The PS5 hardware has been revealed. Along with the console’s specifications, a lot of games that will be released for the PS5 were also announced. One of the new games for the console is Spiderman: Miles Morales. Check out the teaser as shared by GameSpot! If you’ve seen the previous Spiderman games, then this one will certainly pique your interest. It has certainly piqued mine. Now I just gotta figure out if I can actually afford the console.
The song Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen has been considered by many as the greatest song ever written. Even until now, the song still remains popular both to the young and the old. If you’re one of the people who loved, and still love this song, then you might have sung the song a few times in your life. But are you sure that the lyrics that you’re singing are the correct ones? Mental Floss has a 52-item quiz for you to test your accuracy.
This might be my first time to perfect a Mental Floss quiz. Why don’t you take it, too, and then tell your scores in the comments below.
When Twitter user radtoria decided to buy a Danny DeVito cutout as a gag gift for her boyfriend, she wasn’t expecting another certain someone to become so smitten. It was her cat, Quincy.
"I started putting it in the window to spice up our neighbors' walks. Then I'd take it down at night to close the blinds," radtoria told The Dodo. "Time and time again, I'd wake up to find Quincy snuggling with it."
What’s more amazing is Quincy takes good care of the cutout.
… the little DeVito has been totally unharmed by the cat's constant attention. For Quincy, this cardboard cutout isn't just some plaything.
"He's very gentle with it. He never bites it. He never roughhouses with it. It's like he sees it as a special toy," radtoria said. "If I try to remove it from him (which I don't bother with anymore), he just extends his paws over it and gives a 'don't mess with me' kind of look."
YouTuber akita 2nd recreates the many sounds of various Windows operating systems from the newest one (Windows 10) to the oldest (Windows 3.1). Akita not only recreates the startup sounds, but also the error sounds that can be heard on each operating system. However, while the video is titled “Windows ALL Startup Sounds on Piano”, akita also inserts the startup sound for the Mac.
New York City. 1914. It was a time where the coroner system — a system in which a government official is appointed as coroner — reigned in the city. Unfortunately, it was a “grossly inefficient and corrupt” system, according to the investigation of Leonard Wallstein (the city’s commissioner of accounts) that year.
Of the 65 coroners holding office at the time, “not one was thoroughly qualified by training or experience for the adequate performance of his duties,” he wrote in his report. The few who had medical degrees were “drawn from the ranks of mediocrity,” motivated only by the money they could extort from police, prosecutors, or the accused.
Thankfully, this system was replaced by the medical examiner system, which is a much more faithful system.
Unlike coroners, medical examiners were required to have some kind of post-secondary education, as well as specialized training in forensic pathology — learning to decipher clues like ligature marks, decomposition, and lividity to determine the time, manner, and cause of death.
One of the most notable people that advocated for the medical examiner system was Frances Glessner Lee.
Lee is perhaps best known for creating the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” dioramas of crime scenes in miniature — macabre dollhouses — depicting victims of arson, stabbing, hanging, carbon monoxide poisoning, and more. She handcrafted most of the furniture, clothing, and other minutiae herself to get each detail just right, accurately illustrating traces of physical evidence left at real crime scenes. Stored today at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, the Nutshell Studies are still dusted off once a year and used as training tools for the Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation.
“Kick the bucket”, “take the cake,” “chew the fat,” and “pull someone’s leg.” These are just some of the idiomatic expressions that we use in our daily lives. The question is, why do we use these expressions instead of stating what we really mean directly? Turns out, “there’s still something about [these expressions], and others like [them].”
Idiomatic expressions may well be old and shabby language, but they are our own speech, from the Greek idios, “one’s own.” Fossilized idiomatic language, like the newest of new slang in an exclusive subculture, has a special power to draw two people together in a kind of linguistic intimacy, to express intensities of thought and feeling about their uncertain and sometimes unjust worlds, when the literal meaning of things just doesn’t cut it.
Check out JSTOR Daily’s article and learn more about idioms.
Just as walking on a hard road is much easier than walking on soft sand, which means that less energy is spent, this study conducted by MIT scientists suggests that trucks would find stiffer roads easier to traverse on, and they would use less fuel.
Asphalt may not seem particularly soft to us as we walk on it, but that's only because we don't weigh several thousand pounds. The heavy weight of a transport truck, on the other hand, causes the asphalt to deflect downwards slightly beneath each wheel.
As a result, the truck is perpetually in a state of trying to climb out of an ever-so-slight depression in the road. This means that it burns more fuel than it would otherwise, producing more carbon dioxide emissions in the process. According to MIT researchers Hessam Azarijafari, Jeremy Gregory and Randolph Kirchain, this problem could be alleviated if roads were made of stiffer materials.
And since trucks would use less fuel on stiffer roads, that would also mean that the carbon dioxide emissions produced by these big vehicles would be reduced. While the costs of making the roads stiffer would be initially expensive, it would be a great investment in the long run, as stiffer roads are stronger and require fewer repairs.
I want to go now to the grocery to restock the supplies I have at home. But if everybody does the same, then the grocery might be full, and so it would be best if I don’t go. But if everybody else decides to not go and just stay at home, then the store will be empty, and so I should go because it’s ideal for me. And thus I go back and forth and be stuck in a loop, and spend all day at home theorizing whether I should go or not.
Turns out there is a way to get out of this loop, and that is through a game theory in 1994 by W. Brain Arthur.
