This may look like a facade left over from a demolished building, but no, it was built to look that way. This is the Grudge Building ("al-Ba`sa" in Arabic), the thinnest house in Beirut, Lebanon. The end you see here is only two feet wide, but the other end is 14 feet wide, which you can see in the third picture in the gallery above. Still a very small footprint for a four-story building.

According to a Lebanese urban myth, one man turned sibling pettiness into an extreme sport when he erected the country's thinnest habitable building in front of his brother's property. His intentions were simple: to block his brother's seafront views and devalue the property.

The root of the feud is said to be one brother inheriting a much bigger piece of property than the other. Or that the brother with the property in front lost some area when the road was widened. Either way, we don't know how much truth there is to the tale. No one lives there now, but it does have a history of tenants in its eight apartments. Read more about the Grudge Building at Insider. -via reddit

Don’t worry, it’s just an optical illusion, and a good one too! French artist JR created a new installation that pays homage to classic artworks that are unappreciated and unseen. The installation, called La Ferita, is a massive photo collage installed on the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi. The artwork references the adversities and challenges that cultural institutions have faced over the past year, as My Modern Met details: 

Measuring 28 meters high and 33 meters wide, this optical illusion creates a “crack” in the exterior of the building so that viewers can see masterpieces like Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera. It was installed as Italy entered another lockdown that will last until April 6, closing the doors of all cultural institutions once again. At the same time, the installation of La Ferita also launches a new public art initiative for the city by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and philanthropist Andy Bianchedi.

“They say the museums are closed, but it's up to us to open them. Here is Florence, the city of Boticelli, Donatello, Machiavel, and Dante, we opened the Palazzo Strozzi,” JR says of the piece on his Instagram. “These last few months, we have been deprived of the possibility to be together… but we still have the freedom to dream, to create, to envision the future. Maybe it's not much, but we have that!”



Image via Instagram

Our World in Data compiled a chart showing who we spent our time with at different stages of our lives. Altogether, we spend more time alone than with anyone else. And as we grow older, we tend to spend more and more time alone. But that doesn't mean we are necessarily lonely.

Spending time alone is not the same as feeling lonely. This is a point that is well recognised by researchers, and one which has been confirmed empirically across countries. Surveys that ask people about living arrangements, time use, and feelings of loneliness find that solitude, by itself, is not a good predictor of loneliness.

The chart is interactive at the site, so you can look up any age and see who Americans are spending their time with.  -via Digg

Speedriding or speed riding is paragliding on skis. We can assume the point is to go as fast as you can. In this video, French speedrider Valentin Delluc shows what he can do while speeding through Avoriaz, a resort town in the French Alps. The resort was closed at the time, so the only one in danger is Delluc himself -and the film crew. Of course, it was Red Bull that talked him into it, as if you couldn't tell by the product placement. The run is only two minutes, then there are making-of clips and outtakes. -via Geekologie

The Shigir Idol, a nine-foot-tall totem pole decorated in geometric carvings and human faces, is the only surviving Stone Age wooden artifact . Experts now believe, thanks to new research, that the sculpture is older than Stonehenge. Understanding its origins would also change our understanding of our ancestors, as Artnet details: 

Found in a peat bog by gold miners in 1890, the idol is the jewel of the collection at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, a remote institution in Russia’s Ural Mountains. Its age remained a mystery even to experts until 1997, when Russian scientists using radiocarbon dating found that it was 9,500 years old. The unexpected find initially prompted skepticism from some experts, given the sophisticated nature of the piece, now believed to be the earliest known ritual art.

In 2018, more advanced accelerator mass spectrometry technology testing the pristine core of the larch wood statue—rather than the surface, which had undergone numerous conservation treatments over the more than 100 years since its discovery—determined that it was actually even older: closer to 11,600 years old.

Now, a new study published in Quaternary International has pushed that date back by a further 900 years—making it more than twice as old as Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids.

“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” the paper’s lead author, archaeologist Thomas Terberger, the head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, in Germany, told the New York Times. “The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”

The statue’s complex iconography, with its abstract symbols, defies what archaeologists believed they knew about the hunter-gatherer societies in Europe and Asia, whose artistic output was thought to be limited to animal images and hunting scenes, not objects with ritual significance.

