View this post on Instagram

Corduroy in #corbetscouloir Probably a first! @jhparkandpipe must be prepping for #jhkingsandqueens Thanks @ericseymour for the 📸

A post shared by Jess McMillan (@jmcmillan) on Feb 1, 2019 at 4:53pm PST

We love being young. It is the age where our bodies, and our performance, are at its peak. With that being said, we don’t like to get older, as we get weaker. Same goes with Jess McMillan. She doesn’t love getting older.

“Turning 40 was terrible,” she says. She’s worried that her day job, as the events coordinator at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming, is eating into her ski time, and at 41, she knows she has to work a little harder to keep in shape for her annual big ski trips.

McMillan is most successful freeskier of all time. Now, she travels the world and appears in videos by Warren Miller Entertainment.

“My favorite thing is to always try something new,” McMillan says. “Explore a different part of skiing. Challenge yourself.” 

How does she keep her body in shape throughout the year? Find out on Outside.

(Image Credit: Jess McMillan/ Instagram)

Melinda McDowell had used drugs ever since she was a teenager. She didn’t try methamphetamine, however, until one night in 2017 when her mother suddenly died of a stroke. That night, she went into her neighbor’s house, and the neighbor had crystal meth.

"I tried it and I was hooked from the first hit," McDowell says. "It was an explosion of the senses. It was the biggest high I'd ever experienced."

From here, McDowell’s life goes downhill. 

...that big high started getting more elusive. But she kept using the drug frequently, and it took a toll. She went from 240 pounds to 110. Eventually, she lost custody of her children, who were put in foster homes. McDowell started having hallucinations.

She tried her best to stop using meth, and she tried many times. Unfortunately, after just stopping for a few days, she’d have severe panic attacks and start to shake uncontrollably.

One night, she remembers lying on her bathroom floor thinking that if she didn't get help, she'd die.

McDowell heard about a woman named Nancy Beste who had recently opened a treatment center called Road to Recovery, near where the former lived. McDowell says she begged the woman.

McDowell’s call came at a fortunate time, says Beste, who was a certified addiction counselor and physician assistant. Beste just came back from a conference where she learned a research about medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, for methamphetamine users.

Some early studies indicate that naltrexone, the same medication used to treat alcohol addiction and opioids, can work for some people addicted to methamphetamine.

Beste gave McDowell a prescription for naltrexone and signed her up for individual and group therapy…

Find out more about what happened next to McDowell, and find out more about naltrexone, over at NPR.

(Image Credit: Radspunk/ Wikimedia Commons)

For some reason, kids view 911 as a go-to number when they need help. Well, they’re not wrong, but it seems that perhaps some parents don’t explain what kind of help shall they call 911 for. This perhaps explains why some kids call 911 to ask for help with their math homework.

Recently, police in a Phoenix suburb got a strange 911 call. It wasn’t an emergency, but rather a request. A 5-year-old boy just wanted to order a Happy Meal from McDonald’s.

In a follow-up call, the father, Randy Skabelund, told the dispatcher that there was no emergency and his son Charlie must have had his cellphone.

Nevertheless, a police officer responded to the young boy’s request.

Officer Randolph “Scott” Valdez arrived later at the family’s home for a welfare check.

He brought the requested meal, took time to teach Charlie about when it’s the right time to call police and even posed for a few photos.

The boy’s mother, Kim Skabelund, says Valdez handled the situation with “love and kindness.”

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Video Credit: Inside Edition/ YouTube)

This one-legged skeleton is believed to be Charles-Etienne Gudin, one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s generals, according to a French historian and former soldier.

The 200-year-old skeleton was discovered by a team of French and Russian archaeologists in July during an excavation in Smolensk, Russia, which lies about 250 miles west of Moscow.

Pierre Malinowski, who led the dig, told CNN that after he unearthed the remains he flew overnight with part of the skeleton's femur and teeth inside his suitcase from Moscow to Marseille to compare the DNA with that of the general's mother, brother and son.

"A professor in Marseille carried out extensive testing and the DNA matches 100%," Malinowski told CNN. "It was worth the trouble."

More details about this news over at the site.

