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

The Red Bull Formula 1 pit crew set a world record for the fastest pit stop three times this year, the last time at 1.82 seconds. When you've made it to this elite team, there's no limit to what you might be in for. In September, the crew was sent up in a Russian vomit comet to attempt a zero-gravity tire change. You can see a behind-the-scenes documentary about this marketing stunt here. -via reddit

I loved the 15-puzzle — the game with 15 tiles and a single empty space in a 4x4 grid — when I was a kid.

The goal is to slide the tiles around and put them in numerical order or, in some versions, arrange them to form an image.

The first 15 puzzle I was able to complete was a picture of a cat with a mouse sitting on its head. It seemed difficult at first, but after trying the game countless times throughout the days and weeks, I was able to get the hang of it.

The game has become a staple of party-favor bags since it was introduced in the 1870s. It has also caught the attention of mathematicians, who’ve spent more than a century studying solutions to puzzles of different sizes and startling configurations.

Now, a new proof solves the 15 puzzle, but in reverse. The mathematicians Yang Chu and Robert Hough of Stony Brook University have identified the number of moves required to turn an ordered board into a random one.

Check out this story over at Nautilus.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Making a durable, natural-looking skin substitute that could cover burn injuries or other wounds has been a decades-long dream of bioengineers. Now we may be much closer to that dream, thanks to a new method for printing 3-D skin complete with working blood vessels.

The research, done at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Yale University, uses living human skin cells turned into a liquid “bio ink.” The bio ink is used to print artificial skin, which then grows its own blood vessel system.

“The vasculature is very important because that’s how the host and the graft talk to each other,” says Pankaj Karande, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at RPI, who led the research. "Communication between host and graft is critical if the skin substitute is not to be rejected by the body."

Head over at Smithsonian for more details about this.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Video Credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/ YouTube)

It was Valentine’s Day, year 2013, and it was one Valentine’s Day that Patricia Acensi-Ferré would probably never forget. That day, she learned that she had breast cancer. She was 35 years old at that time, and she was a new mom taking care of a baby at the end of her maternity leave. It was a tough situation.

But she decided to fight it with humor: She named her tumor “Roberto” and, when her hair started falling out, she named one of her wigs “Ginger.” She survived a 15-month-long treatment that grew to involve surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Today, she is cancer-free. 

But her battle did not stop on the day she was declared cancer-free.

With the date of her return set for March 2014, though, Acensi-Ferré received another blow: While she was away, her job had been eliminated. Before her cancer, she had worked for about 15 years in the French government. In accordance with French law, Acensi-Ferré was offered another project—but it was unrelated to her interests and experience. 

Even before her maternity leave, Acensi-Ferré had felt like her employer wanted her to quit. The French have a name for it: placardisé, meaning “relegated to a closet.” Now, she had had enough; she negotiated an exit package with her employer, and then quit.

“Even without the cancer, the moral limit had been surpassed from my point of view,” she says. “I think it could not have happened any other way.” But still, she wondered how her situation could have played out differently. 

While Acensi-Ferré’s double-whammy experience can be considered a rare experience, her experience taking time away from work isn’t. She is only one of many people who “off-ramp” or voluntarily take leave. Off-ramping has become more common in many rich countries throughout the recent years. The question is, how do companies keep their employees with this kind of thing going on?

More details about this story over at Quartz.

(Image Credit: fancycrave1/ Pixabay)

What do you do with 260 tons of turkey? Make frozen dinners! And so the TV dinner was created as the response to an emergency situation at Swanson. That was just the beginning. Cheddar has the full story.

When chocolate is first made, and then again when it is melted and reshaped, it needs to be tempered in order to retain its glossy structure and consistency. This means that the crystals are restructured in a precise way by controlled cooling.

Tempering in metallurgy refers to heating and cooling a metal, normally steel, to improve properties such as consistency, durability or hardness. The same is true for chocolate. [Bristol chocolatier Zara] Narracott passes me an untempered piece for tasting: it has a white coating and looks dry. Once in the mouth, it instantly crumbles rather than melts, but still tastes good. Next up is an extremely smooth and glossy-looking dark chocolate with a caramel centre. Biting into it gives a very satisfying crunch allowing the caramel to ooze out. Delicious.

