"Photo of a man wearing a helmet landshape with light going out from his eyes." (from Sacha Goldberger's Facebook post)
Posted on Facebook on October 2014 to March 2015, Olivier Castaing’s School Gallery showcases images of popular characters and gives them a classic feel.
DC Comics characters like the Joker, Superman, Batman and Robin, Marvel Comics characters such as Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the Hulk, and Star Wars characters like R2-D2 and Chewbacca appear on this series of images.
Ekaterina Lukasheva, a paper artist based in San Francisco creates amazing tessellations and she makes it seem easy. These masterpieces even have expanded and contracted forms!
Lukasheva also wrote several books with her latest being Floral Origami: From Beginner to Advanced: 30 Delicious Origami Flowers and Balls for Home Decoration.
Anyone who have experienced a long-haul flight knows how it can get to be a pain in the butt (literally!). You spend almost all of your time in that flight on your seat eating, drinking, sleeping, relaxing, chatting, or working. Long-haul flights can get boring, and even the expensive business class ones are no exception.
Enter Airbus’ new “Settee Corner” chair, offering couch-style airplane seating, with the usual business class features.
From CNN:
The new airplane seat premiered at the Aircraft Interiors Expo 2019 (AIX) in Hamburg, Germany, attracting buzz from passengers and airlines alike.
On these new seats, fliers can recline, lounge-style, just like on a couch at home. They can be joined by a traveling partner for an aperitif and to enjoy the in-flight entertainment.
And when it's time to sleep, they just lie down on the seat, no mechanisms needed.
Aside from promoting a more comfortable way of air travel, the new style also is 30-50% lighter than the traditional style.
This coming December, a European consortium will go to Antarctica to begin drilling to the eastern ice sheet of the continent. They aim to pull up a frozen core of material almost 3 kilometers in length.
From BBC:
Scientists hope this can lead them to an explanation for why Earth's ice ages flipped in frequency in the deep past.
Although it might seem at first glance to be a rather esoteric quest, researchers say it bears down directly on the question of how much the world is likely to warm in the centuries ahead.
"Something happened about 900,000 years ago. The ice age cycles changed from every 40,000 years or so, to every 100,000 years; and we don't know why," Dr Catherine Ritz from the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, France, told BBC News.
The site for the new drilling operation would be at the spot dubbed as the “Little Dome C”, found about 40km southwest of the Dome Concordia, the Franco-Italian research station.
Find out more about this icy operation over at BBC.
We learn in elementary school that there are three states of matter — solid, liquid, and gas. Scientists have discovered a new phase of matter: one that is solid and liquid at the same time.
...a team has used a type of artificial intelligence to confirm the existence of a bizarre new state of matter, one in which potassium atoms exhibit properties of both a solid and a liquid at the same time. If you were somehow able to pull out a chunk of such material, it would probably look like a solid block leaking molten potassium that eventually all dissolved away.
“It would be like holding a sponge filled with water that starts dripping out, except the sponge is also made of water,” says study coauthor Andreas Hermann, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Edinburgh whose team describes the work this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
This state, called the chain-melt phase, join the group of other unusual states of matter.
(Image Credit: Screenshot from National Geographic.
Original Photo by Turtle Rock Scientific/ Science Source)
Most spinal cord injuries are believed to be permanent and irreversible. Not this time. Doctors Ren Xiaoping and Sergio Canavero claim that they were able to repair fully severed animal spinal cords.
From South China Morning Post:
Ren Xiaoping and Sergio Canavero said the new work they published in a scientific journal showed that monkeys and dogs were able to walk again after their spinal cords were “fully transected” during surgery and then put back together again. The neurosurgeons described the results as medically “unprecedented”.
The highly experimental procedures took place at Harbin Medical University in China. Both studies were supported by video evidence and published in Surgical Neurology International, a peer-reviewed medical journal based in the United States.
This concept, however, will raise ethical concerns. See the full story here.
(Image Credit: Ooom/ Canavero / South China Morning Post)
Star Wars fan Hubert Zitt, a professor at Zweibrücken University of Applied Sciences, along with a small team, transformed the Zweibrück Observatory of the Natural Science Association into an enormous R2-D2.
From Sad and Useless:
The professor completed this project in late 2018, aided by his father-in-law Horst Helle, the master painter Klaus Ruffing and several helping students and it has caught the eyes of Star Wars fans everywhere.
Hubert Zitt is well known for his expertise in the Star Wars and Star Trek franchise.
Here are some of the majestic images of the observatory. See the whole gallery by clicking here.
Malvina Reynolds wrote “Little Boxes” in the early 1960s. The song was inspired by Reynolds driving past “rows of lookalike pastel-hued houses in a new suburban housing tract in the Bay Area.” What comes into your mind when you see these types of houses
From CityLab:
Reynolds saw the cookie-cutter houses as both symbols and shapers of the conformist mindset of the people who lived in them—doctors and lawyers who aspired to nothing more than playing golf and raising children who would one day inhabit “ticky-tacky” boxes of their own.
