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?

They are lunar rainbows, in other words rainbows created by moonlight, not sunlight. You don't see them in daylight, but in the night sky. image source Just as a rainbow is sunlight refracted by raindrops,

There have been several recent studies showing that people who have inflamatory diseases, those with conditions like PCOS, those with diabetes and those who are obese have different gut bacteria compared

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

We've got lots of what I like to call the (stunning, lovely, beautiful, etc) when I list the item for sale on my online auction site. I prefer weird and grungy, but the pretties will do as money makers!

Deutsche Bank has been in the news, with it's share price falling like a stone, because the market believes it is in trouble. For more on the Deutsche Bank problem see this previous article. bank of england