anthropology

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Morbid Road Trip: Medical Oddities Around the World

In our last two macabre getaways, we planned an almost-cross-country trip to see various items tied to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and took in the best of America’s medical oddities. Today, we go worldwide in a quest for more cadavers, gore and anatomical monstrosities outside the US. All aboard! Museum Vrolik - Amsterdam,... READ ON

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Is Your Name to Blame for All Your Problems?

Name tag image via Shutterstock As Juliet bemoans the grudge her family has against Romeo's based on their names, she says, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Apparently, there's a lot more in a name than Juliet thought—especially if your name is Mandy or Kevin. A study finds that people with these names—and other "bad" names—are unpopular on dating sites and tend to have poorer self esteem, are lonelier, are less intelligent, and even smoke... READ ON

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The Last Five Members of the Akuntsu Tribe

Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know (“Learn Something New Every Day, By Email”). To subscribe to his daily email, click here. Rondônia is a state in the northwest of Brazil that shares a border with Bolivia. Covered mostly by rain forest (or, more commonly, deforested area that was once rain forest), Rondônia is the 13th largest Brazilian state (of 26) by area, but only the 23rd by population. It covers an area of just over 90,000 square miles, roughly the size of Michigan,... READ ON

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Giving Rural Kids Computers and Seeing What Happens

Sugata Mitra's TED Talk starts with these words: "There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go...." From this jumping-off point, Indian education scientist Mitra shows us a variety of experiments in which he placed computers with internet access in contexts where kids could experiment with them on their own -- without teachers. "At the end of [the early experiments], we concluded that groups of... READ ON

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The Bodacious Letter B

Always a bridesmaid and never a bride, B is the also-ran, the second best, the afterthought, the sidekick to the alphaletter A. When things fall apart, we go to Plan B; we’ll watch B-movies with B-list actors on basic cable if we can’t fall asleep; we’ll pass on grade-B meats and eggs and B-rated bonds. Despite its second banana billing, B has shown some incredible staying power. The oldest B appears, like A, in one of the earliest known alphabet inscriptions, discovered in central Egypt and... READ ON

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Ancient Green Beer Contained Antibiotics

Alexander Fleming's dodgy cleaning habits helped him discover penicillin in 1928. The bacteriologist was cleaning Petri dishes when he noticed mold growing on staphylococcus (staph) bacteria. The mold, Penicillium notatum, killed the staph around it and Fleming realized he stumbled on a treatment for bacterial infections. Fleming's discovery revolutionized medical practices, but researchers found that he wasn't the first to accidentally discover antibiotics. Ancient Nubians regularly drank antibiotics in... READ ON

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Ape Women: 10 Dedicated Primate Researchers

Women are doing amazing work in primatology, the study of monkeys, apes, prosimians, and even humans. Although many are working on furthering our understanding of our closest relatives, we will take a look at only the most prominent.1. Vanessa... READ ON

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Small River Cemetery No. 5

There's a 4,000-year-old cemetery in the desert north of Tibet known as Small River Cemetery No. 5. In it, more than 200 mummies rest underneath a "vigorous forest of phallic symbols," and the corpses show signs of European and Siberian origin. So how did they end up in China? The New York Times gives us some clues in a new story: A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets. But what really jumps out at me is all this talk of phalluses and proto-lingerie. Here's a snippet: The cemetery lies in what... READ ON

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Is Your Child a Dandelion or an Orchid?

An article in the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic poses a fascinating scientific question: do some children's genes give them a greater risk of failure, but also a greater chance for success, if they're raised under the right circumstances? Such children are dubbed "orchid children" David Dobbs's piece The Science of Success. The comparison is to a Swedish folk saying about "dandelion children" who will thrive anywhere (although, yes, good parenting helps them too -- just not as much). Dobbs... READ ON

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Anthropology Lessons: Endangered Cultures

Wade Davis is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence (an awesome-sounding job that I kinda want) and an anthropologist. He travels worldwide, living with indigenous people and documenting their cultures. In this TED Talk from 2003, Davis talks about endangered languages and endangered cultures -- cultures are being lost at an astounding rate (at least in 2003, one human language was going extinct every two weeks). Further, he shares his vision of the ethnosphere, "humanity's great legacy" of... READ ON