Новости за 01.07.2016

Unskilled American men in their twenties are dropping out of the labour force, not even looking for jobs. What are they doing all day? “The hours that they are not working have been replaced with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average unem­ployed man in this group plays video games an average of 12, and sometimes upwards of 30 hours per week. Surveys indicate they are quite content compared to their peers”

“Why explore extraterrestrial caves? Partly for the same reasons scientists venture into caves on Earth. They’re protected from weather and from meteoric bombardment. Liquid water on Mars is likely to exist underground, at depths where ice is melted by warmth from the planet’s interior. They offer protection from radiation. If life moved underground to escape, caves are a good place to look for fossil evidence of their tenancy. It’s even possible that in some Martian caves, life still exists”

News from the world of science. “A male black-horned tree cricket restricted to a diet of apples and water will consume his own spermatophore after a failed mating attempt. The number of chubs sold per day positively correlates with the frequency with which deli slicers are cleaned. Chinese engineers created a necklace that listens to what you eat. The Large Hadron Collider was shut down by a weasel later identified as a marten. The largest python ever captured laid a single egg, and died”

Conservative MP on Britain after Brexit. “We need our cabinet to go to Europe again and again until the Commission and European leaders are totally familiar with what we are trying to do. I don’t think we can accept the Commission saying ‘there is no deal’. There is always a deal. People say: ‘We can’t give you this because our people want this, if we give you this our people are going to ask for the same’. This is strange. If their own people want the same thing, what does it mean that they can’t... Читать дальше...

The battle as recalled in the diaries and conversation of the writer’s father, James Heffer, an 18-year-old despatch rider on the Western front in 1916. “He talked of the Somme, like the rest of his war, with the detachment of a historian (he became a tax inspector) rather than with the emotion of one who had been up to his ankles in blood there. Perhaps even for one so calm and as philosophical as he was, any detailed introspection was, even half a century afterwards, more than would be wise”