Category: English

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Melissa Chim, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Excelsior University

Ahh, Valentine’s Day: the perfect moment to tell your sweetheart how much you love them with a thoughtful card.

But what about people in your life you don’t like so much? Why is there no Hallmark card telling them to get lost?

The Victorians had just the thing: a cruel and mocking version of the traditional Valentine’s Day card. Later coined “vinegar valentines” by 21st-century art collectors and dealers, such cards were usually referred to as mock or mocking valentines during the Victorian era.

Such cards were meant to shock, offend and upset their recipients. Not surprisingly, as with real Valentine’s Day cards, senders often chose to remain anonymous.

Vinegar valentines are what we historians like to call ephemera, that is, materials that are usually not meant to last a long time.

It’s hard to imagine a recipient of a vinegar valentine wanting to keep it lovingly in a frame, and many have been lost to time. But luckily, some vinegar valentines have survived and have been preserved in the collections of many historical institutions, such as Brighton and Hove Museums and the New York Public Library.

One jab at obnoxious sales ladies reads:

“As you wait upon the women

With disgust upon your face

The way you snap and bark at them

One would think you owned the place”

There is even a card for the pretentious poet who pretends to make a living with his art:

“Behold this pale little poet

With a finger at forehead to show it

But the way he gets scads

Is by writing soap ads

But he wants nobody to know it!”

The anonymous nature of the vinegar valentine meant that anyone could be an unwitting recipient. Some cards could poke gentle fun, but others could have quite dangerous results.

In 1885, a resident in the U.K. city of Birmingham, William Chance, was charged with the attempted murder of his estranged wife after he received a vinegar valentine from her. He shot her in the neck, and she was sent to the hospital.

‘Pompous, vain and conceited’

But who could be disliked so much that they would receive a vinegar valentine?

The poor, old and ugly were convenient targets. Unmarried men and women might also receive a vicious rejection from potential partners.

A Feb. 9, 1877, article from the Newcastle Courant notes that “it is the pompous, the vain and conceited, the pretentious and ostentatious who are generally selected as butts for valentine wit.”

Sending such a valentine was a way for ordinary people to enforce social norms disguised as a joke. It was also a way to feel powerful over an already vulnerable person, even if the sender was vulnerable themselves.

Vinegar valentines emerged as a sour offshoot of the cultural ascendancy of Valentine’s Day itself. While rooted in an ancient Roman fertility ceremony, the day was turned into a celebration of love by the Victorians.

The first Valentine’s Day cards in the early 1800s were often made by hand. With the rise of industrialization, by the 1840s and 1850s most cards were produced in factories. These regular Valentine’s Day cards were often decorated with lace and romantic images.

An industry of insults

By the mid-1800s, both Britain and the United States entered into what one historian calls “Valentine’s mania.”

The earliest vinegar valentines were sheets of paper folded like a letter. And to add insult to injury, before the availability of prepaid postage, the recipient had to pay to receive their letter.

Many printers offered vinegar valentines alongside the more traditionally positive and ornate cards. Even the firm Raphael Tuck & Sons, “Publishers to Their Majesties the King and Queen of England,” joined the vinegar valentine craze.

Vinegar valentines made their way across the pond to the United States in the mid-1800s. Some American printers made their own vinegar valentines; others, such as A.S Jordan, imported them from Britain.

During the American Civil War, these cards became a medium to express anger and frustration. If you supported the Union, you could send the following message to an unlucky secessionist from the South:

“You are the man who chuckles when the news

Comes o’er the wires and tells of sad disaster,

Pirates on sea succeeding-burning ships and crews,

Rebels on land marauding, thicker, aye, and faster

You are the two faced villain, though not very bold,

Who would barter your country for might or for gold.”

Votes and valentines

As vinegar valentines continued to be produced throughout the early 1900s, a new target became very popular – the suffragette.

