Stories By Van

A devil is said to haunt the wooded Pine Barren of southern New Jersey. Dubbed the Jersey Devil, it has never been photographed or captured, but has appeared in dozens of books, films, and television shows including "The X-Files." Most accounts suggest that the creature has a horse-like face with antlers or horns sprouting from the top of its head. It walks on two legs, ending with cloven hooves or pig's feet. The overall body shape resembles a kangaroo, though it also has wings like a bat. Some say it has a tail like a lizard; others say it has no tail at all. The monster is said to kill dogs, chickens and other small animals, as well as leave spooky cloven hoof prints in snow, and bellow a terrifying screech in the wooded darkness. History of the Jersey Devil The Jersey Devil is the subject of a legend dating from the early 18th century. There are several variations, but a common story holds that a woman named Mother Leeds (who was believed to have been ...

Prejudice is a biased opinion about others based solely on their membership in a certain group. The biased opinions that prejudice is based on are rooted in stereotypes; stereotypes are the ideas that people have about members of different groups based on the expected attributes, characteristics, and attitudes of these groups; many of these stereotypes are culturally based. Discrimination is when these opinions about membership of certain groups becomes behaviors directed towards others based on that group membership.   Prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes can be based on age, gender, race, nationality, religion, language, class, disability and etc.   The direct origin of prejudice and discrimination has not been decided, however, academics concur that people are not naturally born being prejudiced; this is evidenced by the social construct of these attitudes, and the fact there has been extensive evidence found that states that prejudice is not found in young chil...

A few years ago, while stopping by “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to plug his latest book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry , Neil deGrasse Tyson did what he does best: break down the mysteries of the universe for us commoners. To start things off, Colbert pulled out this image of Earth taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft: If you squint your eyes, you can just barely spot it beneath Saturn’s massive rings. “Just a reminder, we are a speck in the middle of a cosmic void,” Tyson told Colbert. He added that if you were an alien traveling through space, you’d barely notice Earth because it’s so puny. Though Tyson was quick to note he isn’t the first to view our home planet this way; Carl Sagan first drew our attention to this sobering fact by referring to Earth as a “pale blue dot” in 1990. “You should not be walking the streets without a baptism in cosmic perspective,” he said. When Colbert asked him what he meant by that, Tyson explained, “If you look up in the un...

Extrasensory perception (ESP) refers to information that is perceived outside of the five senses. This includes phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and the knowledge of future events. Since these phenomena cannot be overtly seen or measured, they often regarded as unbelievable or psychotic. However, recent research is beginning to unveil the possible biological mechanisms behind such phenomena. Mirror Neurons: Telepathy refers to communication outside of the known senses. Many studies have demonstrated that we can “read” other people’s minds because we have neurons that act as automatic mirrors. In fact, we can grasp the intentions and emotions of others automatically. In 2007, psychology professor Gregor Domes and his colleagues found that the ability to interpret subtle social cues can be enhanced by oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust and social approach behavior. It is not such a stretch to imagine that we can pick up the emotions and intentions of others around...

Elon Musk is usually far from a technological pessimist. From electric cars to Mars colonies, he’s made his name by insisting that the future can get here faster. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, he sounds very different. Speaking at MIT in 2014, he called AI humanity’s “biggest existential threat” and compared it to “summoning the demon.” He reiterated those fears in an interview published with Recode’s Kara Swisher, though with a little less apocalyptic rhetoric. “As AI gets probably much smarter than humans, the relative intelligence ratio is probably similar to that between a person and a cat, maybe bigger,” Musk told Swisher. “I do think we need to be very careful about the advancement of AI.” To many people — even many machine learning researchers — an AI that surpasses humans by as much as we surpass cats sounds like a distant dream. We’re still struggling to solve even simple-seeming problems with machine learning. Self-driving cars have an extremely hard ...

Perhaps you already heard of a theory that aircrafts exhaust a chemical trail, also called “chemtrail”? Conspiracy theorists claim that it is meant to manage solar radiation, manipulate peoples, control human population, and modify the weather as well as cause illnesses and other health issues. We all have seen the white or dark trail left behind an aircraft. But what actually is it? Can it really affect our health? Let us go through some of the acclaimed “chemtrails” and explain what it is. It Comes Out Of The Wingtips It does come out of the wingtips but that is no “chemtrail” – it is called a wingtip vortex . This can be often seen when the air is both cold and humid. Very basic physics really – when an aerodynamic object, in this case, a wing, flies through cold air, it generates a white trail next to the wingtip. Black Smoke Indicates How Bad It Is When an aircraft exhausts such black clouds, it must be dangerous chemicals? Well, not really – if an airplane pr...

A near-death experience, or NDE, is a profound psychological event that may occur to a person close to death or who is not near death but in a situation of physical or emotional crisis. Being in a life-threatening situation does not, by itself, constitute a near-death experience. It is the pattern of perceptions, creating a recognizable overall event, that has been called “near-death experience.” Across thousands of years and in cultures around the world, people have described powerful experiences that follow this general pattern with its common features. At its broadest, the experiences involve perceptions of movement through space, of light and darkness, a landscape, presences, intense emotion, and a conviction of having a new understanding of the nature of the universe. An NDE may begin with an out-of-body experience—a very clear perception of being somehow separate from one’s physical body, possibly even hovering nearby and watching events going on around the body. An...