Seventy-five years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States unleashed a terrifying new weapon as the new atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, followed by another in Nagasaki three days later. An estimated 200,000 people were killed, and others who survived the bombings dealth with the effects for years afterward -some for the rest of their lives. Many suffered in silence, as they were victims of discrimination in postwar Japan, only opening up about their experiences recently, in their old age, for projects like the 1945 Project and The Last Survivors of Hiroshima. Taeko Teramae is one such hibakusha.

Hiroshima survivor Taeko Teramae didn’t realize the full extent of her injuries until her younger brothers started making fun of her appearance. Confused, the 15-year-old asked her parents for a mirror—a request they denied, leading her to surreptitiously track one down on a day they’d left the house.

“I was so surprised I found my left eye looked just like a pomegranate, and I also found cuts on my right eye and on my nose and on my lower jaw,” she recalled. “It was horrible. I was very shocked to find myself looking like a monster.”

Nine people who agreed to be a part of these projects tell their stories of surviving Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's bombings at Smithsonian. Warning: these accounts are disturbing and sometimes graphic.

We really can’t get out of our homes right now, but who can stop us from daydreaming or planning our future trips? If you’re looking for more places to put on your itinerary list, this Star Bed in Zimbabwe might catch your interest! Wilderness Safaris’s Star Bed overlooks a productive area for wildlife activity, as Travel and Leisure detailed: 

“Linkwasha’s new Star Bed is positioned right in the middle of the action where the animals come to drink at Scott’s Pan and is a wonderful addition to our Hwange offering,” Wilderness Safaris Zimbabwe Managing Director, Ron Goatley, shared in a statement. “In the dry season, the magical elephant experience will be taking place all night long, in front of and all around the Star Bed — offering a life-changing experience for our guests who want an authentic wildlife adventure.”

The star bed sits out on a wooden platform, covered in a protective mosquito net, and not much else. But, its minimal design is ideal, as the true star of the show is the epic view. 

image via Travel and Leisure

This latest private airline suite concept will be a dream come true for germaphobes, or for people who would like a very clean suite.The concept called ‘Pure Skies’ was created by UK design consultancy PriestmanGoode. The company improved hygiene and personal space by harnessing UVC light and heat cleaning, as Dmarge detailed: 

“We’ve introduced UVC light and heat cleaning, in combination with photochromic and thermochromic inks in the materials and finishes,” the company wrote. “As the heat from cleaning reacts with the inks, a message of reassurance appears on seats, helping alleviate passenger anxiety about hygiene during boarding.”

“The pandemic will have a lasting impact on passenger expectations. Pure Skies is a complete review of both Economy and Business Class cabins.”

“Our vision takes into account development times, airline requirements for revenue streams, increased passenger concerns around hygiene and personal space and green recovery incentives,” PriestmanGoode added.

image via Dmarge

There are more than 1,400 different species of bats known to science, but most of us just know fruit bats with their dog-shaped faces and insect-eating bats with relatively flattened faces. Nature is full of very different-looking bats, some adorable and others the stuff of nightmares. The picture above is of a white-throated round-eared bat. While these species have their taxonomic Latin names, their common names tend to describe them well. See 30 species of odd-looking bats at Bored Panda, with names like the hammer-headed bat, the yellow-winged bat, the little white-shouldered bat, the big-eared woolly bat, the desert long-eared bat, the eastern tube-nosed bat, and the wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bat.

(Image credit: Desmodus)

This one isn’t just some art illusion drawn in the ground. The Abyss is a deep crack that appears to go down to the centre of the earth. If you wanna reach this place, you need your hiking shoes because you’ll take a 4.5-kilometre hike along the Extension Ridge in Nanaimo, Canada. Narcity has more details: 

The photos of this fissure don't do it justice for how impressive it is. Just make sure not to get too close. There are no barriers around here, so you do have to be careful.

The long crack in the ground is roughly 16 inches wide. It is wide enough for a pet or person to fall into.

The cause of the long split is still a mystery. Some of the theories suggest the area is the result of a collapsed old mine tunnel or an earthquake.

