“This is a music typewriter: how music was typed before computers,” reads the caption of this photo from Mass1m01973. Just one among the many unique and fascinating pictures you can find on the Internet, from gynandromorph butterflies to random once-in-a-blue-moon moments captured in photos. Here’s another one that might blow your mind:

They may look like novelty household trinkets, but they’re actually grains of sand taken by Dr. Gary Greenberg, a scientist slash photographer with a knack for observing the miracles of the natural world through a microscope. The full slideshow is available for viewing on Science American. 

The world is just awesome! You can check out all 50 photos here. 

(Image credit: Mass1m01973, Gary Greenberg via Bored Panda)

It makes news headlines every time that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates switch places as the richest person on earth. What you have to remember is that those rankings are based on publicly available data. They don't include people who have enough money and power to hide their wealth. And then there's the problem of defining exactly what we mean by wealth. Cash and property are measurable, while the ability to use money that belongs to other people usually doesn't factor into the tally. And what about the power wielded by enriching and therefore obligating others? These abilities lead some to assert that the richest person in the world is actually Vladimir Putin.  

Once elected, Putin, like his predecessor, reported his finances and holdings publicly, including his salary and exact amount in his many bank accounts. He has continued to do so since. The result? Over the years while his salary has changed regularly from year to year, he has made approximately $100K-$190K annually in that span, for example in 2018 reporting an income of $135K. Today between his wife’s and his own accounts, the couple seem to have a little over a half a million in cash in various bank accounts, though why he isn’t investing this is rather curious given his apparent lack of any other investments and almost complete lack of actually needing any cash for his day to day life given the government foots the bill for most everything. Of this, Putin states, “Honestly speaking, I don’t even know what my salary is. They deliver it to me, I take it, put it my bank account and don’t even count it…”

As for his other assets, he also owns a studio sized apartment in Saint Petersburg, a slightly larger apartment in Moscow, owns a small garage, a couple cars, a small plot of land outside of Moscow, and otherwise has various minor assets of no great worth.

Of course, over the years people can’t help but notice that Putin has a collection of watches he wears very publicly whose purchase price combined is around that of his reported entire net worth, ringing in at about $400,000-$700,000 if various reports are to be believed. For reference, the highest valued watch he has been spotted wearing costs around $140,000- a Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar watch.

On top of that, the clothing he can often be seen wearing is likewise extremely expensive, such as his $6000+ tailored suits from outlets like Kiton and Brioni. Not just expensive suits, in one photo of him working out, Putin can be seen wearing sweatpants that cost over $1,400 a pair, apparently made from silk, cashmere and the tears of impoverished children, along with a similarly priced top.

Read up on what is known and what is rumored about Putin's wealth at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Presidential Press and Information Office)

What really makes us grateful for modern medicine is learning about not-so-modern medicine. In the 16th and 17th centuries, epilepsy was beginning to be seen as a disease instead of demonic possession, but there was still very little that could be done about it. Known by many names, such as grand mal, the sacred disease, crank, and the falling sickness, epilepsy was studied, but little understood.

The natural causes of the disease were debated extensively. Various explanations were proposed including rising vapours within the body; black bile and other bad humours; elemental similarities to thunderstorms; and excessive pride (leading to a fall).

The possible cures for the falling sickness were also wide-ranging and varied in their availability. The hermetic physician, Paracelsus, recommended mistletoe, blood from a decapitated man, pieces of the human skull, preparations of gold and coral or spirit of vitriol (now known to contain ether). Another treatment, based on the doctrine of signatures (which used herbs which resembled particular body parts to heal those parts), was powdered soap-wort seed, offered for three months at the time of the new moon; this was a substance which frothed when rubbed in water.  

