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International Day of Friendship

The International Day of Friendship is a United Nations (UN) day that promotes the role that friendship plays in promoting peace in many cultures. It is observed on July 30 each year.

 

What Do People Do?

To mark the International Day of Friendship, the UN encourages governments, organizations, and community groups to hold events, activities and initiatives that promote solidarity, mutual understanding and reconciliation.

Background

In 2011, the UN proclaimed the International Day of Friendship with the idea that friendship between peoples, countries, and cultures can inspire peace efforts and build bridges between communities. The UN wanted for the day to involve young people, as future leaders, in community activities that include different cultures and promote international understanding and respect for diversity.

‘Striking’ Face of 4,500-Year-Old English Man Revealed

excerpt from –  Live Science………

The face of a man who died in England around 4,500 years ago has been reconstructed, revealing a “striking” image that should help humans alive today feel a personal connection, researchers said.

The man’s remains were excavated in the 1930s and 1980s at Liff’s Low bowl barrow, a burial mound located in Derbyshire, England. He was found buried with a type of pot called a beaker and a stone pendant that was likely worn on a necklace, the researchers said.

Anthropological analysis done in the 1980s found that the man was about 5 feet, 7 inches (1.7 meters) tall and was between the ages of 25 and 30 when he died, said Claire Miles, a collections assistant at the Buxton Museum. The anthropologists at the time found that the man had a fracture in his left elbow that had “healed poorly,” Miles said, noting that the cause of the man’s death is unknown.

The museum commissioned Face Lab, a team of forensic specialists at Liverpool John Moores University, to reconstruct the man’s face ahead of an exhibit featuring his remains scheduled to open in September. 

 

Maryam Mirzakhani, Stanford mathematician and Fields Medal winner, dies

Stanford mathematics Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, the first and to-date only female winner of the Fields Medal since its inception in 1936, died Friday, July 14, after a long battle with cancer. Mirzakhani was 40 years old.

By Andrew Myers and Bjorn Carey

Stanford mathematics Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, the first and to-date only female winner of the Fields Medal since its inception in 1936, died Friday, July 14. She had been battling breast cancer since 2013; the disease spread to her liver and bones in 2016. Mirzakhani was 40 years old.

Professor Maryam Mirzakhani was the recipient of the 2014 Fields Medal, the top honor in mathematics. (Image credit: Courtesy Stanford News Service)

The quadrennial Fields Medal, which Mirzakhani won in 2014, is the most prestigious award in mathematics, often equated in stature with the Nobel Prize. Mirzakhani specialized in theoretical mathematics that read like a foreign language by those outside of mathematics: moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.

Mastering these approaches allowed Mirzakhani to pursue her fascination for describing the geometric and dynamic complexities of curved surfaces – spheres, doughnut shapes and even amoebas – in as great detail as possible. Her work was highly theoretical in nature, but it could have impacts concerning the theoretical physics of how the universe came to exist and, because it could inform quantum field theory, secondary applications to engineering and material science. Within mathematics, it has implications for the study of prime numbers and cryptography.

Mirzakhani joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2008, where she served as a professor of mathematics until her death.

“Maryam is gone far too soon, but her impact will live on for the thousands of women she inspired to pursue math and science,” said Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. “Maryam was a brilliant mathematical theorist, and also a humble person who accepted honors only with the hope that it might encourage others to follow her path. Her contributions as both a scholar and a role model are significant and enduring, and she will be dearly missed here at Stanford and around the world.”

Despite the breadth of applications of her work, Mirzakhani said she enjoyed pure mathematics because of the elegance and longevity of the questions she studied.

A self-professed “slow” mathematician, Mirzakhani’s colleagues describe her as ambitious, resolute and fearless in the face of problems others would not, or could not, tackle. She denied herself the easy path, choosing instead to tackle thornier issues. Her preferred method of working on a problem was to doodle on large sheets of white paper, scribbling formulas on the periphery of her drawings. Her young daughter described her mother at work as “painting.”

“You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math,” she told one reporter.

In another interview, she said of her process: “I don’t have any particular recipe [for developing new proofs]. … It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck you might find a way out.

Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran, and – by her own estimation – was fortunate to come of age after the Iran-Iraq war when the political, social and economic environment had stabilized enough that she could focus on her studies. She dreamed of becoming a writer, but mathematics eventually swept her away.

She attended an all-girls high school in Tehran, led by a principal unbowed by the fact that no girl had ever competed for Iran’s International Mathematical Olympiad team. Mirzakhani first gained international recognition during the 1994 and 1995 competitions. In 1994, she earned a gold medal. In 1995, she notched a perfect score and another gold medal.

After graduating college at Sharif University in Tehran, she headed to graduate school at Harvard University, where she was guided by Curtis McMullen, a fellow Fields Medal winner. At Harvard, Mirzakhani was distinguished by her determination and relentless questioning, despite the language barrier. She peppered her professors with questions in English. She jotted her notes in Farsi.

McMullen described Mirzakhani as filled with “fearless ambition.” Her 2004 dissertation was a masterpiece. In it, she solved two longstanding problems. Either solution would have been newsworthy in its own right, according to Benson Farb, a mathematician at the University of Chicago, but then Mirzakhani connected the two into a thesis described as “truly spectacular.” It yielded papers in each of the top three mathematics journals.

“The majority of mathematicians will never produce something as good,” Farb said at the time. “And that’s what she did in her thesis.”

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said the “unprecedented brilliance of this creative scientist and modest human being, who made Iran’s name resonate in the world’s scientific forums, was a turning point in showing the great will of Iranian women and young people on the path towards reaching the peaks of glory … in various international arenas,” according to Iranian state media.

“What’s so special about Maryam, the thing that really separates her, is the originality in how she puts together these disparate pieces,” said Steven Kerckhoff, at the time of her Fields Medal award. Kerckhoff is a professor at Stanford who works in the same area of mathematics. “That was the case starting with her thesis work, which generated several papers in all the top journals. The novelty of her approach made it a real tour de force.”

After her doctorate at Harvard, Mirzakhani accepted a position as assistant professor at Princeton University and as a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute before joining the Stanford faculty.

“Maryam was a wonderful colleague,” said Ralph L. Cohen, the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor of Mathematics at Stanford. “She  not only was a brilliant and fearless researcher, but she was also a great teacher and terrific PhD adviser.  Maryam embodied what being a mathematician or scientist is all about:  the attempt to solve a problem that hadn’t been solved before, or to understand something that hadn’t been understood before.  This is driven by a deep intellectual curiosity, and there is great joy and satisfaction with every bit of success. Maryam had one of the great intellects of our time, and she was a wonderful person.  She will be tremendously missed.”

In recent years, she collaborated with Alex Eskin at the University of Chicago to answer a mathematical challenge that physicists have struggled with for a century: the trajectory of a billiard ball around a polygonal table. That investigation into this seemingly simple action led to a 200-page paper which, when it was published in 2013, was hailed as “the beginning of a new era” in mathematics and “a titanic work.”

“You’re torturing yourself along the way,” she would offer, “but life isn’t supposed to be easy.”

Mirzakhani is survived by her husband, Jan Vondrák, and a daughter, Anahita.

The university will organize a memorial service and an academic symposium in her honor in the fall, when students and faculty have returned to campus.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said she died on July 15.  Mirzakhani died on Friday, July 14.

Yazd city inscribed on UNESCO World Heritage

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ― designated eleven new sites on Sunday and may continue to do so throughout next week until the annual World Heritage Committee meeting ends on July 12. 

The ancient city of Yazd in Iran is one of UNESCO’s new World Heritage Sites. The City of Yazd is located in the middle of the Iranian plateau, close to the Spice and Silk Roads. It bears living testimony to the use of limited resources for survival in the desert. Water is supplied to the city through a qanat system developed to draw underground water. The earthen architecture of Yazd has escaped the modernization that destroyed many traditional earthen towns, retaining its traditional districts, the qanat system, traditional houses, bazars, hammams, Zoroastrian temples and the historic garden of Dolat-abad.