The unusual sight is 30 minutes from downtown Nanaimo. You'll need to drive along Harwood Mine Road. 

image via Narcity

Broadway houses some of Manhattan’s most celebrated structures like the Custom House, the Woolworth Building, City Hall, and the Flatiron. But the famous avenue is also home to other buildings that deserve a closer inspection! Check out William J. Hennessey’s list of Broadway’s hidden gems. The next time you’re on Broadway, you should also look for these structures. 

image via The Daily Beast

Usually found thriving inside Warp Pipes, the Piranha Plants wait for the perfect opportunity to chomp down the heroes of the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario and Luigi. But this Piranha Plant is different from all of its kind. It doesn’t bite, and it’s friendly towards people.

Paladone’s Piranha Plant lamp comes with its mouth wide open, and looks intimidating as it pokes its head out of a drain pipe. Its green stalk is poseable, so you can bend it to your whim, and aim its light where you want it. Rather than living organic matter, this Piranha Plant is made from plastic, and it’s teeth aren’t sharp enough to break skin. The plant can go anywhere too, since it runs on battery or USB power.

(Image Credit: Technabob)

Found in the border between Peru and Bolivia in the Andes Mountains is one of the largest lakes in South America: Lake Titicaca. For the Inca and the Tiwanaku (the people that lived there before the Inca), the lake, which is home to still and reflective waters, is a sacred lake. Currently, the lake is filled with “sunken sacrifices from centuries ago.”

After years of searching, archaeologists have now retrieved the first underwater offering not yet damaged or looted by opportunists: a box of volcanic rock, submerged around 500 years ago. 

Upon opening this tightly-sealed sacrifice in front of local Indigenous leaders, the research team discovered an ancient llama, carved from the shell of a spiny mollusc called a spondylus from Ecuador, and a furled sheet of gold, thought to be part of a bracelet.

If historical accounts from the invading Spanish are right, the box may have once even held the blood of children or animals, although no human remains have been found in the lake to date.

Scientists believe that boxes such as this one are lowered on the lake as some sort of sacrifice to the gods.

More details about this one over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Teddy Seguin/Université libre de Bruxelles/ ScienceAlert)

Jesse Dunietz was surprised as he attended the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics. For decades, natural-language processing (NLP), the AI branch that specializes in creating systems that analyze the human language, has been measuring the ability of these systems through benchmark data sets.

Much of today’s reading comprehension research entails carefully tweaking models to eke out a few more percentage points on the latest data sets. “State of the art” has practically become a proper noun: “We beat SOTA on SQuAD by 2.4 points!”

But during this year’s meeting, Dunietz felt something different.

Attendees’ conversations were unusually introspective about the core methods and objectives of natural-language processing (NLP), the branch of AI focused on creating systems that analyze or generate human language. Papers in this year’s new “Theme” track asked questions like: Are current methods really enough to achieve the field’s ultimate goals? What even are those goals?

For Dunietz and his colleagues, the field needs a “ transformation, not just in system design, but in a less glamorous area: evaluation.”

More details about this over at Technology Review.

(Image Credit: insspirito/ Pixabay)

We all have regrets in our lives. It might be regret in choosing the wrong degree program at our university, regret in making a financial decision that resulted in a huge loss, or regret in a relationship that should have been ended way earlier before things got worse. Regrets come with a lot of “what if” questions and “I should have done this” statements, as well as pain that could either cause us to grow and move forward, or to shrink and stay stuck. Of course, all of us want to grow, but how do we do it properly?

Psychology professor Shawn M. Burn gives us advice on how to deal with our regrets. See her tips over at Psychology Today.

(Image Credit: sir5life0/ Pixabay)

For decades, humans have been using light-emitting devices such as flashlights in order to hunt for prey. Apparently, sudden light causes confusion to animals and makes them freeze. In the past, however, flashlights with incandescent bulbs quickly run out of power, which makes it a costly tool for the hunter. It also makes hunting more difficult. But with the current LED technology, which can emit the same light with less power, hunters have found it easier to hunt. There is a downside, however.

Cheap, powerful flashlights are allowing hunters in tropical jungles around the world to more easily kill nocturnal animals, including endangered species such as pangolins, according to a new study. Scientists warn the new technology threatens to further damage ecosystems already strained by overhunting.

