Researchers from Duke University have developed an AI tool that can create realistic images from blurry images, which is kinda cool but creepy at the same time.

Previous methods can scale an image of a face up to eight times its original resolution. But the Duke team has come up with a way to take a handful of pixels and create realistic-looking faces with up to 64 times the resolution, 'imagining' features such as fine lines, eyelashes and stubble that weren't there in the first place.

While this may not be used to identify people, the researchers say that this method, called PULSE, could be used to create realistic faces that don’t exist in real life.

The system can convert a 16x16-pixel image of a face to 1024 x 1024 pixels in a few seconds, adding more than a million pixels, akin to HD resolution. Details such as pores, wrinkles, and wisps of hair that are imperceptible in the low-res photos become crisp and clear in the computer-generated versions.

We’ve really come far in artificial intelligence.

More details about this one over at TechXplore.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Duke University/ TechXplore)

Animator William J. Crook tries to imitate how a match stick burns, using a twig and some colorful leaves. The result is a fun and surreal stop-motion video. Unfortunately, the fun is short-lived, as the video only lasts 23 seconds.

See the short animated clip over at The Awesomer.

(Image Credit: William Crook/ The Awesomer)

The "internet bench" at Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, UK, was installed in 2001 as a place you can get connected. There was no wifi at the time, so the bench's phone connections could be useful for that, but there were very few laptops, either. You can imagine that it wasn't a big success. But that wasn't really the point. Tom Scott explains.

Stewart Adams spent a large chunk of his life searching for a cure for rheumatoid arthritis. He failed in that endeavor, a regret he never really got over. But he did invent an effective treatment for arthritis, called ibuprofen, which is known in the US by the brand names Motrin and Advil. That ibuprofen is used for a wide variety of pain relief is Adams' greatest achievement.

Adams began his research by studying how aspirin worked, which no one else was doing at the time. He was interested in the drug’s anti-inflammatory properties and hoped to find something that mimicked those qualities but didn’t cause an allergic reaction, bleeding or stomach irritation like aspirin could.

Adams recruited Nicholson, a chemist, to help him test more than 600 different compounds in hopes of finding one that could reduce inflammation and that most people could tolerate. They narrowed down the field to five drugs. The first four went into clinical trials and all failed. The fifth, though, proved to be successful. They received a U.S. patent for ibuprofen in 1966. Three years later, it was approved as a prescription drug in England and soon became available around the world as an over-the-counter pain reliever.

Which brings us to that day in 1971, when Adams had to deliver an important speech at a pharmacological convention in Moscow. The problem was, he had spent the night before toasting ibuprofen's success with vodka. Read the story of Stewart Adams and the development of ibuprofen at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Derrick Coetzee)

The outrageous characters of the Old West are often found to be the product of dime novels and less-than-rigorously researched newspaper articles written to thrill those back east. One such character is "Cattle Kate," born Ellen Watson. Her life was interesting enough without the extras heaped upon her, but those extras found a willing audience.  

“Cattle Kate” Watson was one of early Wyoming’s most scandalous outlaws. She was a prostitute, a cattle thief, and a mean, aggressive Amazon who would beat you up as soon as look at you. She was, in short, a public menace. In 1889, her harassed neighbors finally had had enough, and resorted to classic rough frontier justice. Watson, along with her equally disreputable husband/pimp, were captured and strung up. No one mourned them.

It is a colorful story, one which made Watson one of the Old West’s most famous villains. There is just one problem: not one of the “historical facts” listed above is even close to being true.

Aside, unfortunately, for the lynching part.

What really happened was more of what we now call "shocking but not surprising." We touched on Cattle Kate's life in a previous article, but you can get the full story of the persecution of Ellen Watson at Strange Company.

Ze Frank gives us true facts about cats in a way that makes it clear that cats are weird. You knew that already, but this video goes into detail about cats' carnivorous tastes, amazing eyes, sensitive whiskers, and scratchy tongues. Of course, there are plenty of jokes along the way, as you'd expect from Ze Frank.

