Recommended Links of the Week (No. 664)

Amazon destroys, mass extinction, spoiled brains, the words of mushrooms, and ancient beer. Want more? Keep reading, because that's all you need for the full Recommended Links experience. Enjoy!

Beer in the Roman world: "Beer is without doubt the oldest alcoholic beverage. Its invention was probably down to chance: abandoned wet grain or even a ritual offering, since it was customary to consume sacrifices after offering them to the deity. This drink almost certainly appeared in Mesopotamia. One of the oldest attested cooking recipes appears in a Mesopotamian culinary treatise, a recipe for making beer. The women of the time were the ones who made it, a fact found in almost every culture."

Working at 10 p.m. is increasingly common: flexibility or perversion of remote work?: "Traditionally, workers tend to have two peaks of work during the day, mid-morning and after lunch, according to Microsoft data and various earlier studies. However, 30% of the workers in the Redmond study showed that, in addition to those two, they had a third one around 10 p.m., probably after dinner."

The story of Daira, Rokitansky syndrome, and what it's like to be born without a vagina: "The young woman had never menstruated, but she thought it was normal, because since she was four she had been diagnosed with diabetes and since then she was told that the disease is related to some menstrual cycle disorders. In her search for answers, she went to an endocrinologist, who ordered a chest study to rule out another problem. That is how she came to the ultrasound that changed her life on May 14, 2015."

30 moments photographed for the first time in history: "All this changed from the 19th century on, when the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took a photograph from the window of his house in Le Gras, probably the first photograph in history, or at least the oldest surviving photograph. From then on, the photographic process began to evolve and improve rapidly. By the end of the 19th century, photography had already gained some popularity, capturing unique moments for the first time that would remain for posterity printed in a photographic image."

The astronomer who designed the first steam vehicle in history, as a gift for the emperor of China: "All these instruments were very large, made of brass and profusely decorated with oriental motifs, with huge bronze dragons as supports. Despite their size and weight, they were easy to handle, which shows Verbiest's great skill in mechanical design. It is also known that he experimented with steam to propel ships, and around that time he designed, as a toy for the emperor, a steam-powered vehicle."

Mushrooms may be able to 'talk': "It has long been known that mushrooms emit electrical signals that could serve them to communicate. Something like those that travel through human neurons. However, a new study, published in The Royal Society Open Science, has found a way to translate the spikes of those electrical signals into a kind of language. Almost as if they were words in the spoken communication method we humans use. Therefore, it could be said that they have discovered how mushrooms talk."

This is how the last hunter-gatherer lived according to her remains: "Buried in an upright position, with crossed legs, the last hunter-gatherer of history appears to have been an ancient shaman in Sweden. The burial took place, according to the information from her bones, at least 7,000 years ago. The woman was buried with her torso fully upright, surely by the members of the clan to which she belonged. The people who carried out her funeral ritual in that remote past decided that, to rest perpetually, she should be seated with her legs crossed. Millennia later, that is how her remains were found."

Spoiled brains: how we fall into unhappiness by trying to avoid unhappiness: "Besides fleeing from pain, we have now reached a point of not tolerating even minor forms of discomfort. The longing for happiness has reached a point where we constantly seek to distract ourselves from the present, to avoid it with continuous entertainment: 'We all flee from pain, some take pills, others browse the internet on the couch while watching Netflix; however, all this attempt to isolate ourselves from pain seems to have made our pain worse.' Seeking happiness makes us unhappy."

The mental weakness caused by female genitalia: "Nineteenth-century doctors considered that in nature females were always the passive subject and prisoner of the sexual system. Therefore, they connected this interpretation, their social position, functions, aptitudes and roles with their sexual organs. Anything that affected these organs would have repercussions on their brain and on woman in general, whether her emotional predominance, her aptitude for child-rearing, her moral sensitivity, her domestic tendency, her affection and her natural purity. It is because of this connection between the sexual organs and the brain that they feared 'nervous attacks'."

An engineer is building a post-apocalyptic internet in case of global disaster: "The world as we know it could end at any moment. But there are those who are already preparing for it: the preppers. At Magnet we have talked about this curious lifestyle. Fire, food, water: they are the three starting points of a community of people who will not be caught off guard by the end of the world. But there are those who go even further. An engineer has built an alternative Internet in case of apocalypse, a new communications protocol resistant to disasters."

Everything Amazon destroys: "Amazon kills. Marathon workdays cause numerous pathologies and injuries, according to MacGillis, who has even found deaths, documenting at least six workers who have died since 2013 while working at an Amazon center. He particularly reconstructs the lives of two of them. One is Jody Rhoads, whose neck was trapped in 2014 between a forklift and a steel shelf at a Carlisle center in Pennsylvania. The company denied that it was a work accident, but 'the autopsy made it clear that it was not a "natural death", as they said.'"

Humanity is 'mirroring' the causes of the Permian mass extinction: "Scientists have discovered a previously unknown factor that caused the Permian mass extinction: the uncontrolled appearance of toxic microbes in fresh and salt waters that made them incapable of supporting life. This was possible for three reasons that, as has been proven, occur in every period of global warming: the emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases (before by volcanoes, now by man), a strong rise in temperatures, and the excessive input of nutrients into the waters from land (as happens, for example, in the Mar Menor)."

Videos

Videos: Extreme close-up of a face mask, spider flying with electric field, the effects of Mad Max: Fury Road, leech sucking blood, ancient "Street Fighter II: THE RIDE!!!!", Moonlight Dubstep Remix, Playboy bunny auditions (1972-75), see photosynthesis in real time, moving stones in the Mojave Desert, "perpetual motion", raccoon steals camera, new sounds for the classic piano, parrot singing, drone in a deserted Shanghai, absolutely awesome, baby trying a strawberry for the first time, San Francisco created by artificial intelligence, the stars of the Mojave, Miniatur Wunderland in 360°, otters versus vacuum cleaner, and the horror short: The Home

Galleries

Galleries: the atlas of the last /r/place, ancient people sticking out their tongues, the boxers of George Moore's circus, memories of arcade machines, street photography by Jeffrey de Keyser, watercolors of pretty girls and grandmothers with shotguns, superheroes and demons, the mundane made abstract, embroidery of cartoons, Toraji's heroines, rhinoceros and zebra are friends, Marilyn Monroe as the Queen of Cheesecake, giant solar farms, Altamira cave art, the Vertedero Animado and the Tiradero Visual.

OK, enough links for now. See you next time and thanks for visiting!