Meghan Hughes used her powers to transform into a unicorn. Then she brought the warmth of her love to her neighbors by clearing snow in her neighborhood in Schenectady, New York. CBS 6 Albany reports:
She says she's pleasantly shocked by all the attention.
“I thought it would be fun to put the Halloween costume on and bring some joy to something that isn't very joyous,” she said.
Meghan says she may have a business on her hands! She tells us people have asked her to snow plow their driveways and even attend birthday parties for kids.
Artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach and sold the artwork for a tidy sum. But that's just the beginning of the story. Next, performance artist David Datuna came along and ate the banana!
Gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin was about to head to the airport when he heard that the banana was eaten. He darted to the space, clearly upset. A fair goer tried to cheer him up and handed him his own banana.
Perrotin and a gallery assistant re-adhered the borrowed banana to the wall just after 2 p.m.
The annual Sleepy Skunk movie trailer mashup is here! Clips from boatloads of movies from 2019 have been artfully edited for maximum impact. It starts out lively, kinetic, and goofy, then slides into an epic action section, followed by a tense and dramatic emotional section. If any of these clips pique your curiosity about a movie you haven't yet seen, there's a timeline listing them here. -Thanks, Louis!
Chemotherapy is scary and debilitating, but that's nothing compared to cancer. Chemotherapy harnesses dangerous poisons to kill cancer cells, which also harms healthy tissue. However, modern medicine is making great strides in targeting cancer cells exclusively. But there did that idea come from? Strangely, it began with a World War I chemical weapon. Learn about chemotherapy in the TED-Ed lesson. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Researchers have been following the migratory movements of a golden eagle named Harper for five years. This year, they also tagged his mate Athena with a solar-powered tracker. The two eagles spent the summer on the shores of the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, then flew south for the winter. Harper took off a couple of days before Athena, and they took separate routes. But they both ended up in Bernheim Forest near Clermont, Kentucky ...and they found each other!
Bernheim Conservation Director Andrew Berry said Athena traveled down toward Fort Knox then used the Crooked Creek Wildlife Corridor to make her way back to Bernheim Forest.
Athena spent the first night alone in Bernheim, but found Harper the next morning — likely after calling to each other. Together, they flew to the top of a knob and sat together, Berry said.
“It was really awesome to see her fly 1,700 miles back to Bernheim and then within 24 hours be able to relocate her companion Harper,” he said.
Dog lovers can't help but let out a tiny 'aww' when they watch this video of a dog enjoying a soak in a tub of water. I know I did. The sheer excitement of our furry, black friend cannot be contained as he flails about in the water with enough energy to harness a small town. Such random, internet gems remind me of the simple joys in life.
We know from stories of the Old West that newspapers of the time were more dedicated to sensationalism than facts. A good yarn sold papers, especially in areas for away from the place where the story occurred. But over time, journalism changed and "fact checker" became an occupation, although a grinding one usually relegated to women. Publications that wanted to build a reputation as reliable began to filter stories through fact checkers before publication, but it wasn't a popular innovation with everyone.
If writers were pitted against fact checkers, it was because the former resented a check on the idea of the lone genius whose words were unassailable. In the era of New Journalism, The New Yorker’s fact-checking arm came in for criticism from figures like Tom Wolfe, who saw in it a form of groupthink and regarded it as a cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.
Can a person’s fate be subject to randomized chance? In this context, the “chance of induction” or the likelihood of being drafted for military service in Vietnam was entirely up to a lottery system.
Participants in the draft lottery could not have known until decades later that they were taking part in one of history’s largest and unprecedented randomized experiments that forever changed the way social scientists understood large-scale data collection. Soon, researchers began investigating the life-altering consequences the lottery had on the men who were drafted.
“The lotteries” not only changed how the Selective Service chose men for the conflict in Vietnam, they also marked a turning point in the history of science. By assigning military induction via an arbitrary factor uncorrelated with personal traits, the lotteries amounted to an experiment.
