The Art of Reading

I know it will never come to that but the United states of America already has already made a very complex plan on how it would survive a nuclear war if it happens to be the worst day in the America’s history. It is a NIGHTMARE SCENARIO and with nuclear threats popping up around the world from countries such as North Korea and Iran, America has already prepared itself on how to survive a nuclear attack. Other nuclear countries pose significant threat to the US and that is why president Trump is fighting hard to denuclearize countries like North Korea and Iran. There’s no doubt that America will suffer damages but they will respond with a devastating nuclear attack. They will try to intercept the missiles using anti-missile but that could fail. Even if it was successful America would still respond. 1. Calculate the time it will take for the incoming missile to hit the US and set the countdown clock. 2. Always know where the president is at all times. 3. There’s no time to evacuate th...

Managing money, sticking to a budget and even handling investment decisions are easier than even before with today's crop of personal finance apps. But not every tool out there is actually worth downloading and learning to use. You can take some of the guesswork out of moving your finances to mobile with this list of the best personal finance apps for 2018. 1. Mint: Best app for managing your money. Hands down, the free Mint app from Intuit Inc. (INTU) – the name behind QuickBooks and TurboTax – is an effective all-in-one resource for creating a budget, tracking your spending and getting smart about your money. You can connect all your bank and credit card accounts, as well as all your monthly bills, so all your finances are in one convenient place – no more logging in to multiple sites. Mint lets you know when bills are due, what you owe and what you can pay. The app can also send you payment reminders so you can avoid late fees. Based on your spending habits, Mint even gi...

Earth only has one moon, but dozens of natural satellites revolve around Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system. And new members in the Jupiter posse are still being discovered. On July 16, 2018, it was announced that a team of astronomers had found 12 previously unknown moons around the planet. The big find happened last year. Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute for Sciences was leading a search for new objects in the distant Kuiper Belt, an enormous ring of debris that lies beyond Neptune. Sheppard and his colleagues decided to take a break from their primary research goal and observe Jupiter for a while. That's how they wound up standing on Galileo's shoulders. In 1610, the great astronomer Galileo Galilei noticed four heavenly bodies that appeared to revolve around Jupiter. Named Io, Europa, Ganymede and Castillo, these are Jupiter's biggest moons by far — and they were the first to be discovered. As stargazing technology grew more sophisticated, it ...

The Property Brothers, Drew Scott and Jonathan Scott, ride the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train roller coaster during a visit to Disney's Magic Kingdom Park. Some people really like riding coasters — but is it possible to get addicted to the endorphin high? Chloe Rice/Disney Resorts via Getty Images At its highest point, the Kingda Ka roller coaster is 456 feet (138 meters) tall, equivalent to 45 stories off the ground. A terrifying prospect for many, this immense drop is nonetheless tantalizing for people who enjoy a good endorphin rush. Which makes us wonder, can you be addicted to endorphins? Before we dive into that, it's important to note that endorphins aren't the only feel-good chemicals our bodies produce. Serotonin production helps us feel important and worthy, and the hormone oxytocin helps people build trust and loving relationships. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter released when our brain experiences pleasure — whether from food, drugs or video games. Endorphin...

What color is the ocean? Well, blue, of course. But this wasn't always the case. If you assume that prehistoric oceans were blue just like they are today, you'd be wrong. Scientists recently discovered ancient oceans were actually a rosy hue, making pink the world's oldest-known color. Researchers found the mighty little pink pigment in bacterial fossils from the Sahara Desert in Mauritania, West Africa. The cyanobacteria were thought to have survived on sunlight and, more than 650 million years ago, they became the dominant life form in Earth's oceans for eons. Cyanobacteria probably even predated algae, which has long been thought to be one of the earliest building blocks of the evolutionary life of larger animals, according to findings published July 9 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So what made these little microbes think pink? Well, it wasn't their fashion sense. The fossilized chlorophyll inside the bacteria was dark red and...

Think you remember having your diaper changed, taking a bottle or – Heaven forbid – getting circumcised? Think again – the odds are strongly against the legitimacy of such memories. In fact, research out of London, published in the journal Psychological Science found that nearly 40 percent of first memories are likely not true at all, since those respondents claimed them from extremely early in life. Of the 6,641 participants in this large-scale, web-based study, 2,487 (almost 40 percent) claimed their first memory to date at age 2 and younger. In fact, 893 of those note a memory from age 1 and younger. This is in stark contrast with a significant body of existing research, which places the age of encoding between 3 and 3-and-a-half years old. "The established view is that the distribution around mean age at encoding is truncated, with very few or no memories dating to the preverbal period, that is, below about 2 years of age," the authors write in the study. Now, no one...

