Sequoia, a 550-pound black bear, lives at the Folsom City Zoo Sanctuary in Folsom, California. Zookeepers commonly leave dog food in his enclosure for him to eat. This attracted a feral cat, which eventually decided that Sequoia's den would be a good place to live. Zookeepers have since named her Little Bear.
Little Bear the cat tolerates the other bears that live at the zoo, but she has a "special relationship" with Sequoia, according to the zookeepers. They stay close together, like friends should.
Think of it as a retro hoverboard. Beily Kralik attached wheels to the bottom of a shipping pallet. They're fitted precisely within the distance between the tram tracks of Bratislava, Slovakia. Then he went skating along the tracks.
Jean II le Meingre Boucicaut (c.1366-1421) was a French knight of high renown in his own day. Aside from his chivalrous comportment, he was famous for his mastery of the physical demands of fighting in full plate armor.
A description of Boucicaut's physical conditioning program survives to this day. To test its effectiveness and the practicality of wearing full armor, Daniel Jacquet performed those exercises and more while wearing a 58-pound suit of armor. He jumped on a horse, ran, chopped wood, did cartwheels, and more. And although Boucicaut did not call for it, at the end of the video, Jacquet danced to Elvis Presley's "Don't Be Cruel" in the steel suit.
Dr. Victoria Bateman teaches economics at Cambridge University in the UK. She has a strong opinion about a current political controversy in Britain. So before walking into a meeting of 30 colleagues to discuss teaching materials and course curricula, she stripped off her top and wrote a message across her breasts.
Bateman's nudity was not a distraction. If these academics even noticed it, they gave no sign. The Telegraph (content warning: nudity) reports:
A source who took part in the meeting told the Daily Telegraph: “It is well known to the faculty that she has posed naked but obviously the behaviour here was different. One thing is to pose naked and another to show up naked.
“This was a standard meeting about the teaching of economics and we moved away from her state of dress. We remained silent on that issue and managed to get through the agenda in the meeting.”
If seeing Bateman's breasts made any impression on the chair of the meeting, it was only a practical one:
Nigel Knight, director of studies at Churchill College and the chair of the meeting, glanced at her and then said to his secretary: “I think we need some cups for the coffee” and everyone else just stared straight ahead.
When he was 15 years old, the family of Elie Wiesel of Sighet, Romania was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp operated by Nazi Germany. Among them, only Wiesel and 2 of his sisters survived the 8 horrible months of torture, starvation, and murder that preceded liberation.
After the war, the orphaned Wiesel went to France, then to the newborn State of Israel. He became a journalist. In 1954, he wrote an 800-page memoir in Yddish of his Holocaust experiences. Four years later, he published a much shorter version in French, which has been translated into English with the title Night.
Through Night, Wiesel taught the world about the hell of the Holocaust. For his humanitarian work, he earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. More honors followed, including an invitation to become President of Israel in 2007. He died today at the age of 87. You can read more about Wiesel's life at Haaretz.
According to the family, it had been acquired by a now-deceased relative in the 1930s. For many years, the vase was used as a doorstop at their home in Birmingham, UK.
But this is no ordinary vase. It's Chinese porcelain dating back to the reign of the Quianlong Emperor (1711-1799). It may have been made in the Imperial kilns for the Emperor's summer home. Hansons Auctioneers sold it to a buyer for the equivalent of $850,000 USD. You can read more about it at the Huffington Post.
The Packard Brothers are simple men. All they want on a hot summer day is an ice cold beer. So they turn to each other and say, "Hey, pass me a beer." Then they deliver cans of beer in extraordinary ways.
We've previously seen their acrobatic beer passing. Now they're back with more trick shots featuring a summer fun theme to promote Old Milwaukee Beer.
The ravages of cancer treatments can leave a woman infertile. That's why doctors at Oxford University in the UK extracted ovarian tissue from a toddler, then incubated the eggs until they were mature. These eggs can be frozen for future pregnancies once the child grows up.
