DeviantArt has noticed the amount of artworks posted on their site being stolen and sold as tokens online. In order to protect their users, the company has begun to fight against these thieves. The online art gallery has launched an AI-powered tool that raises alarms when one of its members’ artwork is found to be stolen and sold by someone else as a NFT: 

Liat Karpel Gurwicz, chief marketing officer of DeviantArt, told Motherboard that the expansion of DeviantArt’s protection tool to cover NFTs came after a devastating period for the community. Qing Han, a “well-known and beloved” artist best known as Qinni, passed away in February 2020 and had her art stolen and sold as NFTs. “And it was at that point that we felt that we needed to look into what we could do to offer our artists protection, beyond just our own platform,” Gurwicz said.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens,  are cryptographic signatures stored on the blockchain that are supposed to prove ownership of the digital work in question. Its immutable record of ownership and provenance has convinced crypto investors to pay huge sums of money to claim ownership to a jpeg. Even if it’s just a rock jpeg based on free clipart.

[...]

DeviantArt said in a blog post that artists can focus on creating because its AI will do the detective work and “scan public blockchains and third-party marketplaces for potential art infringements.” The platform will also deploy an army of human moderators so as not to leave the final word to AI since automated image detection technology can so easily mess up. If a near-identical match is detected, users will get a notification on the site.

Image credit: Vice 

Sound baths are a great way to focus during meditation. With the current situation over our heads, sometimes we feel the need to relax and destress. Sound baths and sound therapy are used in meditation to help people focus and stay present, bringing them back to the moment, as Tara Atwood shares to Lifehacker: 

“Sound healing therapy uses aspects of sound and music to improve physical and emotional health and well-being,” she says. “Rich, audible tones and invisible frequencies are heard and felt, and our bodies naturally resonate with the frequencies emitted into the space, restoring normal vibratory frequencies from out-of-harmony parts of the body, mind, and soul, while encouraging a deep state of relaxation and healing. The frequencies of sound and audible tones have deep effects on our breath, blood flow, cellular movement, biorhythms, thoughts, and our brain waves.”

Atwood uses ancient Tibetan singing bowls and pure quartz crystal alchemy bowls for her sound baths, but you can start a little smaller. She said you can even use your voice to hum and create vibrations.

To learn more about sound bath meditation, check Lindsey Ellefson’s full piece here! 

Image credit: JD Mason

It’s a majestic sight, and it provides shade-- how nice! Spanish crochet teacher Eva Pacheco and her students created a massive crochet canopy that covers a shopping corridor in  Alhaurín de la Torre. The canopy, which was established as a project three years ago to bring a sustainable shade to the area, is made up of multiple crocheted squares: 

[...]Since then, Pacheco and her students have continued adding to their creation—using recycled fabric in a variety of vibrant colors—so that it now covers almost 500 square meters (5, 381 square feet).

As people walk underneath the ongoing masterpiece, they can admire a variety of different patterns, including geometric, floral, and abstract. Not only does this covering provide shade for shoppers, but it also decorates the street with whimsical art.

Image credit: Alhaurin de la Torre.

This feat would have been amazing if not for its environmental implications. For the very first time (in recorded history), it has rained at the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet. This was most likely caused due to the massive heat waves that the country has been experiencing, with temperatures at the glacier’s summit rising above the freezing point: 

"There is no previous report of rainfall at this location, which reaches 3,216 meters (10,551 feet) in elevation," NSIDC reported, noting the amount of ice lost in one day was seven times more than the daily average for this time of year.

On August 14, 2021, temperatures rose above freezing on the summit of Greenland, fueling a rain event that dumped 7 billion tons of water—the heaviest since records began in 1950. pic.twitter.com/EyTDhS80f5

— National Snow and Ice Data Center (@NSIDC) August 18, 2021

"Greenland, like the rest of the world, is changing," University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted Scambos told The Washington Post. "We now see three melting events in a decade in Greenland - and before 1990, that happened about once every 150 years. And now rainfall: in an area where rain never fell."

