For centuries, New York City has been a major economic and cultural center. In the early 20th century, cameras began documenting the liveliness of the city for the first time. A lot has changed since then, but the energy of New York remains the same.
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Scientists in Vietnam are set to embark upon the largest mass identification project in history, using DNA analysis techniques developed in Germany to determine the identities of millions of people who died during the Vietnam War.
Though it is now more than four decades since hostilities ended, remains of those who lost their lives on the battlefield continue to turn up across the country, yet most of these have decomposed to such an extent that identification is not possible.
In an attempt to resolve this ongoing tragedy, the Vietnamese government has recruited German biotechnology firm Bioglobe to oversee a large-scale DNA profiling project, which is now ready to be rolled out.
The first stage of the operation will being next month, when a group of Vietnamese scientists will travel to Hamburg to receive training on how to use special DNA analysis kits developed by another German firm called Qiagen.
This technique has been specially designed to meet the particular challenges of working with bones that have remained buried for over 40 years in the humid Vietnamese climate.
Under such conditions, DNA tends to decompose very rapidly, which makes it very difficult to obtain sufficient samples to create a profile of the individuals to whom these bones belonged, Nature reports.
The new approach will involve chemically breaking down the cells in bones in order to extract their genetic material. This will then be amplified using specialized enzymes to generate a sufficient amount needed to read the sequences and create a genetic profile.
At the same time, researchers hope to collect DNA samples from thousands of surviving Vietnamese civilians, enabling them to create a national genetic reference bank. Using this, they should be able to finally determine the identities of those corpses for which DNA profiles are obtained.
The Vietnam war raged from 1954 to 1975, and saw the Communist-backed North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front (or Viet Cong) take on the forces of the South Vietnam government and the U.S.A.
Estimates for the number of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers killed during the conflict are highly ambiguous, ranging from 1-3 million, although some reports suggest that the number could be as high as 3.8 million.
A major reason for this confusion lies in the fact that so many of those who died on the battlefield have not been identified. While only one U.S. soldier killed in the conflict remained unidentified at the end of the war, the vast majority of Vietnamese casualties have still not been formally confirmed or named.
However, the team behind the forthcoming project – which includes experts who helped to identify more than 20,000 victims of the Bosnian War – hopes to DNA profile around 1.4 million unidentified specimens by 2020.
SEE ALSO: Florida police used a smidgen of DNA to try to fully reconstruct an alleged criminal's face
"Fancy" and "McDonald's" usually don't belong in the same sentence. But this Mickey D's location in Freeport, Maine looks pretty classy.
As noted on Reddit, Freeport's only McDonald's in was built inside a 150-year-old mansion.
It's actually the only McDonald's in the town. Take a look inside.
Source: The New York Times and The Freeport Historical Society
"I have a dream ... " We all know the words that start the famous speech.
But Martin Luther King Jr.'s crowning moment may never have happened without one of the largest protests ever — the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
After growing backlash against blacks in the South, King and five others planned the event, a peaceful demonstration to end segregation and promote equal rights.
King crafted his famous speech specifically for the 250,000 people who would gather in the nation's capital that day.
Source: Associated Press
Source: Associated Press
Source: Congress of Racial Equality
The Persian Gulf War was one of the last conflicts between conventional military powers, pitting a US-led coalition against what was then the fourth-largest military on earth.
The US began its aerial bombardment on January 17th, 1991, and by the end of February, Saddam Hussein's army had been expelled from Kuwait, which the Iraqi dictator's forces had occupied for seven months.
Here's a look back at the start of the military campaign that ended the Persian Gulf crisis — and one of the biggest military triumphs in US history.
"I have a dream ... " We all know the words that start the famous speech.
But Martin Luther King Jr.'s crowning moment may never have happened without one of the largest protests ever — the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
After growing backlash against blacks in the South, King and five others planned the event, a peaceful demonstration to end segregation and promote equal rights.
King crafted his famous speech specifically for the 250,000 people who would gather in the nation's capital that day.
