As the virus exploits dangerous gaps in vaccination coverage, the World Health Organization (WHO) experts stated on Friday that measles may be staging a comeback that will surely be destructive.

The WHO department director Kate O’Brien states that the entire world “is facing an alarming upsurge in measles cases in all regions”.

“The impact of these outbreaks is really devastating,” she said, “causing not only widespread loss of life, but also preventable disability that is affecting family livelihoods and national economies, and straining healthcare systems.”

Latest WHO global data show that reported cases of measles - which is one of the world’s most contagious diseases - rose by 300 percent globally in the first three months of this year compared to the same period in 2018. This follows consecutive increases over the past two years.

There is no specific antiviral treatment for measles, but it can be prevented with two doses of vaccine. The vast majority of cases of infection are in unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people.

Learn more about the disease over at Reuters.

(Image Credit: Tumisu/ Pixabay)

The “Tetris Challenge” is a meme which involves emergency responders around the world posing like action figures lined up along with the tools and equipment that they use. The police of northern Thailand just tried this challenge, which attracted considerable attention.

In a photo posted by the Region 5 Police’s official Facebook account, a squad of police patrol are shown lying flat on the pavement, their equipment scattered all around them – from motorcycles and checkpoint signs to first aid kits and tridents.

The tridents, by the way, are described by one policeman as a vital tool for fighting “knife-wielding madmen” (oddly specific?).

A police officer, who refused to be named as his station does not allow policemen to talk to the media, states that the photoshoot took place at Lampang Police Station on Oct. 8. All instruments seen in the photo are always carried by every patrol car.

“We want to show the equipment we carry all the time,” ... “It’s the policy of Region 5 Police. We must be prepared at all times.”

He said one of his colleagues came up with the idea after seeing emergency responders in other countries participating in the meme.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Region 5 Police/ Facebook)

Parramatta Road is a highway in Sydney, Australia, and it is considered as “the longest stretch of ugliness in the world” for its conditions that are very unfriendly, especially towards pedestrians. Now, the Inner West Council approved a plan to build new parks, create public art and cycleways, as well as plant new trees. The plan costs $13 million.

The council's master plan is designed to transform streetscapes around Parramatta Road, such as Pyrmont Bridge Road in Camperdown, Crystal Street in Petersham and Catherine Street in Leichhardt.

[...]

But the plan does not address basic problems – such as damaged footpaths – on the busy road, said Vera Nadile, a director of Euroespresso on Parramatta Road in Annandale.

“They’re spending money on locations other than Parramatta Road,” she said. “They’re thinking of putting really nice plants in all the other streets and that’s going to look great. But each one of those trees is going to cost a fortune.”

Ms Nadile also said business owners were concerned that new cycleways would result in a loss of parking and loading areas in front of their shops.

“I think what they want to do is good for the area but I don’t agree with removing everybody’s parking to put bike paths in,” she said.

More details over at The Sydney Morning Herald.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Inner West Council)

Does this ad make any sense at all? Someone was paid to come up with it. This tagline is part of a collection of 30 advertisements that make you go "Hmmm." Some are just old and display outdated thinking. Others are possibly mistranslations. But many of them are deliberate double entendres that might make you blush. See all of them at Bored Panda.

With new models of smartphones released every six months, developers continue to add new features and increase the devices' specifications to make them more powerful and efficient.

We've already seen how the iPhone can be used to make an entire movie. Despite having just an iPhone, filmmakers such as Sean Baker and Steven Soderbergh were able to experiment with the scope and limits of making films with these smartphones.

So in this regard, Joey Daoud of Filmmaker Magazine got a chance to interview FiLMic Pro's creator Neill Barham and discuss how the future of filmmaking can be shaped by the use of smartphones.

(Image credit: Hermes Rivera/Unsplash)

When I was in grade school, it was usually during the fall season when our school held a book fair. I was always pretty excited to see what kinds of books they would have.

I usually went with books about animals, since I really liked reading about animals back then. There were other books as well ranging from comic books to science books and even some novels and YA lit. My parents would give me the money to buy the books, bring them home, and read them.

