By answering an age-old question about man’s best friend, scientists have figured out how wolves became the dogs we all know and love today. It’s pretty common knowledge that dogs are related to their wild canine cousins, but the new study lays out how the transformation occurred. Namely, it asserts that wolves became good boys behavior-wise before they started looking more like domesticated dogs than wolves.
Whether you’re a golf enthusiast or just find yourself walking by a package of golf equipment in a store, you may have wondered why the sport’s round white balls have hundreds of tiny depressions on their surface. Are these dimples just for looks, or do they serve a purpose?
Once every few months, I take my iPhone and go to Settings -> General -> Reset -> Erase All Content and Settings. I skip the offer to use a backup, or transfer data, and build from the factory settings. My friends think I’m masochistic. But hear me out.
Vaccinations have saved millions, maybe billions, of lives, says Michael Kinch, associate vice chancellor and director of the Center for Research Innovation in Business at Washington University in St. Louis. Those routine shots every child is expected to get can fill parents with hope that they’re protecting their children from serious diseases.
As human civilizations flourished, so did infectious disease. Large numbers of people living in close proximity to each other and to animals, often with poor sanitation and nutrition, provided fertile breeding grounds for disease. And new overseas trading routes spread the novel infections far and wide, creating the first global pandemics.
I can’t remember how old I was when I first learned the words denotation (the definition of a word) and connotation (the suggestion of a word). But I do remember feeling a little betrayed by the idea that there was a whole layer of language that couldn’t quite be conveyed through a dictionary. Like most young people, I enjoyed learning but thought of it as something I would eventually be done with. At some age, I assumed, I would need to know everything. Understanding the nuances of language seemed like an obstacle to that goal.
If you think about the desktop programs you use regularly, for many people it’s going to probably be limited to an image editor, a web browser, and perhaps an office application. Working in the cloud is the norm now, and the trend is only going in one direction.
When you can’t seem to squeeze on those strappy sandals that looked so cute last summer, or your formerly slender ankles and calves are starting to balloon up like Snoopy at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, it could just be due to a long day standing in pumps that are a half size too small—but it could also be a signal that something else is going on in your body:
Is there an alternate timeline where America is known as the United States of the Pickle-Dealer? It seems unlikely, but there’s an element of truth to this half-sour hypothetical. Amerigo Vespucci didn’t discover the Americas, contrary to what the map-makers who named the continents believed, but his given name did end up lending itself to the so-called “new world.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson once called Vespucci “the pickle-dealer at Seville,” a derisive label that may have stretched the truth a bit, but pointed towards a very real part of the itinerant Italian’s biography.
Whether or not you’re picky, know that tools for the hands are tools for the brain. Handwritten notes are a powerful tool for encrypting embodied cognition and in turn supporting the brain’s capacity for retrieval of information. And secondly, when you take notes by hand, your hands create a robust external memory storage: your notebook.