Source: Associated Press
Source: Associated Press
Source: Congress of Racial Equality
Some train stations do more than chauffeur busy commuters. Their incredible architecture make you want to wander their halls forever.
America's railways started to blossom toward the end of the 19th century. Thanks to endless renovations over the years, many of these stations still reflect that old-school grandeur.
Take a gander through the seven most beautiful stops (past and present) on our railways.
Completed in 1913, the New York City station features elaborate moldings and beautiful marble. When commuters look up, they see a spectacular 25,000-square-foot mural of constellations with gold-leaf stars. At its center, there's the iconic gilded clock.
When it was built, Grand Central represented innovation in transit hub design, with features like its incorporation of luggage-friendly ramps rather than stairs.
When the Cincinnati Union Terminal was completed in 1933, it was the largest rotunda in the Western Hemisphere.
The Art Deco-style station features a glass entrance and a fountain out front. Inside, four artists collaborated on massive murals that chronicle stories in American history. The German-American painter Winold Reiss produced 23 glass-tile mosaic panels that live on as impressive displays of public art.
This glamorous train station almost wasn't built. In 1926, Los Angeles voters had the choice between the construction of a network of elevated railways or a much smaller Union Station.
The election took on a racial tone that reflected prejudice against the wave of Chinese immigrants, since the station would be in the heart of LA's original Chinatown. A majority chose Union Station, however, and it was completed in 1939.
Today, Union Station is the largest train terminal on the West Coast, with nearly 110,000 people passing through it each day. Some of its highlights include mosaic floors and gold chandeliers that hang from wooden beams.
The transit hub plans to finish upgrades by December 2016, including a faster rail, more shops and restaurants, and parking for bikers.
The New York City subway is one of the longest, busiest, and oldest systems in the entire world.
You'd expect something that sees nearly two billion annual riders to run on state-of-the-art equipment, but it doesn't. In fact, a lot of the components that make up the subway's signal system are so old that they're no longer manufactured — many of the pieces were originally built in the early 1900s.
So if they can't buy new equipment, how do they keep the system running? We visited the MTA's signal shop in Inwood, Manhattan to find out.
Learn more by visiting the New York Transit Museum.
Story and video by Ben Nigh
In 1914, English cartographer John G. Bartholomew created an isochronic map, a map that shows all points that are accessible in the same amount of time. Ships and railroads were the fastest modes of travel then, but relative to the planes, cars, and highways that have developed in the last century, they were extremely time consuming. In only a century, transportation among other things has developed to bring down 40 days of travel time to only a day and a half.
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Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company, has become the first company to ever launch, land, relaunch, and land the same rocket.
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It didn't take long for the US to begin expanding westward after winning independence from British rule. By the mid-1800s, the country had pushed its territorial bounds across North America to the Pacific Ocean, and began dividing up territory into its present-day 50 states.
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This weekend was an important one for all football fans, as four teams went head-to-head to see who will compete in Super Bowl 50.
On February 7, the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers will face off at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara.
The Super Bowl has been a huge part of American culture for decades. In 1970, the American Football League (AFL) and the NFL joined together to form one league. Since then, the Super Bowl has been the stage where the top teams from the AFC and the NFC fight for the championship.
Here are 16 historical images from past Super Bowl games to catch you up on your NFL knowledge for this year's 50th anniversary.
SEE ALSO: How the Broncos built the defense that clobbered Tom Brady in the AFC Championship
Source: History.com
When President Ronald Reagan heard about the Challenger explosion the morning of January 28, 1986, he was preparing to give the State of the Union address that very night.
He postponed the speech for the following week, and instead directly addressed the nation on the disaster.
His words were mournful, but also inspirational, promising that this bleak event would not be the last of America's exploration into space — but rather a painful "part of the process" of expanding humankind's horizons.
"We'll continue our quest in space," Reagan said from the Oval Office that evening. "There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue."
The Challenger disaster was the worst tragedy in US spaceflight history, taking the lives of the seven crewmembers onboard, including civilian high school teacher and trained payload specialist Christa McAuliffe.
