A bike race in Colorado saw a moose join in! The moose stayed ahead of the pack for a good five minutes, but eventually tired a little. He finally realized that this mad gang wasn't pursuing him when they began to overtake him. That gave him enough confidence to stop. Or maybe he was just having fun, we don't know. -via Digg
The city of Fukuoka wants to cheer up the kids in their local children’s hospital, and one of the ways they thought of was to repaint one of their port cranes to make it look like a giant giraffe. The initiative, which was unveiled by the city’s mayor over a week ago, is planned to be completed by February 2022, and is expected to cost about 100 million yen (about $900,000). The city has six cranes, and if the first one becomes popular, the city will consider painting the other five.
Now this is wholesome.
(Image Credit: Fukuoka City/ Spoon & Tamago)
A small group of prehistoric people went inside a cave now known as the Axturra Cave, located in Spain. Worming their way through passages, the group finally arrived at their destination: a 40-feet long limestone wall which stood eight feet above the cave floor. With their engraving tools, the group carved images of horses, bison, deer, and mountain goats. The question is, why?
In 2015, two scientists rediscovered this masterpiece, now known as the Ledge of Horses, along with dozens of other carvings and paintings in other hard-to-reach corners of Atxurra Cave. Faded by time, some figures had nearly vanished. Researchers flooded the chambers with LED lights and took photographs, which they ran through software to detect elements not visible to human eyes. They recreated the art in digital form, allowing the modern word to behold it.
But those artists of old did not have LED lights or any sort of modern lighting back when they made their masterpiece. What they had were torches with flickering light, and that may just be the key to how to look at the art in the same manner that these ancient people looked at it.
Over the years, archaeologists have proposed that Paleolithic societies created the art as part of hunting rituals or psychedelic drug trips, or as historical records, teaching devices, or graphic novels, where a series of panels conveyed a continuous narrative. In some caves, animals or parts of their bodies are rendered several times, juxtaposed or superimposed in different positions. The light and shadows thrown by flames may have created the illusion that these figures were moving, according to some researchers, who call this art form “proto-cinema.” At Chauvet for example, the painting of an eight-legged bison might have appeared, by torchlight, to be a four-legged animal striding across the wall.
Marc Azéma, an archaeologist and filmmaker, made this case in his book La préhistoire du cinema [The Prehistory of the Cinema]. In 12 French caves, Azéma identified more than 50 animal figures that might have been drawn to look as if they were galloping, tossing their heads, or swishing their tails.
“The flickering light, the dancing shadows, the warm glow from the fire, many people have argued that this creates a sense of theater, that you’re looking at an ancient version of cinema,” says University of Victoria archaeologist April Nowell.
Nowell himself had this unforgettable experience when he and his colleagues went into the cave with their flame mimicking lamps. He tells his story over at Atlas Obscura.
(Image Credit: Olivia Rivero and Maria Soto/ IÑAKI INTXAURBE/ Atlas Obscura)
What is it like to be an athlete currently living in the Olympic Village for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics? We know that the bed is made from cardboard, but what else is there? United States rugby player Cody Melphy shares with us on his TikTok some stuff inside the Olympic Village, and well, from what he shares, living there “just feels like a royal summer camp,” according to a TikTok user.
The Village is located in the Harumi waterfront district, so some of the rooms have amazing views to a beautiful skyline and Cody shows that he’s one of those lucky people.
Check out Melphy’s stories inside the Olympic Village over at Bored Panda.
(Image Credit: codymelphy/ Bored Panda)
Acoustic trapping is the phenomenon in which sound waves are made capable of moving matter thanks to the acoustic radiation force that they produce. A trained opera singer shattering a wine glass is an example of this phenomenon. Scientists have been studying this phenomenon since the 1980s, and they have used devices called “acoustic tweezers.”
"When an acoustic wave interacts with a particle, it exerts both an oscillatory force and a much smaller steady-state 'radiation' force," wrote the American Physical Society. "This latter force is the one used for trapping and manipulation. Radiation forces are generated by the scattering of a traveling sound wave, or by energy gradients within the sound field."
When tiny particles encounter this radiation, they tend to be drawn toward regions of certain pressure and velocity within the sound field. Researchers can exploit this tendency by engineering sound waves that "trap" — or suspend — tiny particles in the air. Devices that do this are often called "acoustic tweezers."
One of the common challenges of acoustic trapping is that sound waves bounce off reflective surfaces, which disrupts the device. This new acoustic tweezer has a solution to this problem: by adjusting ultrasonic transducers in order to create overlapping sound waves.
By changing how the transducers emit sound waves, the team can move the acoustic trap through space, which moves the bit of matter.
