The phenomenon known as the Fata Morgana mirage causes seafarers to see things that don't exist on the horizon. It's not due to seasickness or hunger or the relentless boredom of sailing driving one mad, but those things probably didn't help. It's a real illusion caused by the way light works with the atmosphere and the sea.

In 1818, when British explorer John Ross entered Lancaster Sound while seeking the Northwest Passage, he saw a mountain blocking his ship’s course and decided to sail no further. Ross named the mountain range the Croker Mountains, but a later expedition showed that they did not exist. In 1906, American explorer Robert Peary viewed a vast land northwest of Ellesmere Island and named it Crocker Land after his patron George Crocker. A couple of years later, Donald MacMillan went in search of the island and for five days chased the frozen apparition in vain before realizing that like Peary what he was seeing was an illusion.

A conspiracy theorist might see meaning in the similarity of the names, but these are just a couple of the big mistakes caused by the mirage. Read an explanation of how the Fata Morgana mirage works at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Juris Seņņikovs)

Artist Jenny Jinya is an illustrator who also does comics. She wrote a graphic tale about black cats that went viral, and now had added a new chapter that will tug at your heartstrings. Read the entire story on one page at Jinya's site. And if you enjoyed that one, you can also read a story about a little dog who's a good boy. Bring a hankie. -via Bored Panda

It has been suggested multiple times that nuclear power can be the alternative to the diminishing supply of fossil fuels as the demand for the energy source increases. The suggestion has increased traction as the climate change crisis becomes more urgent. However, is this alternative worth it? While it is a plausible source of energy, the risks can outweigh its benefits, as seen in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl and Fukushima are major nuclear-power disasters, where lives were lost. The New Yorker retells the Fukushima tragedy as the discussion for nuclear energy arise again. While nuclear energy is a great alternative, is the world ready for its production? Or are we going to have another major disaster again, as we cannot handle nuclear power well at the moment? 

image via wikimedia commons

Miyu Kojima is an employee of a firm that specializes in cleaning up homes in morbid pasts. She cleans up after the kodokushi (“lonely deaths”), where people who live alone are found dead in their homes. To show an aspect of the kodokushis’ lives before their deaths, Kojima creates dioramas of the rooms where they died. Her horror-esque dioramas are dark and grotesque, carefully detailed and eerily realistic, as Japan Times details: 

Scattered on a circular chabu-dai coffee table are empty jars of “one-cup” sake and shōchū (distilled spirits), the moldy remains of a convenience store bento-box lunch and horse-racing stubs — hints that the inhabitant may have met his sudden, solitary death while contemplating his chances at the racetrack.

In another room, a blue tarp holding a pool of blood is spread out below a severed noose tied to a ladder leading up to the loft. On the wall, written in tape, is the word “gomen” (“sorry”), while what appears to be a last will sits on the desk.

Then there’s the bathroom. Here, a red soupy liquid fills the bathtub, its contents unknown, and overflows onto the tiled floor.

image credit: Alex Martin via Japan Times

The use of food-related themes in art has been widespread as years pass by. From artists using food as a motif to speak about social issues, to using food as the main material in different mediums, from paintings to sculptures, food isn’t a newcomer in the field of art and self-expression. It seems that food is now also the main motif in decorative pieces. Inedible art decorations are everywhere, from food shops to cafes and home decor stores near you, these food objects are accessible and can be displayed in any corner of your home. The appeal behind this sudden trend of displaying inedible food may be related to the satisfaction of viewing the food you can’t eat, or just for the aesthetic. 

(via Vogue)

image via The Webster

Night-mode is a smartphone feature that shifts the colors of your screen from cold to warm tones, aiming to make you sleep better. However, a study led by Dr. Tim Brown suggest that relying on your phone’s night mode to help you sleep wouldn’t work. Blue light actually don’t disrupt sleep, contrary to popular belief. In fact, your phone’s yellow lights during night mode is actually worse, according to the study. The Guardian has the details: 

According to the study, brightness levels are more important than colour when it comes to stimulating the body clock. However, when the light is equally dim, blue is more relaxing than yellow.

This makes basic sense: daylight is yellow, twilight is blue, and sunrise and sunset are pretty reliable ways to tell your body clock what time it is. Of course, at this point, we only know it works on mice – and mice don’t have phones. “We think there is good reason to believe it’s also true in humans,” says Dr Brown.

