Images of perfect bodies, flashy new cars or cheap fast food are researched, tested, designed and plastered everywhere to make you feel anxious, insecure or become obese. Adverts are not there to inform but to sell one thing: unhappiness. They work because they make us dissatisfied with what we’ve got or what we look like. They make us want the next new thing, until of course the next new thing comes along. They help sow the seeds of mental illness, insecurity, humiliation, debt, brand bullying at school and, through the remorseless use of resources they inspire, they threaten the planet.

Desert Trackways: 7-Million-Year-Old Clues to Elephant Social Complexity

For 14 months of my life I was lucky enough to reside in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Funded by the National Science Foundation to study baboons, I lived surrounded by a gorgeous array of mammals and birds. I was fascinated, in particular, by the elephants who roamed the savannas and swamps.

As I witnessed at Amboseli, the core social units in elephant herds are made up of female relatives and their offspring. In these matriarchal units, bonds are tight. When family members spend time apart, their reunion is often a joyful event, marked by entwined trunks and trumpeted vocalizations. Males remain part of these units only until puberty. After that, they live mostly on their own, joining another herd for mating.

Last month, scientists reported an exciting discovery: A series of fossilized footprints suggests that elephants lived in these same family units, with the big bulls roaming alone, 7 million years ago.

Paleontologist Faysal Bibi and his research team published their findings in the journal Biology Letters. At a desert site called Mleisa 1 in the United Arab Emirates, two preserved “trackways” of prehistoric elephant prints were found. In speaking with the BBC, Bibi called the footprints “a beautiful snapshot” of the animal’s social behavior.

The first trackway shows that at least 13 individuals moved simultaneously in a single direction. The variation in footprint sizes and stride lengths guarantees that elephants of different ages and, almost certainly, of both sexes moved together.

The second trackway cleanly intersects the first at a single point. These prints were made by a large elephant, very probably a sexually mature male. All indications are that this male was solitary and moved over the landscape apart from the herd. Bibi et al. conclude that “The Meisa 1 trackways provide direct evidence for the antiquity of characteristic and complex social structure in Proboscidea,” the taxonomic family that includes living and extinct elephants, as well as mastodons and mammoths.

I’m forever telling my anthropology students that “behavior doesn’t fossilize.” In a sense, the elephant trackways make an exception to that rule. Strictly speaking, it’s the herd structure that is reconstructed by the footprints. But might this not clue us in to herd behavior as well? It’s reasonable to suspect that prehistoric elephant families whose members traveled together also shared emotional bonds.

Seven million years ago, there were no Homo sapiens on our planet; our lineage was either in its extreme infancy or soon to evolve. I love to imagine the trackway elephants roaming a world without us.

Nowadays, researchers report that elephants experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because of human actions. In The New York Times Magazine in 2006, Charles Siebert wrote:

“In ‘Elephant Breakdown,’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, [psychologist Gay] Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.”

Siebert notes, and I agree, that the evidence for elephant PTSD is compelling. It’s only gotten worse for elephants in the years since he wrote his piece, as the current situation in Cameroon exemplifies. Elephant slaughter is terrible enough; on top of that, the survivors suffer emotionally.

Thanks to the discovery of the elephant trackways, we know that elephants have lived in complex social units for at least 7 million years. For all the millenia intervening between then and today, elephants have survived and adapted. I hope that they can survive what we’re doing to them now.

The “dark universe” — the sum of Dark Matter and Dark Energy — is pretty much THE universe. Observations put the dark universe at about 95 percent of the total. That means our kind of matter and energy — the stuff you see, touch and experience every day — is a mere 1/20th of the cosmos.

To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru. And civilization’s assault on the stars has consequences far beyond its impact on astronomers. Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder.

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Distant ‘waterworld’ is confirmed

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a new class of planet: a waterworld with a thick, steamy atmosphere.

The exoplanet GJ 1214b is a so-called “Super Earth” - bigger than our planet, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter.

Observations using the Hubble telescope now seem to confirm that a large fraction of its mass is water.

The planet’s high temperatures suggest exotic materials might exist there.

“GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” said lead author Zachory Berta, from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The planet was discovered in 2009 by ground-based telescopes. It is about 2.7 times the Earth’s diameter, but weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits its red-dwarf star at a distance of just two million km, meaning temperatures on GJ 1214b probably reach above 200C.

In 2010, astronomers released measurements of its atmosphere. These suggested that GJ 1214b’s atmosphere was probably made up of water, but there was another possibility - that the planet was covered in a haze, of the type that envelopes Saturn’s moon Titan.

Mr Berta and his colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope’s wide-field camera to study the planet as it crossed in front of its star - a transit. During these transits, the star’s light is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, giving clues to the mixture of gases present.

Hubble’s observations can give clues to gases in the planet’s atmosphere

The researchers said their results are more consistent with a dense atmosphere of water vapour, than one with a haze.

Calculations of the planet’s density also suggest that GJ 1214b has more water than Earth. This means the internal structure of this world would be very different to that of our own.

“The high temperatures and pressures would form exotic materials like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’, substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience,” said Dr Berta.

The planet’s short distance from Earth makes it a likely candidate for follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, which may launch by the end of this decade.

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CRACKED: 6 Myths Everyone Believes about Space (Thanks to Movies)

Our knowledge of outer space is a lot like our knowledge of history — it’s really hard to separate what we know from research from what we picked up from movies. In both cases, this means that a lot of our everyday knowledge about space is just laughably wrong.

Yep, it’s not enough for space to make us feel small — it needs to make us feel stupid, too.

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John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter to his eldest son ›

He’s the first person you’ve ever met who speaks in bullet points. In fact, he sometimes more resembles a collection of studied gestures than a mere mortal, so much so that he gives the impression that everything about him is calculated, including the impression that everything about him is calculated. Which can make him seem like a Big Thinker but also like a complete phony — an unsettling combination.

Todmorden: A town where greenthumbs, not sticky fingers, prevail

The Daily Mail pays a visit to Todmorden, a quaint British town that’s littered with raised vegetable and herb gardens where residents can grow — and take — whatever they fancy.

Here in the United States of Immaculately Manicured Lawns, it can be hard enough as is to grow a small, neatly kept patch of veggies in your front yard without provoking the ire of your neighbors, the local HOA, and/or city officials.

So can you imagine an entire town of more than 10,000 people where edible landscaping is the norm? A town that not only encourages front yard gardening but gardening in highly trafficked public spaces like the supermarket parking lot, the doctor’s office, and the railway station? A town where wandering into your neighbor’s yard without permission to grab a couple sprigs of fresh mint, a head of lettuce, and a few tomatoes is totally kosher?

This all might sound like some far-fetched, fever dream utopia conjured up by Michael Pollan, but this place does indeed exist. And it’s called Todmorden.

Todmorden, an ethnically and economically diverse mill town of about 15,000 residents located about 20 miles from Manchester in West Yorkshire, U.K., is home to Incredible Edible, an ambitious, agrarian-minded scheme that’s brought together an entire community under one common goal: to become completely self-sufficient in food by the year 2018. And so far, things are going swimmingly.

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(via justinternest)

Reddit: Best free online learning centers

A 10+ also went to another 4-5er, Kali, who was almost entirely unsmiling (I read this as “fierce”). She was dressed in a karate uniform fastened with a pink belt. Sequined pink stripes ran down each side of her pants, and pink ribbons sat on both sides of her chest. She performed to a dubstep soundtrack in front of a poster reading, “LET’S FIGHT BREAST CANCER” that wasn’t further explained. Her routine consisted of a screechy series of punches and kicks, ending with her breaking wooden planks with both her hands and her feet.