How Did Life Arise on Earth?

How Did Life Arise on Earth?

7:38:00 PM   Amazing, Education, History, Nature, Science,

Was it a magnificent stroke of luck, or was it inevitable? 

Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, and for much of that history it has been home to life in one weird form or another.

Indeed, some scientists think life appeared the moment our planet's environment was stable enough to support it.

The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilized mats of cyanobacteria called stromatolites in Greenland that are about 3.7 billion years old. Ancient as their origins are, these bacteria (which are still around today) are already biologically complex—they have cell walls protecting their protein-producing DNA, so scientists think life must have begun much earlier. In fact, there are hints of life in even more primeval rocks: 4.1-billion-year-old zircons from Western Australia contain high amounts of a form of carbon typically used in biological processes. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]

But despite knowing approximately when life first appeared on Earth, scientists are still far from answering how it appeared.

"Many theories of the origin of life have been proposed, but since it's hard to prove or disprove them, no fully accepted theory exists," said Diana Northup, a cave biologist at the University of New Mexico.

The answer to this question would not only fill one of the largest gaps in scientists' understanding of nature, but also would have important implications for the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.

Lots of ideas

Today, there are several competing theories for how life arose on Earth. Some question whether life began on Earth at all, asserting instead that it came from a distant world or the heart of a fallen comet or asteroid. Some even say life might have arisen here more than once.

"There may have been several origins," said David Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We usually make 'origins' plural just to indicate that we don't necessarily claim there was just a single origin, but just an origin that didn't happen to get blasted by giant [asteroid] impacts."

Most scientists agree that life went through a period when RNA was the head-honcho molecule, guiding life through its nascent stages. According to this "RNA World" hypothesis, RNA was the crux molecule for primitive life and only took a backseat when DNA and proteins—which perform their jobs much more efficiently than RNA—developed.

"A lot of the most clever and most talented people in my field have accepted that the RNA World was not just possible, but probable," Deamer said.

RNA is very similar to DNA, and today carries out numerous important functions in each of our cells, including acting as a transitional-molecule between DNA and protein synthesis, and functioning as an on-and-off switch for some genes. [Extreme Life on Earth: 8 Bizarre Creatures]

But the RNA World hypothesis doesn't explain how RNA itself first arose. Like DNA, RNA is a complex molecule made of repeating units of thousands of smaller molecules called nucleotides that link together in very specific, patterned ways. While there are scientists who think RNA could have arisen spontaneously on early Earth, others say the odds of such a thing happening are astronomical.

"The appearance of such a molecule, given the way chemistry functions, is incredibly improbable. It would be a once-in-a-universe long shot," said Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University. "To adopt this [view], you have to believe we were incredibly lucky."

The anthropic principle

But "astronomical" is a relative term. In his book, The God Delusion, biologist Richard Dawkins entertains another possibility, inspired by work in astronomy and physics.

Suppose, Dawkins says, the universe contains a billion billion planets (a conservative estimate, he says), then the chances that life will arise on one of them is not really so remarkable.

Furthermore, if, as some physicists say, our universe is just one of many, and each universe contained a billion billion planets, then it's nearly a certainty that life will arise on at least one of them.

As Dawkins writes, "There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack."

Shapiro doesn't think it's necessary to invoke multiple universes or life-laden comets crashing into ancient Earth. Instead, he thinks life started with molecules that were smaller and less complex than RNA, which performed simple chemical reactions that eventually led to a self-sustaining system involving the formation of more complex molecules.

"If you fall back to a simpler theory, the odds aren't astronomical anymore," Shapiro told Live Science.

Trying to recreate an event that happened billions of years ago is a daunting task, but many scientists believe that, like the emergence of life itself, it is still possible.

"The solution of a mystery of this magnitude is totally unpredictable," said Freeman Dyson, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University in New Jersey. "It might happen next week or it might take a thousand years."

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Does the Soul Exist?

Does the Soul Exist?

7:23:00 PM   Amazing, Education, Nature,

Many people today believe they possess a soul. While conceptions of the soul differ, many would describe it as an "invisible force that appears to animate us."

It's often believed the soul can survive death and is intimately associated with a person’s memories, passions and values. Some argue the soul has no mass, takes no space and is localised nowhere.

But as a neuroscientist and psychologist, I have no use for the soul. On the contrary, all functions attributable to this kind of soul can be explained by the workings of the brain.

Psychology is the study of behaviour. To carry out their work of modifying behaviour, such as in treating addiction, phobia, anxiety and depression, psychologists do not need to assume people have souls. For the psychologists, it is not so much that souls do not exist, it is that there is no need for them.

It is said psychology lost its soul in the 1930s. By this time, the discipline fully became a science, relying on experimentation and control rather than introspection.

What is the soul?

It is not only religious thinkers who have proposed that we possess a soul. Some of the most notable proponents have been philosophers, such as Plato (424-348 BCE) and René Descartes in the 17th century.

