James' World 2

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It was once a small and seemingly cozy late Bronze Age village. A settlement of five circular dwellings was built on stilts about 6.5 feet above a rambling river in eastern England. The homes were full of domestic knick knacks that paint a picture of daily life about 3,000 years ago. By all available evidence, Must Farm was a peaceful settlement constructed by skilled builders. That is, until a catastrophic fire engulfed  “Britain’s Pompeii” and its buildings and materials plunged into a muddy river below. 

Now, the first of two reports published March 19 by the University of Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) delves into the details of the Must Farm settlement. This prehistoric stilted village dates back to about 850 BCE and was built in a swampy wetland locals call The Fens or Fenlands. The settlement was excavated in 2015 and 2016 after it was discovered on the edge of the town of Whittlesey, northwest of Cambridge.

According to the team, the site provides them with a unique blueprint for the circular architecture, home interiors, and overall domesticity of the prehistoric “fenlanders” who lived in England’s east.

“These people were confident and accomplished home-builders. They had a design that worked beautifully for an increasingly drowned landscape,” report co-author, CAU archaeologist Mark Knight, said in a statement. “While excavating the site, there was a sense that its Bronze Age residents had only just left. You could almost see and smell their world, from the glint of metal tools hanging on wattled walls to the sharp milkiness of brewed porridge.”

An archeological mirror

The Must Farm dig site currently contains five total structures with walkways that connect them, surrounded by a fence about 6.5 feet high made from sharpened posts. However, the original settlement was likely twice as big. During the 20th Century, half the remains were removed when the area was quarried. The team believes that the site may have been home to at least 60 people living in family units. 

The river that previously ran underneath this community on stilts likely would have been shallow and ran slowly, with thick vegetation. The boggy ground below cushioned the burned remains of the buildings when they fell from the fire. This created an archaeological “mirror” of what had stood above, so the team could map the layout of the structures.  

One of the main roundhouses had almost 538 square feet of space–about the size of many New York City apartments–that may have had distinct areas for specific activities the way modern homes do. 

“Conducting research on Must Farm is a bit like getting an estate agent’s tour of a Bronze Age stilt house,” report co-author and CAU archeologist David Gibson said in a statement.

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An illustration of the Bronze Age stilt settlement uncovered at Must Farm in eastern England. Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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Hitler is so fully imagined a subject—so obsessively present on our televisions and in our bookstores—that to reimagine him seems pointless. As with the Hollywood fascination with Charles Manson, speculative curiosity gives retrospective glamour to evil. Hitler created a world in which women were transported with their children for days in closed train cars and then had to watch those children die alongside them, naked, gasping for breath in a gas chamber. To ask whether the man responsible for this was motivated by reading Oswald Spengler or merely by meeting him seems to attribute too much complexity of purpose to him, not to mention posthumous dignity. Yet allowing the specifics of his ascent to be clouded by disdain is not much better than allowing his memory to be ennobled by mystery.

So the historian Timothy W. Ryback’s choice to make his new book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” (Knopf), an aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932, seems a wise, even an inspired one. Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

Ryback’s story begins soon after Hitler’s very incomplete victory in the Weimar Republic’s parliamentary elections of July, 1932. Hitler’s party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (its German initials were N.S.D.A.P.), emerged with thirty-seven percent of the vote, and two hundred and thirty out of six hundred and eight seats in the Reichstag, the German parliament—substantially ahead of any of its rivals. In the normal course of events, this would have led the aging warrior Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s President, to appoint Hitler Chancellor. The equivalent of Prime Minister in other parliamentary systems, the Chancellor was meant to answer to his party, to the Reichstag, and to the President, who appointed him and who could remove him. Yet both Hindenburg and the sitting Chancellor, Franz von Papen, had been firm never-Hitler men, and naïvely entreated Hitler to recognize his own unsuitability for the role.

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Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential to shake the foundations of physics.

“If true, it would be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” said Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering dark energy in 1998.

The new observations come from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) team, which today unveiled a map of the cosmos of unprecedented scope, along with a bonanza of measurements derived from the map. To many researchers, the highlight is a plot showing that three different combinations of observations all insinuate that the influence of dark energy may have eroded over the eons.

“It’s possible we’re seeing hints of dark energy evolving,” said Dillon Brout of Boston University, a member of the DESI team.

Researchers inside and outside of the collaboration all stress that the evidence is not strong enough to claim a discovery. The observations favor the erosion of dark energy with the sort of middling statistical significance that could easily vanish with additional data. But researchers also note that three distinct sets of observations all point in the same intriguing direction, one that’s at odds with the standard picture of dark energy as the intrinsic energy of the vacuum of space — the quantity that Albert Einstein dubbed the “cosmological constant” due to its unvarying nature.

“It’s exciting,” said Sesh Nadathur, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth who worked on the DESI analysis. “If dark energy is not a cosmological constant, that’s going to be a huge discovery.”

Rise of the Cosmological Constant

In 1998, Riess’s group, along with another team of astronomers led by Saul Perlmutter, used the light of dozens of distant, dying stars called supernovas to illuminate the structure of the cosmos. They discovered that the expansion of the universe is growing faster as it ages.

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, any matter or energy can drive cosmic expansion. But as space expands, all the familiar kinds of matter and energy become less dense as they spread out in a roomier universe. As their densities fall, the expansion of the universe should slow down, not speed up.

