Lara Croft is one of the few video game characters who have broken though niché gamer circles to become a world wide cultural phenomenon.
With the franchise having sold over 42 million copies in its lifetime, it can be easy to see why.
But Croft has drastically changed over 19 years. With this year's release of "Rise of the Tomb Raider," Croft looks nothing like her 1996 debut counterpart. Here's how she's changed over the years.
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The U.S. military is awash in regulations, laws, and official traditions. How troops march and salute, what uniform to wear to what event, or what you are supposed to say when greeting a superior are all examples of “on-the-books” behaviors expected of service members.
And then there are the “off-the-books” traditions. They are the unwritten rules: traditions that go back way before the books were printed. These activities — especially the ones involving hazing — are often frowned upon, but still continue to happen, usually without any official recognition.
Here are eight examples.
SEE ALSO: 5 bad luck military events that happened on Friday the 13th
The “fighter pilot mafia” is definitely a thing in the Air Force and Navy, which is the nickname for the pilot sub-culture within each service. Soon after aviators get to a new unit they will go through an unofficial ceremony of receiving their callsigns, and they usually are not very flattering.
On the flip side is the final flight. Much like a football coach gets a giant cooler of Gatorade dumped over their head at the end of a game, pilots sometimes will get hosed down with water by their comrades. In some cases, they’ll be doused with champagne.
In the case of Maj. Vecchione (shown below), his peers also threw string cheese, flour, and mayonnaise on him. Personally, I would’ve thrown in some ketchup and mustard, but hell, I wasn’t there.
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Nothing like a little tradition that allows some dude to tap your brand new wife on the butt. When a service member wants to go through the pageantry of having a “military wedding” — wearing their uniform at the altar and bringing along a sword detail — they can expect that at the end of it all, some random dude will be sexually harassing his wife for the sake of tradition.
It goes like this: On the way out right after the ceremony, the couple passes over an arch of swords on both sides. They go through, kiss, go through, kiss, then they get to the last one. Once they reach the final two and pass, one of the detail will lower their sword, tap the bride, and say “welcome to the Army [or Marine Corps, etc]!”Here’s the Navy version:
The Crossing the Line ceremony goes far back to the days of wooden ships. According tothis Navy public affairs story, sailors were put through this hazing ritual designed to test whether they could endure their first time out at sea.
These days, sailors crossing the line for the first time — called Pollywogs or Wogs for short — can expect an initiation into the club of those who have done it before, referred to as Shellbacks. During the two-day event, the “Court of Neptune” inducts the Wogs into “the mysteries of the deep” with activities like having men dress up as women, drink stuff like a wonderful mix of hot sauce and aftershave, or make them crawl on their hands and knees in deference to King Neptune. I swear I’m not making any of this up.
In the modern military that is decidedly against hazing rituals, the events have toned down quite a bit. In 1972 a sailor may have expected to be kissing the “Royal Baby’s belly button,” which again, is totally a real thing.
Nowadays however, there’s much less of that sort of thing, and the Navy stresses that it’s all completely voluntary (ask any sailor, however, and they’ll probably tell you it’s “voluntary” with big air quotes).
Fear of Friday the 13th, also known as friggatriskaidekaphobia, plagues our society.
Every year, the world loses $700 to $800 million on Friday the 13th because people won't conduct business as usual. Many especially refuse to fly.
On top of that, almost 80% of high rise buildings skip the 13th floor. Many airports exclude gate 13, and hospitals regularly avoid room 13.
So where does this superstition originate? The roots link back to religion — of all denominations and time periods.
First and foremost, the Last Supper's 13th guest (and last apostle), Judas betrayed Jesus, according to the Bible. Then, His Crucifixion occurred on a Friday. Some scholars also believe Eve tempted Adam on a Friday.
Also, Babylon's ancient Code of Hammurabi skips number 13 when listing laws. Egyptians considered the afterlife the 13th phase of life.
