Michael Richardson, a special collections librarian at the University of Bristol, found the parchment pieces glued into a 15th-century book in 2019, reports Sarah Durn for Atlas Obscura. Since then, Campbell and colleagues Leah Tether and Benjamin Pohl, both medieval historians at Bristol, have concluded that the pages made their way to England about 80 years after they were written. //

“We know it was in England by that point [because] someone has written ‘my god’ in the margins in English,” Campbell tells Atlas Obscura. “From the handwriting, we’ve dated that to the early 14th century.”

By 1520, the pages had ended up in a scrap pile at a British bookshop, where they were used as binding materials for a French philosophy text. That book found its way to the Bristol public library sometime after the collection’s establishment in 1613. As the scholars explain in a statement, the book’s “likely route to Bristol” was Archbishop of York Tobias Matthew, who co-founded the library and collected many books in Oxford. Matthew left his collection to the library after his death in 1628.

The text probably remained at the library until Richardson discovered the pages in 2019. Now, the scholars have published the translation, as well as their study of the manuscript fragments, in a book titled The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment. //

The team found that the account differed from other versions of the story in several key ways. A sexual encounter between Merlin and Viviane, also known as the Lady of the Lake, is “slightly toned-down,” Tether tells the Guardian. //

Merlin’s image has changed dramatically over the centuries. In more modern versions of the King Arthur legends, he is a wise advisor to the king. In the earliest iterations of the story, however, Campbell says he was a “morally dubious” magical seer or even a “creepy little boy [whose] father is a devil.”

Where do things go from here? They go nowhere. There is no massive “right-wing” threat. There will be no redux of January 6th. Democrats are going to have to compete in 2022 on their own merits, and boy, do their merits suck. The feds can keep poking and prodding, hoping to stoke a reaction that provides fodder, but it seems no one is up for taking the bait. Thus, you end up with today’s laughable scene.

This country has real problems. People gathering to protest is not one of them. And let’s not forget that while the feds were wasting masses of men and resources to stand around at a non-violent rally, the Southern border is quite literally being invaded due to a lack of law enforcement personnel. That’s the idiocy of our government perfectly illustrated.

Rush
@exRAF_Al
This is a seminal moment. The police hold power through illusion, they are only bestowed moral authority. Once it’s gone it’s gone - and it has gone, openly now. The issue now for Australian coppers is where do they go from here? #Australia #Melbourne //

What happens when the government has pushed normally law-abiding people much too far, completely abridging their basic freedoms? This is what happens, and it’s likely just the start. It’s likely to get even crazier there, as people let the government know that they’ve had enough.

Even taking into account the physical separation of second-factors I mentioned earlier, and the reliance on your smartphone, it’s still a win-win for most people, most of the time. That’s becuase most people don’t have unique, long, complex, random passwords for every account and use a password manager to, well, manage them. That said, if you do, then there’s no real rush to dump your password access route to be honest.

When it comes to finding ways to help people deal with life's challenges, it would be strange if thousands of years of religious thought didn’t have something to offer. //

This story is adapted from How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno.

Even though I was raised Catholic, for most of my adult life, I didn’t pay religion much heed. Like many scientists, I assumed it was built on opinion, conjecture, or even hope, and therefore irrelevant to my work. That work is running a psychology lab focused on finding ways to improve the human condition, using the tools of science to develop techniques that can help people meet the challenges life throws at them. But in the 20 years since I began this work, I’ve realized that much of what psychologists and neuroscientists are finding about how to change people’s beliefs, feelings, and behaviors—how to support them when they grieve, how to help them be more ethical, how to let them find connection and happiness—echoes ideas and techniques that religions have been using for thousands of years. //

Regularly taking part in religious practices lessens anxiety and depression, increases physical health, and even reduces the risk of early death. These benefits don’t come simply from general social contact. There’s something specific to spiritual practices themselves.The ways these practices leverage mechanisms of our bodies and minds can enhance the joys and reduce the pains of life. Parts of religious mourning rituals incorporate elements science has recently found to reduce grief. Healing rites contain elements that can help our bodies heal themselves simply by strengthening our expectations of a cure. Religions didn’t just find these psychological tweaks and nudges long before scientists arrived on the scene, but often packaged them together in sophisticated ways that the scientific community can learn from.

