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 

Crocodile tears have a use after all! Some bugs will actually land near a crocodile’s eyes to drink their tears. Ecologist Carlo de la Rosa noticed that some bugs were perched near a crocodile’s eyes while he was traveling the Puerto Viejo River in Costa Rica  He then found out that the bees and butterflies drink crocodile tears for their salt intake. 

(via Flipboard) 

Image screenshot via Flipboard 

Over the years, space junk has become a growing problem for the Earth’s atmosphere. Of the approximately 6,000 satellites orbiting our planet, about 60 percent of them are now defunct and unused, and this junk presents many hazards to our atmosphere. To address this problem, the Japanese logging and wood processing company, Sumitomo Forestry Co., has teamed up with Kyoto University. Their goal: to design and build wooden satellites. They aim to have working prototypes by 2023.

Both will work together to experiment with different types of wood and test them in extreme environments on Earth, emulating conditions quite similar to those faced by satellites launched into orbit – such as severe changes in temperature and unfiltered exposure to sunlight and radiation.

Kyoto University professor and Japanese astronaut Takao Dai explained to the BBC that wooden satellites held one major advantage over their counterparts made from metal – should they fall out of orbit and burn up upon re-entering the atmosphere, they won't release as many harmful particles and dangerous debris.

"We are very concerned with the fact that all the satellites which re-enter the Earth's atmosphere burn and create tiny alumina particles which will float in the upper atmosphere for many years," he said, also adding that "eventually, it will affect the environment of the Earth."

Cool!

(Image Credit: BBC/ Mashable)

It’s something we are all familiar with: liquid glass. Scientists at the University of Konstanz have identified liquid glass as a new state of matter. Glass is actually not a liquid, as much as other people would tell you, it is an amorphous solid: 

Normally when a substance transitions from a liquid to a solid, the formerly free-flowing atoms line up into a rigid crystal formation. That’s not the case with glass though: its atoms “freeze” in their disordered state.

In the new study, the researchers discovered a form of glass where the atoms exhibit a complex behavior that’s never been seen in bulk glass before. Essentially, the atoms can move but aren’t able to rotate.

The team made this discovery in a model system of colloidal suspensions. These mixtures are made up of large solid particles suspended in a fluid, making it easier for scientists to observe the physical behavior of atoms or molecules. Normally these particles are spheres, but for this experiment the team used elliptical ones so they could tell which direction they were pointing.

Image via New Atlas 

Pop culture stories do manage to all look alike after a while. When a story works, it will work again. While not checking all the boxes, I can think of other heroes that fit this trope. Dorothy Gale for one. Frodo. King Arthur. Of course, there are reasons for all this. It's everyone's fantasy to be the hero of their own story. The lack of parents frees one to act instead being protected. Magic and special abilities make it possible. Fighting for justice against oppressive evil overlords is the epitome of heroism. The stick and the hairy friend... those are just a lot of fun. This comic is from John Atkinson at Wrong Hands. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Don’t worry, it’s not a fictional movie. A feature film based on the Rubik’s Cube will be made by Hyde Park Entertainment Group and Endeavor Content. The film isn’t the only media that Hyde Park Entertainment is making based on the iconic toy. The company, in partnership with Glassman Media, is also making a game show based on the toy. 

Image via wikimedia commons

 The deadly dance floor where John the Baptist was sentenced to death has been found by archaeologists. A courtyard uncovered at Machaerus in Jordan is likely the area where Salome danced so well that she was able to ask for John the Baptist’s head as a reward. Live Science has the details: 

At Herod Antipas' birthday party, Herodias' daughter, named Salome, performed a dance that so delighted Herod Antipas that the king promised her anything she wanted as a reward. Salome, goaded on by Herodias, asked for the head of John the Baptist. Herod Antipas was reluctant to grant the request, according to the Bible, but he ultimately decided to fulfill it and had John the Baptist's head brought to Salome on a platter. 

A courtyard uncovered at Machaerus is likely the place where Salome's dance was performed and where Herod Antipas decided to have John the Baptist beheaded, wrote Győző Vörös, director of a project called Machaerus Excavations and Surveys at the Dead Sea, in the book "Holy Land Archaeology on Either Side: Archaeological Essays in Honour of Eugenio Alliata" (Fondazione Terra Santa, 2020). The courtyard, Vörös said, has an apsidal-shaped niche that is probably the remains of the throne where Herod Antipas sat. 

Whether or not the discovered area is the actual location where John the Baptist was beheaded remains unknown. But hey, at least we can associate a place in real life towards the event now, right? 

Image via Live Science 

People in the past envisioned flying cars by the year 2010. Yeah, sorry about that, but we have yet to achieve the flying cars we see in films. While most of us are scrolling through various ‘yearly fortunes’ and tarot card readings for a sneak peek of what can happen to us this year, it’s also fun to check out what people from a full century ago envisioned for us. Entrepreneur’s Jason Feifer compiles the predictions people from 1921 had for the year 2021. Do you think some of it will come true or has already come true? 

Image via the Entrepreneur