So far, the device is only able to move millimeter-sized pieces of matter with varying degrees of success. "When we move a particle, it sometimes scatters away," the team noted. Still, improved acoustic trapping and other no-contact lifting technologies — like optical tweezers, commonly used in medicine — could prove useful in many future applications, including cell separation, nanotechnologies, and biological research.
Cool!
(Image Credit: Kondo and Okubo/ Japan Journal of Applied Physics/ Big Think)
If you’re the type who loves to grow his beard, and can walk outside freely without worrying that someone might shave it, then consider yourself lucky, as people who lived in Peter the Great’s time did not have your kind of luxury. At that time in Russia, men were not allowed to grow beards, and if the bearer really wants to keep his beard, then that person has to pay the beard tax and carry with him all the time a beard token. Of course, the next question would be: why?
The beard tax was just one part of a larger project: Peter the Great’s aesthetic reinvention of Russian culture. The tsar ordered his subjects to replace their familiar long Russian overcoats with French or Hungarian jackets. Mannequins set outside the Moscow city gates illustrated the new fashions for all to see. Tailors who continued to sell Russian styles ran the risk of steep fines, and anyone walking the streets in an old-fashioned robe was liable to have it shorn short by the Tsar’s inspectors.
Upon Peter the Great’s return from his travels in Europe, he immediately began “Europeanizing” his homeland, starting by shearing the beards of his court nobles at his welcome-home party.
Peter the Great’s beard tax would go on until his death in 1725, and the tax would only be lifted in 1772.
(Image Credit: U.S. State Department/ Wikimedia Commons)
This is the Casamia Community House, a structure built by VTN Architects, a Vietnamese architectural studio. Located at the coastal area of Cam Thanh, Hoi An city in Vietnam, the place not only boasts a very windy spot, but also a beautiful design and a large open area. The interior floor area measures 1,600 sq m (17,222 sq ft), and its arched ceiling reaches almost 9 meters high.
Elsewhere in the building lies a gym, a storage area, a medical area, a bathroom, and a kitchen. There's also a swimming pool outside. Glass doors open the building up to the outside so it can be cooled naturally, though ceiling fans are also installed, too.
As you can see from the pictures, the building is made mainly of bamboo. But thanks to its roof being thatched, the structure is not easily destructible.
… VTN Architects says that the building has been designed to be long lasting, even in the face of storms and other severe weather.
VTN Architects certainly has plenty of experience creating bamboo structures and some of its previous bamboo-based works include the Diamond Island Community Center and Vedana Restaurant.
Looks like a comfortable place to stay at. What do you think?
(Image Credit: Hiroyuki Oki/ New Atlas)
English, as she is spoken, is as simple or difficult to learn as most other languages. But English as she is written is really weird. We've seen many examples of strange English spelling, such as "ough," used in thought, drought, tough, cough, through, and though, which are all pronounced differently. How did English spelling become so disengaged from pronunciation? Linguist Arika Orent (previously at Neatorama) takes us through a history of written English to explain how it happened. There was a period of several hundred years after the Norman Conquest when English wasn't written down much at all. And as England was struggling out of that confusion, the movable type printing press came along. Typesetters had plenty of choices, but no strict guides.
Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn’t to faithfully represent the author’s spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of ‘correct’ English – it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in.
Standard-setting was only partly in the hands of the people setting the type. Even more so, it was down to a growing reading public. The more texts there were, the more reading there was, and the greater the sensibility about what looks right. Once that sense develops, it can be a very powerful enforcer of norms. These norms in the literacy of English speakers today are so well entrenched that simple adjustments are very jarring. If ai trai tu repreezent mai akshuel pronownseeayshun in raiteeng, yu kan reed it, but its difikelt and disterbeeng tu du soh. It just looks wrong, and that feeling of wrongness interrupts the flow of reading. The fluency of reading depends on the speed with which you visually identify the words, and the speed of identification increases with exposure. The more we see a word, the more quickly we recognise it, even if its spelling doesn’t match the sound.
Some spellings got entrenched this way, by being printed over and over again in widely distributed texts, very early on.
Once spelling was standardized in printed text, it tended to stick even when pronunciation changed. There's a lot more to it, which you can read at Aeon. -via Metafilter
Feel like this might help fr 👀
— Overtime (@overtime) July 26, 2021
(via handinyofacehoops/TikTok) pic.twitter.com/wJqWIqac8P
This is a clever invention. The HandInYoFace places a hand-shaped obstruction in front of a player's eyes to simulate the obscured vision of a player trying to shoot and pass while blocked.
I'm struggling to find the origin of this product and video, the latter of which appears to be a TikTok account. Hopefully we can see the training aid in sporting goods stores soon.
