Happy 1600th Birthday Venice

Or is it various birthdays?   March 25th was the 1600th birthday of the founding of Venice. Or so the story goes. It’s a tale of two gentlemen from Padua, a town on the mainland about 30 miles west of Venice. On March 25th, 421 CE they were rowing or sailing in the lagoon and happened upon one of the many small islands, this one called Rivoaltus, that constitute what we now call the city of Venice. The Paduans moored their boat and then put a couple of stones on the ground to mark the moment,…

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Are Humans Designed to Trash the Planet?

There Might Just Be an Antidote to Our Ingrained Selfishness     The answer is yes.   According to biologist Bobbi Low of the University of Michigan and science writer Matt Ridley, humans are innately selfish beings who lean toward consuming all the planet’s recourses for themselves with little or no regard for others. But, they argue, with a shift of focus that very same selfishness could also be harnessed to slow down the process and possibly save the earth for future generations.   Although this article is twenty-eight years old, it…

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Anthropologists In Space

The Otherworldly Tale of Anthropologists and Space Aliens     On October 4, 1957, Russia launched the first satellite, the first human-made object, to orbit the earth, calling it “Sputnik” which is Russian for “traveler.” America wanted to be the first in space — after all, the Cold War was raging, and the space race was part of that war — but it took a year before they launched a similar U.S. satellite. Those launches, and the space race in general, were signs of a massive, universal, culture shift for the human…

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I Was Once a Revolutionary

Exposed in Print, I Now Tell My Story I was recently exposed for my previous revolutionary activities.Everything they said about me and my fellow activists is true. And that time was one of the most interesting and intellectually engaging periods of my life. That’s because this particular revolution was not about governance or politics; there was no civil war involved. Instead, it was a scientific revolution that changed the very foundations of the discipline of evolutionary biology. The reveal, with my work cited several times, wasn’t posted on Facebook or Twitter. Nor was…

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