Jean Marie Smith is the artist-in-residence at the Creasey Mahan Nature Preserve in Goshen, Kentucky. It's a garden and family fun center that educates people about nature. To entertain visiting kids (and probably adults), Smith decorates hay bales for Halloween. She writes:
After reviewing popular trends and interviewing friends and family, I finally settled on which characters I would use. My criteria include one book character, one iconic cartoon character, and something for all ages. Some of the bales are double-stacked, or placed on end or on sides, depending on the character to be sculpted.
Erik Rintamaki of Michigan is an avid rock collector. While searching for agates along Lake Michigan in 2017, he found stones that glowed under ultraviolet light. This is how he discovered a previously unknown mineral: yooperlight.
The name comes from the word "yooper" -- someone who lives on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Rintamaki has trademarked that name. The scientific term is "cyenite clasts containing fluorescent sodalite." These stones were brought to Michigan from Ontario by glaciers thousands of years ago. You can learn more about yooperlites in this video by Wonder World.
Pall Sigurdsson and his friends were diving in Indonesia and encountered a tiny coconut octopus that was using a plastic cup for protection. Thinking the flexible transparent plastic cup wasn't much protection, they offered it shells instead.
While a shell is a sturdy protection, a passing eel or flounder would probably swallow the cup with the octopus in it, most likely also killing the predator or weakening it to a point where it will be soon eaten by an even bigger fish.
We found this particular octopus at about 20 meters under the water, we tried for a long time to give it shells hoping that it would trade the shell. Coconut octopus are famous for being very picky about which shells they keep so we had to try with many different shells before it found one to be acceptable.
An old abandoned insane asylum always makes for a good horror story setting. The US has more than a hundred abandoned asylums, so it's a trope we are all familiar with. They have quite a bit in common with each other. First, they are abandoned. Second, these old buildings all look alike. The reason for this was the influence of Pennsylvania doctor Thomas Kirkbride. He advocated for the philosophy that the mentally ill should be treated instead of simply being isolated. It was the moral thing to do.
Kirkbride worked a few years at the Friends Asylum, learning and practicing moral treatment. Then in 1840, he became superintendent of his own asylum, the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane. It was here that he began thinking about another way to treat insanity. He started thinking a lot about the environment where patients were treated.
As part of a push to get patients out of that prison-like basement, the hospital had already commissioned a brighter, more spacious building in the countryside, but Kirkbride came to believe that even this wasn’t enough. He wanted an asylum designed with treatment in mind. A few years later, Kirkbride was given the opportunity to construct his own facility for the hospital and began to experiment. The architecture of the building, the landscaping of its grounds, the efficiency of its operation — nothing was left to chance. He documented everything he learned in an extremely detailed book called On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane With Some Remarks on Insanity and Its Treatment.
The asylum designs that came to be known as Kirkbrides were magnificent and quite progressive for their time. Read about the rise and fall of Kirkbride asylums at 99% Invisible. -via Digg
It's not a secret to most people that James Buchanan most likely had an intimate relationship with his bachelor friend William Rufus King as the two have been stuck together throughout most of their lives like two peas in a pod.
But historian Thomas Balcerski examines the personal documentation left by Buchanan and comes to the conclusion that, contrary to popular speculation, he wasn't gay.
Buchanan’s purported homosexuality has inspired considerable literary and scholarly output in the last few decades, including a 1987 article in the noted historical journal Penthouse.
The question arises because Buchanan spent a good portion of his political prime, coinciding roughly with the 1830s, in a very close friendship with another lifelong bachelor: William Rufus King of Alabama — a senator, diplomat, and finally vice president under Franklin Pierce (for a month and a half, until King died of tuberculosis).
If you’re a man struggling to find a female partner, here’s some advice for you, at least from companies that sell this service: for a night, hire a professional wing woman that could help you ease the conversations with prospective dates. There’s a hidden advantage to having a female companion, however, and it’s something deeply rooted in our minds.
Women seeking romantic partners seem to prefer men already chosen by another lady. It’s a notion ingrained in pop psychology, but actually based on the scientific hypothesis that heterosexual women practice “mate choice copying.” That is, females save time and energy finding a worthy mate by selecting one previously picked by others.
Researchers have documented mate choice copying in animals from rodents to birds to fish. But whether humans do it is more ambiguous.
Check out more about mate choice copying over at Discover.
Saturn is strikingly known for its beautiful rings. Despite the conduction of many space voyages, the age of its rings is still unsure. That’s because age is difficult for astronomers to measure since the indirect measurement involves other properties such as mass, color, or composition and their effect on the age of the ring. Estimates are also widely varied.
To estimate the rings’ age, researchers try to consider what’s happened to change the rings from their original appearance to how they look today. As particles within the rings collide with and gravitationally influence each other, the rings should spread out until they essentially fade away. The rings should also get darker with time, as dust and meteorites fall onto them, affecting their color and brightness.
Here, a good starting point would be the measurement of the mass of the rings and the amount of light they reflect. This is heavily dependent on how researchers model the solar system processes and the ring’s evolution over time. It might take a future mission to Saturn!
In a time when blackboards have been replaced with whiteboards or slide show presentations, many mathematicians stick with chalk and boards.