Adding to the difficulty was the tendency to accuse a practitioner of witchcraft if a patient actually got better. Read about the early modern era of epilepsy at the British National Archives. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

The video above shows the top winner in the annual Illusion of the Year competition. It's called the Dual Axis illusion by Frank Force. Is this shape spinning vertically or horizontally? You can't tell, because it's a 2D image, but your brain makes it seem one or the other, until visual cues help you change the orientation. Another of the finalists, Bodiject Fingers by Kenri Kodaka, shows us how seeing one's fingers as disembodied from our hands makes them seem like separate foreign objects.  

All it takes is a mirror, and some students to freak out. See all the top ten finalists here. -via reddit

Growing up, I have received a lot of the word “no” from my parents, and you might have as well, too. And, if you’re a parent, you might have said a lot of “nos” to your kids. But how often should a child be corrected? When does the word become detrimental to a child?

While redirecting toddlers and small children is often necessary to help keep them safe, as they grow and start to explore their world, the negative reinforcements often increase. They have curfews; limits on their television watching or video game playing; bedtimes, etc. Then, as children turn into adolescents, they start to test the limits of their household rules. They want to assert their independence which can lead to household friction. As a result, the “no’s” may increase. Then, as they go through their teenage years, their pushing of boundaries can lead to even more negative responses. 

While the word “no” is not in and of itself a problem, constantly hearing negative feedback can be detrimental to a child's healthy development. As children grow, they are constantly exploring who they are and testing their limits. They want to be able to do what they want when they want. This manifests itself in them asking for more and more freedoms, even freedoms they may not be ready for. For example, they may want to sleep over at their girlfriend’s house, or feel school is a waste of time and want to quit.

Read more about this over at Psychology Today.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Unlike other plants, sweet potato plants do not have spines or poisons to defend themselves. Some of them have, however, something else that lets hungry herbivores know that they are not an all-you-can-eat buffet, a new study finds.

When one leaf is injured, it produces a chemical that alerts the rest of the plant—and its neighbors—to make themselves inedible to bugs. Sweet potato breeders could potentially engineer plants to produce the chemical as an all-natural pest defense.

Plant ecologists led by Axel Mithöfer of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, started to look into sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) defenses after they noticed something interesting about two varieties of the plant grown in Taiwan: The yellow-skinned, yellow-fleshed Tainong 57 is generally herbivore-resistant, but its darker orange cousin, Tainong 66, is plagued by insect pests.

To find out why, the team offered up Tainong 57 and 66 plants to hungry African cotton leafworm caterpillars. Both plants released at least 40 airborne compounds as the caterpillars snacked on their leaves. But Tainong 57 produced a lot more of a chemical called DMNT, which has a very distinct odor, the team details this month in Scientific Reports. (“The smell is not nice,” Mithöfer says. “You wouldn’t want it as a perfume.”)

The chemical DMNT causes the exposed plants to produce a protein called sporamin in their leaves, which makes caterpillars unwell when they eat the leaves.

Find out more about this over at Science.

(Image Credit: ivabalk/ Pixabay)

The ancient Babylonians were an amazing people who had many extraordinary achievements. Among those is a mathematical formula that I believe most of us still remember from eighth grade, and that formula was originally a solution to paying tax.

The particular problem for the ordinary working Babylonian was this: Given a tax bill that has to be paid in crops, by how much should I increase the size of my field to pay it?

This problem can be written down as a quadratic equation of the form Ax2+Bx+C=0. And it is solved with this formula [see photo above]:

Are your middle school memories returning?

Over four millennia later, millions of people across the planet still remember this formula thanks to the modern way mathematics is taught.

But far fewer people can derive this expression. That’s also due to the way mathematics is taught—the usual derivation relies on a mathematical trick, called “completing the square,” that is far from intuitive. Indeed, after the Babylonians, it took mathematicians many centuries to stumble across this proof.

[...]

Enter Po-Shen Loh, a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who has found a simpler way—one that appears to have gone unnoticed these 4,000 years.

Check out the full article over at Technology Review.

(Image Credit: Technology Review)

A neutron star truly has a unique magnetic field properties that it could change how we understand these enigmatic objects. It could also be a representative of an entirely new class of neutron stars.

