Meet the EcoPaintJetPro, a paint shop robot that can lay down finishes and designs on a vehicle without the need for covering the automobile. The machine was made by BMW and Duerr, a German engineering firm. According to BMW, “the EcoPaintJet Pro leaves no overspray, saving them time, money, water, and chemicals of cleanup. It's also more efficient, not requiring electrostatic paints, nor that the paints be physically separated as in a traditional paint shop, and it takes less energy to apply two paints at once.”
Keith Haring's "Fiorucci Walls" will be displayed at the New York City Center for a limited time. The mural was commissioned in 1983 by Milan-based designer Elio Fiorucci, who asked Haring to turn his store into a work of art. The artist turned the designer’s 5,000-square foot store into a canvas. A panel of the mural survived in Fiorucci’s storage after the installation came down in 1984.
Can we appreciate and marvel at beautiful photographs without considering the people who made them? Alternatively, can we separate the artist from their art? These two similar questions arose after different cases of horrible people (either with a long-running history of scandals, or they are just a terrible person in general) remaining popular for their artworks, making the populace forget about their ‘sins’ or past bad behaviors.
Fstopper’s Illya Ovchar explores the topic of art and artist separation on prominent photographers in the field. Check the full piece here.
This large artwork is a way for its creator to shed light on plastic pollution. According to Our World In Data, the world had produced 7.8 billion tonnes of plastic by 2015. This means that more than one tonne of plastic is allotted per person. That’s a lot of plastic.
Benjamin Von Wong’sTurn Off the Plastic Tap aims to raise the discussion of plastic pollution creatively. The photographer is known for tackling environmental issues in his work, and this new piece was done in collaboration with the Embassy of Canada in France. Wong, along with like-minded individuals, built a huge three-story-tall tap that looks like it releases plastic.
A relic of Earth’s past can be found in a river ecosystem in the Yucatan Peninsula. Marine ecologist Octavio Aburto-Oropeza and his fellow researchers revealed the existence of a swampy riverbed full of red mangrove trees in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists state that the riverbed is a time capsule, and has been trapped in time for more than 100,000 years. The mangroves were able to survive and thrive even though it is far from the coastlines, appearing to have existed in isolation. “We hope our results convince the government of Tabasco and Mexico’s environmental administration of the need to protect this ecosystem,” the study team writes.
Rapa Nui, now known as Easter Island, was first populated by Polynesians somewhere between 690 AD and 1200 AD. But that appears to be a singular event, as the culture of the island developed in complete isolation afterward, due to the distance it lay from other populated islands of the Pacific. That is, until 1722, when Europeans found their way to the island. Along the way, the people of Rapa Nui developed a system of writing called rongorongo, consisting of around 600 hieroglyphs.
Rongorongo was mainly used by the elite, and was not accessible to most of the population. Europeans had no clue about rongorongo documents etched in wood until a missionary found them in 1864. Tragically, by then there was no one left on Rapa Nui who could read the written language. Peruvian raids had taken many islanders away into slavery, and when they returned, they brought diseases that wrecked the native Rapa Nui population.
Writings in rongorongo are rare, with only 23 known examples still in existance. A new study takes a look at a wooden tablet from Rapa Nui known as the Berlin tablet. The rongorongo symbols on it are barely decipherable thanks to erosion and woodlice, but a 3D scan reveals the tablet, which is the largest rongorongo tablet ever found, contains 387 legible glyphs, and may have contained up to 5000 symbols before the wood was damaged. That would make it the longest rongorongo document ever found, if it were still a full document. The research was aimed at determining the age of the Berlin tablet by the species of wood and the history of its deterioration. Read about rongorongo and the Berlin tablet at The History Blog. -via Strange Company
How well would you be able to spot a predator stalking you in the jungle? Or even an urban jungle? Redditor donibobes took this picture of his cat. You might assume he was taking picture of the front of the house, but the cat is there. You just can't see him because of his feline camouflage skills. I had to go to the comments for a spoiler.
If you need to, and you probably will, you can enlarge the picture greatly here. Then imagine if this were a hungry tiger sitting in a tree you just walked by. You'd never know what hit you.
We all know someone of whom it has been said "could drink anyone under the table." However, pushing the limits can be dangerous, and binge drinking has led to many deaths. The problem with drinking alcohol in a hurry is that you can imbibe too much before the effects show at all, and then you are suddenly too drunk to understand your limits. A competition to see who can drink more than someone else may remind you of a certain scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which Marion Ravenwood not only survived the contest, but also an attempted murder and the fact that her bar burned down. Real life is not as exciting, nor as survivable.
