The Rijksmuseum has doubled its collection of works online. From Rembrandt, to Vermeer, and to other artists who used art to cope with loss and loneliness during the plagues of their time, the museum in Amsterdam has digitized 709,622 works of art. Their expansive digital collection is free for downloading, sharing and editing with a free Rijksmuseum account, which is just great. 

Image via Open Culture

How extreme you might ask? Some of them are standing at the ends of the Earth! These structures are built to withstand incredible temperatures and other environmental factors, so that scientists and researchers can work on tackling some of the planet’s biggest problems at their source (eg. climate change, rising sea levels). A series of research facilities and laboratories are built in the Antarctic, deep underwater, and some are alongside remote ecosystems. Wired lists some extreme structures that have been built and are just being built. Check the full piece here. 

Image via Wired 

Now this is something that archaeologists in the future might discover and then spend years wondering how the civilization living in it disappeared without a trace. Sadly, no one actually ever lived in this town. The Burj al Babas is a $200 million-dollar ghost town that was a development project gone wrong. After the Turkish real estate crisis, the real estate company handling this project went bankrupt, and the once-lavish area is now in ruins. 

While we look forward to things calming down here on Earth, there's going to be plenty of activity in the heavens. Ars Technica put together an overview of plans that include everything from innovative rockets to private flights to the construction of a new space station. And three different nations have spacecraft scheduled to land on Mars in February!

The United Arab Emirates' first mission to the Red Planet, Mars Hope, is due to arrive on February 9. At this time, the spacecraft will make a challenging maneuver to slow down and enter orbit around Mars with an altitude above the planet as low as 1,000km. If all goes well, the spacecraft will spend a Martian year—687 Earth days—studying the planet's atmosphere and better understanding its weather.

China has not said when, exactly, that its ambitious Tianwen-1 mission will arrive at Mars, but it's expected in mid-February. After the spacecraft enters orbit, it will spend a couple of months preparing to descend to the surface, assessing the planned landing site in the Utopia Planitia region. Then, China will attempt to become only the second country to soft-land a spacecraft on Mars that survives for more than a handful of seconds. It will be a huge moment for the country's space program.  

NASA's Mars Perseverance will likely be the last of three missions to arrive at Mars, reaching the Red Planet in mid-February and attempting a landing in Jezero Crater on February 18. This entry, descent, and landing phase—much like with the Curiosity lander in 2012—will be must-see TV.

Read what else 2021 has in store for space exploration at Ars Technica. -via Digg

(Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

Whoever made this banner seems to have been short of “A”s when he or she made this one. Either that, or maybe this person really intended this.

I don’t know what the word “hyppy” means, but if I were to make a guess, this word might be related to “hip” or “hype.”

Well, what do you think?

Image via Engrish.com

They call this Nordic Noir. I'm sure you'd have to have experience with the genre to fully get the humor, but it's funny even with no context. Anyone from Scandinavia willing to share their thoughts? The comments at reddit have links to some similar shows that you might want to explore, if you're into this sort of thing.

When retiring a nuclear warhead during the Cold War, the technicians at Lackland Air Force Base’s Medina Annex took care to remove the enriched uranium that gave it the unearthly power of a nuclear bomb. However, there remained quite a bit of TNT that was used to ignite the bomb, plus depleted uranium and natural uranium. The detonators also remained. On November 13, 1963, one of those warheads was interred underground in the nuclear weapons bunker at the Annex. Then something happened to trip a detonator.

“There’s no direct answer to what caused it that we know of,” insisted Floyd Lutz, who is eighty and owns a water treatment business in San Antonio. “When the igloo was fixin’ to ignite, we were inside setting down those units.” As soon as that loud crack! sounded, he and Ehlinger scampered through the open doorway amid dust and smoke.

“The fire started, so we hauled ass,” Lutz explained. They sprinted past Huser, yelling as they went.

“[They] didn’t have to tell me to run,” said Huser. “They went one way; I went the other down Perimeter Road. I guess it had rained the day before, and I bogged down in a ditch and fell, got back up and turned around and looked, and there was smoke coming off of the igloo’s vent. I was going to go to the next set of igloos to set off an alarm. I got about halfway, and the whole thing blew up.”

The blast itself was bad enough, as retold by those who were there, but those in the surrounding area thought World War III had erupted. And would there be nuclear fallout? Read the story of the 1963 detonation at Texas Monthly. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: 37th TRW Office of History and Research)

If you want some advice on how to spend a long lonely winter inside, safe from viruses but at risk for boredom, maybe we can take some tips from the Antarctic expeditions of a hundred years ago. Before permanent science stations and before the internet, these men knew the risk of being stranded meant they had to take along their own distractions. Most expeditions included at least one musical instrument, brought by someone who knew how to play it. The Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902-1904) included a designated piper, Gilbert Kerr, pictured above. (This image was the subject of some Wikipedia shenanigans a few years ago.) The crew also produced diaries and newspapers, which I guess only differed from each other by whether they were shared.

There is a long tradition of polar explorers creating newspapers for themselves. Reports on the weather or accounts of visits to penguin colonies were interspersed with short stories, poetry, interviews, crossword puzzles and word games. They were illustrated with both humorous and artistic drawings. Over time, these texts took on a great deal of sexual content, including lewd jokes and fantasies.