McAuliffe is the second woman you see here, in the last footage before the crew boarded the Challenger spacecraft:
Reagan also addressed schoolchildren who watched the launch live on TV in order to see McAuliffe, the first teacher bound for space, make her historic flight:
"I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen," he said. "It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them."
As the US transitions into a predominantly private space program, with companies like SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and Blue Origin pushing to ever greater heights, Reagan's words are just as poignant today. They also ring true for the rising space tourism industry and Virgin Galactic's deadly SpaceShipTwo crash in October 2014.
We've posted the full text of his speech after this video from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, which shows the entire address:
And here's the speech in its entirety, from NASA's archives:
Ladies and gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering.
Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.
Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.
We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.
I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it."
There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."
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NOW WATCH: Watch Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company make history with a monumental rocket landing
What were the greatest human catastrophes of the 20th century?
When asked this question, most people answer the Second World War, followed by the First World War.
The former killed around 50 million people, the latter 17 million.
But there was another catastrophe that dwarfed both of these, that is rarely mentioned.
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1920, better known as the Spanish flu, killed at least 50 million people worldwide, and perhaps as many as 100 million.
While working on a book about that pandemic, I have been thinking a lot about why it has for so long attracted the label “forgotten”.
It certainly isn’t because it only affected Spaniards. “Spanish” flu is a misnomer, a historical accident that came about because, unlike the belligerent nations in the First World War, Spain, which was neutral, didn’t censor its press to avoid damaging morale.
The first flu victims Europeans learned about from the newspapers, therefore, were Spanish.
The reasons the Spanish flu has so often been overlooked go deeper than its name, and they have to do with the nature of collective remembering – or more importantly, collective forgetting. This is a subject that has interested historians and social scientists for a long time, though they have tended to focus on its external manifestations – monuments and memorials.
Only in the last few years have psychologists brought an empirical approach to the question, and started probing the representation of collective memory in the brain. Their initial findings are both fascinating and disturbing, because they show that collective memory, like individual memory, is shockingly fallible. Together we only remember a fraction of what happened, and so the interesting question becomes, why do we remember what we do, and forget all the rest?
A few years ago, anthropologist James Wertsch of Washington University in St Louis, a pioneer in this young field, observed that collective memories tend to follow a simple narrative structure, having a beginning, a middle and an end. Wars fit this template very well.
One 2014 study showed, for example, that Americans’ memories of the Second World War were constructed around three major events: the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese (the beginning), the D-Day landings in France (the turning-point), and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the end).
Other events belonging to the war were either forgotten or fused with these.
Pandemics lack such a structure. The Spanish flu, for example, was over in some places in as little as six weeks, so there was no time for a narrative to unfold.
Werstch also noted that collective memories tend to highlight heroic or mythical elements while playing down negative ones, or ones that don’t fit the narrative. There are no real heroes in a pandemic, and no victors either – no-one likely to go around bragging about it afterwards. And according to memory researchers, that lack of bragging rights may be another reason why the Spanish flu was overlooked for so long.
Charles Stone, a psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has been studying the consequences of “mnemonic silence” – the failure, by a leader, a community, or even an entire nation, to express a memory publicly. In one study, he and his colleagues find that what high-profile figures say about episodes from the past can shape what, if anything, the public recalls about them.
Stone’s study centred on a speech the King of Belgium gave in 2012, at a time when Belgium was facing certain delicate political problems – not least, the fact that it had recently emerged from eight months without a government. Stone and his colleagues identified four such problems and, knowing that the King would address some or all of them when he spoke, sent out surveys to 81 Belgians before and after his speech, to assess their memories in connection with each one. The people who didn’t hear the King speak remembered as much about each problem at both timepoints, but those who did hear him remembered less about the subjects he raised than they had beforehand. That’s because he mentioned certain events in connection with each issue, but not others. Participants who heard the speech later recalled the events he mentioned, while forgetting the ones he didn’t – resulting in a lower overall tally of memories for each one, after the speech. Though the results are preliminary, Stone says they indicate that public figures can induce selective forgetting, and so shape collective memory.
