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But the Indian Government says in a press release: "Considering the large size of our community, the number of deaths is quite normal."The point officials are making is that there are about half a million Indian workers in Qatar, and about 250 deaths per year - and this, in their view, is not a cause for concern. In fact, Indian government data suggests that back home in India you would expect a far higher proportion to die each year - not 250, but 1,000 in any group of 500,000 25-30-year-old men. Even in the UK, an average of 300 for every half a million men in this age group die each year.Tim noonan from the ITUC believes the comparison is misleading. The migrant workers in Qatar are not only young, they are fit. "Qatar requires them to be given a medical examination to screen them for pre-existing conditions, so this is comparing apples and pears," he says. Of course, India is a very poor country and Qatar is a very rich country - the richest in the world in terms of GDP per capita - so it's perfectly reasonable to say that Qatar should do better by its migrant workers. But then it is. So is the figure of 1,200 Qatar World Cup deaths just meaningless? no, says Tim noonan. He denies the ITUC came up with the figure just to get headlines. In fact he thinks the real figure may well be higher. "To describe a problem is the correct thing to do," he says. "And we believe we've described it accurately and conservatively."

This kind of feedback loop—wherein an error that appears on Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original falsehood—is a documented phenomenon. There’s even a Wikipedia article describing it.

According to Keynes, the nineteenth century had unleashed such a torrent of technological innovation—“electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production”—that further growth was inevitable. The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century, and this, in concert with ever greater “technical improvements,” would usher in the fifteen-hour week.

Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community. Few would deny, for example, that American Jews who still speak Yiddish in the home are a tighter-knit community, less assimilated into Anglophone American life and less at odds with questions about Jewish identity, than Jews who speak only English.

From ghosts to gods, human beings have invested enormous effort trying to understand the invisible.

Remarkably, science has learned to play this same game, too, but with much greater success. When was the last time you bumped into a radio wave? No one had "seen" radio waves until 1887, when Heinrich Hertz discovered that an oscillating electric current driven through a wire on one end of the lab could excite aNother current in aNother wire set up on the other side of the lab. The unseen world of radio waves was, on that day in 1887, suddenly apprehended.

That's why dark matter is a lot like the light inside your closed fridge.

The point of his experiment was to use the illusion as a tool, to force the brain to change its perception of body size so that the scientists could use a scanner to spy on the mental work in progress. This kind of mapping to find the origins of body image had not been done before, Dr. Ehrsson said. "It's a little bit of a forgotten sense," he said. "We know about touch, pain and position, but the sense of size of body parts has been a mystery. There are no receptors in skin or muscle that tell the brain the size of body parts, so the brain has to figure it out by comparing signals."

An Argentinian court has decided that a Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) named Sandra is a non-human person with rights, and will no longer be held captive in the Buenos Aires zoo where she has lived for the last 20 years. Sandra's case was taken up in november 2013 by the Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA). The lawyers argued that Sandra was intelligent and self-aware enough to understand and be negatively affected by her conditions, as well as being aware of the passage of time. The court agreed, and the judges unanimously voted in favor of a writ of habeas corpus for Sandra, deciding that she had been wrongfully imprisoned.