Attention to the Unseen

A Mayan elder explains in more detail how the Mayan cyclical calendars worked. It’s always worth being reminded that the real Americans inhabited this continent long before the Europeans arrived. Tim Padgett writes: I once took a Classics professor friend of mine, a real Hellenophile, to the majestic Maya ruins of Palenque in southern Mexico. [...]

Henry Marsh writes: I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing. With a pair of short-wave diathermy forceps I coagulate a few millimetres of the brain’s surface, turning the living, glittering pia arachnoid – the transparent membrane that covers the brain – along with its minute and elegant [...]

“With all the fuss over TED’s self-censorship, we searched through hours of footage to find 10 talks the organizers really should have excised” writes Foreign Policy associate editor Joshua Keating. Why? Just so that Foreign Policy readers could waste their time watching TED talks that in Keating’s view aren’t worth watching? Curious to find out [...]

The Washington Post reports: Rep. Tim Ryan (D) is a five-term incumbent from the heartland. His Ohio district includes Youngstown and Warren and part of Akron and smaller places. He’s 38, Catholic, single. He was a star quarterback in high school. He lives a few houses down from his childhood home in Niles. He’s won [...]

PopSci reports: Each star in the Milky Way shines its light upon at least one companion planet, according to a new analysis that suddenly renders exoplanets commonplace, the rule rather than the exception. This means there are billions of worlds just in our corner of the cosmos. This is a major shift from just a [...]