With the recent lockdowns that have been implemented in many places across the world, museums and cultural institutions have been temporarily shut down. Because of this, various institutions have decided to digitally archive artworks and historical objects.

A recent addition is Van Gogh Worldwide, a massive collection of the post-impressionist artist’s paintings, sketches, and drawings.

And this can only mean one thing: you can now view over a thousand of Van Gogh’s artworks online for free!

From landscapes to self-portraits to classic still lifes, the archive boasts more than 1,000 artworks, which are sorted by medium, period, and participating institution—those include the Van Gogh Museum, Kröller-Müller Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Each digital piece is supported by details about the work, any restorations, and additional images.

Awesome!

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When thinking of strange-looking creatures, the things that will probably come to your mind are those in works of fiction, legends, and myths, such as centaurs and mermaids. Aliens might also come into mind. But it seems that we need not look beyond reality in order to look for strange-looking creatures, as there are many who live among us. We just need to look deeper, literally.

Gizmodo compiles photos of 12 bizarre sea animals. Check them out over at the site.

(Image Credit: NOAA/ Gizmodo)

Sora News 24 illustrates what a proper single serving Pringles container really should look like. The Japanese division of the Pringles potato chip brand declared November 11 to b Pringles Day and celebrated by distributing these extremely long cans to selected gourmands. Each one is 5 feet and 3 inches tall, which is the height of Fuwa, the brand's spokeswoman. Perhaps, in the future, you will be able to order Pringles by the Fuwa.

Photo: Sora News 24

The name California was given to the west coast of the New World by Hernán Cortés’s conquistadors as they charged through, destroying the Aztec Empire and claiming territory. The name was taken from a Spanish novel, Las sergas de Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, written sometime around the year 1500. The story tells of the fictional island of California and its queen Calafia.  

At least initially, Queen Calafia seems like she could have sprung from the pages of a modern fantasy novel, ruling a kingdom that wouldn’t have been out of place in Westeros or Middle Earth. Her island, located “on the right side of the Indies, very close to … the Terrestrial Paradise,” is filled with gold and inhabited only by Black women, who tame wild griffins to ride into battle (fed with the flesh of any unfortunate men who show up). Calafia herself is described as beautiful, strong, and courageous. The book portrays her in an unfailingly positive light, though it ultimately places her under the control of medieval European patriarchy.

The novel is an example of a "crusade romance" in which the Gospel is proclaimed to the faraway and exotic people of the world. A closer look at the book as well as its context and influence tell us a lot about medieval attitudes about race and religion as the Age of Exploration dawned.

(Image credit: Cheryl Thuesday for Atlas Obscura)

In the 1980s, Leta Powell Drake interviewed plenty of celebrities for KOLN/KGIN in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was also the station's program director, morning host, and a character on a children's show. As you can tell from these clips, she never held back in her probing the minds of those who were simply trying to promote their latest projects. If you'd like to see more, there's an archive of many of Drake's interviews from History Nebraska.  -via Kottke

A program manager at the Surrey Wildlife Trust has spotted a spider thought to have been extinct in an undeveloped portion of a British military base. The spider, known as the great-fox spider (Alopecosa fabrilis), was last seen 27 years ago, in 1993.

"It's a gorgeous spider, if you're into that kind of thing," the program manager Mike Waite told The Guardian.

[...]

Waite found several male spiders, one female and possibly some immature spiderlings, though the latter were difficult to identify conclusively.

The adult spiders have gray-and-brown furry bodies. They can spin silk, but instead of making webs, they use that silk to line the burrows that they dig in order to hibernate over the winter. Great fox-spiders are critically endangered, but they are also found on the European mainland, particularly on coastal sand dunes in Holland and Denmark, according to The Guardian.

Know more about the great-fox spiders over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Mike Waite/ Surrey Wildlife Trust)

On November 12, 1970 the Oregon Highway Division had a whale of a task on their hands. How were they going to go about removing a whale carcass that had washed up on the beach in Florence, Oregon?