Image via Artnet 

A new research has discovered the identity of the tiny humans that lived on the islands of Southeast Asia over 50,000 years ago. The origin of these ‘hobbits’ are unknown, but the study suggests that they are closely related to Denisovans and Neanderthals. Fossil evidence of the two ‘hobbit’ species,  Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis, showed that their small stature is a result of an evolutionary process, as Gizmodo details: 

At the same time, the new paper, led by João Teixeira from the University of Adelaide, provides further confirmation of interbreeding between the Denisovans and modern humans, specifically modern humans living in Island Southeast Asia, an area that encompasses tropical islands between east Asia, Australia, and New Guinea. Denisovans—a sister group of Neanderthals—reached the area some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, but archaeologists have yet to uncover a shred of fossil evidence related to these so-called “southern Denisovans.” That’s obviously weird, given the overwhelming genetic evidence that they lived in this part of the world, but it means there are important archaeological discoveries still waiting to be found. At least in theory.

So, the new paper, co-authored by anthropologist Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London, suggests modern humans interbred with Denisovans but not H. floresiensis or H. luzonensis. That’s an important result, because it could help to explain the presence of the diminutive humans, who died out around 50,000 years ago, in this part of the world. Excitingly, it could mean that these “super-archaics,” in the parlance of the researchers, “are not super-archaic after all, and are more closely related to [modern] humans than previously thought,” explained Teixeira, a population geneticist, in an email.

In other words, H. floresiensis or H. luzonensis might actually be the elusive southern Denisovans.

Image via Gizmodo 

Space is a vast and unknown area that holds more mysteries than we can comprehend. Sure, we know some aspects of the system the Earth is in, but how about outside the solar system? Well, astronomers may have figured out how to navigate around interstellar space. Check the full video here! 

(via Flipboard) 

Image via wikimedia commons 

Here’s another way to recycle your empty plastic bottles! Well, it also requires extra effort, but hey, it’s an alternative material for reducing noise. Researchers from the University of Washington, along with architecture firm NBBJ teamed up to create a new sound absorption technique that uses empty bottles embedded inside walls. Their prototype provided a 60 percent reduction, as Input magazine details: 

The basic idea is that empty bottles neutralize noise by capturing some of the sound energy that passes by; once inside, the waves bounce around the cavity and clash with the narrow shape of the bottle’s neck, causing the energy to dissipate. So the group decided to see what would happen if a wall was made with bottles embedded inside, with the necks facing outwards and the cavities hidden inside.

According to the group, prototype slabs of the wall were introduced to NBBJ’s office and they measured noise reductions of around 13 decibels... or the equivalent of wearing noise-canceling headphones. That’s pretty incredible and could go a long way towards helping workers who are sensitive to noise being made by people around them (read: me).

“We can’t ignore the human voice. It ties back to a survival mechanism,” says Ryan Mullenix, a partner at NBBJ, in an interview with Fast Company. “That has a big impact on our executive function, our cognitive control, our emotional self-regulation. In the basic sense, it just stresses us out.”

Image via Input Magazine

A structural battery is an energy storage device that can be part of a structure. Scientists have made a structural battery ten times better than the existing batteries in the market. Researchers from the Chalmers University of Technology and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden created a ‘massless’ structural battery for electric cars: 

In fact, these cars must be specially designed to carry the mass of the batteries. But what if the frame of the car could hold energy? “Due to their multifunctionality, structural battery composites are often referred to as ‘massless energy storage’ and have the potential to revolutionize the future design of electric vehicles and devices,” the researchers explain.

The battery’s combined qualities (or “multifunctionality”) make it 10 times better than any previous massless battery—a project scientists have worked on since 2007.

Chalmers University of Technology writes in a press release:

“The battery has an energy density of 24 Wh/kg, meaning approximately 20 percent capacity compared to comparable lithium-ion batteries currently available. But since the weight of the vehicles can be greatly reduced, less energy will be required to drive an electric car, for example, and lower energy density also results in increased safety. And with a stiffness of 25 GPa, the structural battery can really compete with many other commonly used construction materials.”

Image via Popular Mechanics 

The original music video for "Y.M.C.A." is a happy, upbeat song. It's no wonder that people like to sing and dance to it a public events.