"Like the heat wave in the [US Pacific] northwest, it's something that's hard to imagine without the influence of global climate change."

Image credit: Annie Spratt

12 frames of stop motion animation I made using knitting! Process video out now as well! 🐑 pic.twitter.com/zFUR5G7Ulg

— Chloe Lemay (@chloe_glow) August 10, 2021

Chloe Lemay is a professional animator and a yarn crafter as well! This sequence of sheep jumping over a fence is the result of hand-knitting. Don't try counting them, because you might fall asleep. But do turn the sound on. Here you can see how she made the video.

Lemay first drew the cartoon, then pixelated each frame on graph paper, then knitted a dozen squares by the pattern for each one. Did they end up on a sweater? No, but they sure made a cool wall hanging!



-via Nag on the Lake

While the rest of the world is turning off lights to save energy, the Orkney Islands are producing so much clean renewable energy that they don't know what to do with it! To be honest, there are plenty of things they can do with it, but the necessary infrastructure is not quite there yet, so they are looking in many different directions to keep from wasting it. The obstacle, of course, is money. Sadly, according to an Orkney resident in the comments, one thing the power companies haven't considered is dropping the price of electricity for local residents, so they still burn coal and oil to heat their homes, if they don't have their own turbine.

The village of Trasmoz, Spain, has only a few dozen year-round residents, but it's a mecca for thousands of people who take part in their witchcraft festival every July. Or visit their sorcery museum any time of the year. Trasmoz is a cursed village, and has taken that status to heart, becoming the Spanish equivalent of Salem, Massachusetts.

Its unorthodox past goes back to a series of squabbles that began more than 700 years ago. At the time, Trasmoz was a prosperous community of Christians, Jews and Arabs with a powerful adversary: the neighbouring monastery of Veruela.

A quarrel between the two over whether villagers could fell trees in the area for firewood came to a head in 1252, leading the monastery’s abbot to demand that Trasmoz be excommunicated from the Catholic church. “One could call it a tantrum,” said Ruiz.

I didn't know a town could be excommunicated. But that was only the beginning. Another dispute 250 years later saw the abbot put a curse on the town. The villagers mainly shrugged and went on with their lives. Afterward, Trasmoz's reputation provided a handy cover for crimes, such as counterfeiting and even murder. But when other Spanish villages began to use local themed festivals to draw tourists, Trasmoz knew what it had to do. Read about the cursed village of Trasmoz at The Guardian. 

This photo above, titled "Ohhh Nein" by Doris Dörfler-Asmus, was one of the over 606,000 photos from 170 countries submitted to the CEWE Photo Award 2021. It was shortlisted in the category Animal.

View more fantastic animal photos from the competition over at our new cute animals and pet site Supa Fluffy.

Image: Doris Dörfler-Asmus/CEWE Photo Award 2021

Meet the X-Men Princesses, a series of mash-up artwork of what Disney's Princesses would look like if they were X-men mutants. This marvelous (ahem) artwork series is drawn by the talented illustrator and comic artist Marcus Williams (AKA Marcus the Visual).

Pop Culturista, our new pop culture site, has the gallery, X-Men Princesses: Disney Princesses and X-Men Mash Ups by Marcus The Visual

Images: Marcus The Visual

Paul Rantham's company specializes in turning shipping containers into offices and bathrooms. One day in 2016, while on a trip to Palm Springs, he got an idea of turning shipping containers into swimming pools, and thus Modpools was born.

During the lockdown period last year, Rantham's company saw a huge increase in demand as people couldn't travel and decided to put in swimming pools in their backyard instead.

Homes & Hues has the story Modpools: Turning Shipping Containers Into Swimming Pools

Image: Modpools

According to his bio, Chicago-based digital artist Doctor Photograph is an expert in creating "doctored images, fake cover art and bootleg toys." So his images may be fake, but the laugh he got from his imaginary items are quite real!

Take a look at a compilation of Doctor Photograph's fake grocery items over at Pictojam. Here's 30 Grocery Items That Don't Exist But Should.

