Watching a movie or a TV show together often brings people closer to one another. But it seems that bonding over a shared watching experience is not limited to just us humans - chimpanzees and bonobos also get that same sense of bonding, as shown by a new scientific study.

The study, published by the Royal Society, placed chimpanzees and bonobos in front of a screen to watch a video. “Chimpanzees watching a video together get the same sense of bonding and closeness that humans can feel from watching a movie or TV show together”, study co-author Wouter Wolf of Duke University told CNN: 

Pairs of chimps were monitored as they watched videos - and psychologists found an increased sense of closeness between them in a way previously thought to be unique to humans.

Eye-trackers were used to make sure the apes were watching the film and fruit drinks were used to encourage them to stay relatively still and in the same place.

Researchers say it shows the "deep evolutionary roots" of the heightened emotional impact of watching something with someone else.

It also raises questions about what is lost when there are fewer shared experiences - such as if families stop watching television together and are separately plugged into social media or using their own mobile phones.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

Meet Alex (@alexthehonkingbird), a 20-year-old cockatiel from Brisbane, Australia. This cockatiel is unlike any other - he’s a rockstar. 

Alex loves headbanging to rocking tunes, as videos taken by the bird’s owner Annika Howells clearly show. The videos have now gone viral, and Alex is a legit avian celebrity.

View this post on Instagram

Been working on my music during the break. It’s important to take time for your hobbies outside of work.

A post shared by AlexTheHonkingBird (@alexthehonkingbird) on Apr 25, 2019 at 5:19pm PDT

“I never expected thousands of people all around the world would become fans of my birds,” Annika tells Instagram as they feature Alex for #WeeklyFluff. Fluff and continue to rock on, Alex!

image credit: @alexthehonkingbird on Instagram

WiFi may be the most convenient way to connect to the internet but it's not the most reliable or the fastest. Which is why ethernet cables still have a place in our lives because having a hard connection would make sure that the signals from your modem to your computer are stable and strong.

Still, the fact of the matter is that a wired connection is still objectively better for just about anything that requires an internet connection. Sometimes the benefits are subtle, but sometimes they're life-changing. 

For example, WiFi is notoriously fickle. Thick walls and metal objects can totally throw off the signal emanating from your router and turn what should be a perfectly connected household into a depressing dead zone.

(Image credit: Thomas Jensen/Unsplash)

A stone tower sits on the Rhine River in Germany. First built by Romans in antiquity, it has been destroyed and rebuilt several times. They call it Mäuseturm, or the Mouse Tower. The story behind that name holds that there was a dire famine in the area in the year 970, during which many people starved to death. But the archbishop of Mainz, Hatto II, ignored their distress and continued to enrich himself at the people's expense.

Hatto II had his barn full, but he did not spare a single grain for the starving poor, instead tried to sell them at such inflated prices that most could not afford it. The peasants became angry and were planning to rebel, so Hatto II devised a cruel trick. He promised to feed the hungry people and told them to assemble at an empty barn and wait for him to come with food. The peasants were overjoyed and made their way to the barn to await his coming. Once the barn was full, Hatto II ordered the barn's doors shut and locked, and then set the barn on fire.

When Hatto II returned to his castle, he was immediately besieged by an army of mice. To escape the rodents, the bishop fled his castle and sought refuge in the tower that stands on an island on the Rhine, hoping that the mice could not swim. But the mice followed him, pouring into the river by the thousands, and while many drowned even more reached the island. The swarm ate through the tower’s doors and crawled up to the top floor, where they found Hatto II and ate him alive.

That's the legend, and there's no evidence that it's true. However, like most legends, there are pieces of history, language, and culture that came together over time to create the tale. Read what's behind the legend of the Mouse Tower at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Marion Halft)

Apollo 11 was undoubtedly a success and its contributions have paved the way for more crewed space missions to be launched. However, there was one thing that the Apollo 11 team missed which could have led to an untimely demise. Only when they returned to Earth did they realize it.

To quote from Nancy Atkinson's book, pilot Frank A. Brown, flying about 450 miles (725 km) away from the re-entry point, reported the following:

I see the two of them, one above the other. One is the Command Module; the other is the Service Module. . . . I see the trail behind them — what a spectacle! You can see the bits flying off. Notice that the top one is almost unchanged while the bottom one is shattering into pieces. That is the disintegrating Service Module.

Fortunately for everyone, none of the debris resulting from the Service Module's re-entry impacted the Command Module, and the astronauts all arrived safely back on Earth.

Different from how it should have gone, the Service Module should have thrusted away from the Command Module upon re-entry so as to shift its trajectory and avoid collision with the latter. However, it didn't happen that way. Despite that minor mishap, thankfully it didn't lead to a major disaster since none of the debris from the Service Module hit the Command Module.

