Trying to imagine the online form that lets students choose how they'd like to get updates on food deliveries pic.twitter.com/spOl3HWKlC

— Nich🎃las Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) October 30, 2020

The University of Cambridge dates back to 1209 and has thus experienced the travails of pandemics of the past 800 years, including the Black Death. One of the hygienic practices dating back to that time includes ringing a bell to clear space between the infected and the uninfected. This type of hand bell is called a plague bell.

Cambridge students who are self-isolating can select to have their food deliveries announced by plague bell. One difference between now and centuries ago: they make this selection by filling out an online form.

-via Marginal Revolution

Counting and keeping an eye on a certain group is a daunting task. It requires steady focus and attention. I can’t seem to imagine how difficult it would be if I was tasked to monitor 300,000 penguins. Thankfully, we have machines that could make our jobs easier and faster.

How do you keep a close and regular eye on 300,000 nesting pairs of Adélie penguins spread over two square kilometres of ice? Send in the drones, of course.

But not without a plan. It helps to have an algorithm that can partition the space, assign destination points to each drone and figure out how to move them through those points in the most efficient way, limiting backtracking and redundant travel.

Get that right, and you can do detailed visual surveys in a couple of hours rather than a couple of days. Researchers at Stanford University, US, developed just such a system and put it through its paces at Cape Crozier, near McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

Know more about this story over at Cosmos Magazine.

(Image Credit: Kunal Shah/ Cosmos)

It’s not a surprise that there are now more people who regularly use video conferencing apps to meet virtually with their friends and co-workers. But how much was the increase, really? Well, it is big enough to make people who invest in companies, which provide video conferencing services, happy.

Microsoft saw some big growth in Microsoft Teams at the beginning of the pandemic, and it has kept accelerating over the past six months. During an earnings call with investors today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reveled Microsoft Teams now has 115 million daily active users. That’s a more than 50 percent rise from the 75 million that Microsoft reported almost six months ago.

It’s difficult to compare Microsoft’s numbers to its rivals, though. Both Zoom and Google report daily active participants, which means a single user could be counted multiple times through different meetings during a day. Google revealed it has 100 million daily active participants earlier this year, and Zoom said it had 300 million daily active participants. Slack also saw some growth earlier this year.

Now that’s big money.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Alexandra_Koch/ Pixabay)

Bad habits can be hard to break. Just like good habits, you do them unconsciously, and that’s the reason why it would be difficult to break and change them. But it doesn’t mean that it would be impossible. But of course, you have to do it the right way.

Diane Dreher provides us five tips based on neuroscience research that will help us break bad habits successfully. Here is the first one:

Build Awareness and Take Control. Habits are unconscious. The first step in breaking a bad habit is bringing it into conscious awareness. We can do this by consciously keeping score. My friend Bob had smoked cigarettes for 20 years. When he wanted to break this habit, he took out an index card, wrote down the date, and made a checkmark for each cigarette he smoked that day. Just by becoming aware, he decreased the number of cigarettes he smoked per day. In one month, he went down from two packs a day to one. Then he took charge, cutting down from smoking 20 cigarettes a day one week, to 19 a day the next, progressively smoking less and less until he finally quit completely.

Check out the other tips over at Psychology Today.

What bad habits were you able to break in the past?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Using his left hand as accompaniment, and the AK-47 that he’s holding with his right hand, Vinheteiro plays the Soviet Anthem, because why not? And since he’s holding a gun, and with his finger on the trigger, I’m pretty sure that no one will be stopping him from doing so.

The music still sounds good, though.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Vinheteiro/ YouTube)

You don't have to worry about your pharmaceutical reaction so as long as inanimate objects are waiting to affirm your life choices, as seen in Ryan Hudson's Channelate. And let us be glad that Kyle chose to have a normal throw pillow instead of an anime hug pillow as his companion (I'll let you Google that on your own).

Inverness Caledonian Thistle don’t employ a cameraman as their camera is programmed to follow the ball throughout the match. The commentator had to apologise today as the camera kept on mistaking the ball for the linesman’s head... pic.twitter.com/LeKsc2bEj7

— Tom Cox (@seagull81) October 24, 2020

The Scottish football team Inverness Caledonian Thistle decided to forego paying a cameraman and employed a robotic artificial intelligence algorithm to operate the camera for games. This is an important job, as spectators are banned from attending games due to the pandemic.  

The club announced a few weeks ago it was moving from using human camera operators to cameras controlled by AI. The club proudly announced at the time the new "Pixellot system uses cameras with in-built, AI, ball-tracking technology" and would be used to capture HD footage of all home matches at Caledonian Stadium, which would be broadcast directly to season-ticket holders' homes.

Cut to last Saturday, when the robot cameras were given a new challenge that hadn't been foreseen: A linesman with a bald head.

