Earth is Flat, Vaccines are bad and Global Warming is a myth. What makes people reject scientific research?

Credit: JooJoo41/Pixabay

A lot happened in 2016, but one of the biggest cultural shifts was the rise of fake news - where claims with no evidence behind them (e.g. the world is flat) get shared as fact alongside evidence-based, peer-reviewed findings (e.g. climate change is happening).

Researchers have coined this trend the 'anti-enlightenment movement', and there's been a lot of frustration and finger-pointing over who or what's to blame. But a team of psychologists has identified some of the key factors that can cause people to reject science - and it has nothing to do with how educated or intelligent they are.

In fact, the researchers found that people who reject scientific consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccine safety, and evolution are generally just as interested in science and as well-educated as the rest of us.

City climate change Credit: NASA Climate Change

The issue is that when it comes to facts, people think more like lawyers than scientists, which means they 'cherry pick' the facts and studies that back up what they already believe to be true.

So if someone doesn't think humans are causing climate change, they will ignore the hundreds of studies that support that conclusion, but latch onto the one study they can find that casts doubt on this view. This is also known as cognitive bias. 

"We find that people will take a flight from facts to protect all kinds of belief including their religious belief, their political beliefs, and even simple personal beliefs such as whether they are good at choosing a web browser," said one of the researchers, Troy Campbell from the University of Oregon.

"People treat facts as relevant more when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against their opinions, they don't necessarily deny the facts, but they say the facts are less relevant."

This conclusion was based on a series of new interviews, as well as a meta-analysis of the research that's been published on the topic, and was presented in a symposium called over the weekend as part of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual convention in San Antonio.

The goal was to figure out what's going wrong with science communication in 2017, and what we can do to fix it. 

The research has yet to be published, so isn't conclusive, but the results suggest that simply focussing on the evidence and data isn't enough to change someone's mind about a particular topic, seeing as they'll most likely have their own 'facts' to fire back at you. 

"Where there is conflict over societal risks - from climate change to nuclear-power safety to impacts of gun control laws, both sides invoke the mantel of science," said one of the team, Dan Kahan from Yale University.

Instead, the researchers recommend looking into the 'roots' of people's unwillingness to accept scientific consensus, and try to find common ground to introduce new ideas.

So where is this denial of science coming from? A big part of the problem, the researchers found, is that people associate scientific conclusions with political or social affiliations.

New research conducted by Kahan showed that people have actually always cherry picked facts when it comes to science - that's nothing new. But it hasn't been such a big problem in the past, because scientific conclusions were usually agreed on by political and cultural leaders, and promoted as being in the public's best interests. 

Now, scientific facts are being wielded like weapons in a struggle for cultural supremacy, Kahan told Melissa Healy over at the LA Times, and the result is a "polluted science communication environment". 

So how can we do better? 

"Rather than taking on people's surface attitudes directly, tailor the message so that it aligns with their motivation," said Hornsey. "So with climate skeptics, for example, you find out what they can agree on and then frame climate messages to align with these."

The researchers are still gathering data for a peer-reviewed publication on their findings, but they presented their work to the scientific community for further dissemination and discussion in the meantime.

Hornsey told the LA Times that the stakes are too high to continue to ignore the 'anti-enlightenment movement'.

"Anti-vaccination movements cost lives," said Hornsey. "Climate change skepticism slows the global response to the greatest social, economic and ecological threat of our time."

"We grew up in an era when it was just presumed that reason and evidence were the ways to understand important issues; not fear, vested interests, tradition or faith," he added.

"But the rise of climate skepticism and the anti-vaccination movement made us realise that these enlightenment values are under attack."

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10,000 years ago, the Sahara Desert was one of the wettest areas on Earth

Rainier conditions than previously thought turned the Sahara Desert into grasslands, lakes and rivers from 11,000 to 5,000 years ago, a new study finds. A brief return to aridity around 8,000 years ago set the stage for cattle herders to spread across North Africa, researchers suspect.

