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POPSLinguistic superpowers The book Limits of Language by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall is a sort of languages-only Guinness Book of Records, listing everything that’s large, small and otherwise interesting about the manifold manners of human speech and associated forms of communication. One item deals with the world’s most linguistically diverse countries, and is illustrated with this map, of the world’s ‘linguistic superpowers’.
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POPSVirtual Barber Shop (Audio...use headphones) You've gotta love your brain and the way it can translate phase and timing differences in sound into a spatial map, without you really having to think about it. You'll need headphones for this to work.
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POPSThe Brain Unmasked Diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) is one of these twists. It uses magnetic resonance signals to track the movement of water molecules in the brain: water diffuses along the length of neural wires, called axons. Scientists can use these diffusion measurements to map the wires, creating a detailed blueprint of the brain's connectivity.
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POPSThe Unstoppable Coal Fire Blazing Beneath Pennsylvania In 1962, firemen in the Pennsylvanian mining town of Centralia successfully extinguished a minor blaze at a landfill dump – but little did they know a layer of coal just below the surface had ignited, creating a hidden and deadly inferno that raged undetected beneath the town for almost twenty years.
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POPSGet Out of Jail Free: Monopoly's Hidden Maps more (at source): Of all the tools in a military-grade escape kit, the most critical item was the map. But paper maps proved too fragile and cumbersome, said Debbie Hall, a cataloguer in the map room at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England. For hundreds of years, even before World War II, silk was the material of choice for military maps, Hall said, because it wouldn't tear or dissolve in water as easily as paper and was light enough to stuff into a boot or cigarette packet. Unlike maps printed on paper, silk maps also wouldn't rustle and attract the attention of enemy guards, she said.