Women fighting for the right to vote were seen by their detractors as unfeminine, and vinegar valentines were a cheap and convenient medium to enforce gender roles. In such cards, suffragettes were usually depicted as ugly spinsters or abusive, lazy wives. One card warns, “A vote from me you will not get, I don’t want a preaching suffragette.” Similarly, another card says:

“You may think it fun poor Cupid to snub,

With the hand of a Suffragette.

But he’s cunning and smart, aye, there’s the rub,

Revenge is the trap he will set.”

There were even cards made for anti-suffragist women looking to secure a husband. One card plaintively proclaims, “In these wild days of suffragette drays, I’m sure you’d ne’er overlook a girl who can’t be militant, but simply loves to cook.”

There were also pro-suffrage Valentine’s Day cards. One card defiantly asks, “And you think you can keep women silent politically? It can’t be did!”

Cupid as a troll

Vinegar valentines continued to be popular through the Golden Age of picture postcards in the early 1900s. They declined in popularity after World War I. This may be due to a decline in card giving overall, or a cultural shift away from “lowbrow” humor. But they never fully went away.

The spirit of the vinegar valentine saw a second revival in the 1950s with the rise of the comic postcard.

And the effects of vinegar valentines can still be seen, and felt, today. Anonymous internet trolls keep up the sniping spirit so prevalent in the Victorian era. Today’s vinegar valentines are extremely online. They are just as spiteful, but the difference is they are emphatically not restricted to one particular day in February.

Melissa Chim does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Valentine’s Day cards too sugary sweet for you? Return to the 19th-century custom of the spicy ‘vinegar valentine’ – https://theconversation.com/valentines-day-cards-too-sugary-sweet-for-you-return-to-the-19th-century-custom-of-the-spicy-vinegar-valentine-273995

Source: The Conversation – USA – By David Joffe, Associate Professor of Physics, Kennesaw State University

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

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Can we generate a way to interact with dark matter with current technology? – Leonardo S., age 13, Guanajuato, Mexico

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That’s a great question. It’s one of the most difficult and fascinating problems right now in both astronomy and physics, because while scientists know that the elusive substance called dark matter makes up the majority of all matter in the universe, we’ve never actually observed it directly. Dark matter is so difficult to interact with because it’s “dark,” which means it doesn’t interact directly with light in any way.

I’m a physicist, and scientists like me observe the world around us mainly by looking for signals from different wavelengths of light. So no matter what type of technology scientists use, they run into the same issue in the hunt for dark matter.

It’s not completely impossible to interact with dark matter, though, because it can interact with ordinary matter in other ways that don’t involve light. But those interactions are generally very weak. What we call dark matter is really anything that we can see only through these weaker interactions, especially gravity.

How we know dark matter exists

One way that dark matter can interact with ordinary matter is through gravity. In fact, gravity is the main reason scientists even think dark matter exists at all.

For decades, scientists have been observing how galaxies spin and move throughout the universe. Gravity acts on stars and galaxies, in the same way it keeps you from floating off into space. Heavier objects have a stronger gravitational pull. At these huge scales, researchers have spotted some unexpected quirks that gravity alone can’t explain.

For example, almost 100 years ago, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky studied a cluster of galaxies called the Coma Cluster. He noticed the galaxies inside it were moving very fast, so much so that they should have flown apart many millions of years ago.

The only way the cluster could have stayed together for so long is if there was much more matter holding it together with gravity than the telescope could see. This extra matter necessary to hold the galaxies together became known as dark matter.

About 40 years after Zwicky, an American astronomer named Vera Rubin looked at the individual stars moving around the centers of spiral galaxies as they rotated. She saw that the stars at the outside edges of the spiral were moving much faster than you’d expect if only the gravity from the stars you could see was keeping them from flying off into intergalactic space.

Just as with the galaxies moving around the cluster, the motion of the stars around the edges of the galaxies could be best explained if there was much more matter in the galaxies than what we could see.