Plato believed we do not learn new things but recall things we knew before birth. For this to be so, he concluded, we must have a soul.

Centuries later, Descartes wrote his thesis Passions of the Soul, where he argued there was a distinction between the mind, which he described as a "thinking substance," and the body, "the extended substance." He wrote:

… because we have no conception of the body as thinking in any way, we have reason to believe that every kind of thought which exists in us belongs to the soul.

One of the many arguments Descartes advanced for the existence of the soul was that the brain, which is a part of the body, is mortal and divisible – meaning it has different parts – and the soul is eternal and indivisible – meaning it is an inseparable whole. Therefore, he concluded they must be different things.

But advances in neuroscience have shown these arguments to be false.

Stripping humans of the soul

In the 1960s, Nobel laureate Roger Sperry showed that the mind and our consciousness are divisible, therefore disproving that aspect of Descartes' theory.

Sperry studied patients whose corpus callosum, the superhighway connecting the right and left hemispheres, had been severed by surgery aiming to control the spread of epileptic seizures. The surgery blocked or reduced the transfer of perceptual, sensory, motor and cognitive information between the two hemispheres.

Sperry showed each hemisphere could be trained to perform a task, but this experience was not available to the untrained hemisphere. That is, each hemisphere could process information outside the awareness of the other. In essence, this meant the operation produced a double consciousness.

Thus, Descartes cannot be correct in his assertion the brain is divisible but the soul, which can be read as the mind or consciousness, is not. In his effort to prove the existence of the soul in humans, Descartes actually provided an argument against it.

Rather than investigating rats with souls, psychologists stripped humans of theirs. In 1949, psychologist D.O. Hebb claimed the mind is the integration of the activity of the brain.

Many neurophilosophers have come to the same conclusion as the psychologists, with Patricia Churchland more recently claiming there is no ghost in the machine.

The brain does it all

If the soul is where emotion and motivation reside, where mental activity occurs, sensations are perceived, memories are stored, reasoning takes place and decisions are taken, then there is no need to hypothesise its existence. There is an organ that already performs these functions: the brain.

This idea goes back to the ancient physician Hippocrates (460-377 BCE) who said:

Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency and lamentations. And by this … we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet and what are unsavoury…

The brain is the organ with a map of our body, the outside world and our experience. Damage to the brain, as in accidents, dementias or congenital malformations, produces a commensurate damage to personality.

Consider one of the functions supposedly – if we listen to Plato – carried out by the soul: memory. A major knock on the head can make you lose your memories of the past several years. If the soul is an immaterial substance separate from our physical being, it should not be injured by the knock. If memory were stored in the soul, it should not have been lost.

The neuronal activity in the brain is responsible for the cognitive and emotional dysfunctions in people with autism; it would be cruel and unethical to blame their hypothetical souls.

Manipulation of the brain is sufficient to alter emotion and mood. The soul is totally superfluous to this process.

The ability of psychotherapeutic drugs to alter mood provides another line of evidence against the presence of the soul. If you produce a chemical imbalance in the brain, such as by depleting dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin with tetrabenazine, you can induce depression in some people.

Correspondingly, many depressed people can be helped by drugs that increase the function of these neurotransmitters in the brain.

The brain is where thinking takes place, love and hatred reside, sensations become perceptions, personality is formed, memories and beliefs are held, and where decisions are made. As D.K. Johnson said: “There is nothing left for the soul to do.”

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Where Is the Rest of the Universe?

Where Is the Rest of the Universe?

7:04:00 PM   Amazing, Education, Nature, News, Science,

Most of the universe is made up of "stuff" that is invisible, possibly intangible and interacts with other things only via the force of gravity. Oh, yes, and physicists don't know what the stuff is or why it makes up so much of the universe — some four-fifths of its mass.

They call it dark matter.

So where is this mysterious stuff that makes up such a huge chunk of our universe, and when will scientists find it?

First, though, how do we know it's even out there?

Dark matter was first hypothesized in the 1930s when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky realized that his measurements of the masses of galaxy clusters showed some of the mass in the universe was "missing." Whatever was making galaxies heavier, it didn't give off any light, nor did it interact with anything else except via gravity.

Vera Rubin, in the 1970s, found that the rotation of galaxies was not following the predictions of Newton's laws of motion; the stars in galaxies (notably Andromeda) all seemed to be orbiting the center at the same speed, rather than those farther out moving more slowly as theories of gravity said they should. Clearly, something was adding mass to the outer parts of galaxies, something nobody could see. [Does the Universe Have an Edge?]

Other pieces of evidence came from gravitational lensing, which happens when the gravity of a large object bends the light waves around that object. Per Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity bends space (like a sumo wrestler might deform the mat he is standing on), so light rays bend around massive objects even though light itself is massless. Observations indicated that there wasn't enough visible mass to bend the light by as much as it was bending around certain galaxy clusters — in other words, the galaxies were more massive than they should be.

