The Star Wars films have become widely popular over the years. Even now, in 2019, its influence still stays strong for both the young and old generations, and with the upcoming film The Rise of Skywalker, it will surely stay popular for perhaps forever across galaxies far far away.
The influence of the Star Wars franchise has even reached the anime genre. Check out these Star Wars anime openings found in YouTube. Check out some of them over at Geek.com.
It’s winter once again, and the days become colder as they pass by. What can we do to stay warm on this season? Some would opt to do 50 jumping jacks and chug eggnog. But with all the gadgets and devices that we have today, it’s become super easy to cope this winter.
Check out the things that you might consider having to keep yourself warm during the holiday season over at EnGadget.
Farmers in the Malnad region in Shivamogga, Karnataka, India, have been plagued by monkey raids on their crops. One of them, Srikant Gowda, decided to combat the monkey threat by making his dog more menacing. News 18 reports that he painted his dog to look like a tiger:
He found a farmer in Bhatkal who was using a fake tiger doll to scare away monkeys. Gowda triedthe same tactic in his areca field and realised it worked.
However, Gowda told Deccan Herald that the endeavour would not last much longer so he instead he painted his dog. The paint is made of hair dye and lasts up to a month before fading.
The farmer has also put up posters of his dog and and that of tigers in the grass to scare away rogue monkeys.
If you were around in 1997, you might recall seeing this Pizza Hut ad featuring the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev was a reformist who opened the door to peaceful revolution, yet represented the Communist Party to the end. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought perilous economic turbulence that affected Gorbachev as well as millions of everyday Russians. By the mid-90s, he needed money. And Pizza Hut, which had stepped into the Soviet Union just before it ended, saw an opportunity.
The concept obviously exploited the shock value of having a former world leader appear. But the ad played on the fact that Gorbachev was far more popular outside Russia than inside it. As late as October 1991, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 54 percent of Americans wanted to see Gorbachev as the head of the Soviet Union, compared with only 18 percent for Yeltsin. And warm feelings toward Gorbachev persisted in the West long after the Soviet Union dissolved. “In contrast to his unpopular standing at home,” the political scientist Andrew Cooper writes in Diplomatic Afterlives, “Gorbachev retained superstar standing abroad as a visionary statesman.” At home, Gorbachev was a pariah. Abroad, he was an elder statesman and celebrity, far more beloved than the buffoonish Yeltsin.
What happens when a dog and a cat play Dungeons & Dragons? Dungeonmaster @AndiEwington knows. The world they enter is magical, but the dog and the cat still act like, well, a dog and a cat. They see the world through different eyes, and only follow instructions the way they do in everyday life.
Dog: ‘I want to cast Animal Friendship.’
DM: ‘On what?’
Dog: ‘The cat in my party.’
DM: ‘Cat, roll for your saving throw’.
(Passes)
DM: ‘It doesn’t work’.
Cat: ‘I’m going to kill you in your sleep tonight.’
Traditionally, bullets become ineffective when underwater. However, U.S special forces may soon be able to shoot their weapons while submerged. These new bullets work by forming a bubble of air around a bullet, which allows the bullet to travel with less physical restrictions.
Ordinary bullets are designed to travel through the air at speeds greater than half a mile per second. Traveling through a different medium, well, that’s a different story. Bullets rapidly slow to a stop once they enter another medium—that’s a feature, not a flaw.
But what happens if bullets must travel through a medium other than air before striking their target? Water, for example, is 800 percent denser than air. Bullets quickly lose velocity, slowed by friction as they pass through the medium…
The CAV-X Supercavitating Ammunition is classified by the company as a “Multi-Environment Ammunition.” The company says “this projectile is effective against submerged targets and targets in the air. Depending on the weapon and the used loading variant, this ammunition is suitable for use in partial or fully submerged weapons, regardless of if the target is in water or on the surface.”