Strange as it may seem, there isn't really one standard definition of life. We can't say that life requires something as specific as breathing or growing; there's just too much variety to living things to nail down one specific criterion. What we can do is talk about some things that all living things on Earth share: They're carbon-based; they require water; they use energy. Perhaps most important for survival, they can grow or reproduce in some way. So is that all scientists and astrobiologists are looking for when searching for signs of life outside the Earth? Let's take a deeper look at what is required for life to exist. As we just said, a main requirement is water, which is necessary for many chemical reactions [source: NASA ]. Liquid water allows for chemicals to be transported or dissolved, so we do need the water to be between 59 and 239 degrees Fahrenheit (15 and 115 degrees Celsius) so it doesn't vaporize or freeze [source: NASA ]. Ene...

The image of a long-dead man peers out from a daguerreotype plate (right) after the tarnish (left) is removed with synchrotron X-rays The very first photographic images and the technique that created them were formally introduced to the world on Aug. 19, 1839, in a scientific lecture to a breathless, jam-packed audience at the Institut de France in Paris. Details of the technique revealed that a silver-coated copper plate cleaned with nitric acid was iodized, exposed in a camera and an invisible, latent image was then revealed by exposure to heated mercury vapor. Pretty cool, huh? Eponymously dubbed the daguerreotype after its inventor, the French artist and illusionist, Louis Daguerre , these seemingly magical and amazingly precise images marked the beginning of photography and the first "true" or exact visual portrayals of history. The French government released Daguerre's process into the public domain and within months the daguerreotype became a worldwide sen...

While it would be really cool if there were tons of legitimate historical reports of faintly glowing apparitions of ships and sailors, there are many more stories about something less metaphysical but still pretty creepy: ships that were abandoned without an apparent cause or trace. On this episode of the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, hosts Holly Frey and Tracy V. Wilson tell us a few tales of the bottomless blue and the ships that sailed them — and washed up on some shore entirely deserted. If that sounds like a fairly routine course of events for ships of yore, you might be surprised to learn how weird the circumstances of these incidents were. Take the Resolven, a cargo ship that traveled between Canada and Wales in the late 19th century. In 1884, some sailors spotted it off the coast of what is now Newfoundland and Labrador. The ship was moving haphazardly through the water, and when the sailors boarded the Resolven they saw why. While the sails were set, there wasn...

Sometimes a wound requires a bandage, but what if that bandage wasn't just a passive way to prevent infection? What if a bandage could play an active role in diagnosis and recovery? This idea, that bandages can be "smart," is behind a new invention by a team of engineers at Tufts University. The team developed a flexible bandage less than 3 millimeters (around an eighth of an inch) thick that actively monitors chronic wounds and then responds by delivering wound-specific drug treatments to promote healing. "We've been able to take a new approach to bandages because of the emergence of flexible electronics," said Sameer Sonkusale, Ph.D., co-author and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts University's School of Engineering, in a news release. "In fact, flexible electronics have made many wearable medical devices possible, but bandages have changed little since the beginnings of medicine. We are simply applying modern technology...

    An “irreplaceable” iconic stone landmark that took 320 million years to form has been smashed in seconds by “idiot” youths. One of the balancing stones at the Brimham Rocks was sent toppling from its perch in what authorities have described as a “completely pointless” act by the thoughtless kids. The youths had been spotted pushing the sandstone rock off the crag at the National Trust-owned tourist spot at Summerbridge, North Yorkshire, two weeks ago — forever damaging the iconic landmark. The Brimham Rocks are about 215 miles north of London. Slamming the careless act, Helen Clarke, from the National Trust, said: “It might have been fun for some people.” “Actually, it is just completely pointless and needless.” Thousands of tourists flock to the stunning landmark every year to see the weird and wonderful shapes sculpted by wind and ice over millions of years. People have also carved their names into the sandstone — previously touched only by nature. Names inc...

