Many geek gifts consist of little more than tee shirts, posters and the like... but while those are great, they also aren't exactly sophisticated. If you're looking for a tasteful gift that still has a geeky edge, you won't want to miss this round up of classy gifts for the nerds in your life.
The list includes everything from original artwork to jewelry and from customized glassware to surprisingly naturalistic Minnie Mouse ears. Don't miss the full list here.
Ready for some fascinating FUNgi biology? These are stinkhorn mushrooms from the Phallaceae family of fungi. Aptly named for their foul-smelling stench and hornlike shape, stinkhorns are gasteroid fungi, meaning they create spores inside their bodies rather than outside like most other mushrooms. Flies are attracted to the stinkhorn’s malodorous and gelatinous spore-containing substance called the gleba, which they feast on then distribute all over the forest floor.
The stinkhorn mushroom can often be found in tropical areas.
(Video: YouTube)
Harry, a doctoral student in New Zealand, refers to his octopus as "evil." The octopus in question appears to share similar sentiments about his biologist. He says that, four months ago, he accidentally knocked over a pipe where she was hiding.
She can carry a grudge. The octopus sucks up water from a pump and spits it at Harry when he walks past. The video above is from one of her unsuccessful (but recorded) attempts. Harry has gotten thoroughly soaked.
-via Super Punch
Are we at the dawn of a new age? “The Age of A.I.” grapples with the reality behind that sentiment and the weight that the world of artificial intelligence bears on real life applications, from developing the latest technology to finding innovative solutions to global issues. The 8-part docuseries is a YouTube Originals production available for streaming this week on December 18.
-via Android Central
(Video: YouTube)
A fully intact 1930s fresco painted by Frederick Olmsted Jr. was found beneath layers of paint on the plain white walls in the hallway of the venerable San Francisco Art Institute. It's one of a dozen murals painted over at the institute. https://t.co/BZnEelgkzM pic.twitter.com/5pQmX5bfRT
— NBC Bay Area (@nbcbayarea) December 13, 2019
San Francisco Art Institute Facilities Manager Heather Hickman Holland noticed some unusual bumps in a wall at the school. She first thought they were cobwebs, but later realized they were outlines of faces! A little digging revealed that there are a half-dozen or so murals underneath the painted walls at the school, frescoes painted in the 1930s as a project of the Works Progress Administration.
The school received a city art grant to uncover small squares of paint on the walls, revealing hints of what may lie underneath. The school eventually received grants from the Henry Mayo Newhall Foundation and the national Save America’s Treasures to finally remove the paint on the wall where Olmsted’s mural was believed to rest.
As architectural conservator Molly Lambert and her team began peeling away the paint, the faces of 1930s workers began to emerge from their long slumber. The nine figures were back at work cutting and moving slabs of marble, smoking cigarettes and polishing the newly cut pieces.
“Of course when you uncover something like this you’re not sure what the quality’s going to be,” Lambert said. “But this is fantastic.”
Once the bulk of the paint was removed, the work came down to a lot of delicate scraping to remove the final layers. Lambert estimated the fresco was covered over in some dozen layers of paint.
The first fresco revealed was a work by Frederick Olmsted. Read about the discovery at NBC Bay Area. -via Metafilter
One way to eat a Nobel Banquet meal is by winning a Nobel Prize. That's kind of difficult, though. You have to be really good at something, and, unfortunately, the categories of that something are tightly restricted. Unfairly, really. I mean, there's not even a Nobel Prize category for monster trucks, which shows how out-of-touch the Nobel Committee is these days.
Anyway, you can still eat like a winner at the Stadshuskällaren, a hoity-toity restaurant in Stockholm. Upon reservation and request, diners can eat any of the meals offered at the Nobel Banquets dating back to 1922. The Smithsonian reports:
“The Nobel Banquet is a celebration that’s known worldwide, so we thought it would be a good idea to let everyone have the opportunity to enjoy the menus and taste what it’s like,” says Maria Stridh, co-owner and CEO of Stadshuskällaren. “It’s a fun thing to do if you’re traveling from another country and want to try something special that’s related to Sweden. Often people will select a certain year that’s important to them, such as the year that they were born or the year when someone from their country won the prize.”
-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Stadshuskällaren
The Chikuraku is a 3-day festival celebrated each year by thousands in Taketa City (Oita Prefecture) in Kyushu, Japan.
Rather than let their bamboo forests fall into disrepair, the city came up with the idea of carrying on with their felling and using the bamboo in an annual lantern festival. It began with just 400 and has grown, gradually, to 20,000 bamboo lanterns.
Learn more about how economic changes in Taketa City’s bamboo industry marked the birth of this beautiful display of lights.
Photo: sankei photo via Spoon & Tamago
October 22, 2017 — Storm clouds had gathered above the Central United States, and they released a flash of lightning so huge it lit up the skies above three states, namely, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The flash of lightning, which spanned over 310 miles (500 kilometers) horizontally, was so totally unexpected that a group of researchers wrote a study about it, and they described it as a “megaflash”. It was one of the longest flashes of lightning ever recorded.