But for forest ecologist Robert Nasi, the problem is not the LED flashlights; it is how people use them.

For example, Gabonese hunters working at night in the vast forests of the Congo reported killing threatened species, including the giant pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) and various small antelopes known as duikers. LEDs could fuel intensive hunting of the sort that can take a toll on jungle ecosystems, Nasi says. But for people hunting to feed themselves, the lights could save time, freeing them up to do other things like fish or tend crops.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Memed_Nurrohmad/ Pixabay)

In 1992, Pepsi-Cola was in a war with Coca-Cola over the Philippine soda market, and Pepsi was losing badly. So they launched a sweepstakes in which people would collect bottle caps with numbers. The winning number would be worth varying amounts of money, up to a million pesos (worth $68,000 today). Number Fever, as it was called, boosted Pepsi sales as people collected bottle caps with numbers. The winning number was announced on May 25. Marily So tells how her husband located a bottle cap with the winning number, 349, and saw that it was worth a million pesos. There was rejoicing, but the couple did not know that Pepsi had printed 600,000 bottle caps with number 349 on them.

Similar scenes were playing out across the country. A bus driver had three 1 million-peso 349s. A mother of 12 whose children went through 10 bottles of Pepsi a day had won 35 million pesos. Winners raced to the iron gates of Pepsi’s bottling factory in Quezon City, just northeast of Manila, to claim their prizes. As the crowd grew, a secretary dialed the marketing director, Rosemarie Vera. “There seems to be many 349 crowns in circulation among people I know,” the secretary said, according to an account in the Philippine Daily Enquirer. At 10 p.m., someone from the company telephoned the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry and said a mistake had been made.

Within a year, a violent consumer uprising would be under way, with riots and grenade attacks leaving dozens injured and five dead.

Read the full story of the soda pop promotion that went oh-so-wrong at Bloomberg Businessweek.  -via Damn Interesting

Fox Benwell has a postal cat! His cat Linnet waits by the door for the mail to be delivered. Watch as she enthusiastically receives a package, checks to see if anyone is watching, and then steals upstairs to put it in her stash. See more of Linnet at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort

It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of other planets where humans could live was considered a fantasy. Now we have lots of data coming in from exoplanets, those outside our solar system, and they come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors. Could they support life? The common theory is that only planets in which water would be in liquid form are suitable for us to live in, and these fall into the "habitable zone." Our solar system has three such planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Since we can't live on Mars and Venus as they are, you can see that habitability actually depends on many factors.    

The idea of a habitable zone is a bit squishy, because having liquid water depends on a laundry list of other things, including the existence of an atmosphere, what’s in it, and more. But it’s a useful concept as long as you don’t look at it too closely†.

So technically, three planets orbit the Sun in its habitable zone. But how many could you fit in there?

At some number you’d hit a limit. The finite region of space means planets would get too close together. They’d interact gravitationally, and celestial hijinks would ensue: They’d create chaos, and some planet or planets would have their orbit messed up, dropping them into the Sun or ejecting them from the system entirely.

Scientists have crunched the numbers to find out how many planets could be in a system's habitable zone. It depends on the size and heat of the star, and a few other factors. But the answer will have you imagining a system where people could send mail to their relatives on the next planet over. Read how it might work at Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt/IPAC)

If you want to get really away from it all, keep the rest of the world at bay, and have plenty of space to spread out, you might be interested in a property for sale near Fairdale, North Dakota. The brutalist architecture envelopes an interior steampunk aesthetic. 

Unique opportunity to own a bit of Cold War history!  Located in Fairdale ND, this Walsh County Sprint Missile site offers a nostalgic Cold War experience.  Site needs some repair, but could provide that extra privacy, security and protection when needed.  The site is surrounded by dual fences and sits on 3 parcels totaling 49.48 acres. There is a cement entry building, a command bunker, and 14 sprint launch tubes.  Current owner utilizes portable power and water tanks. Power is available nearby and a well could be drilled for water requirements.  Property will be offered as one total unit.

From the outside, the facility looks like a 20th-century Stonehenge. Before you purchase, you should read some of its history at Atlas Obscura. Then see lots of pictures at the auction listing. The missile silos will be auctioned off on August 11.

(Image credit: Pifer's)