Then there is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the "echo" of the Big Bang, and supernovas. "What the CMB tells you is that the universe is spatially flat," said Jason Kumar, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii. "Spatially flat" means that if you were to draw two lines across the universe, they would never meet, even if those lines were a billion light-years across. In a steeply curved universe, those lines would meet at some point in space.

Researchers then calculated how much matter the universe must have in order to be flat and produce the amount of normal matter (also called baryons) observed in the universe.

 "I ask myself, 'Is the amount of matter I have equal to baryonic matter, and it's not," Kumar said.  

There's now little dispute among cosmologists and astronomers that dark matter exists. Yet it seems unaffected by light, and it isn't charged like electrons or protons are. So far it has eluded direct detection.

 "That's kind of the mystery," Kumar said. There are may ways scientists have tried to "see" dark matter – either via its interactions with normal matter or looking for particles that dark matter might become. "Those experiments are going to keep getting better, and don't seem to have any hiccups so far as they go to better detectors."

What we know it isn't

A number of theories have come and gone as to what dark matter is. One of the first was logical enough: The matter was hidden within massive astrophysical compact halo objects, or MACHOs, such as neutron stars, black holes, brown dwarfs and rogue planets. They don't emit light (or they emit only very little), so they are effectively invisible to telescopes. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

Yet surveys of galaxies looking for small distortions in the light of background stars produced by a MACHO passing by — called microlensing events — couldn't account for the amount of dark matter around galaxies, or even a significant portion of it. "MACHOs seem as ruled out as ever," said Dan Hooper, an associate scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

Dark matter doesn't appear to be clouds of gas that telescopes wouldn't see, either. Diffuse gas would absorb light from the galaxies that are farther away, and on top of that, ordinary gas would re-emit radiation at longer wavelengths – there'd be a massive radiation of infrared light in the sky. Since that doesn't occur we can rule that out as well, Kumar said.

What it might be

Weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, are some of the strongest contenders to explain dark matter. WIMPs are heavy particles — about 10 to 100 times heavier than a proton — that were produced during the Big Bang, though just small quantities are left today. These particles interact with normal matter via gravity or the weak nuclear force. More massive WIMPs would move more slowly through space, and therefore be "cold" dark-matter candidates, while lighter ones would move faster, and be "warm" dark matter. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

One way to find them is in "direct detection" experiments, such as the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, which is a container of liquid xenon in a South Dakota mine. If a xenon nucleus seems to "bounce" with no explanation, that would be a candidate for getting hit with a dark-matter particle. The magnitude of the bounce would give an idea of the new particle's mass. But Hooper said that LUX hasn't seen anything yet.

Another way to see the WIMPs might be particle accelerators. Inside accelerators, atomic nuclei smash into each at near the speed of light, and in the process that energy of the collision gets turned into other particles, some new to science. So far, though, particle accelerators haven't detected anything that looks like a dark matter candidate, either.

Results from both direct detection and particle accelerators, however, have placed limits on the size and mass of this hypothetical dark-matter particle, Kumar said. The sensitivity of LUX is down to 200 MeV, or about a fifth of a proton's mass, and it could theoretically see particles as heavy as 1 TeV, which is comparable to some types of quarks. Since LUX saw nothing so far, that could well mean that dark matter isn't in that range.

Kumar said that it's possible that WIMPs are really heavy, and because they are so massive there just aren't that many of them, meaning the chance they'll hit a xenon atom is small. 

Another possibility: axions. These subatomic particles could be detected indirectly by the kinds of radiation they emit as they annihilate or as they decay into other kinds of particles, or appear in particle accelerators. Yet there hasn't been any direct evidence of axions, either.

Since detecting heavy, slow-moving "cold" particles, like WIMPs or axions, hasn't yielded results yet, some scientists are looking at the possibility of lighter, faster-moving particles, which they call "warm" dark matter. There has been a renewed interest in such a dark-matter model after scientists found evidence of an unknown particle, using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, in the Perseus cluster, a group of galaxies about 250 million light-years from Earth. The known ions in that cluster produce certain X-ray emission lines, and in 2014, scientists saw a new "line" that may correspond to an unknown lightweight particle, Nicola Menci, an astrophysicist at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), told Live Science in an email.

If dark-matter particles are light, scientists are going to have a difficult time detecting them directly, said Tracy Slatyer, a physicist at MIT. Slatyer has proposed new kinds of particles that might make up dark matter.

"Dark matter with [a] mass below about 1 GeV is really hard to detect with conventional direct detection experiments, because they work by looking for the unexplained recoils of atomic nuclei… but when the dark matter is much lighter than the atomic nucleus, the recoil energy is very small," Slatyer said. Protons — a hydrogen nucleus — can't be any lighter than about 938 MeV, so a particle that weighs in the keV range would be 1,000 times lighter. "Think bouncing a ping-pong ball off a bowling ball; the bowling ball doesn't move very much," she said.

