What makes some languages survive and others fade away? The oldest language in Britain, Welsh, is thriving, but across the Irish sea Gaelic is barely spoken by 1% of the population on a daily basis (though

It's fashionable to claim that social mobility is dead and "inequality" rules. Inequality and social mobility are two different things. The first refers mainly to income - inequality simply refers

Yesterday's police report of the men suspected of the Novichok poisonings of the Skripals and two bystanders was stunning in it's detail. The question arises, Why did the Russians risk using a nerve agent

I was reading the biography of Winston Churchill by Dr Martin Gilbert, and had got to volume IV (yes, Churchill's life is so full it requires umpteen volumes to cover it), and came across this quote from

Apparently the EU thinks so. According to the Daily Telegraph, the EU's deputy negotiator Sabine Weyand thinks the UK is bugging EU meetings and is finding out stuff before the EU has even had a chance

There is a myth that Cortes defeated the Aztec Empire with just 500 men and superior weapons. The only problem is that it isn't true. Cortes had help, organised by Malinalli, the Nahua woman who was Cortes'

Europe has been on fire this summer as the following map from a few days ago shows: And it's not just Europe - North America and Japan have been suffering heatwaves as well as parts of Russia and China.

You can survive droughts if you have a carefully managed water table. But if you don't manage your water table you end up with no agriculture. This is the cautionary tale of how Saudi depleted it's water

Let's recap what actually happened. In April 2015 a deal was reached between the Iranian government on the one hand and the EU, USA, Russia and China on the other to lift sanctions on Iran if they stopped

The UK Parliament has something called "Parliamentary Privilege" which allows MPs to say whatever they want in Parliament, without being arrested or sued. They can make accusations without libel

We know that homo-sapiens and our earlier homonid predecesors evolved from woodland apes. The fossil and DNA record confirms this. We also know that about a million years later, homonids were found on

Overstock was one of the first online retailers to enable payment by Bitcoin. They've now announced a partnership with Shapeshift, allowing users to pay using altcoins via Shapeshift's API: image source

The information has been taken from If you haven't a wallet of your own, sending your coins to an exchange that supports bitcoincash is the next best thing. Note that HitBTC, also allows people to trade

It's been like that for days. Does anyone know why? I am assuming that there is no problem on Steem's side - is there any way the dev team could reach out to Poloniex and ask them what the problem is?

The Winklevoss ETF was not the only bitcoin ETF waiting for SEC approval. Two other ETFs, the SolidX Bitcoin Trust ETF, and Grayscale investments Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) are also awaiting approval.

In the last few weeks there have been a number of interesting and provocative articles written by Steemers discussing the current curation/distribution system. Some have fixated on the fact that some writers

Great financial crash, what great financial crash! Australia, uniquely in the developed world, sailed through it with ease. They have now racked up 100 consecutive quarters of growth. Their last recession

This post is a response to @dantheman's post about negative voting on steemit. He talks mainly about how a whale can cancel the upvotes of a lot of ordinary members, but also about how whales can abuse

I've more or less given up reading the "New" tab, there is so much there that doesn't interest me, and then when I get to the bottom of the page I have to wait for what seems like ages while

I've noticed that the "hot" tab is full of posts that have about 35 instant upvotes. What these have in common is that the posts all have the "steem" and "steemit" tags. So