Matt Benedetto has Unnecessary Inventions for you — products that are so creative (but useless) you’d want to have one.
Sunglasses not too dark for you? Fret no more for this SunShaders™ — a shader for your shades.
Want to shade yourself from the sun’s heat or from the rain, but don’t want your hands full? Get this Hoverbrella™ and enjoy walking around as it follows you wherever you go.
These and more on Twisted Sifter.
(Image Credit: Unnecessary Inventions by Matt Benedetto / Instagram)
Have you experienced getting goosebumps from a certain part of the song that you’ve heard? It may be a certain pitch, a certain reverb, or a certain tune that would move you to tears or would make you laugh or would send shivers down your spine. This is emotional arousal through music. Through this study, the researchers proved that these chills were real, although this experience is won’t work for everyone.
In their research titled, “The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of Emotional Arousal,” Valorie N. Salimpoor and company stated that:
The intensity of pleasure experienced from music listening has lead some researchers to suggest that it may act upon the dopamine reward system of the brain, which is implicated in processing highly rewarding stimuli such as cocaine and amphetamines, food, and playing videogames. The assumption that music may also involve this system is largely based on brain imaging findings that have found increasing blood flow or oxygenation to striatal regions of the brain that are implicated in reward…
Assessment of emotional responses to music, particularly the ability for music to induce highly pleasurable feelings, has become a topic of interest to music researchers with practical implications for music composition, therapy, and marketing. The present data provide a direct link between emotions and pleasure in music listening, and reveal new avenues for research to examine whether strongly felt emotions can be rewarding in themselves in the absence of a physically tangible reward or a specific functional goal.
See more of this study at plos.org.
Via Futility Closet
(Image Credit: Malte Wingen / Unsplash)
I remember years ago, when I was in high school, I would complain to myself, “How would this subject help me in my life? I won’t use this when I grow up.” I would later answer this question for myself, and my answer would be “because the school wants to hone your creativity and critical thinking.”
But don’t you wish that there was more in high school than just writing on the board solving math equations, like being taught how to cook, or how to replace a flat tire? Hopefully a school in Kentucky does just this. Bullitt Central High School hosts “adulting” classes such as “tax filing”, “meal prep”, “love letter writing”, and “resume writing”.
Read more on IcePop.
(Image Credit: wendywatson94 / Wikimedia Commons)
Originating from the word “senpai” (which means “senior” in the Japanese language), the word “paisen” is a slang term for senpai. It is made by switching the two syllables.
McDonald’s Japan rebranded their bacon and potato pie, and there came the Bacon Potato PieSen.
Despite your sen-pie’s crusty outer layer, he has a warm, creamy centre made up of smoky bacon, creamy sauce and potato.
The Piesen will disappear around the middle of May, so let's hope he notices us before then!
Yum!
(Image Credit: McDonald’s Japan / Grape Japan)
It turns out having fun and bonding with your coworkers by playing video games, can increase productivity inside the office, researchers from Brigham Young University (BYU) found out in their study.
...newly-formed work teams experienced a 20 percent increase in productivity on subsequent tasks after playing video games together for just 45 minutes. The study, published in AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, adds to a growing body of literature finding positive outcomes of team video gaming.
“To see that big of a jump — especially for the amount of time they played — was a little shocking,” said co-author and BYU associate professor Greg Anderson. “Companies are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on team-building activities, and I’m thinking, go buy an Xbox.”
The only downside to this research, as the researchers pointed out, is that this experiment was conducted to newly-formed teams on which members knew nothing about each other.
(Image Credit: Gabe Mayberry / BYU Photo)
Parents have a difficult time raising up our children. Oftentimes, they tend to let anger and frustration get the best of them, and then they channel that anger and frustration to their very own kids. This leads the parents to shout at their kids and say hurtful words to them. This heavily affects the children mentally and emotionally, as some researches would say. This makes them more aggressive, and these children would have violent tendencies in the future. In other words, shouting is bad.
So is there an alternative to shouting? Hopefully, yes. Readers of Goats and Soda, NPR’s blog focused on health and “all sorts of development around the world”, submit over 300 tips and tricks on how to discipline the kids without having to shout at them. Some of these tips are busting out the “Woofie”, giving the kids “The Look”, and going into “Grandma Mode.”
Why don’t you give it a look?
(Image Credit: Malaka Gharib/ NPR)
George Berzsenyi is not a popular figure. I’m quite sure you have not heard of him. I haven’t heard of him either. But his success is not found in fame. His success is found in the thousands of lives he has touched. He has mentored a lot of high school students in the subject of math, and they loved him for it. He is, for the students, the main reason for their love of math.
Read the testimonies of these once protégés now turned the best scientists and mathematicians of America, as Joe Palca interviews them.
Teachers really are influential people.
(Image Credit: Sara Stathas for NPR)
Kids would often ask us or talk about death. As much as possible, we’d like to avoid that kind of conversation with them. It’s too much. It’s for adults. It’s considered taboo. So how do you make a child learn about death in a fun way?
“Taboos create fears and uncertainties,” the Vienna Psychotherapy Association said. “The child feels that something is wrong, and then he is left alone with that.”