There is perhaps a more obvious truth to be drawn – if your phone is telling you to switch to night mode, it is time to put down your phone.

It is not the colour of the screen that is keeping you awake; it is all the stuff your phone offers as an alternative to sleep at 2am. There is only one real night-mode switch: the off button.

image via wikimedia commons

Sleep is something mysterious, and not fully understood even by scientists. But one thing’s for sure: it is something essential in our lives. It has a crucial role in immune function, metabolism, memory, learning, and other vital functions.

Sleep has many great benefits in the body, especially in the brain. This is just one of the many benefits of sleep in the brain: it organizes the flow of fluids that can wash away build-ups of proteins as well as wastes around neurons.

When you sink into a deep sleep, a cycle of activity starts behind your closed eyelids. First, a slow electrical wave pulses through the brain. A few seconds later, the amount of blood within the brain drops. Then a wave of cerebrospinal fluid reverses its usual direction of flow and moves upward through large cavities in the lower and central portions of the brain. The pattern repeats about three times a minute for the duration of non-REM sleep, the typically dreamless phases when your eyes remain still.

In a recent study, researchers observed the rhythmic sequence uniting these three phenomena in humans for the first time and found the causal links between them. Their finding clarifies how sleep may protect the brain’s well-being by driving elements of an obscure “plumbing system” found in the brain only a few years ago.

In the near future, this newly discovered mechanism might be the basis for new treatments to prevent cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer’s disease as well as other conditions.

More about this study over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: ColiN00B/ Pixabay)

Scientists at Swiss university ETH Zurich have found a way to make chocolate shimmer, without the artificial colorants. The stunning incandescence is achieved through a surface imprint that disperses light to display an array of hues, similar to a chameleon’s skin. Instead of a coating, the researchers tried to do an impression on the surface, which allows a colorful shimmer to appear.  Researchers plan to refine the chocolate shimmer to a glow. Geek.com has the details: 

Thanks to experts from the FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, who developed a mould that makes it possible to imprint more than one chocolate at a time, this unique method can be scaled up for industry.

The scientists are in discussions with major chocolate producers, according to ETH; they even plan to establish a spin-off company. A patent for the process has also been filed.

“The project was only successful because different disciplines worked together,” the university said in a press release. “Fresh ideas prevented the project from stalling at crucial moments.”

image via Geek.com

Major depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States. In 2017, an estimated 17.3 million adults in the country had at least one major depressive episode. This number represented 7.1% of all U.S. adults. These people have had few treatment options, until now.

In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug called esketamine (Spravato). It is...

a fast-acting nasal spray derived from ketamine that is the first genuine advance in treating depression in more than 30 years.

First synthesized in the 1960s and still used globally as an anesthetic on battlefields and in surgery, ketamine became popular as an illicit club drug known as Special K in the 1980s and ’90s because it triggered trippy dissociative side effects. But nearly two decades ago, researchers noticed it banished depression even in people who are suicidal or resistant to treatment. Another plus: Their response was swift and profound.

Find out more about this drug over at Discover.

(Image Credit: Anemone123/ Pixabay)

The editing battles on this began after an Austrian teenager launched the Wikipedia entry.

If you ask Google “what is OK Boomer?”, Google would answer back that it is “an ageist catchphrase and internet meme that gained popularity throughout 2019, used to dismiss or mock attitudes stereotypically attributed to the baby boomer generation.”

Google’s answer comes from the then-current English language version of the OK Boomer Wikipedia page, which means that “the knowledge from the online encyclopedia branched out to the wider net”. It also helps explain why the editors behind the Wikipedia article feel so strongly about its content.

The online encyclopedia has been known in the past for its infamous edit warring, where editors delete changes and try to hijack a page to slant the encyclopedic summaries toward a subjective point of view. It seemed worth investigating the OK Boomer Wikipedia page to see if there were in fact signs of a fully digital, young-versus-old bloodbath.

But on his investigation, Stephen Harrison found an entirely different thing.

[It] was a generally respectful editorial process and a few young people who were contributing in good faith.

Find out more about this over at Slate.

This is wholesome.