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The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona has produced the largest 3D map of our universe to date.  Marilyn Sargent/The Regents of the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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A new research study has uncovered ancestry details previously thought lost to the history of some deceased slaves at Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland. These slaves worked for decades and have surviving descendants living in the United States to this day.     

Many slaves from the trans-African slave trade were brought to America without extensive documentation, which leaves many of their descendants unsure of their own family history.  tangie

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Invisible vacuum energy is all around us. We could use it to power propulsion, enhance nanostructures, and build levitating devices.

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Light Speed

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Federal Judge Aileen Cannon has been a thorn in special counsel Jack Smith’s side for almost two years. Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump in 2020, first drew widespread attention in 2022, when she oversaw a civil lawsuit Trump filed related to the classified-documents case against him. Cannon’s decision to allow Trump a “special master” in the case stunned legal observers, who saw it as a legally questionable gift to the former president. That earned her a strong rebuke from a conservative-leaning panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned the ruling.

Since last year, Cannon has presided over Trump’s criminal trial in the documents case and has continued to issue a series of puzzling decisions, almost all of which have benefited Trump, while maintaining a lethargic pace that is also advantageous for the former president — who has made no secret of his Cannon fandom. Recently, Cannon and Smith clashed over a confounding set of instructions she handed down involving Trump’s attempt to have his case dismissed over the Presidential Records Act.

What explains Cannon’s judicial behavior, and what, if anything, can Jack Smith do about it? For perspective on those questions, I spoke with University of Texas law professor Lee Kovarsky, who has frequently opined on the documents case.

Last week, Judge Cannon dismissed Trump’s attempt to have his case thrown out with the claim that taking and keeping classified documents is legal under the Presidential Records Act. But even in that ruling, observers thought she may have undermined Jack Smith. Can you explain how?
She dismissed Trump’s motion to dismiss, meaning she said that she wasn’t going to dismiss the whole case because Trump had conclusively proven that the Presidential Records Act foreclosed prosecution. But by deferring decision on whether the Presidential Records Act is a viable defense, she avoids deciding it now, when her mistake could be corrected, and defers the decision for later, when it can’t.

Meaning it couldn’t be appealed.
It couldn’t be appealed. You’ve heard the phrase “double jeopardy.”

Yeah.
The moment when jeopardy attaches at a trial is a really significant thing — it’s when the jury is impaneled and sworn in. And basically, if she gives the instruction to the jury and the jury acquits based on that flawed instruction, Trump can’t be retried after the acquittal because of double jeopardy. Alternately, she doesn’t even have to send it to the jury. She could direct a verdict in Trump’s favor before she sends anything to the jury on that basis. And that also would not be reviewable because of double jeopardy. The fact that she’s left the issue open to be the basis of an instruction or a directed verdict later is what’s so canny about it. Not canny, but deceptive.

Because she may be setting up a land mine?
Yeah. Whereas if she had just decided it now, even if she had decided it wrongly, then Smith could have taken it up to the 11th Circuit for correction before jeopardy ever attached, so it wouldn’t affect the outcome of the trial. But she’s deferred.

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One of the few publicly available photos of Judge Cannon. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Shutterstock

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For globe trotters, few experiences rival the thrill of touching down in a new city, the adventures that await just beyond the tarmac. But, then there’s the dreaded jet lag – the physiological price of long-distance travel. However, recent studies out of the US might just have presented the ideal solution. With strategic eating patterns and a dose of sunlight, travelers may soon bid goodbye to jet lag. As one dives into the heart of this research, one thing becomes evident: our body’s internal clocks and the disruption they face during travel plays a pivotal role.

What Causes Jetlag?

Jetlag arises from disruptions to the body’s circadian rhythm – an innate 24-hour cycle governing numerous bodily functions. This rhythm is synced to Earth’s daily rotation. Thus, jet-setting across multiple time zones can wreak havoc on this internal system, leading to insomnia, fatigue, erratic hunger, digestive issues, and even severe headaches.

Determined to find a remedy, researchers at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico undertook a comprehensive study.

“Having a larger meal in the early morning of the new time zone can help overcome jet lag,” revealed Yitong Huang, the study’s author from Northwestern University. Huang emphasized the importance of maintaining meal schedules, noting, “Constantly shifting meal schedules or eating at night can cause misalignment between internal clocks.”

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Jetlag arises from disruptions to the body’s circadian rhythm – an innate 24-hour cycle governing numerous bodily functions. (CREDIT: Creative Commons)

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“I don’t think anyone in the United States government, Americans, do not support actual Nazis or white supremacists. I know that I certainly do not,” said Greene, who is well known for her white nationalist leanings.

“It’s interesting to hear my colleague just now talk about disavowing white supremacists when in 2022, she spoke at an event led by white supremacists and white nationalist Nick Fuentes,” said Frost.

“And when asked about it, doubled down on it and said ‘We’re going to focus on people not labels.’ So get out of here with that damn hypocrisy,” said Frost.

He was exactly right. Greene did attend the “America First Political Action Conference” in Orlando which was organized by noted anti-semite Nick Fuentes — the infamous hatemonger who would later team up with Kanye West and meet with Donald Trump.

The truth is that Marjorie Taylor Greene knows that her party is infested with white nationalists and she panders to that base to cement her political future.

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Credit…Photo illustration by Lauren Peters-Collaer

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