(Image Credit: CNN)

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was an 18th-century German sculptor in Vienna. In that era, painters may have had free rein to experiment with facial expressions, but carving a statue of rock or even casting one in bronze was a major project that required a pleasant, thoughtful, or determined expression to capture a personality for posterity. halfway through his career, Messerschmidt abandoned those rules and began making "character heads" with extreme grimaces. His contemporaries thought he'd lost his mind. They may have been right.  

Messerschmidt, Nicolai claims, believed himself to be tormented by demons; the wicked spirits were angry that his work as an artist had uncovered divine secrets of human proportion. “He also couldn’t comprehend for a long time why he who lived such an ascetic life of celibacy would have to endure such torture from the spirits, who should have been, according to (romantic) theory, most sympathetic to him,” Nicolai wrote. A collector who visited Messerschmidt reported that his face was ruined from pulling faces all day long, modelling for his own busts. (Did anyone ever tell you, as a kid, that your face would “get stuck like that?” Messerschmidt’s the guy to whom it actually happened.)

But Messerschmidt’s project, of cataloging “the sixty-four different varieties of grimace” (as Nicolai put it), may not have been as unorthodox as it seems.

Read about Messerschmidt's character heads and see a slideshow of them at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Flickr user Sam Howzit)

The original plan for the final chapter of the Star Wars triple trilogy was to highlight General Leia as the main character, after focusing on Han Solo in The Force Awakens and on Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi. But those plans had to be changed due to the death of actress Carrie Fisher in December of 2016. Fisher's role in The Rise of Skywalker had to be reconsidered. The film will will still feature Leia, using unused footage from the two previous films. While we don't yet know what will happen, we now have some idea of the original plan, explained by her brother Todd Fisher.  

In the original version of the ninth and final installment, The Rise of Skywalker, his sister, Leia (played by Carrie Fisher), was going to emerge as a full-fledged Jedi warrior, complete with her very own lightsaber. That’s according to no less an authority than Fisher’s real-life brother, Todd Fisher, who filled us in on what the plan was for his sister’s iconic character prior to her sudden death in December 2016. “She was going to be the big payoff in the final film,” Fisher reveals exclusively to Yahoo Entertainment. “She was going to be the last Jedi, so to speak. That’s cool right?” (Watch our video interview above.)

Cool is an understatement: It’s positively wizard. Leia’s Force abilities were teased in a key scene of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, and the Resistance general apparently would have had the chance to get even more physical in The Rise of Skywalker. “People used to say to me, ‘Why is it that Carrie never gets a lightsaber and chops up some bad guys,’” Fisher says, noting that Alec Guinness was roughly the same age when Obi-Wan Kenobi battled Darth Vader in A New Hope. “Obi-Wan was in his prime when he was Carrie’s age!”

Read more of Fisher's discussion of his sister and her role in Star Wars at Yahoo! Entertainment. -via The Daily Dot

The brain receives far more memories than it can keep everyday. It absorbs lots of new information throughout the course of the day, but it only retains some of them overnight. It is said that sleep seems to be a crucial factor in keeping this balance of learning and forgetting, reinforcing some memories and destroying others through the brain’s patterns of electrical signaling. However, the mechanisms that are at work at the brain have been unclear.

Earlier this month, a research paper reported that scientists have chipped away at the mystery. The research isolated the opposing functions of two kinds of brain waves: one that strengthens memories and the other that weakens them.

Simply by distinguishing these brain waves from each other, the researchers began to form an explanation that reconciles competing theories about how the brain processes memories to retain some and lose others. There was a gap in our understanding of how sleep could be important both for remembering and forgetting, said Karunesh Ganguly, an associate professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and the senior author on the study.

Theories about memory consolidation generally fall into one of two camps, and some evidence supports each of them. One attributes long-term learning to patterns of brain activity that are reenacted during sleep. These ensembles of neural firing mimic the signals involved in the original learning, and that repetition strengthens the synaptic connections between the neurons to ingrain the memory. Without reactivation, other connections are in theory not fortified, and those memories should wither away.

As an alternative, many researchers put stock in the idea of “synaptic downscaling,” in which the brain more actively clears itself of less useful memories. Because learning involves neural activity that strengthens brain connections, it becomes an energy drain. During sleep, less energy goes into the connections, allowing those with less long-term importance to weaken. Removing this background noise from unneeded memories clarifies the brain’s signals and keeps it more efficient.

