How do you make close-up shots of tiny things look larger-than-life? You’ll be amazed to find that macro photography is an accessible hobby that does not necessarily require expensive equipment or a far-off destination to get the best shots with what you already have. We’re given useful tips on how to enhance macro photo quality and how you can apply these even when using your mobile phone to capture small subjects, like the insects in your backyard.
Who says you can’t have fun while working? With the help of these viral shortcuts, what normally takes you several clicks and scrolls could be done in a matter of nanoseconds. Try out these Microsoft Excel hacks or bookmark this cheat sheet to save yourself valuable time and effort, whether at home or in the workplace.
Here just a few:
Shift+Space: Select an entire row
Ctrl+Space: Select an entire column
Alt+Semicolon: Select visible cells
Ctrl+Plus: Insert new row or column above or to the left of selected row or column
Ctrl+Minus: Delete selected row or column
Alt+Plus: Calculate the sum of selected cells
Ctrl+N: Open new workbook
Ctrl+S: Save current workbook
F4: Repeat last action
Ctrl+Up/Down Arrow: Move to the first or last cell in a column
To go gluten-free or not to go gluten-free, that is the question… on the minds of many Americans today who are avoiding gluten for many different reasons. Gluten-free products cater mainly towards people with Celiac disease, a medical condition that is characterized by having a severe allergy to gluten. But it’s also become an increasingly popular option for even those without the disease who are seeking a healthier diet or lifestyle.
Gluten is basically protein in wheat products and it can be difficult to digest for people, possibly worsening or causing health issues.
Whether or not you avoid gluten is a personal preference. Some people simply avoid it because they follow health experts who recommend cutting it out (which is totally fine). If you don't think you have any issues with it and aren't concerned, you don't have to follow a trend simply because other people do. And if the evidence above concerns you, then taking out gluten is a simple way to avoid the health risks some claim are associated with it.
So, why hop on the bandwagon? Here are top reasons for why people avoid it and the effects it can have on your health, according to nutrition science and health professionals.
What’s a fun way to make your online chat conversations more interesting? Here’s one: create your own personalized emoji!
Emoji Maker gives you a simple interface for customizing your favorite emoji templates to create a brand new one. You can build on a blank template and add as many layers as you want or use the randomizer tool for a surprise.
The only downside for now is that you cannot add it to an emoji keyboard, but you can download it as a png file and easily send it as a sticker.
"Good photos come from experience; experience comes from bad photos," says Nigel Danson, a landscape photographer with over 150k subscribers on his YouTube channel where he gives tips and techniques for landscape photography.
In his recent video, he analyzes some of his “bad” photos and gives 5 points to consider in order to tell whether a shot is good or bad (I have added explanatory questions to go along with them):
Balance - Do the various elements in your photo complement one another?
Flow - Is there a simple and easy-to-follow direction for the viewer’s eyes?
Attention - Which details stand-out and are being emphasized?
Simplicity - Can your viewer understand what’s going on in the photo?
Distractions - Is there too much going on at one time in the photo?
Danson discusses what makes a photo a good one at 8:11.
These tips are just a guide and he cautions that,
It’s a good idea to get other people’s feedback, but then you’ve got to treat it with care; if you just take everyone’s feedback, then everyone’s gonna have something different and you’ll end up with nothing.
So, get feedback from other people but remember to stay true to your vision for each image because it’s easy to get lost in the woods.
Psychologist Dr. Logan Jones says that while social media ‘detoxes’ can be helpful in some cases, it’s more important to explore why you need to take a break in the first place.
"On a deeper level, these social media companies know exactly what they are doing [from] a neurological perspective. What they're doing is called intermittent reinforcement -- it's what casinos do too with slot machines. And it's the same with swiping on Tinder or checking your Instagram. The addiction is the reward pathway, it's a dopamine hit," Jones said.
So, instead of quitting Facebook or Instagram cold-turkey, try lessening your social media intake bit-by-bit. For example, Jones suggests “turning off notifications, turning off vibrate, and using a feature on your phone that monitors how much time you spend on social apps.”
"Addiction is anything you do to escape a feeling that has a life-damaging consequence. So a lot of people will turn to social media to escape a feeling of boredom, loneliness, wasting time -- whatever feeling they want to escape. The life-damaging consequences of social media addiction are that you are not present and as engaged with life," Jones said.
It’s also helpful to replace your social media addiction with positive habits, like reading, exercising, or meeting up with friends in real life. But don’t be discouraged and give up if you feel the urge to check your phone for Facebook updates 3 seconds after you pick up a book. It takes at least 3 weeks or 21 days for new habits to fully form, according to Jones.
In summary, social media is like a drug, so it’s best to take your recovery efforts one step at a time. Understand where the problem of your social media addiction comes from by assessing your own motives and then find new healthy habits to replace your addiction. But don’t forget to be patient with yourself, we are all a work in progress.
Finally, always consult a health professional first regarding any questions or issues you have, these tips are no substitute for medical advice.
Kids love Frozen. It’s obvious from the animated feature film’s box-office success to the seemingly endless sale of books, video games, dolls, Broadway shows, and even cereal! Now Princesses Elsa and Anna, two fictional but larger-than-life characters, have made it to Google.