More recently, scientists have combined optical telescopes that observe visible light with X-ray telescopes. Optical telescopes can take pictures of galaxies as they move and rotate. Sometimes, galaxies in these images are distorted or magnified by gravity coming from large masses in front of them. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing, which is when the gravity around a very heavy object is so strong that it bends the light passing by it, acting like a lens.

X-ray telescopes, on the other hand, can see the clusters of hot gases that surround galaxies. By combining these two telescopes, astronomers can see galaxies as well as the gases surrounding them – all the observable matter. Then, they can compare these images with the optical results. If there’s more gravitational lensing seen than what could be caused by the gas, there must be more mass hiding somewhere and causing the lensing.

How we might be able to see dark matter

Unfortunately, all this tells astronomers only that dark matter must be there, not what it really is. The evidence for dark matter is all based on how it interacts with gravity at very large scales. It’s still “dark” to scientists in the sense that it hasn’t interacted directly with any measurement devices.

The good news is that light and gravity aren’t the only forces in the universe. A force called the weak force might be able to interact directly with dark matter and give scientists a direct signal to observe. Most of the ideas about what the dark matter might be include the possibility of it interacting through the weak force, converting energy into signals that are visible.

The weak force is not observable at normal scales of distance. But for objects the size of an atom’s nucleus or smaller, it can change one type of subatomic particle into another. The weak force can also transfer energy and momentum at very short distances – this is the main effect scientists hope to observe with dark matter. These processes might be extremely rare, but in theory they should be possible to see.

Most experiments looking to see dark matter directly are searching for signals of rare weak interactions in an underground detector, or for gamma rays that can be seen in a special gamma-ray telescope.

In either case, a signal from dark matter would likely be very faint, resulting from an interaction that can’t be explained any other way, or a signal that doesn’t seem to have any other possible source. Even if the effect is faint, it might still be possible to observe, and any such signal would be an exciting step forward in being able to see the dark matter more directly.

In the end, it may be a combination of signals from experiments deep underground, in particle colliders, and different types of telescopes that finally lets scientists see dark matter more directly. Whichever technology ends up being successful, hopefully sometime soon the matter that makes up our universe will be a little less dark.

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Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

David Joffe receives funding from NASA through a grant from the Georgia Space Grant Consortium.

– ref. How do scientists hunt for dark matter? A physicist explains why the mysterious substance is so hard to find – https://theconversation.com/how-do-scientists-hunt-for-dark-matter-a-physicist-explains-why-the-mysterious-substance-is-so-hard-to-find-269876

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kevin Omland, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as “primitive” or “ancient” and use terms like “higher” and “lower” animals.

This anthropocentric perspective was entrenched in 1866, when German scientist Ernst Haeckel drew one of the first trees of life. He placed “Man,” clearly labeled, at the top. This illustration helped establish the popular view that we are the ultimate goal of evolution.

Modern evolutionary biology and genomics debunk that flawed perspective, showing there is no hierarchy in evolution. All species alive today, from chimpanzees to bacteria, are cousins that each have equally long lineages, rather than ancestors or descendants.

Unfortunately, these outdated notions remain prevalent in scientific journals and science journalism. In my new book, “Understanding the Tree of Life,” I explore why it is fundamentally misleading to view any current species as primitive, ancient or simple. As an evolutionary biologist, I offer an alternative view that emphasizes evolution’s complex, nonhierarchical, interconnected history.

Not primitive, just different

Egg-laying mammals, the monotremes, are frequently labeled the most “primitive” living mammals. This category includes the platypus and four species of echidnas. Indeed, their egg-laying is an ancient characteristic shared with reptiles.

But platypuses also have many unique recent adaptations that make them well suited to their lifestyle: They have webbed feet for swimming and a bill with specialized electroreceptors that detect prey in the mud. Males have spurs with venom that they can use to defend themselves against rivals. If you take a platypus’s view, they’re the pinnacle of evolution for their specific ecological niche.