Images: Doctor Photograph

(They Can Talk/Jimmy Craig)

Don't just bring a bag. Bring a roll of bags. You need a backup plan in case your dog is backed up. Listen to your dog's warnings.

During her life in New England, Emily Dickinson was better known for her baking than she was for her poetry. One of her recipes, for black cake, or Caribbean Christmas cake, was scribbled on a note that is now in the hands of Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and it has become a tradition in recent years for Dickinson fans to bake it for her birthday in December.

A relative of British fruit cake, black cake depends on the sugar English colonizers forced the Indigenous and African people they enslaved to produce. The Caribbean version of the cake usually includes rum and either molasses or burnt sugar, also known as browning, a bitter liquid that results from scalding white sugar over a high flame. “You can taste the slight bitterness at the back of your throat,” says Canadian poet M. nourbeSe philip, who wrote an essay on Dickinson’s black cake. For many Caribbean families, preparing the cake is a joyful annual tradition. philip watched her mother bake the cake growing up in Trinidad and Tobago. After she immigrated to Canada, her mother shipped her a homemade black cake every year.

The recipe and its ingredients were likely brought to New England from the Caribbean along the horrific triangular trade. Dickinson’s version uses molasses and swaps the rum out for brandy. Both Dickinson’s and Caribbean recipes are dense with dried fruit, including raisins, currants, and candied citron in Dickinson’s case. And they’re fragrant with nutmeg, cinnamon, and mace, brought to the Caribbean by colonizers from the spice coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Malabar.

Dickinson's recipe calls for 19 eggs and will feed an army, but there is also a scaled down version with more accessible ingredients. The article at Atlas Obscura has more, though, as it looks at what is revealed about Emily Dickinson by the recipes, notes, and letters she left behind.

The YouTuber behind the Brick Experiment Channel designed and built a remote-control LEGO car to see how it would climb obstacles. The first iteration of that car is here, but it wasn't good enough. In this video, he adds another joint to the chassis and puts it into situations you just know the car cannot climb out of. But it does. The vehicle design is quite impressive, but his skills at controlling the movements are amazing. -via reddit

Competitive athletes face a constant conundrum in many sports. Gaining weight can give you more energy, muscle, and endurance. But losing weight can put you in a different competition class, which can make the difference between winning and losing. For women athletes, there's also the extra pressure of keeping their weight down for appearances. Looking chubby or masculine can be brutal when you're in the the media spotlight. Coaches and athletes alike have long bought into the "leaner is better" idea. But there's a cost to dieting while training for a sport. Nutritionist Christel Dunshea-Mooij became concerned about New Zealand women's rowing team after the 2016 Olympics. They were in danger of RED-S, or Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport.

In 2018, Dunshea-Mooij tested the female rowers to find out their energy availability, which she describes as "the energy available to the body - from food - after the costs of exercise have been accounted for." So what's left over to run your body for the day.

The athletes made a food diary to see how many calories they were consuming, used their watches to calculate their energy expenditure, and had DEXA scans to determine their fat-free mass.

“When we saw the data, we were shocked,” Dunshea-Mooij admits.

She drew up a risk model based on the IOC consensus statement on RED-S, with three coloured zones - red for high risk, orange for moderate risk, and green for low risk of RED-S. "Only one of our females was in the green,” she says.

RED-S can cause issues with bone density, fertility, immunity, and metabolic and cardiovascular function. (Most of the rowers had "excellent bone density", also measured by the DEXA scan.)

Dunshea-Mooij worked with the rowers' coaches to turn things around. This not only meant eating more, but changing how the athletes thought about eating.

Jackie Kiddle, the current world champion in the lightweight double sculls, was also in the orange after the original testing.

As a lightweight athlete, the change in fuelling was a big shift, she says. “It used to be you ate less to stay a lightweight. But to be able to see I could eat a lot more and then train harder - and stay at the same weight - was eye-opening. It made a huge difference to the way I trained, because I could work harder.”

The change in their training diets led to four Olympic medals won by female boats in various rowing events. In fact, rowing was New Zealand's most successful sport in Tokyo. Read how they did at Newsroom. -via Metafilter