Echoes in the Mist

This 24 April 2019 video says about itself:

Rare Giant Soft-Shell Turtle Released Into the Wild | Nat Geo Wild

A Cambodian community is attempting to save this endangered species, which can grow to the size of a small sofa.

We sometimes hear fears of attempts to “homogenise” Indian society. These fears are groundless, because the task is impossible. This huge unwieldy body, for all its dark spots, has antibodies that resist external, centralised or formal controls; it prefers decentralisation, which have become an intimate part of its temperament evolved over millenniums. – Prof Michel Danino

India’s beginnings—the Harappan or Indus-Sarasvati civilization, to limit those beginnings to the first urban development on the subcontinent—speak of civic order, the sharing of concepts of town planning, sanitation and craft, and their implementation through some degree of standardisation, despite substantial regional differences. If we jump two millenniums to the Mauryan Empire, the first large-scale one in historical India, we see most of the subcontinent brought together under one central rule; here too, sociocultural integration remained respectful of diverse regional cultures, in consonance with India’s ethos (“The Individual and the Collective in Indian…

This 19 April 2019 video about Paris, France says about itself:

The bees that live on the roof of Notre Dame are alive and buzzing, having survived the devastating fire that ripped through the cathedral on Monday.

Beekeeper Nicolas Geant told CNN that he received a call from the Notre Dame spokesman saying there were bees flying in and out of the hives. “Which means they are still alive!” Geant said.

“Right after the fire I looked at the drone pictures and saw the hives weren’t burnt but there was no way of knowing if the bees had survived. Now I know there’s activity it’s a huge relief!”

Notre Dame has housed three beehives on the first floor on a roof over the sacristy, just beneath the rose window, since 2013. Each hive has about 60,000 bees. Geant said the hives were not touched by the blaze because they are…

This 2016 video is called TOP 10 FLIGHTLESS BIRDS.

From Harvard University in the USA:

Genetics behind the evolution of flightless birds

April 17, 2019

Summary: Based on the analysis of the genomes of more than a dozen flightless birds, including an extinct moa, researchers found that while different species show wide variety in the protein-coding portions of their genome, they appear to turn to the same regulatory pathways when evolving flight loss.

Since Darwin’s era, scientists have wondered how flightless birds like emus, ostriches, kiwi, cassowaries and others are related, and for decades the assumption was that they must all share a common ancestor who abandoned the skies for a more grounded life.

By the early 2000s, new research using genetic tools upended that story, and instead pointed to the idea that flighlessness evolved many times throughout history. Left unanswered, however, were questions about whether…

Easter began as a Pagan festival celebrating spring in the Northern Hemisphere, long before the advent of Christianity. – Prof Carole Cusack

On Easter Sunday, a bunny will deliver chocolate eggs to many households across the world.

Have you ever wondered how this seemingly bizarre tradition came to be?

Well, it turns out Easter actually began as a Pagan festival celebrating spring in the Northern Hemisphere, long before the advent of Christianity.

“Since pre-historic times, people have celebrated the equinoxes and the solstices as sacred times,” University of Sydney Professor Carole Cusack said.

“The spring equinox is a day where the amount of dark and the amount of daylight is exactly identical, so you can tell that you’re emerging from winter because the daylight and the dark have come back into balance.

“People mapped their whole life according to the patterns of nature.”

Following the advent of Christianity, the Easter…

This 8 April 2019 video shows black-tailed godwits reflected in water.

The video is from the Grote Peel nature reserve in Limburg province in the Netherlands.

This 13 April 2019 video says about itself:

Egypt unveiled a 4,400-year-old tomb on Saturday. The site was discovered in early April in the Saqqara burial site in the Giza Governorate.

The tomb belonged to a Fifth Dynasty nobleman named Khuwy and consisted of chambers and sub-chambers decorated in colourful reliefs and well-preserved inscriptions.

Secretary General of Supreme Council for Egyptian Antiquities Mostafa el-Waziry said archaeologists were able to identify fingerprints of the tomb’s painter.

A group of reportedly 52 foreign ambassadors and cultural attaches, among them Egyptian actress Yousra, accompanied Waziry at the unveiling ceremony.

From AFP news agency, 13 April 2019:

Egypt unveils colourful Fifth Dynasty tomb

In a major archaeological discovery, Egypt on Saturday unveiled the tomb of a Fifth Dynasty official adorned with colourful reliefs and well preserved inscriptions.

The tomb, south of Saqqara, a vast necropolis south of Cairo, belongs to a senior…

This video is about whooper swans, both adult and young, in winter in Sweden. Featuring goosanders as well.

This 10 April 2019 video says about itself:

New human species found in the Philippines

Scientists have found a few bones and seven teeth belonging to a previously unknown species of human. They’ve named the new species Homo luzonensis, after the island of Luzon in the Philippines where it was found. The bones are tiny, suggesting that Homo luzonensis was under 4 feet tall. That would make it the second species of diminutive human to be found in south-east Asia; in 2007 scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, found on the island of Flores in Indonesia and nicknamed the hobbit.

Both species lived around 50,000 years ago, at a time when Asia was also home to our species, the Neanderthals and a group called the Denisovans. The new species raises many questions, including who were its ancestors and how did it move?

Read the…

The supremacy of spiritual knowledge is perhaps the most significant master idea of Indian civilisation and will remain one of its most enduring legacies. – Prof Michel Danino

The previous article in this series, Dharma, generator of Indian ethics, attempted to circumscribe the central yet elusive notion of dharma, which bundles together law, truth, duty, right thinking and right action, virtue, honour and a few more values. In many ways, it may be viewed as the foundation of Indian culture and civilisation. As Kapil Kapoor, a fine scholar of Indian knowledge systems, once remarked pithily, “Dharma is the one-word unwritten constitution of India.”

In other words, it would be a serious mistake to equate dharma with “religion”. India’s two epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, whose central purpose is to expound and discuss dharma, are not, in that sense, religious texts. Sharing the same purpose are texts on…