What makes Andrew's Jeep so scary is that it's driven from the right side, so it really looks like Pennywise is driving on the left! With animated movements and recordings of the monster's voice, you might think that it will run you down.
Andrew Johnson of Louisville, Kentucky, makes many Jeeps like this. He takes them to events and gets a lot of favorable responses, especially from Pennywise's favorite victims. He explained to WLKY News:
Lots of kids really, really like it. I go to schools and festivals. It's a lot of fun.
This microphotograph shows a cross-section of a blade of grass, and the structures inside. Some of those structures are vascular bundles, and they're showing their little smiley faces! Maybe they are happy because they have water. In a discussion at StackExchange, those who know say this is one of the species of grass that has adapted to live in dry areas, such as a desert, and the blade curls up to protect the side that absorbs water. A commenter named Always Confused tells us more about the grass.
The 2 sides of the leaf develop into different structure. The adaxial ("upper") surface, which in its underneath contain the the soft, green tissue, and the abaxial ("bottom") surface which contains more sclerotic tissue.
Normally, when dry-period runs, the leaf remains rolled in an way, so that soft side stay inwards , concave manner, closed, protected from evaporation. The outer, convex abaxial-face acts as a shield.
When rains come; the leaf work in a manner of bimetallic-strip. The inner (adaxial) surface absorbs water and expands (the "hinge cells" help it); and the inner-face become open. Then the inner-face work as a water-absorption tissue.
When dry-period come-again, the leaves enter their original state.
Another post identifies the species as Ammophila arenaria, or marram grass, used to stabilize sand dunes on the coasts. The color is not true. The specimen was stained to make the structures show up better, which happily highlights the pareidolia. -via reddit
The SeaBubble is a potentially new form of electric transportation, and the newest hope to beating the Parisian traffic. Known as a “flying taxi”, the SeaBubble resembles a vehicle straight out of a science fiction film, being oblong, glassy, and having the ability to glide across water without making a sound. This wonder vehicle can reach 20 miles per hour, as The Washington Post details:
Known as a “flying taxi,” the boat can reach 20 miles per hour as it rises nearly 30 inches above the water using wing-like structures known as “hydrofoils” that are designed to reduce drag. Inside, the vehicle holds up to four passengers, who face one another as if riding in a London taxi, according to Le Parisien, whose reporter snagged a ride inside the futuristic vehicle.
Designers say the taxi — which has been tested up and down the river Seine in the heart of Paris — can be hailed using a smartphone app and could be available for rides as early as next year, pending final licensing.
Most barber shops have the iconic and well-remembered rotating red, white, and blue poles outside. The reality and origin behind those tricolored poles are redder than the red on the poles. Barbers, in medieval times, did more than just cutting hair. They were known as barber-surgeons, where besides hair-cutting, they also performed minor surgery, pulled teeth, and amputated limbs.
But it’s not the minor surgeries they performed that made the barber poles of today blue, red, and white, it’s the bloodletting that made these poles like that. Barbers performed bloodletting when Pope Alexander II ordered monks and priests to stop performing the service, as Reader’s Digest detailed:
At the time, people thought having too much blood in a certain area could cause diseases like fevers or the plague, and letting some out would make them healthy. During the treatment, barber-surgeons would give patients poles to hold, the original barber poles. Grasping the staff made their veins pop out a bit, making them easier to find while the barbers went all Sweeney Todd.
Even back then, people knew there was a limit to bloodletting, so barbers would stop the bleeding with a white cloth. They’d then tie those towels to the poles and hang them outside their shops, according to History. Some towels stayed blood-stained even after they were washed, so it was common to see a pole with white and red swirling around in the breeze.
These days, barbers leave the medical treatment to doctors, but their poles are a nod to their bloody past.
Rainbow-colored designs span bridges, corridors, and large-scale sculptures in Elsa Tomkowiak’s new work, exhibited as a part of the second edition of Annecy Paysages in southeastern France. Her rainbow art interventions scale from covering up outdoor bridges to six 15-foot spheres along lake Annecy. There’s always more room for creative art exhibitions, afterall!