Google is bringing the leading ladies even closer to fans with a skill available by default on all Google Assistant devices. Just say, “Hey Google, tell me a Frozen story” and...
When you do, you’ll launch the skill (there’s some music and an intro), which takes you to a campfire with some of the film’s main characters. After the intro has finished playing, you or your child can select a character you’d like to tell you a story.
It’s a fun trick, and a free one, and is bound to impress younger kids.
This Christmas season, we could all use some practical tips to minimize stress in our homes. Cat owners know how difficult it is to keep a cat off a Christmas tree. And thanks to the Internet, life-changing remedies to mundane challenges are just a click away. Nick Douglas, seeing this problem, compiled answers from various Reddit users about how we can best manage cats on Christmas. Douglas, writing for LifeHacker, says,
Cats love Christmas trees. A lot of them love messing with the tree, even climbing it. They’ll knock off the ornaments, make needles fall, and eventopple the tree. I looked through Reddit, where every user owns two hundred cats, digging through years of posts for the best advice on keeping cats from ruining Christmas trees or hurting themselves.
“Electric Night” photographed by Ivan Pedretti was featured on Wednesday’s ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’ on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website with the caption:
It may appear, at first, like the Galaxy is producing the lightning, but really it's the Earth. The featured nighttime landscape was taken from a southern tip of the Italian Island of Sardinia in early June. The foreground rocks and shrubs are near the famous Capo Spartivento Lighthouse, and the camera is pointed south toward Algeria in Africa.
In the distance, across the Mediterranean Sea, a thunderstorm is threatening, with several electric lightning strokes caught together during this 25-second wide-angle exposure.
Much farther in the distance, strewn about the sky, are hundreds of stars in the neighborhood of our Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy. Farthest away, and slanting down from the upper left, are billions of stars that together compose the central band of our Milky Way.
NASA selects a different photo of the cosmos each day. Here's the latest one!
Fortune lists the five best things restaurants did in 2019 to improve dining experiences across America. From cuisine fusion to statement wallpapers and start-up boosters to non-alcoholic cocktails (good news, pregnant mommies), these moves by big names in the restaurant scene can inspire more restaurateurs to keep finding creative ways to improve their business.
I must say, what probably takes the cake on this list is the considerate gesture by several restaurants to keep toiletries, like diapers and menstrual products, in their customer restrooms.
“Eco-friendly, backyard DIY saunas” is not a phrase you would encounter every day. Thankfully, BZB Cabins and Outdoors turns this dream into a reality with their reasonably *coughs* priced Sauna Kits.
BZB recently rolled out a collection of “ready-to-assemble outdoor sauna kits that can be set up by two people in just a few days.”
The BZB saunas are the ultimateDIY project for those needing to unthaw during the freezing winter months. Costing between $5,000 and $14,950, the ready-to-assemble sauna kits come in a variety of styles, such as barrel, oval and igloo-shaped. The kits also come in different sizes, from a tiny, two-person sauna to a larger structure that fits up to eight people.
Alzheimer's and dementia are some neurocognitive diseases typically correlated with aging. However, recent studies suggest that cognitive impairment is linked to inflammation caused by a leaky blood-brain barrier rather than the natural process of getting old. It's safe to say that more research is needed to establish the link between the two.
For Kaufer and fellow scientists, that hypothesis is supported by several years of studying epilepsy among brain trauma patients. They discovered that certain brain injuries, like stroke or football concussions, inflict damage on the blood-brain barrier, which protects your brain from foreign harmful agents, such as albumin, entering through the bloodstream.
In their recent experiment, they were able to disrupt the inflammatory response triggered by albumin and reverse pathological signs of aging (thereby improving brain function) in young and old mice by using a new anti-inflammatory drug on their brain.
Lest we get ahead of ourselves, it's important to note that few animal studies have succeeded in translating to clinical human trials. So, these results among mice may not necessarily be transferable to human cases of dementia, according to scientists.
Thanks to Kaufer and her team, they discovered new academic insights into rodent brain aging and they successfully developed new methods and techniques to test for leaks in the blood-brain barrier among patients.
Can a person’s fate be subject to randomized chance? In this context, the “chance of induction” or the likelihood of being drafted for military service in Vietnam was entirely up to a lottery system.
Participants in the draft lottery could not have known until decades later that they were taking part in one of history’s largest and unprecedented randomized experiments that forever changed the way social scientists understood large-scale data collection. Soon, researchers began investigating the life-altering consequences the lottery had on the men who were drafted.
“The lotteries” not only changed how the Selective Service chose men for the conflict in Vietnam, they also marked a turning point in the history of science. By assigning military induction via an arbitrary factor uncorrelated with personal traits, the lotteries amounted to an experiment.
Eleven years after the fall of Saigon, Norman Hearst, Thomas B. Newman, and Stephen B. Hulley used their knowledge of the Selective Service Lotteries to design a study that would answer that question. They could not simply examine the correlation between service in Vietnam and mortality, because serving in the military might correlate with other factors—such as a willingness to take risks—that would independently make individuals more likely to die. Hearst, Newman, and Hulley recognized this problem and knew the solution: a randomized experiment, which assigns treatment (here, to military service) by chance.