As a parent, there are certain types of books you want your children to read. However, most of the time, children would just buy whatever is most interesting to them, often very different from parents' expectations. So here's a list of books parents' want their children to buy versus what children actually buy.

(Image credit: Hello I'm Nik/Unsplash)

We’ve seen Hollywood’s attempt at adapting Japanese anime, and no, that Dragonball movie doesn’t exist at all. Some like it, some don’t. The majority still turn back to the original creations and wonder why Hollywood (even with the source material) can’t get their adaptations right. Jeff Gomez, the founding CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, a production company that is now introducing “Ultraman” to Western studios, believes that cultural difference can be the one to blame: 

“Japanese shows didn’t talk down to you,” he tells me on a call during a business trip to Los Angeles. “They were serious in tone and treated me seriously intellectually. I was an avid reader, so I read all the show credits. As a kid I knew the names Osamu Tezuka and Go Nagai. They were called ‘celebrated creators’ in the English-language write-ups. That was very different from the U.S. model, where most of the writers were just hired hands.”

Even today, the authority Japan confers upon writers and artists often trips up American licensees, who think that wining and dining studio heads and publishing CEOs is all that’s required to seal a deal. It’s what “Pokemon” producer Masakazu Kubo of Shogakukan once told me was America’s “Walmart model,” where “the retailers buy cheap, sell cheap in massive amounts — and they take all the money. They don’t care who made the product.”

(via The Japan Times) 

image credit: via wikimedia commons

Popular luxury brand Louis Vuitton is partnering with Riot Games to offer specially-designed champion skins and a capsule collection by famed French designer and LV creative director Nicolas Ghesquière. This partnership allows the players of League of Legends to spend their Riot Points on some avatar luxury items, which may be the closest they can get (at the moment) to wearing something from Louis Vuitton. In addition to the champion skins and the capsule collection, the Summoner’s Cup, an acclaimed esports trophy, will be encased in a Vuitton-designed travel trunk. 

(via The Washington Post)

image credit: via wikimedia commons

Russian miners found a rare Matryoshka diamond that may be over 800 million years old. The rare “double diamond” resembles a traditional Russian Matryoshka doll, with the stone composed of a diamond within a diamond. The stone was mined at Nyurba mining and processing division of ALROSA in Yakutia and scientists and experts claimed the discovery as the first “diamond within a diamond” unearthed in the history of global diamond mining, as Geek.com detailed:

Yakutsk Diamond Trade Enterprise found this mysterious diamond during a sorting process and they turned it in to the Research and Development Geological Enterprise of ALROSA, where it was studied with several methods, including  X-ray microtomography, Raman, and infrared spectroscopies. Scientists hypothesized that there was an internal diamond at first and the external one developed during the stages of growth.

“The most interesting thing for us was to find out how the air space between the inner and outer diamonds was formed. We have two main hypotheses. According to the first version, a mantle mineral captured a diamond during its growth, and later it was dissolved in the Earth’s surface,” said Oleg Kovalchuk, deputy director for innovations at ALROSA’s Research and Development Geological Enterprise. “According to the second version, a layer of porous polycrystalline diamond substance was formed inside the diamond because of ultra-fast growth, and more aggressive mantle processes subsequently dissolved it. Due to the presence of the dissolved zone, one diamond began to move freely inside another on the principle of [the] Matryoshka nesting doll.”

image credit: Research and Development Geological Enterprise of ALROSA via Geek.com

Aaron Brink and Steve Reidell of The Hood Internet are the guys who brought us the awesome mix of songs from 1979. Now they've taken it one year further with 50+ songs from 1980. And they say that 1981 and 1982 are coming later this month! It would be fine with me if they continued this for every year up to the present, if they are all going to be mixed this well. -via Laughing Squid

Those who gamble are more superstitious than the general population because they rely on luck to beat the odds. That's not at all surprising, but the specific superstitions could be gruesome. Gamblers often ascribe their success to lucky charms, which could be the blood, hair, or body parts of someone deceased, or even an instrument of execution, such a hangman's rope. Someone who died while gambling was even luckier, as his spirit was supposedly going to stay at the table until his bad luck was avenged. And then there are cases where people took a winning lottery ticket to the grave with them. How lucky is that?