Eleven years after the fall of Saigon, Norman Hearst, Thomas B. Newman, and Stephen B. Hulley used their knowledge of the Selective Service Lotteries to design a study that would answer that question. They could not simply examine the correlation between service in Vietnam and mortality, because serving in the military might correlate with other factors—such as a willingness to take risks—that would independently make individuals more likely to die. Hearst, Newman, and Hulley recognized this problem and knew the solution: a randomized experiment, which assigns treatment (here, to military service) by chance.
But how exactly did the system work?
The draft lotteries worked in just this way. In each lottery, dates—representing the birthday of draft-eligible men—were randomly paired with the numbers 1 to 365 (or 366 for lotteries covering a leap year). In the first lottery, the succession of birthdates drawn from a vase determined the assigned lottery number—the first date drawn received lottery number 1; the second date, number 2; and so on. In subsequent lotteries,officials improved the randomization by simultaneously drawing numbers and birthdates from different receptacles. The number paired with each birthdate determined the order in which men were called for military induction.
The influence of the lotteries was far-reaching, sowing the seed for numerous other studies that had practical implications for politics, economics, psychology, mortality, and socioeconomic life.
Recognizing the parallels between the draft lotteries and an experiment, Hearst, Newman, and Hulley began scanning the birthdates of men who died in California and Pennsylvania from 1974 to 1983. The team tallied the number of birthdates called for induction and compared that with the count of birthdates not called for induction. If the draft lotteries did affect death rates, the tallies would differ.
In an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the team reported a greater frequency of birthdates that had been called for induction among the death certificates. Specifically, in results still relevant to today’s veterans, the team reported that having a draft-selected birthdate increased mortality among draft-eligible men by about 4 percent, including a 13 percent increase in the rate of suicide and an 8 percent increase in the rate of motor-vehicle death.
Consider, for instance, the puzzle of how life experiences interact with individuals’ genetic endowments. According to research by Lauren Schmitz and one of us (Conley), being drafted propelled men who were already genetically disposed toward smoking to start doing so. Normally, one cannot randomly assign smoking in a scientific study; each lottery effectively did so because of the greater access to cigarettes that it provided draftees.
In 1990, the MIT economist Joshua Angrist became the first to use the draft lottery as an experiment for studying social and economic experiences.
In political science, researchers studied the lotteries to understand how exposure to public policy influences civic life. Tiffany C. Davenport found that parents whose sons received lottery numbers likely to be called for induction turned out to vote at a higher rate than parents whose sons did not receive such low lottery numbers—an effect that was most pronounced in towns with a war casualty.
Studies on the Vietnam Lotteries were possible because they took place right before the Information Age (around the 1970s) when digital records and databases were being introduced.
This year marks the 50th anniversary since the Vietnam Selective Services Lottery was inaugurated in the United States.
Read more about the impact of “The Lotteries” at The Atlantic.
Alzheimer's and dementia are some neurocognitive diseases typically correlated with aging. However, recent studies suggest that cognitive impairment is linked to inflammation caused by a leaky blood-brain barrier rather than the natural process of getting old. It's safe to say that more research is needed to establish the link between the two.
For Kaufer and fellow scientists, that hypothesis is supported by several years of studying epilepsy among brain trauma patients. They discovered that certain brain injuries, like stroke or football concussions, inflict damage on the blood-brain barrier, which protects your brain from foreign harmful agents, such as albumin, entering through the bloodstream.
In their recent experiment, they were able to disrupt the inflammatory response triggered by albumin and reverse pathological signs of aging (thereby improving brain function) in young and old mice by using a new anti-inflammatory drug on their brain.
Lest we get ahead of ourselves, it's important to note that few animal studies have succeeded in translating to clinical human trials. So, these results among mice may not necessarily be transferable to human cases of dementia, according to scientists.
Thanks to Kaufer and her team, they discovered new academic insights into rodent brain aging and they successfully developed new methods and techniques to test for leaks in the blood-brain barrier among patients.