Echidnas may seem primitive, especially because they lack a capability that humans have – giving birth to live young. Yet they possess many extraordinary traits that humans lack. Echidnas are known for their outer covering of protective spines. They also have powerful claws for digging, a sensitive beak and a long sticky tongue, all of which they use foraging for ants and termites. In a head-to-head competition foraging for prey in a termite mound, an echidna would easily outperform any human.

Other mammals native to Australia also turn up on lists of primitive mammals, such as many species of marsupials – pouched mammals, including kangaroos, koalas and wombats. These species generally give birth to small, minimally developed young that move to the mother’s pouch where they complete development. Pouch development may seem inferior to the human way, but it does have advantages. For example, kangaroos can simultaneously nurture young at three stages of development.

Evolutionary tree appearance depends on focus

Marsupials such as opossums, or monotremes such as the platypus, are often shown at the bottom or left side of an evolutionary tree. However, that does not mean that they are older, more primitive or less evolved.

Evolutionary trees – what scientists call phylogenies – show cousin relationships. Just as your second or third cousin is no more primitive than you are, it is misleading to think of a koala or echidna as primitive because of where they are depicted on these trees.

When scientists and journalists choose which species to include in the evolutionary trees in their publications, it can influence how the public perceives these species. But species shown lower on the page are not “lower” on some evolutionary scale.

Rather, they are placed there because the focus of many of those trees is on placental mammals, such as humans, other primates, carnivores, rodents and so on. When the focus is on placental mammals, it makes sense to include one or two species of marsupials as comparisons for reference.

In contrast, in a tree focused on marsupials, one or two placental mammals could be included at the bottom of the page for comparison.

Why understanding the tree of life matters

Viewing humans as the goal of evolution leads to a misunderstanding of the entire evolutionary process. Since evolution is the conceptual foundation for all biology, this flawed perspective can hinder all biological and biomedical science.

Mastering a modern understanding of evolutionary trees is crucial to advances in fields ranging from animal behavior and physiology to conservation and biomedicine. For example, because rhesus monkeys are much more closely related to us than are capuchins, rhesus monkeys are generally better subjects for preliminary tests of human vaccines. Opossums, incorrectly considered to be primitive, are a great species for providing a broader framework for studies of neurobiology and aging because they are distantly related to us, not because they are lower or more ancestral.

Grasping the profound reality that humans are not the pinnacle of evolution, but one branch among many, is foundational for all modern biology. Understanding the tree of life is central to fully embracing the shared modern status of all animals, from platypuses to people.

Kevin Omland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. No animal alive today is ‘primitive’ – why are so many still labeled that way? – https://theconversation.com/no-animal-alive-today-is-primitive-why-are-so-many-still-labeled-that-way-266208

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Md S Hossain, Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington

Globally, more than 400 million tons of plastic are produced each year, and less than 10% is recycled. Much of the rest ends up burned, buried or drifting through waterways, a problem that’s only getting worse.

As a civil engineer, I started asking a simple question: Instead of throwing used plastic away, what if we could build something useful with it?

That question led to a technology that mixes small amounts of recycled plastic with asphalt – the black, sticky material used to make roads and parking lots. The result is a stronger road that lasts longer and keeps some used plastic out of the environment.

You can see these roads on my university’s campus at the University of Texas at Arlington, where my team has paved test sections in parking lots. Perhaps more importantly for testing this technology at scale, we have constructed a one-mile section of plastic-infused road in Rockwall, Texas, a city near Dallas. We’ve gotten interest from more cities in and outside Texas as well.

My goal is to take one problem – plastic pollution – and use it to fix another: deteriorating roads.

Where the idea came from

I grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Bangladesh, near a large dump site. As a child, I noticed that people living closest to the piles of waste were often sick, while those farther away were healthier.

At the time, I didn’t know the science behind it – I just saw neighbors having to choose between buying medicine and buying dinner. That memory left a long-lasting impact on me.

Years later, when I became an engineer, I learned that poor waste management doesn’t just harm the environment – it harms people. That realization became the foundation of my work.

