In an interesting twist of fate, researchers from the Institute of Papyrology at Heidelberg University discovered “curse tablets” from the Roman era, a fascinating look at the more superstitious side of a triumphant empire.
Found in a pit in the Town Square in Heerlen, the curse tablet measuring about 3.7 by 1.9 inches had been laid to rest at a former Roman military settlement of Coriovallum in Lower Germania.
Whoever left it there had a vendetta against her own, or someone else, as researchers suspect that a slave had written the curse either against the four slaves named, or an unknown person.
Known as a defixione or katadesmoi, these curse tablets made of lead were marked with spells and then buried in places associated with supernatural forces, showing that we, humans, have always had a desire to invoke the gods to act in our favor.
This is a rare sighting from Roman Egypt that revealed the role that magic played in that society, at a time when cultures and belief systems were mixing and spreading throughout the empire.
Researchers had an arduous task before them, as time damaged the inscription. They employed reflectance transformation imaging, which allowed them to penetrate the tablet deeper than their eyes could, picking up more of the inscription lost, their wish perhaps answered by the gods.
Upon the profane/sacred tablet, they found references to Egyptian divinities, which, according to researchers, surprised them as a rare sighting in Germany. Most in Northern Europe follow a similar format: Latin and Roman. Not Egyptian.
And the plot thickens… as it was buried, interestingly, in a former Roman military settlement, and typically, these were buried in locations infused with the supernatural. Below three magical symbols, the author wrote the names of four enslaved people. The men held Latin names. The women, Greek.
As the inscription had been damaged, researchers couldn’t decipher whether this tablet had cursed four slaves or whether four slaves had cried out to the Egyptian gods and demi-heroes, who knows? To wrath. To wreak havoc on an unknown person.
“The tablet served either as a curse against these four slaves or as a curse in their name against an unnamed person,” as the Heidelberg papyrologist told Phys.
Already, the curse tablet stands alone among the others that researchers have found, because the author etched the message in Greek rather than Latin. These thin sheets of lead containing scratches of supernatural desires were used to sway a court case, target a rival, or even a lover, as per Archaeology News.
“It cannot be ruled out that one of the two women was the author of the inscription and had brought the supposed ability to communicate with divine powers through such curses with her from Roman Egypt,” says Dr. Julia Lougovaya, research associate at the Institute for Papyrology in Phys.
That might suggest that she wrote it for someone, on behalf of four slaves. This author might have originated from Roman Egypt because of the references used. Along the Nile, magic played a fundamental role in society. But interestingly, more so related to protection and healing, as per Phys.
But this was a curse. And these tablets were Roman. So, did a former slave flip the concept? The significance of the tablet rests on its cultural mix.
In the far north of the Roman Empire, this Egyptian-meets-Greek artifact was found, exhibiting just how far the mélange of cultures traveled. Perhaps, it might even inspire ideas as to who might have wanted to curse someone at some Roman camp, because of the slave names written across the tablet.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
One whale skeleton on the deep seafloor can host an entire neighbourhood of animals. On whale skeletons studied, researchers have found as many as 190 species of macroscopic bottom-dwelling animals on a single skeleton. Biologists call the phenomenon a whale fall, and the name is almost literal: a body falls, and an oasis assembles around it.
The setting matters. The abyssal plain is one of the hungriest places on Earth, a soft floor that lives on whatever scraps drift down from sunlit water far above. A great whale arriving intact is a sudden windfall, tens of tonnes of food dropped onto a surface that normally goes without.
What follows is a sequence of feasts, each handing off to the next over years.
Researchers describe the process in overlapping stages. First come the mobile scavengers. Hagfish, sleeper sharks, crabs and their kind strip the soft tissue, a stage that can run up to two years for a large animal. Once the flesh is gone, a wave of smaller opportunists settles onto the bared bones and the enriched sediment around them.
In what is called the sulfophilic stage, bacteria break down the fats locked inside the skeleton and release hydrogen sulphide, one of the same chemical currencies that helps fuel life at hydrothermal vents and cold seeps. The Smithsonian describes this final stage as the point when bacteria break down lipids trapped inside the bones, generating sulfur and supporting a larger community of rare species.
That chemistry can sustain a community of chemosynthetic animals for a long time. The Natural History Museum puts this stage at roughly 10 to 50 years, and one large whale-fall community has been tracked for more than 50 years.
The bones themselves turned out to shelter one of the stranger residents in the deep. In 2002, on a whale fall about three kilometres down in Monterey Canyon, scientists found a new genus of worm they named Osedax.