Seljuk sultans bath discovered in Anatolia

Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey) reports that A bath used by the Seljuk sultans 1,000 years ago” has been found in Gevele Castle on Takkeli Mountain, located in central Anatolia. The bath water was heated with a furnace and circulated through gaps in the lower part of the bath. “We did not expect to find such a structure,” said Ahmet Çayci of Necmettin Erbakan University The team also found private rooms that may have been used for washing. Gevele Castle is known for its small mosque, cistern, tunnels, and dungeons. . “The castle should have a view terrace and the venues where the sultan was hosted,” Çayci added. “We are continuing to search for it.”

International World Population Day

In 1989, the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programme recommended that 11 July be observed by the international community as World Population Day, a day to focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues. This year’s theme is “Family Planning: Empowering People, Developing Nations.”

Access to safe, voluntary family planning is a human right. It is also central to gender equality and women’s empowerment, and is a key factor in reducing poverty.

Yet around the world, some 214 million women in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy are not using safe and effective family planning methods, for reasons ranging from lack of access to information or services to lack of support from their partners or communities. Many of those with an unmet demand for contraceptives live in the poorest countries on earth.

Investments in making family planning available also yields economic and other gains that can propel development forward.

This year’s World Population Day, 11 July, coincides with the Family Planning Summit, the second meeting of the FP2020–Family Planning 2020–initiative, which aims to expand access to voluntary family planning to 120 million additional women by 2020.

900-Year-Old Collection of Women’s Jewelry

A 900-year-old collection of women’s jewelry has been discovered in the kitchen of a Crusader fortress tower in the central Israeli city of Modi’in, during an archaeological excavation at Tittora Hill.
Several of the ancient rings, bracelets and earrings that were found were made of bronze and silver.

According to Avraham Tendler, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) excavation director, the jewelry “appear[s] to have been accidentally dropped during cooking in the kitchen of an ancient tower.”

The archaeological dig is part of a joint initiative between the IAA and the Modi’in-Maccabim-Re’ut Municipality. The project brings together some 2,500 schoolchildren, long-time residents of the town and local volunteers for the opportunity to collaborate in discovering their city’s cultural heritage

 

DNA reveals genetic history of ancient Egyptians

A recent finding that the ancient Egyptians and their modern counterparts share less – genetically – in common than you might think has been very intriguing to researchers and archeologists. A team of scientists from the University of Tuebingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, both in Germany, have decoded the genome of ancient Egyptians for the first time, with unexpected and surprising results. Their findings were recently published in the journal of Nature Communications.

Their study concluded that preserved remains found in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt, were closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from the Near East, Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans. On the other hand, modern Egyptians, by comparison, share much more DNA with sub-Saharan populations. These new findings are not only intriguing but also have created major questions and re-evaluation of the region’s history and migration patterns.

It is important to note that ancient Egyptians have experienced more investigation and studies than any other ancient civilization.  However, extracting genome data and utilizing this type of incredibly modern technology is a new frontier for Egyptologists.  In this recently published study, scientists took 166 bone samples from 151 mummies, dating from approximately 1400 B.C. to A.D. 400, extracting DNA from 90 individuals and mapping the full genome in three cases.  Previous DNA analysis of mummies has been treated with a necessary dose of skepticism, according to Professor Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute.   We know that heat and high humidity in tombs, paired with some of the chemicals involved in mummification, all contribute to DNA degradation, but the paper describes its findings as “the first reliable data set obtained from ancient Egyptians” as reported by CNN and other international news outlets.

Next researchers looked for genetic differences compared with Egyptians today. They found that the sample set showed a strong connection with a cluster of ancient non-African populations based east of the Mediterranean Sea.  The researchers describe the new findings as incredibly far reaching as the DNA is not just telling us about one person but about the ancestors and parents.

The scientists report that this period covered the rule of Alexander the Great (332-323 B.C.), the Ptolemaic dynasty (323-30 B.C.) and part of Roman rule (30 B.C.-A.D. 641) and they note that Strict social structures and legal incentives to marry along ethnic lines within these communities may have played a part in the Egyptians’ genetic continuity.  The researchers also reported that the modern Egyptians were found to “inherit 8% more ancestry from African ancestors” than the mummies studied the report cites increased mobility along the Nile, increased long-distance commerce and the era of the trans-Saharan slave trade as potential reasons why.