Slatyer said there is a lot of research being done on how to find dark-matter particles if current methods fail. Using "superfluid" liquid helium, semiconductors and even breaking of chemical bonds in crystals, are among the ideas being floated.

Kumar said one reason dark matter is so mysterious is precisely that physicists feel that they understand, to a point, how the Big Bang nucleosynthesis ― the origins of matter ― worked. The Standard Model, which predicted the Higgs boson, has been very successful so far, so unless they've all been really wrong about something fundamental it's odd that nobody has managed to detect a dark-matter particle yet.

If, for example, dark-matter particles are very different from what many current models predict, it's possible that particle accelerators wouldn't have seen it. Accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider are better at seeing things that interact with the strong nuclear force, which decay into other particles.

"If that's the way your dark matter works it's a great machine to find it," he said. "But if there isn't a heavier particle like that it's harder." 

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How Hot Is Lightning?

How Hot Is Lightning?

6:58:00 PM   Amazing, Education, Nature, Science,

Lightning is one of the most destructive forces in nature. But for all the folklore and legends amassed over human history on lightning, we know surprisingly little about the inner workings of this powerful phenomenon, including something as simple as how the current that flows through a thunder-inducing flash is related to the temperature of the strike.

Lightening

"The basic physics of lightning, such as lightning initiation and lightning propagation, is not fully understood at this point," said Robert Moore, a lightning researcher from University of Florida in Gainesville.

"We know the basics, but not the details. So when anybody makes headway, it is major news."

Lightning causes more than $5 billion in damages every year in the U.S., as well as more fatalities than hurricanes.

"A direct hit from a lightning strike can melt a power cable or start a forest fire, where the amount of heat from the lightning plays a major role," said Xiangchao Li, a scientist from China who specializes in lightning research. Li and his team discovered a mathematical relationship between the current intensity and the temperature inside lightning. Their result was published last month in the journal Scientific Reports.

Although there are approximately 100,000 lightning strikes on Earth every single day, the randomness of the occurrences makes it difficult for scientists to study them in an effective or systematic way. So until Thor, the Norse god of lightning as well as other meteorological events, joins a lightning research team, scientists are left to their own devices.

Luckily such a device does exist. Known as an impulse current generator system, the device can create artificial lightning with currents up to tens of thousands of amperes. For perspective, a household or automotive fuse is usually rated well below a hundred amperes, and an electric current of just a few amperes can easily kill you. A natural lightning strike typically carries around 20-30,000 amperes of current. Certainly there are other factors such as size and setting of natural lightning that cannot be replicated in a laboratory, but just in terms of sheer current output, the lightning generated by the device can really give Thor a run for his money.

By using their artificial lightning system, Li and his team were able to dial up lightning strikes at will, with currents between 5,000 to 50,000 amperes. This resulted in artificial lightning strikes with temperatures as high as 17,000 F, twice as hot as the surface of the Sun.

This creates a new problem — at such high temperatures, a normal thermometer would explode. And even if it didn't, it wouldn't react quickly enough to register the temperature of the lightning strike. Fortunately, there is "light" in "lightning." Li and his team were able to record the lightning's temperature within a millisecond by measuring the intensity of the light at various wavelengths.

After striking lightning at the same place over and over again, they concluded that the relationship between the current and temperature of lightning is a highly logarithmic one, meaning that the temperature difference between lightning strikes with 1,000 and 10,000 amperes is similar to those with 10,000 and 100,000 amperes. This result provides solid evidence for previous theoretical predictions that lacked the support of data.

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Secret Behind Mona Lisa's Smile

Secret Behind Mona Lisa's Smile

6:21:00 PM   Amazing, History, News,

Mona Lisa

It’s a smile that has beguiled art lovers for nearly 600 years and made the Mona Lisa probably the most famous work of art in the world. But the lady in the painting was not being coy or enigmatic, according to the views of a doctor published on this day: she was suffering from Bell’s Palsy.

Those afflicted by the temporary condition find that a weakness on one side of the face causes the corner of the mouth to droop and that it is difficult or even impossible to close the eye on the affected side. Smiles are distorted. It happens because a nerve controlling specific facial muscles has become swollen or pinched.

And that, Dr. Kedar Adour was reported in Physicians’ Weekly as saying, is precisely what happened to the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. The condition would explain why her smile is a little higher on the left side of her face and why her left eye is narrower than her right, he said.

The Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda, was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Aged 24 when da Vinci began painting her in 1503, she outlived her husband and had five children. The painting is displayed at the Louvre in Paris.

In 1959, British doctor Kenneth Keele reported that the woman in the painting had a "puffy neck" caused by an enlarged thyroid gland, a sure sign that she was pregnant. And in 2011, Canadian scientists who had subjected the painting to extensive three-dimensional laser and infra-red scans, concluded that if not pregnant, Mona had just given birth.

