Showing results for "mark schectman"

For centuries, Aboriginal Australians have said they belonged to the oldest sustained civilization on the face of the Earth, citing their culture and history of oral storytelling that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Now, one of the most extensive analyses of Indigenous Australian DNA to date suggests that they've been right all along.

The 1970s were a chaotic time in America. One of the decade’s most electrifying moments, magnifying flashpoints in American politics, culture and journalism, was the abduction of newspaper heiress Patricia “Patty” Campbell Hearst in early 1974.

The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is - a representation of geographic information - and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography. Only a few examples exist: Around the 11th century, a now-anonymous scribe created a chart of how the planets moved through the sky. By the 18th century, scientists were warming to the idea of arranging knowledge visually.

Next to the bus stop on Stanton Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Stanton Heights community, a massive retaining wall looms, gray and grim, speckled with rust. Originally built to hold the soil in tight against the slope of the land, the wall now holds something else: green, leafy hop cones, scaling their way up a trellis system made of twine.

As the first known person to dive into several coral systems in the Red Sea, Julia Spaet expected to encounter some surprises. Over several years, she sighted dolphins, rays, moray eels, sea turtles, loads of fish and the most colorful smattering of coral species she’d ever witnessed. But the most surprising thing was what she didn’t see: sharks.

Today, marks the birth of one of the world's most renowned authors, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the writer behind Sherlock Holmes.

The idea that black cats bring bad luck is a total myth, but that doesn’t mean these solid-colored kitties have an easy time getting adopted. All the superstitions surrounding black cats have a real effect on finding them a home, giving these kitties some of the lowest adoption rates and the highest euthanasia rates out of all furry felines. However, if you’re looking to give a lonely black cat a forever home, you might have to wait until after Halloween is over. That's for their own protection, though.

In the twenty-first century, wrote Elizabeth Pleck in the Journal of American Ethnic History in 2001, it remains "one of the most lasting innovations of United States black nationalism of the 1960s. Maulana Karenga, a prominent member of the black nationalist community, designed the holiday “as a celebration of African American family, community and culture,” according to History.com.

Shortly after lunch on a cold December morning in 1956 a trio of New York City detectives stepped out the back door of the copper-domed police headquarters looming like a dirty gray temple above the tenements and trattorias of Little Italy.

It can often feel like there is something deep and universal about a collection of notes making up a chord or arranged into a beautiful melody. For some, music can crawl up the spine and evoke real shivers. Over the centuries, Western music has assumed its highly developed system of harmony and intervals was tapping into some grand truth innately recognized by all humans; after all, even Justin Bieber's music is based on mathematical ratios described by Pythagoras himself.

That’s when the town's former residents voted it out of corporate existence. Only one elderly couple still lived there at the time, according to a report published in The New York Times. Three years previously, the town had been home to 2,242 residents, who were all suddenly evacuated when it was revealed that their dirt roads had all been sprayed down with a mixture containing the toxic chemical dioxin—the main ingredient in Agent Orange.

In 1960, a group of Nashville, Tennessee, students began to do something extraordinary: sit. These were no couch potatoes. Rather, they were building the Civil Rights Movement by sitting at segregated lunch counters and refusing to leave. Woolworth’s, one of the city’s most popular stores, was often their target.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have put an end to World War II, but they weren’t the only destructive weaponry developed during the war.

Brunhilde Pomsel, who worked as the private secretary of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, has died. She was 106 years old. Though Pomsel worked closely with Goebbels and his family—she spent three years transcribing his reflections and taking his dictation—she maintained until her death that she knew nothing about Hitler’s Final Solution.

What a 19th-century rebellion against automation can teach us about the coming war over robots taking our jobs.

Genealogy has gotten pretty sophisticated in recent years. There are now massive online archives that make it easier than ever to hunt down obscure ancestors, not to mention mail-in DNA tests that can reach back centuries. But an approximately 350-year-old manuscript published online for the first time can reveal another fascinating detail about one's family history: whether any ancestors were accused of practicing witchcraft.

John Anderson’s Liberty Street cigar shop was no different from the dozens of other tobacco emporiums frequented by the newspapermen of New York City. There only reason it was so crowded was Mary Rogers.

A high piece of wall came down in the middle of dress rehearsal. The musical was Victor/Victoria, the gender-bending comedy, and young dancers in black leotards ran and scattered in all directions, screaming, as the patch of plaster broke free, plummeted down, and landed with a harmless thud off stage right. A puff of powder marked the strike zone, amid elaborate lighting fixtures that run up each side of Teatro América.

Jack Barsky was standing on a New York subway platform in 1988 when someone whispered in his ear: “You must come home or else you are dead.” No one had to tell him who’d sent the message. For ten years, Barsky had been a Soviet spy in the United States. Now, the KGB was calling him back. But Barsky wanted to stay.

During the late Bronze Age, the eastern Mediterranean was dominated by the "Group of 8," the Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians and Babylonians. But around 3,200 years ago all of these civilizations went into steep decline - besieged by war, famine, corruption and bickering. Archaeologists still debate why the disruption happened and whether it was a caused by an external event like an earthquake or climate change or the result of civil unrest.