Updated 09/05/2020

Study shows the Sahara swung between lush and desert conditions every 20,000 years, in sync with monsoon activity


The Sahara desert is one of the harshest, most inhospitable places on the planet, covering much of North Africa in some 3.6 million square miles of rock and windswept dunes. But it wasn't always so desolate and parched. Primitive rock paintings and fossils excavated from the region suggest that the Sahara was once a relatively verdant oasis, where human settlements and a diversity of plants and animals thrived. Notes phys.org

Thousands of years ago, it didn’t just rain on the Sahara Desert. It poured.

Camp in the Sahara Desert at Merzouga, Morocco in North Africa 123RF.com

Grasslands, trees, lakes and rivers once covered North Africa’s now arid, unforgiving landscape. From about 11,000 to 5,000 years ago, much higher rainfall rates than previously estimated created that “Green Sahara,” say geologist Jessica Tierney of the University of Arizona in Tucson and her colleagues. Extensive ground cover, combined with reductions of airborne dust, intensified water evaporation into the atmosphere, leading to monsoonlike conditions, the scientists report January 18 in Science Advances.

Study shows the Sahara swung between lush and desert conditions Phys.org 

Tierney’s team reconstructed western Saharan rainfall patterns over the last 25,000 years. Estimates relied on measurements of forms of carbon and hydrogen in leaf wax recovered from ocean sediment cores collected off the Sahara’s west coast. Concentrations of these substances reflected ancient rainfall rates.

Credit: Boing Boing

Rainfall ranged from 250 to 1,670 millimeters annually during Green Sahara times, the researchers say. Previous estimates — based on studies of ancient pollen that did not account for dust declines — reached no higher than about 900 millimeters. Saharan rainfall rates currently range from 35 to 100 millimeters annually.

Leaf-wax evidence indicates that the Green Sahara dried out from about 8,000 to at least 7,000 years ago before rebounding. That’s consistent with other ancient climate simulations and with excavations suggesting that humans temporarily left the area around 8,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherers departed for friendlier locales, leaving cattle herders to spread across North Africa once the Green Sahara returned (SN Online: 6/20/12), the investigators propose. 

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Artificial Intelligence Used to ID Skin Cancer. Deep learning algorithm does as well as dermatologists in identifying skin cancer

A dermatologist using a dermatoscope, a type of handheld microscope, to look at skin. Computer scientists at Stanford have created an artificially intelligent diagnosis algorithm for skin cancer that matched the performance of board-certified dermatologists. Credit: Matt Young

It's scary enough making a doctor's appointment to see if a strange mole could be cancerous. Imagine, then, that you were in that situation while also living far away from the nearest doctor, unable to take time off work and unsure you had the money to cover the cost of the visit. In a scenario like this, an option to receive a diagnosis through your smartphone could be lifesaving.

Universal access to health care was on the minds of computer scientists at Stanford when they set out to create an artificially intelligent diagnosis algorithm for skin cancer. They made a database of nearly 130,000 skin disease images and trained their algorithm to visually diagnose potential cancer. From the very first test, it performed with inspiring accuracy.

"We realized it was feasible, not just to do something well, but as well as a human dermatologist," said Sebastian Thrun, an adjunct professor in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "That's when our thinking changed. That's when we said, 'Look, this is not just a class project for students, this is an opportunity to do something great for humanity.'"

The final product, the subject of a paper in the Jan. 25 issue of Nature, was tested against 21 board-certified dermatologists. In its diagnoses of skin lesions, which represented the most common and deadliest skin cancers, the algorithm matched the performance of dermatologists.

Why skin cancer

Every year there are about 5.4 million new cases of skin cancer in the United States, and while the five-year survival rate for melanoma detected in its earliest states is around 97 percent, that drops to approximately 14 percent if it's detected in its latest stages. Early detection could likely have an enormous impact on skin cancer outcomes.

Diagnosing skin cancer begins with a visual examination. A dermatologist usually looks at the suspicious lesion with the naked eye and with the aid of a dermatoscope, which is a handheld microscope that provides low-level magnification of the skin. If these methods are inconclusive or lead the dermatologist to believe the lesion is cancerous, a biopsy is the next step.

Bringing this algorithm into the examination process follows a trend in computing that combines visual processing with deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence modeled after neural networks in the brain. Deep learning has a decades-long history in computer science but it only recently has been applied to visual processing tasks, with great success. The essence of machine learning, including deep learning, is that a computer is trained to figure out a problem rather than having the answers programmed into it.