Typically, regular lightning flashes measure between just 0.6 miles and 20 miles (1 and 20 km) in length. But as increasingly sophisticated mapping techniques have revealed, some truly colossal bolts are crackling above our heads. These recent discoveries raise an interesting question: How big can lightning actually get? And should we be worried about these atmospheric heavyweights?
More about this over at LiveScience.
(Image Credit: FelixMittermeier/ Pixabay)
We humans are creating digital data at an extremely fast pace. Experts predict that by 2020, each person on Earth will be producing an average of 1.7 megabytes of data every second. That’s a gigabyte every 10 minutes.
This plastic bunny could be the key in storing all of those digital data.
Today, most data is stored in 1s and 0s, usually on magnetic- or optical-based systems such as hard drives or DVDs. That’s far from ideal, given that the systems have a max lifespan of about a century and the amount of data each device can store is tiny compared to the massive amount humanity produces.
This is where DNA data storage comes in.
Past research has shown that it’s possible to translate the 1s and 0s of binary code into the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs of DNA and then create artificial DNA molecules containing that code. A single gram of this DNA can store a billion terabytes of data and preserve it for potentially thousands of years.
A team of European scientists has found a way to store that DNA in pretty much any object. They have demonstrated this capability by encoding instructions for creating a 3D-printed plastic bunny right in the bunny itself.
For their study, which was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology on Monday, the researchers first encoded the printing instructions for the bunny in DNA. They then encased that DNA in glass nanobeads and added the beads to the plastic used to 3D print the bunny.
“Just like real rabbits, our rabbit also carries its own blueprint,” researcher Robert Grass said in a press release.
After printing the first bunny, the scientists cut off a bit of its ear and extracted the DNA-containing beads. A DNA sequencer was then used to decode the instructions, which they used to create another bunny complete with the DNA-containing nanobeads. They did this until they had five generations of identical bunnies.
Amazing!
(Image Credit: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich/Erlich Lab LLC, Israel)
A man from Perry Hall, Maryland, was finishing his shift at a Baltimore auto shop when he received a text from his pregnant wife asking him to buy cookies on his way home.
The man was told to stop by the store and pick up some of her special cookies. “I already knew which kind and where to get them because there is only one store where I know they are sold,” the man said. His wife’s simple wish turned out to be a “life-changing shopping trip.”
Doing what his wife said, the man stopped at the Food Lion market in Baltimore and bought the cookies. He also bought a $10 Cash Club scratch-off ticket when he saw another customer buy the same ticket.
He scratched off the ticket later while watching TV with his wife.
"I sat there scratching and listening to the TV in the background," the player said. "Then, I see that I matched a number and I was happy to see it was $10,000. When I realized I misread the number, I almost jumped off the couch!"
The ticket was a $100,000 jackpot winner.
The father of four boys and a baby girl on the way said he and his wife plan to use the money to pay off their car loan and credit cards, buy holiday gifts and save for expenses related to the upcoming birth of their daughter.
What a very lucky man.
(Image Credit: Maryland Lottery/ UPI)
Brock Armstrong has recently been investigating a fancy new stationary bike, which arrived on the market not too long ago. The bike uses a variation of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). The bike appeals to Brock’s fashionista side, inner nerd, and inner coach because of its features, but despite that being the case, he still finds himself scratching his head.
This is where the stumbling block starts for me. The bike's website claims that the device is "clinically proven to give you the same cardio benefits of a 45-minute jog in under 9 minutes, with only 40 seconds of hard work."
Really? On a stationary bike? Where you aren't using your arms at all, your skeleton is supported by a seat, and your legs are only moving through a biomechanically repetitive and limited range of motion? I find that claim dubious at best.
What is HIIT? And what are its problems?
Find out more by reading Brock’s article over at Quick and Dirty Tips.
(Image Credit: Ichigo121212/ Pixabay)
Don’t worry. It’s just a t-shirt with a picture of a baby on it.
Not many details can told about this photo, but it appears to have emerged from a Russian Imgur user named A Russian And His Bike.
He tagged the image “Please, if you are ever washing your favourite shirt with a picture of your child on it, just put a warning note on the washer or something…”
Dozens of Imgur users commented the image had made them do a serious double take. More than one asked him to add a similar warning to the actual upload.
One commenter, typical of many, said “'GOOD GRIEF! Put a note on the title that actually shows up on the thumbnail, too, please!’”
I wonder where the real baby is when this photo was taken.
(Image Credit: DailyStar)
There are plenty of no-frills dessert recipes out there that manage to still be hits without the hassle, especially for the holidays when you have guests over. You can easily tweak these recipes to your liking, but the basic groundwork is already laid down for you, and the rest of the creative process, like decorating and adding your own personal touch, is in your hands. These ideas could also be handy for baking beginners. I would personally want to try making those cute-looking Oreo snowman balls. Edible Frosty the Snowman, anyone?
Find the links to all 15 recipe ideas from cnet here.
(Image credit: justataste / Instagram)
“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)