Adrian Glover, a deep-sea biodiversity researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, calls them “the most important animals responsible for the process of breaking down the bones,” though the large scavengers do plenty of reducing earlier on.
An individual Osedax can spend as long as about a decade feeding on a single whale’s bones. That figure is worth holding against the popular claim that the worms gnaw for the better part of a century: the documented number for an individual worm is closer to ten years, not eighty.
What made the worms possible is the strange economy of the deep. As Robert Vrijenhoek, the MBARI evolutionary biologist who led the discovery, put it: “When carcasses fall to the bottom of the ocean, there are no hyenas down there to eat the bones.” Osedax is the exception that filled the gap.
For all that researchers know about how whale falls work, almost no one has watched a natural whale fall unfold from death and sinking through the whole ecological succession. Fujiwara et al. note that, since the first observations in 1987, several natural whale falls have been opportunistically encountered during remotely operated vehicle, submersible and trawl deployments.
For years, one of the deepest confirmed natural examples was an Antarctic minke whale resting at 4,204 metres in the South-West Atlantic. Just this month, researchers reported active whale-fall ecosystems in the Diamantina Zone of the southeastern Indian Ocean, including one at 6,789 metres, pushing the known depth range far beyond that earlier record.
When Vrijenhoek’s team found unexpected genetic diversity in their bone-eating worms, the result led him to a simple inference: “there must be a lot of dead whales out there.” That was a deduction from genetics rather than a count, and even with new discoveries, the watched record remains tiny compared with the deep ocean itself.
The honest answer to how many active whale falls are feeding deep-sea communities at this moment is that no one really knows, only that the number seen by human eyes is a sliver of the number that must be there.
The post When a dead whale sinks to the seafloor, its ‘whale fall’ becomes an oasis feeding deep-sea life for decades — up to 190 species crowding a single skeleton, with bone-eating worms gnawing the bones for as long as a decade appeared first on Space Daily.
Imagine your flight is delayed three hours. Or someone leaves you a bad review that you think is unfair. Or a person you live with wakes up in a foul mood and you can feel it filling the kitchen.
The first reflex, at least mine, is to push back against the thing. To argue with the airline, draft the reply, try to fix the mood. To treat the situation as a problem I can solve if I just apply enough force.
I started reading Stoicism in earnest during a period of failure and a general search for meaning. Seneca’s line about how we waste time stayed with me as a durable impression from that whole reading rabbit-hole.
But the idea I keep coming back to, the one that has been most useful, is the one Epictetus opens his Enchiridion with:
“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions”.
The handbook was compiled by his pupil Arrian from Epictetus’s teaching, but the thought is his, and modern readers tend to call it the dichotomy of control.
A note before I go further. I’m not a psychologist or a philosopher by training, just a reader who came to the Stoics during a rough stretch and kept reading. What follows is reflection on old ideas and a little modern research, not advice, and the psychology I mention is observational, drawn from particular groups of people rather than rules about you.
The easy misreading is to hear “big things versus small things,” as if Epictetus is telling you to sweat the little stuff and let the big stuff go. I don’t think that is the cut he’s making. The cut is between what is your own doing and what is not. Your judgments, your choices, your effort, your intentions sit on one side. Your body, your property, your reputation, your job title, the outcome of almost anything — all of that sits on the other.
The slightly uncomfortable part is how short the first list turns out to be once you’re strict about it. Almost everything I would naturally call “mine,” the result of my work, what people think of me, whether a plan succeeds, is not actually in my power. As the professor of philosophy, Massimo Pigliucci puts it, the idea “basically reminds us that our agency, our ability to change things, is far more limited than we normally think.”
Years ago I tried to build a coffee business. It failed. And the part I didn’t understand until afterward was that the outcome was never really mine to control. Whether the business survived depended on the market, on timing, on a hundred things I couldn’t move no matter how hard I pushed. What was actually mine was the effort, the decisions, the work I put in each day. Those I could give fully.
The first time around I got this exactly backwards. I poured my anxiety into the outcome, the part I couldn’t touch, and the fear of failing followed me everywhere. When the thing I’d been dreading finally happened, the strange discovery was that the reality was lighter than the fear had been. Fearing it was worse than living it. I’m not romanticizing this, and I’m certainly not recommending failure as a teacher. But the dichotomy was sitting right there in the experience. The effort was mine. The result never was. Carrying the result as though it were mine just doubled the weight.
