Between you and me, I wouldn’t  shell out a whopping $6.5 million for a photo. Then again, I’m also not rich enough to pay that amount of money for a single photo. Photographer Peter Lik’s photo, called “Phantom,” holds the record for the most expensive photo sold. The Phoblographer details on the very expensive purchase: 

“The purchase also included Lik’s masterworks “Illusion” for $2.4 million and “Eternal Moods” for $1.1 million.  With this $10 million sale, Lik now holds four of the top 20 spots for most expensive photographs ever sold.  He already has a position in the ranking with a previous $1 million sale of famed image, “One.”

$10,000,000. So why so much money? Peter is well known for his landscape photography and his color work. To see landscape and black and white together is very rare. Combine that with the very ghost-like look due to dust and the little sliver and light, and you’ve got yourself a winner. Technically, this is a very tough image to accomplish because of the high amounts of contrast. According to Lik’s news post today, it was shot in the Southwest part of the United States.

Image via The Phoblographer 

Multiple hikers and travelers have encountered a nameless hiker, who only introduced himself as a ‘mostly harmless’ hiker before he was found dead in a tent. Investigators tried to identify the unknown man, but his fingerprints didn’t show up in any law enforcement database, and his DNA did not match any entry in the national DNA databases. His cause of death was ‘undetermined’, just like how no one knows his identity. The mystery behind his death and his identity has alluded investigators for years, and even the Internet tried their best in trying to solve the mystery of the hiker: 

The investigators were stumped. To find out what had happened, they needed to learn who he was. So the Florida Department of Law Enforcement drew up an image of Mostly Harmless, and the Collier County investigators shared it with the public. In the sketch, his mouth is open wide, and his eyes too. He has a gray and black beard, with a bare patch of skin right below the mouth. His teeth, as noted in the autopsy, are perfect, suggesting he had good dental care as a child. He looks startled but also oddly pleased, as if he’s just seen a clown jump out from behind a curtain. The image started to circulate online along with other pictures from his campsite, including his tent and his hiking poles.

Soon there were dozens of people jumping in. They had seen the hiker too. They had journeyed with him for a few hours or a few days. They had sat at a campfire with him. There was a GoPro video in which he appeared. People remembered him talking about a sister in either Sarasota or Saratoga. They thought he had said he was from near Baton Rouge. One person remembered that he ate a lot of sticky buns; another said that he loved ketchup. But no one knew his name. When the body of Chris McCandless was found in the wilds of Alaska in the summer of 1992 without any identification, it took authorities only two weeks to figure out his identity. A friend in South Dakota, who’d known McCandless as “Alex,” heard a discussion of the story on AM radio and called the authorities. Clues followed quickly, and McCandless’ family was soon found.

The story pulled people in. Everyone, at some point, has wanted to put their phone in a garbage can and head off with a fake name and a wad of cash. Here was someone who had done it and who seemed to have so much going for him: He was kind, charming, educated. He knew how to code. And yet he had died alone in a yellow tent. Maybe he had been chased by demons and had sought an ending like this. Or maybe he had just been outmatched by the wilderness and the Florida heat.

Image via Wired 

The hominins who became Neanderthals ventured out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans followed, and settled in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. When Homo sapiens joined them, it's a stretch to think that Neanderthals welcomed them with open arms. Rather than just co-existing, even at arm's length, Nicholas R. Longrich of the University of Bath contends that they were more likely to have been at war for tens of thousands of years. He looks at the general nature of similar species and at the evidence left behind.  

Prehistoric warfare leaves tell-tale signs. A club to the head is an efficient way to kill – clubs are fast, powerful, precise weapons – so prehistoric Homo sapiens frequently show trauma to the skull. So too do Neanderthals.

Another sign of warfare is the parry fracture, a break to the lower arm caused by warding off blows. Neanderthals also show a lot of broken arms. At least one Neanderthal, from Shanidar Cave in Iraq, was impaled by a spear to the chest. Trauma was especially common in young Neanderthal males, as were deaths. Some injuries could have been sustained in hunting, but the patterns match those predicted for a people engaged in intertribal warfare – small-scale but intense, prolonged conflict, wars dominated by guerrilla-style raids and ambushes, with rarer battles.

