Soil depletion, floods, and drought. These are some of the things that could threaten our food production and lessen our chances of survival, USC Architecture assistant professor Aroussiak Gabrielian says. According to her, we need to move away from designing stuff that can only benefit us humans; Instead, we should think more about “ways to be more collaborative and ethical with our surroundings.” This is where Gabrielian’s idea of humans wearing landscapes comes in — a wearable vest that benefits the user, and serves as an ecosystem for plants, animals, and insects.

...Made from moisture retention felt in which seeds are embedded, the project is essentially a wearable garden vest that grows crops nourished by bodily waste, that also serves as a habitat for some small creatures.

A prototype of this wearable garden yielded 20 pounds of crops over only a few weeks. It grew 40 different types of vegetables, including cabbage, arugula, broccoli rabe, kale, peanuts, peas, mushrooms, strawberries, and herbs like sage, rosemary, and lemon thyme. The majority of the crops were microgreens, which contain up to 40 times the amount of nutrients as their “macro” counterparts and were able to be seeded directly into the fabric. The other vegetables could be planted within the cloak using soil pockets.

Check out Fast Company for more details about this suit.

I can’t stop but think that this could be the ghillie suit 2.0.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Posthuman Habitats/ Fast Company)

Tarot card readings are all over the Internet recently, such as Twitter threads of daily tarot card readings. Some people wait and rely on these threads for understanding their lives, even if there’s no certainty of its validity. While tarot readings and astrology aren’t really empirically based, they do give people the framework of understanding the reason behind someone’s worries or dismay, as the Huffington Post details: 

It’s also no surprise that practices like tarot and astrology are increasingly coupled with mental health advice. Therapeutic guidance (sometimes from actual therapists) has a bigger platform thanks to social media, which has arguably made talking about and understanding mental health more possible for the general population.

Plus, many people can’t afford professional help or need a supplement to therapy, so they turn to the internet and social media for advice on dealing with daily stress, Dore said. There are numerous barriers to getting mental health treatment, including high cost, insufficient insurance coverage and a lack of options. Recent data found that 1 in 4 Americans said they had to choose between paying for daily necessities and paying for mental health care.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

Two UC Berkeley professors co-authored a study that reportedly 

resulted in the creation of a new material that can capture carbon dioxide from wet flue gases in an effort to mitigate climate change.

The material in this study was designed for the purpose of capturing carbon dioxide from the exhaust of power plants, according to Jeffrey Reimer, professor and chair of UC Berkeley’s chemical and biomolecular engineering department.

Using a computer to find MOFs or metal organic frameworks (what Reimer calls “tinker toys”), researchers were able to design a material for extracting CO2 from wet flue gases. 

For more about wet flue gases and why this study matters for climate change, head over to the original post by The Daily Californian. 

Photo: Pixabay

Life could be lonely for lighthouse keepers along the New England coast. They lived on tiny islands or spits of land, sometimes with their families, and only got supply drops about once a month or so. How could one get Christmas gifts for the family in such a situation? They didn't have to, because they could rely on Flying Santa to come through.

Seamond Ponsart Roberts first learned about Flying Santa when she was 5 years old. In October 1945, her mother, Emma, told her the jolly old fellow would deliver a doll to her by airplane. For the next three months, every time an aircraft flew over the lighthouse they called home, the excited little girl would ask, “Is that him? Is that my Flying Santa?”

Her special delivery did arrive in December in the form of a package dropped from a plane by Edward Rowe Snow of Massachusetts, a veteran recently returned from World War II who would go on to author numerous books and articles about seafaring history and traditions. His classic Storms and Shipwrecks of New England was first published in 1943 and republished several times since then. Through his writing and weekly radio show, he cemented the legacy of Flying Santa, a 90-year-old holiday tradition that continues today.

Snow was neither the first nor the last Flying Santa, or even a pilot, but he filled the role for 40 years. The tradition of Flying Santa began in 1929, and continues today. Read about Snow and the Flying Santa program at Smithsonian. You'll also find out what happened to Seamond's doll.