None of this is permission to stop caring or go limp. That’s the version of Stoicism that gets it wrong, the one that treats “let it go” as an excuse to do nothing. Epictetus is not saying don’t try. He’s saying try completely on the part that is yours, then release your grip on the part that isn’t. You act fully, then you stop demanding a particular result from the universe as the price of your peace.
So the freedom here is not the obvious kind. It isn’t getting more control over outcomes, more grip on the delayed flight or the bad review or the mood in the next room. It’s noticing, in the moment, which part of the thing is actually your own doing, giving that part everything, and setting down the rest.
These days, when a result I wanted slips away from me, I try to ask one plain question before I start fighting it: was this ever mine to decide? Often the answer is no. And there’s a real lightness in putting down a thing you were never holding up in the first place.
If any of this is landing closer to home than it is interesting, a good therapist or counsellor is worth far more than any old book or article, mine included.
The post Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Epictetus: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions” appeared first on Space Daily.
Age verification is consuming the Internet. From social media bans in Australia to porn restrictions in half of US states, for many having to prove their age to access websites is becoming an everyday requirement. But one of the key technologies underpinning many of these age checks is about to seep into the offline world—with potentially life-changing consequences for people having their age predicted by AI.
Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are—to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers.
An investigation by WIRED and Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with The Independent, has obtained an internal UK government report detailing its tests of FAE technologies. It shows how the systems regularly mistake children for adults and appear to contain serious bias problems, which directly impact the largest group of migrants subject to age assessments in 2025, according to data from the Home Office. The investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of the technology and whether it should be deployed in such high-stakes scenarios.
© Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images
This week's science news was filled with things missing and found, with the revelation of the first-ever deep-sea footage of the elusive goblin shark making waves in the press.
Goblin sharks (Mitsukurina owstoni) are mysterious, deepwater creatures that have not changed much since they first appeared on Earth 125 million years ago — making them "living fossils." But capturing a recording of the sharks in their deep habitats is exceptionally difficult, and they have previously been seen alive only after being hooked to the surface on fishing lines. Scientists recently filmed not one, but two goblin sharks: The first near Jarvis Island in the South Central Pacific, and the second 6,550 feet (1,997 meters) deep in the Tonga Trench.
If you like your elusive animals on the wilier (and certainly much cuter) side, we also reported on the first ever photographs of the dwarf fox, a species that was believed to be extinct but has been found near a highway in Cozumel, Mexico.
Elsewhere, archaeologists found a second cannonball from the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, meaning they now have one from each side of the conflict. And separate teams of archaeologists discovered the remains of a prehistoric man in Germany who may have been a human sacrifice and signs of a "prototype" Stonehenge close near the famous Stone Age monument.
If you got this far wondering if the "missing" news items were, well, missing, we also covered how a "cold blob" of absent heat in the Atlantic Ocean is shifting Indian summer monsoons, threatening over one billion people; the Texas-size chunk of ice missing from Antarctica; how an ancient chunk of the moon found in Africa hints at a calamitous lunar collision; and a bizarre viral infection that left a woman unable to recognize her own father.
The next major Californian earthquake could be closer than we thought, according to an alarming new study.
The research, based on historical modeling of earthquake activity, found that Southern California's San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems are at their highest levels of tectonic stress in more than 1,000 years; while also being connected by a "gate" system that could make them rupture together.
The exact odds of each event happening and the timing of a possible future rupture are unknown. But the scientists stress that understanding how much strain is building up inside the system could help to prepare for whatever comes next.
Our eyes are remarkably adaptable, switching from navigating under bright lights to the near pitch-black of a moonless night. But anyone who's stubbed a toe during this acclimation window — and that definitely includes me — may have once or twice asked themselves why it takes our eyes so long to adjust to the dark. Live Science shed a bit of light on the question.
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What do you get if you split a photon? Anywhere from zero to an infinite number of more photons, physicists say.
That's the finding made by a new experiment that simulated a photon being sliced by a shutter under various circumstances, revealing the result was anywhere from zero to one to upwards of an infinite swarm of the tiny light particles. The probability of each of these states corresponded to how quickly the shutter cut the photon.
And the unexpected behavior has some truly profound implications for how we view fundamental particles.
Discover more physics news
—Indonesia's near-identical, 'Twin Peaks' volcanoes form striking mirror image — Earth from space
—Neuroscientists are searching for the 'cellular substrate of loneliness'
China's response to the climate crisis continues to astonish. Over the past two decades, the world's industrial powerhouse has presided over the largest and fastest clean energy buildout in modern history, while also working to bring its carbon emissions to a peak before 2030.
