University of Pennsylvania immunologist De’Broski Herbert could not believe what his eyes were seeing when he looked deep inside the lungs of mice infected with influenza. What he found there was a strange-looking cell filled with taste receptors.

He recalled that it looked just like a tuft cell — a cell type most often associated with the lining of the intestines. 

Why was a cell with taste receptors in the lungs? And why was it there in response to influenza?

Herbert wasn’t alone in his puzzlement over this mysterious and little-studied group of cells that keep turning up in unexpected places, from the thymus (a small gland in the chest where pathogen-fighting T cells mature) to the pancreas. Scientists are only just beginning to understand them, but it is gradually becoming clear that tuft cells are an important hub for the body’s defenses precisely because they can communicate with the immune system and other sets of tissues, and because their taste receptors allow them to identify threats that are still invisible to other immune cells.

In other words, they are not merely taste receptors.

Know more about these cells over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine)

This is Bear. He's a good dog. Bear was abandoned as a puppy due to OCD, which in dogs is usually a sign that they need a job to do. And so Bear was trained as an animal tracker -for a good purpose. And now he's going out in areas of Australia ravaged by fire to seek out wildlife in need of help.

Bear, a Cattle Dog cross-breed, is trained to find both koalas and quolls, another small Australian marsupial, in the wild.

“This is the first year that we have been involved in the fires,” Romane Cristescu, his minder and ecologist at The University of the Sunshine Coast, told Reuters.

“It is a bit more dangerous than what we usually do.”

Bear, who usually looks for sick or injured wildlife for conservation and research purposes in calmer conditions, has been wearing protective socks on his paws to search through areas scorched by fire.

Bushfires have been raging in Queensland and New South Wales, destroying both wildlife and the habitats that sustain them. The fires have also killed four people and burned hundreds of homes.

This is Bear. He was abandoned as a puppy due to his OCD, but quickly found a new life as a koala detection dog. As wildfires devastate Australia’s east coast, Bear is doing his best to locate any injured or misplaced koalas. He’s their unexpected savior, and our thirteenth 15/10 pic.twitter.com/dWe8tWbEJo

— WeRateDogs® (@dog_rates) November 21, 2019

Read more about Bear and the bushfires at SBS News. Good luck, Bear! -via Metafilter

Let's turn back time, back to an era in which people used paper money for almost everything, offices and businesses had their own cats, and New York had several newspapers to fill twice every day. November 14, 1900, dawned as an ordinary day, until a scrawny stray cat wandered into the Louis Scharlach & Co. bank in order to take a warm nap. The bank already had a cat, a large cat named Isaac, who didn't appreciate an interloper in his territory.

Everything was peaceful until Isaac, described as “the well-fed office cat,” sensed the presence of the would-be cat burglar and started sniffing him out. It wasn’t long before Isaac found the intruder under the safe and began lashing out with his claws. According to The Sun, “Both animals were abusing each other in the worst language cats can command, and the fur on Isaac’s back was standing straight up.”

Bank clerk Max Lubiner made an amateur mistake by thinking he could also reach under the safe and grab the unwanted guest. When the cat sank his claws into Max’s hand, the clerk howled out in agony.

Several other clerks were able to coax out the cat using sticks, but that only made matters worse. Once the two felines were free from the metal safe, “there was the wildest kind of a time in the bank.” The cats went full at it, jumping on desks and scattering piles of paper money and coins that the clerks had been counting for customers.

But that was just the beginning of the mayhem. Bank customers thought there was a robbery in progress. People gathered outside just in case some cash flew out the windows. And the cops wanted to know what was going on. Read the story of the cat burglar and the feline bank guard whose fight made the papers at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

The branch that the beaver needed for his dam was very long--too long, really, for him to haul alone.

So 19-year old Alexander Oswald lend him a helping hand. Together, beaver and man were able to carry it across the road. The drivers in Deggendorf, Germany, were good sports about the delay caused by their animal brother.

-via Geekologie

You may have seen chubby-cheeked babies and wide-eyed puppies. How did you react to them? I could assume that you probably went, “Awwww! How cute!” But have you ever wondered why you felt that way?

Once thought to trigger a hardwired, primarily maternal, caregiving response, researchers are now learning that cuteness actually sets off unique brain activity — in women and men — that goes beyond making sure Junior wants for nothing. Marketers and product designers have known for decades that cuteness sells, but a series of recent studies suggests it’s less about caregiving and more about empathy, community and sharing.