Nobody, of course, knows for sure. If she were alive today, would the lady tell? Or just smile enigmatically?

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How Basketball Was Invented

How Basketball Was Invented

5:30:00 PM   Amazing, History, News, Sports,

Basketball Invention

Unlike sports such as baseball, football and hockey that evolved slowly into the games fans know today—basketball sprung forth from a singular inventor’s imagination. Find out how a Canadian with just a pair of peach baskets, an old soccer ball and 13 typewritten rules invented one of America’s favorite pastimes and find out how different the original sport was to the one played today.

Winter had not even officially arrived, and already the boys were getting restless. Days after a blizzard buried Springfield, Massachusetts, in snow, a highly contagious case of cabin fever tore through the International Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Training School. The unruly students roughhoused in the halls and wouldn't quiet down. Even a modified game of football in the gymnasium failed to burn off their excess energy.

James Naismith, a second-year graduate student who had recently been appointed a physical education instructor, took up a teacher’s challenge to develop a game that would keep the pupils active in the winter months. The 31-year-old Canadian native drew on his knowledge of rugby, lacrosse and a childhood game known as “duck on a rock,” which combined tag with throwing, to dream up a new sport.

On December 21, 1891, Naismith cleared the athletic equipment off the gymnasium’s wooden floor and picked up a soccer ball. He asked a janitor for two square boxes, but the best the custodian could do was a pair of peach baskets, which Naismith mounted to the lower rail of the gym’s balcony, about 10 feet off the ground.

The inventor of basketball, Dr. James Naismith, stands in a field carrying a ball and a basket.

“I called the boys to the gym, divided them up into teams of nine and gave them a little soccer ball,” Naismith recalled in a 1939 radio interview that aired on WOR-AM in New York City. “I showed them two peach baskets I’d nailed up at each end of the gym, and I told them the idea was to throw the ball into the opposing team’s peach basket. I blew the whistle, and the first game of basketball began.”

The only rule Naismith gave to the boys was to get the soccer ball into the bottom of the peach basket, from which it was retrieved by students in the balcony. The lack of guidelines, however, soon proved problematic. “The boys began tackling, kicking and punching in the clinches. Before I could pull them apart, one boy was knocked out, several of them had black eyes and one had a dislocated shoulder. It certainly was murder,” Naismith said in the 1939 broadcast, which is thought to be the only existing recording of his voice.

The game may have been rough, but it was fun. “After that first match, I was afraid they’d kill each other, but they kept nagging me to let them play again, so I made up some new rules,” Naismith recalled. The physical education instructor sat down and devised 13 rules for his invention and gave them to his secretary to type up onto two pages, which he posted in the gym.

The most important rule was that there could be no running with the soccer ball. It could only be thrown or batted from the spot where it was caught. “That stopped tackling and slugging,” Naismith said. “We tried out the game with those rules, and there were no casualties. We had a fine, clean sport.”

Naismith had considered instituting free throws as penalties for teams committing fouls but found that “after a little practice, a good thrower could convert it into a goal almost every time.” Instead, the original rules called for a player making two consecutive fouls before the scoring of a basket to sit out until the next goal. Three consecutive fouls by a team resulted in a score for the opponents. There was to be “no shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping or striking in any way” in the game, which was composed of two 15-minute halves.

In spite of student suggestions that he call the game “Naismith Ball,” the modest inventor gave the sport a two-word moniker—“basket ball.” In an article that ran in the January 15, 1892, edition of The Triangle, which was distributed to YMCAs around the country, Naismith detailed his 13 rules for a “new game of ball” that “calls for physical judgment and co-ordination of every muscle and gives all-around development.”

Naismith’s brainchild caught on quickly at other YMCAs and spread to college campuses to become the fastest-growing game in the history of sports. Basketball was not only for the boys, either. From the sport’s advent, women dressed in blouses and bloomers played the game that the Boston Globe found in 1893 to be a “very fair feminine substitute for football.”

In 1898, Naismith was hired as the first men’s basketball coach at the University of Kansas. (Ironically, he is the only men’s coach in the program’s history to have a losing record.) During his tenure, he saw his 13 rules begin to evolve. The bottoms were eventually cut out of the peach baskets to make them hoops, and free throws ultimately gained favor to become part of the game. Dribbling was introduced in 1901. While Naismith initially wrote that team sizes could range from 3 to 40 players, depending on the size of the floor space, five-player squads became the norm.

The first basketball team, consisting of nine players and their coach on the steps of the Springfield College Gymnasium in 1891 are shown. Dr. Naismith is in civilian clothes.

Naismith’s original 13 rules—complete with a hand-written line edit—now reside at the University of Kansas after alumnus David Booth, who grew up in eye-shot of the campus, purchased them at auction in 2010 for $4.3 million. The price fetched by the two yellowing pages even eclipsed that of a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln and once owned by Robert Kennedy that was up for bid at the same auction. Earlier this year, a new display featuring the rules was unveiled in a 32,000-square-foot building adjacent to the university’s basketball arena.