As one explorer explained, “The importance of not allowing any sense of depression to become a part of the atmosphere of our life was clear to all.”

There were other methods these explorers used to keep their sanity, which you may find utterly dreary in comparison to video games. But you work with what you have. Read the rest at Atlas Obscura.

Spotting and photographing snow leopards in the Kibber wildlife sanctuary of Spiti valley.

Have you ever wondered how insects take off from the ground as they fly? Thanks to modern technology, we are now able to observe these creatures up close and in slow motion, and we are also able to see how they differ from each other. Some insects fly awkwardly. Some need a leg up before flying, and others need a literal “jump start.”

In this video, Adrian Smith from Ant Lab documents the flight of 11 insects in slow motion.

Via Laughing Squid

(Image Credit: Ant Lab/ YouTube)

New York — Something seems to have happened in the squirrels in Rego Park, Queens. In the past several weeks, some people have reported to WCBS-TV that they were attacked by a squirrel.

Micheline Frederick pointed to a bruise on her wrist where she said the squirrel landed on her and then sank its teeth into her fingers and hand.

“We’re wrestling in the snow and there’s blood everywhere and my fingers getting chewed and it won’t let go,” Frederick said. “Eventually, it just stopped and there I was a big bloody mess.”

A photo Frederick says she took after the attack shows a snowy pathway covered in blood.

“This was an MMA cage match! And I lost!” she added.

It is not clear yet what caused these squirrels to be aggressive.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: bharatspace/ Pixabay)

Scientists at Stanford University have developed this prototype smart toilet that has a system that can scan a person’s butt, specifically the anoderm (the exterior part of the anus), which is said to be unique for every person. The butt scanner, in other words, is similar to a fingerprint scanner. After it scans the anoderm,

the system then uses its under-the-seat mounted camera and sensor array to analyze a person’s urine and excrement for health evaluation and discerning potential concerns.

The system was developed specifically for being able to identify the different members of a household for separate waste analysis and not as a stand-alone biometric identification system, which is probably for the best since the use of analprint scanners would make identifying yourself for access to an office building significantly more awkward.

There are more details about this over at Vice.

Via Technabob

What are your thoughts a-butt this one?

(Image Credit: Vice/ Technabob)

Okay, so maybe we’re still in our homes, and it’s been a long year. That doesn’t mean we should stop dreaming of places we could travel when this whole pandemic is over, right? If you like daydreaming like me, or want to note future locations you want to travel to, Euronews has a list of the prettiest fairytale-esque villages in Spain. Check the full piece here. 

Image via Euronews

Uh, what? OpenAI has built a new model called DALL·E that could combine language and images in a way that will make artificial intelligence algorithms better at understanding both words and what they refer to. DALL-E is an attempt by developers to have AIs be better at understanding what words and sentences mean. Now where does the avocado armchair come in? Technology Review has that one covered: 

To test DALL·E’s ability to work with novel concepts, the researchers gave it captions that described objects they thought it would not have seen before, such as “an avocado armchair” and “an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog.” In both these cases, the AI generated images that combined these concepts in plausible ways.

The armchairs in particular all look like chairs and avocados. “The thing that surprised me the most is that the model can take two unrelated concepts and put them together in a way that results in something kind of functional,” says Aditya Ramesh, who worked on DALL·E. This is probably because a halved avocado looks a little like a high-backed armchair, with the pit as a cushion. For other captions, such as “a snail made of harp,” the results are less good, with images that combine snails and harps in odd ways.

DALL·E is the kind of system that Riedl imagined submitting to the Lovelace 2.0 test, a thought experiment that he came up with in 2014. The test is meant to replace the Turing test as a benchmark for measuring artificial intelligence. It assumes that one mark of intelligence is the ability to blend concepts in creative ways. Riedl suggests that asking a computer to draw a picture of a man holding a penguin is a better test of smarts than asking a chatbot to dupe a human in conversation, 

Image via Technology Review 

If you notice your phone battery capacity dropping after a year or two of use: that’s normal, because rechargeable batteries slowly lose capacity over time. Charging your phone while you sleep is also a bad habit to adopt, especially if you’re partially charging your phone’s battery between 20 to 80 percent, as Make Use Of details: 

Manufacturers specify the life expectancy of smartphones through "battery charge cycles." A charge cycle is defined as charging the battery from 0 to 100 percent and then discharged back down to 0 percent. The number of expected charge cycles will tell you how many full cycles the battery can handle before it noticeably starts to lose capacity.

Avoid extremes to extend your battery life. Partial charges and discharges that combine to 100 percent count as a single full cycle. By partially charging and discharging between 20 and 80 percent, you could get 1,000 full cycles or more before hitting a noticeable drop in capacity. That's almost three years of daily charges.

Why does this happen? It's due to how your battery actually works. These batteries are made of a lithium cobalt oxide layer and a graphite layer. Lithium ions move from the graphite to the lithium cobalt oxide to release energy. Charging your battery moves those ions back to the graphite layer.

That's why either extreme damages the battery: you're compromising the cell's integrity because over-stuffing a layer with Lithium increases internal resistance.

Image via Make Use Of