Saxophonist Armin Küpper does some jazz call and response with a pipeline in Mönchengladbach, Germany. The pipeline is as skilled as Küpper, keeping perfect time with him. I'd love to pair it with an alphorn and really get this jam session funky.

-via TYWKIWDBI

We love doctors for treating us when we are sick or when we need surgery. We appreciate them for doing their best to keep us healthy, examining us to identify the reason why we’re sick and then prescribing us the proper medicine that will address our health problem. If there’s one thing we don’t particularly like them for, however, it’s their bad handwriting.

What would it be like if doctors designed logos? The logos would look like these.

See the photos over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad And Useless)

Russia. May 29. A reservoir owned by a Russian company, named Norilsk Nickel (Nornickel), has collapsed. This caused about 21,000 tonnes of diesel fuel to spill, polluting the rivers in the Arctic. The company, as well as the Russian officials, suspect that the cause for the collapse was the permafrost thawing. Thankfully, it would seem that the damage caused by the catastrophic incident could be reversible, as the first stage of the cleanup operation was completed a few days ago. But there’s something more dangerous than the incident apparently, and that something would be the one that might have been behind the incident — the thawing permafrost. It . . .

is a time bomb threatening health and the environment, and risks speeding up global warming.​

[...]

When permafrost thaws, this matter warms up and decomposes, eventually releasing the carbon that it holds as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, gases which have a greenhouse warming effect on the planet.

[...]

The thawing of the permafrost also threatens to unlock disease-causing bacteria and viruses long trapped in the ice.​

More about this over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: FlorenceD-pix/ Pixabay)

Great white sharks are popularly known to be man-eaters. Pop culture often portrays them in films and in novels to be dangerous creatures, always craving for human flesh whenever they see one. Science disagrees with this, however.

New research into the diet of great white sharks has revealed that their stomachs contains a wide variety of species that live on the seafloor, implying these movie villains spend more time foraging along the seafloor than anyone realized. That said, we'd still recommend you avoid skinny dipping at night on beaches commonly frequented by sharks.

"The stereotype of a shark’s dorsal fin above the surface as it hunts is probably not a very accurate picture,” said lead author Richard Grainger, a PhD candidate at the Charles Perkins Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, in a statement.

“Understanding the nutritional goals of these cryptic predators and how these relate to migration patterns will give insights into what drives human-shark conflict and how we can best protect this species,” added Dr Gabriel Machovsky-Capuska, an adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Perkins Centre and a co-author of the study.

More details about this over at IFL Science.

(Image Credit: Olga Ernst/ Wikimedia Commons)

Margie’s Meatloaf Mecca is the talk of Athens, Ohio. The restaurant serves only meatloaf and strawberry milk. On the restaurant's website, proprietor Margie Pandora boasts of three kinds of meatloaf ("moist, dry and drier") and strawberry milk that uses a half cup of strawberry powder for each glass. A billboard in Athens says the restaurant is "coming soon," but the sign has been up since October, and there is no restaurant at the address. And there never will be.

OU alumni John Sammon and Steve Dimatteo are the geniuses behind this enormous prank. According to Sammon, his friend, Margie Pandora, got married in December, and he decided he wanted to surprise her when she came to her bachelor party in Athens.

“I do marketing, and a couple of my other friends who were in on this are in marketing as well,” Sammon said, adding he is now an owner of an advertising agency. “So we basically created a fake business and put up a billboard to kind of just have some fun with her ahead of the wedding because she’s our good friend.”

Sammon and Dimatteo worked together to come up with the most ridiculous business they could think of, and they decided on Margie’s Meatloaf Mecca, a restaurant that only sells ‘moist,’ ‘dry,’ and ‘drier’ meatloaf alongside strawberry milk.

“Because it’s in Athens, it’s like … it’s gotta be fake, but there’s also an element to it where it could be real, so that’s the fun of all of it,” Sammon said.

The pranksters only paid for one month of billboard space, but the advertising company sees no reason to take it down ...until they are completely out of inventory, we suppose. It certainly draws attention, and the website draws traffic. You can even buy merchandise with Margie’s Meatloaf Mecca on it, including face masks. Read the story of Athens' totally fictional restaurant at The Post. -via Metafilter

Hildegard von Blingin' (not Saint Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179) is a musician of the bardcore style. She takes modern songs back in time to the middle ages. Her discography includes "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People and "What Is Love" by Haddaway.

-via Nag on the Lake

The sun is the source of all our energy, in one way or another. Could it also be the source of our eventual destruction? This is the latest apocalyptic question presented by Kurzgesagt. However, the earth has some reassuring protections. The giveaway in the title is "civilization," which doesn't mean human life, but the technology we depend on. We've gotten along without it before.

With malaria claiming around 400,000 lives annually in the African region, the battle against the carriers of this disease, mosquitoes, still rages on. In this new study, a new material has been proven to be an effective insecticide against these tiny yet deadly creatures. What’s more, it’s even more effective than the regular pesticide, which the mosquitoes are becoming more and more resistant to.

