“Come storm our shelter,” wrote the OKC Animal Welfare on their Facebook post on Friday. “We have great animals ready to protect you from the Area 51 aliens. Adoption isn’t that far out of this world!” they continued. They even showed their dogs wearing tinfoil hats on the post.
The shelter has 150 dogs, 54 cats, two pigs and one hamster available for adoption, according to its website.
The event organizer started the [Area 51] event as a joke. Now, more than 1.8 million have signed up for the September 20 event, which jokingly encourages participants to storm Area 51, long believed by conspiracy theorists to be a holding site for extraterrestrial life.
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Still, the Air Force told CBS News it was aware of the post and called it "dangerous." It's unclear if anyone will actually show up to the event, but they may feel safer with a tinfoil-wearing pet by their side.
Y’all, having sled dogs has been so good for my body image. And not because mushing is a joy-filled, physical outdoor activity, although that’s true. It’s actually something much simpler than that. pic.twitter.com/PJDMtBF0Bv
Dogsledder Blair Braverman shared something she realized over the years she has worked with sled dogs, training and feeding them from when they were pups until retirement. She saw how these dogs were built in different ways and yet there is something so wonderful in the diversity of their bodies and how they were designed.
It may simple and obvious but her experiences with the sled dogs showed her how these dogs having different body types is just how nature intended them to be. There's nothing wrong with being built uniquely from others. In fact, the dogs don't even care how their bodies look like. If ever they were aware about that at all, they would probably not care still as long as they are fed and get to run around and have fun.
Some of them eat thousands of calories a day and are still complete stringbeans. They eat literally three times as much food as everyone else. pic.twitter.com/Qd5gzbLils
Some of them can eat, like, a tablespoon of kibble, and the next day they need a bigger harness. They’re easy keepers; their bodies naturally want to be bigger. Which is good! Easy keepers make great sled dogs. pic.twitter.com/tgGkbypAPe
Cancer cells have different ways of surviving in our body despite all our efforts into subduing, neutralizing, and eventually eliminating them. So we also have to find crafty ways to get rid of them. One such method that a team from McCormick School of Engineering used is to disguise chemo drugs as fat.
“It’s like a Trojan horse,” Nathan Gianneschi, a professor of chemistry and of biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and associate director of the International Institute of Nanotechnology at Northwestern University. “It looks like a nice little fatty acid, so the tumor’s receptors see it and invite it in. Then the drug starts getting metabolized and kills the tumor cells.”
One other advantage to this method is that it reduces the risk of side effects from the drug since it targets or is consumed by the cancer cells directly. They tested the drug delivery system by using a common chemo drug and introducing it into a small animal model with tumors.
Disguised as fat, the drug entered and completely eliminated the tumors in three types of cancer: bone, pancreatic, and colon. Even better: the researchers found they could deliver 20 times the dose of paclitaxel with their system, compared to two other paclitaxel-based drugs. But even at such a high quantity, the drug in Gianneschi’s system was still 17 times safer.
Just announced in Hall H at #SDCC, Marvel Studios’ THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER, an original series with Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan and Daniel Brühl. Streaming exclusively on Disney+, Fall 2020. pic.twitter.com/FmFMKWUrhO
Ever since Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, everybody has been eagerly anticipating and speculating what's next in Marvel's massive franchise. We know that it was the end of an era but that doesn't mean the stories and characters we loved so much and grew up with over the years will just fade away from memory. Marvel has a lot more in store for us.
Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, today unveiled the Phase 4 slate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at Comic-Con. He hit the stage at Marvel's panel in Hall, announcing a tantalizing suite of new superhero movies, set for release over the next two years. A list that included Black Widow, The Eternals, Thor 4: Love and Thunder, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
I honestly don't recall any scene even close to this, and I've seen lot of old movies. But still, he makes us laugh at the melodrama, a feature film's worth squeezed into a minute and a half. Joel Haver plays both parts. -via Digg
The hum is a sound that only, according to some estimates, two percent of people can hear. The scientific world has no known explanation for this noise. For some of the 2%, it sounds like an engine idling. For others, it sounds like a low-frequency rumble. But almost all of those who can hear it can agree on one thing: it is a persistent, maddening noise.