(Image Credit: TeeFarm/ Pixabay)

Juno, NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting spacecraft, has discovered a new giant storm on the planet. While giant storms on this planet are not surprising, this storm in particular did something amazing: it has shouldered its way into a ring of storms found at Jupiter’s south pole, which converted the tiny pentagon of evenly spaced storms into a hexagon of evenly spaced storms.

“One of the very first things we discovered at Jupiter is that the poles don’t look like the rest of the planet,” Steve Levin of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

When Juno arrived in 2016, he adds, one of its finds was that the south pole had a giant central storm surrounded by a ring of five others. “Now we have six,” he says.

[...]

When the original storms, all of them about 7000 kilometres across, were first discovered (the new storm is about one-third as big), scientists were amazed by their symmetrical arrangement. But the recent change is even more amazing.

(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SWRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM)

You know the bares bones story of how Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came to be. First it was a story in a promotional booklet given to kids by Montgomery Ward in 1939. Then it became a simple song written by Johnny Marks and sung by Gene Autry in 1949. And then in 1964, the story was again fleshed out, this time for a TV special that is still broadcast 55 years later. But there's more to the story. Johnny Marks had a hard getting anyone interested in his Christmas song about a reindeer.

It was off to a slow start. Marks had pitched a demo for his new song but the biggest stars weren’t interested. Both Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby turned him down before Marks got a foot in the door with Gene Autry. The “Singing Cowboy” himself didn’t actually like the song, but his wife loved it, and she talked her husband into recording it as the B-side to another Christmas single he was recording for Columbia Records. By the end of the year, Marks’ little ditty about a flying red-nosed reindeer named Rudolph was the biggest song in the country.

Crosby released a new version the following year. Then Sinatra, and then the Supremes and the Temptations. By 1980, more than 500 different renditions had been commercially released. By the end of the century, it was the biggest Christmas song ever written, and so closely identified with the holiday that it is hard for subsequent generations to imagine the holiday without it. No one since Charles Dickens had so profoundly altered the mythology of Christmas itself.

Read how the different iterations of Rudolph and his red nose captured the public's imagination at HuffPo.

(Image credit: Rankin Bass)

Christmas, and the midwinter festivals that preceded it, have been around a very long time, so there is no end to the superstitions surrounding the holiday. The turning point of winter at the solstice was traditionally the start of a new year in northern climates, and therefore people did everything they could to ensure food, fortune, and fertility for the coming year. And it being winter, they had plenty of time stuck inside to come up with the "rules." Here is a small sampling.

Societal pressure to be happy and in love at Christmas is nothing new, consequently there is a glut of love divination superstitions for this time of year, strangely all aimed at women. For example, young women who go out and hit pigs with a stick at Christmas can tell the age of their husbands-to-be, presumably if they can avoid being arrested for trespassing and pig-bothering in the meantime. The first pig to squeal determines the age: old pig, old husband; young pig, young husband; no squeal, no husband.

If there’s a hen house next to the pig sty, knock on its door between 11pm and midnight. If the rooster answers, you’ll be married; if the knocking is followed by silence, you’ll not marry. Probably best to check there’s a rooster in there first, and make sure it is before midnight, as farm animals are briefly gifted with the power of speech at this time – naturally it’s fatal for a human to hear them.

There are also superstitions surrounding decorations, Christmas food, and gifts, at Folklore Thursday. -via Strange Company

Have you ever wondered what your auto mechanic is doing when it's too cold for anyone to bother bringing their car in? This must have been inspired by the jingling sounds of wrenches dropped by accident on the concrete floor. After you watch it once, go back and watch it again at 1.5x speed. Yeah, his wrenches are just a little bit out of tune, but the warm wishes are perfect. -via reddit

Jessica Myshrall’s grandmother loved euchre so much that her family dropped a deck of cards into her casket. “Deal us a hand, Beth,” Jessica’s grandfather said. Despite being in grief, the family laughed. The grandmother would have laughed, too.

For them, euchre is not just a card game; it is a rite of passage. Through illnesses, arguments, divorces, and death, they have played countless games of euchre.

Those who attend the Tuesday-night game continue to do so in the same way devout Christians attend service… Euchre has held us together and helped us heal.

Know more about Jessica’s story over at The Walrus.

What about you? What games do you and your family play together?

(Image Credit: Atchius/ Wikimedia Commons)