It is apparent that Homo sapiens eventually won the war, although Homo neanderthalis left traces in our DNA. Read the argument for the long-running battle between early humans at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Charles R. Knight)

Jennifer George loves to watch the wildlife in her Southern California backyard, and there's nothing to draw a variety of critters like a nice drink of clean water. She set up a fountain and a camera in order to catch what goes on when she's not watching. Everyone came- predator and prey, birds, reptiles, and mammals!  You can see many more fountain clips at George's Instagram page, including a bobcat that only comes at night. -via Digg

For years, entrepreneur Terence Jackson, Jr. of Southfield, Michigan pursued his dream: to build a mobile bowling alley to entertain people at parties and corporate events. Despite the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, he was able to launch his project this summer. He says that Luxury Strike Bowling is the only trailer of its kind in the world: a completely mobile 2-lane bowling alley.

Children learn to communicate at an astonishing rate when they are young and interacting with family members. They become fluent quickly, even if they are exposed to several different languages. But does that innate drive to communicate depend completely on exposure? That's a question that has always puzzled us, although it was approached differently in the past. The ingrained idea in ancient times was that humans have a "natural" language, and proposed experiments aimed at finding out which language that is, which would obviously indicate that language's superiority.  

The earliest such account comes from Herodotus, who described a supposed experiment by Psamtik I (who ruled Egypt from 664-610 BCE). Psamtik is said to have placed two newborns in the care of a shepherd with instructions to raise the children in isolation, with goats to provide milk as needed and no exposure to human speech. The goal was to determine whether the Egyptians or the Phrygians were the “eldest of all men” by observing whether these isolated children grew to speak the Egyptian or Phrygian language. According to legend, when the children were brought before Psamtik, they held out their hands and cried “becos”, the Phrygian word for bread. This was taken as evidence that the Phyrgians, rather than the Egyptians, were the oldest people. It is unlikely that these events unfolded exactly as described by Herodotus, but it does show that our fascination with the origins of language dates back thousands of years.

Such experiments are quite unethical, as confirmed by cases of children who were discovered to have been raised in abusive isolation situations. These children have profound language difficulties, but due to neglect, they have a host of other problems as well. However, there was a case in Nicaragua where children were cared for but raised in language-deficient circumstances, and they managed to build their own language. Read about that astonishing scenario and more at Today I Found Out.

(Unrelated image credit: Yılmaz Kilim)

The body of a dragonfly is shaped something like a helicopter. And it does hover in midair. So, yes: dragonflies grow into full-size helicopters. It makes perfect sense. The largest helicopters grow into Mi-26 heavy lift choppers.

-via Born in Space

President Woodrow Wilson went to France for the Paris Peace Conference, in which the Allies set up the terms for the end of World War I. He was the first US president to visit Europe while in office, which seems strange today for a couple of reasons: first, all modern American presidents visit Europe while in office, and second, Europe currently doesn't allow Americans to visit at all because there's a pandemic. There was also a pandemic in 1919, and soon after the conference began, Wilson fell ill with the flu.    

Behind closed doors at the Hôtel du Prince Murat, the situation was grave. The president lay in bed, wracked with coughing fits, diarrhea, and high fever, while his staff tried to make sense of his delirious rantings. As chief usher Irwin Hoover recalled, they simply couldn’t convince Wilson that the hotel was not, as he insisted, teeming with French spies.

“About this time he also acquired a peculiar notion he was personally responsible for all the property in the furnished place he was occupying,” Hoover said. (Apparently, Smithsonian reports, Wilson thought some furniture had gone missing, though it hadn’t moved at all.) “Coming from the President, whom we all knew so well, these were very funny things, and we could but surmise that something queer was happening in his mind.”

The president's true condition was kept secret from the public. Wilson eventually rejoined the Peace Conference, but his ineffectiveness there had lasting consequences for the rest of the 20th century. Was is because of his illness? Read about President Woodrow Wilson's personal experience with the flu pandemic at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Library of Congress)

Who knew there are specific cat breeds that are more ‘loyal’ to their owners compared to other breeds? We always think that dogs are the loyal bunch, and cats are most likely to just walk away from their owners when they think it’s inconvenient for them. But that’s not true. A pet’s loyalty can be shown through different actions, and different cats show their loyalty in different ways: 

With that in mind, there are two standouts. First, we have the Manx, which Purina says will follow you around, swim, enjoy car rides and act as a guard-cat for you and your family. The fabled Maine Coon Cat, which will grow to a dog-sized 20-ish pounds, acts similarly, but as a bonus, will also welcome other family pets into their circle. In that sense, it may take the cake.