How plastic roads work

Traditional asphalt is made from a mix of stones, sand and a petroleum-based binder called bitumen, which holds everything together. In my research team’s process, we replace a small part of that bitumen – about 8% to 10% – with melted plastic from everyday items, such single-use plastic bags and plastic bottles. For our plastic road construction project near Dallas, we used 4.5 tons of plastic waste for nearly a mile of a one-lane road.

We first clean the plastic, then shred it into small flakes. Finally, we mix it into the asphalt at high temperatures. These steps ensure that it melts completely and bonds tightly, leaving no loose plastic behind.

This process is like adding rebar to concrete: The plastic adds flexibility and strength. Roads with this mix can better handle extreme temperatures and heavy traffic. In hot places, that means fewer cracks and potholes.

During an extreme heat wave in April 2024, plastic road constructed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, showed no visible signs of distress or cracks, whereas many roads in Bangladesh had visible cracks and distress during the same period.

It also reduces the demand for new petroleum-based materials, since we’re reusing recycled plastic that already exists. Plastic road replaces bitumen, an already petroleum-based ingredient in the road, with waste.

The plastic waste problem

Plastic waste has grown dramatically over the past several decades. In the U.S., plastic waste has increased every year since the 1960s, with the steepest rise between 1980 and 2000.

In 2018 alone, landfills received nearly 27 million tons of plastic, making up 18.5% of all municipal solid waste nationwide. That’s a staggering amount of material sitting unused.

Plastic-infused asphalt can also save money. Because it lasts longer and resists cracking, cities may spend less on repairs and maintenance. In Rockwall, for example, early estimates suggest these roads could extend the pavement’s life by several years.

Under extreme heat, bitumen can melt. During a performance evaluation of a plastic road test section in Bangladesh, we found that adding plastic to the mix increases the road’s heat resistance. These results are especially helpful for states like Texas that deal with extreme heat over the summer. For our sites in UTA’s parking lot and in Rockwall, the pavement has so far stayed intact on days when temperatures surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Overcoming challenges

But there are still challenges. Scaling up production requires a consistent supply of clean, sorted plastic, which not all cities have the infrastructure to provide. Some types of plastic can’t be safely melted or may release harmful fumes if not processed correctly. We’re studying these issues closely to make sure the process is safe.

There are also questions about what happens when plastic roads reach the end of their life. Could they release microplastics – tiny plastic fragments – as they wear down? Early research suggests the risk is low because the plastic is bound within the asphalt, but we’re continuing to monitor it.

My own lab studies show very minimal microplastic release, and a 2024 study found that the release of microplastics from recycled plastic-asphalt was estimated to be a thousand times less than the release of rubber particles from worn tires.

Eventually, we may need to come up with alternative materials for these roads if plastic waste begins to decline. But in the meantime, this type of waste is still readily available.

Building toward a sustainable future

Our next steps involve expanding this technology to more regions, testing different types of plastic blends and ensuring that every road built this way is durable, affordable and environmentally safe.

Right now, we are working on testing and implementing plastic roads in cities beyond Texas and even in other countries. We also have filed for a patent for the technology and in the long term plan to eventually commercialize it.

When I see plastic roads being built in Bangladesh – sometimes not far from where I grew up – I think back to the people who lived near those dump sites. This work isn’t just about roads or recycling. It’s about dignity and keeping at least some waste away from the places where people live.

Md S Hossain is listed under a patent filed for plastic-infused asphalt.

– ref. Infusing asphalt with plastic could help roads last longer and resist cracking under heat – https://theconversation.com/infusing-asphalt-with-plastic-could-help-roads-last-longer-and-resist-cracking-under-heat-264156

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charles Edward Gehrke, Deputy Division Director of Wargame Design and Adjudication, US Naval War College

In the first weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a strange pattern emerged in Western media coverage. Headlines oscillated between confidence and confusion. Kyiv would fall within days, one story would claim, then another would argue that Ukraine was winning. Russian forces were described as incompetent, then as a terrifying existential threat to NATO.