"We made a very powerful machine learning algorithm that learns from data," said Andre Esteva, co-lead author of the paper and a graduate student in the Thrun lab. "Instead of writing into computer code exactly what to look for, you let the algorithm figure it out."

The algorithm was fed each image as raw pixels with an associated disease label. Compared to other methods for training algorithms, this one requires very little processing or sorting of the images prior to classification, allowing the algorithm to work off a wider variety of data.

From cats and dogs to melanomas and carcinomas

Rather than building an algorithm from scratch, the researchers began with an algorithm developed by Google that was already trained to identify 1.28 million images from 1,000 object categories. While it was primed to be able to differentiate cats from dogs, the researchers needed it to know a malignant carcinoma from a benign seborrheic keratosis.

"There's no huge dataset of skin cancer that we can just train our algorithms on, so we had to make our own," said Brett Kuprel, co-lead author of the paper and a graduate student in the Thrun lab. "We gathered images from the internet and worked with the medical school to create a nice taxonomy out of data that was very messy -- the labels alone were in several languages, including German, Arabic and Latin."

After going through the necessary translations, the researchers collaborated with dermatologists at Stanford Medicine, as well as Helen M. Blau, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford and co-author of the paper. Together, this interdisciplinary team worked to classify the hodgepodge of internet images. Many of these, unlike those taken by medical professionals, were varied in terms of angle, zoom and lighting. In the end, they amassed about 130,000 images of skin lesions representing over 2,000 different diseases.

During testing, the researchers used only high-quality, biopsy-confirmed images provided by the University of Edinburgh and the International Skin Imaging Collaboration Project that represented the most common and deadliest skin cancers -- malignant carcinomas and malignant melanomas. The 21 dermatologists were asked whether, based on each image, they would proceed with biopsy or treatment, or reassure the patient. The researchers evaluated success by how well the dermatologists were able to correctly diagnose both cancerous and non-cancerous lesions in over 370 images.

The algorithm's performance was measured through the creation of a sensitivity-specificity curve, where sensitivity represented its ability to correctly identify malignant lesions and specificity represented its ability to correctly identify benign lesions. It was assessed through three key diagnostic tasks: keratinocyte carcinoma classification, melanoma classification, and melanoma classification when viewed using dermoscopy. In all three tasks, the algorithm matched the performance of the dermatologists with the area under the sensitivity-specificity curve amounting to at least 91 percent of the total area of the graph.

An added advantage of the algorithm is that, unlike a person, the algorithm can be made more or less sensitive, allowing the researchers to tune its response depending on what they want it to assess. This ability to alter the sensitivity hints at the depth and complexity of this algorithm. The underlying architecture of seemingly irrelevant photos -- including cats and dogs -- helps it better evaluate the skin lesion images.

Health care by smartphone

Although this algorithm currently exists on a computer, the team would like to make it smartphone compatible in the near future, bringing reliable skin cancer diagnoses to our fingertips.

"My main eureka moment was when I realized just how ubiquitous smartphones will be," said Esteva. "Everyone will have a supercomputer in their pockets with a number of sensors in it, including a camera. What if we could use it to visually screen for skin cancer? Or other ailments?"

The team believes it will be relatively easy to transition the algorithm to mobile devices but there still needs to be further testing in a real-world clinical setting.

"Advances in computer-aided classification of benign versus malignant skin lesions could greatly assist dermatologists in improved diagnosis for challenging lesions and provide better management options for patients," said Susan Swetter, professor of dermatology and director of the Pigmented Lesion and Melanoma Program at the Stanford Cancer Institute, and co-author of the paper. "However, rigorous prospective validation of the algorithm is necessary before it can be implemented in clinical practice, by practitioners and patients alike."

Even in light of the challenges ahead, the researchers are hopeful that deep learning could someday contribute to visual diagnosis in many medical fields.