Only a year after acclaimed director John Huston gave us The Maltese Falcon, he was called up to serve in World War II. The army put him to work creating propaganda films, which he took seriously. Huston created three masterpieces, the last of which was Let There Be Light, an unscripted documentary that featured returning soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Previously referred to as battle fatigue or shell shock, the term PTSD didn't make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1980. Huston's one-hour documentary followed World War II veterans undergoing treatment at Mason General Hospital on Long Island.
When the Army saw the finished product, higher powers pulled the plug on the movie, citing concerns for the soldiers’ privacy. In contradiction to this, the Army approved several film stills from Huston’s footage (which clearly show the soldiers’ faces) to be published in a 1945 article for Life magazine on the treatment of “battle-fatigue” for wounded soldiers. Why was a powerful film tackling the complexities of PTSD denied a release? The decision would help push back the awareness and progress for PTSD treatment by another four decades.
“Eco-friendly, backyard DIY saunas” is not a phrase you would encounter every day. Thankfully, BZB Cabins and Outdoors turns this dream into a reality with their reasonably *coughs* priced Sauna Kits.
BZB recently rolled out a collection of “ready-to-assemble outdoor sauna kits that can be set up by two people in just a few days.”
The BZB saunas are the ultimateDIY project for those needing to unthaw during the freezing winter months. Costing between $5,000 and $14,950, the ready-to-assemble sauna kits come in a variety of styles, such as barrel, oval and igloo-shaped. The kits also come in different sizes, from a tiny, two-person sauna to a larger structure that fits up to eight people.
Fortune lists the five best things restaurants did in 2019 to improve dining experiences across America. From cuisine fusion to statement wallpapers and start-up boosters to non-alcoholic cocktails (good news, pregnant mommies), these moves by big names in the restaurant scene can inspire more restaurateurs to keep finding creative ways to improve their business.
I must say, what probably takes the cake on this list is the considerate gesture by several restaurants to keep toiletries, like diapers and menstrual products, in their customer restrooms.
Alexey Kondakov creates a masterful yet playful spin to classical art in Napoli Project. In his digital collages, he fuses “antiquated characters inside clothing shops and riding public transportation,” giving us a brilliantly fresh perspective of historic characters against the backdrop of a starkly different style and tone of a bygone era.
Using photo manipulation, Kondakov superimposes Renaissance paintings onto scenes from contemporary European locations including, but not limited to, Italy, Berlin and London.
To get a hint of just how much skill is required to do this, I made my own botched attempt to create Classical Meets Contemporary as seen above. Not as easy as it looks, folks.
To see an expert rendition of how photo manipulation is really done, follow Kondakov on Facebook or Instagram.
Most people think of cats as fairly inscrutable. Cat owners learn to read body language, as the predators keep their faces still and let their emotions come out in their tails. While it's true that cats don't use facial expressions the way people do, there are subtle changes in a cat's face that can give away their feelings. However, few people can reliably read those facial expressions. A recent experiment in which 6329 people were shown close-up images of cats' faces without the rest of their body or environmental context clues, the average score was only 59%, revealing that people are not good at reading a cat's face.
So why do researchers think they have any expression at all? Roughly 13 percent of subjects scored well on the test, getting at least 15 of the 20 questions correct. Those that did well were generally people who had extensive experience with cats, like veterinarians. That led researchers to conclude that people can become more attuned to the subtle flickers of emotion that may pass over a cat’s face.
“They could be naturally brilliant, and that’s why they become veterinarians,” Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist and the study’s senior author, told The Washington Post. “But they also have a lot of opportunity to learn, and they’ve got a motivation to learn, because they’re constantly deciding: Is this cat better? Do we need to change the treatment? Does this cat need to go home? Is this cat about to take a chunk out of my throat?”
Do you think you have what it takes to be a cat whisperer? You can take an online version of the test to see if you outscore the average participant.