Analysts spoke with certainty about strategy, morale and endgames, but often reversed themselves within weeks. To many news consumers, this felt like bias – either pro-Ukraine framing or anti-Russia narratives. Some commentators accused Western media outlets of cheerleading or propaganda.

But I’d argue that something more subtle was happening. The problem was not that journalists were biased. It was that journalism could not keep pace with the war’s informational structure. What looked like ideological bias was, more often, temporal lag.

I serve in the Navy as a war gamer. The most critical part of my job is identifying institutional failures. Trust is one of the most critical and, in this sense, the media is losing ground.

The gap between what people experience in real time and what journalism can responsibly publish has widened. This gap is partly where trust erodes. Social media collapses the distance between event, exposure and interpretation. Claims circulate before journalists can evaluate them.

This matters in my world because the modern battlefield is not just physical. Drone footage circulates instantly. Social media channels release claims in real time. Intelligence leaks surface before diplomats can respond.

These dynamics also matter for the public at large, which encounters fragments of reality, often through social media, long before any institution can responsibly absorb and respond to them.

Journalism, by contrast, is built for a slower world.

Slow journalism

At the core of their work, journalists observe events, filter signal from noise, and translate complexity into narrative. Their professional norms – editorial gatekeeping, standards for sourcing, verification of facts – are not bureaucratic relics. They are the mechanisms that produce coherence rather than chaos.

But these mechanisms evolved when information arrived more slowly and events unfolded sequentially. Verification could reasonably precede publication. Under those conditions, journalism excelled as a trusted intermediary between raw events and public understanding.

These conditions no longer exist.

Information now arrives continuously, often without clear provenance. Social media platforms amplify fragments of reality in real time, while verification remains necessarily slow. The key constraint is no longer access; it is tempo.

Granted, reporters often present accounts as events are occurring, whether on live broadcasts or through their own social media posts. Still, in this environment, journalism’s traditional strengths become sources of lag.

Caution delays response. Narrative coherence hardens fast. Corrections then feel like reversals rather than refinements.

Covering real-time events

The war in Ukraine has made this failure mode unusually visible. Modern warfare generates data faster than any institution can metabolize. Battlefield video and real-time casualty claims flood the system continuously.

For their part, journalists are forced to operate from an impossible position: expected to interpret events at the same speed they are livestreamed. And so journalists are forced sometimes to improvise.

Early coverage of the war leaned on simplified frames, including Russian incompetence, imminent victory and decisive turning points. They provided provisional stories generated to satisfy intense public demand for clarity.

As the war evolved, however, those stories collapsed.

This did not mean the original reporting was malicious. It meant the narrative update cycle lagged behind the underlying reality. What analysts experienced as iterative learning, audiences experienced as contradiction.

The acceleration trap

This forces journalism into a reactive posture. Verification trails amplification, meaning accurate reports often arrive after the audience has already formed a first impression.

This inverts journalism’s historical role. Audiences encounter raw claims first and journalism second. When the two diverge, journalism appears disconnected from reality as people experienced it.

Over time, this produces a structural shift in trust. Journalism is no longer perceived as the primary interpreter of events, but as one voice among many, arriving late. Speed becomes a proxy for relevance. Interpretation without immediacy is discounted.

Although partisan bias certainly exists, it is insufficient to explain the systemic incoherence Americans are witnessing.

Can journalism adapt?

Institutions optimized for one tempo rarely adapt cleanly to another. Journalism is now confronting the risk that its interpretive cycle no longer matches the speed of the world it is trying to explain.

Its future credibility will depend less on accusations of bias or even error than the question of whether it can reconcile rigor with speed, perhaps by trading the illusion of early certainty for the transparency of real-time doubt.

If it cannot, trust will continue to drain. An institution that evolved to help society see is falling behind what society is already watching.

The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

Charles Edward Gehrke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Journalism may be too slow to remain credible once events are filtered through social media – https://theconversation.com/journalism-may-be-too-slow-to-remain-credible-once-events-are-filtered-through-social-media-273748