Every Olympic year, the Olympic flame begins its journey from Athens to the host city of that year’s Games. Said to represent the importance of fire to the ancient Greeks, the flame relay is a reliable, if slightly hokey, tradition. In 2016 as the flame is currently on a 12,400-mile journey to Rio de Janeiro, the site of the Summer Olympics. Before Rio, though, is a 300-city tour of Brazil. And it was on that tour, on Sunday, that the flame came under attack. Working on what he told police was a dare, a 27-year-old threw a bucket of water at the torch and its bearer, according to the BBC. In the video above, you can see the perpetrator slowly wait for his moment, before tossing a not-inconsiderable amount of water the flame’s way. Yet, all of that careful planning failed. The water-tosser, identified as Marcelino Mateus Silva Proença , missed, and was later arrested. According to CNN, Proença seems to be enjoying the notoriety, posting stories about the water incident on his Fa...

Mark Twain, a fan of English As She Is Spoke. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-ds-05448 ) In the middle of the 19th century, a relatively unknown author named Pedro Carolino rapidly gained intercontinental popularity over a small Portuguese-to-English phrasebook. English as She Is Spoke (or O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez) was originally intended to help Portuguese speakers dabble in the English tongue, but was penned by a man who spoke little to no English himself. And, instead of helping Portuguese speakers learn a second language, it became a cult classic for fans of inept and unintentional humor. It quickly gained notoriety among English speakers, including author Mark Twain, who wrote the introduction for the first English edition, published in 1883. Twain endorsed the book, saying “Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.”  A photochrom of the Tower of Lon...

  After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, his giant empire broke into pieces and descended into a long period of political turmoil with rulers constantly jockying for power. This period, known as the Hellenistic Age, saw the rise of multiple schools of philosophy, all of which had at their core the task of trying to quell the anxiety caused by the political events that they had no control over. Stoicism was one of these schools. Stoicism was for everyone. If you were making a late night infomercial trying to convince people that Stoicism was right for them, no matter which walk of life they came from, you couldn’t ask for three people with more diversity between them than Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius to plead your case. Known as the three “crown jewels” of Stoicism, these men dedicated their lives to applying Stoicism to the adversity that faced them, and their brilliant insights and techniques can teach us all something about the human condition. 1. D...

Some people believe that certain automatic gestures — like scratching our heads when we're thinking — are natural motions that were passed down to us from our caveman predecessors. JOSE LUIS PELAEZ INC./GETTY IMAGES If you've ever had the distinct pleasure of sourcing stock photos for any reason, you've likely come across a whole lot of laughing women eating salads alone . But you've also probably stumbled upon a truckload of people scratching their heads to symbolize confusion, deep thought and/or perhaps a bad case of seborrheic dermatitis — dandruff. Scalp dryness aside, how exactly did the head scratch come to symbolize intellectual processes? Some people believe that certain automatic gestures are simply natural, expressive motions our caveman predecessors passed down to us. "One popular explanation for any hand-to-head movements is that they're frustrated aggression — a reversion to the natural movements of our rock-throwing ancestors," wrote Sa...

Peter Senge is one of the greatest thinkers of the contemporary corporate world. His theories help companies clarify their goals, challenge the odds and find new opportunities. He believes, in the long run, the only difference an organization can have is to make you learn faster than the competition. In this book, he teaches you how to do this in your company.  The Era Of Learning Companies In an increasingly competitive world, where companies strive to create their competitive edge and win by using competitive academic strategies, Peter Senge brings a different vision. Companies that will win and have a competitive edge in the future will be "learning companies," companies that are capable of exploiting the collective experience and the ability of people to succeed in a team. The learning organizations are those people who continually improve their ability to create the future they would like to see emerging. They use collective learning practices and are always prepared...

He worked for FEMA at ground zero, but then Kurt Sonnenfeld became a suspect in the mysterious and high-profile death of his wife. Now he's found a new life in South America and become a folk hero by telling an amazing story about the World Trade Center attacks. Did Sonnenfeld get away with murder, or is he just an innocent abroad? Evan Hughes tracked him down in Argentina and asked the big questions Part 1 - A Death In Denver It was late on New Year's Eve, the early hours of 2002. The emergency call came in at 1:40 A.M., and Denver police arrived at the Victorian house on Clayton Street within minutes. The officers crossed the lawn and scaled the porch, and through the glass in the front door, they saw a dark-haired man dressed in a semiformal outfit—black blazer, black shirt, and black pants. The man, who had called 911, appeared to be disoriented and distraught and was slow to respond. He came to the door but called out that he couldn't open it; the dead-bolt lock need...