The robotic camera operator couldn't help but focus on the referee's head, which is stunningly round and white, instead of the ball in play. While this kept the action on the sidelines for viewers, there were plenty of jokes about how this improved the broadcast, "given the usual quality of performance." You can see a highlight video of the game at IFLScience. -via Metafilter

Back in the day, Halloween was taken seriously. Back then, this was believed to be the day when the world of the gods became visible to us, and this resulted in “supernatural mischief.” Some people would offer treats and foods to these gods, while others wore animal skins and heads to disguise themselves as wandering spirits. In doing so, they won’t be disturbed by these spirits. And that is why Halloween back then was really scary.

Know more about the history of Halloween over at CNN.

(Image Credit: Toby Ord/ Wikimedia Commons)

Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously) constructed five different Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to make a sandwich. That in itself is not so surprising, but the mechanisms he uses along the way are astonishing. How did he know precisely how that hand mixer would act? Surely he isn't going to eat jelly out of a toy truck! He doesn't, but how its used is genius. Be sure to stay for the credits, because they get a little messy. -via Digg

I’d say this offer is a steal even in a non-pandemic timeline, but if you have the opportunity, maybe this offer will be of interest to you! Travel company Booking.com is offering $50 weekend-long stays — to represent the unity of the 50 states — at 10 select hotels in culturally rich neighborhoods as part of its America Is for Everyone campaign. Clients who take advantage of  the promo will be able to experience the destinations with a “custom-designed and safety-first itinerary” in order to “enjoy authentic meals, historical tours, and more unforgettable experiences,” as Travel and Leisure details: 

The destinations include hotels in the Vietnamese neighborhood of Factors Row in New Orleans; Little Ethiopia in Silver Spring, Maryland; Greektown in Tarpon Spring, Florida; Germantown in Frankenmuth, Michigan; the Dutch area of Oak Harbor, Washington; Little Haiti in Miami; Little India in Jersey City, New Jersey; the Mexican Cultural District in Denver; the Japanese area of Honolulu; and the Danish Village in Solvang, California.

“In these challenging times, it’s important to remember that it’s the diverse backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives representing so much of the world that have made this country what it is today,” Booking.com’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Arjan Dijk, said in a statement. “We hope the ‘America Is For Everyone’ experiences help quench Americans' collective curiosity and inspire travelers to seek out new experiences they may not have realized existed so close to home.”

Image via Travel and Leisure 

Samir Mazahem thought that he was saving numbers on the lottery app. What he had done, however, was very different from what he thought he was doing. Apparently, he had just bought an extra ticket with the same numbers that he had picked for the previous ticket that he bought. When he realized that he spent an extra $2 for the June 9 Mega Millions Game, he got upset. But he didn’t think much about it.

But his mistake turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

As he logged on recently, he found out that he had two $1 million winners.

“I couldn’t believe it was real,” Mazahem said. “It took several days for the reality to set in that my mistake had paid off to the tune of $2 million!”

He recently claimed his prize and plans to buy a new house and save the rest.

Lucky guy.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Limited money. No friends. No associates. No job. But, this guy still managed to put out an incredible music video with some great acting skills included.

Click here for his incredible video. Make sure to like and follow.

In this sea of carved pumpkins, there is one that is slightly different from the others. Unlike its peers, this one doesn’t have a nose. Can you find where it is?

This puzzle was made by Hungarian artist Gergely Dudás, who is also known online as Dudolf.

If you found it, congratulations. And for those of you still craving more, we also have this other visual puzzle from Dudás featuring a lone ghost hiding within an army of skeletons.

Via Mental Floss

(Image Credit: Dudolf/ Mental Floss)

Longtime Neatorama readers know that Josh Sundquist comes up with amazing Halloween costumes every year that utilize the fact that he has only one leg. He's also an athlete, so he can do some pretty amazing things with his ideas. This year, he is Baby Groot! If you've been keeping up over the years, you can skip ahead to 2:40 to see him walking around as Baby Groot, and how the costume was made. -via reddit

It was an early June evening, and two scientists, physicist Raphael Sarfati and computer scientist Orit Peleg, can be found deep in the forest trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, bringing with them gear that is vital to photographing their subject, like butterfly nets, and GoPro cameras. Their subject: fireflies who turn on and off their lights in sync with each other.

Unlike many firefly species that flash in individualized patterns for months every summer, these special fireflies display in a specific, collective pattern that the scientists wanted to track.

With their tent and cameras set up and dusk descending, the sporadic blinking of individual fireflies harmonized into synchronous flashing. “They are everywhere around you. You can’t even count how many there are, all flashing at the same time for a few seconds and then they all stop at the same time as well. It’s dark and then it picks it up again,” Sarfati says. “It’s really astonishing.”

But why fireflies? Their study, it turns out, would be helpful in improving robot communication and synchronization in the near future.

Learn more details about this study over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: Radim Schreiber/ Wikimedia Commons)