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A tremendous wealth of the Vikings was discovered on a small island in the Baltic Sea. The entire Swedish was much poorer

Riches found on the island of Gotland. Credit: Gabriel Hildebrand / The Royal Coin Cabinet

Stratification did increase on the island as time passed, though. Archaeologists have found that, throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, silver hoards were distributed throughout Gotland, suggesting that wealth was more or less uniformly shared among the island’s farmers. But around 1050, this pattern shifted. “In the late eleventh century, you start to have fewer hoards overall, but, instead, there are some really massive hoards, usually found along the coast, containing many, many thousands of coins,” says Jonsson. This suggests that trading was increasingly controlled by a small number of coastal merchants.

This stratification accelerated near the end of the Viking Age, around 1140, when Gotland began to mint its own coins, becoming the first authority in the eastern Baltic region to do so. “Gotlandic coins were used on mainland Sweden and in the Baltic countries,” says Majvor Östergren, an archaeologist who has studied the island’s silver hoards. Whereas Gotlanders had valued foreign coins based on their weight alone, these coins, though hastily hammered out into an irregular shape, had a generally accepted value. More than eight million of these early Gotlandic coins are estimated to have been minted between 1140 and 1220, and more than 22,000 have been found, including 11,000 on Gotland alone.

(Nanouschka Myrberg Burström)An example of one of the earliest silver coins minted on Gotland (obverse, left; reverse, right) dates from around 1140.

Gotland is thought to have begun its coinage operation to take advantage of new trading opportunities made possible by strife among feuding groups on mainland Sweden and in western Russia. This allowed Gotland to make direct trading agreements with the Novgorod area of Russia and with powers to the island’s southwest, including Denmark, Frisia, and northern Germany. Gotland’s new coins helped facilitate trade between its Eastern and Western trading partners, and brought added profits to the island’s elite through tolls, fees, and taxes levied on visiting traders. In order to maintain control over trade on the island, it was limited to a single harbor, Visby, which remains the island’s largest town. As a result, the rest of Gotland’s trading harbors, including Fröjel, declined in importance around 1150.

Gotland remained a wealthy island in the medieval period that followed the Viking Age, but, says Carlsson, “Gotlanders stopped putting their silver in the ground. Instead, they built more than 90 stone churches during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” Although many archaeologists believe that the Gotland Vikings stashed their wealth in hoards for safekeeping, 

Carlsson thinks that, just as did the churches that were built later, they served a devotional purpose. In many cases, he argues, hoards do not appear to have been buried in houses but rather atop graves, roads, or borderlands. Indeed, some were barely buried at all because, he argues, others in the community knew not to touch them. “These hoards were not meant to be taken up,

” he says, “because they were meant as a sort of sacrifice to the gods, to ensure a good harvest, good fortune, or a safer life.” 

In light of the scale, sophistication, and success of the Gotland Vikings’ activities, these ritual depositions may have seemed to them a small price to pay.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Archaeology . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

This fascinating periodic table shows the origin of each atom in the human body. "We are made of stardust"

Credit: Jennifer Johnson

Here’s something to think about: the average adult human is made up of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms, and most of them are hydrogen - the most common element in the Universe, produced by the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

The rest of those atoms were forged by ancient stars merging and exploding billions of years after the formation of the Universe, and a tiny amount can be attributed to cosmic rays - high-energy radiation that mostly originates from somewhere outside the Solar System.

As astronomer Carl Sagan once said in an episode of Cosmos, "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of stardust."

To give you a better idea of where the ingredients for every living human came from, Jennifer A. Johnson, an astronomer at the Ohio State University, put together this new periodic table that breaks down all the elements according to their origin:

Jennifer Johnson

To keep things relevant for the human body, Johnson explains that she cut a number of elements from the bottom section.

"Tc, Pm, and the elements beyond U do not have long-lived or stable isotopes. I have ignored the elements beyond U in this plot, but not including Tc and Pm looked weird, so I have included them in grey," Johnson explains on her blog with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The new periodic table builds on work Johnson and her colleague, astronomer Inese Ivans from the University of Utah, did back in 2008 - a project born out of equal measures of frustration and procrastination.

"This is what happens when you give two astronomers, who are tired of reminding everyone about which elements go with which process on a periodic table, a set of markers, and time when they should have been listening to talks," Johnson admits.

The periodic table works by identifying the six sources of elements in our bodies, and breaks them down into the processes in the Universe that can give rise to new atoms: Big Bang fusion; cosmic ray fission; merging neutron stars; exploding massive stars; dying low mass stars; and exploding white dwarf.