The Manx and Maine Coon are likely to be your best bets for loyalty, but no matter the breed, there's no guarantee of any quality in any purebred animal. So give serious consideration to a rescue cat. Because loyalty goes both ways.

Image via Grunge

In this low-resolution remake of Pinocchio, a pair of kayakers off Avila Beach, California were almost swallowed by a humpback whale. The whale was feeding on fish and krill when it breached the surface of the water, taking two women, Julie McSorley and Liz Cottriel, with it. KSBY News reports that they were underwater for a few seconds before their kayak righted itself and the whale moved on.

Content warning: NSFW language.

-via Dave Barry

Spooky season might be over, but that doesn’t mean we can no longer engage in spooky activities! There’s no harm in playing a thriller or a horror game or two. Unless you easily get spooked, and the blazing eyes of the moving animatronics in Five Nights At Freddy’s keeps  you awake at night, then, maybe not all horror games. Maybe some games inspired by fictional creatures are right up your alley. If you’re looking for a good discussion of different horror games, if you’re looking for a new game to play, or if you’re just interested about spooky games in general, check out IGN’s Game Spook podcast here. 

Image via IGN

If my parents made me such a cool playhouse as a child - wait, scratch that. If someone builds me such an epic game-inspired playhouse or a small hut for my own shenanigans, I’ll probably admire them for the rest of time. Watch Once Upon A Workbench as he builds a playhouse inspired from the 2017 Nintendo Switch game Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The playhouse looks exactly like the house you can buy in Hateno Village! 

How does the brain work? Nobody knows for sure. But we know that through the signals that our brain sends and receives, we can move, speak, and do many tasks within the day.

Sophisticated imaging technologies like functional magnetic resonance can give you some clues. But it’d be great to have something more direct. For decades, technologists have been trying to get brains to interface with computer keyboards or robot arms, to get meat to commune with silicon.

A team of scientists on Wednesday have revealed promising results on a new approach to the brain-computer interface.

It involves mounting electrodes on an expandable, springy tube called a stent and threading it through a blood vessel that leads to the brain… In an article published in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery, the Australian and US researchers describe how two people with paralysis due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) used such a device to send texts and fool around online by brain-control alone.

Now that’s phenomenal work.

Learn more details about this method over at Ars Technica.

(Image Credit: sbtlneet/ Pixabay)

It is a common experience to be matched up with or against a toxic player in an online game. Of course, we don’t like it when it happens. But we’re not quitters, and so we just bear with it until the match ends, and we hope that there will be no toxic players in the next game. But what if that can be a reality? Where all the non-toxic players can enjoy the game, while the toxic ones get to play with each other? It seems that these will soon come true if this new patent from Amazon pushes through.

Instead of just giving them the boot, Business Insider reports that the system would instead give the most toxic gamers a taste of their own medicine by putting them all in the same matches with each other. Then, all the people who would otherwise ruin your game end up harassing and trolling each other instead.

[...]

But this new patent would track gamers throughout all of their matches, minding the names they call teammates and opponents as well as other metrics for their behavior. Similar idea, but more ambitious in terms of how people get sorted. It’s sort of like a gaming version of the algorithms already used and abused by real-world law enforcement, but with vastly lower stakes — and no one is actually prevented from playing the game as a result.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Olichel/ Pixabay)

We've reached the point where Christmas season begins as soon as Halloween is over. There are three houses on my drive home with holiday lights up already. In fact, I spent Halloween evening watching a Hallmark Christmas movie (and now I feel as if I have seen them all). If you want some help getting into the Christmas spirit, you could pull up a movie from Christmases past, using a handy list from Esquire. It's a very arguable list; some of them are just horrible, others appear to be ranked by how much "Christmas" is included in the film. However, you probably will agree that the top fifteen or so deserve to be there. Otherwise, you might find a movie you've never seen and be intrigued enough to try it out- quite a few have trailers posted. Check them all out here.  -via Digg