Brussel, Sept. 10. A romance has just been unfolded in connection with the recent Brussels lottery. For some time the chief prize of $40,000 was unclaimed, and the identity of the winner as just been established in a remarkable manner.

It appears that a young Belgian, aged 19, had purchased a ticket for the lottery, and shortly afterwards he was killed while at work through a stone falling on him. A few days before the result of the lottery was announced he was buried, according to custom, in his Sunday clothes. Some weeks passed and no claimant came forward for the first prize. Then the young man’s friends remember that he had a lottery ticket in the waistcoat pocket of his best suit, and an application was forwarded to the authorities for permission to have the body exhumed. After the usual official delay, the request was granted, and as was expected, the winning ticket was found in the dead man’s clothes. The relatives are now claiming the money. The Oregon Daily Journal [Portland, OR] 11 September 1910: p. 49

There are other newspaper stories of corpses buried, or coming close to being buried, with a winning lottery ticket. Read about these and other tales of morbid gambling superstitions at the Victorian Book of the Dead. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

Alexei Leonov died yesterday at the age of 85. You may not be familiar with him, but he was a hero of the Soviet Union (literally, he was awarded Hero of the Soviet Union twice). Leonov was a cosmonaut who became the first person to perform a spacewalk, or EVA, when he left his Voskhod 2 spacecraft for 12 minutes in March of 1965. While such spacewalks were eventually performed routinely, the first one was touch-and-go.

Leonov’s body temperature spiked, and his spacesuit had inflated so much that he couldn’t control it. He attempted to deflate it, but the quick depressurization nearly gave him the bends. He needed to re-enter the spacecraft the wrong way.

The re-entry didn’t go so well either...

Leonov later participated in another first: the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, a collaboration between the Soviet and American space programs.  

They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky... The Addams Family came to life as a single-panel magazine comic in the 1930s. Then it was a TV series in the 1960s. The family returned for a couple of movies in the '90s. They went to Broadway in 2010. And this weekend, The Addams Family is in theaters in a new animated feature film. What makes us keep coming back to The Addams Family?   

It might stand to reason that the man behind the family, Charles Addams, was a lost soul with a troubled background who brought his pain to the pages of the New Yorker. But in reality, born in 1912 in Westfield, New Jersey, Addams grew up in a warm, loving household as the only child of devoted parents; his father sold pianos. Charles was known to be a scamp who loved a good gag—a favorite being when he would scare his grandmother by popping out of his home’s dumbwaiter. He once told Linda H. Davis, author of Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life, “It would be more interesting, perhaps, if I had a ghastly childhood—chained to an iron bed and thrown a can of Alpo everyday. But I’m one of those strange people who actually had a happy childhood.”

What Addams always had was a love for the macabre (the common descriptor of his work he eventually grew weary of), be it exploring graveyards, trespassing in an abandoned neighborhood Victorian mansion, or drawing German Kaiser Wilhelm II in all manner of graphic death scenes.

Addams' creation exploded in popularity with the TV series, and carved its own niche that outlived him. Read about all the incarnations of The Addams Family and what made them special at Smithsonian.

Kids do the cutest, silliest things. In this anecdote from Zulkey, Claire shares a funny little conversation between her son James and her husband Steve. James tells his dad that they watched a movie about lions at school. When Steve asks him whether they learned about lions, James replies, "NO! WE DIDN'T LEARN ABOUT LIONS!"

And so, in an attempt to depict what movie they watched at school, Steve created this Youtube video about lions:

(Image credit: Jeremy Avery/Unsplash)

Navigating one's way through the airport is already a hassle, especially when it gets too congested that there's barely any space left to move around. It's even more of a struggle for people with disabilities and the elderly.

In response to this need, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has been testing a new technology, the personal mobility, self-driving electric wheelchairs that would make travel easier for PWDs and perhaps even the elderly. 

Developed through a partnership between Panasonic and WHILL, a Japanese tech startup, the robotic chairs operate in a follow-the-leader fashion to reach a destination. The chairs are also capable of detecting and avoiding obstacles, though airline employees serve as guides.

(Image credit: ANA)