The gap between these theories is bridged by the new research, which looks at the roles in memory retention of different brain patterns that are linked with sleep.

More details about this over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Imagine this scenario for a moment: You’re running a cockroach farm. You have cameras all over the place, and all the cameras are equipped with advanced image recognition technology. It is a rather boring day, until you reviewed the logs at the end of your shift. While the system showed that it has recorded zero instances escaping into the staff-only areas, it showed that it has recorded seven instances of giraffes. Curious about what happened, you decide to review the camera footage.

You are just beginning to play the first “giraffe” time stamp when you hear the skittering of millions of tiny feet.

What happened?

Your image recognition algorithm was fooled by an adversarial attack. With special knowledge of your algorithm’s design or training data, or even via trial and error, the cockroaches were able to design tiny note cards that would fool the A.I. into thinking it was seeing giraffes instead of cockroaches. The tiny note cards wouldn’t have looked remotely like giraffes to people—they’d be just a bunch of rainbow-colored static. And the cockroaches didn’t even have to hide behind the cards—all they had to do was keep showing the cards to the camera as they walked brazenly down the corridor.

While this scenario is entirely fictitious, it has some truth in it: image recognition systems can be fooled, and they can be deceived easily.

Researchers have demonstrated that they could show an image recognition algorithm a picture of a lifeboat (which it identifies as a lifeboat with 89.2 percent confidence), then add a tiny patch of specially designed noise way over in one corner of the image. A human looking at the picture could tell that this is obviously a picture of a lifeboat with a small patch of rainbow static over in one corner. The A.I., however, identifies the lifeboat as a Scottish terrier with 99.8 percent confidence.

I wonder: when will recognition systems be perfected?

More details about this over at Slate.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

What would you feel if you find out that someone's buried in a highway near your home?

The same spooky feels will get you if you happen to pass by runway 10 at Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport in Georgia. Why? Two people are buried there.

[W]hen the Savannah airport needed to expand during World War II, it was met with resistance from descendants of the Dotson family.

Believing that their ancestors wouldn't have wanted to abandon the land they worked so hard to cultivate, the Dotson family insisted on keeping the matriarch and patriarch put. The graves of Richard and Catherine Dotson, the farmers who originally owned the land and died in 1884 and 1877, sit on the edge of runway 10 and 28, while two more graves, of their relatives Daniel Hueston and John Dotson, can be found nearby in the brush.

Richard and Catherine's graves feature markers — his says "At rest," while hers says "Gone home to rest," according to The State, a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina.

The spooky part of it? 

"It's said that if you are coming in to land just after sundown, two figures will appear just along the north side of the runway," a regional airline captain, Lisa Ruedy, wrote for the website All Things Aero, according to The State.

Image Credit: Savannah Airport

The historical figure of Johann Georg Faust was a 16th Century German occultist. The legendary Faust was a character written about in plays in stories since that time. This fictional Faust sold his soul to Satan for dark powers. His wickedness is contrasted with that of the lady Margareta, a woman of humility and holiness, whom Faust covets. Faust is encouraged down his dark path by the demon Mephistopheles.

This inspired a now-unknown 18th Century sculptor to carve a single log of sycamore wood into a sculpture that, when viewed from one side shows Mephistopheles and, from the other, shows Margareta. It is on display at the  Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India. You can see more photos of this remarkable piece at My Modern Met.

Photo: Salar Jung Museum

When you go for a stroll in the forest, you’ll feel that the air is fresh. People often associate the fresh air to the purifying abilities of plants and trees. As they inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, they remove the pollutants in the air. Could it be the same case for the air inside our houses?

For decades, humans have installed to their homes ferns, peace lilies, and other types of plants, to try to bring the forest to their houses. We have assumed that these plants will grant us cleaner air at our homes because of the plant respiration. Scientists, however, say otherwise.

To clear out the chemical compounds wafting through our homes, we’d need to install a literal jungle, according to two Drexel University researchers.

