Could you be the first one to catch a signal from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) brand new experimental satellite?

On December 17, the space agency will be launching a new cubesat, called the OPS-SAT, on a Soyuz rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. The satellite will launch with ESA’s Cheops exoplanet-tracker. When it reaches space, the cubesat will deploy its solar panels and ultra-high frequency antenna, and will then begin to send signals back home to Earth.

It is then that radio amateurs will have an opportunity to catch the first signals from this small satellite and find it out in the cosmos, per a request from ESA’s mission control team in Darmstadt, Germany.

Now, not only is ESA inviting radio amateurs to get involved with OPS-SAT, the agency has also opened up the opportunity for anyone to apply to become an "experimenter." If you want to utilize OPS-SAT, you can apply and learn more here.

Find out more about the satellite over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: ESA)

Automobile manufacturer Porsche usually concerns itself with designing terrestrial vehicles, but for this project it collaborated with Lucasfilm designers to create a new starfighter for the Star Wars universe.

While it does not exist in full-scale flyable form, the starfighter, called the Tri-Wing S-91x Pegasus, is being built out as a highly-detailed sub-scale model, which is five feet in length. It will be unveiled at the “Rise of Skywalker” premiere in LA this month.

Note that the S-91x won’t actually be in the movie — it’s more of a design exercise and promotional thing than something that is actually intended to feature in narrative Star Wars universe content. But the collaboration is interesting because it combines Porsche sensibilities and direct design inspiration from that company’s 911 and Taycan real-world vehicles, with authentic Lucasfilm touches like an astromech slot behind the cockpit and the somewhat “lived-in” detailed industrial look of Star Wars universe technology.

(Image Credit: TechCrunch)

An international team of scientists has tried to calculate an estimated mass of the Milky Way galaxy using sophisticated models. They have written their efforts and results on paper, and have posted it on the arXiv preprint server.

Research before has led to estimates of the size of our galaxy, which is now thought to be 256,000 light-years across.

Now, in this new effort, the researchers have carried out work that has led to an estimate of our galaxy's mass—approximately 890 billion times that of the sun, or 3.9 tredecillion pounds.

Figuring out the size, shape and mass of our galaxy is no easy feat considering that we are measuring it from within. We cannot see much of it because of interstellar gases and occluding stars. Because of that, scientists have looked for other ways to map the galaxy.

Find out more about the model that they used over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Christmas in Japan is a relatively new phenomenon, and it is celebrated with the traditions of a romantic date, a strawberry cake, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. It's traditional. KFC for Christmas seems weird to us, but it's been that way since the 1970s, and the chain makes a big chunk of its yearly sales during Christmas. The company has long explained it as American expats looking for a substitute for turkey for the holiday, but we assumed that they just told Japanese customers that fried chicken was a traditional American Christmas food. But it turns out that it wasn't the company that did it. It wasn't even an American. It was a franchisee named Takeshi Okawara, who opened Japan's first KFC outlet. His store in Nagoya didn't go over well, and Okawara had to take side jobs, like playing Santa Claus. It was that job that inspired the lie.

Okawara promoted fried chicken as a substitute for traditional Christmas turkey, which the Japanese knew from TV and cinema was eaten for Christmas throughout the West. Selling chicken and sides together in Christmas-themed “Party Barrels” and decorating his store’s Colonel Sanders statue as Santa-san brought in enough customers to save his business.

With word of the Christmas “Party Barrels” making their way across Japan, the national broadcaster NHK interviewed Okawara about his role in bringing the Colonel to Japan and asked if KFC for Christmas was a common custom overseas. Unable to turn down such a glaring opportunity, the young entrepreneur said yes. “I still regret that, but people liked it because it was something good [they thought came] from the U.S. or European countries,” he told Household Name.

Read the story of how Christmas in Japan came to include Kentucky Fried Chicken at Atlas Obscura.

Yeah, it's easy to mess up a word or two when you're live on air, but it's hard to just correct and go on when the entire studio is laughing at you. This is a long video, but you don't have to watch it all at once. Unless you want to spend 15 minutes giggling.  -via Digg

Why are whales so big? And why aren’t they bigger? Those are two long-standing questions for biologists, and it seems that they might have answers now thanks to sophisticated sensors which were suction-cupped onto the backs of whales.

Being large in size boosts a whales’ ability to reach more food for less effort. It helps them exploit the riches of the deep sea that other creatures can’t reach.

