Meet Mystique, an incredibly intelligent 29-year-old male humpback dolphin. Did I mention that this special dolphin is a treasure hunter? In exchange for food or rewards, the friendly mammal offers an employee or any other person who approaches him with curious items from the sea: 

"What we have to do is give him a fish in return.

"We haven't trained him, but he has trained us to do this.

"He gets under it [and] if he drops it too far out, or we say 'come on, that's not good enough', then he gets underneath it and brings it to us."

The items have included bottles, big bits of timber, shells, and wood, which are brought in on his beak.

"We swear he has a collection waiting to bring to us," Lyn McPherson said.

Image credit:  Barnacles Cafe and Dolphin Feeding

Allen Pan of Sufficiently Advanced has managed to make the samurai sword a bit more menacing by adding 250,000 volt of electricity. Watch as as his electrified samurai sword sizzled and crackled before sending a huge arc through the air to a nearby steel structure!

Image: @allenpan

Photographer and Star Wars fan Daniel Sands cleverly recreated iconic scenes from the movie with LEGO and homemade special effects:

"I want it to be simple with no fancy studio. The first ones I did I used an upturned pizza box on my tumble dryer, used a bike light for lighting and some baking powder to resemble snow,” Sands says about his ongoing project, trying to show everyone that photographers don't need expensive equipment to snap high-quality pictures.

Pictojam has the gallery: Star Wars Fan Recreated Iconic Scenes with LEGO and Homemade Special Effects

Image: Daniel Sands (@danielsandsphotography)

In a game where dachshunds compete, we all win! Watch The Wienerlympics, where three dachshunds named Crusoe, Daphne and Oakley compete in various sports like swimming, weightlifting, fencing, high dive, long jump, wrestling, and, of course, running.

From our new cute animals and pets site SupaFluffy, here's Wienerlympics: An Olympic Competition for Dachshunds

Image: Crusoe the Dachshund

Now this is the ultimate escape from city life!

Homeowner Rosie sold her home in the city and moved to an off-the-grid house built from five interconnected shipping containers in the middle of a forested preserve in the coast of New Zealand. As such, the house is equipped with solar panels, rainwater collection system and even vermi-composting toilets.

All worth it for being able to live in such an amazingly lush forest!

Take a look over at Homes & Hues, our new architecture and home design site: Off-the-Grid Living in a 5x 20ft Shipping Container Home in a New Zealand Forest

Image: Bryce Langston/Living Big in a Tiny House

Monowi, Nebraska, is the smallest incorporated town in the United States, with a population of one person. You read about it here quite a few years ago. Elsie Eiler has been the mayor and sole resident since 2004, when her husband Rudy died. So when Eiler read the results of the 2020 census, the information on her town came as quite a surprise.

The U.S. Census Bureau was reporting Monowi’s population had exploded by 100% and was now home to two people, according to 2020 results it recently released.

“Well, then someone’s been hiding from me, and there’s nowhere to live but my house,” Elise Eiler said Wednesday. “But if you find out who he is, let me know?”

His name is Noise, and he was created by an algorithm to try to protect Eiler’s personal information. Monowi didn’t add another resident to its population, but the Census Bureau did.

“What you’re seeing there is the noise we add to the data so you can’t figure out who is living there,” a Census spokeswoman said. “It protects the privacy of the respondent and the confidentiality of the data they provide.”

It's a bit late to protect Eiler's privacy, as she is well-known for running her small town as she sees fit. She's not alone, so to speak, as the nearby town of Gross went from a population of two to three, unbeknownst to the couple who live there by themselves. Read about the Census Bureau's algorithm that alters the reports we see, called disclosure avoidance, at the Lincoln Journal-Star. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Andrew Filer)

Dutch master Johannes Vermeer painted his Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window in the late 1650s. For about 250 years, it has been in the custody of the museum Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, Germany. We now know that the wall behind the girl has a large picture of Cupid! The existence of the painting within the painting was revealed by x-ray in 1979, but it wasn't known at the time whether Vermeer himself covered it up or not.  

But when a major restoration project began in May 2017, conservators discovered that the paint on the wall in the background of the painting, covering the naked Cupid, had in fact been added by another person. When layers of varnish from the 19th century began to be removed from the painting, the conservators discovered that the “solubility properties” of the paint in the central section of the wall were different to those elsewhere in the painting.

Following further investigations, including tests in an archaeometry laboratory, it was discovered that layers of binding agent and a layer of dirt existed between the image of Cupid and the overpainting. The conservators concluded that several decades would have passed between the completion of one layer and the addition of the next and therefore concluded that Vermeer could not have painted over the Cupid himself.

The restoration is now complete, and the painting will soon go on exhibit. Read the saga of the hidden Cupid at The Art Newspaper. -via Kottke

The ninth, or possibly tenth, movie in the Fast & Furious franchise is called simply F9, or sometimes F9: The Fast Saga, or maybe Fast & Furious 9. At any rate, that's so many movies that the main cast has wandered far from the world they inhabited in the first film, yet they continue to use the same action movie tropes to reel in an audience. Screen Junkies is well aware of this, and so they had plenty of material for this Honest Trailer.

It’s true that the more advanced our technology becomes, older people have a harder time adapting with them. While there’s no questioning their ability in digesting and consuming information, the pace at which technology advances gets too fast for them to cope up with. They try their hardest, and that’s what matters, right? Sometimes, their efforts result in some ...hilarious instances. It is funny and cute, and is in no way a slight against them! Bored Panda compiles some top moments when old people get outwitted by modern technology. Check the full piece here! 

Image credit: Bungalowbeast

For 32 years, actor Peter Falk played the role of Frank Colombo, a LAPD detective who could intuitively know who had committed murders that he investigated. In 69 television movies, Colombo gradually ensnared each murderer who thought that he was far too clever for the seemingly erratic, dim-witted detective.

Falk played other roles, including the grandfather in The Princess Bride. But he best known as Colombo.

Yet Falk did far more than just act. He was also an artist. A tweet by Diane Doniol-Valcroze alerted me to his self-portraits as Colombo. Pictured above is one sold by the Bonham's action house.

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