Appalachian History Series Blue Springs, known locally as the community around Midway and today within Mosheim, sat on the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad. On October 10, 1863, Union forces under Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside met Confederate cavalry under Brig. Gen. John S. “Cerro Gordo” Williams here and drove them from the line.

Appalachian History Series Bull’s Gap sits where the railroad and the road squeeze through Bays Mountain between Greene and Hawkins counties. In the fall of 1864 the gap again became the key to East Tennessee. Across three days, November 11 to 13, Major General John C. Breckinridge pressed a smaller Federal force under Alvan C. Gillem, roughly 2,500 effectives, with about 3,000 Confederates on the field.

Appalachian History Series A Yard Built for Coal Country On a broad bottom along the Cumberland River, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad built a new classification yard at Shonn, the rail hamlet that would soon be known as Loyall. Construction occurred in 1921 to serve the coal boom that was transforming Harlan County. Contemporary descriptions and later summaries agree on the timing.

Abandoned Appalachia Series A school on Browney’s Creek Cubbage Elementary stood in the Miracle community of far-southeastern Bell County, Kentucky, near the junction of KY 987 and KY 219. Locals often identify the broader area by the stream that drains it, Browney’s Creek, and by the clustered family names that gave Miracle its name.

There is a crisis in scientific publishing. Science is haunted. In early 2024, one major publisher retracted hundreds of scientific papers. Most were not the work of hurried researchers, but of ghosts—digital phantoms generated by artificial intelligence. Featuring nonsensical diagrams and fabricated data, they had sailed through the gates of peer review. This spectre of AI-driven fraud is not only a new technological threat.

The great multimedia content deception Learning teams spend millions on dressing up content with multimedia. The premise is always the same: better graphics equal better learning. The evidence tells a different story. The focus on the presentation and transmission of content represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how learning actually works in our complex world.

Educational technology professionals cite Richard Mayer’s 2008 study more than any other research on multimedia instruction. They are citing the wrong conclusion. Mayer did not prove multimedia enhances learning. He proved multimedia creates cognitive problems requiring ten different workarounds – and accidentally built the case for text-based instruction.

A dashboard of transparency indicators signaling trustworthiness Our Research Transparency Check (Bekkers et al., 2025) rests on two pillars. The first pillar is the development of Papercheck (DeBruine &

Rene Bekkers, 4 September 2025[*]   A dashboard of transparency indicators signaling trustworthiness Our Research Transparency Check (Bekkers et al., 2025) rests on two pillars. The first pillar that we blogged about previously is the development of P apercheck , a collection of software applications that assess the transparency and methodological quality of research (DeBruine &

I’m currently running a D&D campaign, and in a recent session we ended with the plan for the party to interrogate a character they’d captured. We play every other week, which meant I had two whole weeks to figure out what exactly this character knew. I was worried about a few things though.

Appalachian History Series A highway made a lake Lake Linville is not a conventional reservoir built behind a separate concrete structure. Kentucky’s own mapping and basin summary explain that “Renfro Creek was dammed in 1968 by the I-75 fill embankment to create the lake.” The same Kentucky Geological Survey page notes that the Mount Vernon Water Works draws its raw water from Lake Linville and even provides a ramp locator for public access.