It's a revolutionary new treatment that's being called "the holy grail of fertility treatments." It offers new hope to prepubescent girls with cancer. The Telegraph reports:
Prof Tim Child, from Oxford University, said: “Cancer treatment can be very successful but the drugs can completely damage the ovaries. This gives hope to young girls who could otherwise be sterilised by chemotherapy or radiotherapy.”
“It’s extremely exciting because it's two simultaneous approaches showing effect,” he said.
While the process was able to identify the most mature of the immature eggs, which were then incubated overnight, to assist their survival, he said he was hopeful that in future, scientists would be able to expand the technique to retrieve thousands more specimens.
In 1971, Disney World built a private airport to provide direct access to its facilities. The Disney World Airport, serviced by the now-defunct Shawnee Airlines, had a unique feature. When a plane rolled over the runway at precisely 45 MPH, the bumps played the tune of "When You Wish Upon a Star" from the animated musical Pinocchio.
The airport closed shortly after it opened, as it proved impractical. But the runway remains and, as this video appears to demonstrate, is publicly accessible. It's mostly used a storage area. You can read more about this short-lived Disney venture into aviation at Atlas Obscura.
According to legend, the Buddha gave a hermit a single strand of his own hair, which was made of gold. The hermit gave it to a local king named Tissa. In exchange, King Tissa used his magic to pull an enormous boulder out of the sea and place it on a cliff. Then the king built a pagoda on the top of the boulder to serve as a shrine for the golden hair.
This is the Kyaiktiyo Balancing Pagoda in Burma. The entire rock and shrine is painted with gold. For a thousand years, pilgrims have come to the base of the rock to pray.
Etsy seller LanVy Nguyen of New York City used to work in corporate finance. Now, she is "a designer of things beautiful." And they certainly are! She designs wooden wedge shoes that are so beautiful that they look like they belong in museums instead of closets. They're custom made by craftsmen in Vietnam, who take 18 days to make each pair.
My best guess is that the camera is angled precisely to create inaccurate impressions from both the viewer's perspective as well as the mirror reflection. When the hands turn the forms, they briefly take on strange shapes that don't jibe with the previous impressions
Sugihara quite rightly won second place at the Best Illusion of the Year competition this year with these odd cylinders.
Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University. Recently, he mused about why the settings of Star Trek and Star Wars are so different. There are advanced technologies in both--far beyond our own reality--but enormous differences in the politics, economies, and cultures between them.
1. The armed forces in Star Trek seem broadly representative of society. Compare Uhura, Chekhov, and Sulu to the Imperial Storm troopers.
2. Captains Kirk and Picard may be overly narcissistic, but they do not descend into true power madness, unlike various Sith leaders and corrupted Jedi Knights.
3. In Star Trek, any starship can lay waste to a planet, whereas in Star Wars there is a single, centralized Death Star and no way to oppose it, short of having the rebels try to blow it up. That seems to imply stronger checks and balances in the world of Star Trek. No single corrupt captain can easily take over the Federation, and so there are always opposing forces.
I think that the core difference is that Star Trek (at least in The Next Generation era) is highly utopian. The Federation at the center of the Star Trek story is prosperous, peaceful, and incorruptible. Factionalism, let alone tribalism, is rare. Hundreds of species with radically different cultures and even biological systems live together without serious disagreement. Material wants and injustice are almost unknown.
I love Star Trek and prefer it to Star Wars, but it's quite unrealistic. The reason why Star Wars is so savage and tragic compared to Star Trek is because real life is savage and tragic.
The long-running Japanese TV show Masquerade asks contestants to re-enact scenes with low-tech visual effects. The overall theme appears to be something like the pantomime tradition in Western theatre.
Here's an impressive clip from that show. The performers are dressed as pool balls. The player smoothly breaks the rack, sending the heads rolling toward the pockets.