They could not bury it because they were afraid that the smell of rotting whale flesh would continue to permeate. Neither could the carcass be burned. Nor was anyone willing to cut up and bury odoriferous, decaying remnants of the Cetacean behemoth. Finally, the highway workers had a bright idea, they settled on using a half ton of dynamite to disintegrate the whale remains. However, the idea wasn't so bright after all. Things did not go as planned.

Watch the video for KATU reporter Paul Linnman's color commentary. Be sure to read the amusing comment thread including this one:

Showed this just now to my husband, who has somehow never seen it. I said, “All these men around, and not ONE of them said, ‘Hey, this isn’t a good idea,” My husband, without missing a beat, replied, “They wanted to see the explosion."

Video Credit: KATU Classic - YOUTUBE

Shop for whale themed t-shirts including netflix and krill by louisros at the NeatoShop!

ESTO #NoEsRestauración. Es una intervención NO profesional.
👎

Polémica en Palencia por una restauración que deja hecho un «cristo» el relieve de una fachada https://t.co/18pEBXjKH4

— ACRE (@A_CR_E) November 9, 2020

Spain is full of wonderful art that spans hundreds, if not thousands of years. Why are so many art restorations in the country entrusted to people who aren't art restoration experts? First we had Ecce Homo, then St. George, and even the Virgin Mary. Now a statue in the town of Palencia has gone viral for its new face that resembles a potato or something.

The Palencia statue, which formerly was of a smiling lady placed within a country scene, adorns part of the facade of a bank in this city of some 78,000 in the country's north. The Art Newspaper reports that the statue was originally unveiled in 1923.

In Spain, professional art restorers and conservationists are once again calling for stricter oversight. On Twitter, the Madrid-based organization of professional restorers and conservators, ACRE, deplored the work in Palencia, writing that the rehab was not professional.

Read about the incident, and see what the statue is supposed to look like at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting

This dog named Monkey should be on American Ninja Warrior! Monkey's trainer, Omar von Muller, built an obstacle course that would confound humans and dogs alike, but this dog has it down. He takes on a tightrope, balance bean, seesaw, ladder, and all manner of apparatus, and even throws some mustard on his performance with a sideways walking handstand! That's a good dog. -via Laughing Squid

War leaves many scars. A person who returns from war is no longer the person he used to be before. As a result of the many horrors that the veteran has experienced throughout his time in the battlefield, he might find it hard to talk about it with his loved ones.

Often family members are afraid of saying the wrong thing, pushing too hard, or worry that starting this conversation will open a Pandora's box of memories and harm the veteran.

While these conversations need to be handled with care, they do not have to be forbidden.

Regina Koepp from Psychology Today gives us some tips on how to talk with veterans about their experiences. Here is one of her tips:

Create a space to talk. Let the veteran know that all aspects of their life are important, the positive and the painful, and ask if they’d be willing to share about their military experiences. 

Don’t expect this conversation to happen in public. Military experiences can be emotional, and people don’t want to be vulnerable in public. Consider sharing a meal together and allow the conversation to happen naturally. Or, do an activity together, like a walk or a hike, or working on a puzzle together, and then ask if they’d be willing to share.

Check out more of these over at the site.

(Image Credit: centaur60/ Pixabay)

This is Norm, a pug who loves traveling with his hooman Jeremy Veach. In each of their travels, Veach always makes sure to take photos of Norm, some cool, and others silly, if not hilarious.

Check out some of the photos over at Sad and Useless. You may also check Veach’s Instagram account if you want to see more.