However, upon investigation, they found that the same thing happened in previous missions Apollo 8 and Apollo 10. So to prevent any big disaster from happening in the future, they changed the procedure for the separation of the two spacecrafts.

(Image credit: NASA/Wikimedia Commons)

And we're not talking about Wall-E. For now, it doesn't really have a name either but we can call it a "micro-bristle-bot" because it's very tiny, measuring only two millimeters long. What's most special about it is what it can do.

Unlike many robots, which run on electricity, this bot is powered by vibrations. Built in a four- or six-legged configuration, it’s 3D-printed with a super tiny actuator. When the frequency is perfectly in-tune with the robot’s onboard components, the device comes to life. That also means it won’t move from random sounds in the environment—the robot only responds to a single perfect pitch.

The team from Georgia Institute Technology built the micro-bristle-bot and says that these tiny robots could one day be programmed or even "coordinated to move together like a swarm of ants", similar to how Ant-Man communicates with and makes ants do his bidding. But there are other ways to make use of this technology.

The research team imagines them working as environmental sensors, or even making their way into the human body to repair tissues. Because they’re small, fast, and require no battery or other electricity, they are particularly well-suited for extreme environments like the human body.

(Image credit: Allison Carter/Georgia Tech)

Sad news for Japan.

Thirty three people have been confirmed dead after a suspected arson attack razed the Kyoto Animation Studio. 

Witnesses stated that a man was screaming “Die!” before he set the studio on fire.

The unnamed 41-year-old suspect was also injured during the incident and he was taken to a hospital. Knives were discovered by the police at the scene of the fire.

Apparently the man had set fire on the studio because the company had allegedly "stole a novel". Police is still investigating the motive of the crime.

Some 70 people were believed to have been in the studio when the building was set on fire at 10.35 in the morning. 11 bodies were found on the second floor, four more on the stairs.

Meanwhile, president of the anime company, Hideaki Hatta said the news of fire was heart breaking.

“This has just broken our hearts. What’s the use of resorting to violence?” he said when present at the damaged building.

[...]

Even Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has offered a message of condolence on Twitter.

“So many people were killed or injured. It’s so appalling I can’t find the right words. I pray for … their souls.”

Popularly called KyoAni, the animation studio is known for producing K-On!, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, A Silent Voice, and Clanaad.

(Image Credit: ABS-CBN News)

本日、京都で発生した放火殺人事件では、多数の死傷者が出ており、あまりの凄惨さに言葉を失います。お亡くなりになられた方のご冥福をお祈りいたします。負傷された皆様にお見舞いを申し上げるとともに、一日も早い回復をお祈りしています。

— 安倍晋三 (@AbeShinzo) July 18, 2019

Dopamine is a chemical messenger in the brain associated with happiness. It affects reward-based behaviors and motivation, as well as movement. Treatments for Parkinson’s disease have been mostly focused on this chemical. Researchers from Yale University, through their new study, challenge the long-held assumptions about the sole role of dopamine in this degenerative disorder.

In people with Parkinson’s disease, nerve cells that produce dopamine slowly die. The loss of dopamine leads to slower movements, resting tremors, and other symptoms that worsen over time. To reverse parkinsonism — the collection of symptoms seen in Parkinson’s disease — doctors provide a treatment that increases dopamine levels in the striatum, a portion of the brain that is responsible for motor learning. However, medical treatments do not consider the effects of parkinsonism on another neurotransmitter, acetylcholine.

Scientists had previously believed that when dopamine levels dropped, acetylcholine levels increased. However, this relationship had never been thoroughly investigated, despite acetylcholine’s likely role in creating a movement disorder called dyskinesia, which develops in most patients after several years of dopamine treatment for parkinsonism.

Neurology professor Nigel S. Bamford, together with his fellow researchers, explored the relationship between dopamine and acetylcholine through the use of mice. This is what they found out.

...Bamford and his co-authors learned, motor function in parkinsonism becomes dependent on both dopamine and acetylcholine.

These findings suggest that treating parkinsonism may require targeted therapies that restore the balance between these two chemicals, instead of focusing solely on dopamine, said the researchers.

See the full study here.

(Image Credit: sabinevanerp/ Pixabay)

Thread: everyone knows that medieval art is filled with snails fighting knights, but there's actually a whole medieval snail ecology and society, from snail-birds to snail-monks. And, ofc, snail-cats.

WARNING: this thread gets very very silly.

Erik Wade presents us with a bestiary of sorts, a collection of medieval snail art that shows how medieval monks combined snails with people, cats, dogs, deer, unicorns, birds, chickens, rabbits, monkeys, pigs, and other creatures.



