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.
As we approach the end of the decade, get ready for more and more lists of everything that happened over the last ten years. Yes, I know that numerically the decade doesn't officially end for another year, but that's not how real people use numbers. DJ Earworm gives us a mashup of 100 of the biggest songs from the 2010s. Due to some notable missing songs, I believe these were picked based on their beat. There's an alphabetical list of the songs he used at the YouTube page. -via Metafilter
For hundreds of years, the claim of the 2nd century Greek doctor Galen, remained unchallenged. Galen believed that the blood is produced in the liver. The produced blood then would be filtered through tiny pores in the heart. But was it the right one? No, it wasn’t. We know better.
But who really discovered how the heart actually works? The discovery of the heart’s true anatomy is commonly credited to the English physician William Harvey, but before him was someone who correctly explained how the heart pumps blood and did so way before the arrival of modern medicine.
Check out who this person is over at JSTOR Daily.
(Image Credit: ReaperDZ/ Pixabay)
Built by Tesla and managed by renewable energy company Neoen, is the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia. It is the biggest battery in the world, and it is set to grow even bigger next year. It will be expanded by an extra 50 percent early next year.
The Hornsdale facility was built in 2017 to help alleviate the energy woes of the state of South Australia, which had seen rolling blackouts the previous summer. Tesla was awarded the contract, and Elon Musk vowed to build it within 100 days or it was free. True to his word, it was completed in November that year.
With a capacity of 129 MWh and an output of up to 100 MW, Hornsdale became the world’s largest lithium-ion storage battery, a title that it still holds two years later. And now, it looks set to strengthen its lead with a new expansion.
More details about this news over at New Atlas.
(Image Credit: Hornsdale Power Reserve)
Looking for the perfect gag gift for your favorite rodent lover? You need the Squirrel Underpants from the NeatoShop. This little pair of briefs makes an excellent stocking stuffer or white elephant gift.
This striking pair of tightie whities is great for those who believe in upholding squirrel decency. Those who find squirrel nudity driving them a little nutty will rejoice!
The Squirrel Underpants is made of 95% cotton, 5 % spandex with a 6" waist for extra comfort. They come packaged on cardstock, with an image of a squirrel, to show the full effect of Squirrel Underpants.
Please note that this is a gag gift. We don't suggest you actually try to dress your friendly neighborhood squirrels. Friendly neighborhood squirrels may cease to be friendly if you try to dress them.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Gag Gifts & Pranks. New items arriving all the time.
Don't forget to stop by the NeatoShop to see our large collection of customizable apparel and bags. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months all the way to 10 XL adult shirts. We know that fun, fabulous, and nature loving people come in every size.
Sprawled on her back in the dirt, with her head resting on one side, and her elbows bent as if she was about to prop up, is an elderly woman. She was already dead for three months, and her face was no longer recognizable.
She was among more than 150 corpses scattered beneath the trees, rotting in the open air or covered in plastic, on roughly three wooded acres.
This might look like a serial killer’s dumping ground for an outsider, but this was just another ordinary day at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Anthropology Research Facility. This facility, known as the “body farm”, is one of the first of only a handful of such facilities in the world where researchers study human decay and law enforcement officers train to retrieve human remains at crime scenes.
The dead woman was there to play her part in a developing frontier in forensic crime solving: analyzing and interrogating the suite of trillions of microorganisms and other creatures that are witness to our deaths.
“It’s an exciting time,” said Dawnie Steadman, director of the school’s Forensic Anthropology Center — through which the body farm operates — standing in the shade to escape the nearly 95-degree heat one morning in late May. “We’re in an age of technology where the microbes can help provide new answers about time of death, but also whether a body was moved, and medical conditions inside the body that can help identify a person.”
Post-mortem interval, which is the calculation of time since death, is an important aspect of forensic investigation. It is one of the focuses of body farm research.
