How Mengzi came up with something better than the Golden Rule

What could be better than "do unto others as you would have others do unto you"?

Alain Nogues/Corbis via Getty Images

There's something I don't like about the 'Golden Rule,' the admonition to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

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How did Africa get its name?

These maps show surprising juxtapositions of ancient and modern toponyms of the Mother Continent.

Image: Hansueli Krapf, CC BY-SA 3.0
  • "Africa" is just one of the ancient names that competed to define the entire continent.
  • Geographical terms like Sudan, Maghreb, and Guinea have remarkably wide and changeable areas of application.
  • Newly independent African nations sometimes adopted names of former kingdoms – even faraway ones.
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Ancient philosophic scrolls — scorched by Vesuvius — could be made readable once again

Carbonized papyrus scrolls may again see the light after thousands of years.

Digital Restoration Initiative/University of Kentucky
  • Researchers will be using new technology to examine famous ancient artifacts.
  • They'll use the powerful light source, Diamond, at the U.K.'s national synchrotron facility.
  • The team has developed a special technique to virtually unwrap the scrolls so that they can be read.
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How time stopped circling and percolating and started running on tracks

Outside Europe, much of the world followed an assortment of rules and understandings about what time meant.

SEBASTIAN KAHNERT/AFP/Getty Images

Reflecting on Albrecht Altdorfer's painting Alexanderschlacht (1529), or The Battle of Alexander at Issus, the German historian Reinhart Koselleck wrote that, for medieval Europe, time was marked by 'expectations' and thus the painting was filled with portents.

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Confirmed: Some dinosaurs did nest in colonies

An unexpectedly revealing find in Mongolia solves a longstanding riddle.

Image source: Noiel / Shutterstock
  • Normal geological evidence isn't precise enough to confirm paleontologists' suspicions.
  • The new fossils find is covered by a fine veneer of red sand deposited in a single season.
  • Scientists can infer whose eggs they were.
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