Along the Rhine River, there's a tiny piece of Germany surrounded on all sides by Switzerland. Büsingen am Hochrhein is an enclave and an exclave that consists of just 3 square miles of territory that is home to over a thousand residents. BBC Travel visited it and learned how this Alpine village remained German territory:
For Büsingen, the problem began in 1693, long before Germany existed. The village was under Austrian control when a family feud over religious allegiance led to the kidnapping of the Catholic-leaning feudal lord of Büsingen. His cousins hauled him to the nearby Swiss (and Protestant) town of Schaffhausen, where he was sentenced to life in prison. It took six years and the threat of Austria invading Schaffhausen to finally free the lord.
A few decades later, when Austria sold its local holdings to the Swiss canton of Zurich, it held on to Büsingen – strictly out of spite, according to historians. “They said it would never go back to Switzerland. Never, ever, ever,” the deputy mayor said.
That meant that when parts of the Austrian Empire were later absorbed by Germany in the 19th Century, Büsingen was claimed by the new republic.
The orderly Swiss tried to clear up the mess in 1919 when it held a referendum that saw Büsingen residents voting by 96% to leave Germany. But Berlin wasn’t interested in giving the town up because Switzerland offered nothing in return.
The people of Büsingen effectively live in two different nations and cross the border as needed:
Nowhere is the division more evident than at Restaurant Waldheim. A line painted across its outdoor dining terrace marks the international border, so it’s possible to be served a plate of schnitzel in Switzerland, and then reach into Germany to grab a stein of beer from the other side of the table.
Still, for residents, living a binational life brings up daily contradictions and choices. Although commerce is typically conducted in Swiss francs and most residents work in nearby, larger Swiss towns, they still must pay the higher German income taxes. Children go to a local (German) primary school, but parents decide in which country they’ll attend high school. Likewise, Büsingen locals have both German and Swiss postal and international telephone codes: callers can dial either Germany’s +49 or Switzerland’s +41, and still ring a resident. And perhaps most notably, the town’s football club is the only German team allowed to play in the Swiss league.
For $100,000 you can spend a night inside an igloo at the North Pole! Great deal, right? North Pole Igloos hotel, a temporary hotel sight that will open on April 2020, will be made up of 10 heated domes where the guests can sleep in the center of the Arctic Ocean for one month. For people to survive the journey to the North Pole, they need to rough it in tents and bring all the equipment to be safe in the cold, frozen environment. However, North Pole Igloos hotel will provide its guests with all the necessities: heated igloo with en suite toilet, on-site camp manager, Arctic wilderness guide, chef and security team.
If you can spare $100,000 by the time the hotel will open up for business, then maybe you can experience fine hotel at the North Pole!
At Bran Castle in Romania, the gift shop sells a souvenir snow globe that has bats swirling around instead of snow! Unfortunately, the gift shop is not online. A commenter pointed out that you can make your own snow globe with swirling bats, since bat-shaped glitter is now a thing.
It's natural for adolescents to rebel against their parents and try to find ways to relate to their peer group instead. An easy way to do that is through fashion, as folks inevitably find out when their children begin choosing their own clothing. Artist Myfanwy Tristram was puzzled by her 14-year-old daughter's look, but not exactly shocked. After all, she herself was a rebellious teenager once. A goth, in fact.
Fine: I’m proud of this fierce individual that appears to have inherited my own peacock inclinations. Not so fine: I find myself envious that she has a period of wild experimentation ahead of her — and a figure that means she fits into pretty much every thrift store find.
So, uncomfortable with this disagreeable feeling, and at risk of falling into the parental cliché of “you’re not going out dressed like that!” I realize that there’s just one thing to do. I need to try and understand more about where the crazy looks are coming from. Instead of sighing heavily at the mess and fruitlessly asking, once again, for her to just try and keep it in check, I sit down and ask her to give me a beginner’s guide to her style. She is delighted to assist.
Trendy teen looks in the 21st century have a twist: instead of being spread by the fashion industry, they owe more to peer influence from around the globe via internet. Read Tristram's findings as her daughter explains where her style comes from, and how it contrasts with her mother's experiences, in a delightfully-illustrated chronicle at Longreads. -via Metafilter
Led by the University of Bristol, a team of scientists have found infant feeding vessels, which suggest that prehistoric babies were fed animal milk through the use of these, which are the equivalent of modern-day baby bottles.