Mnemonic silence doesn’t always induce forgetting. When the Soviet authorities rewrote Lithuanian history books in the wake of their occupation of that country in 1940, the Lithuanians carefully curated their own version of the past – refusing to accept the “false” memory that they had invited their occupiers in, for example. Likewise, Armenians living in Turkey remember the Armenian genocide of the 1910s, even though Turkish law restricts public discussion of the episode. In both cases, Stone says, the group identity of the “underdog” depended on the maintenance of those publicly suppressed memories, giving Lithuanians and Armenians a powerful motive not to forget.
There is no underdog in a pandemic, since everyone is a potential victim. In 1918, however, there was one influential constituency in whose interests it was to erase memories of the Spanish flu – the doctors and scientists who failed to stem the tide of death (essentially because they didn’t know that influenza was caused by a virus), along with the politicians who, having no credible alternative to offer, advised the public to put their faith in them. In those circles, many came to see the pandemic as a humiliating defeat. As German historian of science Wilfried Witte put it a few years ago, “Politicians and doctors had no interest in building a monument to influenza.” Monuments abound to the two world wars, of both the concrete and psychological varieties, but not to the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. In that case, mnemonic silence induced forgetting very effectively – at least for a while.
SEE ALSO: A select group of people have an uncanny ability to remember faces for years
CHECK OUT: The scientific way to remember everyone's name
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Muscle memory has nothing to do with muscles — here's how it works
Wall Street and the surrounding financial district in lower Manhattan are a center of world commerce. But the streets beneath bankers' feet are rich with their own history and secrets.
We took a trip downtown to take a look at the secrets hiding in plain sight (or maybe just beyond a tourist's selfie stick) with Tom Schilkie of The Wall Street Experience.
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What's so cool about Alexander Hamilton?
Born a penniless bastard in the Caribbean, he would become a Revolutionary War hero and the genius behind much of America's government, all before dying in a duel at the age of 49.
Playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda saw it right away after reading Ron Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton." The biography inspired Miranda to create the hip-hop musical"Hamilton!"— a global phenomenon that is sold out on Broadway nearly through 2016 and about to go on national tour.
After listening to the album obsessively, we wanted to share some of the magic. Keep reading to see our guide (pulling from Chernow, Genius, and more) to key lines from the best musical ever.
Alexander Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755, in the West Indian capital city of Charlestown, located on the Caribbean island of Nevis.
His parents were unmarried, his father rejected him, and his mother died when he was 13.
By that point, many people would have given up. Not Hamilton ...
Hamilton had talent and dreams.
The orphan clerked for a trading company, read every book he could get his hands on, and honed his skills as a writer. After publishing a gripping essay in a local paper, community leaders paid for him to go to America to continue his education.
In 1772 he enrolled at Elizabethtown Academy in New Jersey. By 1773 he had impressed enough people to get a scholarship to King's College (later known as Columbia University).
That's when he really started making noise.
Hamilton, age 19, anonymously published his first political essay in 1774 in defense of the Boston Tea Party, where Americans destroyed British tea to protest taxes.
The young firebrand gave a speech that summer that turned him into a hero of the cause.
In 1775, his anonymous essay "The Farmer Refuted" not only made the best case yet for revolution but explained how the colonists could win.
Today is Rosa Parks' birthday. The "mother of the civil rights movement" would be turning 103.
Parks fought against segregation and the Jim Crow Laws of the time, and became a symbol of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
Take a look at her history-making legacy.
When I first heard this story, I didn't believe it.
How could an iron manhole cover be the fastest human-made object ever launched?
I honestly pictured something akin to the exploding manhole covers that terrify NYC residents:
SEE ALSO: We're on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy — here's what will happen to Earth
CHECK OUT: New evidence suggests the moon was formed in a head-on collision between Earth and another planet
Pizza is one of the world’s most popular food. It is also the world’s most photographed food on social media.In 2015, nearly 75,000 pizza restaurants sold nearly $39 billion worth of pizza in the United States. But this versatile dish had a humble start in a small Italian town.
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