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.

Find out more at My Modern Net.

Photo: Pixabay / Pexels ; Wikimedia Commons

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.

(Image credit: Luke Rogers)

The season is upon us, so it's time to watch the greatest of all Christmas movies: Die Hard. Redditor lammage01 is helping to spread that special Christmas cheer with this Advent calendar inspired by the classic Bruce Willis film. He used artwork borrowed from A Die Hard Christmas: The Illustrated Holiday Classic, a storybook that retells the classic tale.

Each day of this time of expectation and preparation, pull a tab out. Terrorist leader Hans Gruber will fall just a little bit more to the bottom of Nakatomi Tower.

-via Ace of Spades HQ

Before the development of the printing press, book s were serious business. They were copied painstakingly by hand, one copy at a time, and the resulting work was worth a lot of money. Since these manuscripts were tempting to thieves, many of them included a curse upon any who would steal or abuse them. They might even rhyme.

Who folds a leafe downe
ye divel toaste browne,
Who makes marke or blotte
ye divel roaste hot,
Who stealeth thisse boke
ye divel shall cooke.

Read more of these medieval book curses at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

Photographer Lara Vychuzhanina of Yekaterinburg, Russia, imagined the dolls Barbie and Ken living in Russia during the final years of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. She set the dolls in a dismal apartment, which is an intricate recreation in miniature, down to the brand-name products in the kitchen.  



See more images from this series at Bored Panda.

The artist known as My Dog Sighs is fascinated by faces, especially eyes. Some of his eyes are enormous, all-consuming images. Others are smaller, but equally vivid. I especially enjoy his cans, which he paints to add faces to pre-existing bodies.

That's not a sculpture of a banana. Artist Maurizio Cattelan had considered making one out of resin. But, instead, he simply stuck a real banana to a wall with a strip of duct tape. It sold at auction at the Art Basel event in Miami Beach.

Although the art news website Artsy does not say precisely what the price was, it does mentioned that the sculpture had been priced at $120,000.

It's called Comedian. Cattelan intends it as a joke. I suspect that his audience, especially the person in it who purchased the banana, may be the butt of the joke.

-via Chris Arnade | Photo: Zeno ZottiJacopo Zotti

Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (previously at Neatorama) takes the art of the pie to the next level. She unveiled her latest work at reddit. It's a raspberry Christmas pie featuring Baby Yoda! Check out the details that make it special: the edge is festooned with holly and candy cane shapes, but also has three Mandalorian helmets. The baby is drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows and a candy cane. His eyes are shiny thanks to a glaze of maple syrup. And look at his tiny Santa hat! You can enlarge the picture here. See more of Clark-Bojin's pies at her website and at Instagram.

Update: We now have an image of the pie before it was cut!

Winter may be coming, but this subreddit’s cold reception to the franchise is icier than the Night King. 

In 2019, the record-breaking HBO fantasy series, Game of Thrones, came to its conclusion after nearly eight years since its first episode aired in the U.S. in 2011. The crowd reactions to the season finale were mixed, to say the least, with fans across the globe generally divided on whether they love or hate season 8, which ran from May to April of 2019. 

Reddit's 2019 Year in Review lists the leading television community platforms on the website, and enthroned at the top 2 are freefolk followed by the GoT community itself. This is not so surprising considering the massive buzz its creators, Dan Weiss and David Benioff, have generated since the very beginning, from the breathtaking panoramic sets to the gruesomely unexpected character deaths. After all, who doesn’t get fired up from their favorite TV show? 

Fans who were keen to lambast the show identified their group as refusing to “bend the knee” to the HBO installment, hence the name “freefolk.”

Did you know that r/freefolk was able to raise over $100k for Emilia Clarke’s (Daenerys Targaryen) SameYou charity? 

Read the full story at The Wrap.

Photo: @iyasirhere / Twitter)

A little girl wakes up on a special day and wants her hair to look perfect. But she's just a kid, and her father knows nothing about hair styling (obviously someone else did his). You might think this is about black hair and about a father overcoming his incompetence, but it's much more than that. Hair Love was directed by Matthew A. Cherry, producer of BlacKkKlansman, Everett Downing Jr., animator in Up, and Bruce W. Smith, animator in The Princess and the Frog. -via Metafilter 

We know that there are children who develop even in the worst circumstances, while there are others who are sensitive. The question is, why is it that some children become the latter and others the former? That is what pediatrician and researcher Tom Boyce has been asking for over four decades.

Starting in the 1970s, Boyce, like many pediatricians, observed that most kids were physically and mentally resilient—relatively immune to illness, injury, and disease. But a small group of kids seemed to accumulate a disproportionate number of health and behavior problems: from severe respiratory disease, injuries, and developmental delays, to more mental and behavioral issues, like anxiety, depression, and aggression. He could see these kids tended to come from families that faced a lot of stress or adversity, in the form of socioeconomic disadvantage or general misfortune.

There was, Boyce found, a consistent link between family stress, adversity, and all kinds of childhood illnesses, injuries, and behavioral disorders. The associations, however, were modest.

