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From today's featured article

Immanuel Kant

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that studies beauty, taste, art, and related phenomena. It examines aesthetic properties or features that influence the appeal of objects, like elegance and ugliness. Philosophers debate whether these properties exist objectively or depend on subjective experience. Taste is a sensitivity to aesthetic qualities, and differences in taste can lead to disagreements about aesthetic judgments. Artworks are artifacts or performances such as painting, music, dance, architecture, and literature. Art interpretation and criticism seek to identify the meanings of artworks. Discussions focus on elements such as what an artwork represents, which emotions it expresses, and what the author's underlying intent was. Aesthetics is relevant to fields such as ethics, religion, psychology, and everyday life. Its roots lie in antiquity, but it only emerged as a distinct field of inquiry in the 18th century when philosophers like Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant (pictured) engaged with the subject systematically. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Male Yucatán molly flaring his dorsal fin

... that Yucatán molly males flare their "sails" (pictured) both to woo and to shoo?
... that Wales's first Commonwealth Games medallist in shooting walked off the podium when the wrong national anthem was played?
... that the writer of the visual novel SeaBed based it on a comic that he drew in his spare time at work?
... that Whispering Woods, the second novel set in the universe of Magic: The Gathering, was later declared non-canonical?
... that future Olympian Nam Singh Thapa's boxing career began when he was arrested and forced to compete in a match?
... that the original occupant of the Farnsworth House likened her experience there to that of a caged animal?
... that in 2002, Sarah Baxendale broke the Guinness World Record for the longest kiss featured on screen?
... that 16 years ago, a man in Ireland slipped on some ice?

In the news

Laura Fernández Delgado

The Winter Olympics open in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.
Attacks on two villages by Islamist gunmen in Kwara State, Nigeria, kill at least 162 people.
Laura Fernández Delgado (pictured) is elected as the president of Costa Rica.
Clashes between the Balochistan Liberation Army and the armed forces in several districts of Balochistan, Pakistan, leave at least 225 people dead.
The US Department of Justice releases over three million documents from the Epstein files.

On this day

February 7: Independence Day in Grenada (1974)

Contemporary painting of the siege of Gibraltar

1783 – American Revolutionary War: After three years and seven months, Spain and France abandoned their attempt (pictured) to capture Gibraltar from the British.
1941 – Soviet border guards opened fire on civilians attempting to cross the border from the Soviet Union to Romania near Lunca, killing several hundred people.
1948 – Neil Harvey became the youngest Australian to score a century in Test cricket.
1986 – President of Haiti Jean-Claude Duvalier fled the country after a popular uprising, ending 28 years of one-family rule in the nation.
1991 – The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army shelled 10 Downing Street with mortars in a failed attempt to assassinate British prime minister John Major.

Henry Fuseli (b. 1741)
Tony Tan (b. 1940)
Angel Aquino (b. 1973)
Richard Williams (d. 1980)

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Today's featured picture

The Pacific gull (Larus pacificus) is a bird in the gull family, Laridae, native to the coasts of Australia. It is moderately common in a band along the coast between Carnarvon, Western Australia, in the west, and Sydney in the east, as well as Tasmania and other islands off the continent's southern coast. The Pacific gull ranges in length from 58 to 66 centimetres (23 to 26 in), with a wingspan of 137 to 157 centimetres (54 to 62 in). Its diet consists of fish and invertebrates, such as crabs, sand flatheads and cephalopods. This Pacific gull of the subspecies L. p. pacificus was photographed in Moulting Lagoon Important Bird Area, Tasmania.

Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp

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