The word "jumbo," meaning big, didn't exist before the elephant named Jumbo. He was a star in his day, although he did not live the kind of life an elephant should. Tufts University has the biography of the world's most famous elephant. Actually, this is more than a biography, because Jumbo had quite a story even after he died. -via Kottke
Make way for the long-lost piece of Stonehenge! Hell, I didn’t know the iconic location had some pieces missing until now. The missing piece was taken by Robert Phillips in 1958 while performing restoration work on the monument. Phllips took the cylindrical core after it was drilled from one of Stonehenge's pillars. Now, after 60 years, scientists have a chance to study the inside of the monument through the core:
They found that Stonehenge's towering standing stones, or sarsens, were made of rock containing sediments that formed when dinosaurs walked the Earth. Other grains in the rock date as far back as 1.6 billion years.
"We have CT-scanned the rock, zapped it with X-rays, looked at it under various microscopes and analyzed its sedimentology and chemistry," said study lead author David Nash, a professor of physical geography at the University of Brighton in England.
"With the exception of thin-section analyses and a couple of the chemical methods, all of the techniques we used in the study were new both to Stonehenge and the study of sarsen stones in the U.K.," Nash told Live Science in an email.
Stonehenge's central circle of pillars was erected during the Neolithic period, about 4,500 years ago, according to English Heritage, a nonprofit organization that manages historic monuments in England.
"Sarsens were erected in two concentric arrangements — an inner horseshoe and an outer circle — and the bluestones [smaller monument stones] were set up between them in a double arc," English Heritage said on its website.
Image credit: Sung Shin
Jason deCaires Taylor is a British artist known for his underwater sculpture installations, such as the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park, the first underwater sculpture park in the world, in Grenada, as well as the Cancun Underwater Museum in Mexico. Now, he has a new underwater sculpture installation, this time located in Mediterranean waters. His new installation, the Museum of Underwater Sculpture in Cyprus, features 93 sculpted figures, each made with materials that attract marine life. Taylor hopes that his work will “bring people closer to the marine environment and the conservation and protection of our marine ecosystem.”
His installation apparently cost €1 million (about $1.17 million).
Some of the figures featured include huge trees weighing up to 13 tons as well as children pointing cameras at shapes depicting the human race while playing hide and seek.
"I tried to incorporate as many references to climate change and habitat loss and pollution as I could, because those are really the defining issues of our era," Taylor tells CNN Travel.
"I'm kind of hoping that it leaves the visitor with a sense of hope along with a sense that the human impact isn't always negative. That we can reverse some of the things we've done.
(Image Credit: MUSAN/ Jason deCaires Taylor via CNN)
The quest for breaking the world record of the most accurate value of pi continues to this day. In 2019, a Google employee from Japan named Emma Haruka Iwao calculated the number to 31 trillion digits. In 2020, a man from Huntsville, Alabama, USA, named Timothy Mullican calculated 50 trillion digits of the number. This year, a new challenger for the world record arrived.
Swiss researchers said Monday they had calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer.
"The calculation took 108 days and nine hours" using a supercomputer, the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement.
Its efforts were "almost twice as fast as the record Google set using its cloud in 2019, and 3.5 times as fast as the previous world record in 2020", according to the university's Centre for Data Analytics, Visualisation and Simulation.
Unfortunately, the team will not reveal the whole number until the Guinness Book of Records confirms their achievement.
The number pi is one of the most interesting numbers in the world of mathematics. Because of the non-repeating nature of its non-terminating decimal numbers, computer scientists can use it to test the capabilities of their computers (while trying to set a new world record in the process). What’s more...
The Swiss team said that the experience they built up calculating pi could be applied in other areas like "RNA analysis, simulations of fluid dynamics and textual analysis".
(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)
Yup. You’ve read the title correctly. There are spiders who prey on snakes, which could be up to 30 times their size. And not just any snake, mind you; these arachnids prey upon the most venomous snakes in the world.
Take the Australian redback. Not including legs, a female of this species of spider is only about the size of an M&M candy. But she can take down relatively big prey such as juvenile eastern brown snakes, which are among the most venomous serpents in the world. A snake that gets trapped in a redback’s web — a messy tangle of long, sticky silk threads that dangle to the ground — is quickly set upon by the spider, which subdues the struggling victim with more sticky silk before delivering a toxic bite that eventually kills the snake.
Biologist Martin Nyffeler describes this finding as “very fascinating and a little frightening”, and it really is what he describes.
But it’s not just the Australian redback spider that is capable of killing (and then eating) snakes, as there are at least 11 different families of spiders capable of doing the same thing.
More about this over at ScienceNews.
(Image Credit: Daniel R. Crook via ScienceNews)
Meditation is a great activity for clearing up the mind, which helps oneself to focus on what is necessary. Those who practice it claim that it helps their brains. Scientifically speaking, however, the effects of meditation have been very difficult to prove. A new study from Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science just filled this knowledge gap recently, and they found out that meditation does, indeed, benefit the brain.
The results, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, show that meditation training led to faster switching between the brain’s two general states of consciousness.
One is called the default mode network, which is active when the brain is at wakeful rest and not focused on the outside world, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. The other is the dorsal attention network, which engages for attention-demanding tasks.
Learn more about this exciting research over at EurekAlert.
(Image Credit: Silentpilot/ Pixabay)
Ruin your friendships with class with the Monopoly Glass Edition made by the WS Game Company. This edition of the beloved (and hated) board game comes with a 16” x 16” tempered glass game board instead of the regular game board. It also comes with translucent houses and hotels, instead of the regular opaque ones.
This edition indeed looks gorgeous. However, you might have to control your emotions while you play with this glass edition, as the board is really fragile.