Possible infant feeding vessels, made from clay, first appear in Europe in the Neolithic (at around 5,000 BC), becoming more commonplace throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages.
The vessels are usually small enough to fit within a baby's hands and have a spout through which liquid could be suckled. Sometimes they have feet and are shaped like imaginary animals. Despite this, in the lack of any direct evidence for their function, it has been suggested they may also be feeding vessels for the sick or infirm.
So how did the researchers conclude that these vessels were, in fact, used to feed babies? Find out on EurekAlert.
Entombed is an Atari 2600 game, where the player and their team of archaeologists get stuck into a ‘catacombs of zombies’. The game, among many other old releases, are explored by ‘video game archaeologists’ to learn how the early days of video gaming came about, and to find secrets that can help modern programming problems of today. In trying to unearth how this video game was created, video game archaeologists John Aycock and Tara Copplestone stumbled upon a bigger mystery than they expected.
Entombed’s main gameplay mechanisms are the catacombs, a down-ward scrolling and two dimensional maze that players have to navigate to escape zombies. The game generates the maze design randomly and on the fly, where players never traversed the same maze twice. This is where the mystery lies, on how the game decided its maze designs, as BBC detailed:
It turned out that the maze is generated in a sequence. The game needs to decide, as it draws each new square of the maze, whether it should draw a wall or a space for the game characters to move around in. Each square should therefore be “wall” or “no wall” – “1” or “0” in computer bits. The game’s algorithm decides this automatically by analysing a section of the maze. It uses a five-square tile that looks a little like a Tetris piece. This tile determines the nature of the next square in each row.
How? That’s the fascinating part. The fundamental logic that determines the next square is locked in a table of possible values written into the game’s code. Depending on the values of the five-square tile, the table tells the game to deposit either wall, no wall or a random choice between the two.
Aycock and Copplestone have tried retro-engineering the table. They looked for patterns in the values to try and reveal how it was designed, but this was to no avail. Whatever the programmer did, it was a stroke of mild genius. During their research, Aycock and Copplestone were able to interview one of the people involved in the game’s production, Steve Sidley.
He too remembered being confused by the table at the time. “I couldn’t unscramble it,” he told the researchers. And he claimed it had been the work of a programmer who developed it while not entirely sober: “He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain.” Aycock tried to contact the programmer in question but got no response.
It might look like a bunch of moon craters, but somewhere in this image lies a large piece of metal that carried India’s hopes of lunar science.
This image was captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA on September 17, as it went over the target landing site of the Chandrayaan-2 mission.
That project's lander, dubbed Vikram, fell silent in the final minutes of its touchdown procedure on Sept. 6. The India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which oversees the mission, spent two weeks trying to establish communications with the lander.
ISRO has said it was able to spot the lander with the orbiter component of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, but the agency has not released those photographs. NASA wanted to help the effort, but LRO's angle on the scene was suboptimal during its first flyover of the targeted landing site after the attempt.
Head over to Space.com to find where the missing moon lander is.
(Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)
This is the Starship Mk1, the orbital-space prototype of the spacecraft that SpaceX plans to use as it aims toward fully reusable commercial spaceflight. It also aims to make Elon Musk’s daring plan come true. The plan? To get humans to Mars and sow the seeds which will help us become an interplanetary species.
Ormia flies find their hosts for their young by listening for cricket calls. When they find their target, the flies deposit their eggs on or near the cricket. Larvae would hatch and burrow inside of the cricket, and it would eventually burst through and kill the host.
The research was published in Royal Society Open Science, and used sticky fly traps near speakers broadcasting cricket calls across a gradient of noise. The results show that fewer parasitoid flies were caught near speakers in noisier locations. Because parasitoids end up killing their hosts, the results suggest that crickets may benefit from calling in noisy areas.
The study also found that both traffic noise and natural ocean noise inhibit fly orientation to sound, suggesting crickets could use sound as a parasite shield across different soundscapes. These results suggest that soundscapes may influence the evolution of tightly co-evolved host-parasitoid relationships.