The volcanic glass material used in this new intervention is perlite, an industrial mineral most frequently used in building materials and in gardens as a soil additive. The tested insecticide created from perlite, called Imergard WP, can be applied to interior walls and ceilings—and perhaps even inside roofs—as an indoor residual spray. The spray contains no additional chemicals, is not toxic to mammals and will be cost effective. Early results show that mosquitoes do not appear to have resistance to the perlite spray.

More details about this study over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Colonizing astronomical bodies, such as our neighbor planet, Mars, as well as our very own Moon, has been humanity’s dream for decades now. Countless novels and films have already imagined what this would look like, should it happen. But before this dream could be fulfilled, some scientists say that we may need to do something first if we really want to settle down on other places other than Earth — we may need to tweak our DNA.

Crewed missions to Mars, which NASA wants to start flying in the 2030s, will be tough on astronauts, exposing them to high radiation loads, bone-wasting microgravity and other hazards for several years at a time. But these pioneers should still be able to make it back to Earth in relatively good nick, agency officials have said.

It might be a different story for those who choose not to come home, however. If we want to stay safe and healthy while living permanently on Mars, or any other world beyond our home planet, we may need to make some tweaks to our species' basic blueprint, experts say.

Of course, this would probably be a controversial topic, as this would lead to bioethical discussions.

More about this over at Space.com.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

If there’s a place where we wouldn’t be able to say “it’s just a small thing, don’t worry about it,” it would be in the microscopic world, where even the smallest of changes could cause the worst of effects. This statement is demonstrated by a protein used by meningococci bacteria, which causes deadly diseases like meningitis and sepsis. The said protein is called ProQ.

The RNA-binding protein ProQ is involved in the activation of more than 250 bacterial genes.

ProQ ensures that meningococci can better repair their DNA if damaged and it makes them resistant to oxidative stress. Both these factors contribute significantly to the bacteria's pathogenic properties.

[...]

"We were surprised that a comparatively small protein can have such a great influence on bacterial gene regulation," says Christoph Schoen, professor at the Institute of Hygiene and Microbiology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany.

ProQ only consists of about 120 amino acids. By comparison, many other proteins are usually made up of several hundred amino acids.

More details about this study over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Alexandra Schubert-Unkmeir / University of Wuerzburg/ EurekAlert)

In the beginning, Jean Van Landeghem of Turnhout, Belgium assumed that the pizza delivery driver had the wrong address. That made sense for the first pizza. Then the pizzas kept coming over and over again, even from different restaurants, like a specter in a bad horror movie. The Bussels Times reports:

“It can be on a weekday or during weekends, and at any time of day. [The orders come from] delivery services in Turnhout, but also from the surrounding area. I have even had orders delivered to me at 2:00 AM,” Van Landeghem said.

“I cannot sleep anymore. I start shaking every time I hear a scooter on the street. I dread that someone will come to drop off hot pizzas yet another time,” he added.

One day in January 2019, Van Landeghem said, ten different delivery men showed up at his house, one of which had 14 pizzas with him.

Van Landeghem has sworn revenge against his mysterious foe:

He reported the false deliveries to the police several times, he said, but he still has no idea who the person harassing him is. “I cannot take it anymore. When I find out whoever has been bothering me for the past nine years, it will not be their best day,” he said.

Unrelated photo by ms.askr

Sunlight may just be one of the best gifts that you can receive daily in life for free, provided that you don’t take too much of it. One of the best-known benefits of sunlight is that it helps us synthesize vitamin D, which helps us in maintaining enough calcium levels (calcium homeostasis) as well as skeletal integrity. The vitamin also helps in brain development. Aside from the sunlight triggering the vitamin D synthesis in the human body, it also helps in cancer prevention, as well as in treating several skin conditions. Now, new benefits from sunlight have been suggested: it helps people sleep more at night, and it also helps them perform better on cognitive tests.

Check out the study over at MedicalXpress.

(Image Credit: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2020). DOI: 10.3390/ijerph17093219)

This little kitten is named Duck, because of the way she waddles. She waddles because she only has her two back legs. However, as she learned to balance her body and get around better, Duck started resembling a T-rex! Now she's a star, with an Instagram account named Purrasic Duck.

Hi! I’m Duck🦖
Im a two legged lady catosaur double amputee rescue and I’m heckin photogenic

That's just adorable.

Rob Greenfield helped his friends build a tiny house in just three days. Well, three and a half days, to be precise. The tiny house is built from wood harvested from his friends’ property and some second hand materials. Watch Greenfield pull off the project with minimal materials and a limited amount of time! 

It’s really fun to see restoration projects, as it gives us a glimpse of how antique objects looked in their prime. In this video, Odd Tinkering restores a flashlight that was used by the Germans in World War II. Aside from its primary function, which is to provide light in darkness, the flashlight can also change its colors for signalling purposes. See how he painstakingly restored this antique object in this video.

(Video Credit: Odd Tinkering/ YouTube)