Someone took a train in Switzerland last October and deboarded quite a bit lighter. They left behind a package filled with gold bars worth more than $190,000! You'd have to be pretty oblivious to leave that much behind by accident -and then not go back for it it.  

Despite "extensive investigations," the owner of the high-value package had not been tracked down, officials said in a statement published in the local government Lucerne Canton gazette.

After authorities failed to track down the owner of the precious cargo, the gold bars, worth 182,000 Swiss francs ($191,000), were confiscated by the public prosecutors office.
Now, authorities have decided to publicize their quest to find the bounty's mysterious owner.  

While Switzerland is a banking mecca, it's not like this sort of thing happens every day. The owner of the gold bars must be either so rich that the loss was incidental to them, or more likely did not want the bars traced to some nefarious activity. Read more details of this curious lost-and-found at CNN. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Kotivalo)

I’ve seen a caution sign in a mall before telling me that I might get hurt because the floor is wet. I’ve also seen a caution sign on our induction stove, telling me that the ceramic plate is hot after cooking, and so I shouldn’t touch it. But never before have I seen a sign which just tells me to not move. I wonder what would happen if I did, though. Will I get shot with a laser beam?

Only God knows, I think, or someone who understands Chinese characters.

Image via Engrish.com

Insomnia could be considered as one of the toughest disorders a person can have. While it may be considered by some as just a sleep disorder caused by stress and anxiety, it is much more than that. A person suffering insomnia is not only affected physically, but also mentally and emotionally.

If you’re someone who had this, you know how difficult it is to deal with insomnia. But if you are currently struggling with it, then James Parker has a message for you: you’re not alone in this one.

We are all out there, keeping an eye on things: a sodality, a siblinghood, an immense and floating guild of piercingly conscious minds. What might happen, if not for our vigilance? Into what idiocies of optimism and vainglory might humanity collapse? We’re like the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones, except there’s millions of us. Above the city rooftops it shimmers and flexes; it tingles over the leafy suburbs: the neural lattice of our wakefulness.

Parker’s An Ode To Insomnia can be read over at The Atlantic. It’s a good read.

(Image Credit: Cdd20/ Pixabay)

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It really sucks that I can’t go, but if you’re close to Portland this weekend, don’t miss the opening of LAX/PDX at @antlerpdx . This awesome show curated by L.A. gallery @thinkspace_art will feature more than 75 international artists and i’m soooooo stocked to be part of it :) !!!👐🏻💥👐🏻•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• #everythingsucks #decorativeplate #marieclaudemarquis #mcmarquis #lettering #handlettering #typography #kitty #cats #vintage #artoninstagram #artoftheday #antlergallery #thinkspacegallery #laxpdx #station16gallery

A post shared by Marie-Claude Marquis (@marimarki) on Jun 7, 2018 at 5:31am PDT

Because this is a family-friendly blog, I'm choosing images for this post very carefully. But once the kids are out of the room, check out Marie-Claude Marquis's entire portfolio of altered decorative plates.

Who would want to be a web-slinging superhero or an armed man in a village killing zombies and other monsters when he can be a cat trying to escape in a cybercity? That’s right. This game, titled Stray, will offer you a chance to see the world in the eyes of a cat. Now if that’s not an interesting premise, then I don’t know what is.

[The game] is set to hit PS5 and PC sometime in 2021, equipped with jaw-dropping graphics and a fascinating story to unravel.

The official synopsis for the game reads:

Lost, alone, and separated from family, a stray cat must untangle an ancient mystery to escape a long-forgotten city… see the world through the eyes of a stray and interact with the environment in playful ways. Be stealthy, nimble, silly, and sometimes as annoying as possible with the strange inhabitants of this foreign world.

If there was an upcoming game that I’ll have high expectations with, it would be this one.

See the teaser trailer here.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive/ PlayStation/ YouTube)

When Charlotte Morrison decided to strip all the wallpaper layers in one of her house’s rooms, she found something interesting — a decades-old message that was hidden on the wall. It was a wallpapering tip dated December 21, 1997, written by one “Jon”.

