Smart bear! A hilarious video of a bear who turned on a lost GoPro was discovered by a hiker in Wyoming. Once the hiker was able to scan the device’s SD card, he was treated to unique footage.
The majority of the video is just the bear trying to eat the GoPro, with the animal trying to gnaw on the device for a little while. The footage is both cute and funny at the same time. It’s surprising that the abandoned GoPro not only survived the snow, but also the bear who was looking for its next snack. Check the footage above to see more of the bear’s shenanigans with technology!
A pair of limited-edition sunglasses is now for sale for a whopping $495. What’s special about this eyewear? Well, clothing brand and material science company Pangaia created a pair of sunglasses that is made from carbon dioxide.
With the help of Twelve, a startup thatturns greenhouse gas emissions into the chemical building blocks for new materials, Pangaia used their technology to create polycarbonate lenses. The company used Twelve’s “CO2Made” chemicals instead of fossil fuels. The sunglasses are luxurious, elegant, and lightweight. These design choices were implemented to show how valuable and transformative the eyewear is.
A group of graffiti artists banded together to turn Chicago Skyway’s Southern viaducts into wonderful artworks. The dirty, rusted support columns that feature pockmarked walls and glass-strewn sidewalks are now colorful walls filled with different graffiti art.
The Meeting of Styles, a traveling, international gathering of graffiti artists along with other artists from Colorado, Texas, and California took up the challenge of painting different murals in Chicago Skyway. Even though the artists involved in the project produced various art pieces, a similar style has emerged from the multiple works. According to Krase, one of the painters, “it’s just a matter of coincidence. We didn’t plan that. It’s just our own styles happen to be cohesive.”
A team of music historians, musicologists, composers, and computer scientists worked together to finish Beethoven’s unfinished 10th symphony. The said symphony has been puzzled over by Beethoven fans and musicologists.
When Ludwig von Beethoven died in 1827, he only left some musical sketches of the unfinished piece. He was unable to finish the work due to deteriorating health. The team used artificial intelligence to teach a machine both Beethoven’s entire body of work and his creative process in order to reconstruct and finish the musician’s 10th symphony.
To learn more about the process of reconstructing and finishing Beethoven’s unfinished musical piece, check the full piece here.
Vintage Halloween pictures are often quite unsettling, because the costumes are creepily unprofessional and the lack of color makes them even creepier. It's as if these clowns wanted to inspire laughter, but ended up terrifying the crap out of us. But this isn't a vintage picture.
Photographer Tara Mapes does beautiful full color portraits, but her heart is in the creepy side of the art. Every fall she stages a photo shoot for halloween to bring out the horrors associated with the holiday. Check out last year's portrait gallery, and a photo shoot at an abandoned asylum.
This year, Mapes went to the cornfield and brought some clowns. What could be more terrifying than that? Oh, you'll find out, when you check out the rest of the gallery for Halloween 2021.
If you want to run a railway, you've got to train people to control the tracks, so that trains can get where they need to go without crashing into each other, or snarling up traffic for hours at a time. In Germany, these signal operators are trained at the Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld in Darmstadt. The facility has a model train that may not be the biggest or prettiest in the world, but it is probably the most accurate, because it is used to teach rail traffic control.
However, not every train station in Germany uses the same controls. The Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld model train can be controlled by mechanical switches, which can be a hundred years old, or by electronic switching from the mid-20th century, or by computerized systems that only the wealthier cities have. If you want to be a railway signal operator in Germany, you'll have to learn all the systems. Tom Scott shows us how it's done.
The guy who goes by Backyard Racing has a large back yard and plenty of time on his hands. He spent four months and $9,000 building an enormous Hot Wheels track. Why? So he could strap a camera to some wheels and share a POV video with us! We soar through every corner of the property, including a leap through the air, a couple of underwater sequences, and loop-the-loops.
The effect of watching this is akin to going on a roller coaster ride without waiting in line or tossing your cookies. Keep your eyes on the tracks going around the turns and you'll know what I mean.
It's photography award seasons, so there are a LOT of fantastic images from various photography competitions that you shouldn't miss.
We've compiled the winners and shortlisted entries of many of these photography competitions across the new Picto sites - from funny animals of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards to the breathtaking aerial shots of the Drone Photo Awards to the majestic celestial objects galaxies away in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Award.
Above is "Time for School" by Chee Kee Teo, featuring an otter momma taking a baby otter back and fro for a swimming lesson - view more finalists of the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.