The way the corresponding colours fill up the boxes of elements shows roughly how much of that element is the result of the various cosmic events.

So you can see that elements like oxygen (O), magnesium (Mg), and sodium (Na), resulted from gigantic explosions of massive stars called supernovae, which occur at the end of a star's life, when it either runs out of fuel, or accumulates too much matter.

The incredible amount of energy and neutrons this releases allows elements to be produced - a process known as nucleosynthesis - and distributed throughout the Universe.

Old favourites like carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), on the other hand, exist mostly thanks to low-mass stars ending their lives as white dwarfs. 

Strange elements boron (B) and beryllium (Be), and some isotopes of lithium (Li) are unique in their origins, because they're the result of high-energy particles called cosmic rays that zoom through our galaxy at close to the speed of light.

Most cosmic rays originate from outside the Solar System, and sometimes even the Milky Way, and when they collide with certain atoms, they give rise to new elements. 

Interestingly, lithium is part of the reason why Johnson decided to distribute this new periodic table in the first place. If it's giving you a serious case of deja vu, it's because there's a similar version on Wikipedia:

Jennifer Johnson

But, as Johnson explains, the Wikipedia version is unclear in some places, and just plain wrong in others.

She says the "large stars" and "small stars" in the Wikipedia version don't make much sense, because nucleosynthesis has nothing to do with the radius of the stars, so we have to assume they mean "high-mass stars" and "low-mass stars", respectively. 

"High-mass stars end their lives (at least some of the time) as core-collapse supernovae. Low-mass stars usually end their lives as white dwarfs," says Johnson.

"But sometimes, white dwarfs that are in binary systems with another star get enough mass from the companion to become unstable and explode as so-called Type-Ia supernovae. Which 'supernova' is being referred to in the Wikipedia graphic is not clear."


Head over to Johnson's blog to access a higher resolution version of the periodic table, and if you need a colour blind-friendly version, she's got you covered:

Jennifer Johnson

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DOCTORS SUCCESSFULLY TREAT TWO BABIES WITH LEUKEMIA USING GENE-EDITED IMMUNE CELLS

Scientists are using gene-editing techniques to fight cancer.

IT’S A PROMISING APPROACH, BUT STILL NEEDS A LOT MORE RESEARCH

In a study out this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, a group of British doctors reported that they had successfully “cured” two infants of the blood cancer leukemia using a treatment that involves genetically modified immune cells from a donor.

The study was incredibly small—just two babies—and the infants have only been free of leukemia for 16 and 18 months. Technically, that’s not long enough to say they are cured. Declaring someone who previously had cancer as “cured” usually doesn’t happen until that person has been free of the disease for a few years, at least. But what’s significant about this study is that it combines a promising, novel approach—CAR T cell therapy—with a relatively new gene-editing technique called TALENS, which enables the direct manipulation of genes within a person’s DNA.

In the cancer community, CAR T cell therapy is already touted as a promising immunotherapy treatment (which involves harnessing a person’s immune system to fight cancer on its own), but in preliminary trials, it’s had its limitations. Before it can become a universal cancer treatment, these kinks and logistics need to be worked out. And researchers in the field think that many of them can be solved using gene-editing techniques such as TALENS, the one used in this study, as well as CRISPR, supposedly the easiest such technique to date.


First, what is CAR T-cell treatment?

CAR T, which stands for chimeric antigen receptor T cell, is a new type of cancer treatment which is not yet publicly available, but is in active clinical trials in the United States as well as many other countries such as the United Kingdom and China. The therapy involves removing some T cells (specialized immune cells) from a patient's blood. Then those cells are genetically altered in a lab, giving them special receptors on their surface called CARs. Once the cells are ready, they are infused back into the patient’s blood, where the new (CAR) receptors seek out tumor cells, attach to them, and kill them.
CAR T-cell trials are currently in phase II clinical trials in the United States. A few drug companies, including Novartis, have plans to make the therapy available as early as this year.


How does gene-editing help?