But an underdiscussed aspect of China's climate plans are its bold attempts to geoengineer the environment to be more resilient and better suit human needs. That's why, in his three-part "Taming Nature" series, Live Science's production editor James Price investigated the country's efforts to create a permanent atmospheric river and build the world's biggest dam in earthquake-prone Tibet.
If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are some of the best news analyses, crosswords, interviews, opinion pieces and quizzes published this week.
—A secretive Chinese probe has just arrived at one of Earth's 'quasi-moons' and will soon attempt a first-of-its-kind landing [News analysis]
—Dangerously hot and humid: Rising temperatures in the US make outdoor exercise hazardous [News analysis]
—Rainforest quiz: Can you sort Earth's largest rainforests from biggest to smallest? [Quiz]
—Live Science crossword puzzle #48: Largest fish on Earth — 6 across [Crossword]
European bison (Bison bonasus) are typically considered to be a non-prey species — only being hunted by humans.
But rare and unexpected camera trap footage from Poland's Bialowieza Primeval Forest (the oldest and best-preserved temperate lowland forest in Europe) has called that into question.
In the video, a herd of bison is recorded rallying around a newborn calf to fend off an attack from five wolves (Canis lupus), successfully driving the predators away. It's a nerve wracking watch, and one that could become more common as wolf packs grow in size thanks to a late 1980s hunting ban across the region.
Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.
An asteroid now bears the name of beloved musician Elliott Smith, thanks to one ambitious filmmaker.
Elliott Smith passed away at the age of 34 in 2003, but his impact and his music continue to connect with people around the world. And his influence has now extended to space, thanks to independent filmmaker Orlando Campopiano, who worked to get an asteroid named "Elliottsmith."
"I hope this introduces at least one new person to Elliott's brilliant discography, and I'm happy to see a permanent legacy in the stars! To have this tribute to him blessed by the estate and discoverers is also a great honor," Campopiano told Stereogum.
While listening to the song "Shooting Star," from Smith's album "From a Basement on the Hill," which was released in 2004 following his death, Campopiano had the idea to try and get an asteroid named after Smith, he told Stereogum.
He took this inspiration and ran with it, connecting with Smith's estate and working together to submit a proposal to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which gives official names to cosmic objects, including asteroids. Maybe there are some Elliott Smith fans at the IAU, because the organization actually said yes.
With this positive response, Asteroid (861969) 2014 OS439 is now officially "Elliottsmith."
The asteroid was discovered back in 2014 by the Pan-STARRS 1 (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) project in Hawai'i.
The IAU's announcement of the renaming reads: "Steven Paul 'Elliott' Smith (1969–2003) was an influential, Oscar-nominated American songwriter. His intricate music left a lasting impact on many musicians. Asteroid 861969 honors his birth date, August 6, 1969. Smith often used celestial motifs in his work, notably in the song 'Shooting Star,' which, in hindsight, symbolizes his brief but brilliant light."
As this classification states, this asteroid is more than just a random rock in the sky. Its previous, numerical name 861969 happens to perfectly mirror Smith's birthday. This cosmic alignment makes it feel like this naming was truly meant to be.
You can get a look at the asteroid's place in our solar system on the small-body website of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which you can find here.
The Mini is a bite-sized version of The New York Times' revered daily crossword. While the crossword is a lengthier experience that requires both knowledge and patience to complete, The Mini is an entirely different vibe.
With only a handful of clues to answer, the daily puzzle doubles as a speed-running test for many who play it.
So, when a tricky clue disrupts a player's flow, it can be frustrating! If you find yourself stumped playing The Mini — much like with Wordle and Connections — we have you covered.
Here are the clues and answers to NYT's The Mini for Saturday, June 20, 2026:
The answer is Its.
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The answer is Not.
The answer is Two Face.
The answer is Regimes.
The answer is Origami
The answer is SSE
The answer is Lag
The answer is Ann
The answer is Intros.
The answer is Towers.
The answer is Stogie.
The answer is Kamala.
The answer is Iceman.
The answer is Design.
The answer is Fig.
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Mini Crossword.
Today's Connections: Sports Edition will be easier if you know collegiate sports.
As we've shared in previous hints stories, this is a version of the popular New York Times word game that seeks to test the knowledge of sports fans.