In fact, understanding what cuteness is and how it affects us may help us harness its powers for good.

Know more about cuteness, and how the study about it started, over at Discover.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

2009. It was the year when Facebook launched a piece of code that changed the world. It was the “like” button, the brainchild of Leah Pearlman, Justin Rosenstein, and several other programmers and designers. They thought that the users of the social media website would be too busy to leave comments on their friends’ posts. If there was a simple button to express affirmations, however, then that would make everything better.

“Friends could validate each other with that much more frequency and ease,” as Pearlman later said.

It worked—maybe a little too well. By making “like” a frictionless gesture, by 2012 we’d mashed it more than 1 trillion times, and it really did unlock a flood of validation. But it had unsettling side effects, too. We’d post a photo, then sit there refreshing the page anxiously, waiting for the “likes” to increase. We’d wonder why someone else was getting more likes. So we began amping up the voltage in our daily online behavior: trying to be funnier, more caustic, more glamorous, more extreme.

Code shapes our lives. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has written, “software is eating the world,” though at this point it’s probably more accurate to say software is digesting it.

The Facebook like isn’t the only piece of code that had a lasting impact around the world. Check out the other pieces of code over at Slate.

(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)

Scientists in the US were able to overcome a major obstacle in creating mini-organs. They were able to program cells to take on the desired shape instead of relying on 3D printing or external “scaffolds.”

Described in a paper in the journal Cell Systems as an “inside-out” approach, this method could “signal a paradigm shift” in how mini-organs like mini-kidneys and brains are grown on the lab bench. This could one day lead to personalized organ transplants.

The team, led by bioengineer Todd McDevitt at Gladstone Institutes in the US, was driven by an enduring issue with state-of-the-art ways of producing mini-organs such as 3D printing. The cells just won’t stay put.

[...]

McDevitt’s team wanted to own those cellular minds and so took control of two genes that together make up something of a joystick that directs how the cells organise.

More details about this over at Cosmos.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Ashley Libby, David Joy, and Iman Haghighi, Gladstone Institutes)

Twelves bottles of wine are inside a Northrup Grumman resupply rocket, along with other essential supplies for the International Space Station. Unfortunately, the wine isn’t part of the astronaut’s supplies. The wine was sent by French startup Space Cargo Unlimited for a project meant to study the effects of space on wine aging, aptly named  “Vitis Vinum in Spatium Experimentia” (“Wine Grape in Space Experiment.”). Futurism has the details: 

For the next twelve months, the wine will remain on the ISS, sealed in its glass bottles, while samples from the batch age simultaneously back on Earth. After the space wine returns to Earth, the researchers will analyze both samples to determine how space aging affects the fermentation process of wine, including a bit of taste testing to see how flavors may have changed.

According to Space Cargo Unlimited’s website, the mission is “the first privately lead comprehensive research program on the ISS” to focus “on the future of agriculture for a changing Earth.”

image credit: via wikimedia commons

Ze Frank's True Facts series normally focuses on animals, but this time he takes a left turn to a fungus, specifically the stinkhorn mushroom. Why? Because footage of stinkhorns and mushrooms in general give him the opportunity for unlimited double entendres and horrifying grossness at the same time. While this video is technically safe for work, adults will understand his non-stop raunchy allusions. -via Laughing Squid

London-based photographer Joshua Blackburn photographed every launderette in London. Launderama, the photo series resulting from Blackburn’s project, features photos from the 462 launderettes he has visited. From the old model of laundry machines, to the aesthetics of these last remaining public laundries, Blackburn managed to immortalize and showcase the individuality and aesthetics of these laundries. To see more from the project, you can head to his Instagram.

image credit: Joshua Blackburn on Instagram

If you've dreamed about living in an underground bunker, or else are seriously committed to surviving the apocalypse, here's a deal that can take digging out of the equation! A twelve-acre real estate listing in Catalina, Arizona, hides a Titan missile complex beneath your feet. And it's only $395,000!

BOLD opportunity to own a decommissioned underground Titan II missile complex. This property was once one of the most top secret of government assets and is now ready to fulfill a new mission. That mission is for you to define amongst the limitless scenarios. Secure storage facility? Underground bunker? Remarkable residence - literally living down under? The property is situated on a 12 + acre parcel with boundless views. Private yet not too remote. Quick easy access to Tucson and just 20 minutes for supplies.