By estimating the energy used — and gained — when foraging for 13 species of whales and porpoises, scientists have shown that how big the creatures get is influenced by feeding strategy and prey availability.

The sizes of toothed whales like orcas, which use echolocation to hunt for individual prey, appear to be constrained by how much food they can grab during a dive, researchers report. That’s not the case, however, for blue whales and other filter feeders, which tend to be much larger than their toothed cousins. Filter feeders alive today aren’t constrained by food availability, which may mean they might be limited by their biology. Or the animals could be on their way to evolving to be even bigger, according to a study in the Dec. 13 Science.

“This is a fascinating study,” says Samantha Price, an evolutionary biologist at Clemson University in South Carolina who wasn’t involved in the research.

Check out ScienceNews for more details.

(Image Credit: rmferreira/ Pixabay)

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Happy 4th of July! Who’s getting a workout in?! #fatgripz #happyfourth

A post shared by Fat Gripz (@fatgripz) on Jul 4, 2019 at 7:34am PDT

You might have seen this heavy rubber handles before, but you might not have taken notice of them. Called FatGripz, you can use these handles to wrap around barbells and dumbells.

Their main job is to make the bar harder to hold onto, which can be a good thing.

(Fat Gripz is one popular brand, but it’s often used as a name for the whole category of object. There are multiple sizes of Fat Gripz, plus other brands, like Alpha grips.)

But what are they really for? They are for when you want to give your gripping muscles an extra challenge.

It’s harder to grip something wide than something narrow. If you’re lifting a normal sized barbell or dumbbell, your fingers and thumb wrap around it. But if you’re lifting something bigger, you need to squeeze with your hand just to be able to hold on. That requires your hand and forearm muscles to work harder.

I believe I can handle lifting them up… Without the dumbbells, of course.

(Image Credit: Fat Gripz/ Instagram)

When the first Baby Yoda merch was unveiled, most of us said that it stunk. Then came Funko and Disney’s stuff, about which we complained again. Now, it’s Hasbro’s turn at creating the Baby Yoda merch, and it might be the best one yet.

Hasbro has released some merch, but at the moment, the talking plush is the only actual physical toy, and the rest seem to be computer-generated images.

Check them out over at Gizmodo.

(Image Credit: Hasbro/ Gizmodo)

Technology company Nvidia has always been the best when it comes to delivering high-quality graphics. Now, they try to surpass their limits as they change 2-D images into 3-D models through the use of encoder-decoder architecture.

Paul Lilly in Hot Hardware was among the tech watchers who made note that the way they went from 2-D-to-3-D was news. It's no big surprise when the path is the reverse—3-D into 2-D—but "to create a 3-D model without feeding a system 3-D data is far more challenging."

Lilly quoted Jun Gao, one of the research team who worked on the rendering approach. "This is essentially the first time ever that you can take just about any 2-D image and predict relevant 3-D properties."

Why is this technology “news”? Because it is insanely fast. The renderer can produce a 3-D object from a 2-D image in less than 100 milliseconds. If that is not impressive, I don’t know what is.

The technology also has real-world applications such as in security and autonomous cars.

More details over at TechXplore.

(Image Credit: Nvidia)

When Nichola Mullen-King from Newcastle returned home on Monday, December 2, she was extremely surprised when she found her whole kitchen under wraps… literally! Her husband Carl had covered the entire room and almost everything in it in Christmas wrapping paper, including the fruit, the chopping board, as well as the utensils. Talk about dedication!

The amusing act took him around two hours to complete and it's fair to say Nichola wasn't all that impressed with his work.

Sharing snaps of her 'new' kitchen on Facebook , she wrote: "My a******e of a husband came up with the bright idea to wrap part of the kitchen for elf on the shelf…

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Caters News Agency)

The oceans are our world’s most significant carbon sink. They absorb the carbon dioxide and excess heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions. With this in mind, they could be a great ally in reducing the impact of climate change. There is a problem, however. Overfishing, global warming, and plastic pollution are destroying the ecosystems of the sea, and this hinders the capacity of the seas to store carbon and absorb heat.

It is vital to halt overfishing and to curb the stream of waste entering the precious oceans. It could help tackle the climate crisis. If governments forged a new treaty to protect the oceans and created ocean sanctuaries around the world, it could restore many areas to health. By setting a target of safeguarding 30% of the oceans (at least) by 2030, it would combat global heating, according to a new report by Greenpeace International called In Hot Water.