Since it was first reported in Bristol, England, in 1970, this elusive phenomenon has plagued thousands of people across the globe, slowly eroding their sanity. One of them is Steve Kohlhase, an industrial-facilities mechanical engineer living in Brookfield, Connecticut. In Garret Harkawik’s short documentary Doom Vibrations, Kohlhase describes the noise: “Your ears are ringing real bad. If it’s a bad day, it feels like your brain is being squeezed. It’s nauseating.” Kohlhase says his dog, too, seems to suffer from the noise; once Kohlhase started hearing it, the canine became lethargic, and has never recovered.
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“I think most people view the hum as a fringe belief,” Harkawik [stated], “because it’s so subjective—people say they hear something that most people can’t hear. But when you look at the vast number of people who say they hear it, it’s obvious that there’s something going on.”
You’ve heard it right. On this small community of Christians, there is no crime, no debt, and no homelessness.
Houses there are surrounded by acres of forest. On a warm day, they can swim in a lake, with no worries of their mortgage, as it is paid. Evenings are spent at a communal barbecue, where the community sing songs around the fire.
People chat and read books. No one is glued to a phone and children don’t fight over the Xbox because no one has a computer or TV.
The women are dressed modestly – scarves cover their hair while their long skirts and shirts look like sackcloth.
The lives of the 300 people here are not their own because they’re serving a higher being: Jesus.
They must ask permission to start ‘courting’ a person who has caught their eye, no one can divorce and they can’t choose their jobs or have any possessions.
Most people have never heard of the Bruderhof, unsurprising as there are just 3,000 members of the small Christian sect in the world, spread across the UK (there’s another in Nonington, Kent, and a small one in Peckham, south London), the US, Germany, Australia and Paraguay.
‘We have a different vision for our society,’ says Bernard Hibbs, 38, the community’s outreach director who has let in TV cameras for the first time.
We use batteries frequently — from our smartphones, to our wristwatches, to our laptops, and to our cars.
Most of our batteries are lithium-ion ones. People are alarmed that since the demand for this type of battery is high, this might lead to shortages of lithium in the world. This is why scientists look for an alternative for lithium-ion batteries, in the form of sodium-ion batteries. Sodium is cheap and abundant, which makes it a good alternative.
However, there’s a catch: Sodium-ion batteries have a much shorter lifespan than lithium-ion ones. But why do this type of battery decay quickly? Or in general, why do batteries decay in the first place? Scientists may have found the reason.
… UC Santa Barbara computational materials scientist Chris Van de Walle and colleagues have uncovered a reason for this loss of capacity in sodium batteries: the unintended presence of hydrogen, which leads to degradation of the battery electrode…
Professor Peelaers, now at the University of Kansas, described the key findings: “We quickly realized that hydrogen can very easily penetrate the material, and that its presence enables the manganese atoms to break loose from the manganese-oxide backbone that holds the material together. This removal of manganese is irreversible and leads to a decrease in capacity and, ultimately, degradation of the battery.”
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… Now that its detrimental impact has been flagged, measures can be taken during fabrication and encapsulation of the batteries to suppress incorporation of hydrogen, which should lead to better performance.”
In fact, the researchers suspect that even the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries may suffer from the ill effects of unintended hydrogen incorporation. Whether this causes fewer problems because fabrication methods are further advanced in this mature materials system, or because there is a fundamental reason for the lithium batteries to be more resistant to hydrogen is not clear at present, and will be an area of future research.
FaceApp has been a popular app these days for its ability to make people on photos look older in their photos. The question is, is the app accurate in creating “elderly” versions of people? The Sun put FaceApp’s accuracy to the test by “lining it up against old and new pics of A-List celebs.”
Here are the photos and see for yourself. For me, it is pretty accurate it scares me.
To be fair, this script is only presented as artificial intelligence; it makes way too much sense for that to truly be the case. But it is a completely goofy oversimplification of the plot of The Lion King with an extreme overcomplication of the story's underlying meaning, coupled with the kind of misunderstandings that an alien from another planet might make. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Bleasdale Church of England Primary, a school believed to be the smallest in England, will close down after it was left with only two pupils. The school will be shutting off its doors on Tuesday as one of the pupils will be leaving it to go to secondary school.
Following a public consultation earlier this year, the Lancashire County Council pronounced that the school is “no longer financially viable.”