This new treatment has worked really well for blood cancers like leukemia, especially in young children. The problem, as the researchers point out in their study, is that each set of T cells have to be custom made for each patient. That takes a lot of time, and a lot of money. Further, it’s not always feasible, or even possible, to harvest T cells from leukemia patients who simply don’t have enough healthy ones to begin with.
And that’s where gene-editing comes in. The researchers took T cells from donor recipients and made a total of four genetic changes. The two they made with TALENS enabled the T cells to become universal—allowing them to be used in any person without the risk of rejection (a phenomenon called graft-versus-host disease, where the recipient’s immune system creates such an overwhelming response to the foreign cells that the patient can die as a result). The other genetic alterations added that signature receptor to seek out and attack cancer.


What are the limitations of this study?

The two infants in the study—aged 11 and 18 months—both had an aggressive form of leukemia, and had already been subjected to other treatments like chemotherapy and stem cell transplants. And the fact that they have remained cancer free is extremely promising. But again, the study was small. Further, according to a report in MIT Technology Review, many CAR T experts argue that because the children also received other treatments simultaneously (one had a stem cell transplant soon after receiving the CAR T cells) it’s impossible to know for sure whether the CAR T cells were the sole reason the cancer cells stayed away. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told MIT Tech Review. “It would be great if it works, but that just hasn’t been shown yet.


What’s next?

The combination of CAR T cell immunotherapy with gene-editing remains an incredibly promising area of research. Not only to create a “universal donor” CAR T cell, but also to make the treatment more effective. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are currently researching using the the gene-editing technique CRISPR to edit out two genes—called checkpoint inhibitors—that prevent CAR T from working as well as it should. The trial, which could take place this year, would be the first case of a CRISPR-altered cell being used in a human patient in the United States. In November, a Chinese group tested their first CRISPR gene-edited T cells in a patient with lung cancer.
However, it’s important to remember that CAR T cell therapy is in its early stages, and CRISPR/TALEN gene edited CAR T is even newer. There’s still a lot more work to be done, including many, many more studies like this one, with a lot more patients, before it’s available for everyone.

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Secret room of the famous Rushmore

After its completion 75 years ago, the colossal presidential sculpture carved into Mount Rushmore quickly became an American icon. However, few know that hidden behind the hairline of Abraham Lincoln is a doorway to an unfinished chamber originally intended to hold some of America’s most treasured documents.

On Halloween in 1941, the 14-year effort to carve the enormous profiles of four American presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—into the southeastern face of Mount Rushmore was finally completed. However, one little-known, but critical, element of Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s “Shrine of Democracy Sculpture” was left unfinished and remains concealed from view behind Lincoln’s mighty brow.

Mount Rushmore as carving began with conceptual drawing of Borglum’s idea for a the never-built entablature inserted. (Credit: NPS, Mount Rushmore National Memorial)

Carved into the solid granite wall of a small canyon running right behind the presidential lineup is an 18-foot-tall doorway that resembles the entrance to an ancient tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. While Nicolas Cage’s character in the movie “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” discovered the entrance to a legendary city of gold inside a cave on Mount Rushmore, no such riches can be found in the actual chamber chiseled into the mountain. Anyone crossing the threshold would discover an empty room approximately 75 feet in length with a 35-foot-tall ceiling. Holes jack-hammered into the walls to hold dynamite for blasting lend a honeycomb effect. Red numbers, perhaps painted by Borglum himself, give instructions for the removal of rocks.

Gutzon Borglum (Credit: Library of Congress)

Borglum had intended for this incomplete chamber to be, in essence, his artist’s statement explaining the meaning of his sculpture—not for present generations but for future civilizations, and even interplanetary visitors, thousands of years in the future. “You might as well drop a letter into the world’s postal service without an address or signature, as to send that carved mountain into history without identification,” the sculptor wrote. While the four faces carved on Mount Rushmore are instantly recognizable even to school kids today, Borglum thought they might one day become as mysterious as Stonehenge. “Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor,” he lamented. “Civilizations are ghouls.”

The sculptor’s early plans for Mount Rushmore included next to Washington’s head a massive 80-by-120-foot inscription in the shape of the Louisiana Purchase that would list nine of the most important events in the history of the United States between 1776 and 1906. However, even with the most astronomical of point sizes, the text would not have been legible at great distances, and ultimately logistics required that portion of the mountain to be used for Lincoln’s head. Borglum abandoned the inscription and instead drew up plans to build a repository deep within the mountain that would hold some of America’s most treasured artifacts and documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.