Like the original Connections, the game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight, and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier — so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for the latest Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
The NYT's latest daily word game has launched in association with The Athletic, the New York Times property that provides the publication's sports coverage. The sports Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words, and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake — players get up to four mistakes before the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Yellow: Baseball nicknames
Green: Cyclist clothing
Blue: Geographically specific
Purple: Same word, different meanings
Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:
Yellow: New York Yankees, informally
Green: Tour de France jerseys
Blue: Locations of Big 12 Schools
Purple: What "boot" might mean
Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today's Connections: Sports Edition #635 is...
New York Yankees, informally: BRONX BOMBERS, EVIL EMPIRE, PINSTRIPES, YANKS
Tour de France jerseys: GREEN, POLKA DOT, WHITE, YELLOW
Locations of Big 12 schools: BOULDER, FORT WORTH, MANHATTAN, WACO
What "boot" might mean: CLEAT, EJECT, KICK, MISHANDLE
Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be new sports Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Connections.
Can one question really tell you how a whole life is going? It sounds too simple. A life has work in it, and health, and the people you love, and the quiet sense of whether any of it means anything. Reducing all of that to a single number on a scale feels like measuring an ocean with a teaspoon.
And yet that is more or less what a group of wellbeing researchers argued in earlier this year. In a short reply published in Nature Human Behaviour, the editors of the World Happiness Report made the case that individual wellbeing is best captured “by single self-reports of one’s overall quality of life.” One question, asked directly. That’s the whole proposal.
A quick note before going further. I am not a psychologist, an economist, or a wellbeing researcher of any kind, so take what follows as one curious reader’s reading of a scholarly debate, not advice. The work here is observational social science, and a population-level pattern is never a verdict on how your own life is going.
The argument the 2026 reply is pushing back against has obvious appeal. In 2025, Harvard’s Tyler J. VanderWeele and Baylor’s Byron R. Johnson published early results from the Global Flourishing Study, a survey of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries. Rather than asking one question, they built a composite index across five domains: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships.
You can see why. A person could be financially comfortable and lonely, or healthy and adrift. Stitch the domains together and you get a fuller picture. VanderWeele draws a distinction here between two ideas, and he is careful to hedge it. Wellbeing, he suggests, “might be viewed as all aspects of a person’s life are good as they pertain to that individual, whereas flourishing is all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the context and communities and environments in which that person lives.”
The composite view runs into a problem, though, and I have felt it personally. Ticking the boxes does not reliably move the overall sense of how life is going.
So the counter-argument is not “wellbeing is simple.” It is closer to this: most of what gets bundled into a flourishing index is not wellbeing, it is the stuff that produces wellbeing. The 2026 authors put it carefully, with the hedge intact. In their view, “most of the individual factors that get combined in such an index are causes of wellbeing and not wellbeing itself.”
Health, money, relationships: on this reading, those are inputs. Ask about them and you are measuring the recipe, not the meal. Ask a person to rate their overall life, and the editors argue, “the resulting product is wellbeing, in other words, the quality of life as we experience it.” The person has already done the weighting in their head. They know how much the lonely-but-comfortable trade actually costs them, in a way no fixed formula across 200,000 strangers can.
This is not a fringe idea dreamed up to win an argument. It is how the global rankings already work. The World Happiness Report’s country ordering rests on a single life evaluation question, the Cantril ladder, which asks people to place their life on a 0 to 10 ladder. Gallup asks it of people in more than 140 countries.
Here is that question:
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”
The single question dares to remove almost everything and trust the person to have done the math. There is something honest in that, and something that could go wrong.
But a tidy number can flatter or deceive. A bad week can drag it down; a sunny afternoon can lift it past what you’d say on reflection.
One ordinary evening I tried it on myself. Zero to ten, how good is your life, overall. I landed on a number quickly, which surprised me, and then immediately distrusted it, which surprised me less. The honest answer wasn’t the number. It was the half-minute of weighing that produced it, the things I added in and the things I quietly let go. The number was just where the weighing stopped. Maybe that is the whole point, and maybe it is the catch: the single question doesn’t simplify the life, it just forces you to do the arithmetic.
If any of this is landing closer to home than it is interesting, talking to a good therapist is worth far more than reading this article.
The post In 2026, wellbeing researchers suggested that simply asking people one question about how good their life is overall may be the clearest and most comparable way to measure wellbeing around the world appeared first on Space Daily.
The Moon continues to get more illuminated each night as we work through the lunar cycle. Can you see anything tonight? Keep reading to find out what you might see.
As of Saturday, June 20, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 44% of the moon will be be lit up, according to NASA's Daily Moon Guide.
