If you’re tired of the usual pop songs or lo-fi beats, maybe it’s time to listen to sounds from nature. It’s okay if you’re stuck in a major city, because this radio station brings you nature ASMR with a simple click to a website. Tree.fm is an online radio station for tree songs in stereo, as Open Culture details:
Tree.fm “is a tool that gives you instant access to the sounds of the world’s forests,” Beth Skwarecki writes at Lifehacker. Many of those sounds, like the forests that produced them, are endangered, not only from the usual suspects but also the noise pollution of highways and housing developments. Listen to forest songs on repeat or hit “listen to a random forest” and be “transported to Madagascar to listen to some lemurs, or to Ghana to hear some peacefully rushing water, or to Russia, where a bird I’ve never heard of puts on a vocal performance.” This is good medicine. Discover the forest songs that best soothe your nervous system or delight ears at Tree.fm.
Imagine earning up to $29.5 million at the age of nine? Can’t relate! Forbes magazine has named the young Texan YouTuber named Ryan Kaji as the highest-paid YouTuber of 2020. Kaji has earned $29.5 million from June 2019 to June 2020. Just wow. The majority of his earnings actually come from licensing, as Mashable details:
But while Ryan's video content has earned him fat bucks, the majority of his earnings actually come from licensing deals on over 5,000 Ryan's World products that range from action figures to clothes to electronic gadgets.
Also, Ryan also has a series called Ryan's Mystery Playdate on the children's network Nickelodeon that sees him tackle physical challenges and mental puzzles to uncover the identity of his secret playdate.
On the latest list by Forbes, Ryan managed to beat other YouTubers such as newcomer Mr. Beast (US$24 million), Dude Perfect (US$23 million), Rhett and Link (US$20 million), and Markiplier (US$19.5 million). Even more impressive is the fact that Ryan was also listed as YouTube's top earner for the previous two years.
Interestingly enough, Ryan isn't the only under-10 YouTuber within the list's top 10 highest earners. In seventh place sits six-year-old Russian Nastya with US$18.5 million in earnings coming from over 39 billion total views on her videos of her and her father playing with LEGO, doing household chores, and explaining viruses.
Elaborating on the list, Forbes also revealed that the top 10 earners on YouTube made an estimated US$211 million in total over the year ending June 2020 – a 30 percent increase over the previous year. They attributed the COVID-19 pandemic as the major reason for the uptick, with people being forced to sit at home way more than usual.
Listen, these designs may be terrible, but they did try to convey what they wanted to say. It just didn’t happen in the way they envisioned. Each ended up being funny or ridiculous, and a lesson on what not to do when designing book covers, user interfaces, and logos. Creative Bloq shares 12 epic design fails that can make you question why they were approved in the first place.
While you're stuck at home, dreaming of warmer weather, you might want to take a tour of the beautiful town of Savannah, Georgia. Online, that is. Savannah is known for its classic Southern architecture, museums, Spanish moss, antiques, and ghosts. And the people there take hospitality seriously.
The open container policy is a unique characteristic of the city, meaning it is 100% legal and 100% part of the Savannah experience to sip and savour while wandering the streets of the Historic District (provided you’re drinking from disposable cups). Throughout the historic district, there are hundreds of centuries-old live oak trees which are the true jewels of the city. Visiting in the mid to late fall is quite lovely with cooler temperatures and less humidity. It’s said that Savannah was spared from the destruction of the Civil War because of her beauty. There are numerous secret gardens to discover and wandering the many squares (all 22 of them) can fill an entire day – don’t miss the picturesque Wright Square one of the original four, where the city’s first burial ground lies beneath your feet.
Happy holidays indeed! These elephants wearing Santa hats are spreading holiday cheer, and making sure everyone stays safe during the pandemic. The animals handed out face masks to primary school students in central Thailand. Now this is also a reminder to us : wear a mask! Practice the necessary health protocols! But also, happy holidays!
If your country had a space force, what would you call the personnel of that force? For the United States Space Force, they decided to call their personnel “Guardians”. Yes. Guardians. Let that sink in.
"Henceforth, the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as Guardians," U.S. Vice President Mike Pence announced today (Dec. 18) during a ceremony marking the branch's impending first anniversary.
"Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Guardians will be defending our nation for generations to come," Pence added, also invoking the terms that refer to people who serve in the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. (Service members in the nation's other military branch, the Coast Guard, are called "Coast Guardsmen.")
But what does the United States Space Force do? Learn more about the country’s newest military branch over at Space.com.
Humans are able to do great things when they have mastered the laws of physics. This ring made out entirely of Pringles is proof of that statement. But what holds the pieces together? According to the one who posted this, it’s friction and gravity.
Is it just me or does the hand soap kind of solidified? I think it’s too cold in this bathroom. Might be best to turn the heater on, or else someone might suffer from hypothermia.