(Image credit: Dolly Bicknell collection)

The 1999 movie Galaxy Quest combined comedy, action, and science fiction. Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Alan Rickman are actors starring in a sci-fi TV show similar to Star Trek, fandom and all. But the aliens don't realize that, and recruit the show's cast into an actual intergalactic war. It's a fun premise, and Galaxy Quest won several science fiction awards. Now Screen Junkies goes back twenty years to re-examine the movie for good and bad and meta. Mostly good.    

Non-biodegradable plastics are cheap, easily manufactured, and useful for food preservation and packaging, but its negative consequences tend to far outweigh the benefits, especially as it accumulates in landfills and oceans at an alarming rate. Lawmakers from different countries have started making steps towards banning single-use plastic in their respective localities, with some doing so in favor of other plastic substitutes. However, even some options were discovered to be not as environment-friendly as initially thought. 

So, what does it take to make a truly sustainable alternative to single-use plastics? Several companies and start-ups have already created their own single-use plastic replacements. And the proposed solutions so far include a spectrum of interesting ideas from fish skin to seaweed.

Head over to Wired for more about commercially viable plastic alternatives and the issues surrounding it.

-via Wired

Photo: Jordan Beltran / Unsplash

Everyone remembers their favorite Christmas episode from their favorite TV series, but you haven't seen all the best ones. Check out Mental Floss's picks for the 40 best Christmas episodes ever. As you can guess, there's a lot going on in the Friends episode entitled "The One With the Holiday Armadillo."  

Whatever your feelings may be about Ross Geller’s questionable behavior as a parent, boyfriend, professor, doctor (of paleontology), or person in general, you must admit his histrionics as the holiday armadillo have earned him a place in the Christmas television hall of fame. In the absence of any available Santa Claus costumes, Ross dons a terrifying armadillo suit to teach his half-Jewish son about Hanukkah—but when Chandler appears dressed as Santa Claus, and Joey bursts in dressed as Superman, it turns into the weirdest Christmas pageant of all time. —EG

Yeah, there's a lot going on in that one, but even more in this entry:



The 40 episodes featured range from 1955 to series that are still running, alphabetically from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to The X-Files. Read the synopses of each at Mental Floss, many with video clips, and you might want to seek some of them out on home video or your streaming service.  

When you think of "Soviet camp," you probably envision the Gulag system, where Stalin sentenced millions of political prisoners to work camps as punishment. But there were also summer camps for kids, called Pioneer camps. Between 1922 and 1991, all children in the Soviet Union were required to join the Young Pioneers organization, and Pioneer summer camp meant weeks spent with other youth, playing sports and learning wilderness skills. It also included indoctrination and basic military training.

I eventually came across the story of Pavlik Morozov, a 13 year-old boy who became the literal poster-child for the Young Pioneers in the 1930s. He was just a kid when he turned his parents in to the police for hiding grain, and actively participated in their assassination. He was then killed by his grandfather for betraying his family. Pavlik was celebrated as a martyr by the Soviets. Statues of him were built, and numerous schools and youth groups were named in his honour. His former school became a shrine and children from all over the Soviet Union went on school excursions to visit it.

The Young Pioneers organisation, which claimed Pavlik as one of their own for the perfect propaganda story, had a huge impact on the moral norms of generations of children, who were actively encouraged by the Soviets to inform on their parents.

Many former camp attendees remember those days with fondness. Read about Pioneer camps and see plenty of pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

It’s a windy winter morning in Dresden, Germany, and crowds of people have gathered in front of the city’s Kulturpalast concert hall. Snowy-white wisps can be seen to be blowing onto the crowd, but it is not snowing — what’s dusting the crowd is powdered sugar coming from a gigantic cake which weighed 8,700 pounds (around 4 tons). The cake sits upon a horse-drawn wagon.

This is Stollenfest, a supersized celebration of Dresden’s signature holiday treat, Christstollen.

Rich, buttery, and studded with rum-soaked raisins and candied citrus peel, the city’s version of stollen holds such a hallowed position in Dresden that thousands of fans flock to the city to watch a parade in its honor, held this year on December 7.

