It's been a joke ever since the advent of modern art- if this painting were hung upside down, would anyone know the difference? Alex Boese looked up cases in which that actually happened. Yes, museums and galleries have been known to hang pictures upside down, or even sideways. While most could be classified as modern art, they are not all abstracts. The image at the top is a case in which critics assumed the painting was abstract, but it was only upside-down.

At a 1915 art exhibition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, "The Blue Pool," by George Bellows, was hung in a conspicuous location. Several artists gave talks at the event in which they referenced it, describing it as "modern in treatment." It was only after three weeks that the exhibitors realized they had hung the painting upside-down. When righted, the seemingly abstract swatches of color transformed into a more familiar scene of a pool of water surrounded by rocks.

Read 13 stories of art displayed the wrong way, and even more examples of people making that joke about it, at Weird Universe.

You've seen memes about getting drunk and buying something ridiculous online, like a goat for one's apartment. In this case, the buyer was not drunk, but mistakenly bought 1,000 chickens anyway. Steve Morrow of Hamilton, New Zealand, saw an auction on the online site Trade Me for "one 1000" chickens.   

Morrow said he thought the highest bidder could take as many birds as they wanted and the seller would continue to auction the rest of them off until they were all gone.

He said he put in an auto bid for $20, thinking he could at least get two hens.

"When the auction closed, I thought 'this is great', I could take as many birds as I wanted," Morrow said.

"But when I spoke to the man and he said it was for 1000 hens ... holy moly, I was stunned, I can tell you that."

When the automatic auction ended, Morrow had gotten all those chickens for a mere $1.50. After processing the shock, Morrow went to work trying to find takers for the birds. The online response was good, and he has already found homes for 700 of them. Read the full story at Stuff. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Amity Beane)

For some medicines, it doesn’t matter what time of day you take it. For others, pharmacists may recommend that you take it at the same time every day. 

Scientists say that there are about 30% of medicines in which taking it at a certain time of day matters. And there’s also a recent study that shows that blood pressure medication is more effective when taken at night.

The question is, how do you know if the timing of your medication is crucial?

In most cases, it’s not important when you take your medicine. For instance, you can take non-drowsy antihistamines for hay fever, or analgesics for pain when you need them. It doesn’t matter if it is morning, noon or night.

What is more important is the time interval between each dose. For instance, paracetamol needs to be taken at least four hours apart, any closer and you run the risk of taking a toxic dose.

[...]

It may seem fairly obvious to take some medicines at particular times. For example, it makes sense to taking sleeping medications, such as temazepam, at night before you go to bed.

Some antidepressants, such as amitryptyline or mirtazapine, have drowsy side effects. So it also makes sense to take them at night.

More details about this over at The Conversation.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)

Did you know that when Paul Lauterbur thought of the first concept for the MRI machine, he sketched it out on a restaurant napkin? And did you know that J.K Rowling first scribbled down the idea of the Hogwarts houses on the back of an air sickness bag? 

Quentin Tarantino writes all his screenplays longhand. At the start of each project, he buys a specific notebook and pen. There’s also Tinder CEO Elie Seidman who swears by pen and paper.

Stephen Moore writes:

It might sound impractical — archaic, even — but if you’re struggling with productivity or creativity, it might be time to grab a pen and paper, and let your brain flow out onto the page. I’ve been using the old-school tools, and sure, they can feel a little clunky. In my notebook, there are crossed-out words, lines, arrows, and mistakes everywhere. My hand cramps up every now and then.

And yet, the simple practice of writing longhand has done wonders for me and my work. It has given me an uncluttered way to connect with my thoughts on an emotional level. It’s also allowed me to study my own thought process — I can see how my ideas and thoughts formed, how I got from A to B. The scribbles, scored-out sentences, and underlined words tell their own story.

There’s also an actual science behind writing. MRI scans have revealed that doing this increases neural activity in some parts of the brain.

Check out the benefits of writing over at Medium.com.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: DarkWorkX/ Pixabay)

In a cave south of Barcelona, archaeologists found a toe bone from an eagle that showed clear evidence of the talon being cut off with a tool. That discovery joined about a dozen other raptors with cut talons found at digs believed to be from Neanderthal settlements. This excavations range from 130,000 to 44,000 years old. They point to the possibility that Neanderthals wore jewelry made of raptor talons.  

"I think it is an important addition to growing body of evidence of personal ornament usage in Neanderthals, now spanning more than 80,000 years," says Davorka Radovčić, a curator at the Croatian Natural History Museum, Zagreb, who studied the talons at Krapina but was not involved in the new study.

