Enlarge / A nori farm off the coast of Japan. (credit: H. Grobe)
The tasty Japanese seaweed nori is ubiquitous today, but that wasn't always true. Nori was once called “lucky grass” because every year's harvest was entirely dependent on luck. Then, during World War II, luck ran out. No nori would grow off the coast of Japan, and farmers were distraught. But a major scientific discovery on the other side of the planet revealed something unexpected about the humble plant and turned an unpredictable crop into a steady and plentiful food source.
Nori is most familiar to us when it's wrapped around sushi. It looks less familiar when floating in the sea, but for centuries, farmers in Japan, China, and Korea knew it by sight. Every year, they would plant bamboo poles strung with nets in the coastal seabed and wait for nori to build up on them.
At first it would look like thin filaments. Then, with luck, it grew into healthy, harvestable plants with long, green leaves. The farmers never saw seeds or seedlings, so no one could cultivate it. The filaments simply appeared every year. That is, they appeared until after World War II, when pollution, industrialization along the coast, and a series of violent typhoons led to a disastrous drop in harvests. By 1951, nori production in Japan had been all but wiped out.
Kal El…. is literally Hebrew. It means Voice of God. He’s a Jewish illegal immigrant. For a reason. He was written in the 30s.
I mean Superman was literally written as an allegory for first generation American Jews dealing with the struggle of assimilation vs maintaining traditional culture. The birth of Superman as a comic was essentially Jewish Immigrant history.
Not all heroes wear capes, but a hell of a lot of supervillains hire uniformed thugs to terrorize innocent civilians.
Eric Ward est un instituteur originaire de l’Ohio mais lorsqu’il n’enseigne pas à ses jeunes élèves, ce photographe autodidacte capture au fil des saisons les paysages grandioses, parfois sauvages et souvent baignés de lumière des Etats-Unis. Cette sélection de photos qui donne à voir des maisons et des bâtiments isolés à travers le pays invite le spectateur à la contemplation, loin de l’habituelle agitation du monde moderne.
Sitting at the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains on the Spanish side of the French-Spanish border is an immense railway station. Built with iron and glass, the station’s art nouveau building stretches a quarter of a kilometer long, and its façade is decorated with more than three hundred windows. Inside the building there was once a luxurious hotel, an infirmary, a restaurant and living quarters for customs officers. Aside from the platform and the main building, there was a large locomotive depot, two sheds for the transshipment of freight between French and Spanish trains, various other outbuildings and an extensive layout of tracks. The station was nicknamed the “Titanic of the Mountains”.
Pour donner un aspect quasi-surréaliste à ses photographies de Tokyo, le photographe Yoshito Hasaka n’hésite pas à jouer avec le contraste ainsi que la netteté, qu’ils pousse à leur paroxysme. Cela résulte en un cliché parfaitement cohérent avec l’image que l’on se fait de la capitale nippone : des néons, du (beau) monde, de la vie, du marketing et une ambiance qui ne faiblit jamais.
Enlarge / This Nilometer at Cairo is an ancient device that Egyptians used to measure Nile flooding, to predict the harvest, and set tax levels. Scientists used historical data from Nilometers to see how volcanic eruptions affected Nile floods (and by extension, the health of the harvest). (credit: Berthold Werner / Wikimedia Commons)
From 305 BCE to 30 BCE, ancient Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemaic Dynasty, a Greek family put in place after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. Though Egypt's wealth and importance were legendary during this time, it was also a period of great civil unrest. Perhaps because they were being ruled by foreigners, the Egyptian people revolted against their leadership several times during the 200s, sparking civil wars. But now scientists believe these revolts may have broken out in part because of a chain reaction started by volcanoes halfway across the world.
There's no doubt that the Egyptians were chafing under the yoke of their foreign monarchs. The days of the great pharaohs were over, and leaders from the north were replacing Egyptian culture with Greek gods and architecture. But why did the Egyptians' resentment boil over into open revolt sometimes and remain at a steady simmer otherwise? Historian Francis Ludlow of Trinity College, Ireland, and his colleagues believe that ash, dust, and other particles released by volcanoes during the 200s BCE caused temperatures to cool around the globe. Cooling resulted in less water evaporation, which meant less rain for northern Africa and, therefore, less flooding of the life-giving Nile River.
Because the ancient Egyptians were a farming culture that lived and died by the harvest, the annual Nile flood was key to survival. Floods meant nutrient-rich waters fed the fields and everyone could eat. Nile levels were so important to the Egyptian economy that the government based tax amounts on readings from "Nilometers," stone wells fed by the river where they could measure its height in cubits. If the levels were trending too high (destructive flooding) or too low (drought), taxes were scaled back to account for people's diminished fortunes.
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