Cocoa butter – the fat obtained from cocoa beans and mainly consisting of oleic, palmitic and stearic fatty acids – gives chocolate its physical structure. When tempering chocolate, it is the crystal structure of the cocoa butter that chocolatiers are manipulating. ‘Cocoa butter is a six-phase polymorphic crystal,’ explains chocolatier Richard Tango-Lowy, a physics graduate who now runs the Dancing Lion Chocolate shop in Manchester, US. The desirable crystal structure for chocolate is form V.

A dive into the crystallization of chocolate can help us understand why factories with their chemists and experienced chocolatiers produce a consistently better product than a home cook, but there are ways that anyone can learn to temper chocolate with practice. The science underneath the art of chocolate is explained at Chemistry World. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Blackcat)

Back in 2015, we were introduced to a new protagonist for the Star Wars saga. The protagonist was Rey (played by Daisy Ridley in the film) who we came to know and love. 

Now, Rey has been an object of cosplay for many people, men and women alike. Everyone loved her, and everyone wanted to be her. The question is, why?

The answer is found in her costume: it was a no-nonsense, economical costume.

More about this story over at Wired.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Amy Lombard/ Wired)

Porter Wagoner was a huge country music star in the 1950s and '60s. He had a syndicated TV show called The Porter Wagoner Show. In 1967, he hired a "pretty little lady" from East Tennessee named Dolly Parton to be his sidekick for the show. They recorded a string of hit duets. Parton was grateful, but she was more than window dressing.

Appearing on The Porter Wagoner Show was Parton’s big break. But, after several years of working together, Wagoner and Parton’s relationship became acrimonious. Parton, whose star was rising, felt stifled by Wagoner’s terms. She first tried to bargain with her boss, suggesting she could stay and work for him if she could also make her own records, perform solo, and act independently. “I’m not trying to take anything from you or me,” she recalls telling him, as she talks to Abumrad about her and Wagoner’s complicated relationship. With some cooperation, they could both gain from her having more freedom as an artist. Wagoner, however, would not budge.

The struggle between Parton's ambitions and Wagoner's control festered for years. Parton wrote a song about her complicated feelings called "I Will Always Love You," which was a hit in three different decades. Read how Parton's tensions with Wagoner led to her biggest hit at Quartz. -via Digg

(Image credit: Moeller Talent, Inc.)

Special Object 3003 Templewo is an abandoned Soviet military bunker buried under the woods in Poland. It once was a storage and assembly site for conventional and nuclear weapons, and has been empty and unused since 1992. But the ants who make it their home inadvertently play out an illustration of heaven and hell.

On top of a ventilation pipe that juts out from the mostly underground facility, there is big, mound-like nest of wood ants. It is a perfectly normal place for wood ants to live. They feast on the sweet honeydew secreted by aphids dwelling in nearby pine trees, and soak up the rays of post-Soviet sun.

But within the bunker, in a small room at the bottom of that shaft, there was a second colony of ants. These ants had no sun, no warmth, no light, and no honeydew. So they survived on the flesh of their fellow ants. Their colony was the wretched result of individuals falling from the healthier colony above, and with no way to climb out of the bunker, they could never return. It feels like a mirror-horror that could have come straight out of the mind of Jordan Peele, except that instead of a commentary on race and class in America, it’s a testament to one population’s sheer will to survive.

Scientists have known about the ants since 2013. The ants in colony two do not reproduce, but go about their ant lives as best as they can until they die and become food for others. There will always be more new ants that fall from above. But does it have to be this way? Read about the scheme to save the cannibal ants from their unnatural fate at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Stephan Wojciech)

Before there was Walmart, there was Woolworth's. These were general-purpose dime stores where shoppers roamed with carts and brought their selected items to the cashier for purchase. In the late 19th century, this was a new kind of shopping experience that has become the norm today at brick-and-mortar shops.

In the 20th century, many Woolworth's opened little restaurants inside where shoppers could grab a meal. These were called luncheonette counters.