To purify your air with houseplants, you’d need anywhere from 10 to 100 plants per square meter — enough that you could get lost in your own apartment. That means those windowsill succulents and that drooping snake plant your sister gave you are little more than aspirational ornaments.

While the plants we have at home may not give us clean air, at least they are beautiful.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: coyot/ Pixabay)

Christine Hunger is a speech-language pathologist. She has been teaching her dog Stella to communicate in English with a custom soundboard since Stella was a puppy. Stella can press buttons to bring up words she knows (29 words so far), and even more important, has been stringing words together to relay a thought. Those thoughts are exactly what you'd expect from a good dog.  

Last night, right before this video was taken, I accidentally said “ball” on Stella’s device while I was actually reaching for a different word. But, Stella took this very seriously! She picked up her ball, dropped it on her device, and said “Good” (Translation: Good idea, Mom!)
•
I started recording right after she said “Good” and caught the rest of her thought: “Happy ball want outside!”

Read about Stella and her skills in an interview at People, or go more in depth and follow
Stella's progress at Hunger's blog Hunger For Words. If you just want to see more of Stella in action, check out YouTube or Instagram.  -via Metafilter

Looking back from 30 years on, our opinions of the Disney movie The Little Mermaid are colored by the movies that came afterward, but it was groundbreaking at the time. I was impressed by a Disney Princess that actually had agency, even if her desires and actions were sometimes questionable. The story of The Little Mermaid is the story of Disney's renaissance. After Walt Disney's death in 1966, the company went into decline for almost 20 years. What stopped the slide into obscurity was recruiting Michael Eisner to run the company. He slashed expenses, concentrated on TV, and diminished the importance of animation. The animation department was under threat of elimination in the late 1980s when they went for a Hail Mary feature film project- one that was very different from all the previous animated Disney movies.  

At the suggestion of director Ron Clements, studio chiefs decided to pursue the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Little Mermaid,” except with a happy ending and a central villain. (In the original story, the mermaid does not get the prince. Instead, she faces a variety of antagonists and ends up committing suicide.) Ashman got right to work, transforming the depressing 19th-century yarn into a dynamic Broadway spectacle.

In classic Disney animated features of old, plot was advanced through dialogue, and songs were incidental. For instance, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the song “Whistle While you Work” does nothing to move the plot forward. Ashman and Menken approached the film’s book as they would a Broadway musical, using songs to impart critical plot points and character development. Music tells the audience everything they need to know about Ariel: The song “Part of Your World,” for instance, is a classic example of the “I Want” trope of American musical theater. “They approached it like a Broadway musical,” recalled Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel, in the DVD documentary. “It is something totally different. The characters actually run out of words, can’t express themselves anymore, and it has to come out in song.”

But that was just the beginning of what made The Little Mermaid different from the movies that came before. Read how Ashman and others broke the formula for Disney animated films at Smithsonian.

18 years is a long time to wait for a government to repair the damage that a government vehicle left on private property.

But it gets worse.

Homeowner Calvin Hawley first noticed and reported the incident in 1993!

Hawley, a resident of Winnipeg, Manitoba, noticed that a city-operated snow removal truck damaged his curb when his second son was born. CBC News quotes him:

"I came home from the hospital ... and discovered a large chunk of curb under a whole whack of snow," says Hawley, who lives on Tyrone Bay in St. Vital.

That was January 26, 1993. The day is clear in his mind, because that's when his second son was born.

When Hawley reported the problem many, many times, the public servants were unhelpful:

"One time they told me the system for logging complaints had changed and my previous complaints weren't on record."

Still, he didn't give up. He kept calling and as the years passed, the rebar or reinforced steel used to strengthen the curb gradually became more exposed and crumbled.

Two years ago, he even saw a city repair team working on other damaged curbs in the neighborhood. But not his.

The good news is that the City of Winnipeg has now given itself a deadline to complete the task: June 26, 2037.

So Hawley might as well count this problem as solved.

-via Dave Barry

Lasse Scharz is a ship's cook. Here he is aboard the Avontuur preparing a meal for the crew. The camera is rigidly fastened to the boat, but the boat is bobbing along on the ocean. Scharz is quite experienced with such conditions, and tells us he uses big pots and only fills them halfway because otherwise they'd spill. -via Laughing Squid