By John Johnson
Jane Austen is going on Britain’s 10-pound note in 2017, reports the BBC . And the guy she’s replacing is no slouch—Charles Darwin. Along with her image will be a quote from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice : “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” The Guardian calls the… …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
By Rajeev Peshawaria, Contributor What do Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, John Lennon and the Beatles, Mahatma Gandhi, Howard Schultz, Abraham Lincoln, Michelle Kwan, Thomas Edison, Beethoven, Steven Spielberg, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, Soichiro Honda, Charles Darwin and Michael Jordan have in common? …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By The Huffington Post News Editors
This was an action packed week in the art world, ripe with everything from tornado-chasing photographers to secret drumming societies. Now that we have your attention, read on for details.
What would Charles Darwin or Jim Henson look like in color?
1835 – Charles Darwin departs Valparaiso for Andes crossing
1956 – NZ bowl out WI for 77 at Eden Park to score their 1st Test Cricket win
1982 – Men’s Fig Skating Champions in Copenhagen won by Scott Hamilton (USA)
1984 – Last day of 1st-class cricket for G Chappell, R Marsh, B Laird
1992 – Martina Navratilova and Judy Nelson settle their galamony suit
2012 – Encyclopedia Britannica announces that it will no longer public printed versions of its encyclopedia
1818 – Albion Parris Howe, Bvt Major General (Union Army), died in 1897
1872 – Oswald Garrison Villard, American journalist
1897 – Marcel Thiry, Belgian poet (Statue of Fatigue)
1912 – James Friell, political cartoonist
1926 – Frederick Hemming McClintock, criminologist
1936 – Clarence Nash, animation voice (Donald Duck)
1569 – Louis Condé, French prince/co-leader of Hugenots, dies in Battle of Jarnac
1918 – William Courtleigh, actor (Susie Snowflake), dies at 26
1941 – E Hellendoorn, Dutch resistance fighter, executed
1967 – Frank Worrell, West indian cricketer, dies
1970 – Rick Besoyan, composer, dies at 45
1987 – Gerald Moore, England, pianist (Am I Too Loud), dies at 87
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at HistoryOrb.Com – This Day in History
By The Huffington Post News Editors
What would iconic black-and-white photos of Charles Darwin or Jim Henson look like in color?
We can find out what historical icons look like in color, thanks to Mads Madsen, an active reddit and Facebook user with a knack for photo manipulation. The 18-year-old colorizes historical images, from close-ups of famed scientists Albert Einstein and Nikola Tessla to entertainment giants like Audrey Hepburn and Charlie Chaplin. He even throws in a few world leaders and military heroes into the mix for good measure.
Read More…
More on Photography
By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
On this day in economic and financial history …
The Dow Jones Industrial Average reached the end of its financial crisis bear-market slide on March 9, 2009. This was only the second bear market to destroy more than half of the Dow’s value and thus was the second most devastating crash in Dow history, behind only that which began the Great Depression. It also became the second most volatile bear market in history, with the exception of the very brief crash of 1987 — an average trading day during the financial crisis slide saw the Dow’s change by an average of 1.51% in either direction.
The causes and consequences of this collapse continue to be debated and explored years later, and investors remain on edge, the memory of wealth destruction fresh in their minds. Nearly four years to the day after the crash ended, the Dow surpassed its previous heights, returning to levels first reached in 2007. Will this new level endure? Only time will tell.
Click here to see an in-depth timeline of the financial-crisis crash, from the early warning signs to the first days of recovery.
Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was first published on March 9, 1776. It is now widely regarded as one of the cornerstone texts of classical economics, and it has influenced economics writers for centuries in the same way that Isaac Newton advanced physics and Charles Darwin revolutionized biology. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton pushed back against it in 1791, but both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson found wisdom in its pages. Jean-Baptiste Say (of Say’s Law) and economic demographer Thomas Malthus both drew inspiration from it. So did Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who embraced Smith’s support of generally unfettered capitalism.