She uploaded a photo of the note to Facebook, which reads, “If you ever need to wallpaper this room again, it will take eight rolls of wallpaper. I bought just six rolls at $21.00 per roll. I didn’t have enough (it really pissed me off).”

She told Fox News that it “made the hours spent stripping the wallpaper worth it.”

The post quickly became viral, and it eventually reached Jon’s relatives. The man, however, was not fond of social media.

Morrison hasn’t spoken to Jon directly, she explained. “I have spoken to (Jon’s relative),” she said. “She asked him questions I had asked and he confirmed them, he also told us about features in the house that was here when we moved. She said he hates social media, and I told her social media thinks he is a legend.”

Morrison originally planned to paint the room, but ever since finding the room, she said that she would like to “test Jon’s math.”

Well, if ever Jon’s math was wrong, she could write another note on the wall for the next house owner.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Charlotte Morrison/ Facebook)

Even if you never eat a Kit-Kat bar, you know the song. You'd have to be pretty young to not know it. Now we learn the story behind the ear worm from the man who wrote it. -via Digg

The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the oldest and the most intact of them all. Constructed in the third millennium BC, we marvel at all the labor and time it took to build it. We know it was constructed over a period between ten and twenty years, but the number of people who worked on it has been the subject of intense speculation for, well, forever. Since we don't know, maybe a better question would be how many workers would have been actually required to build such a massive pyramid.

We must start with the time constraint of roughly 20 years, the length of the reign of Khufu, the pharaoh who commissioned the construction (he died around 2530 B.C.E.). Herodotus, writing more than 21 centuries after the pyramid’s completion, was told that labor gangs totaling 100,000 men worked in three-month spells a year to finish the structure in 20 years. In 1974, Kurt Mendelssohn, a German-born British physicist, put the labor force at 70,000 seasonal workers and up to 10,000 permanent masons.

These are large overestimates; we can do better by appealing to simple physics. The potential energy of the pyramid—the energy needed to lift the mass above ground level—is simply the product of acceleration due to gravity, mass, and the center of mass, which in a pyramid is one-quarter of its height. The mass cannot be pinpointed because it depends on the specific densities of the Tura limestone and mortar that were used to build the structure; I am assuming a mean of 2.6 metric tons per cubic meter, hence a total mass of about 6.75 million metric tons. That means the pyramid’s potential energy is about 2.4 trillion joules.

Vaclav Smil crunches the numbers to come up with way fewer required laborers, in a very workable ratio of Egypt's population at the time. However, we all know that no work crew operates with 100% efficiency, because they are human. Read how the pyramids could have been built with smaller numbers than we assumed at IEEE Spectrum. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: L-BBE)

In 1945, an ambulance delivered a very ill man to Boston’s U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. The ambulance driver gave the patient's name as Charles Jamison, but then left. The hospital treated the man for a bone marrow infection, which left him a paraplegic. He also had amnesia, and could give no details about himself, his family, or his background. He has been a mystery ever since, but not because of a lack of investigation.

Jamison was around sixty years old, with graying hair and brown eyes. He was six feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds. There was a two-inch scar on his right cheek, the index finger of his left hand was missing, and both arms were covered with tattoos. His appearance was so distinctive that it was thought it might help identify him, but that failed to be the case.

The tattoos were a mixture of flags and hearts. Some of the flags were American, others British. One faded tattoo had a scroll that seemed to say “U.S. Navy.” This led to the assumption that Jamison had been a sailor in the naval and/or merchant service, a belief bolstered by the fact that he had been brought to the only hospital in Boston that specifically treated seamen. There was a theory that Jamison had been aboard a freighter that had been shelled and torpedoed by a German submarine, but that could never be verified. However, after being sent Jamison’s fingerprints, both the FBI and the military replied that they had no record of him, which would not have been the case had he served in either the Navy or the merchant marine. His photo was sent to missing persons bureaus across the country, but that proved to be just as futile as every other effort to identify him.

Over next 30 years, many possible leads were chased down. Jamison contributed some details he recalled, but they led nowhere useful. Read the story of Charles Jamison, or whoever he was, at Strange Company.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Allan C. Green)