-via Super Punch
*laugh* I normally avoid these refs..but WOW. REAL LIFE Sponge bob and Patrick! #Okeanos Retreiver seamount 1885 m pic.twitter.com/fffKNKMFjP
— Christopher Mah (@echinoblog) July 27, 2021
Christopher Mah is a marine biologist who works for NOAA and for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. He was aboard NOAAS Okeanos Explorer ship watching a feed from the ROV when he saw a familiar image: Spongebob Squarepants and his best friend Patrick Star! He was quite surprised, as the depictions of the creatures in Spongebob Squarepants aren't realistic.
Very few of them resemble SpongeBob's boxy shape.
But the SpongeBob-like sponge in the image, Mah said, belongs to the genus Hertwigia. He was surprised by its bright yellow color, which is unusual for the deep sea. That far down, most things are orange or white to help them camouflage in the dimly lit environment.
The sea star nearby, known as Chondraster, has five arms covered with tiny suckers. Those allow it to creep across the ocean floor and attach itself to rocks and other organisms. Chondraster stars can be dark pink, light pink, or white.
This star's color "was a bright pink that strongly evoked Patrick," Mah said.
Another deviation from the TV show is that sea stars are liable to eat sponges. Read about the unusual scene from the ocean floor at Insider. -via Smithsonian
Cassie is a walking and running robot inspired by the biomechanics of the ostrich. The robot from Agility Robotics looks a bit like an ostrich, too, if the bird could operate without a head. Cassie harnesses machine learning to negotiate a route and stay on track. In this video, see how she runs a 5K course in 53 minutes on a single battery charge. She's no Olympic sprinter, but my battery would have run down much sooner. -via Laughing Squid
See also: Digit, the somewhat more human-shaped robot from the same company.
The Moon is here in this picture. Yep. It’s fully visible. But if you can’t find it, that’s all right. The photographer couldn’t find it, either, so you’re not alone. It is only thanks to the long exposure of the camera that we can see it. Let me give you a hint: You can find the Moon in the blue sky. The question is, why is it so difficult to find?
For one reason, this photograph was taken during a total lunar eclipse, when the Earth's shadow made the Moon much dimmer than a normal full Moon. For another, the image, taken in Colorado, USA, was captured just before sunrise. With the Moon on the exact opposite side of the sky from the Sun, this meant that the Sun was just below the horizon, but still slightly illuminating the sky. Last, as the Moon was only about two degrees above the horizon, the large volume of air between the camera and the horizon scattered a lot of light away from the background Moon.
Have you found the Moon? If you did, then congratulations!
(Image Credit: Jimmy Westlake (Colorado Mountain College)/ NASA)
Before a newborn mammal opens its eyes, its retinal waves are already active, and its brain is already anticipating its environment. By the time that this newborn mammal opens its eyes, it has already made visual sense of the world, and is “prepared to respond immediately to environmental threats.” At least this is true for mice, as this study led by graduate students from Yale only focused on these mammals.
"At eye opening, mammals are capable of pretty sophisticated behavior," said Crair, senior author of the study, who is also vice provost for research at Yale." But how do the circuits form that allow us to perceive motion and navigate the world? It turns out we are born capable of many of these behaviors, at least in rudimentary form."
[...]
Mice, of course, differ from humans in their ability to quickly navigate their environment soon after birth. However, human babies are also able to immediately detect objects and identify motion, such as a finger moving across their field of vision, suggesting that their visual system was also primed before birth.
Amazing!
(Image Credit: Rama/ Wikimedia Commons)
Archaeologists in the Abu Qir Bay in the Mediterranean Sea stumbled upon an interesting piece of history when they scanned the bottom of the bay using a sub-bottom profiler. Buried beneath some five meters of clay and debris was a ship that had a 25-meter-long hull. Archaeologists believe that this wrecked ship was once an Egyptian warship, built with speed in mind over capacity and agility.
“Finds of fast galleys from this period remain extremely rare,” said IEASM archaeologist Frank Goddio, who led the project. The Abu Qir Bay ship is only the second warship ever found from the last few centuries BCE—the Ptolemaic Period in Egypt and the era of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage.
Learn more about the sunken ship, as well as the ancient Egyptian port city, over at Ars Technica.
(Image Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities/ Ars Technica)
Dogs help us in many ways. They can be a source of comfort for us when we’re stressed, anxious, or depressed. They can also be a source of encouragement for us to stay fit. But dogs do more than help us psychologically; they can also help us in potentially life-threatening situations.
We've all heard the cliche of the dog rescuing humans from a burning building, but it's been demonstrated experimentally, too: Dogs will help a trapped human, particularly when that human expresses distress.
However, when it comes to food, don’t expect your dog to share one bit of it to you, even if you’re the one who gave it to him. This was what animal researchers found out on their study (which is now published over at the journal PLOS One).
Learn more about this over at ScienceAlert.
(Image Credit: SNGPhotography/ Pixabay)
