Charles Darwin's daughter had an unusual hobby: Hunting phallic mushrooms More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. A well-known tale says Henrietta Darwin (left), or Aunt Etty, as family called her once burned phallic-shaped mushrooms to protect the "morals of the maids. But is the story really true? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . On a warm autumn day in the early 1900s, Henrietta Darwin, Charles Darwin's eldest daughter, marched into the woods near her house on the outskirts of Gomshall, a rural English village about 30 miles southwest of London. Armed with a basket and a stick, her keen eyes scanned the damp, leafy undergrowth. At last, she smelled a rotten odor, and directed her gaze to the stench. There, a few feet away, she spotted her enemy: the stinkhorn mushroom. With its elongated shape protruding from the ground, the penis-shaped fungus oozed with a slime that smelled like carrion . She dug it up, took it home, and burned it before anyone could see it. The unsightly mushroom could have corrupted her maids' morals, or even their health. At least, that was the excuse she told her young niece Gwen Raverat, with a twinkle in her eye. A fascinating woman in her own right, Henrietta Darwin was one of Charles Darwin's 10 children. Although Raverat paints an interesting picture of Henrietta's mushroom-hunting passion in her memoir, Henrietta's father, the famous naturalist and author of deeply valued his daughter as a collaborator on some of his most important works. Born in 1843, Henrietta was Darwin's third daughter and the first to survive early childhood. As a young woman, she was raised in a household of curiosity and scientific engagement, and likely due to her father's work on evolutionary theory, she wrestled with questions of free will, God, and the possibility of eternal life. This book was the first of Darwin's works to apply his theory of evolution to the human species. For her efforts, Darwin wrote to her in 1870: "You have done me real service; but by Jove, how hard you must have worked, and how thoroughly you have mastered my MS [manuscript]," he wrote. "All this is as clear as daylight." Public Domain He also wrote to her again in 1871, after had been published: "Several reviewers speak of the lucid, vigorous style, & c.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you've ever wondered whose addresses Charles Darwin was sure to keep tabs on--or even a few rat poison recipes--you're in luck. A digitized edition of the famed naturalist's personal address book is available online for the first time. "It's incredible that this little treasure-trove of details by Darwin has remained unpublished until now," NUS science historian John van Wyhe said in a statement . "It offers fascinating new insights into his life and the way he worked."

In this paper, I present a novel method to detect intellectual influence across a large corpus. Taking advantage of the unique affordances of large language models in encoding semantic and structural meaning while remaining robust to paraphrasing, we can search for substantively similar ideas and hints of intellectual influence in a computationally efficient manner. Such a method allows us to operationalize different levels of confidence: we can allow for direct quotation, paraphrase, or speculative similarity while remaining open about the limitations of each threshold. I apply an ensemble method combining General Text Embeddings, a state-of-the-art sentence embedding method optimized to capture semantic content and an Abstract Meaning Representation graph representation designed to capture structural similarities in argumentation style and the use of metaphor. I apply this method to vectorize sentences from a corpus of roughly 400,000 nonfiction books and academic publications from the 19th century for instances of ideas and arguments appearing in Darwin's publications. This functions as an initial evaluation and proof of concept; the method is not limited to detecting Darwinian ideas but is capable of detecting similarities on a large scale in a wide range of corpora and contexts.

How can something understood as the universal symbol for joy so easily become the makings of our worst nightmares? Unhappy, unsettling smiles--like those in Todd Phillips' Joker or the truly chilling masks donned by Ethan Hawke in last year's The Black Phone--appear here to stay as fixtures of the horror genre. Paramount's new flick, directed by Parker Finn, makes the concept its very premise, with the movie following a psychiatrist plagued by smiles everywhere she turns. Baseball fans got a taste of her strife thanks to a stunt marketing campaign for Smile featuring actors smiling creepily behind the dugout. Whereas the 2018 horror film Truth or Dare used CGI to stretch the smiles of the actors like a Snapchat filter befitting the uncanny valley, the smiles in Smile for the most part do not appear digitally modified, by my estimate.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, one of the masterminds behind projects such as Tesla and SpaceX, announced his next venture, namely Neuralink. The company aims to merge humans with electronics, creating what Musk calls the neural lace. It is a device that injected into the jugular vein would reach the brain and then unfold into a network of electrical connections connected directly to human neurons. The idea is to develop enhanced brain-computer interfaces to increase the extent to which the biological brain can interact and communicate with external computers. The neural lace will go down to the level of brain neurons: it will be a mesh that will be able to connect directly to brain matter and then connect with a computer. That human being will be a cyborg.

Do your facial movements broadcast your emotions to other people? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under contentious debate. Some experts maintain that people around the world make specific, recognizable faces that express certain emotions, such as smiling in happiness, scowling in anger and gasping with widened eyes in fear. They point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion.

Two centuries after Charles Darwin put the theory forward, a new study finally shows that birds living near the equator are more colourful. Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the amount of colour in photos of over 24,000 preserved birds from the Natural History Museum's collection. Tropical birds living near the equator are roughly 30 per cent more colourful than non-tropical birds living nearer the poles, the scientists found, but they don't know exactly why. The long-held theory, first suspected by Charles Darwin and other naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries, hasn't been proven until now, the experts say. Research from the University of Sheffield found tropical birds living near the equator are roughly 30 per cent more colourful than non-tropical birds living nearer the poles.

Darwin designed his tongue-in-cheek cost-benefit analysis to help himself make a choice. In that respect, it was an algorithm, as are recipes, business processes and just about any other instructions that we use in our daily lives either to solve problems or to complete tasks. Nowadays, algorithms are programmed into devices to automate jobs that past generations had to do by hand. We call it artificial intelligence and it has moved into the mainstream. All this has been made possible by recent improvements in software and hardware, which have boosted computational performance, data storage capabilities and network bandwidth. AI technologies are driving the digital transformation of industry and society by satisfying demands for more intelligent services and analytics.

When we humans imagine the future, it is common to picture ourselves nested within an ecosystem populated by robots, devices, and virtual realities. The future is shining and technological. The future is digital, ones and zeros, electricity and invisible connections. The dangers of the future--automation and artificial intelligence--are of our own invention. Nature is an afterthought in our contemplation of what comes next, a transgenic potted plant behind a window that does not open.

Men who only briefly catch a glimpse of a woman are much more likely to overestimate how attractive she is than a woman glimpsing a man, a study reveals. Researchers, led by Murdoch University, in Perth Australia, worked with nearly 400 volunteers, asking them to rate the attractiveness of people of the opposite-sex from a blurry image, and then from a clear image. The results showed that on average men overestimate women's attractiveness, whereas on average women underestimate men's attractiveness. If you've been having trouble finding love on dating apps, you might want to try dating one of your friends. A study looked at data from just under 2,000 couples of different demographics in Canada.