Neanderthals lived from Portugal to Eurasia, but their penchant for using raptor claws seems restricted to a specific region of southern Europe, from northern Spain through southern France and northern Italy to Croatia, says the lead author of the new study, Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, a researcher at the Institute of Evolution in Africa (IDEA), which is based in Madrid. Did wearing talon jewelry have special meaning for Neanderthals living in this geographic area?

"We think that the talons are related to the symbolic world of the Neanderthals," Rodríguez says. While it's difficult or even impossible to know what these symbols actually meant to Neanderthals, their use may imply that Neanderthals were practicing a form of communication.

These artifacts are much too old to have been created by homo sapiens, who arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals wearing ornamentation with no use in survival points to their capability of symbolic thought. Read about the discoveries and what they may mean at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Lou-Octavia Mørch)

Silvia Galva died in her home in Hallandale Beach, Florida, in July when she was stabbed by a spear with a 12-inch blade. Adam Reechard Crespo, Galva's boyfriend, told police that Galva had stabbed herself accidentally during an altercation between the two. Crespo was arrested on a second-degree murder charge. A month later, police obtained a warrant for data from Galva's Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, hoping there was a recording of the incident.

“It is believed that evidence of crimes, audio recordings capturing the attack on victim Silvia Crespo that occurred in the main bedroom ... may be found on the server maintained by or for Amazon,” police wrote in their probable cause statement seeking the warrant.

Whether police stumbled across a silent witness or are overestimating the eavesdropping capacity of smart technology remains to be seen. Amazon turned over multiple recordings, but neither the company, police, nor the State Attorney’s Office will say at this point what was on them.

“We did receive recordings, and we are in the process of analyzing the information that was sent to us,” said Hallandale Beach Police Department spokesman Sgt. Pedro Abut.

Whether the recordings have any relevance to the case or not, it will be interesting to find out exactly how much of what is said in a home ends up on Amazon's servers, retrievable at a later date. Read more on the story at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Gregory Varnum)

From Kevin Hart as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, to The Weeknd as Joker. These are just some of your celebrities who spent their Halloween dressing up as a different person, or as an iconic fictional character.

Check out the rest over at BoredPanda. 

Who do you think did the best one? (For me, it was Paul Rudd as Weird Al.)

(Image Credit: BoredPanda)

Julius Pringle, the Pringles mascot, steps to life gracefully from the can which contained his potato chips. This is one of many sculptures by Japanese artist Harukiru. Food packages, absent the contents, are the base materials for his sculptures of humans, machines, musical instruments, and more. In Harukiru's hands, a box of Oreo cookies can become a fighter jet and a box of whisky can be a knight in full plate armor.

30 of his works are currently on display at a museum in Tokyo. This compilation video shows many of those works.

-via Technabob

Some people will tell you that they don't want to eat sentient animals. Dietary choices are personal, but it helps if you understand what that really means. How do we know which animals are sentient? Dr. Jonathan Birch is an associate professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who plans to conduct a series of experiments to test the limits of sentience in lower order animals, such as bees and crabs. Birch has done prior research on the subject and managed to get a 1.5 million euro grant from the European Research Council for these studies. And in order to judge such matters, we must first define what we mean by sentience.

Sentience, as Birch described, is the lowest level of cognition, and the level which Birch hopes to study. Sentience can be described as having a unique point of view. “Sentience is just this term for, basically, consciousness.... there being something like what it feels like to be you. Whether it’s having this experience of a blue sky or the smell of a cup of coffee.”

The next level of cognition is sapience, the ability to have a train of thought and perhaps even form opinions. Finally, the highest level is the concept of self and self-identity.

However, it does appear that the philosophy professor has an agenda.

“I do think that sentience is at the core of what it is for something to have moral status because I think it’s very closely related to something having interests. If crabs are sentient, for example, it’s against the crab’s interests to be dropped in boiling water”. Birch hopes that his research will extend animal welfare protection to invertebrates as well.    

Read more about the experiments at Forbes. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Toni Wöhrl)

Tradition dictates that judges and lawyers (barristers) in London appear in court wearing the kind of powdered wigs that Americans dropped more than 200 years ago. Great Big Story takes us into the tailor shop that makes those wigs. Not only do the particulars need to wear wigs, but those wigs come in different styles for different roles and occasions. At least they don't require powder anymore.

Animator Kevin Parry sliced a lot of cakes to make this stop-motion animation. There's no plot, just a lot of slicing through colorful cakes.