Basketball rule books have gained considerable heft since Naismith concocted the first guidelines 125 years ago. The National Basketball Association’s Official Rule Book is now more than 65 pages long and dictates everything from where coaches may stand on the sideline to the need for players to tuck in their shirts to something that Naismith could never have dreamed of—the use of instant replay to aid referees.

James Naismith's Original Rules of Basket Ball display, developed in 1891.

1. The Ball may be thrown in any direction by one or both hands.
2. The ball may be batted in any direction with one or both hands (never with the fist).
3. A player cannot run with the ball. The player must throw it from the spot on which he catches it, allowance to be made for man who catches the ball when running, if he tries to stop.
4. The ball must be held by the hands; the arms or body must not be used for holding it.
5. No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking in any way the person of an opponent shall be allowed; the first infringement of the rule by any player shall count as a foul, the second shall disqualify him until the next goal is made, or if there was evident intent to injure the person, for the whole game, no substitute allowed.
6. A foul is striking at the ball with the fist, violation of rules 3, 4, and such as described in rule 5.
7. If either side makes three consecutive fouls it shall count a goal for the opponents (consecutive means without the opponents in the meantime making a foul.)
8. A goal shall be made when the ball is thrown or batted from the grounds into the basket and stays there, providing those defending the goal do not touch or disturb the goal. If the ball rests on the edges, and the opponent moves the basket, it shall count as a goal.
9. When the ball goes out of bounds it shall be thrown into the field of play by the person first touching it. In case of a dispute the umpire shall throw it straight into the field. The thrower-in is allowed five seconds; if he holds it longer it shall go to the opponent. If any side persists in delaying the game, the umpire shall call a foul on that team.
10. The umpire shall be the judge of the men and shall note the fouls and notify the referee when three consecutive fouls have been made. He shall have the power to disqualify men according to rule 5
11. The referee shall be the judge of the ball and shall decide when the ball is in play, in bounds, to which side it belongs, and shall keep the time. He shall decide when a goal has been made, and keep account of the goals, with any other duties that are usually performed by the referee.
12. The time shall be two 15-minute halves, with 5 minutes rest between.
13. The side making the most goals in that time shall be declared the winner. In case of a draw, the game may be by mutual agreement, be continued until another goal is made.

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Six Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes

Six Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes

9:30:00 AM   Amazing, History,

When you think of the Middle Ages, chances are you picture gallant knights sitting astride brilliant destriers galloping through a sea of plagues, ignorance, and filth. And you can hardly be blamed for that, when everything from the movies you watch to your high school history teacher (who was mainly the football coach) has told you that ...

#6. Scientific Progress Was Dead

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The Myth:

They call it the Dark Ages for a reason. Any scientist who dared to actually study the universe would be shut down by the Catholic church, which thought all that bullshit was immoral and that the Bible was all the learnin' anybody could possibly need. They even thought the Earth was flat, for crying out loud.

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"No, we can't cross the ocean there, don't you see that sea monster in the way?"

The Reality:

Aside from the fact that, as we've already explained, most people in the Middle Ages did not think the Earth was flat, the church wasn't responsible for killing science -- to the contrary, it was largely responsible for saving it.

After the barbarians invaded Europe and Rome went the way of the dinosaurs, the Catholic church was the last remaining aspect of Roman culture in Western Europe. The church went about setting up monasteries across Europe, and along with the monks came the monks' massive libraries. Monks were just about the only educated people in the early Middle Ages, and pretty much everything we know about this entire time period was written by them.

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"Look, the monks' scroll clearly says that all monks had 12-inch dongs, so it must be true."

As time went on, the church stepped it up a notch and started establishing universities to foster the preservation of knowledge. You may have heard of a few of them: Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Paris (not to mention pretty much every other top school in Europe). At these universities, students studied more than most college kids do today, with an average bachelor's degree taking up to seven years to earn, and a master's or doctorate taking several more. The universities were also big on translation, having successfully translated into Latin guys like Aristotle and Plato, which effectively made the Renaissance possible. All of this despite the fact that beer bong technology was still in its infancy.

Around the same time as universities were popping up all over Europe, the Crusades were bringing Europeans into contact with advanced Muslim ideas of science and technology. Ideas like the compass and the astrolabe came to the West via Muslim Spain and came in handy during the later Age of Exploration. Italian merchants came back from trading in North Africa and gave us another innovation: Arabic numerals.

Sju
Pfft, like people are going to want to learn a whole other set of characters.

Medicine also made massive advances thanks to the university system. Contrary to popular belief, dissection of corpses was actually fine and dandy with the church, and medieval universities often did it in the basement (OK, so maybe it wasn't totally fine and dandy). By the 14th century, there were functional hospitals, and doctors had learned how to use antiseptic when lopping off people's body parts.