But how exactly did the system work?
The draft lotteries worked in just this way. In each lottery, dates—representing the birthday of draft-eligible men—were randomly paired with the numbers 1 to 365 (or 366 for lotteries covering a leap year). In the first lottery, the succession of birthdates drawn from a vase determined the assigned lottery number—the first date drawn received lottery number 1; the second date, number 2; and so on. In subsequent lotteries,officials improved the randomization by simultaneously drawing numbers and birthdates from different receptacles. The number paired with each birthdate determined the order in which men were called for military induction.
The influence of the lotteries was far-reaching, sowing the seed for numerous other studies that had practical implications for politics, economics, psychology, mortality, and socioeconomic life.
Recognizing the parallels between the draft lotteries and an experiment, Hearst, Newman, and Hulley began scanning the birthdates of men who died in California and Pennsylvania from 1974 to 1983. The team tallied the number of birthdates called for induction and compared that with the count of birthdates not called for induction. If the draft lotteries did affect death rates, the tallies would differ.
In an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the team reported a greater frequency of birthdates that had been called for induction among the death certificates. Specifically, in results still relevant to today’s veterans, the team reported that having a draft-selected birthdate increased mortality among draft-eligible men by about 4 percent, including a 13 percent increase in the rate of suicide and an 8 percent increase in the rate of motor-vehicle death.
Consider, for instance, the puzzle of how life experiences interact with individuals’ genetic endowments. According to research by Lauren Schmitz and one of us (Conley), being drafted propelled men who were already genetically disposed toward smoking to start doing so. Normally, one cannot randomly assign smoking in a scientific study; each lottery effectively did so because of the greater access to cigarettes that it provided draftees.
In 1990, the MIT economist Joshua Angrist became the first to use the draft lottery as an experiment for studying social and economic experiences.
In political science, researchers studied the lotteries to understand how exposure to public policy influences civic life. Tiffany C. Davenport found that parents whose sons received lottery numbers likely to be called for induction turned out to vote at a higher rate than parents whose sons did not receive such low lottery numbers—an effect that was most pronounced in towns with a war casualty.
Studies on the Vietnam Lotteries were possible because they took place right before the Information Age (around the 1970s) when digital records and databases were being introduced.
This year marks the 50th anniversary since the Vietnam Selective Services Lottery was inaugurated in the United States.
Read more about the impact of “The Lotteries” at The Atlantic.
Alexey Kondakov creates a masterful yet playful spin to classical art in Napoli Project. In his digital collages, he fuses “antiquated characters inside clothing shops and riding public transportation,” giving us a brilliantly fresh perspective of historic characters against the backdrop of a starkly different style and tone of a bygone era.
Using photo manipulation, Kondakov superimposes Renaissance paintings onto scenes from contemporary European locations including, but not limited to, Italy, Berlin and London.
To get a hint of just how much skill is required to do this, I made my own botched attempt to create Classical Meets Contemporary as seen above. Not as easy as it looks, folks.
To see an expert rendition of how photo manipulation is really done, follow Kondakov on Facebook or Instagram.
Anisha Kalidindi, an Ohio State University graduate student in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, had a dilemma.
If you’ve ever worked at a laboratory with a microscope, you’d know that every setting in your equipment has to be precise for your results to be scientifically accurate. And in neuroscience experiments, ensuring you have an ideal setup with your specialized equipment greatly aids in being able to observe even the minutest details--down to each individual brain cell in a mouse.
This is when Kalidindi had the bright idea to utilize a simple toothpick to track the tilt of the mouse’s head.
We made a crude scale from –4 to +4 in both the up-down and left-right directions on the head mount, but we needed a way to indicate what position the mouse’s head was in. We needed something easy and fast that we use to track the position. Then the idea struck: a toothpick would be perfect. We would create two mini protractors (one for up-down and one for left-right), with the toothpick serving as the “position tracker.” We broke the toothpick in half and stuck the rough edge to the head mount. The pointy end would point to a position on our scale, one for up-down and one for left-right. And just like that with a toothpick and a bit of superglue, our problem was solved.
Now I can record the toothpick position, then go back and put the mouse’s head in an identical position day after day. Over a four-day experiment we have to go back into the darkroom every six hours, and the handy toothpick allows me to collect the data I need for my next insight into the ever-complex biology of the brain.
Walk into any molecular biology lab, and you may see something similar: an everyday object as humble as a toothpick next to (or even attached to) a very expensive piece of equipment. These are the labs where we learn about the types of cells that allow us to think, which proteins cause which diseases and how our genetic code can be targeted to improve our health. The environment where we make these lifesaving discoveries may seem utterly exotic, but we sometimes have to improvise with whatever we can find—just like anyone else. I know I will always have a toothpick at the ready from now on.
Perhaps Kalidindi’s setup could be replicated among other neuroscientists struggling in this area. After all, some of the most life changing discoveries have been made from improvisations. Just something to pick your brain.