But the number thirteen's cursed beginnings fall outside the rise of Christianity, too. A similar story occurs in Norse mythology. The 11 closest friends of Odin, the father of all gods, chose to dine together when Loki, the god of evil and chaos, crashed the party. One of the gods, Balder, the god of joy and happiness, died that evening. ("Friggatriskaidekaphobia" brings together "Frigg," a Norse goddess and Friday's namesake, and "triskaidekaphobia," fear of the number 13 in general.)
Much later, King Philip IV of France certainly didn't help by ordering the persecution of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13, 1307. In the following years, several thousand faced torture and execution.
If those tales don't convince you, math also has a stake in why people get bad vibes from the number thirteen. First, 12 appears a lot in our culture — 12 months in a year, 12 hours on a clock, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 apostles of Jesus. We love 12.
Twelve is a "pseudoperfect" number, according to Wolfram. The sum of some of its divisors equals the whole number. For example, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 go into 12. Both 2+4+6 and 1+2+3+6 equal 12.
On December 12, 2012, a boy in Alabama turned 12 at 12:12 p.m. People started calling him everything from "the chosen one" to a sign of the impending apocalypse.
Thirteen has a tough act to follow.
Regardless of where, when, or how this superstition started, we've perpetuated our own fear.
"If nobody bothered to teach us about these negative taboo superstitions like Friday the 13th, we might in fact all be better off,"Stuart Vyse, psychology professor at Connecticut College in New London, told National Geographic.
People's last words are fascinating.
Some share a nugget of wisdom, while others throw in one last joke. Somehow, these last words end up capturing an essence of the person who uttered them.
We put together the graphic below showing the last words of nine famous people.
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King Francis I of France carried ground up mummy with him at all times in case of emergency. That's because mummy was widely used medicinally for thousands of years.
Kathryn Hunt is a Bioarchaeologist who recently was awarded a TED fellowship for her work as a paleo-oncologist. She explained to us how the medical use of mummies paired with later Egyptomania resulted in the loss of millions of mummies.
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I've always been fascinated by William Shakespeare's will.
Specifically, by the way he left his wife his "second-best bed," especially since historians are at odds over what he meant by it.
Was this an insult to a spouse he didn't get along with, or a tender gesture? After all, since everything was handmade, furniture was much more valuable back in the 1600s than it is today.
Thinking about Shakespeare's seemingly odd bequests made me realize that what people list in their wills says a lot about what they value.
So when Ancestry made a searchable database of 170 million will and probate documents available to its subscribers, I eagerly dove in. Of course, most Ancestry members use this information to learn more about their family members; the site touts these records' value in particular for African Americans searching for family history, since wills from the slavery era may name their ancestors as property.
In fact, when I started searching well-known names, the first one I found was a slave owner: George Washington, whose will calls for the freeing of his slaves after Martha's death. (He also called for one, named William Lee, to be freed as soon as he died, which makes sense because Lee was Washington's personal valet.)
What can we learn from the wills of notable dead people? Here's what famous people's taught me about money and finances.
SEE ALSO: How to keep from fighting about money in your relationship
Like Shakespeare, Paul Revere made specific plans for his household furniture after his death; he left it all to his only unmarried daughter — but only if she was still single by the time he died. Revere no doubt figured that if his daughter had already established her own household, she'd have no room for dad's tables, chairs, and beds, second best or otherwise.
Louisa May Alcott's family often went hungry in her childhood; in fact, poverty drove Alcott to start writing. Yet, they never became desperate enough to sell the "family silver"— Alcott left her share to a niece in her will.
Alcott's will also made me wonder if the famous author, who never married, had a love affair or some other skeleton in her closet to cover up, because she called for all her letters and manuscripts to be burned upon her death.
Shakespeare's will makes no mention of his plays, because with no copyright law, intellectual property was not a thing yet. Shakespeare might not have even had copies of his own works.
Not so for Nathaniel Hawthorne, who died intestate in 1864. An inventory of his estate includes copyrights estimated at a $2,500 value — much more than his $200 book collection, his $800 worth of household goods, or any of his investments, which included 10 shares in Boston National Bank ($1,020) and two shares of Jamaica Plain Gas Company ($200).
The Mexican Revolution, which began on 105 years ago and raged for a decade, is considered to be the first major social, political, and cultural revolution of the 20th century, and perhaps the bloodiest conflict in modern North American history.