Smith put forth the concept of gross domestic product as a measurement of national wealth, supported a division of labor into specialist fields for greater productivity, recognized the two-way benefits of trade, and identified the underlying efficiency in the apparent chaos of free markets. These are only some of the key elements of Smith’s 950-page magnum opus. Few (if any) economics texts come close to matching it in importance, with the possible exception of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
Barbie girl in a Barbie world
Barbie, the world’s best-selling toy, made her debut for Mattel on March 9, 1959. The doll’s launch was the result of a multiyear development process that began, simply enough, when Ruth Handler, the wife of Mattel co-founder Elliot Handler, noticed how much her daughter Barbara enjoyed playing with paper dolls. A 1956 trip to Europe exposed Ruth Handler to the German Bild Lilli doll, which bears a distinct resemblance to Barbie, with its blonde hair, movable head and limbs, and mature (for a plastic …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
By The Huffington Post News Editors
By: Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor
Published: 03/05/2013 11:40 AM EST on LiveScience
The mystery surrounding the origin of a wolflike predator that once lived near Antarctica — a puzzle that stumped even Charles Darwin — has now been solved, researchers say.
The extinct carnivore apparently made its way to islands hundreds of miles from the nearest continent by crossing the frozen sea thousands of years ago, scientists explained.
The reddish coyote-sized Falkland Islands wolf was the only mammal native to the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina. The foxlike predator lived on seals, penguins and sea birds until hunters exterminated it in 1876.
The existence of the Falklands wolf perplexed Darwin when he first encountered it in 1834. “How did this great big carnivore arrive to a set of islands 460 kilometers (285 miles) from the nearest mainland when no other terrestrial mammal did?” asked researcher Alan Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “If it came by a land bridge, then the islands should’ve been covered with rodents as well, since South America is rodent central.”
“It was incredibly tame — it swam out to meet sailors, wagging its tail,” Cooper told LiveScience. “That led to suggestions that it was a semi-domesticated dog that Native Americans took out while hunting, explaining how it got to the Falklands when there were no other mammals there.” [Gallery: Photos Reveal Amazing Wolves]
However, past analysis of DNA from museum specimens of the Falklands wolf, including one that Darwin collected, revealed it was not a dog after all. Instead, its nearest living ancestor was the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) from the South American savannas, an odd predator resembling a red fox with almost stiltlike legs.
To help solve the mystery of how the Falklands wolf colonized the islands, Cooper and his colleagues compared its DNA with remains of what seemed like its closest extinct mainland relative, Dusicyon avus. This carnivore is similar to the Falklands wolf, save for smaller teeth and jaws.
The analysis suggested the Falklands wolf did not become isolated from its mainland cousins until about 16,000 years ago, before scientists think humans arrived this far south in South America. This time coincided with the last height of the ice age, when glaciers covered large portions of the planet.
“The sea levels around the world were really low then, since all the water was frozen onto icecaps — in fact, they were about 130 meters (425 feet) lower than currently,” Cooper said.
The researchers then sleuthed through past research and found references to now-underwater terraces of rock off the coast of Argentina that would have created a narrow, shallow marine strait back when sea levels were lower. “This strait would’ve been only 20 to 30 kilometers (12 to 18 miles) wide, but when it was frozen over during really cold periods, the Falklands wolf could’ve effectively walked across …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post
“The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language,” Charles Darwin wrote in “The Descent of Man” (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak. Language, he speculated, might have had its origins in singing, which “might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.” …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Since the observations made by English naturalist Charles Darwin on the Galapagos Islands, researchers have been interested in how physical barriers, such as isolation on a particular island, can lead to the formation of new species through the process of natural selection. Natural selection is a process whereby heritable traits that enhance survival become more common in successive generations, while unfavorable heritable traits become less common. Over time, animals and plants that have morphologies or other attributes that enhance their suitability to a particular environment become more common and more adapted to that specific environment. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
By hnn
In 1855, Charles Darwin took up a new hobby. He started raising pigeons….
Pigeon breeding, Darwin argued, was an analogy for what happened in the wild. Nature played the part of the fancier, selecting which individuals would be able to reproduce. Natural selection might work more slowly than human breeders, but it had far more time to produce the diversity of life around us.
Yet to later generations of biologists, pigeons were of little more interest than they are to, say, New Yorkers. Attention shifted to other species, like fruit flies and E. coli.
Now Michael D. Shapiro, a biologist at the University of Utah, is returning pigeons to the spotlight….
Source: FULL ARTICLE at History News Network – George Mason University
