Recommended Links of the Week (No. 653)

The Recommended Links are on fire with so much power and super interesting stuff. Just to tempt you, look what we have: albino trees, abandoning reason, the myth of washing roots, the rainbow islands and FOMO. Are you going to miss it?

The human race is abandoning reason, according to a study: "A group of scientists has discovered that the growing irrelevance of factual truth in public discourse is part of an increasing trend that began decades ago: over the last forty years, public interest has undergone an accelerated shift from the collective to the individual, and from rationality to emotion. A new study conducted by researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Indiana University in the United States concludes that the language used in public discourse over the last 40 years shows that factual truth and rationality are losing importance compared to intuition and emotion."

Washing the myth of washing roots: "When we search for 'root washing', the results take us to hundreds of articles that promote it but don't cite sources that validate their claims. There are two investigations that analyzed the topic and the results question this technique. Another study showed that excess nutrients from agribusiness end up contaminating water and complicating its purification. Is it worth washing roots? Will the cannabis industry be green if roots are washed on an industrial scale?"

That time an astronaut thought they were going to die but would have 60 seconds to curse Mission Control before their ship burned up: "It was already known that the loss of tiles could be a serious problem, but on television images not much was visible. So once in orbit, NASA engineers asked to use the robotic arm to take images and assess the situation. When the astronauts recorded the starboard wing area, they were devastated: some tiles seemed to have disappeared, hundreds of others were damaged, and there was even damage to the wing fiber panels."

Albino trees - The plant vampires: "We all know what albinism is, a condition that causes genetic alterations in the pigmentation system or, in other words, the melanin in the skin. Now, this condition not only occurs in people, but albinism has also been recorded in animals and plants. Albino trees? Yes, as you read it; beautiful whitish trees that stand like legendary ghosts of a forest and survive for centuries and centuries for some strange reason."

Thomas Selfridge, the first man to die in a plane crash: "After a while flying, the right propeller broke and that caused a series of problems on the plane: a broken cable, loose fasteners… the result was that the flight plunged nose-first toward the ground. Orville Wright, the pilot, managed to glide for a few meters, but he couldn't avoid the disaster. The flight ended with a crash into the ground with the nose of the plane and both crew members thrown into the air. Selfridge hit the base of his skull and died a few hours later."

Life expectancy and end of service of a Roman soldier: "The legionary's job is the only one that allows a free man, deprived of goods and skills, to become someone by achieving a privileged status, that of 'veteranus'. Succeeding in the militias therefore implies surviving their communities, their comrades in arms, half of whom would not reach the end of their twenty-five or twenty-six years of service, to receive the promised bonus: twelve years of salary at once for a legionary of Vespasian or Titus, ten years for those of Domitian."

Rainbow Islands: "'Rainbow Islands' is the sequel to another great classic, 'Bubble Bobble', which, as we have seen on many occasions, does not limit itself to repeating the formula of success with few additions, but reinvents and improves it, turning this title into a gem of such caliber that it could almost have done without any connection to the original because it shines on its own with a force and intensity that, in many aspects, certainly leaves many games of its genre in the dust even today."

Mme Abomah, the beautiful African giantess who was the tallest woman in the world: "Ella Williams, better known by her stage name Mme Abomah (Madame Abomah), worked for years in the entertainment world at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Due to her impressive height of 2.28 meters, she was regularly promoted as the tallest woman in the world and, thanks to her beauty, she also received on many occasions the nickname of 'the beautiful African giantess'."

FOMO syndrome or the fear of missing out: do you know if you suffer from it?: "FOMO, an acronym for Fear of Missing Out, also known as the fear of missing something, is part of the new health problems of our time, since social networks burst into our lives. So much so that it has been recognized by psychologists as a disorder that can lead to serious emotional and mental problems. If you still don't know what it is and you're interested in knowing what the symptoms are to identify if you suffer from it, today we tell you everything you should know about FOMO syndrome and what you should do to avoid suffering from it."

Larisa Savitskaya, survivor of a 5 km free fall after a plane crash in the Far East: "Forty years ago, the tranquility of the sky over the Far East, near the city of Zavitinsk (800 kilometers northwest of Vladivostok), was ruined by the collision of two planes. It happened on August 24, 1981: a Tu-16K missile carrier collided with an An-24RV passenger plane, which was flying from Komsomolsk-on-Amur (910 kilometers northeast of Vladivostok) to Blagoveshchensk (860 kilometers northwest of Vladivostok). The military plane, for its part, was conducting meteorological intelligence reconnaissance."

On science in science fiction: "Science in science fiction is an imaginary used to spur the sense of wonder and make it display all the splendor it carries within and of which it is capable. It is an explanatory and rational corpus, orchestrated to support a feeling, a thought, an idea. And science is, in itself, imaginary. That there are errors or scientific inconsistencies in a science fiction novel is irrelevant. Yes, sure, I am aware that it can grate to the point of throwing us out of the reading, but in that case it will be an extraliterary element that is throwing us out."

The four Golden Hats of the Bronze Age: "Between the 19th and 20th centuries, four curious objects similar to large conical hats were found in southern Germany and France. They are made of thin gold sheets and researchers believe they could be a kind of calendars. All of them seem to have been deliberately and carefully buried almost 3,000 years ago. The first was discovered in 1835 near the German town of Schifferstadt, in Rhineland-Palatinate."

VIDEOS: Coin organizing machine, how to open bottles without a bottle opener, where are now 30 vehicles from 80s series, Spider-Man: No Way Home, turning poop into infinite energy, The Vega Brothers (Trailer), birds exchange trash for food, clearing snow from the roof, Is Elon Musk a fraud?, drugs in the Viking age, puppy saved by drone and sausage, Humans (Robot Chicken), a museum that scares, Arthur C. Clarke anticipating desktop computers in 1974, inside the Statue of Liberty, Song of the Sun (2021 by Choe U-Ram), the evolution of warp in Star Trek, Yu Su - Melaleuca, the shorts The Cameraman's Revenge (1912) and The Windshield Wiper and, to finish, 12 hours of silent films in a row.

GALLERY: The indigenous peoples of Siberia, winners of Ocean Photographic Art, Park My Spaceship, art in food, watercolor portraits, pin-ups of heroic women, the cover girls of RC Magazine, aerial photographs by Dimitar Karanikolov, the Ford Gyron, pretty girls in ice water, color photos of a family circus from the 50s, behind the scenes of The Predator, making room on the aircraft carrier, Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.