The revolution resulted in more than 1.5 million deaths. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican refugees fled to the US. A cascade of leaders rose to prominence — only to be assassinated. Peasant uprisings broke out throughout the country that was in a decade-long state of crisis.
At the heart of the revolution were tensions between the "criollos," or the Spanish-descended ruling class, and "mestizos," or people of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry that comprised a majority of the population and much of the country's peasantry. Mexico in the years leading up to the revolution was a powder keg, with elites facing off over questions of presidential succession and constitutional change, and the peasantry feeling increasingly angry and alienated.
Mexico was in need of fundamental changes — changes that weren't likely to change peacefully.
Tensions came to a head when Porfirio Diaz, the dictator who had rule Mexico for the previous 34 years, sought to continue his rule for an eighth term as president.
Francisco I. Madero, a Mexican political exile wrote and distributed the "Plan of San Luis Potosí," which, among other things, called for a revolution beginning on November 20, 1910, to depose Diaz and restore both the 1857 constitution and the term limits that it mandated.
Though Madero's pen initiated the revolution, reival generals, political figures, and militia leaders, the most famous of which were Pancho Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south, carried out most of the fighting.
Zapata was especially emblematic of the revolution. A champion of the "campesinos," or country people of Mexico, Zapata's rallying cry of “Tierra y libertad” (Land and Liberty) galvanized the rural poor — a population that wanted sweeping change.
Zapata helped draft a counter to the Plan of San Luis Potosí, known as the Plan of Alaya. Under this proposal, land would be redistributed to the peasants who worked on it. Zapata's plan for "land for those who work it" proved popular with campesinos.
By May of 1911, Diaz had left the country. But after 35 years of a single dictator, Mexico found itself trapped in a destructive power vacuum. Madero ruled briefly before being assassinated in 1913 by Victoriano Huerta, a general in league with counterrevolutionaries led by Porfirio Díaz’s nephew.
Amid heavy opposition, Huerta dissolved Mexico's congress and began to impose an autocratic government similar to Diaz's. US President Woodrow Wilson soon sent Marines into the country to remove Huerta.
After US forces helped oust Huerta in 1914, Washington settled on supporting Venustiano Carranza, a wealthy landowner.
At first, Carranza sought to reconcile the differences of the different camps. Carranza's US-backed government eventually endorsed and drafted a new constitution that was approved in 1917.
The constitution included agrarian reform and expanded individual rights. But Carranza left many of his promises unfulfilled, and was assassinated while fleeing Mexico City during the next election, in 1920.
Alvaro Obregon, a one-time ally of Carranza's who later helped overthrow him, became president in 1920, an event that marked the end of over a decade of instability and vioelnce.
Mexico was in continuous turmoil throughout this period. The revolution was a complex and multi-sided conflict that pitted the country's rulers against one another — and against a peasantry eager for political and social change.
While Mexico is now a democracy, the revolution didn't exactly end that way. In 1929, the Institutional Revolutionary Party came to power. Implementing a system often described as a "benign dictatorship," the party would remain in charge of Mexico until Vicente Fox's election 2000.
SEE ALSO: 13 of the most notorious crimes in American history
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Grand Central Terminal is one of the busiest train terminals on earth, with more than 700,000 people coming through the doors every day. Whether they're traveling or simply visiting the beautiful NYC landmark, most passersby won't even notice the historical clues or many secrets on display right before their eyes – or hidden beneath their feet.
Produced by Justin Gmoser. Additional camera by Sam Rega.
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The global health system was completely unprepared when the 2014 Ebola outbreak began, according to a newly published report by a panel of experts from Harvard and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Worse, the authors say, is that those failures exposed how unready that system is to deal with any emerging viral threats.
As Peter Piot, one of the report's main authors said on a Lancet podcast, "we will always have emerging infections ... and as we've seen in West Africa, things can get out of hand with global implications."
Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), knows what dealing with a completely unknown virus is like. As a 27-year-old doctor in 1976, he was one of the first to examine the Ebola virus. After infecting a Flemish nun, the virus was carried in a thermos to Europe, where Piot got a chance to try to identify the strange pathogen.