(Image Credit: Technabob)
Get ready for heavy metal harp! Harpist Emily Hopkins got the heaviest distortion pedal she could find, normally for guitars, and used it with her harps. The resulting sound is like an electric guitar, but still different because of the way a harp is played. Hopkins tries different tunes with different settings, producing sounds ranging from rock 'n' roll to summoning demons from the depths of hell. -via reddit
Polish javelin thrower Maria Andrejczyk had a hard road to the 2020 Olympics. She just missed the medal cutoff in Rio in 2016, suffered an injury in 2017, was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, but fought her way back. In Tokyo, Andrejczyk won the silver medal.
On Wednesday, Andrejczyk posted on her Facebook page that she came across the fundraiser for 8-month-old Miłoszek Małysa, who had a serious heart defect and needed surgery, and she decided to auction off her lone Olympic medal to help raise money for his surgery.
That was last week, and the auction is now over. Read how it turned out at ESPN. -via Nag on the Lake
When Maverick Francisco Oyao realized that his family couldn't afford to rent a prom dress for his sister, Lu Asey Keanna Oyao, he decided to create one himself. He shared on-line how he designed and assembled this one-of-a-kind fairytale winter ball gown.
You may have seen ‘memory palaces’ being used by fictional characters in different TV shows or movies, with BBC’s Sherlock’s main character making use of his mind palace any chance he gets in the show. Memory palaces can exist outside of fiction, and we can build our own! These ‘special structures,’ alternatively called the Method of Loci, tap into our brain’s ability to store lots of location-based information. Popular Science details when and how we could build our personal memory palaces. Check the full piece here!
Image credit: Valdemaras D. (Unsplash)
I wonder if it can turn back time. Google scientists claimed to have created a time crystal in a quantum computer! To be more specific, these experts claim to have used a quantum processor for a useful scientific application: to observe a genuine time crystal. Now before anyone rushes to the Google headquarters with demands to go back in time, time crystals are no less than a new ‘phase of matter:’
Understanding why time crystals are interesting requires a little bit of background in physics – particularly, knowledge of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that systems naturally tend to settle in a state known as "maximum entropy".
To take an example: if you pour some milk into a coffee cup, the milk will eventually dissolve throughout the coffee, instead of sitting on the top, enabling the overall system to come to an equilibrium. This is because there are many more ways for the coffee to randomly spread throughout the coffee than there are for it to sit, in a more orderly fashion, at the top of the cup.
This irresistible drive towards thermal equilibrium, as described in the second law of thermodynamics, is reflective of the fact that all things tend to move towards less useful, random states. As time goes on, systems inevitably degenerate into chaos and disorder – that is, entropy.
Time crystals, on the other hand, fail to settle in thermal equilibrium. Instead of slowly degenerating towards randomness, they get stuck in two high-energy configurations that they switch between – and this back-and-forth process can go on forever.
Image credit: Nathan Dumlao (Unsplash)
The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2021 has drawn to a close. Since 1982, the contest has been run by now-retired Professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University, in order to challenge writers and would-be writers to come up with the opening sentence to the world's worst novel. It's a tribute to author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, once a widely-read author, now mostly known for the contest that bears his name. The winners have been announced. The Grand Prize goes to Stu Duval of Auckland, New Zealand.
A lecherous sunrise flaunted itself over a flatulent sea, ripping the obsidian bodice of night asunder with its rapacious fingers of gold, thus exposing her dusky bosom to the dawn’s ogling stare.
David Hynes of Bromma, Sweden, won the Grand Panjamdrum's Special Award.
Victor Frankenstein admired his masterpiece stretched out on the lab slab; it was almost human, OK, no conscience or social awareness, and not too bright, but a little plastic surgery to hide the scars and bolts, maybe a spray tan and a hairdo, and this guy could run for President!
Read the winners in the categories of Adventure, Children's & Young Adult Literature, Crime & Detective, Dark & Stormy, Fantasy & Horror, Historical Fiction, Purple Prose, Romance, Science Fiction, Vile Puns, Western, and Odious Outliers, plus dishonorable mentions in each, at the contest site.
Even though we never thought about it before, we all already know in our hearts how to recognize the soon-to-be-victim in a movie. It's when Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) puts all the clues together that we realize how easy that determination really is. That said, you may have to watch this short sequence twice to connect the first character with the last character. -via Laughing Squid
Yes, there’s an Irish Baron who was once a steak-eating bodybuilding death metal fan. His name is Randal Plunkett, the 21st Baron of Dunsany. Initially, Plunkett had absolutely no interest in land, but he decided to turn over 300 hectares of his estate back to nature. This action is part of an environmental mission to recreate a vanished landscape in a swath of County Meath, 20 miles north-west of Dublin:
According to the UN, the world needs to rewild and restore an area the size of China to meet commitments on nature and the climate – but not everyone applauds Ireland’s pioneering effort. “You’d be surprised when you live in a castle how many times people think you’re an idiot,” says Plunkett, the 21st baron of Dunsany.
[...]
Plunkett says vindication has come in multiple forms. Before, the estate had just three types of grass, now it has 23. “I didn’t do it, the birds did.” Trees regenerated and multiplied – oak, ash, beech, Scots pine and black poplar. “I see a lot of saplings growing that I haven’t planted.”
Lush, diverse vegetation attracted butterflies and other insects – “it’s like a buffet for them” – which drew more birds, including rarely seen woodpeckers, barn owls, red kites and sparrowhawks.
“I heard the call of a corncrake. I had to Google it to know what it was.” There have also been sightings of snipe and stoats and an unconfirmed report of red squirrels.
Image credit: Patrick Bolger