And that's a good thing, because everybody was encrusted in filth back then, right? Well, about that ...

#5. Everyone Smelled Like Complete Shit

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The Myth:

Even if we know nothing else about the Middle Ages, we know that everyone was absolutely filthy. Medieval peasants looked like something straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail ...

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But not nearly as whimsical.

... and the upper classes were hardly any cleaner. People back then took baths with about the same frequency as we go to the dentist -- a couple of times a year for the obsessive ones. Just getting to a person's genitals required a stiff wire brush and a chisel.

The Reality:

They were way into bathing for much of the Middle Ages. Maybe too into it -- they continued the Roman practice where a bunch of strangers got naked together for communal bathing, and most towns and even villages in medieval Germany had a communal bath where craftsmen would hang out and bathe together after a hard day's work. Just sitting there, probably washing each other's dongs while having loud conversations about how incredibly not gay they were.

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"You see my new pickup wagon with a bunch of tools in the back?"

Meanwhile, not only was it common for medieval folk to wash their hands before and after eating, it was also customary to offer to bathe with guests when they entered your home, something The Man has repeatedly reminded us is no longer acceptable in modern society. Medieval demand for soap (usually made from animal fats, with a variety of oils and salts added) was so great that by the 13th century, soap was being made on an almost industrial scale in Britain, Italy, Spain, and France.

So why do we picture everyone as wallowing in their own filth back then? Well, things changed all at once. If only an act of God could change Europe's epic bathing culture, they got one -- in the mid-14th century, the Black Death strolled up and kicked Europe right in the teeth with its pestilence boot. Suddenly, smart people were telling the previously washed masses that bathing was a surefire way to open your body's pores and invite in all the bad spirits or gremlins or whatever (they weren't too savvy on what caused illness back then).

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"The academy is divided down the middle, between Jews and forest pixies."

As a result, by the early modern period of history, bathing had become obsolete. So it's entirely possible that George Washington rated higher than Richard the Lionheart on the smell-like-shit-o-meter.

#4. Knights Were Honorable, Chivalrous Warriors

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The Myth:

Knights were gallant and brave warriors, charging into battle to slay the dragon and rescue the fair maiden.

The Reality:

Knights often had less in common with this:

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"We shall die for the glory of our randomly assigned piece of land!"

And more in common with this:

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Wessex side.

Remember, knights were professional warriors, and when there wasn't a war to fight, they had to findsomething to do with their war-boners. Most of these guys were relatively young and didn't have Call of Duty to satisfy their violent urges, so they tended to take it out on the local population. Toward the 11th century, many of the local lords started bickering over who would get a slice of the Holy Roman pie that Charlemagne baked, and the knights were at the forefront of these petty wars. These "wars" were less Braveheart-style epic battles and more knights rolling up into villages and slaughtering everybody.

The church tried to curb these conflicts, because frankly, they were nasty and threatened the stability of everything. First they tried to gather up all the knights and shake various body parts of dead saints at them, but when that didn't work, the Pope called the First Crusade and exported all these assholes to the Middle East, where they chivalrously ate babies and massacred the entire population of Jerusalem.

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"Hey, the Pope said we wouldn't go to hell! No backsies!"

Later attempts were made to get these young 'uns under control, one being the chivalric code that was adopted around the 13th century. Examples like Sir Lancelot and Edward the Black Prince were raised to show knights how to behave in battle and in peace. Knights were encouraged to "defend the weak," but "the weak" was commonly interpreted as noble women and children, not peasants. So noble-on-noble violence may have decreased, but it was still totally cool for knights to kill and rape peasants, since, like those beers you had for breakfast, they didn't really count.

#3. Everyone Was a Prude

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The Myth:

Casual sex, and even knowledge of how sex works, is a modern invention. During the heavily religious Dark Ages, sex was strictly forbidden outside of marriage, and every single person of consenting age (a term that was very loosely defined back then) led a life that was a never-ending squelch through a pool of their own sexual repression.

The Reality:

You know those really goofy-looking shoes that men wore back then? The extra pointy ones, like something an elf would wear?

Ziko
We'd still wear those over Heelys.

Well, those points are called poulaines, and apparently they were meant to directly represent the wearer's dong. And in a revelation that will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone even remotely familiar with the intricate relationship between a man and his wang, these points were sometimes so big that dudes couldn't walk up stairs. Good thing they were all wearing those elaborate codpieces to protect their actual dongs when their shoe-dongs tripped them up.

And the sexy didn't stop with their fashion. Prostitution was a big friggin' deal back then. Although technically against the teachings of the church, everyone collectively agreed that if there were no hookers around, men would be out raping, just, everyone, because some of what you've heard about the Middle Ages wasn't a myth. In most medieval cities, prostitution was completely legal yet confined to certain districts and licensed by a town's mayor. The church even got in on this deal andlicensed some holy brothels of its very own.