Learn more about the capabilities of our oceans over at Intelligent Living.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

In 1912, the body of a murder victim was found in Georgetown, Connecticut. She had been tied with wire and had holes in her head. The eventual discovery of a burned crate nearby led police to look for the killer in New York City.

Two weeks after the body of an unidentified woman was discovered in a Connecticut mill pond, a cat helped police find the murder weapon in the East 40th Street apartment where the woman had been killed.

The story had everything a news editor could want for writing eye-catching headlines: murder, sex, mystery, gore, and some very colorful characters, including an Italian laborer called Monkeyface Suciciada, a prostitute named Grace Carbone, and a beautiful teenage girl named Turiddi.

Oh yes, there was also a cat named Tipsy involved in the drama. The cat had a reputation as an expert mouser. The man she helped nab was called Salvatore “the mouse” Geracci.

Read the story of the murder investigation, and how Tipsy the cat factored into it at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

This lonely hearts ad looks like a joke, but it is a real story about a real duck. Chris Morris of Blue Hill, Maine, had three ducks, but two of them were taken by a bobcat. Yellow Duck fell into a funk, mourning the loss of Brown Duck and Gray Duck, one of which was her mate. She stopped hanging around the chickens and quacked at unusual times.

So the 31-year-old special education teacher crafted a singles ad for her and hung it on the community bulletin board at the Blue Hill Co-op.

“Duck seeking duck,” Morris wrote. “Lonesome runner duck seeks companion. Partner recently deceased. Serious replies only.”

“We wanted to post about this to try to find a duck, and that just seemed like the best fit,” Morris said.

The ad worked! Yellow Duck will have her pick of new mates. Read the details of the story at the Bangor Daily News.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Brook Ewing Minner)
 

When ur dad finds ur extensions pic.twitter.com/cJWTnKLqiT

— Not Evan (@actuallynotevan) March 4, 2017

These wisecracking dads being themselves on the Internet are the 'dad joke' meme equivalents of the digital age. In 24 posts, here are moments that made the Internet collectively facepalm or laugh out loud at these jokes, or rather anti-jokes. Wholesome, simplistic, and often pleasantly unexpected, some kinds of humor (and people) never change.

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But imagine how sellable it’ll be at a future garage sale. 💻✨ @ClassicDadMoves . . Source: u/I-love-llamas (Reddit r/mildlyinfuriating)

A post shared by Classic Dad Moves (@classicdadmoves) on Oct 24, 2019 at 1:32pm PDT

What’s more is that Merriam-Webster recently added the informal term as a dictionary entry: 

a wholesome joke of the type said to be told by fathers with a punchline that is often an obvious or predictable pun or play on words and usually judged to be endearingly corny or unfunny 

It’s interesting to know how jokes become culturally considered as dad jokes, without the stereotypical notion of being told by a literal father or father figure.

Here’s the original thread. 

(Image credit: BuzzFeed)

Private Wojtek served proudly with the Polish Army during World War II, although he never set foot in Poland his entire life. He was a diligent worker, loading ammunition before and during battles, and retired as a hero. Also, Private Wojtek was a bear. In 1942, a unit of Polish soldiers adopted a baby bear in Iran after its mother had been shot by a hunter. The bear, named Wojtek, ended up with the 22nd Artillery Supply Company.  

Sergeant Peter Prendys was appointed as Wojtek’s principal guardian. The quiet 46-year-old sergeant, soon dubbed “Mother Bear” by his soldiers, truly became the cub’s surrogate mother, wrapping the bear in his army coat on chilly evenings and cuddling him to sleep in their shared tent. Soon, Wojtek graduated from condensed milk to fruit, marmalade, honey, and syrup. But his favorite treat was cigarettes, which he preferred to eat rather than smoke.

As Anders’ Army headed toward Palestine to meet up with British forces, Wojtek grew up playing with Prendys and his other human friends, who taught him to wrestle and salute. He enjoyed lingering in the camp’s kitchen area, where he would happily eat or drink anything the cooks offered him. When he had been a very good bear, the men would give him a bottle of beer or wine, which he would gulp down before staring mournfully into the empty bottle until one of the soldiers took the hint and tossed him another.

By 1944, Wojtek was full-grown and the unit was ordered to Italy. In order to take the bear, Wojtek was drafted into the army as Private Wojciech “Wojtek” Perski. It was in Italy that Wojtek showed his bravery, utility, and heroism in battle. Read the full story Wojtek the war hero bear, or listen to it, at Damn Interesting.