The Melodicka Bros, a duet from Italy, offer this more somber and melancholy version. Without changing the lyrics, "Y.M.C.A." becomes a downbeat message to young men who can find their only hope of respite at the local YMCA boarding house.

-via Laughing Squid

These babies look SOOO serious immersing themselves in art -- quite literally!

A child care service's Facebook page posted photos of babies left in their nursery as they were dressed in matching onesies. They really looked ready for their group art project.

Rainbow paint was splattered on the brown butchers paper, igniting the babies sense of curiosity and wonder. Soon enough we were all covered in paint! 

After a warm wash down and a change of clothes, the tired babies were ready for a hard earned rest. 

Process art is about the experience, the joy in creating!

Do not disturb!

Those are edible paints, right?!

Image Credits: Green Leaves Mawson Lakes / Facebook

This company collects discarded chopsticks and turns them into coasters, shelves, cutting boards, and furniture!

A couple of times a week, they pick up these chopsticks from over 300 restaurants around Vancouver, which reach around 150 kilograms a day. Upon undergoing some processes like being sorted, dipped in water-based resin, roasted in a massive oven, and cut to different sizes, they're now ready to be used.

The process looks easy, but for sure it takes a lot of craftsmanship from the workers to perfect them. Hats off to them!

Watch their story here.

Video Credit: Business Insider Today

Here’s a small fact: the Pokemon franchise isn’t devoid of spin-offs; other games besides their mainline entries have been published in most of the Nintendo consoles. Games such as Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Pokemon Snap, and Pokemon Go, and other titles are well-known to the fans, but what about the other spin-offs? Did you know that the franchise had a tactical RPG published? Check out Nintendo Life’s list of forgotten Pokemon spin-offs and see for yourself! 

Image via Nintendo Life 

If you’re one of those people who are waiting for the sequel to the 2017 game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, maybe this expansive mod could satisfy you for a while. Thanks to the Wii U version of the game being playable in the Cemu emulator, modders were given a chance to add more spice into the vast and breathtaking world of the game. The expansive mod, called Second Wind project, is a “large-scale story expansion,” as PC Gamer details: 

While development is still ongoing (it's apparently 60 percent complete overall, while a planned port to the Switch version is at one percent), according to the project breakdown among the things Second Wind plans to add are eight new areas, including a hub called Ordon Village, 15 sidequests, 38 meals, 28 animals including variants of existing ones, hand-to-hand martial arts, and the masks and gossip stones from previous Zelda games. There's also a shrine overhaul that will tweak all 120 shrines to make them look unique, and give some "new puzzles, alternative solutions, new enemy encounters and more."

Second Wind also aims to incorporate survival elements, crafting blacksmiths, rebalanced mechanics, changes to quivers and unique horses, all of which come from existing mods. And that's not all. There's a Second Wind wiki with more information, and a Discord server with the FAQ. 

Image via PC Gamer 

Temujin Kensu was convicted of the murder of a college student in Port Huron and sentenced to life without parole. However, there was no physical evidence that connected him to the murder. He was still convicted partly because of a theory presented by the prosecutor at trial: that he was a cunning ninja. That might be the silliest sentence you and I both have read, but it’s all true, as NBC News details: 

Over the years, attorneys, journalists and independent investigators have challenged that theory and raised critical questions about Kensu’s conviction. High-profile supporters, including retired U.S. Senator Carl Levin, have pushed for his release. Since the conviction, a jailhouse snitch recanted his testimony that Kensu had confessed, and a federal judge overturned his sentence after finding, in part, that his lawyer provided ineffective counsel by never calling a crucial alibi witness.

Yet Kensu remains in prison.

Since the 1980s, more than 2,000 innocent people have been exonerated and released from prison, thanks to DNA testing and new evidence uncovered by advocates working on behalf of the wrongfully convicted. But Kensu's case illustrates the obstacles in undoing a questionable conviction when there is no forensic evidence absolving the defendant, such as DNA results.

The case “is a really frustrating example of how unfair our system can be,” said Imran Syed, Kensu’s attorney and the assistant director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic.

Kensu’s last shot at freedom lies with the state’s yet untested Conviction Integrity Unit. Modeled after efforts launched by local prosecutors to investigate innocence claims, Michigan’s CIU is one of only a handful of state-run units in the nation.

Image via NBC News