“The giant stollen is the beginning of Christmastime for Dresden,” says Marcel Hennig, a third-generation master baker who helped make the large cake this year. “It’s a must-do for Dresden bakers.”

Know more about the Stollenfest, and the story that it tells, over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Schutzverband Dresdner Stollen E. V. / M. Schmidt)

Account security is something I worry about all the time, and I don’t understand how people can take it for granted and put a really predictable password on their accounts.

SplashData, a security services firm, has now released their ninth annual Worst Passwords of the Year. The list has assessed over 5 million passwords to determine those commonly shared by hackers. Check it out over at Gizmodo.

Hopefully, your password is not here. Or is it?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

If you were to plan the ultimate vacation to Disney World's new Star Wars theme park Galaxy's Edge, you may as well stay in the ultimate accommodations. The house called Twelve Parsecs by Loma Homes in Orlando is available to rent through Airbnb. It has nine bedrooms with 17 beds, each with a different Star Wars theme. You can sleep in Cloud City, Alderaan, Hoth, Tatooine, Mustafar, Dagobah, Endor, or in one of the spaceships.

There are even Star Wars appliances in the kitchen! See what you could be getting into at Airbnb. Twelve Parsecs will run you $564 a night, but but if you take 17 people, it works out to a manageable fee per person. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Etsy seller VGFantasy, who lives in Russia, offers this agile spacecraft capable of pursuing and destroying the rebels. It's a bit fragile, though, as it's made of glass. If anything, the illumination makes it only more noticeable and thus vulnerable.

The lamp is one of many fine works of stained glass made by VGFantasy. I'm also deeply impressed by this stained glass lamp recreation of Nagoya Castle in Japan.

-via Technabob

This year, Badger Technologies has deployed 500 autonomous robots in the US. The robot, named Marty, is a roving robot, which can identify potential safety hazards and do other labor-saving tasks.

Marty — a slim, grey robot with a wheeled black base that measures only slightly taller than an average adult male — sports colorful LED strips, a name tag, and two disarmingly cute googly eyes. It’s equipped with proximity sensors to prevent it bumping into shelves and shopping carts and cameras that scan for anything that might cause someone to slip and fall — like a spilled beverage.

The cameras can also read price tags, recognize when stock is running low, as well as flag incorrectly tagged items.

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid just came across a Marty bot when he visited a Stop and Shop in Bayonne, New Jersey.

(Image Credit: Badger Technologies)

Gary Larson’s The Far Side comic finally has an official website #TheFarSide #GaryLarson https://t.co/HKtwfaEJwO pic.twitter.com/QRBSSsWcgH

— GEEKSPIN (@geekspinco) December 18, 2019

Gary Larson's comic The Far Side was syndicated in newspapers from 1980 to 1995, when Larson suddenly retired at age 44. Larson is famously protective of his cartoons, and objects to people sharing them online. He has maintained a website, but it hadn't been updated since 2000  ...until now. As of Tuesday, the website The Far Side is live once again, and is the official home of Larson's comics, both new and classic. He explained his reasoning in a letter detailing his relationship with the internet from its beginning.    

So fast-forward to today, and hey, look! I’m writing another letter! This time, though, I’m writing to say something I never thought I would: Welcome to The Far Side website! Guess I’ve got some ’splainin’ to do.

Truthfully, I still have some ambivalence about officially entering the online world — I previously equated it to a rabbit hole, although “black hole” sometimes seems more apropos — but my change of heart on this has been due not only to some evolution in my own thinking, but also in two areas I’ve always cared about when it comes to this computer/Internet “stuff”: security and graphics.

Personally, I am looking forward to more absurdity from the man who brought us Thagomizers, Anatidaephobia, and that Jane Goodall tramp. And cows, of course.

-via Metafilter

Imgur member KneeAppallingTanIceCream was just passing by a veterinary clinic and noticed this series of signs. Who wouldn't be curious after seeing that? Unfortunately, the clinic was closed at the time. However, Fred was there, behind the glass and KneeAppallingTanIceCream managed to get a picture through the window. The post went viral and everyone wants to see more of Fred. You can see Fred and read the story at Bored Panda. Let's hope we learn more about Fred in the future.