Plans for the Hall of Records. (Credit: Mount Rushmore National Memorial)

The sculptor envisioned a grand, 800-foot-long staircase ascending Mount Rushmore that would lead to a glorious chamber called the “Hall of Records.” “Into this room the records of what our people aspired to and what they accomplished should be collected,” Borglum wrote, “and on the walls of this room should be cut the literal record of conception of our republic; its successful creation; the record of its westward movement to the Pacific; its presidents; how the Memorial was built, and frankly, why.”

Visitors to the Hall of Records would enter through great glass doors over which would be perched a bronze eagle with a 38-foot wingspan and the inscription “America’s Onward March.” A cross pointing to the North Star would be mounted upon the vaulted ceiling, and friezes on the wall would depict “the adventure of humanity discovering and occupying the West World.” An inscription written by John Edward Bradley, who won a national contest sponsored by the Hearst newspapers, would detail the history of the country from its founding through the construction of the Panama Canal. Bronze and glass cabinets in the recesses of the 80-by-100-foot chamber would hold documents such as the U.S. Constitution. There would be busts of more than 20 prominent Americans, ranging from Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock to Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers.

Workers in the early stages of constructing the Hall of Records. (Credit: Charles D’Emery photo, courtesy of NPS, Mount Rushmore National Memorial)

In July 1938, workers began to cut into the rock on the north wall of a small canyon concealed by the presidential faces to build Borglum’s American shrine. However, a year into the construction, the federal government, which covered nearly all the cost of constructing the monument, tightened the pursestrings and ordered Borglum to stop work on the Hall of Records and focus his full efforts on completing the presidential profiles.

Seven months after the 73-year-old sculptor died in March 1941, Borglum’s son Lincoln led the effort to finish the carving of the four presidents. The Mount Rushmore National Monument was deemed to be complete, although Borglum’s ultimate plan—and the Hall of Records—remained unfinished.

Mount Rushmore under construction. (Credit: NPS, Mount Rushmore National Memorial)

Borglum’s hopes for the Hall of Records were at least partially fulfilled on August 9, 1998, when four generations of his family gathered in the incomplete chamber as 16 porcelain enamel panels inscribed with the words of documents such as the Declaration of Independence, biographies of the sculptor and his presidential subjects and histories of the memorial’s construction and the United States were placed inside a teakwood box and titanium vault that was lowered into the ground and covered by a 1,200-pound black granite capstone inscribed with a quote from Borglum delivered at the 1930 dedication of the carving of Washington. “It’s the end of the creation of Mount Rushmore as my father saw it,” said Borglum’s daughter, Mary Ellis.

It’s one part of Mount Rushmore, however, that few people can see today. Due to safety and security concerns, visitors are prohibited from scaling the mountain to view the Hall of Records.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by History . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

A dog saved his master's life after the man fell on ice and broke his neck and spent 20 hours in the cold

Source: Personal Archive

His action can be described as a heroic act, a golden retriever managed to save his master's life after he fell on ice and broke his neck.

New Year's Eve, Bob, a man of 64 years in Petoskey, decided to go outside to bring firewood. Dressed only in a shirt, pants and shoes on their feet, the man slipped on ice and because of the coup could not move, notes Oddity Central.

The man began to shout for help, but his neighbor's house is about half a kilometer away, at that hour was not someone who could help him. Fortunately, his dog five years old came to help him.

Source: Personal Archive

,, I screamed for help, but the neighbor is at a distance from my house. By morning I lost my voice almost completely, but Kelsey (dog) never stopped barking. A barking for help and did not go near me kept me warm and kept me awake, '' says Bob.


Snow man remained paralyzed for about 20 hours at a temperature of -4 ° C. Kelsey has done everything possible for the man to stay alive, including was sitting on his chest to keep them warm. After 19 hours, Bob and lost consciousness, but Kelsey continued barking and yelling for help.

Source: Personal Archive

Despite efforts dog, Bob would be frozen in the snow if his neighbor had not heard Rick's desperate howling dog. The man was found at 6: 30 p.m. New Year's Day and was taken to hospital. Column injuries can result in permanent paralysis, but Bob was lucky, before the operation was warned that it might not be able to go, but the next morning he managed to move his arms and legs.