There are no utilities in place, but hey, it's Arizona, and 12 acres can accommodate a lot of solar panels. If you are wondering what you might do with such a facility, DeviantART member sickkids has some ideas, which you can enlarge here. A guy who bought a similar Titan missile silo did an AMA about it not long ago.  -via reddit

Diana Toubassi is a family physician at Toronto Western Hospital, and she has been in practice for dozens of years. Every day seems to be a hectic and chaotic day in the hospital.

“I was thirteen or fourteen patients into the clinic,” she says, recounting a typical day in practice. “I had a green trainee with me who hadn’t done any clinical rotations yet. We were running behind, and I felt like we were drowning in patients. I had her go and see a newborn baby who was there for their first visit. Mom was clearly overwhelmed and tearful already. Baby was jaundiced and not gaining weight.” At the same time, Toubassi says, she was seeing a woman in her eighties armed with a written list of eight issues that had to be resolved in ten minutes.

With precision she tells the story quickly, and she narrates the chaos “as if it were a regularly scheduled program”.

She seems amused as she tells it, as if the sequence of events was both hilarious and ridiculous. Slight discomfort belies her laughter, a momentary slip of the mask from sprightly to exhausted, then back.

[...]

Lately, Toubassi has been drawn to a discipline known as “narrative medicine,” a movement that aims to use the special qualities of storytelling as a tonic for what ails contemporary medicine.

Learn more about narrative medicine over at The Walrus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: DarkoStojanovic/ Pixabay)

For the past three decades, Vietnam has been a country dependent on factory work and now it is moving up the value chain into electronics. Smartphone developer giant Samsung Electronics, for example, has invested $17.3 billion in Vietnam-based factories. Science is emphasized in public schools. University graduates who work for foreign tech firms will know more about how to make phones.

Vietnamese companies have come out with a list of their own phones, mostly cheaper Android models. The QPhone and BPhone were among the first. Now a subsidiary of the Ho Chi Minh City-based conglomerate Vingroup is selling a brand of handset called the Vsmart for about $100.

The problem is, even in their own homeland, Made-in-Vietnam phones don’t sell. But why? It is because the Vietnamese can get more recognized phone brands for around the same prices.

Foreign brands hold higher status than local equivalents, says Maxfield Brown, senior associate with the business consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates in Ho Chi Minh City. “The trajectory for consumer demand in Vietnam for electronics is currently trending toward an interest in international products and I would expect it to continue as consumer spending rises,” he says. Wages are rising in Vietnam though still as low as $171 a month.

Read more about this topic over at Forbes.

(Image Credit: TeroVesalainen/ Pixabay)

Archaeologists in Ecuador have excavated a burial site dating back to around 100 BC. The unearthed skeletons included the remains of two children, ages six months and 18 months at the time of death. Both had been fitted with helmets around their heads that were fashioned from skulls of slightly larger children. A report stated that the helmet craniums were "still fleshed" at the time of burial.  

This discovery was made at the Salango archaeological dig along the central coast of Ecuador in South America. A pair of burial mounds, dated to around 2,100 years old and belonging to the Guangala people, were excavated between 2014 and 2016. A total of 11 individuals were found buried in the mounds, the most extraordinary of which were two infants adorned with “helmets” or “mortuary headgear,” as termed by the researchers in the study, that were fashioned from the brain case, or cranial vault, of juveniles. Other bits of skull were placed around the heads of the dead infants, which was presumably done at the time of burial.

This is the first time skull helmets have been found, and scientists have no clue as to the meaning of the funerary ritual. Read more about the find at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Sara Juengst)

The owner says, "young people nowadays don't care much about the privacy."

He's counting on that to make money. The owner of the One Dollar Hotel in Fukuoka, Japan thinks that his scheme will lose money in the beginning, but turn a profit once he can monetize the videos on his YouTube channel. So far, four people have taken him up on the offer in the past month. CNN reports:

Guests are permitted to turn the lights off, and the bathroom area is out of camera range.

"This is a very old ryokan and I was looking into a new business model," says Inoue, who started running the hotel last year. "Our hotel is on the cheaper side, so we need some added value, something special that everyone will talk about."

-via Dave Barry | Photo: One Dollar Hotel