So to teach kids about death, the museum partnered with a company to produce some gloriously morbid Legos.
Here are some of the gloomy (but cute) photos of the set.
(Image Credit: Cult of Weird)
Known for his bizarre architectural creations, such as a car being upside-down — but does not fall — on what seems to be a peeled part of the road, Alex Chinneck releases yet another of this weird things. Now, he unzips a building made of bricks. This creation is entitled A sprinkle of night and a spoonful of light.
Produced in partnership with IQOS, the new seventeen meter wide piece unzips the side of the facade, leading to an illusion of the whole structure is coming apart. Chinneck also has two other related pieces that can be viewed at Via Tortona 31.
Here are some of the images of this strange, eye-catching, but amazing artwork.
(Image Credit: Mark Wilmot)
Last April 11, the Falcon Heavy made its way to the cosmos and left NASA’s Kennedy Space Center launch pad 39A. The rocket is derived from from three Falcon 9 first stage rockets, with nine Merlin engines each. Also, it is designed to be reusable. Its core landed off shore of Of Course I Still Love You, an autonomous drone ship.
Blooming peacefully on a vertical cliff face, the flower thought to be extinct was rediscovered by scientists when they flew a drone “into the Hawaiian skies to observe an extremely biodiverse area on a remote part of Kauais’s Kalalau Valley.
According to a statement from the National Tropical Botanical Garden, Hibiscadelphus woodii was discovered on a vertical cliff face. Most sections of this area of the valley are inaccessible to humans because of the steep landscape.
...
Dr. David Lorence, director science and conservation for the garden, said, "This incredible rediscovery was made possible by our staff using drone technology and was supported by a grant from the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund. Drone technology greatly facilitates botanical surveys in rough terrain areas."
…
The plant grows in a shrub or small tree and produces bright yellow flowers, which turn purple or maroon as it ages. The species was named and published in 1995, raising the number of Hibiscadelphus at the time from six to seven species. An eighth species was discovered on Maui in 2012, and prior to the rediscovery, only two species still exist in the wild, the statement said.
In this day and age where a lot of animals and plants have gone extinct, it is a breath of fresh air to see this kind of news.
(Image Credit: CNN)
Taking swabs from from the facial fuzz of 18 men and necks of some 30 dogs of various breeds, the researchers from the Hirslanden Clinic in Switzerland found out that the beards were dirtier, and the dogs cleaner.
Every single bearded men, aged from 18 to 76, had high counts of bacteria in their beards. While only 23 out of the 30 dogs had the same result. The other dogs tested recorded medium to low levels.
Seven of the men had so much beard bacteria, there was a risk of them getting sick.
Researchers actually found this disgusting information out by mistake, they were trying to find out if men could pick up dog diseases in their facial hair.
Looks like it’s high time to shave.
(Image Credit: Corpusdigitals (FHvB) / Wikimedia Commons)
Oftentimes, when our kids feel anxious, we go immediately to the rescue. We would immediately go to them and comfort. But this turns out to be counterproductive for the children, says Yale School of Medicine psychologist Eli Lebowitz.
"When you provide a lot of accommodation, the unspoken message is, 'You can't do this, so I'm going to help you,' " he says.
Instead of letting them face their fears and guiding them towards the road of independence, we make them dependent on us, and we unintentionally make their anxiety worse. And so, this kind of method works bad for the kids. Asking the children to change their behavior won’t work either. Enter Lebowitz, who shows us a better way — a new therapy.
The program was part of a Yale University study that treated children's anxiety by teaching their parents new ways of responding to it.
How should the parents respond then? Find out in the article.
(Image Credit: Christopher Cappoziello for NPR)
Laugh all you want, but they’re dead serious about this.
The memers of Instagram argue that while they generate a lot of money and engagement for the website, the said platform does not pay them back for their hard work.
The IG Meme Union will probably never be recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, but organizers say it can still act as a union for all intents and purposes. “We’re calling it a union and doing union-organizing tactics,” Paul Praindo, a representative of the organizing committee, told me. “We stand in firm support of others who are working to organize anti-labor industries. We think these movements mark the beginning of a labor renaissance.” Some other “unions” function this way: The Freelancers Union, for instance, doesn’t have a formal management structure to negotiate with, but does advocate collectively for independent workers.
...
Instagram follows the same business model as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social platforms. The service itself is free to use, but the platform monetizes the content posted to it to sell ads based on metadata attached to that content. Users themselves, who are the ones posting the photos, videos, and memes that keep people coming back to the app, don’t get a cut of that revenue.
Do you think meme workers should be paid?
(Image Credit: Screenshot from unionizedmemes / Instagram)
I love going to playgrounds. As a kid, I would go play on the seesaw or on the slide, or just swing for hours. I still go to playgrounds up to this day. I would watch the kids go swing or slide or just run around and play tag with friends. Unfortunately, I was not given the chance to see these amazing mid-century modern playgrounds.
The past is really an amazing thing to look upon, and how beautiful it is when it blends with the present. Why don’t you take a look, too?
(Image Credit: Kito Fujio)