With just your naked eye, tonight you'll be able to see the Mares Fecunditatis, Serenitatis and Crisium. With binoculars, you'll also catch a glimpse of the Endymion Crater, Posidonius Crater, and the Mare Nectaris.. If you have a telescope, this will help you see all this plus the Apollo 17 landing spot, the Descartes Highlands, and the Rupes Altai.
The next Full Moon will take place on June 29.
According to NASA, the Moon completes one orbit around Earth in about 29.5 days, moving through eight recognised phases along the way. While the same side of the Moon always faces our planet, the amount of its surface lit by the Sun changes as it travels around Earth. As a result, we see the Moon appear in different shapes over the course of a month, from slender crescents and half moons to a bright Full Moon. This repeating sequence of phases is known as the lunar cycle.
New Moon - The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).
Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter - Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon - The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous - The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) - Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
The NYT Connections puzzle today is not too difficult if you're an athlete.
Connections is the one of the most popular New York Times word games that's captured the public's attention. The game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for today's Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
The NYT's latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications' Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Yellow: Partitions
Green: Cold sports
Blue: Reduce, reuse
Purple: A gust
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Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:
Yellow: Dividing structures
Green: Participate in some winter Olympics
Blue: Common recyclables
Purple: What "Draft" might refer to
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The solution to today's Connections #1105 is...
Dividing structures: FENCE, GATE, HEDGE, WALL
Participate in some winter Olympics: CURL, LUGE, SKATE, SKI
Common recyclables: BOTTLE, BOX, CAN, NEWSPAPER
What "Draft" might refer to: BREEZE, ON TAP, RECRUIT, SKETCH
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Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Connections.
The line turns on a single word, and the word is doing more work than it first appears. To understand others is knowledge, something gathered and held. To understand oneself is something else, a state the original Chinese marks with the character ming (明). As Sandra Hill writes for Monkey Press, the character “can be translated as brightness, clarity, illumination, enlightenment.” It is built, fittingly, from the characters for sun (日) and moon (月). Knowledge of others is an accumulation. Self-knowledge, in this reading, is a light.
That distinction is the whole of the verse. Why has it survived twenty-five centuries, and does the gap it names between knowing others and knowing oneself hold up when modern researchers go looking for it?
The verse comes from Chapter 33 of the Tao Te Ching, the principal Taoist text traditionally attributed to Lao Tzu, the “Old Master” usually placed in the sixth century BC. Modern scholarship tends to treat the figure as semi-legendary and the authorship as uncertain, but the text itself, eighty-one chapters, has outlasted every argument about who wrote it.
Part of why the line travels so well is that it survives translation with its core intact. The Chinese reads 知人者智，自知者明. In the Gia-fu Feng and Jane English rendering, it becomes “Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment.”
Dwight Goddard, working in 1919, put it as “He who knows others is intelligent; he who understands himself is enlightened.” Stephen Mitchell’s 1995 version, a loose interpretive rendering rather than a literal translation, reads “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.” The vocabulary shifts across translations, but the underlying structure does not. Every version keeps the same two-part contrast: one kind of knowing pointed outward, a different kind pointed in.
Before going further, a note on register. We are writers reading across philosophy and psychology, not clinicians or credentialed researchers, and the studies below describe patterns across groups of people rather than verdicts about any individual reader.
The psychologist Tasha Eurich has spent years probing the kind of gap Lao Tzu names. In her account on the Blanchard LeaderChat podcast, “Our data reveals that 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware, but the real number is 12 to 15 percent.” Those figures come from her own studies rather than a settled cross-field consensus, so they are best read as one researcher’s finding, not a fixed law. The direction is the interesting part: most people are confident they see themselves clearly, and far fewer actually do.
There is an obvious objection to Lao Tzu’s hierarchy. Surely we have privileged access to our own minds. We can hear our own thoughts; we cannot hear anyone else’s. Shouldn’t self-knowledge be the easy half?
Well, some research suggests the privilege backfires. Psychologist Emily Pronin and Matthew Kugler studied what they call the introspection illusion. When assessing their own bias, participants weighed their introspective sense over the evidence of what they actually did, a generosity they did not extend to others.
That is perhaps the obstacle the verse quietly implies. Knowing others, you have only their actions to go on, and actions are honest in a way intentions often are not. Knowing yourself, you have access to the running commentary, the reasons, the good intentions, and that flood of inside information is exactly what makes the view unreliable.
If any of this lands close to home, a qualified counsellor or therapist is a good person to talk it through with.
The post Thought of the day from Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu: “To understand others is to have knowledge; to understand oneself is to be illumined.” appeared first on Space Daily.
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