(Image Credit: Jeremy Veach/ Sad and Useless)

This minimalistic structure doubles as a functional closet and stylish furniture. Meet Ori’s Pocket Closet, the winner of the A+Product Award for the Smart Building & Technology category. This movable wall is built smart indeed, as it provides a huge amount of storage space for clothes and other items while not grabbing a lot of your home’s surface area: 

Ori’s smart space technology allows building space to be used more efficiently, optimizing designs with flexibility to enable the allocation of more units. Ori’s Pocket Closet is a smart, transformable spatial solution and divider that meets residential needs by increasing storage, privacy and room division — creating a walk-in closet, an entertainment center, home office and additional storage to any residential unit.

Born out of the MIT Media Lab, Ori’s sophisticated smart space technology enhances functionality and comfort through space optimization, increasing organization potential and space utility. Architects and designers now have a viable system that can be integrated earlier in the design process, reducing construction time while maximizing storage potential and square footage.

Image via Architizer 

Because penicillin is so good against various bacterial infections, it is often used as the first line of defense against such infections. However, not all people can benefit from penicillin, as they are allergic to it.

Around 10 percent of people say they’ve had an allergic reaction to penicillin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The question is, why is this the case? It seems the answer can be found in the genes of these people.

… researchers have found a genetic link to the hypersensitivity, which, while rarely fatal, can cause hives, wheezing, arrythmias and more.  

People who report penicillin allergies can have a genetic variation on an immune system gene that helps the body distinguish between our own cells and harmful bacteria and viruses. That hot spot is on the major histocompatibility complex gene HLA-B, said Kristi Krebs, a pharmacogenomics researcher for the Estonian Genome Center at the University of Tartu. She presented the finding October 26 at the American Society of Human Genetics 2020 virtual meeting. The research was also published online October 1 in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

However, while we might have identified a gene linked to penicillin allergy, Krebs states that it’s too soon to say that additional studies will “lead to better understanding of penicillin allergy and also better prediction.”

More details about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Cacycle/ Wikimedia Commons)

Under is a Michelin-starred restaurant located in Lindesnes, Norway. The restaurant is partially submerged five and a half meters below sea level in the North Sea. Dining inside makes you feel like you’re in a submarine, watching sea creatures swim along. Monte Cristo Magazine describes the restaurant as a grey whale in mid-dive, describing how the structure liquefies into the space between land and water. They relay how this one-of-a-kind restaurant tries to survive during the pandemic:  

All is quiet, the lapping of waves hushed above. Ellitsgaard sits in the dining hall in chef’s whites and linen apron, his left arm outstretched and crawling with tattoos. He is framed by the 27-square-metre window that opens onto the wonders of the sea: sugar kelp forests, silvered pollack, and a lumpfish Ellitsgaard and his team affectionately call Ernie.

Forced to remain at home, the head chef grew restless after the first week. “I was building a garden, a project that would have taken me two years to finish but now I could do it in a week, and painting some stuff in the house. Then I didn’t know what else to do.” Like many businesses in Norway, the restaurant was buoyed up by a robust government support scheme. Staff stayed in the village and spent some days on Under’s fishing boat, Knipseren, watching fishermen pull up stone crab and langoustine. Ellitsgaard dove for sea urchin, the restaurant manager foraged for sorrel leaves. The restaurant itself was transformed into a sub-sea stage for livestreamed concerts, including a music video collaboration between composer Hans Zimmer and Norwegian DJ Alan Walker.

Ellitsgaard started visiting the restaurant, too, in the same way one sits beside a loved one in the hospital. The undercurrent of uncertainty loomed—but it felt good to be back. With his sous-chef on the other line, they tested and tasted and sketched out menus, as if Under itself were daring them to push harder.

Image via MonteCristo Magazine 

Now this is just adorable. It’s nice to see how much love and attachment kids have with their furry companions. The little boy who can be seen sneaking out of bed to cuddle with his dog was usually found asleep next to his dog by his parents. They were curious to see how the little boy sneaked out to cuddle, so they set up a camera to record the whole ordeal. This is just adorable, really! Let the dog sleep next to him on his bed, please! 

Image screenshot via LAD Bible