In their love of blackboards and chalk, mathematicians are among the last holdouts. In many fields of science and investigation, blackboards have been replaced with whiteboards or slide show presentations. But chalk is cheaper and biodegradable. It smells better than whiteboard markers and is easier to clean up, mathematicians say. It is also more fun to write with.
Due to her fascination with mathematicians' blackboards, Jessica Wynne, a photographer and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has been photographing mathematicians’ blackboards in the past years, "finding art in the swirling gangs of symbols sketched in the heat of imagination, argument and speculation." A collection of these images will be published by the Princeton University Press in the fall of 2020.
“I am attracted to the timeless beauty and physicality of the mathematicians’ chalkboard, and to their higher aspiration to uncover the truth and solve a problem,” Ms. Wynne said in an email. “Their imagination guides them and they see images first, not words. They see pictures before meaning.”
The title of Ms. Wynne’s book comes from the message often left on blackboards for the cleaners who might come in after hours and wipe away the artifacts of genius: “Do not erase.”
It happens. In a recent article in Nautilus, the writer and M.I.T. physicist Alan Lightman recalled an occasion at Caltech in the early 1970s when Richard Feynman worked out an equation on Lightman’s blackboard that described how black holes could emit heat and radiation, in contravention to everything that physicists then thought.
Dr. Lightman returned the next morning to copy down the equations, but the board had been wiped clean. A year later, Stephen Hawking worked out a similar calculation, which made him famous.
After launching, "Cycling Through the Water," a fun new feature has been added to a Belgian bike path network to encourage the use of bicycles called, "Cycling Through the Trees." Anyone who'll pass by this will surely feel like an "E.T. soaring among the treetops at heights of up to 10 meters (32 feet)."
“The new cycle path climbs gradually so that you can cycle through the treetops. You ride 700 metres along a cycle bridge – a double circle 100 metres in diameter – that slowly rises to a height of 10 metres before then descending again, giving you a sensational 360° experience! Safety is ensured thanks to a subtle wire net with a handrail, and the path’s three metre width gives everyone enough room. This makes ‘Cycling through the Trees’ an accessible experience for everyone.”
You've seen costumes where you swap out your legs for some creature's legs, and it's usually pretty funny. This T-rex costume uses the same idea in a totally different class. It has a steel frame that incorporates 31" (78 cm) stilts. The T-rex blinks, swivels its head, and roars, controlled by the reins. You can check out more pictures of it at Etsy, and see a video here. And it only costs $4,900! That includes free shipping from China and a skin repair kit. Or you could buy a truck.
It is said that our universe has existed for more than 13 billion years and despite the issues we are currently facing in our world, the universe will continue to exist until it eventually has to face its own end as well. What that end might look like can be seen through a simulation created by John Boswell.
"For the first time in her life, the universe will be permanent, immutable. Entropy finally stops growing, since the cosmos cannot get messy anymore. Nothing happens and nothing will ever happen again."
Spider-Man: Far From Home is the second story in a trilogy that began with Spider-Man: Homecoming, but the advance marketing had to mesh with Avengers: Endgame, which hit theaters just a couple of months before. Then the planned third movie was endangered when Sony pulled out of the Spider-Man agreement with Marvel, then they worked things out for another movie to end the story in 2021. Whew. That's a lot of baggage for one film, but it managed to become the first Spider-Man film to gross more than a billion dollars worldwide. Screen Junkies, however, were able to reduce Spider-Man: Far From Home to "Spider-Man goes on vacation."
Making tabungaw hats is a seasonal process. Garcia plants tabungaw seeds during the months of June or July and harvests the fruits when fall comes. He then weaves soft bamboo mesh to form comfortable padding inside the hat and strengthens using rattan. He would often polish and varnish the outer shell to bright yellow or orange hues. He then would travel from village to village to sell his hats.
In an era of baseball caps (often worn by farmers in rice paddies) and indoor office work, wearing a tabungaw hat today is equally symbolic—a fact represented by a small monument in front of Garcia’s workshop, given to him in 2012 by the Filipino government, that announces that he is a “National Living Treasure”for keeping this tradition alive. Rather than use smoke to harden the hats for fieldwork, as he once did with an open fire, Garcia now uses varnish. The yellow hats stacked under a table are for an upcoming school graduation. Garcia also receives orders from politicians and generals, as well as the odd overseas hat collector.
Crafting vegetables into hats has become an excellent business for Garcia. However, no one wants to follow his footsteps – not the government neither his children. In this case, he may be the last tabungaw-hat maker in the Philippines.
Pop-up books have always been fascinating – you open the book and see how intricate flat folds turn into 3D objects. But what if it takes two people to open and flip through a page of a giant one?
This large scale pop-up book by James Gulliver Hancock, produced by Scoundrel Projects and Yipeekiyay, is considered a sculpture. It was actually created for ACU University for the promotion of alumni achievements.
Here are some of its contents taken from Moss and Fog:
Have you ever wondered if Neanderthals imagined their role in our lives, that they would be examples of the distant past? They probably had more important things to worry about, like survival. So maybe we can imagine our own roles as teachers of the past for the humans of the distant future. Animator Kirsten Lepore (previously at Neatorama) does just that in a video that takes place in the same museum, but in different time periods. -via Laughing Squid
