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1 month ago | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. For about 250 years at the beginning of our era, two ancient superpowers coexisted at opposite ends of the vast Eurasian land mass. The Roman Empire and China’s Han Dynasty were too far apart to be in direct contact, but they did know of each other. The Romans called China Seres, the mysterious land where silk came from. The Chinese had vague notions of Daqin, a mighty empire way out west.
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1 month ago | 
myprivacy.dpgmedia.nl | Frank Jacobs
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1 month ago | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. The mountains of northern Laos are beautiful, but tough to negotiate. By car, it can easily take 15 hours to drive the 373 miles (600 km) of winding roads that separate the capital Vientiane from the town of Boten on the Chinese border.
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2 months ago | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people The size of your standard PDF matches the paper in your printer: A4 in most of the world, “letter-sized” in the U.S. and Canada. But standards are not limits. The biggest possible size for a PDF, it has long been said, is a square with sides 237.7 miles (381 km) long, for a total area of 56,047 square miles (145,161 km2).
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Mar 3, 2025 | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people “The quality of mercy is not strained,” argues Portia in The Merchant of Venice, meaning there should be no limits to being kind and forgiving. But 21st-century culture wars are no Shakespeare play. These days, mercy is a finite resource, and the question is how strained the quality (and quantity) of yours is, for it might reveal your tribal affiliation: liberal or conservative.
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Feb 24, 2025 | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people This may look like a weather map, but what it shows isn’t your usual kind of atmospheric interference. The red hexagons denote areas affected by GPS jamming in the preceding 24 hours. GPS jamming, which disables the positioning system of electronic devices, including those used to locate aircraft, can be anything from inconvenient to deadly.
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Jan 30, 2025 | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people The Danes are in “crisis mode” after a “horrendous” call in mid-January between President Donald Trump and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in which Trump in no uncertain terms reiterated his desire to acquire Greenland. What are the Danes to do — ponder and vacillate like Hamlet? Or remember that offense is the best defense?
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Why didn’t the Romans invent the steam engine, electricity, or the airplane? Perhaps because they were 3 IQ points less clever than they could have been. The culprit: lead pollution — but not of the kind we already knew about. The Romans drank tap water from lead pipes, prepared and ate their food on lead-containing kitchenware, used lead in their cosmetics, and even sweetened and preserved their wine with lead acetate.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Except for things at the extreme ends of observation, everything of consequence has already been discovered. At least, that’s how it seems sometimes. But even without a particle collider or a next-generation telescope, exciting discoveries can still be made. Discoveries like a decent-sized Mayan city, and sometimes, all it takes is a simple Google search.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Prosperity is not a given, and neither is poverty. As these maps show, rich regions can lose their wealth, and poor places can turn affluent. While they don’t explain the ebbs and flows of fortune, these maps do provide a fascinating, granular view of where those fortunes rose and fell in Europe, in just over a century. Both maps show regional GDPs relative to the European average.
