EDU - Talksmore

 In 1997, in a game between France and Brazil, a young Brazilian player named Roberto Carlos set up for a 35 meter free kick.  With no direct line to the goal, Carlos decided to attempt the seemingly impossible. His kick sent the ball flying wide of the players, but just before going out of bounds, it hooked to the left and soared into the goal.  According to Newton's first law of motion, an object will move in the same direction and velocity until a force is applied on it. When Carlos kicked the ball, he gave it direction and velocity, but what force made the ball swerve and score one of the most magnificent goals in the history of the sport? The trick was in the spin.  Carlos placed his kick at the lower right corner of the ball, sending it high and to the right, but also rotating around its axis. The ball started its flight in an apparently direct route, with air flowing on both sides and slowing it down.  On one side, the air moved in the opposite direction ...

Lord Shiva— primordial destroyer of evil, slayer of demons, protector, and omniscient observer of the universe— was testing his wife’s patience. Historically, the union between Shiva and Parvati was a glorious one.  They maintained the equilibrium between thought and action on which the well-being of the world depended. Without Parvati as the agent of energy, growth, and transformation on Earth, Shiva would become a detached observer, and the world would remain static.  But together, the two formed a divine union known as Ardhanarishvara–– a sacred combination which brought fertility and connection to all living things. For these reasons, Parvati was worshipped far and wide as the mother of the natural world–– and the essential counterpart to Shiva’s powers of raw creation. She oversaw humanity’s material comforts; and ensured that the Earth’s inhabitants were bonded to each other physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Yet a rift had grown between these two formidable force...

Juana Ramírez de Asbaje sat before a panel of prestigious theologians, jurists, and mathematicians. The viceroy of New Spain had invited them to test the young woman’s knowledge by posing the most difficult questions they could muster. But Juana successfully answered every challenge, from complicated equations to philosophical queries. Observers would later liken the scene to “a royal galleon fending off a few canoes.”  The woman who faced this interrogation was born in the mid-17th century. At that time, Mexico had been a Spanish colony for over a century, leading to a complex and stratified class system. Juana’s maternal grandparents were born in Spain, making them members of Mexico’s most esteemed class. But Juana was born out of wedlock, and her father – a Spanish military captain – left her mother, Doña Isabel, to raise Juana and her sisters alone.  Fortunately, her grandfather’s moderate means ensured the family a comfortable existence. And Doña Isabel set a strong examp...

Order, order. So who do we have here? Your Honor, this is Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen whose lurid affairs destroyed two of Rome's finest generals and brought the end of the Republic.  Your Honor, this is Cleopatra, one of the most powerful women in history whose reign brought Egypt nearly 22 years of stability and prosperity. Uh, why don't we even know what she looked like? Most of the art and descriptions came long after her lifetime in the first century BCE, just like most of the things written about her.  So what do we actually know? Cleopatra VII was the last of the Ptolemaic dynasty, a Macedonian Greek family that governed Egypt after its conquest by Alexander the Great. She ruled jointly in Alexandria with her brother- to whom she was also married- until he had her exiled. But what does all this have to do with Rome?  Egypt had long been a Roman client state, and Cleopatra's father incurred large debts to the Republic. After being defeated by Julius Caesar...

This chimpanzee stumbles across a windfall of overripe plums. Many of them have split open, drawing him to their intoxicating fruity odor. He gorges himself and begins to experience some… strange effects.  This unwitting ape has stumbled on a process that humans will eventually harness to create beer, wine, and other alcoholic drinks. The sugars in overripe fruit attract microscopic organisms known as yeasts. As the yeasts feed on the fruit sugars they produce a compound called ethanol— the type of alcohol in alcoholic beverages.  This process is called fermentation. Nobody knows exactly when humans began to create fermented beverages. The earliest known evidence comes from 7,000 BCE in China, where residue in clay pots has revealed that people were making an alcoholic beverage from fermented rice, millet, grapes, and honey.  Within a few thousand years, cultures all over the world were fermenting their own drinks. Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians made beer throughout ...

If you can't imagine life without chocolate, you're lucky you weren't born before the 16th century. Until then, chocolate only existed in Mesoamerica in a form quite different from what we know. As far back as 1900 BCE, the people of that region had learned to prepare the beans of the native cacao tree.  The earliest records tell us the beans were ground and mixed with cornmeal and chili peppers to create a drink - not a relaxing cup of hot cocoa, but a bitter, invigorating concoction frothing with foam. And if you thought we make a big deal about chocolate today, the Mesoamericans had us beat.  They believed that cacao was a heavenly food gifted to humans by a feathered serpent god, known to the Maya as Kukulkan and to the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. Aztecs used cacao beans as currency and drank chocolate at royal feasts, gave it to soldiers as a reward for success in battle, and used it in rituals.  The first transatlantic chocolate encounter occurred in 1519 when Hernán Co...

Before empires and royalty, before pottery and writing, before metal tools and weapons – there was cheese. As early as 8000 BCE, the earliest Neolithic farmers living in the Fertile Crescent began a legacy of cheesemaking almost as old as civilization itself.  The rise of agriculture led to domesticated sheep and goats, which ancient farmers harvested for milk. But when left in warm conditions for several hours, that fresh milk began to sour. Its lactic acids caused proteins to coagulate, binding into soft clumps.  Upon discovering this strange transformation, the farmers drained the remaining liquid – later named whey – and found the yellowish globs could be eaten fresh as a soft, spreadable meal. These clumps, or curds, became the building blocks of cheese, which would eventually be aged, pressed, ripened, and whizzed into a diverse cornucopia of dairy delights.  The discovery of cheese gave Neolithic people an enormous survival advantage. Milk was rich with essential p...

 During a long day spent roaming the forest in search of edible grains and herbs, the weary divine farmer Shennong accidentally poisoned himself 72 times. But before the poisons could end his life, a leaf drifted into his mouth. He chewed on it and it revived him, and that is how we discovered tea. Or so an ancient legend goes at least.  Tea doesn't actually cure poisonings, but the story of Shennong, the mythical Chinese inventor of agriculture, highlights tea's importance to ancient China. Archaeological evidence suggests tea was first cultivated there as early as 6,000 years ago, or 1,500 years before the pharaohs built the Great Pyramids of Giza.  That original Chinese tea plant is the same type that's grown around the world today, yet it was originally consumed very differently. It was eaten as a vegetable or cooked with grain porridge. Tea only shifted from food to drink 1,500 years ago when people realized that a combination of heat and moisture could create a comp...

Imagine that you’ve been unemployed and seeking work for months. Government benefit programs have helped you cover rent, utilities, and food, but you're barely getting by. Finally, you hear back about a job application. You receive your first paycheck in months, and things seem to be turning around. But there’s a catch.  Your new job pays just enough to disqualify you from the benefit programs, and not enough to cover the same costs. To make things worse, you have to pay for transportation to work, and childcare while you’re at the office. Somehow, you have less money now than when you were unemployed. Economists call this demoralizing situation the welfare trap— one of the many different poverty traps affecting millions of people around the world.  Poverty traps are economic and environmental circumstances that reinforce themselves, perpetuating poverty for generations. Some poverty traps are tied to an individual’s circumstances, like a lack of access to healthy food or educ...