the times, with an intense longing for the ways of his childhood and a sense of hopelessness for the future. Fed up with the ever encroaching, land stealing whites, Tecumseh took his brother’s prophecy and called for all Natives to unite as one people against the whites.
Blackest is the new black: Scientists have developed a material so dark that you can't see it... - Science - News Puritans, Goths, avant-garde artists, hell-raising poets and fashion icon Coco Chanel all saw something special in it. Now black, that most enigmatic of colours, has become even darker and more mysterious. A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. To stare at the "super black" coating made of carbon nanotubes – each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair – is an odd experience. It is so dark that the human eye cannot understand what it is seeing. If it was used to make one of Chanel's little black dresses, the wearer's head and limbs might appear to float incorporeally around a dress-shaped hole. Actual applications are more serious, enabling astronomical cameras, telescopes and infrared scanning systems to function more effectively. The nanotube material, named Vantablack, has been grown on sheets of aluminium foil by the Newhaven-based company. A sample of the new material.
Reservations The collective geographical area of all reservations is 55,700,000 acres (22,500,000 ha; 87,000 sq mi; 225,000 km2), representing 2.3% of the area of the United States 2,379,400,204 acres (962,909,100 ha; 3,717,812.819 sq mi; 9,629,091.00 km2). Twelve Indian reservations are larger than the state of Rhode Island which covers 776,960 acres (314,420 ha; 1,214.00 sq mi; 3,144.2 km2) and nine reservations larger than Delaware's 1,316,480 acres (532,760 ha; 2,057.00 sq mi; 5,327.6 km2). The territory of the Navajo Nation compares in size to West Virginia. Reservations are unevenly distributed throughout the country; the majority are west of the Mississippi River and occupy lands that were first reserved by treaty or 'granted' from the public domain.[2] Because tribes possess tribal sovereignty, even though it is limited, laws on tribal lands vary from the surrounding area.[3] These laws can permit legal casinos on reservations, for example, which attract tourists. History[edit] Gaming[edit]
Why do we have blood types? When my parents informed me that my blood type was A+, I felt a strange sense of pride. If A+ was the top grade in school, then surely A+ was also the most excellent of blood types – a biological mark of distinction. It didn’t take long for me to recognise just how silly that feeling was and tamp it down. But I didn’t learn much more about what it really meant to have type A+ blood. And yet there remained some nagging questions. In 1900 the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner first discovered blood types, winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research in 1930. “Isn’t it amazing?” My knowledge that I’m type A comes to me thanks to one of the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine. Renaissance doctors mused about what would happen if they put blood into the veins of their patients. Such calamities gave transfusions a bad reputation for 150 years. Human patients should only get human blood, Blundell decided. The blood from people in group O was different.
US Natives Native Americans within the boundaries of the present-day United States (including indigenous peoples of Alaska and Hawaii) are composed of numerous, distinct tribes and ethnic groups, many of which survive as intact political communities. The terms used to refer to Native Americans have been controversial. According to a 1995 U.S. Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as "American Indians" or simply "Indians"; this term has been adopted by major newspapers and some academic groups, but does not traditionally include Native Hawaiians or certain Alaskan Natives, such as Aleut, Yup'ik, or Inuit peoples. Since the end of the 15th century, the migration of Europeans to the Americas has led to centuries of conflict and adjustment between Old and New World societies. History Pre-Columbian Map showing the approximate location of the ice-free corridor and specific Paleoindian sites (Clovis theory) Impact on native populations