There are no more Woolworth's, as the company faced increasing competition after the 1960s by Kmart, Target, and, eventually, Walmart. In 1997, the last Woolworth's store closed.

Thankfully, one lunch counter survived. It's now located at an antiques mall in Bakersfield, California. Eater reports on the very authentic experience there:

There, in the back corner at the ground-floor level of the four-story building, is a fully functioning former Woolworth luncheonette counter, complete with 22 counter seats, Formica tables ringing the room, and an open kitchen for griddling burgers and making milkshakes. But this well-protected bit of ephemera isn’t cordoned off with Do Not Touch signs — it’s still a real, thriving luncheonette counter called the Woolworth Diner, serving police officers, antiquers, and locals daily. [...]

The menu is simple at Woolworth Diner, mostly just burgers and a chili dog with sides like fries, baked beans, or macaroni and potato salad. There are milkshakes available, root beer floats too, but nothing even comes close to crossing the $10 mark. Signs hang both inside the dining area and beyond showcasing five-cent Coca-Colas or ten-cent sandwiches, an overt homage to the five-and-dime history of the place. The workers still don black and white outfits when flitting around behind the counter, and many in the dining crowd are old enough to remember Woolworth in all its glory.

-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Farley Elliot

It's a frightening idea: to have half of one's brain removed on purpose. But this surgery, called a hemispherectomy, is sometimes done in children who suffer from constant epileptic seizures, as a last-ditch effort when medication or other treatments don't help. You would think that such traumatic surgery would leave the patient profoundly impaired. But the brain is an amazing organ.

In a new study in the journal Cell Reports, neuroscientists at Caltech describe an investigation of six of these rare patients that offers new insights into how human brains adapt to such extreme changes. The research team performed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans on the patients, all of whom received the surgeries as children and now have relatively normal cognitive abilities. The patients' scans were compared to those of healthy individuals.

The results showed that brain networks in the hemispherectomy patients—networks that control walking, talking, and other functions—were remarkably intact.

Read about these remarkable findings at Caltech. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Caltech Brain Imaging Center)

Suspended animation: the temporary cessation of most vital functions without death, as in a dormant seed or a hibernating animal. The first time I can recall learning about human suspended animation was reading the Madeleine L'Engle young adult book, A Wrinkle in Time.

Now, doctors at University of Maryland School of Medicine claim to have placed humans in suspended animation, for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death.

Samuel Tisherman told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation, calling it “a little surreal” when they first did it. He wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result.

The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR) involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre.

A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted. Tisherman says he hopes to be able to announce the full results of the trial by the end of 2020.

Read the full article at New Scientist.

Image Credit: John Crawford (Photographer) via Wikimedia Commons

Oh, sure, you can claim that your relative is dead and the company needs to pay out. But insurance adjusters know to ask for proof. Like Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify."

The grieving family in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa complied with Old Mutual's demands and delivered the decaying corpse after the company refused to accept documentary evidence of the man's death. The Daily Mail reports:

Ntombenhle Mhlongo and Thandaza Mtshali were filmed taking the body of uncle Sifiso Justice Mhlongo into a branch of Old Mutual somewhere in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, this week after their claim on a funeral plan was delayed. 

Ms Mhlongo said the claim, for £1,700, had been delayed for nine days because of problems over the paperwork, meaning important tribal rites for their uncle, who died at the age of just 46, could not be performed. [...]

Ntombenhle told News 24: 'We are not rich people. We are poor and they were refusing to pay us. We are still so heartbroken. 

'We kept going back but they kept stonewalling and we were angry, frustrated and just wanted to make sure we could properly prepare and bury him. 

We thought if the documents do not give them enough answers then maybe the body will.'

-via Dave Barry

Cory Mervis-Bocskor converted this old Ford Aerostar minivan into the ultimate ride. He uses it as a Burning Man vehicle, but this Type 6 Federation shuttlecraft also has interstellar capabilities. It's modeled after the Goddard, which Scotty flew off the Enterprise-D the last time that he appeared on Star Trek.