Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of my personal heroes. Not just because of his outsized contribution to the civil rights movement, but because of his leadership capabilities and emphasis on non-violent civil disobedience.

It also goes without saying, that this wasn't just a great orator with enlightened tactics, he was also a highly intelligent man with a strong sense of history.

This is on full display in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which I highlighted in the piece: Martin Luther King: "Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was Legal."

Here are some of his timeless words.

Nearly 50 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI and Memphis Police Department have sparingly released information implicating themselves or members of their agencies in facilitating and directly causing the untimely death of Dr. King. Although the Justice Department officially claims James Earl Ray assassinated MLK, a civil suit later determined that a Memphis cop was involved in a conspiracy to murder the civil rights leader.

During a rainstorm on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers in Memphis lost their lives when the truck's compactor accidentally triggered. On that same day, 22 black sewer workers were sent home without pay while their white coworkers received compensation. Less than two weeks later, over a thousand black sanitation workers went on strike wearing placards reading, "I AM A MAN."

In 1835 a labourer was digging a field just outside the English seaside town of Margate. His work was interrupted when he thrust his spade in to the soil and it simply vanished in to the ground. The master of the nearby Dane House School, James Newlove, was made aware of this strange disappearance. He volunteered his young son, Joshua, for the task of being lowered, candle in hand, in to the void via a length of rope

The dinosaur has yet to be officially named, but is informally known as 'Titanosaur'

Titanosaur stands 20 feet tall, and is 122 feet long, weighing 70 tons in life

This is the first fairly complete skeleton found of the newly discovered species

Researchers dug up the bones in a desert region of Argentine Patagonia

The biggest dinosaur ever to be shown at the American Museum of Natural History will be unveiled on Friday, and it is so big, it's head will graze the ceiling and poke out through it's exhibition hall.

Known as the Titanosaur, it is one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, and lived 100 million years ago.

Researchers dug up the bones in a desert region of Argentine Patagonia, after a farmer found what he suspected to be fossils.

Just outside the tiny town of Glenrock, Wyoming the footprints of a 66 million-year-old monster are cemented in stone. This fossil trackway was brought to light with the help of University of Alberta paleontologist Scott Persons, who first viewed the tracks as a 13-year-old while visiting the Glenrock Paleon Museum.

"The Paleon is an unusual place. It's not a big museum, but it doesn't have to be because it's got the badlands for a backyard," explains Persons. The working museum has dinosaurs on display, but also provides opportunities to experience paleontology in action. "Before Glenrock, for me paleontology was dinosaurs in books and their skeletons in display halls and behind glass cases. This was the first time I got my hands dirty in the field and in a fossil preparation laboratory."

The museum's curator, Sean Smith, showed Scott another first: the fossil tracks of a tyrannosaur. "Sean led me out to a sandstone slope and started brushing away at an indented spot. At first, it looked like a prehistoric pothole," Persons recalls. "But soon, I could see the imprints of three big toes each with sharp claw tips. It was so cool my jaw dropped. Then, Sean pointed up slope, and there were two more!"

The Glenrock tracks, as it turns out, are one of a kind. Years after his initial visit to the Paleon, Persons—now a doctoral student in paleontology—reached out to the museum and urged them to pursue formal scientific description of the trackway. With his help, a research paper on the rare footprints has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Cretaceous Research.

More than 40,000 years ago, in the Arctic reaches of what's now Russia, the population of mammoths was at a peak. This was before the last glacial maximum - the last era when ice sheets reached down to cover extensive parts of Asia, Europe and North America - and even in the far north, mammoths would have had large expanses of open landscape in which to roam.

Astonishingly, according to a new study, published in Science, humans may have followed them there, on the hunt, further north into the Arctic than anyone ever realized humans had traveled that early in history.

New evidence, of human-made marks on mammoth bones, shows that humans had already populated the Arctic as early as 45,000 years ago, a team of researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences reports in the new study. That would put our species in that region 10,000 years earlier than any previous evidence has shown.

The latest evidence comes from a single mammoth carcass, first discovered in August 2012, not far from a weather station in Sopochnaya Karga, an area of Russia that stretches further north than the northernmost points of Scandinavia. That summer, a student was walking along the river bank when he spotted bones in an exposed bluff.

A team of Italian and Russian archeologists says that they have made one of the most important discoveries connected with the history of Nubia. According to the Sudan Antiquities Service, the hieroglyphic inscription uncovered at Abu Erteila, may be the most important discovery in the last decade.

AGI reports that the excavations conducted from November to December 2015 by the international team were led by Eugenio Fantusati from Sapienza University of Rome, his deputy Marco Baldi, and by Eleonora Kormysheva, the Director of the Golenishev center for Egyptology, Russian State University for the Humanities, and a Principal Researcher in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Around 200 km (124.3 miles) north of Khartoum they discovered the most impressive artifacts, which include a basalt ritual altar, a hieroglyphic inscription, and a sacred boat. This discovery, which is a fruit of eight rounds of excavations, is shedding new light on the Nubian civilization that existed between the 1st century BC and 1st century AC. The temple where the findings were made, was thought to have been most likely destroyed by a fire. The ruins are currently being carbon-dated to ascertain the exact date of the event.

An ancient pit filled with severed human arms, hands and fingers has been unearthed in France.

The nearly 6,000-year-old pit was found near the village of Bergheim, which sits near the border with Germany.

"The discovery of Bergheim is the witness of a very violent event, which took place at a specific time," said study co-author Fanny Chenal, an archaeologist at the University of Strasbourg in France. "Its unique and extraordinary nature does not allow or help us to better understand the daily life of these people."

And though Chenal and her colleagues don't know exactly what spurred people to such gory acts, the likeliest explanation is a violent skirmish or war, the researchers speculate in the December 2015 issue of the journal Antiquity. [See Images from the Gruesome Pit of Limbs]

It's getting harder to focus on the "news".

Considering that all media is filtered through just five megacorporations (compared with 50 companies in the early '80s), not to mention (but I will) the fact that domestic propaganda was officially "approved" for use against the American people a few years ago, it's kinda hard to tell the difference between what is real and what isn't anymore.

Besides, it's all "hey look, shiny things". Pay attention to the right hand so you won't see what the left is doing.

The distractions on the "news" also serve another purpose. To fill up your short term memory like junk food for the brain. To keep you from remembering what happened last week, let alone last year. From putting these things into perspective, especially historical perspective.

The Roman Empire is famous for its advanced sanitation — public baths and toilets — but human poop from the region shows that it was rife with parasites.

In fact, the empire was infested with a greater number of human parasites, such as whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica dysentery, than during prior time periods.

"I was very surprised to find that compared with the Bronze Age and Iron Age, there was no drop in the kind of parasites that are spread by poor sanitation during the Roman period," said the study's author Piers Mitchell, a lecturer of biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.