After a harrowing experience with the virus in the lab, Piot left his pregnant wife in Belgium and set off for the Congo, then called Zaire, to track down the source of the illness that had devastated a small village called Yambuku and the surrounding area. He joined researchers from around the world on a terrifying hunt for the origin of the disease.
Piot wrote about the experience in his book "No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses." Using photos from the CDC's Public Health Image Library, we've illustrated the team's expeditions into the Congo.
The Cornell University Library's Rare and Manuscript Book Collection has some secrets.
In a recent video posted to the Collection's Facebook, viewers can see a pair of gloved hands handling an otherwise nondescript antique book. Its pages look golden, its cover leatherbound.
But once the disembodied hands turn the book so the long edge faces the camera, and tilt it just right, the golden pages turn into a full-color painting, placed right on the edges of the pages.
This technique is visually arresting, and actually fairly common for antique books. It's called fore-edge painting, and it dates back to the 16th century.
Book with fore-edge paintings can come in two varieties: paintings visible when the book is closed and when it is fanned. Closed fore-edge paintings are readily visible no matter which way you hold the book — not unlike how a teacher might label a textbook by running a highlighter over its pages.
The other style, fanned paintings, are much more mysterious. They can appear on just one side of the book, or all three. These are known as triple fore-edge paintings, and if they depict one continuous scene, the practice is called panoramic fore-edge painting.
The book held in the latest video's anonymous hands is a single fore-edge painting, and it's awesome.
See the painting hidden in the gilt edges of the pages of the book!! It's called fore-edge painting, and this book is one of several in Cornell University Library - Rare and Manuscript Collections.
Posted by Cornell University Library on Thursday, November 19, 2015
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Mathematics is an increasingly central part of our world and an immensely fascinating realm of thought.
But long before the development of the math that gave us computers, quantum mechanics, and GPS satellites, generations of brilliant minds — spanning from the ancient Greeks through the eighteenth century — built up the basic mathematical ideas and tools that sit at the foundation of our understanding of math and its relationship to the world.
Here are 12 of the most brilliant of those minds and some of their contributions to the great chain of mathematics.
Some of the earliest mathematicians were Pythagoras and his followers. Mixing religious mysticism with philosophy, the Pythagoreans' contemplative nature led them to explorations of geometry and numbers.
The most famous result attributed to Pythagoras is the Pythagorean theorem: for a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two shorter legs that join to form the right angle is equal to the square of the long side opposite that angle. This is one of the fundamental results in plane geometry, and it continues to fascinate mathematicians and math enthusiasts to this day.
One apocryphal story of the Pythagoreans illustrates the danger of combining religion and math. The Pythagoreans idealized the whole numbers, and viewed them as a cornerstone of the universe. Their studies of geometry and music centered on relating quantities as ratios of whole numbers.
As the story goes, a follower of Pythagoras was investigating the ratio of the length of the long side of an isosceles right triangle to the length of one of the two shorter sides, which have the same length as each other. He then discovered that there was no way to express this as the ratio of two whole numbers. In modern terminology, this follower had figured out that the square root of 2 is an irrational number.
According to the legend, when the follower who discovered this fact revealed it to his peers, the idea that there could be irrational numbers — numbers that can't be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers — was so shocking to the Pythagoreans that he was taken out on a boat and murdered by drowning.
Euclid was one of the first great Greek mathematicians. In his classic "Elements," Euclid laid the framework for our formal understanding of geometry. While earlier Greek philosophers like the Pythagoreans investigated a number of mathematical problems, Euclid introduced the idea of rigorous proof: Starting with a handful of assumed axioms about the basic nature of points, lines, circles, and angles, Euclid builds up ever more complicated ideas in geometry by using pure deductive logic to combine insights from previous results to understand new ideas. This process of using rigorous proof to build new results out of existing results introduced in the "Elements" has remained perhaps the most central guiding principle of mathematics for over two millennia.