But she was not right about who lived in this suburb just south of San Francisco (named Daly City). It was neither doctors nor lawyers who lived there, but working class and lower-middle class “who were the last group to get in on the postwar housing boom.”
Suburbs have a rich history in themselves. Although sometimes, their stories are not told completely.
The use of plastic bags has become a standard in U.S grocery stores some 40 years ago. But we also are aware that these very same plastic bags cause unwanted problems such as clogging sewers, killing wildlife, and littering landscapes. They have been a common sight to landfills and rivers. The national movement in the U.S that seeks to get rid of them is gaining ground. However, banning plastic bags may turn out to be worse, and not better, for the environment. University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor studied this ironic phenomenon.
From NPR:
Taylor found these bag bans did what they were supposed to: People in the cities with the bans used fewer plastic bags, which led to about 40 million fewer pounds of plastic trash per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for other purposes, like picking up dog poop or lining trash bins, still needed bags. "What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned," she says. This was particularly the case for small, 4-gallon bags, which saw a 120 percent increase in sales after bans went into effect.
The garbage bags mentioned are thicker than typical shopping bags, and therefore use more plastic. As Taylor put it, around 30 percent of the amount of plastic that got rid of returns as thicker garbage bags. In addition to this, there has been a surge in the use of paper bags (since cities have banned plastic bags), which Taylor estimates to be an additional 80 million tons of paper trash. These paper bags according to some studies are more dangerous for the environment.
People in the 1970s get married quickly. Some even get married immediately only a few months after they first met. By the 2010s, people decide to live together for a while before deciding to get married. FlowingData compares these two time periods and gives us a beautiful statistical animation.
...You can see the people who married within the first few months after meeting. There are the people who married five decades after first meeting. I think there’s a romantic comedy script hidden somewhere in there.
Who would have thought that letters can be re-arranged in the form of boxes? This puzzle font was created by Erik and Martin Demaine, Donald E. Knuth and Yushi Uno last year and was presented at Knuth’s 80th birthday party.
From erikdemaine.org:
Each font can be presented in a fully solved form (“Dissection in both forms”) or in a variety of puzzle forms. “Letter without dissection” is the hardest form: the puzzle for each letter is to find a dissection with the specified number of pieces into a 6 × 6 square. In “Dissection in form of letter”, the puzzle is to find the re-arrangement of the letter into the square (a relatively easy puzzle). In “Dissection in form of square”, the puzzle is to figure out which letter the pieces can re-arrange into; this form is a puzzle font in the sense that reading the message requires solving the puzzle.
Head to erikdemaine.org and have fun making your friends’ heads ache by sending them coded messages.
Sexual harassment cases have been growing in number in the Philippines over the past years. Being aware of this, a concerned netizen named Marry Ferjel Babasa shared her DIY pepper spray hack on Facebook. Get a spray bottle, a few pieces of chili pepper and cut them and mix them with water inside the bottle and voila! You now have an effective pepper spray.
The concerned netizen did not expect her post to go viral.
From Coconuts:
“I was really shocked with the number of shares and most of it are girls. And that gave me the idea [of] how us girls really seek for protection,” she told Coconuts.
Yep. You’re not reading it wrong. These glaciers when they have melted will release human poop. And tons of it. Around sixty-six tons of it. Because of global warming.
From Smithsonian:
… On average, climbers spend 16 to 18 days on the mountain, acclimating at lower elevations and ferrying gear up to progressively higher camps before attempting the summit. All those people spending all that time on the mountain means lots of poop, about two tons per year.
In the past, people would throw their wastes into pits or deep ice crevasses, in hopes that their waste would be naturally eliminated. Unfortunately, according to glaciologist Michael Loso, that is not the case. He states that “the poo does not get ground up, but flows down the glacier and eventually pops up to the surface at lower elevations, where it can contaminate streams, rivers and lakes.”
“The waste will emerge at the surface not very different from when it was buried. It will be smushed and have been frozen and be really wet,”...“It will be biologically active, so the E. coli that was in the waste when it was buried will be alive and well. We expect it to still smell bad and look bad.”
The effects of global warming are rampant, not just in Denali, the highest mountain in Alaska, but also in Mount Everest in Nepal.
Head now to this foul-smelling revelation at Smithsonian.
William Rabillo, a 13-year old kid, gave his mom a gift that no mom would ever expect from a child his age -- a car. The single mom, Krystal Preston, naturally, was shocked of what her kid has done for her.
From CBS News:
Rabillo told his mom he was serious — he really bought her a car. He told her they had to go see it "with this lady." The few details coming out of her son made Preston skeptical, but when she walked outside, there was a woman in their front yard waiting to give them a ride.
How did the boy buy the car? Hop in and go to story over at CBS News.