When it comes to modern horror video games, there is one element that gets used a lot, and that element is jumpscares. But jumpscares aren’t the only thing that can make a video game scary. In fact, you can make a video game scary without using them. But how? The answer lies in great sound design and storytelling.
In this video, YouTuber Bricky reviews Darkwood and explains why it is the best horror game with no jumpscares.
Science says that having an alter ego, a different persona than the one you inhabit every day, can boost confidence and reduce anxiety. I can attest to that, as I used a stage name on radio and another on the internet. Batman probably got a lot of courage in hiding behind a batsuit. And others have tried that method of overcoming stage fright.
Beyoncé’s was the assertive and empowered ‘Sasha Fierce’, who allowed her to perform with extra self-confidence and sensuality. “Usually when I hear the chords, when I put on my stilettos, like the moment right before when you’re nervous… then Sasha Fierce appears, and my posture and the way I speak and everything is different,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2008. It was a strategy that she continued to use until 2010, when she felt she had matured enough to avoid the psychological crutch.
Inspired by an emotional meeting with Beyoncé herself, Adele followed suit, telling Rolling Stone magazine in 2011 about her creation of ‘Sasha Carter’. The persona was a combination of Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce persona and the (real) country music star June Carter. Adele said the strategy helped her give her best to every performance during her breakout year.
Although the embodiment of a fictional persona may seem like a gimmick for pop stars, new research suggests there may be some real psychological benefits to the strategy. Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of ‘self-distancing’, which involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to view a situation more dispassionately.
“Self-distancing gives us a little bit of extra space to think rationally about the situation,” says Rachel White, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York State. It allows us to rein in undesirable feelings like anxiety, increases our perseverance on challenging tasks, and boosts our self-control.
John C. Worsley does a Star Trek Christmas song every year. We've seen them here! He edits Star Trek clips to fashion 23rd-century versions of classic Christmas songs. This year Worsley took on the challenge of recreating Mariah Carey's mega-hit "All I Want for Christmas is You," sung by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (and friends). The entire song is covered, the editing is the best he's done, and there are some lyrical surprises to make you grin.
It's the age old problem: how do you keep your snacks warm while keeping Agent 47 busy on his killing spree? Kentucky Fried Chicken has now solved that conundrum by designing a console with a built-in chicken warmer.
It's not exactly an original idea. Gamers have been heating food on overly-hot consoles for years. But what the KFConsole does is conveniently and intentionally conduct the machine's heat to the food. CNN reports:
Your chicken will be kept hot thanks to a custom-built cooling system that keeps the console hardware at a regular temperature while using heat produced by its components to warm the chicken chamber. [...]
The console can handle virtual reality games and offers smooth gameplay thanks to 240 frames per second frame rate and 4K display compatibility, according to details published by Cooler Master.
Meet the anyon (yes, that’s how it’s spelled), a one of a kind, extraordinary subatomic particle that only shows up in specific conditions. Scientists believe that this flat particle could be the key that will unlock quantum computing. The anyon only arise in realms confined to two dimensions, and at temperatures near absolute zero and in the presence of a strong magnetic field:
Scientists have theorized about these flat, peculiar “particle-like objects” since the 1980s, and the very nature of them has made it sometimes seem impossible to ever verify them. But the qualities scientists believe anyons have also made them sound very valuable to quantum research and, now, quantum
The objects have many possible positions and "remember," in a way, what has happened. In a press release earlier this fall, Purdue University explains more about the value of anyons:
“Anyons have characteristics not seen in other subatomic particles, including exhibiting fractional charge and fractional statistics that maintain a ‘memory’ of their interactions with other quasiparticles by inducing quantum mechanical phase changes. Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, professor of physics at MIT, gave these quasiparticles the tongue-in-cheek name ‘anyon’" due to their strange behavior because unlike other types of particles, they can adopt ‘any’ quantum phase when their positions are exchanged.”
Over the years, televisions have increased dramatically in size, but is it necessary? Shall we make our televisions bigger, or is time to decrease the size? If you’re not a fan of big TV screens, then you might like this miniature television from TinyCircuits. You have to build it on your own, however.
Introducing the $64 TinyTV DIY Kit from TinyCircuits, it comes with everything you need to assemble your own miniature television in five minutes and with no skill required. My kind of project!
The TinyTV DIY Kit can store up to 4 hours of video on its microSD card, which you can control with the included remote’s channel up (next video) and channel down (previous video) buttons. Or you can just do what I always do and lose the remote in the sofa and give up on ever watching TV again.
The television’s 3D printed console comes in white, but you can paint it whatever color you’d like for added realism.
When you were young and shy and awkward and felt the world was against you, there may have been someone who told you that good things would happen to you eventually. It wasn't much comfort to hear right then, but time has a way of making it come true. Weird Al Yankovic was a shy and awkward 12-year-old with a crush on the girl who sat in front of him in school. Click the "see more" button, or click through to Facebook to read the story of his interaction with Patrice, and how he reconnected with her almost 50 years later. The story is a ray of sunshine. -via Bored Panda