He figured out what he called the El Farol Bar problem, based on a Santa Fe bar that had a popular music event on Thursday evenings. The problem assumes a group of 100 people who do not know what the others will do. In this problem, if more than 60 people (60 percent) show up, the overcrowding in the finite space would cause a displeasing evening. Guests will have a more enjoyable time if they stay home. Yet if less than 60 people show up, the attendees would have a better time going than staying home. They want to go, but not if the bar is too crowded. They need to decide…
Sounds similar to our grocery problem up there, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. You just have to know your own variables such as an estimate of how many people go to the same store as you.
Unfortunately, you’d have to be familiar with statistics in order to solve your own grocery problem.
Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, trappers and traders prized sea otters because of their thick and waterproof fur. Back in that time, some people were willing to pay a handsome sum of money just to get their hands on otter pelts. And so the once common sea otter (Enhydra lutris) was nearly hunted to extinction in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Fortunately, thanks to conservation efforts, sea otter numbers have rebounded. However, they aren’t welcomed back to the world, because they compete with people for shellfish. It was “a conflict that has provoked debate about balancing the need protections for the otters with the economic impact of their presence in the coastal waters.”
A study published … in Science finds that in economic terms, the otters' effect on their ecosystem—including increasing populations of fish, carbon capture and tourism—far outweigh the costs to the commercial shellfish fisheries with which they compete for tasty clams and crabs.
1955. An exhibit was shown to the assembled guests at the meeting of the Moscow Surgical Society. It was a surgery nobody had thought of. A large white dog was brought in the platform.
The dog looked happy, cheerfully wagging its tail, and [unintimidated] by the large crowd of eager guests in front of him. He seemed particularly unconcerned by the unnatural appendage protruding from the side of his neck.
The unnatural appendage was a tiny head of a brown-haired puppy, which was attached to the white dog by the Soviet scientist Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov a few days before the meeting.
Both the hound and the decapitated head of the puppy were alive and reacting to stimuli. And even as the surgeons watched, the puppy's head gave the ear of its host a nasty bite. The white head snarled.
But why would Demikhov create such a “medical monstrosity”, you might ask? The answer is, because he had a vision for the future.
“The final goal of our experiments was to make transplantation of the heart and other organs in humans possible,” Demikhov wrote in a monograph.
Throughout his life, he has made invaluable early contributions to coronary surgery. Unfortunately, he usually doesn’t get the recognition he very much deserves, as he is just mostly known as the scientist who conducted two-headed dog experiments.
In 1937, at the age of only 21 and still a student, the young Vladimir had shocked his professors by creating the first artificial heart, which he successfully implanted into a dog. The dog survived for five hours. After graduation, Demikhov continued his experimental research, eventually performing successful heart and lung transplants, and later, liver and kidney transplantation on dogs and cats.
If there was a man deserving to be “The Father of Heart and Lung of Transplantation”, it would be Demikhov, according to Doctor Christiaan Barnard, the man who performed the world’s first successful heart transplant in 1967.
David L. Glover is also known as the Bartlett Bee Whisperer. Just this past week, he shared the story of the biggest beehive he’s ever removed. It was in a house that was built in 1924, and there had been bees reported in the walls for 50 years. Glover thought he might see as much as eight feet of honeycomb, but before he was through, he had found 30 feet!
“No one is aware of the size of their honey beehive,” The Bee Whisperer told us that people are shocked by how big the hives are. “They are all surprised because they are expecting something the size of a wasp nest or hornet’s nest. The infrared gives them the first clue, but that’s only the brood combs of the hive. The babies are incubated at 94.5 degrees Fahrenheit [34.7 degrees Celsius]. Any honeycombs in the hive are cooler and usually don’t show on the IR.”
To get to the hive, Glover had to remove the outer clapboard of the house. Once he did, clues led him to finding more and more of the hive. Read the story of the 30-foot beehive at Bored Panda.
Father and son Richard and Steve Doner make custom electric guitars, such as this bass inspired by Back to the Future. Like Doc Brown's DeLorean, it comes equipped with a flux capacitor and switches for players select a destination date. When they sold it in May, the Doners donated all of the proceeds to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.
You can see more photos and videos of the time machine in action here.
Who knew there was a perfect way to cuddle? Cuddling is one of the gestures that can give someone comfort and warmth, and to know that there’s a way to do it perfectly is quite interesting! Scientists from Toho University in Japan studied the effect of different hugs on infants. Yahoo News has the details:
By monitoring heart rates for the infant and using pressure sensors on the adult's hand, the researchers assessed the baby's reaction to just being held, a hug with medium pressure, and what they called a "tight hug."
According to the results, published in the journal Cell, babies were soothed more by a medium-pressure hug than just being held but the calming effect decreased during a "tight" hug.
The researchers kept the length of the hug to 20 seconds as "it was almost impossible to avoid infant's bad mood during a one-minute or longer hold or hug," they admitted in their paper.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, for infants older than 125 days, the calming effect was greater when receiving a hug from a parent than from a female stranger.
So, the perfect hug is considered to be medium pressure from a parent, the scientists believe.
The infants are not the only ones who feel the benefits of a comforting hug, the research showed.
Parents also exhibited significant signs of calmness while hugging their child.
The Bird Library is not strictly a public library, but it is open to the public--or at least everyone who can fly inside. This birdhouse project in Charlottesville, Virginia looks like a library service desk complete with books, accessible space, and a staff on duty when there is birdseed to be found behind the desk.
Kevin Cwalina and Rebecca Flowers built the Bird Library in 2015 and are livestreaming its patrons in action on YouTube. This is impressive, but the library needs to match this innovation by providing more electronic materials to keep up with changing patron demands.
A Gömböc is a shape that always rights itself, which we introduced you to in 2008 (before the umlauts were added). The Action Lab has a concise and easy-to understand explanation in this video. Gömböcs don’t happen in nature, but the shape of one animal comes close. You can probably guess which animal it is. -via Digg