… never before had a neutron star been detected with a magnetic field from one angle, and without one at others…

GRO J2058+42 is a pulsar neutron star about 30,000 light-years (9 kiloparsecs) away. Its binary companion is a type of star that spins so fast, it is spitting out a disc of material around its equator - a decretion disc. That's not super common, but not rare either.

The neutron star has a spin period of 196 seconds - relatively slow for a pulsar, but not outrageously. It's also what's known as an X-ray transient object, with variable X-ray emission.

More details about this weird space object over at Science Alert.

(Image Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech)

There is a LEGO-inspired burger restaurant in the Philippines called the Brick Burger. Not only is the place full of LEGOs, their burgers are, too. That’s right: they have their burgers on LEGO buns.

Sadly, they don’t stack, but that’s okay. Also sadly, these burgers aren’t served by humans dressed as minifigs. You can’t have everything.

The LEGO-themed burger comes in different flavors and colors.

I bet they have the buns all tossed in a bin in the back, just like how many of us store our own LEGO bricks. Except if they step on one of these, it’s no big deal.

Yum!

(Image Credit: Technabob)

Believe it or not, until recently, Buddhist nuns in the Himalayan region weren't allowed to hold leadership positions, or even exercise. That changed when the Drupka order instituted a new regimen for nuns that includes physical training, martial arts, and cycling. This is due to their spiritual leader, Gyalwang Drukpa, who has been working against patriarchy in Buddhism. Read more about the Drupka Kung Fu Nuns at Kottke.

This is Manggo. She is one of three cats living together in Japan, and she's an Instagram star because of her delightfully expressive face. Yes, Manggo is a large cat, but she's on a diet and has already lost half a pound.  





You can see 30 ranked pictures of Manggo at Bored Panda, and follow her progress at Instagram.

If you've ever purchased clothing online, you know how difficult it can be to find something that fits right. So you receive it, try it on, and return it for a different size. Or maybe you order three different sizes and return the two that don't fit. You might be surprised to learn that the ones you return may be sent straight to a landfill. This sounds awfully wasteful, and it is, but it's a matter of economics.

It actually costs a lot of companies more money to put somebody on the product, to visually eyeball it and say, Is this up to standard, is it up to code? Is this going to get us sued? Did somebody tamper with this box in some way? And is this returnable? And if it's clothing, it has to be re-pressed and put back in a nice packaging. And for a lot of companies, it's just not worth it. So they will literally just incinerate it, or send it to the dumpster.

Learn about the waste that comes with online retail and what you can do about it at CBC. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Peter Griffin)

Etsy seller Aunt Marty wants to protect both your dignity and your nose from the winter cold. She crochets cute animals that wrap around your face, garbing your schnoz with an animal. In addition to puppy forms, she offers skunks, pandas, cats, ducks, and roosters.

-via Design You Trust

The Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east end of Russia is a geologic wonder. It's covered with both snow and a chain of volcanoes, making it a difficult place for people to settle. Amid the volcanoes is a small gorge discovered only in 1975 that is known as the Valley of Death. There are no people there, and the valley acts as a trap: animals go in, but they don't come out.

When the snow melts, various critters, from hares to birds, appear in search of food and water. Many die soon thereafter. Predatory scavengers such as wolverines spot an easy dinner; they slink or swoop into the valley—only to die themselves. From lynxes to foxes, eagles to bears, this 1.2-mile-long trough has claimed innumerable victims.

But the killer here is a phantom. The dead, whose corpses are naturally refrigerated and preserved, show no traces of external injuries or diseases that would be responsible for their expirations.

Scientists have studied the region in the years since, and have almost pinpointed the reason for the animal deaths. They can't stay there long, however, or they might join the animal carcasses. Read about the cursed geography of the Valley of Death at Atlas Obscura. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: ISS Expedition 25 crew)

Here we have a mathematical and scientific breakdown of Santa Claus' trip around the world on Christmas Eve. It's a good thing little kids don't know all that much about math and physics. Yeah, it's silly, but interesting. -via Laughing Squid