Sean Bean has played many a villain in his career, who one would expect to die before the movie is over. But even when he plays a hero, he often kicks the bucket before the final act. After more than two dozen deaths, it's getting quite old, and Bean has announced he will no longer take the roles of the doomed. But it's not because of his ego.
“I’ve turned down stuff. I’ve said, ‘They know my character’s going to die because I’m in it!’” Bean told The Sun. “I just had to cut that out and start surviving, otherwise it was all a bit predictable.”
So if he's rejecting roles to avoid spoilers, won't we now have spoilers anyway, because we know he won't play a character who dies? It's all so confusing. You can read more at Indiewire. -via Mental Floss
Last Saturday, cities around the world celebrated “Batman Day”, an invented holiday where DC Comics and Warner Bros. work together to promote the vigilante superhero.
This year marked the 80th anniversary of the first recorded sighting of the Caped Crusader, and, to celebrate this event, ten cities around the world lit up the iconic distress beacon used to summon the superhero, the Bat Signal. Unfortunately, the Caped Crusader did not answer their call.
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Martha Stewart have something in common: they are part of the 1 percent. But when I say “the one percent”, I’m not referring to their monetary stature — I’m talking about them being a part of the people who “thrive on far less sleep than what is recommended by doctors and researchers”. These people have what scientists call short sleeper syndrome.
Trump, Musk and Stewart all reportedly get by on less than six hours a night, making them part of the so-called “sleepless elite.” Most people need around seven to nine hours of sleep a night for overall health and well-being. But it seems that these guidelines don’t apply to a small segment of the population officially called natural short sleepers.
Short sleepers wake up feeling refreshed and wide awake, despite clocking six or less hours of sleep per night. Some short sleepers say a mere few hours of shut-eye a night is all they need to feel great.
It’s sort of like being both a night owl and early riser at the same time. And, unsurprisingly, this group has caught the interest of researchers due to their sleep efficiency.
These people really are a fascinating group to study. Find out more about them over at Discover.
Things sure have changed a lot since the 1960s, when engineers aimed to teach computers to see, and the proposals were, according to John Tsotsos, a computer scientist at York University, “clearly motivated by characteristics of human vision.” Now, computers beat us at our own game.
Computer vision has grown from a pie-in-the-sky idea into a sprawling field. Computers can now outperform human beings in some vision tasks, like classifying pictures — dog or wolf? — and detecting anomalies in medical images. And the way artificial “neural networks” process visual data looks increasingly dissimilar from the way humans do.
[...]
… This raises the question: Does computer vision need inspiration from human vision at all?
In some ways, the answer is obviously no. The information that reaches the visual cortex is constrained by anatomy: Relatively few nerves connect the visual cortex with the outside world, which limits the amount of visual data the cortex has to work with. Computers don’t have the same bandwidth concerns, so there’s no reason they need to work with sparse information.
According to Tsotsos, however, disregarding human vision is folly.
Azerbaijan Artist-illustrator Gunduz Agaev tries to portray the increasing evils of the society through his artworks. According to him, the biggest evil is no other than the brainwashing done by mass media and authorities!
Last September 2018, Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler, together with a team of researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampfler’s cheese cellar. For the next six months, each cheese was exposed to an endless, 24-hour loop of one song. There is classical – Mozart’s The Magic Flute, rock – Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, ambient – Yello’s Monolithi, hip-hop – A Tribe Called Quest’s Jazz (We’ve Got),and techno fromage – Vril’s UV. This was to test the effect of sound waves in the aging process of cheeses.
“The bacteria did a good job,” Wampfler tells SwissInfo. The experts said A Tribe Called Quest’s cheese was “remarkably fruity, both in smell and taste, and significantly different from the other samples.”
Are the differences all in the taster’s heads? The fromage will now go through a biomedical survey to find out the structural differences of the cheeses.
Finbarr Fallon, an architectural photographer, spent about four years documenting the vertical cemeteries on the space-squeezed island.
“I have always been intrigued by how city-specific cemetery design can be,” Fallon says via email. “While death is universal, its memorialization practices are not. I found it fascinating that extreme density and verticality continue to be a defining characteristic of Hong Kong’s dwellings for both the living and the dead.”
Hong Kong began suffering from land shortages in the late 1970s. Because of this, the government forbid the construction of new, permanent cemeteries in lieu of mass public burial sites. Amazingly, these cemeteries can reach heights up to 60 stories!
“The images juxtapose residences for two diametrically opposed groups—the high-rises for the living, and graves for the dead,” says Fallon of his photographs. While there is a conceptual tension between both environments, the geometric patterns that are reflected in both the skyscrapers’ gridded details and the cemetery’s uniform tombstones create a shared visual language.