The surprise my colleagues and I felt when we saw evidence of religion’s benefits was a sign of our hubris, born of a common notion among scientists: All of religion is superstition and, therefore, could have little practical benefit. I’ll admit that we’re unlikely to learn much about the nature of the universe or the biology of disease from religion. But when it comes to finding ways to help people deal with issues surrounding birth and death, morality and meaning, grief and loss, it would be strange if thousands of years of religious thought didn’t have something to offer.

Over the past few years, as I’ve looked back at the results of my studies and those of other researchers, I’ve come to see a nuanced relationship between science and religion. I now view them as two approaches to improving people’s lives that frequently complement each other. It’s not that I’ve suddenly found faith or have a new agenda to defend religion. I firmly believe that the scientific method is a wonder, and offers one of the best ways to test ideas about how the world works. Like any good scientist, I’m simply following the data without prejudice. And it’s humbling.

Rather than scoffing at religion and starting psychological investigations from scratch, we scientists should be studying rituals and spiritual practices to understand their influence, and where appropriate, create new techniques and therapies informed by them.

Free video editing software that works like a champ

DaVinci Resolve 16 for Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems uses innovative smart technology that allows you to make quick edits to your video clips or packages. The downloadable software works great for teams as projects can be accessed by anyone on a team from anywhere.

Almost every afternoon in the Dworzak neighborhood of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Yebu Bare hikes up a steep hillside to fill a 5-gallon bucket with water that spills from a crack in a giant cement cistern. The spindly 12-year-old carefully puts the bucket on her head, then treks down the winding dirt path home.

Her mother, Isate Bare, says their family needs five buckets of this water a day for bathing, washing dishes and cleaning. Isate, Yebu and her siblings take turns hauling it.

A consortium of companies including Intel, Motorola, and AMD began studying EUV as the next step in lithography in the 1990s. ASML joined in 1999, and as a leading maker of lithography technology, sought to develop the first EUV machines. Extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV for short, allows a much shorter wavelength of light (13.5 nanometers) to be used, compared with deep ultraviolet, the previous lithographic method (193 nanometers).

But it has taken decades to iron out the engineering challenges. Generating EUV light is itself a big problem. ASML’s method involves directing high-power lasers at droplets of tin 50,000 times per second to generate high-intensity light. Lenses absorb EUV frequencies, so the system uses incredibly precise mirrors coated with special materials instead. Inside ASML’s machine, EUV light bounces off several mirrors before passing through the reticle, which moves with nanoscale precision to align the layers on the silicon. //

ASML’s new machine introduces an additional trick to produce smaller features on a chip: a larger numerical aperture, which increases the resolution of imaging by allowing light to travel through the optics at different angles. This requires significantly larger mirrors and new software and hardware to precisely control the components. ASML’s current generation of EUV machines can create chips with a resolution of 13 nanometers. The next generation will use High-NA to craft features 8 nanometers in size. //

Demand for faster chips is hardly likely to go down. Mark Lundstrom, a professor at Purdue who began working in the chip industry in the 1970s, wrote an article for Science magazine in 2003 that predicted Moore’s law would run into physical limits within a decade. “In my career, multiple times we thought ‘OK, this is the end,’” he says. “But there's no danger at all that things will slow down in 10 years. We'll just have to do it differently.”

Lundstrom remembers visiting his first microchip conference in 1975. “There was this fellow named Gordon Moore giving a talk,” he recalls. “He was well known within the technical community, but nobody else knew him.”

“And I remember the talk that he gave,” Lundstrom adds. “He said, ‘We will soon be able to place 10,000 transistors on a chip.’ And he added, 'What could anyone possibly do with 10,000 transistors on a chip?’”

As we reported earlier, there were more police and media than demonstrators at the Justice for J6 rally in DC today. //

These guys were so obvious that a lot of people had fun mocking them — the coordinated shirts, shorts, watches, and sunglasses. Also, what looked like possible guns in their pockets. //

But it’s hilarious that even the participant allegedly arrested for a gun was actually law enforcement of some sort. So many feds, they’re arresting each other.

Fed-a-palooza.

Powered by a Jet Engine, the Chrysler Turbine Car Could Run on Perfume or Tequila

With a jet engine adapted for automotive use that could gobble up almost any flammable liquid, the Chrysler Turbine Car was one of the most revolutionary vehicles that ever roamed on American roads.

In our search for speed, humans have achieved some pretty amazing feats. That’s not to say that there haven’t been some crazy ideas, some that actually ended quite badly for the speed seekers. However, let’s take a look at what happens when you strap a jet engine to a standard road bike and live to tell the tale.