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"She'll tickle your schmeckel for only a shekel!"

But let's not leave out the married folk. Since most upper-class marriages were political arrangements and the people getting married didn't necessarily like each other all that much, extramarital affairs were where it was at. And man, did these people get down -- if you've ever watched a show like The Tudors and thought it was all sexed up for a modern audience, you were wrong.

One of the reasons that Eleanor of Aquitaine usurped her husband Henry II was because Henry II apparently had more mistresses than Tiger Woods. Seeing that getting in bed with the king was a good way to get ahead in life, daughters of lower nobility basically became escorts and tried to become the king's favorite mistress, which worked out pretty well for Anne Boleyn when she married Henry VIII and became Queen of England. Worked out pretty well, that is, until she was beheaded for allegedly banging too many people who weren't Henry VIII.

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The Bible is very clear that you're only allowed three affairs at a time.

But the whole situation was still bad news for women, right? Because women were basically property back then? Well ...

#2. Women Were Treated as Cattle

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The Myth:

Europe during the Middle Ages is right up there with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the Top 5 Places It Would Suck to Have a Vagina. Women were horribly oppressed and were treated as second-class citizens -- their only responsibilities were to cook, clean, and squeeze out (male) babies on demand.

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"Sweetie? You get that new male heir I asked for? It's been like an hour ..."

The Reality:

Up until about 200 years ago, Europe was a largely agricultural society. And the funny thing about back-breaking and often dehumanizing labor is that it has a weird way of equalizing people -- when literally every member of the family is out busting his or her ass every morning just to fend off the very real threat of starvation, gender roles and sexism suddenly don't seem all that important. Thus, when it came to household responsibilities, women and men were equals by default, since the women had to do all the same bullshit their husbands had to do. So should time travel ever become a thing, never tell a medieval peasant woman to go make her husband a sandwich, because she'll probably cackle her plague-breath all up in your face before snapping you in half like a twig.

And the story wasn't much different in the cities. If dad owned a shop or a tavern, his daughters were the ones helping out. Sometimes a daughter would actually take over the family business and run it herself if her father became unable to, something that wouldn't really happen until much later in modern society. Women also generally ran the taverns in the Middle Ages -- in fact, women once ran England's entire beer industry. It's not quite clear when that changed, but we have to assume that at some point men realized they had allowed women to become all powerful by letting them be in charge of both beer and vaginas.

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"Well, at least we still have sports ... Oh Christ!"

Women who weren't busy running taverns or growing crops to survive could join a convent, which may not sound all that impressive until you realize that this gave them access to education in a time when that was extremely rare -- nuns could read and write in an age when the most powerful kings couldn't. And if they stuck with it long enough to become the abbess of a convent, they were in a position of power very similar to a male lord -- only, you know, maybe even a little higher, seeing as how they technically reported directly to the King of Kings and all.

#1. Life Was Horrible and Everyone Died Young

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The Myth:

Life in the Middle Ages has famously been described as "nasty, brutish, and short." The food sucked, the housing sucked, the work sucked, everything sucked. Luckily, people didn't have to endure all the perpetual suck for long, since they only lived to see 35, tops. Today, if you see a character older than 60 in a movie set in the Middle Ages, he's also a wizard.

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"A wizard dies precisely when he means to. Or when the giant eagles show up late."

The Reality:

As for lives being short, while it may be true that the average life expectancy was 35 years, we tend to overlook one very important word there: average. Infant mortality was brutal, since vaccinations against childhood diseases didn't exist yet and medicine was still in its "Here, chew on this root and stick some leeches on your junk" stage. So that skews the average way down. But if a male living in 1500 managed to see his 21st birthday, he was expected to live around 50 more years from that point.

The typical perception of the medieval peasant is someone breaking his back doing nonstop labor for lords who gaveth not a single fuck as to his well-being, but your typical peasant actually workedaround eight hours a day, with long breaks for meals and naps. And did you know that peasants got more time off than you do? Sunday was an automatic day off, and when you factor in long vacations at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer, plus all the saints' days (considering the fact that the Catholic church has even more saints than it does scandals), and medieval peasants were on holiday for a goodone-third of the year. And since much of that time was accompanied by epic festivals, they spent it getting shitfaced on various varieties of medieval ale. So not only did they work less than you, they also partied harder.

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"Hey, you guys coming to the after-orgy?"

And it turns out they weren't exactly living lives of "bare bones subsistence," either. By the late Middle Ages, your average English worker was making around $1,000 a year -- significantly better than people in some of today's poorer nations. And while no one will argue that that level of income would provide lifestyles that would inspire rap song lyrics, it did allow them to afford varied diets, the occasional luxury item, and plenty of ale to cover all the partying they were virtually required to do. Hell, you could get a rap song out of that, right? Quick, what rhymes with "dick shoes"?

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