When an individual is unidentified, the post-mortem interval can help investigators narrow down who they might be based on missing persons records. “If we say, well, this individual passed away at least a year ago,” Steadman said, “then we know not to look at recent cases.”
More details about this topic over at Undark.
(Image Credit: Rene Ebersole/ Undark)
Most of us don’t read license agreements of the apps that we use. I myself am guilty of this. I just scroll down and click or tap “I agree” and I go on my merry way after. Since most of the time we do this, we have no idea what the consequences will be unless we encounter an issue within the app. Thankfully, we have a “robot lawyer” in our midst that could help us take the mystery out of license agreements.
DoNotPay, the “robot lawyer” service that helps you contest parking tickets and even sue people, is launching a new tool to help customers understand license agreements. Called “Do Not Sign,” the service is included with DoNotPay’s monthly $3 subscription fee, and it lets users upload, scan, or copy and paste the URLs of any license agreements they’d like to check. The service uses machine learning to highlight clauses it thinks users need to know about, including options to opt out from data collection. It’s available starting today, November 20th, on the web and via DoNotPay’s app on iOS.
More about this over at The Verge.
(Image Credit: DoNotPay)
Mental Floss has an article about why we eat pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. While the history of pumpkin pie is interesting, it also led me to something not quite so wholesome. The Thanksgiving holiday was a sticking point in the schism between the North and the South that developed leading up to the Civil War.
“Thanksgiving was, above all, a New England holiday, and New England was abolitionist territory,” as Diana Karter Appelbaum put it in her book “Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, an American History.”
Those who urged their fellow Americans to celebrate Thanksgiving as a national ritual were Northern evangelical Protestants who were strongly linked to the abolitionist movement. As anti-slavery sentiment swelled in the 1840s, many Northern ministers took the opportunity of Thanksgiving to rail against the moral wrongs of slavery.
Southerners, in turn, pushed back against the idea of Thanksgiving. Resistance to the holiday was particularly strong in Virginia, where local leaders viewed their state, not New England, as the cradle of the new American nation.
The acceptance of Thanksgiving in the South came about gradually, with sweet potato pie being served as an alternative to pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving is celebrated across the United States these days, only now it is a time where families traditionally come together to argue about their political differences.
(Image credit: TheCulinaryGeek)
Being an aerial lookout is one of the most dangerous positions in the crew of First World War German Zeppelin. As an aerial lookout, one’s job will be to observe the ground for enemy positions and bombing targets while hanging at the end of a long tether which was suspended from the belly of the aircraft.
The lookout sat in an observation car called the spy gondola or spy basket that was lowered from the zeppelin through the cloud, while the zeppelin itself stayed shrouded within the cloud layer and out of enemy view. The aerial lookout then became the eyes for the zeppelin’s pilot instructing the pilot on an appropriate course via a telephone. Although the job was alarming, it was said that many crew members enjoyed lookout duty because it was the only place where they were allowed to smoke.
The spy gondola was later adapted by the US Navy, but they decided that it was too dangerous to use.
I wonder, how did it feel being an aerial lookout?
(Image Credit: Amusing Planet)
With all the monsters defeated, a king feels his days of glory are past. His daughter wants him to feel important again. With the best of intentions, she hatches a plan to make him a hero again. Royal Madness is from the French animation school Gobelins, but no French skills are needed to catch the feels.
So, you had a little oops with your vehicle and it's going to be some time before you get it fixed -if ever. This looks a lot like my 20-year-old truck, and I wouldn't bother getting a dent banged out, but I might be tempted to add a decal of where Wile E. Coyote went through it. The owner of Hussy Horse Designs makes custom decals, and he made this one just the right size for the dent. He can make you one, too! -via Boing Boing
J.J. Abrams on #TheRiseOfSkywalker: "Everyone is doing the best work I’ve ever seen anyone do. But the ambition of this movie is far greater than Force Awakens. What we set out to do was far more challenging. Everything is exponentially larger on this” https://t.co/jWMuUPOp2T
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) November 19, 2019
Entertainment Weekly spoke to J.J. Abrams and some of the Star Wars cast about the upcoming movie The Rise of Skywalker. While they didn't go into plot points all that much, we do find out some things about the movie that we didn't learn from the trailers.