Once upon a time, there were no remote controls for television sets. Dads everywhere taught their children to change the channels so they could stay in their recliners and watch. I was put to work doing that at an extremely young age, and it wasn't hard to figure out what channel Dad wanted because we only had two. The first remote controls were connected to the set with wires. That was a floor hazard, though, and in 1955, a wireless remote hit the market. The Zenith Flash-Matic was a flashlight that you aimed at the front of your TV set. Really. The complicated bits were on the TV itself, which you can read about at Vintage Everyday. -via Nag on the Lake
Psst! Wanna learn some cool facts to impress the kids? Then you might learn a few unfamiliar things about familiar products. Nike shoes, orange juice, vacuum cleaners, champagne, wigs, hoodies, hot dogs, they're all here. Some of the facts just make you go "Hmm," while others may turn you completely off.
People who have peanut allergies can eat without worries of their food having peanut in it! A Stanford-led study has found a solution that can reverse a person’s peanut allergy for up to six weeks. The study found that one injection of an antibodythat can halt the effects of allergies, as Mindbodygreen detailed:
The antibody interferes with a molecule that triggers common allergic reactions, like swelling, hives and anaphylactic shock. Because of its inhibiting properties, researchers expected the antibody to halt the effects of allergies.
The first thing that pops in our minds when we hear ‘Black Friday’ is the multitude of shoppers flocking to malls and shops, the sales, and people fighting over products on sale. Black Friday is the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season, where the surge in sales is enough to put retailers “in the black” for the year. However, ‘Black Friday’ did not start with sales and shopping. It had a darker meaning, as Huffpost details on the origin of the phrase ‘Black Friday’:
The very earliest use of the phrase Black Friday dates to 1869 and had nothing to do with Christmas shopping. It was the day plummeting gold prices caused a market crash, the effects of which were felt by the U.S. economy for years.
The first mentions of Black Friday as we know it are said to have occurred around the 1950s or ’60s in Philadelphia, coined by traffic police who dreaded the day.
“The Philadelphia Police Department used the term to describe the traffic jams and intense crowding of the downtown retail stores,” said David Zyla, an Emmy-winning stylist and author of “How to Win at Shopping.” He noted that one of the first uses of the term in print appeared in an ad in a 1966 issue of The American Philatelist, a magazine for stamp collectors.
A post shared by Lucas Zanotto (@lucas_zanotto) on Sep 14, 2019 at 7:00am PDT
Have you ever heard of the terms “mood swings”, “crossed eyes”, and “emotional roller coaster”? Those are some of the usual terms we use to describe the various states of emotion that we experience in our daily lives.
Check out this humorous work by designer, visual artist and director Lucas Zannoto, who animated these usual emotional clichés quite literally. Check out more of his literal interpretations over at his Instagram account.
Do you eat Brassica oleracea? You probably do, even though you didn't realize it. Uncultivated, it's known as wild cabbage. But over several thousand years of selective farming, we've turned it into a large part of the produce section of your grocery store. The graphic above doesn't quite do justice to the many different foods that have been developed from this one plant. All those vegetables are the same plant species. -via TYWKIWDBI
A plastic doll comes with perfectly coifed hair, often in curls. If the doll gets played with, eventually you end up with hair like My Little Pony Pinkie Pie, shown above. Combing plastic hair is not easy, and even if you get the tangles out, it often only leads to more frizz. Jen Yates tried out some hair setting tips and ended up with Pinkie looking good as new!
For the first time ever, marine biologists were able to record a blue whale’s heartbeat. The researchers suction-cupped a pulse monitor to the back of the biggest animal on Earth, and the gigantic creature dove and resurfaced nonstop for nearly 9 hours as it alternately filled its lungs with air and its belly with tasty fish hundreds of feet below the surface.
During these deep, grub-hunting dives, the whale's heart rate see-sawed wildly, pumping as many as 34 times per minute at the surface and as few as just two beats per minute at the deepest depths — about 30% to 50% slower than the researchers expected.
Learn more about the blue whale and its heart over at Live Science.