That said, there was a drinking contest in which two young, large, and wealthy men felt compelled to outdrink each other. Lord Louth, age 34, was visiting from England, and made the acquaintance of 32-year-old Albert Haller Tracy, Jr., of Buffalo, New York. Tracy was showing Louth around Buffalo, as the two were of comparable social standing and had much in common. However, both prided themselves on the ability to drink copious amounts of whiskey, and Louth challenged Tracy to a public showdown. They engaged a bartender to prepare and keep count of how many whiskey cocktails each man drank. Word got around, and spectators came and placed their bets between the British lord and the American. The contest made the papers for years afterward. While the story grew in later years, even the immediate reports had the men drinking an astonishing number of cocktails. Read the entire story of the drinking contest, plus notes on how it was researched, at The Daily Beast. -via Digg
A horror offering from Omeleto, the short film Seek follows two sisters on a road trip who stop at an apparently empty rest area. Spoiler- it's not empty. Seriously, if it were me, I would have turned around as soon as I saw the interior. I don't mind going on the side of the road if this is the alternative. The short film doesn't waste any time on special effects (or money, either), but focuses on the buildup of dread that makes a world of difference when creeping you out is the point. Seek was directed by Aaron Morgan and has won several awards. Contains NSFW language. Read more about the short at io9.
This is a spider made from an Oreo cookie. They are pretty easy to make with pretzel sticks and a dab of icing. But nature has its own Oreo spider. National Geographic wildlife photographer Joel Sartore explains.
A species of trapdoor spider, the oreo spider does not spin webs, but instead, burrows, using its hardened abdominal disc to plug the entry to its underground home. A member of the Cyclocosmia genus, these rare spiders are the smaller, less hairy cousins of tarantulas. pic.twitter.com/LNp2Lajh5N
Cyclocosmia has a pretty fancy trapdoor, if you know what I'm saying. Now we have to wonder if the cookie took its look from the spider. Nah, we know that Oreo cookies took their look (and everything else) from Sunshine Hydrox cookies. -via Fark
The demented mashup artist known as There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) combined "Psychosocial" by Slipknot with "Baby Shark" in order to introduce our young children to heavy metal. At reddit, he said he made this to terrify his son for Halloween, but expects that like his other metal mashups, it may become the child's favorite song. From the YouTube page (which has since been pulled):
Sorry the comments are disabled. YouTube is rightfully confused as to whether or not this is a children's video.
I can tell you, this is not a children's video, but you might get a kick out of it. -via reddit
Sooner or later, you will run across a collection of Victorian postmortem photographs on the internet. The early days of photography overlapped a period in which families would produce numerous children, but many of them died in childhood, or even infancy. The death toll was high for every age group. We know Victorians had plenty of rituals surrounding death and mourning that seem strange to us. Arranging to have a portrait made of someone who died would often be the only photograph ever taken of them. Photographers even had special equipment used to prop up dead bodies to make them seem alive in these photographs.
Except that most of the previous paragraph is just plain bunk. It's true that pictures were made of the dead, but those are usually of a mother holding a deceased infant, or a body lying in a coffin. The vast majority of postmortem photographs you see in such galleries are either faked or real pictures of living people. They may look dead, but that is explained by how portrait photography came about in the first place. Read how postmortem photography became a thing despite evidence to the contrary at Atlas Obscura.
If you haven't seenSquid Game, it's a South Korean series on Netflix about a game show in which the stakes are very high- riches if you win, death if you don't. It's become a global sensation for its drama, violence, and social commentary... and the fact that it's available in dozens of languages. This Honest Trailer warns you of spoilers, but I doubt it gives away too much, in case you want to sign up for Netflix for Squid Game. Be warned that this Honest Trailer contains lots of violence. The entire first season of Squid Game is streaming now, and there's no decision yet on whether there will be a second season.
Vampires are supposed to be terrifying. The legends go back several hundred years of dead people who rise from their graves and stalk the living to drink their blood. But there was a sea change in the legend when vampires made it to the movies. Dracula was a well-dressed member of the noblity that struck the audience as kind of sexy. Hollywood ran with that idea, and made vampires attractive monsters that didn't always kill people, but could, so that they gave us the thrill of danger that draws audiences in. Even in supposedly scary movies, some are scarier than others.
As the vampire became an iconic movie character, comedies about them popped up. Vampires in comedies are not all that scary. Then there are movies that have entire families and communities of vampires, in order to give us something a little different. In these larger groups, there will be variations in how terrifying and how lame a character can be. You might be surprised at how many movies and TV shows have featured vampires, some of them horrifying, but others comically impotent, while a few are downright beloved. Read a list of the least scary vampires we've watched at Den of Geek.
The Merkins, who do horror film song parodies all the time, but espacially around Halloween, are back with a takeoff on Mötley Crüe's "Girls Girls Girls." Except the band is named Möstly Crüel and the song is "Kills Kills Kills." This one knocks it out of the ballpark, as the production values are top-notch, they've got the hair band moves down, the lyrics are, yeah, weird, and the music is good, too! Check out their previous slasher film parodies, "As Long as You're Bloody," "Every Life I Take," "I'll Kill You That Way," "Friends with no Faces," and others. -via Geeks Are Sexy