It's CAKE. This took a lot longer to animate than I ever could have imagined. I put so much work into this stop-motion that I am now a professional baker - I am now accepting bookings for your next event.

You can imagine that he may have also gained a pound or two during the process. -via reddit

Art is hard to define, so the boundaries of art keep expanding in every direction. With so many experimental projects on public display, it's no surprise that occasionally they go bad in a big way. South Korean artist Lee Bul exhibited her work Majestic Splendor at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997, and they made her take it down. Why? Because the work consisted of rotting fish and sequins in plastic bags. The smell drove patrons away.  

So not exactly the best start. Undaunted, Lee later brought her fishy opus back to the public's nostrils in 2018 with an appearance at the Hayward Gallery in London, this time with an odor-reducing chemical included in the bags to help mitigate things. There was just one problem: That chemical was volatile, and could explode when mixed with the kind of organic compounds that might come from, say, a piece of rotting fish. Luckily, Lee's artwork didn't involve any dead fi- whoops.

Sure enough, right before the exhibition's return to public glory, a bag of fish exploded while being moved, starting a fire in the gallery. Firefighters were called to put out the blaze, and a security guard required treatment for possibly the grossest kind of smoke inhalation. On the other hand, Bul's exhibition did go off with a bang. We'll see ourselves out.

That's just one of 6 stories of art gone wrong at Cracked. There are not as many deaths as the title might imply, but plenty of injuries and destruction.  

This is the Gothic Hills Cemetery, an elaborate haunted house in the San Fernando Valley, California. It was the fruit of over a thousand hours of work by Troy Yu and Aaron Bolton. A few weeks ago, however, violent winds ripped through the neighborhood, and it tore the roof off of the majority walkthrough. It also damaged other central set pieces. It was two weeks before opening night. What can they possibly do?

Yu wasn’t sure that all the hard work could be salvaged. He wrote to his followers online, “We’ve suffered nearly complete destruction of our haunt in the 60mph winds we had last night.” The final room of the haunt, considered the most impressive part of the attraction, was hit the hardest. With ceiling framing and walls now lying on the ground, Troy went on, “We’re assessing the damage and will update when we know where to go from here. It seems no matter how much we try to increase our wind-worthiness each year, the winds have got news for us.”

After much debate, the friends finally made a decision. Even though their creation was in ruins, they would try their best to reconstruct it.

They put out a call asking for volunteers to help with repairs, and covered the cost of unexpected damage themselves. Their efforts went into overtime. They did have one comforting thought: This was not the first time they’d constructed a haunted house on a seemingly impossible deadline. And this time, they had a community to help them.

Check out Atlas Obscura for more details about this inspiring story.

(Image Credit: Shannon Brown)

Perhaps one of the reasons why the popularity of electric cars is limited is because we have to charge the car batteries for hours and hours, and we can’t find a schedule to charge them, as we are already too busy with our daily lives. Is there something that can make electric cars more appealing? Can we charge car batteries at a much faster rate? Hopefully, the answer is yes.

...Penn State engineers have just figured out how to charge car batteries in 10 minutes for 200-300 miles of driving. “Fast charging is the key to enabling widespread introduction of electric vehicles,” says Chao-Yang Wang, who published his team’s work in Joule.

What’s the secret? FInd out over at Fast Company.

(Image Credit: MikesPhotos/ Pixabay)

Smart devices are supposed to be smart. After all, they’re not called “smart” for nothing. Because of Bluetooth, wifi, or some kind of companion app, we’re theoretically getting something extra for all the money that we’re spending. (Smart devices are also more expensive than non-smart devices, so I guess it should be no surprise that smart devices have something extra to offer us.)

By that logic, the smart Oral-B Genius X should be more than just an electric toothbrush.

But what extra can this toothbrush offer us, and what makes it different than other toothbrushes?

The difference between the Genius X and other electric toothbrushes is it’s like a fitness tracker for your mouth. You can monitor how long you brush, how hard you brush, and what areas you covered. There’s artificial intelligence built-in so the Genius X can evaluate your brushing style, but you can also manually track things like brushing your tongue, flossing, bleeding gums, and whether or not you used an oral rinse. You can view your results over months, embark on “journeys” (e.g, if you want blinding white teeth, you can select a two-week whitening journey), and unlock achievements. Like I said, a fitness tracker for your mouth.

Find out more about the toothbrush over at the review at Gizmodo.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Victoria Song/ Gizmodo)