Maybe there's some symbolism here, but I believe that snails are just an easy doodle that you can turn into something else. If you make half the animal a snail, then you don't have to draw legs or whatever- just a spiral. See the entire post at Threadreader or the nested thread with responses at Twitter. -via Metafilter

Do you find it difficult to market your business? 11-year old Seth may just give you an idea on how to attract customers (even the cops). 

Seth decided to set up a stand advertising "ICE COLD BEER."

This quickly caught the attention of his neighborhood in Utah. So much so, that the Brigham City Police Department received three reports about the business operation.

But when officers they arrived on the scene on Tuesday, all they found was a savvy salesman.

The young man was in fact selling ice cold (root) beer. [...]

After all, the evidence was right in front of them: If you look closely enough you can see a tiny "root" written above "BEER" on his sign.

Image: Brigham City Police Department/ Facebook

How do you get the homeless to move away from a park or a public place without resorting to force? Officials in West Palm Beach may have just found the solution:

The extremely popular – and extremely repetitive – children's song can be heard playing on loop all night long around the pavilion, The Palm Beach Post reports. In addition to "Baby Shark," the city is also playing another children's hit, "Raining Tacos."

It won't be raining tacos for the people who sleep around the pavilion — unless they can withstand this potent musical deterrent. The tactic is reminiscent of the blaring music once used by American interrogators to torment prisoners in the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Image: Pink Fong

University of Calgary - a study led by research team of Paul Kubes, PhD became the first to discover an unidentified population of cells in the pericardial fluid found inside the sac around the heart.

The Kubes lab, in collaboration with the Fedak lab, found that a specific cell, a Gata6+ pericardial cavity macrophage, helps heal an injured heart in mice. The cell was discovered in the pericardial fluid (sac around the heart) of a mouse with heart injury. Working with Fedak, a cardiac surgeon and incoming Director of the Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta, the same cells were also found within the human pericardium of people with injured hearts, confirming that the repair cells offer the promise of a new therapy for patients with heart disease.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Human beings first walked on the moon 50 years ago, and the very last manned moon mission was only three years later. What's changed in that time? A lot of things here on earth, but what about on the moon?

Buzz Aldrin, seeing the moon from the surface for the first time, described it as “magnificent desolation.”

It was not so desolate when they departed. The Apollo 11 astronauts discarded gadgets, tools, and the clothesline contraption that moved boxes of lunar samples, one by one, from the surface into the module. They left behind commemorative objects—that resplendent American flag, mission patches and medals honoring fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, a coin-size silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from the world leaders of planet Earth. And they dumped things that weren’t really advertised to the public, for understandable reasons, such as defecation-collection devices. (Some scientists, curious to examine how gut microbes fare in low gravity, even proposed going back for these.)

But are those things still there? There have been photographs taken of the Apollo 11 landing site in the years since, from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. What those photos don't show us, scientists can extrapolate from other sources. Read about the historical Apollo 11 landing site at the Atlantic.

(Image credit: Ruby Aitken)

Looks like Deadpool isn't content on breaking the fourth wall - he's dragging (heh) us through the San Diego Comic-Con 2019 in a unique fashion-style as well.

Dragpool AKA David Schoelen (@the_reel_guy) takes us through his creative process in creating the drag queen/Deadpool mash up in this SYFY WIRE interview:

Can you tell me the origin story of your take on Deadpool, aka Dragpool? How did you decide to design that look, and what went into it?

Dragpool has become one of my favorite characters to cosplay. I stay in that character all day (nine hours in heels!) and everyone from little kids to Marvel bros to goth nerds to grandmas seem to enjoy him.

I'd never dressed in drag before, but the elements of the character seemed to easily emerge, including crystal bullet earrings, rhinestoned glitter lips, and the 2-foot, red beehive wig! I've discovered a whole community of "Pools" — not only cosplayers who bring the comic and screen Deadpool to life, but others who also create their own fusion of the character. They're great folks who are always excited to see a new Pool!

I continue to develop the character — keep the balance of drag elements and Deadpool — trying to never tip the scale in a direction that destroys the mix. I see Dragpool like the Deadpool from the drag universe, just like the diverse Spider-Verse. All the Pools are connected, but each remains unique.

Image via @monkeyarcher_9

Comic book artist Jacob Chabot tweeted his latest fantastic creations: Batman & Catwoman / Titanic and Ghost mash up artwork, just in time for San Diego Comic-Con 2019.

He sure drew 'em like one of his French girls ...

Clayface makes a surprise appearance in this Batman/Catwoman & Ghost (1990) mash-up.