Archimedes was possibly the greatest mathematician of all time. He's best known for his contributions to our early understanding of physics by figuring out how levers work and in the famous legend of his discovery of how water is displaced by a submerged object: While taking a bath, Archimedes watched the water sloshing up to the top of his tub, and in the excitement of his discovery, he ran through the streets naked and shouting "Eureka!"
As a mathematician, however, Archimedes was able to outdo even his own accomplishments in physics. He was able to estimate the value of pi to a remarkably precise value and to calculate the area underneath a parabolic curve.
What is truly amazing about these accomplishments is that he made these calculations using techniques surprisingly close to those used by Newton, Leibniz, and their heirs in the development of calculus about 1,800 years later. He found these values by approximating them with measurements of polygons, adding more and more refined shapes, so that he would get closer and closer to the desired value. This is strongly reminiscent of the modern idea of an infinite limit. As far as his mathematical sophistication was concerned, Archimedes was nearly two millennia ahead of his time.
Heroes come in many forms; some are even furry and four-legged.
Due in part to their superior ability to sniff and hear trouble, dogs have long been a fantastic ally and a great protector of humans.
After all, it was Lassie who, through a series of barks, told the grown-ups that Timmy was in trouble again (Note: Timmy never actually fell down a well. Mineshaft, sure, but no well.)
Dogs can also be quite brave and have been known to run into dangerous situations without a moment of hesitation.
Throughout history, several dogs have gained a reputation as being courageous in wartime.
Here are the stories of five such dogs that became war heroes and helped saved human lives:
SEE ALSO: A Twitter fight between the prime ministers of Greece and Turkey was started by accident
Japanese bombs started raining down on the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory, Darwin, around 10 am on February 19, 1942, just over two months after the Japanese bombing of America’s Pearl Harbor. After the initial attack, which sunk eight ships and badly damaged 37 others, soldiers went looking for the injured among the rubble.
Under a destroyed mess hall, they found the smallest survivor of them all, a six-month-old male stray kelpie (an Australian sheep dog). He had a broken leg and was whimpering. Eventually, the injured pup ended up in the hands of Leading Aircraftman Percy Westcott.
He made it his duty to get this dog help. Westcott took the dog to the doctor, who said he couldn’t treat any “man” who didn’t have a name or serial number. So, Westcott named the kelpie “Gunner” and gave him the number 0000. Satisfied, the doctor put a cast on Gunner’s leg and set them on their way.
From that point forward, Gunner and Westcott were inseparable. When Gunner’s leg began healing (despite his habit of chewing the cast), he would join Westcott on his daily tasks. One day not long after the attack, as the men worked on repairing several planes in the airfield, Gunner started barking and jumping up and down.
The men paid no attention to the dog, but within a few minutes Japanese raiders swooped in and commenced shelling Darwin again.
Luckily, the men and Gunner managed to dive to safety, but it was another surprise attack. Well, to everyone but Gunner. In general, Australian Kelpie hearing, even more so than many other breeds of dogs, is fantastic. Two days later, Gunner again started making a commotion. This time, the men knew to find cover and prepare for the upcoming attack.
From February 1942 to November 1943, over sixty air raids were commenced on Darwin. Gunner warned the soldiers of nearly every one, saving countless lives. Another amazing aspect of this was that Gunner never barked when Australian planes took off or were returning. He was able to differentiate between Australian aircrafts and Japanese aircrafts. It is not known what happened to Gunner after the war.
The Blitz commenced on London on September 7, 1940. For the next 57 days, German bombers enveloped the city in destruction. Right after a particular heavy shelling during one of the first days of the Blitz, an Air Raid Warden named E. King found a hungry stray walking the streets. He threw it some meat and the dog refused to go away.
The dog followed King back to his post and, eventually, became something of a mascot. But Rip, as they called him, soon showed his worth beyond a simple mascot.
Rip came out with King after a bombing one night and his nose started twitching. Rip followed the scent to a collapsed building and started digging. What Rip found was a man, still alive, buried beneath. It was probably the best image this man had ever seen; a barking, sniffing mutt.
Despite never being formally trained, Rip became England’s first urban search and rescue dog. It was reported that he found and rescued over hundred people with his sensitive, life-saving nose. Due to Rip, today London’s police force and military trains hundreds of dogs per year to be part of their urban search and rescue teams.
