The Scottish Highlands are a mountainous region encompassing northwest Scotland.Loch Ness is at the center, overlooked by the ruins of medieval Urquhart Castle and known for the mythical monster “Nessie”. Northeast, near the city of Inverness, dolphins swim in the Moray Firth. Southwest, in the Western Highlands, trails wind up Ben Nevis, the U.K.’s highest peak, and red deer roam Glencoe valley with its waterfalls.
Why did we take so long to invent civilization? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilization – harvesting, then domestication of crop plants – began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilizations appearing 6,400 years ago.
For 95 percent of our species’ history, we didn’t farm, create large settlements or complex political hierarchies. We lived in small, nomadic bands, hunting, and gathering. Then, something changed.
We transitioned from hunter-gatherer life to plant harvesting, then cultivation and, finally, cities. Strikingly, this transition happened only after the ice age megafauna – mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant deer and horses – disappeared. The reasons humans began farming still remain unclear, but the disappearance of the animals we depended on for food may have forced our culture to evolve.
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Photo from Wikimedia Commons/Cloudordinary, CC BY-SA.
The White Cliffs of Dover, part of the North Downs formation, is the region of English coastline facing the Strait of Dover and France.The cliff face, which reaches a height of 350 feet, owes its striking appearance to its composition of chalk accented by streaks of black flint.
The flashier fruits of Albert Einstein’s century-old insights are by now deeply embedded in the popular imagination: Black holes, time warps, and wormholes show up regularly as plot points in movies, books, TV shows. At the same time, they fuel cutting-edge research, helping physicists pose questions about the nature of space, time, even information itself.
Perhaps ironically, though, what is arguably the most revolutionary part of Einstein’s legacy rarely gets attention. It has none of the splash of gravitational waves, the pull of black holes, or even the charm of quarks. But lurking just behind the curtain of all these exotic phenomena is a deceptively simple idea that pulls the levers, shows how the pieces fit together and lights the path ahead.
The idea is this: Some changes don’t change anything. The most fundamental aspects of nature stay the same even as they seemingly shape-shift in unexpected ways. Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity led to the unmistakable conclusion, for example, that the relationship between energy and mass is invariant, even though energy and mass themselves can take vastly different forms. Solar energy arrives on Earth and becomes mass in the form of green leaves, creating food we can eat and use as fuel for thought. (“What is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness?” asked the late Richard Feynman. “Last week’s potatoes!”) That’s the meaning of E = mc2. The “c” stands for the speed of light, a very large number, so it doesn’t take much matter to produce an enormous amount of energy; in fact, the sun turns millions of tons of mass into energy each second.
Guilin is a city in southern China known for its dramatic landscape of limestone karst hills.At its center are 2 lakes, Shanhu (Cedar) and Ronghu (Banyan), remaining from a medieval-era moat that once surrounded the city. Boats travel through these and other lakes via connected rivers. On Shanhu Lake’s shore, twin pagodas, the Sun and Moon, light up the sky at night.
Water rushes into Venice’s city council chamber just minutes after the local government rejects measures to combat climate change. Wildfires consume eastern Australia as fire danger soars past “severe” and “extreme” to “catastrophic” in parts of New South Wales. Ice levels in the Chukchi Sea, north of Alaska, hit record lows. England sees floods all across the country. And that’s just this week, as I write this.
Human-caused climate change, and the disasters it brings, are here. In fact, they’re just getting started. What will things be like in another decade or century?
It depends on what we do. If our goal is to stop global warming, the best way is to cut carbon emissions now—to zero. The United Kingdom, Denmark, and Norway have passed laws requiring net-zero emissions by 2050. Sweden is aiming at 2045. But the biggest emitters—China, the United States, and India—are dragging their heels. So to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels by 2100, it’s becoming more and more likely that we’ll need negative carbon emissions. That is, we’ll need to fix the air. We’ll need to suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than we put in.
On July 4, 1988, FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States. At the time, there was no top-flight professional league in the U.S., and it had been 38 years since the country had participated in a World Cup. As a condition for awarding the tournament, FIFA required the United States to create a new professional league.
A year and a half later, Paul Caligiuri scored one of the most important goals in American soccer history. His strike against Trinidad and Tobago qualified the U.S. for the 1990 World Cup — the team’s first since 1950. Although under manager Bob Gansler the Americans lost all three World Cup games in Italy that summer, falling to Czechoslovakia, the Italians, and Austria, the modern era of American soccer had begun.
Two months after the 1990 World Cup, United States Soccer Federation president Werner Fricker was up for reelection. Although Fricker had helped the U.S. secure the 1994 World Cup, he was ousted and replaced by Alan Rothenberg, a former investor in the North American Soccer League and overseer of the wildly successful 1984 Olympic soccer tournament in Los Angeles.
One of Rothenberg’s first moves as president was to name Bora Milutinovic head coach of the national team. The Serbian coached Mexico to the 1986 World Cup quarterfinal and, even more impressively, led Costa Rica to the 1990 World Cup round of 16 after being hired as head coach just 90 days before the tournament.
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The final 22-man USMNT roster for the ’94 World Cup. (Getty Images)
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An image of Scottish Highlands Scenery
The final 22-man USMNT roster for the ’94 World Cup. (Getty Images)