They were statistically significant, meaning they were unlikely to be due to chance, but they could only explain a small portion—just 10%—of different outcomes, of why a child with more stress would have worse health and behavior.

Boyce wondered: What if it was a child’s reaction to the stress, and not the type or amount of stress, that predicted who would suffer most? Clearly excessive stress is bad for all children (as it is for adults); governments, doctors, and communities should focus on reducing poverty and violence to support families and minimize stress. But were some kids better able to weather those stressors?

Read more about what Boyce found out over at Quartz.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Watch this 1-minute time lapse of two guys transforming the interior of an old van into a ‘tiny home’ complete with a kitchen sink, multiple storage, computer desk and bed! 

Now that’s tiny living with a big mind. 

It’s unclear whether the van actually moves though. 

Would you ever live in one of these? 

-via Gyfcat

These are harmful bacteria that cause strep infections, which are infections that kill over 500,000 people each year. Why are they so successful in infecting the body? It is because they are masters of disguise. To hide from the immune system, they blanket their surfaces with molecules that resemble our own. David Gonzalez, a biochemist and microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego, state that this technique effectively provides the pathogens “cloaks of invisibility.”

...To avoid being snuffed out by the immune system, the bacteria that cause strep throat tear apart red blood cells and then dress themselves in the debris…

More details on Smithsonian.

I guess we could say that these pathogens can be comparable to ninjas. What do you think?

(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)

Anisha Kalidindi, an Ohio State University graduate student in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, had a dilemma. 

If you’ve ever worked at a laboratory with a microscope, you’d know that every setting in your equipment has to be precise for your results to be scientifically accurate. And in neuroscience experiments, ensuring you have an ideal setup with your specialized equipment greatly aids in being able to observe even the minutest details--down to each individual brain cell in a mouse. 

This is when Kalidindi had the bright idea to utilize a simple toothpick to track the tilt of the mouse’s head. 

We made a crude scale from –4 to +4 in both the up-down and left-right directions on the head mount, but we needed a way to indicate what position the mouse’s head was in. We needed something easy and fast that we use to track the position. Then the idea struck: a toothpick would be perfect. We would create two mini protractors (one for up-down and one for left-right), with the toothpick serving as the “position tracker.” We broke the toothpick in half and stuck the rough edge to the head mount. The pointy end would point to a position on our scale, one for up-down and one for left-right. And just like that with a toothpick and a bit of superglue, our problem was solved.

Now I can record the toothpick position, then go back and put the mouse’s head in an identical position day after day. Over a four-day experiment we have to go back into the darkroom every six hours, and the handy toothpick allows me to collect the data I need for my next insight into the ever-complex biology of the brain.

Walk into any molecular biology lab, and you may see something similar: an everyday object as humble as a toothpick next to (or even attached to) a very expensive piece of equipment. These are the labs where we learn about the types of cells that allow us to think, which proteins cause which diseases and how our genetic code can be targeted to improve our health. The environment where we make these lifesaving discoveries may seem utterly exotic, but we sometimes have to improvise with whatever we can find—just like anyone else. I know I will always have a toothpick at the ready from now on.

Perhaps Kalidindi’s setup could be replicated among other neuroscientists struggling in this area. After all, some of the most life changing discoveries have been made from improvisations. Just something to pick your brain. 

-via Anisha Kalidindi

Photo: snd63 / Needpix

Remember the "talking rings" from the 1960 movie The Time Machine? If only we had information technology that required no power or additional technology to decipher it. But that's not the case. In our own homes, we have trouble accessing home movies if they were recorded on VHS or even DVDs. How many time capsules contain those formats instead of printed photographs that anyone can access? Nick Yablon, author of the book Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule, began researching time capsules when he found a reference to them from 1911. They go back at least as far as 1876, although the term wasn't coined until later. He addressed the problem of time capsule packers who assumed the future would be somewhat consistent with the present.   

Sometimes the diversity of media materials that time capsule contributors thought would be useful for future historians hindered Yablon’s understanding rather than aided it—such as when Yablon came across phonography cylinders from 1901. “Researchers couldn’t directly use those wax cylinders,” he told Perspectives. “They were quite fragile.” Archivists had to carefully extract the music for anyone who wished to hear them. Wax cylinders weren’t the only unusual items Yablon came across in his research. San Francisco-based dentist Henry D. Cogswell’s 1879 time capsule—which Cogswell called a “great Antiquarian Postoffice [sic]”—included “a box of breath sweeteners, a mechanical pencil, a souvenir pen and bud vase from the Centennial Exposition, a silk bookmark, a wooden puzzle, a paperweight . . . and, presumably Cogswell’s own contribution, some false teeth.” In an interview with Perspectives, Yablon said that, while researching the book, he also came across a piece of “corn on the cob in an Oklahoma time capsule [from] 1913.” (“It was in fairly good condition,” Yablon added.)

On the other hand, those physical objects could be things you'd find in any antique store -except maybe the corn. It could be that 100 years isn't long enough to bury a time capsule, as long as there's no soon-to-be-obsolete information format inside. Read about the history of the time capsule, including the philosophies behind the different kinds of them, at Perspectives on History. -via Damn Interesting