In 1945, Rip was awarded the Dickin Medal for bravery, an honor bestowed animals for their service during war. On the medal, it reads “For Gallantry. We Also Serve.” Rip passed away in 1946 and is buried in Ilford Animal Cemetery in London.
As French Air Force gunner Robert Bozdech came barreling toward Earth in his now-disabled plane, death was on his mind, not making a new best friend. But that is exactly what happened when he crashed landed in Northern France, ominously known as “No Man’s Land.” He, amazingly, emerged from the wreckage of his plane barely hurt, but heard sounds from a nearby farmhouse.
Thinking it was the enemy, he took out his gun, ready to shoot. What emerged was a gray ball of fur, a German Shepard puppy. He took the pup in his leather jacket and hitched a ride back two hundred miles to St Dizier Air Base. Bozdech’s peers were stunned he was still alive, much less having a new best bud.
Antis, named so because Bozdech loved to fly Russian ANT dive-bombers, became not just a loyal friend, but a seasoned war veteran. Much like Gunner, he barked in warning about oncoming enemy fire. Just like Rip, he learned how to sniff and dig for survivors. Robert and his comrades also considered Antis a good luck charm and, most importantly, braver than many a human soldier. He would hide away in Bozdech’s gunner plane to ensure that he would be there to protect his pal.
Antis would also run into enemy fire to notify others where the injured men were. He was even once injured himself, yet that didn’t stop him from performing his duties. Several days after being injured, he somehow snuck onto Bozdech’s plane as a stowaway.
After the war, Antis was also awarded the Dickin Medal and lived with Bozdech the rest of his life, passing away at the age of 14 in 1953.
A heateddebate has descended on the history world: Was the Statue of Liberty originally a Muslim woman?
The discussion centers around French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of the Statue of Liberty.
In the 1860s, long before the Statue of Liberty was constructed, he designed a statue of a female Egyptian peasant to be placed at the head of the Suez Canal.
The original sculpture, sketched out as a robed woman holding a torch, would be known as "Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia" to symbolize progress.
She would have been Arab, Michael Daly recently noted in The Daily Beast, which means she could have also been Muslim. But Bartholdi never got a chance to build the sculpture.
While some historians believe Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty for the US after he failed to sell that original idea of the peasant statue to Egypt — sort of as a last-ditch attempt at getting the project off the ground — others say that argument belittles both works and the two aren't all that connected.
"Bartholdi remained determined to erect a colossus on the scale of the one in ancient Rhodes,"Daly writes, arguing in favor of the Statute of Liberty as essentially a ripoff. "He sailed to America with drawings of the Muslim woman transformed to the personification of Liberty."
However, historians question the timeline, pointing to the fact Bartholdi originally drew up sketches for "Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia" in the 1860s. It wasn't until 1885 that he brought the Statue of Liberty to the US.
"He went back to France and was there for about a year or so before he went to the United States," Edward Berenson, professor of history at New York University and author of "The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story,"told Global News Canada. "He didn't go directly from Egypt to the United States."
It may only have been once he decided to immigrate to the United States that the idea popped back into his head, reimagined for an American context.
"Bartholdi took the sketches he had made for the Egyptian statue and changed them. He worked from that model," Berenson told Global News.
In other words, Bartholdi certainly could have drawn inspiration from his earlier project in Egypt in bringing a new statue to America. But it's less certain whether he did so as a way to avoid throwing out a complex project.
It may simply have been a design Bartholdi enjoyed, which he wanted to adapt in some form no matter where it stood.
Judge for yourself. The similarities are apparent, but does that mean The Statue of Liberty began as a Muslim peasant?
Bartholdi's proposed Suez canal statue (1869) and his Statue of Liberty model (1875). http://t.co/UHVrIeowKSpic.twitter.com/Ya0BIop4Wt
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Scientists, bioethicists, and members of the public have descended on Washington, DC this week for an international meeting to discuss the ethics of a promising lab technique that lets scientists edit our genes.