Bob and Kelsey are inseparable, they remain together even when the husband go shopping.

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The man who is married 107 women. '' What I do is divine. It is my mission and I will keep doing this until the end of life '

Source: Buzz Nigeria

Mohammed Bello Abubakar is one of the most controversial figures in Nigeria. Husband of 92 years was married 107 women, 97 of them still being wives.

Belo came to fame in 2008 when the papers wrote about his marriage to 86 women and 150 for children. At that time, Muslim clerics accused him of violating their religious rules. The man was put before a choice, 82 women are divorced or suffer the consequences, according to Oddity Central. He refused, claiming that there is no rule in the Quran that prohibit marriage to more than four women, and that every man should be free to marry as many women as he wants.

Belo was arrested at the request of the local court, but was released on condition to keep only four wives. The man ignored the requirement of the court and then was married to other women, reaching a total of 107 of which 10 wives divorced him. Despite his age, Abubakar says that he wants to marry again,, What I do is divine. It is my mission and I will keep doing this until the end of life ''.

Belo advises men not to follow his example as a husband,, normal '' would not do 10 wives. He says he has managed to control on 97 women using divine power.

The most incredible aspect of his family is that none of the members has a fixed income. The man does not work and does not allow any wife to work

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Pine Leaf was a Woman Chief and warrior of the Crow people. And she married four wives

Left photo - Assiniboin Boy, a Gros Ventre man, photo by Edward S. Curtis. Wikipedia/Public Domain, Right photo - Gros Ventre moving camp with travois. Wikipedia/Public Domain

A girl was born in 1806 to the Gros Ventres but in a wave of inter-tribal rage and revenge, she was kidnapped by a raiding party of Crows when she was only 10. A Crow warrior adopted her and raised as one of his people. She seemed quite rebellious toward “girl’s behaviour” and was keen to acquire skills which were traditionally perceived as male ones. Her foster father had already lost his sons in battles or illness and keenly encouraged the pursuits of his daughter – Pine Leaf. She was educated as she was a boy and assisted in gaining her skills in horse riding, marksmanship, and ability to field-dress a buffalo. However, she kept dressing as a girl.

Idealized illustration of “Pine Leaf,” possibly identified with Woman Chief, from James Beckwourth’s autobiography.

After the death of her father, she gained the leadership of his lodge. She got the respect as a warrior after she proved her skills in a riot with the Blackfoots. Pine Leaf was also the most reliable in defending her people whenever there was a need for it. She would answer to any fight in order to protect her people. Also, she formed a group of warriors with whom she reportedly attacked the Blackfoot and stole their horses.

Six Blackfeet chiefs painted by Paul Kane along the South Saskatchewan River in Canada ( c.1851-1856).

It was natural for her to be chosen as bacheeítche (Chief) in the Council of Chiefs and to represent her lodge. She was given the name Bíawacheeitchish, or “Woman Chief.” Later, she would become third among the Council’s 160 lodges. From all data about her, it is hard to say if she married four wives because she was attracted to them or for the benefits of their dowry to increase her wealth.

She made peace with the Gros Ventres party but after a few years, some of their people killed her.


She met with a number of Western explorers including Edwin Denig and Rudolph Kurz, and they were enchanted by her. All stories written about Pine Leaf praise her bravery, cleverness, and skills.

Crow Indians, c. 1878–1883.

Most of the information the world has about her come from James Beckwourth who wrote about Pine Leaf – the Crow warrior. In his writings, he seems fascinated by her, which leaves the reader with the question if he used his fascination lead him to an imagination about the things he wrote. Beckwourth claimed that he met Pine Leaf while living with the Crow in the 1820s.

Left photo – James P. Beckwourth, circa 1860, in Denver, Kansas Territory.  Right photo – Beckwourth as an Indian warrior, 1856.

He also claimed to have had a romantic relationship with Pine Leaf, which is also not a very reliable fact.

There are a few other woman-warriors beside Pine Leaf, all from the Crow Nation. Two such are Akkeekaahuush and Biliíche Héeleelash who was a prominent war leader.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Thevintagenews . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.