Says Fallon: “In making this series I was interested in showing how death is a key force driving urban morphology: how memorializing people can mean they inadvertently live on to shape the landscape that the living continue to exist in, such that the dead might be said to wield more influence on the city morphology than they did when they were alive.”
The lotus is featured in many depictions of South Asian mythology wherein many of the gods and goddesses are placed atop the lotus. It is perhaps because the lotus has become the symbol for purity and thus, the gods and goddesses who, like humans, have the need to sit would be exalted by seating them on a lotus.
For several years, the companies Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have been continuously gaining attention because of their meat alternatives, which have been made possible through the use of state-of-the-art technology. However, the two companies have not crossed paths yet, as Beyond Meat focused on getting into grocery stores, while Impossible Foods focused on the restaurant market.
Both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods sell their ground burger alternatives in similar packaging. They look about like ground meat and both reportedly char—like the real thing—when cooked in a skillet. But just how they will stack up against each other in the hands of home cooks remains to be seen.
Now, people will be able to judge which meat alternative is the better one, as Impossible Foods announced on September 20 that they will be moving their product into grocery stores.
There are two different perspectives when it comes to the nature of human beings. There is one, which argues that humans are inherently good, and there is the other, which argues that humans are inherently evil. The latter, for some reason, has become an unquestioned principle among many evolutionary biologists.
It is a tendency that began some time ago. When the Australian-born anthropologist Raymond Dart discovered the first australopithecine fossil in 1924, he went on to describe these early hominids as:
“Confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of the victims and greedily devouring living writhing flesh.”
But according to David Barash, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, this idea is a dangerous one.
From large Ponzi schemes to multi-million dollar cases of manipulating financial records, Canada has had its fair share of high-profile scams over the years. But how do people manage to pull off this kind of scheme?
The Walrus presents to us several ways that criminals in order to get money from you. Check it out over at the site.
There are so many cool materials and technology being featured in almost all the Marvel stories, but two stand out among the rest as being invulnerable weapons: adamantium and vibranium. But between these two metals, there's actually just one that's truly invincible.
We are bombarded by a lot of information every day. Much of this information that we receive turns into memories in our brains. Unfortunately, as with the words of Ronald Davis, a neurobiologist at the Scripps Research Institute, “we simply cannot deal with all of it.” And so, it is necessary that we forget some things.
In a study of mice, researchers led by Akihiro Yamanaka of Japan’s Nagoya University have pinpointed neurons which help the brain forget excess memories.
[As they] report in the journal Science, special cells called melanin-concentrating hormone, or M.C.H., neurons, release electrical signals during R.E.M. sleep—a sleep phase marked by rapid eye movement, heightened heart rate and intense dreams. This process, in turn, enables the brain to filter out unneeded information and create room for new memories.
According to Sheikh, Yamanaka and his colleagues realized M.C.H. neurons’ significance while studying sleep patterns in mice. Spurred by the realization that these cells interfere with the hippocampus, a brain region needed to consolidate memories, the team decided to conduct a series of tests.
As we breathe in, our lungs fill with air which is carried through every part of our lungs through tubes that are organized in a certain way. These tubes branch off, with one going to the left lung, and the other going to the right. By branching again and again into tinier and tinier tubes, our lungs are filled with air. Without this type of process, we would be dead, and this type of process depends on the principle called self-similarity.
Self-similarity is everywhere in nature. Look at a fern: Each fern leaf is composed of smaller replicas of itself, which are composed of yet smaller replicas. Or think of vast deltas, where huge rivers branch out into smaller and smaller streams and rivulets until they vanish into the earth or oceans. Each branching of a river is similar to a previous branching that created that river.
Why is this principle present everywhere? Because it is efficient. And when I say, everywhere, it really is present everywhere — even in language.
Human language is amazingly creative. If you make up a sentence of any complexity, and search for that exact sentence on the Internet, it’s almost never there. Virtually everything we say is novel. Yet at the heart of this capacity of ours lies an incredibly simple piece of mental technology: Merge. Merge takes two bits of language, say two words, and creates out of them another bit of language. It builds the hierarchical structures of language.
Merge was proposed by Noam Chomsky in the early 1990s. He argued that this single piece of mental technology, plus language specific constraints that children could learn from their linguistic experiences, was enough to capture the syntax of all human languages.
So we have all probably heard that Spider-Man will be taken out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the time being. There isn't really a clear reason as to why Disney and Sony weren't able to come up with an agreement on the matter. Here are some details on it and what's going to happen now that Spidey's gone from the MCU.