The technique, known as CRISPR/Cas9, lets scientists cut-and-paste DNA inside cells to correct genetic defects or, potentially, add new capabilities. It offers enormous promise to improve our understanding of biology and to treat or even eliminate genetic diseases.
But there's a dark side to manipulating our genetics that few want to discuss: Eugenics, the racist practice of trying to "improve" the human race by controlling genetics and reproduction.
While eugenics is most commonly associated with Nazi Germany, it was alive and well in the US and in other countries well before World War II, Daniel Kevles, a historian of science at New York University, said during a talk at the gene editing summit on Monday.
"Eugenics was not unique to the Nazis. It could — and did — happen everywhere," Kevles said.
He and others worry that gene editing tools like CRISPR could bring back something similar to eugenics by allowing us to create so-called "designer babies" with specific mental or physical characteristics.
Eugenics first gained popularity at the turn of the 20th century. The term was coined by the English polymath Francis Galton, Darwin's half-cousin and one of the field's pioneers. At its core, eugenics is about promoting the reproduction of so-called "superior" people and preventing reproduction among so-called "inferior" people.
Many prominent scientists were also supporters, Kevles said, including Charles Davenport, the director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Genetics in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office, which pursued eugenics research from 1910 to 1939; its board included the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, according to the ERO archives.
Eugenics was popularized in books and articles, and newspaper headlines of the time heralded the "era of supermen." State fairs held fitter family contests, where teams of doctors performed psychological and physical exams on family members. The family with the highest eugenic health grade was awarded a trophy.
But it gets far worse than that.
The US also has a sordid history of involuntary sterilization. More than 60,000 people in over 30 states had forced sterilization laws, which were often applied to people with mental illness or minorities. In the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, the court ruled in favor of a Virginia law allowing state-sanctioned sterilization. Eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck was ordered sterilized because she was deemed "feeble-minded" after becoming pregnant (though she was allegedly raped).
These sterilization policies paved the way for similar laws in Europe, including Nazi Germany. In the wake of Nazi eugenics experiments, the practice became less popular, but it persisted in the American legal system for years.
Today, eugenics is a dirty word. But that doesn't mean we're immune to going down that path again, Kevles argued. With CRISPR, we have the ability to make changes to the human genome with unprecedented ease.
For example, sometime in the future you could imagine using CRISPR to create a child who was blond-haired and blue-eyed, like the racist Aryan ideal espoused by the Nazis.
We now know most of the genes involved in controlling eye color. But hair color and other "designer" traits are more complex, controlled by many genes, and today's gene editing tools are still fairly rudimentary.
Still, they're getting better all the time.
Kevles pointed to a number of forces that could drive gene editing technology in an uncomfortable direction: the economics of lowering medical costs, selection for races with a lower risk of a particular disease, overconfidence in genes as the basis of bad traits, and finally, consumer demand to improve ourselves.
The question is, he asked, how will couples who plan to have a baby respond to these pressures?
SEE ALSO: Scientists may soon be able to 'cut and paste' DNA to cure deadly diseases and design perfect babies
DON'T MISS: 2 leading biologists say we should allow gene editing on human embryos
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NOW WATCH: Watch science writer Carl Zimmer explain CRISPR in 90 seconds
The global health system was completely unprepared when the 2014 Ebola outbreak began, according to a newly published report by a panel of experts from Harvard and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Worse, the authors say, is that those failures exposed how unready that system is to deal with any emerging viral threats.
As Peter Piot, one of the report's main authors said on a Lancet podcast, "we will always have emerging infections ... and as we've seen in West Africa, things can get out of hand with global implications."
Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), knows what dealing with a completely unknown virus is like. As a 27-year-old doctor in 1976, he was one of the first to examine the Ebola virus. After infecting a Flemish nun, the virus was carried in a thermos to Europe, where Piot got a chance to try to identify the strange pathogen.
After a harrowing experience with the virus in the lab, Piot left his pregnant wife in Belgium and set off for the Congo, then called Zaire, to track down the source of the illness that had devastated a small village called Yambuku and the surrounding area. He joined researchers from around the world on a terrifying hunt for the origin of the disease.
