omgitscookies

We all know and love Thanksgiving, our happy way to celebrate the subjugation and destruction of a race of indigenous peoples via eating turkey and mashed potatoes. But underneath all the stories, Thanksgiving is just America's own brand of weird brand of harvest holiday. (Read more...)

This news from New Scientist magazine:

""I even get confused when I'm dropping the bait," says Naoko Irie, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan, who uncovered the elephant's inner genius. She presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology's annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.

Moreover, Irie found that as well as summing small numbers with almost 90% accuracy, elephants can discriminate between small numbers."

Frigging amazing. Monkeys, dolphins and now elephants have these basic skills down. It will only be a matter of time until the animals are in college.

Read the full article & watch the video at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14569

From AOL News:



AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Nov. 28) - After more than 60 years, Nazi documents stored in a vast warehouse in Germany were unsealed Wednesday, opening a rich resource for Holocaust historians and for survivors to delve into their own tormented past.

The treasure of documents could open new avenues of study into the inner workings of Nazi persecution from the exploitation of slave labor to the conduct of medical experiments. The archive's managers planned a conference of scholars next year to map out its unexplored contents.

The files entrusted to the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, have been used until now to help find missing persons or document atrocities to support compensation claims. The U.S. government also has referred to the ITS for background checks on immigrants it suspected of lying about their past.

Inquiries were handled by the archive's 400 staff members in the German spa town of Bad Arolsen. Few outsiders were allowed to see the actual documents, which number more than 50 million pages and cover 16 linear miles of gray metal filing cabinets and cardboard binders spread over six buildings.

On Wednesday, the Red Cross and the German government announced that the last of the 11 countries that govern the archive had ratified a 2006 agreement to open the files to the public for the first time.

"We are there. The doors are open," said ITS director Reto Meister, speaking by telephone from the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was visiting with a delegation of U.S. congressional staff members.

Survivors have pressed for decades to open the archive, unhappy with the minimal responses — usually in form letters — from the Red Cross officials responding to requests for information about relatives. (Read More...)