Over the past five years, pupil numbers have fallen from 16 to two.
Tompkins Square is a park in Lower Manhattan that maintains the vibe and aesthetic of Old New York. Known for being a hub for skateboarders, this park is the only spot in the neighborhood that provides flat, open ground and space to learn skateboarding for first timers.
A new proposal by the city, however, aims to remove Tompkins Square - but the skateboarders aren’t taking it lying down. They’re rallying against the authorities to save their beloved training spot.
Now, theNew York City skateboarding community and their allies are rallying to "Save Tompkins" after the City's Department of Parks and Recreation approved a proposal to replace the asphalt at the training facility with synthetic turf in 2020. The Parks Department's decision was made in order to accommodate those who would normally use the fields at the East River Park, which is set to undergo a $1.45 billion flood-protection plan that will take more than three years.
The "Save Tompkins" movement may have been jump-started by skaters, but it's about more than skateboarding, Zhu said. It's about "preserving the identity of the neighborhood," and resisting what the city calls "beautification," which locals know is just another way of saying "gentrification." As is typical of urban renewal projects (another fancy term for gentrification), newcomers may not know the history of a community, leaving OG's feeling like the changes unfolding right outside their doors are not happening with them in mind. If the history of the LES says anything it's that folks are more than willing to fight for what they believe in and in this case, that means protecting the park.
Ever had the problem of bringing too many or too few things on your trip? Looking for some tips on how to become an efficient packer? Vogue’s Elise Taylor relays a story of how professional organizer Faith Roberson helped her to be a more efficient packer.
On my next trip, I was to wear shoes that I’d also use at my destination, not just in transit. And I should cut my shoe baggage in half. “Be selective!” Faith urged. “Reflect on past trips and see which shoes you gravitated towards. Pack only those.”
Invest in a duplicate toiletry bag
Faith advised me to invest in a “duplicate bag”: a small case filled with must-haves that would never leave my suitcase (also ensuring I could never forget it). “If you travel often, especially for work, there is no reason why you should have to unpack and repack essentials. Ideally, you should be able to pack without removing a bobby pin from your bathroom,” Faith said.
Consider each day
“pack for each day, take the time to select each outfit for the day. Knowing what you’re going to wear for that week for events in the day will eliminate the stress of not being prepared, and will save you space.”
Like the flag that was smuggled into a NASA space flight, there are quite a few things that shows how the people working at NASA are still human. In fact, during the Apollo 11 mission, they almost forgot to bring a US flag along with them. Well, with so many things on their hands, nobody can blame the people at NASA.
At no point — right into the middle of 1969 — had anybody at NASA paused and thought about how to celebrate landing on the moon. Somebody at headquarters actually called NASA in Houston and said: "You've got to do something about this, we're gonna have to celebrate somehow." And NASA created the Committee for Celebrations of the First Lunar Landing on the Surface — it sounds like a NASA committee.
A guy named Jack Kinzler, who was a senior technical manager in Houston, came to the meeting with this plan for a flag. He said we've got to plant a flag, you don't go to the moon and not plant a flag. And in order to make it fly on the moon, with no air, and no atmosphere at all, we're going to have to have a vertical flagpole, and ... hinged to it at the top, a horizontal flagpole. And then we're just going to slide the flag out, like a curtain.
And the senior officials who were on the committee ... said: "Jack, that's a great idea. You go make that flag."
They bought off-the-shelf flags. It's pretty clear they bought those flags at Sears.
This and many other behind-the-scenes moments leading up to the Apollo 11 flight and return were documented in a new book by Charles Fishman, "One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon".
Before you're tempted to say, "it's summer, what do you expect?", consider the forecast highs each day. The dark orange and reds here show where high temperatures will be well above normal. This heat, combined that with high humidity, mean heat index values well above 100 °F! pic.twitter.com/x4pzzdqyTA
More than half of the mainland United States, from the Rocky Mountains to the East Coast, has been engulfed by extreme temperatures and high humidity since early this week. The National Weather Service on Thursday said the “widespread and dangerous” heat wave will persist into the weekend.
It is expected that occurrences such as these would increase in the future as climate change continues to take its toll on the weather and the environment. If things were to remain the same, we might be in for some really extreme and unpredictable weather patterns.