Piot wrote about the experience in his book "No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses." Using photos from the CDC's Public Health Image Library, we've illustrated the team's expeditions into the Congo.
The Spanish galleon San Jose — one of the world's great, long-lost sunken ships — has been found.
The ship was filled with gold, silver, and other valuables when it sunk in 1708. Three hundred and seven years later, the wreckage has been located off the coast of Cartagena, the Colombian government announced.
According to CNN, an American sea exploration company says the treasure could be worth up to $17 billion. It's potentially the biggest sunken ship discovery of all time.
The Colombian team that found the wreckage says bronze cannons that were specially made for the San Jose leave "no doubt" that they have the right ship.
Story by Tony Manfred and editing by Ben Nigh
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In 1708, the Spanish galleon San Jose sank 1,000 feet under the Caribbean waves, near the coast of modern-day Cartagena, Colombia. She was on her way to Spain, bringing a hoard of treasure to fund the Spanish throne against their British enemies in the War of the Spanish Succession.
However, as the San Jose was sailing off of the coast of Colombia, a British warship caught up with her and sent the ship, her vast treasure and the majority of her 600 crew to the bottom of the sea.
The actual location of the wreck has remained a mystery until now. On December 4, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced on Twitter that a joint team of international experts with the country's navy and archaeological society had finally found the remains of the treasure-laden San Jose near the island of Baru.
Understandably, he would not give the actual location to safeguard the site from privateers.
Officials say this discovery is the "Holy Grail" of shipwrecks because of the massive wealth of gold, silver, coins, gems and jewelry aboard. The Colombian government plans to build a museum to house and display the precious artifacts, which experts estimate are worth anywhere between $4 and $17 billion.
The ship was hauling the bounty from Spanish colonies to Spain in order to help fund the Spanish in their war over the Hapsburg territory following the death of Charles II. The British, Spain's main adversary, planned to capture the San Jose, cut off the money supply to Spain and use the treasure for their own financial advantage.
However, just before the British could overtake the ship, an explosion ripped through the San Jose and sent the ship to its watery grave. The English got their wish in cutting off money from going to Spain, but both countries lost the immense treasure. It seems that what Spain and Great Britain lost, Colombia has gained.
However, this actually isn't the first time the San Jose has been found. In 1982, U.S. company Sea Search Armada announced it had found the wreckage, but has been fighting with the Colombia government over their share of the wealth. According to established maritime law at the time, treasure-hunters would share half of their reward with the government and keep the rest as profit.
Colombia decided they didn't want to share the treasure and, two years later, overturned the law to instead give the company just a small 5 percent finder's fee, instead of half of the wealth. The Sea Search Armada filed lawsuits in both the U.S. and Colombia to try to get their claim back. The U.S. dismissed the case while Colombia's Supreme Court says the treasure needs to be recovered before anything can be settled.
Regardless of who gets the treasure, the main point is that we've found the wreckage. Now let's just get it to the surface so we can see what marvels the sea has been hiding from us.
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Modern wars are defined by a number of technologies like guided missiles, helicopters, and submarines.
Except all three of those technologies have been in service for more than a hundred years. Here are their stories:
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The ink had barely dried on the U.S. Declaration of Independence when an American launched the first submarine attack in history. Ezra Lee piloted the submarine, dubbed the Turtle, against the HMS Eagle but failed to sink it.
The Turtle was sent against a number of other ships but never claimed a kill before sinking in 1776.
The first drone missions were conducted in World War II and President John F. Kennedy’s older brother was killed in one. These early drones were modified bombers taken into the air by a pilot who then bailed out. The plane would then be remotely operated by a pilot in another bomber.
The drones were all suicide vehicles that would be steered into enemy targets. The program had its roots in a World War I program that created the first guided missiles.
That’s right, the first guided missiles were tested in World War I. Orville Wright and Charles F. Kettering invented the Kettering Bug, a modified plane that used gyroscopes to monitor and adjust its flight to a pre-designated target.
Once the Kettering reached it’s target, its wings would fall off, the engine would stop, and the craft would fall to the ground with a 180-pound explosive. But the missile had a lot issues and the war ended before it saw combat.
