International Human Rights Day is being celebrated around the world today, marking the 64th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights in the dark wake of the end of World War II.

Science, and the technological advances that emerge from its findings, is more important than ever in the modern world. The ease with which people can communicate across borders and time zones has helped grow economies, forge peace and save lives. But that also means that groups without access to technology -- most often societies in developing countries -- are left behind and will be forced to play catch up for decades to come.

These rights are more than effective in theory: They have changed the world for the better many times over.

Dawkins, a frequent and controversial critic of religion, replied that a popular theory gave the human race about a "50 percent chance of surviving through the 21st century." This effective coin flip would be determined by a number of factors, Dawkins said, in which both science and religion were likely to play a part.

Dawkins ultimately said he believed that religious fanatics with access to the most destructive products of science posed the biggest danger to human civilization. Stewart countered, arguing that science contained certain risks in and of itself, in the form of extreme or incautious advancement.

Footprints found in the soft limestone of the Mexican desert have been identified as the oldest in North America. The prints, recently dated to about 10,500 years ago, were found during highway construction in northeastern Mexico in 1961. At the time, the section of rock containing the prints was taken to the Museo del Desierto in Saltillo, Mexico, and put in storage, archaeology site Western Digs reported.

"identifiable as human footprints because of the definable footprint shape and visible mud rims around the heel, balls of the feet and toes (areas of most pressure),"

The detailed dating is significant because it means the prints "prove that humans were living in what now is a desert, since 10,500 years ago, utilizing the resources available at the time," researcher Silvia Gonzalez, of Liverpool John Moores University, told HuffPost Science.

Essay December 2013 The War No Image Could Capture Photography has given us iconic representations of conflict since the Civil War—with a notable exception. Why, during the Great War, the camera failed. 

They could not be rescued yet, and so an anonymous official photographer attached to the Royal Engineers did what he could to record the scene. The picture he took, though, tells almost nothing without a caption. The landscape is flat and featureless. The dead and wounded look like dots. “Like a million bloody rugs,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald of the Somme carnage. In fact, you can’t make out blood. You can’t even tell you’re looking at bodies.

iconic representations of war

But is coulrophobia a real fear? And, for that matter, what is fear?

Psychologists believe that this kind of fear may have less to do with clowns and more with the unsettling familiarity. A normal-sized body with a painted face, big shoes, colorful clothes—but what's under there?"People are typically frightened by things which are wrong in some way, wrong in a disturbingly unfamiliar way," says Paul Salkovskis of the Maudsley Hospital Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma in London.Anthropologists may approach the phobia from the clown's perspective. In 1961, Claude Levi Strauss wrote about the "freedoms" that masking oneself allows. A mask gives a clown the chance to adopt a new identity: "the facial disguise," he writes, "temporarily eliminate[s] from social intercourse that part of the body which...the individual's personal feelings and attitudes are revealed or can be deliberately communicated to others."

Excavation work continues at the Dmanisi site to see if further evidence of early human presence emerges, but much more research will be needed to understand how hominids evolved into today’s human beings before history books are rewritten.

Studies on a newly discovered skull dating back 1.8 million years could drastically change the way we understand human evolution.

The 25–hectare park, which is free and open 24 hours a day, is the brainchild of Norwegian art collector and philanthropist Christian Ringnes.

"I was told it was an old man's idea," he says. "So I decided to worry about the quality of the sculpture first and the feminine connotation second."

The piece is a series of indoor and outdoor spaces that plays with your sense of perception and encourages the contemplation of light.

“communication, critical thinking, creativity and collaboration.”

reative thinking is as much mindset and habit as it is information,

surface learning (doing enough memorization to get by), strategic learning (aiming primarily for high grades and honors), and deep learning (autonomous striving for meaning):