Here’s what we know about how Episode IX begins: It’s been more than a year since the events of 2017’s The Last Jedi. The First Order has decimated the Resistance. Rey has been training to use the Force. Finn and hotshot pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) have been sent by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) to find allies throughout the galaxy, but so far haven’t had any luck. “They’re trying to put bandaids on this leaking ship of the Resistance,” Isaac says.
Their mission leads Finn, Poe, and Rey to work together, which has, oddly, never happened before in the trilogy. And since there’s a time jump, the characters have all grown and changed since we last saw them. “We’re not just a ragtag group of people who have been thrown together,” Isaac says. “We’ve actually had time to train. There are some really great sequences with the three of us in infiltrating spaces.”
Both Isaac and Boyega say they had their character wishes granted for the final film. Isaac wanted Poe to get “out the cockpit and into the group,” while Boyega wanted Finn to become a more capable solider (and not, as the actor candidly puts it, just a “comedic goofy dude who never gets stuff done”).
The article also tells us a bit about Rey's interactions with Kylo Ren, incorporating Carrie Fisher into the film, some new characters, and the return of Palpatine and Lando Calrission. Oh yeah, and force ghosts. -via Uproxx
The Disney princess movie Tangled came out in 2010, when my kids were old enough to go to the movies without me, so I missed it altogether. According to this Honest Trailer, the retold story of Rapunzel was pretty good, if formulaic, and the main drawback is the lack of any song catchy enough to be heard outside of the theater. Watching this caused me to look up the movie at Wikipedia, and the plot seems totally incomprehensible. Still, I now want to see Tangled.
In 2012, Hurricane Isaac slammed into Louisiana. This little squirrel fell out of her nest during the storm, so nearby humans took care of her. It was a perfect match, so they decided to stay together.
Now the squirrel, whom the humans have named Jill, lives among the Two-Legs. They provided her with a teddy bear, which she clutches when it's bedtime.
"Bubble boy disease" is officially called X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). That's when a child is born without an immune system, due to a gene mutation. The standard treatment is to isolate the child in a sterile environment, or bubble. Some victims are helped by a bone marrow or stem cell transplant from a sibling, but those are a minority of patients. The good news is that a 2018 trial at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis has returned promising results in engineering an immune system with gene therapy.
St. Jude wasn’t the first to try gene therapy for SCID-X1. Nearly 20 years ago, researchers in France reported successfully reconditioning immune systems in SCID-X1 patients using a particular virus to deliver the correct gene to cells. But when a quarter of the patients in that study developed leukemia, because the modified virus also disrupted the functioning of normal genes, the study was halted and scientists interested in gene therapy for the disorder hit the brakes.
At St. Jude, experts led by the late Brian Sorrentino, a hematologist and gene therapy researcher, set out to engineer a virus delivery vehicle that wouldn’t have side effects. They started with a modified HIV vector emptied of the virus and its original contents, and filled it with a normal copy of the IL2RG gene. They engineered this vector to include “insulators” to prevent the vector from disturbing other genes once it integrated into the human genome. The goal was to insert the gene into stem cells that had come from the patients’ own bone marrow, and those cells would then go on to produce working immune system cells. It was crucial for the viral vector to not deliver the gene to other kinds of cells—and that’s what the researchers observed. “After gene therapy, for example, brain cells do not have a correct copy of the gene,” explained Stephen Gottschalk, who chairs St. Jude’s Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy.
Did I say promising results? All eight children in the trial were able to leave the hospital and paricipate in normal activities! Read about the disease and the experiment at Smithsinian.
(Image credit: Michelle Goebel)