More beautiful, interesting, and intriguing images of 2021 photo competitions below:
Bright, saturated flowers are the central point of Sophia Ahamed’s new series. The clusters of flowers in vibrant shades of red and pink are behind the expanses of cloudy, blue-ish violet skies. The striking difference between the vibrant flowers and the subdued, faded background is designed to skew perceptions of fiction and reality. Ahamed further explains her work to Colossal. “We associate color with how we perceive the world around us, memories, and emotion,” she says, “Often at times, these elements can act as well as a gentle escape into something more soothing.”
Aww! A stray dog interrupts a street performance in order to comfort an actor who was pretending to be hurt. This adorable interaction between actor Numan Ertuğrul Uzunsoy and the dog is truly heartwarming!
The stray pupper interrupted the play to offer Uzunsoy comfort when his character was injured and in great pain. The actor admits that he did not see the dog approaching him during his scene. At first, Uzunsoy thought his costar was approaching him. Upon realizing that it was a dog, he broke character and smiled. “I was very happy when I felt the dog's kisses,” Uzunsoy said. “I was very touched. He was like an angel who wanted to help me. It was a very emotional moment for me. I was not expecting it.”
Popular Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo, known for its simple and minimalistic apparel, has opened its first cafe in Ginza. The new shop, called Uniqlo Coffee, is located on the top floor of their global flagship store. The cafe follows the brand’s minimalist look, with white walls and simple yet refreshing wooden accents.
This place will now be added to my travel bucket list!
Maybe it’s time to let the data do the talking. In order to find out if left-handed people were actually smarter than the rest of the population, researchers studied the mathematical achievements of right- and left-handed students in Italy. Left-handed students had a significant edge on the more difficult math problems compared to the right-handed students.
According to a meta-analysis of 43 studies, left-handed people have a larger corpus callosum. This is the bundle of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. A stronger connection between the two hemispheres allows left-handers to have stronger spatial abilities, which are linked to mathematics.
To learn more about the possible explanations as to how left-handed people are smarter, check Live Science’s full piece here.
Before social media, before iPhones, before YouTube, even, there was Homestar Runner. It was goofy and subversive, but it was funny and innovative. The experimental Flash animation didn't need any promotion because it had no competition on its level. It didn't need search engine optimization because it was shared granularly. If that sounds like jargon to you, what it means is that everyone liked Homestar Runner because it was weird and innovative, so people turned their friends and acquaintances onto it. This video takes a look at how Homestar, Strong Bad, and the other characters took over the early internet to the delight of all who explored the web back when you were desperate to find anything really worth the effort. It succeeded because it was fun, and fun was what we were looking for.
The cartoon survived the demise of Flash. As old (in internet terms) as Homestar Runner is, it's still there, even though the videos are now hosted by YouTube. -via Digg
There is a planet nearby that is totally populated by robots. But we are going to Mars eventually, or at least of few of us humans will. Therefore, we have to consider all facets of human life as they might be played out on Mars, and that includes death. Sending a dead body back to earth would not be a priority, but what would happen to that body on Mars?
On earth, a dead body that is not embalmed eventually decomposes due to the effects of bacteria and other microbes, insects, fungus, scavenger animals, moisture, and weather. On Mars, there would be no other life forms besides those microbes we carry in our bodies, and the majority of those need oxygen to survive. They also need warmth, and Mars temperatures range from freezing to very much colder.
So what would happen to a deceased human on the red planet? Cremation would be an unnecessary expenditure in oxygen and energy, so burial is a sensible alternative, yet that doesn't mean ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Alison Klesman at Astronomy explains what would likely happen to a dead body in the Martian environment, and offers options for how to deal with it. -via Damn Interesting
Perhaps you've grown used to a very simple relationship with your toilet. Perhaps you use it for only one purpose. But that will change in the future. Competing research teams across the United States are developing "smart toilets" that, with cameras, can identify each user by their "anal print" and diagnose health problems.
The Wall Street Journal (paywall link) reports about various emerging smart toilet designs that will closely monitor your urine and feces. Stanford University's design will chemically test all urine. Duke University's will take stool samples to test for blood and proteins. Other designs will measure blood pressure and heart rate.
Who needs these toilets? Perhaps not you, but the start-up companies working on health-monitoring smart toilets see future markets in assisted living facilities, where staffs could appreciate early warning signs about patient illness.
