This odd-looking installation of three concentric circles forming a wave-like pattern serves both an aesthetic and a practical purpose. The installation titled "Please Be Seated" was built by Paul Cocksedge and was designed to be a communal bench wherein people could lounge around the areas where the waves touch the ground.
Built in Finsbury Avenue Square alongside Make's Number One Broadgate office block in the City of London, Please Be Seated is made of three rings of benches that rise and fall in a wave-like pattern.
Each of the undulating forms – which increase in size and height from the smallest central element – are made from a steel structure topped with scaffolding planks.
"Every single aspect of this is tailored to its environment as well as the function it serves," said Cocksedge. "The curves raise up to create backrests and places to sit, as well as space for people to walk under, or pause and find some shade," he continued.
China may be one of the largest countries in the world in terms of demographics but the situation might change in the next decades if it will not address the issue of its population. To be clear, the issue here is that China will have a long-term population decline which, experts say, could hamper its economic growth in the future.
Should fertility rates remain unchanged, then China could even shrink to 1.17 billion people by 2065, according to the China Academy of Social Sciences.
“From a theoretical point of view, the long-term population decline, especially when it is accompanied by a continuously aging population, is bound to cause very unfavorable social and economic consequences,” the report said.
For the first time in 30 years, the LEGO group launches its very first brand campaign. The brand campaign, titled “Rebuild The World”, the toy company hopes to use their latest initiative to “help nurture the creative skills of the next generation”.
The global campaign was created by french agency BETC and features a live action-adventure film directed by multi-award winning collective traktor. It follows a rabbit being chased by a hunter with a bow and arrow, using LEGO creations to overcome a series of challenges.
The film is complete with surreal touches and a plethora of jokes only fans of the LEGO universe will understand. 2D-printed clothing, cars and trees look straight out of the box, and even the people bend their backs and rotate their heads right around, just like LEGO. Every character, animal and vehicle is based on an existing or past toy, so heads spin 360 degrees, everyday objects are outsized, and a boat can suddenly fly with a little help from a palm tree.
This is the PAPERorgan, the latest project of Wolfram Kampffmeyer, a German artist who loves to use paper to create cool products. This product is a fully functioning modular organ powered by an inflated balloon.
The instrument can run for approximately 40 seconds on one balloon’s-worth of air, and plays a range of notes depending on how each user chooses to tune and expand their organ. For paper organ aficionados, Kampffmeyer clarifies that he has spoken with fellow instrument designer Aliaksei Zholner (previously) to ensure that his design and commercial product are not derivative or competitive.
Kampffmeyer is currently building awareness for the product and will be funding production on Kickstarter. Follow along with the journey on Instagram and Facebook, and sign up for email updates on PAPERorgan’s website.
Traveling is one of the most exhilarating activities one can do in their lifetime, for the joy of exploring new and different locations, along with the feeling of being free and away from your responsibilities from home. However, there are certain risks to this fun and rewarding activity, such as security threats, according to Adam Dean, a senior security specialist. When we travel, we are vulnerable to security threats, along with having little to no privacy, Dean elaborates.
So how can we protect our privacy while traveling? USA Today lists down some helpful tips to avoid having our privacy compromised:
What to do about cameras
If the rental comes with cameras, ensure they aren't in a sensitive area by conducting a careful sweep. Report anything suspicious to the host immediately – and if you don't like what you hear, leave.
What to do about data breaches
a hotel clerk sometimes asks for your name and then announces your room number after you've checked in. You're better off handing the employee your ID when he or she asks for your name and asking the employee to write your room number on a piece of paper. Why? Because there are other people in the lobby, and they could be listening.
"I’ve seen my entire credit card number on hotel receipts," O’Rourke says. "Just to be sure, never leave the customer copy behind. You can destroy it later, but keep it under your control until you do."
What to do about nosy seatmates
"Consider getting a privacy filter that covers your laptop or tablet," he says. "These screens let the user see the content on the screen from a front-on view, while anyone trying to view the content from the next seat over will see a black screen and nothing else."Josh McCormick, the vice president of operations for Mr. Electric, an electrical installation and repair services company.
More ways to enhance your privacy when you travel
• Don't broadcast your itinerary on social media. Wait until you return to start posting vacation photos.
• Get a virtual private network. "The No. 1 danger, when it comes to privacy, is public Wi-Fi hotspots," says Dimitar Dobrev, a director for VPNArea, a VPN provider. A VPN can protect you.
• If your laptop or any storage devices are reviewed at customs or appear to have been moved in your hotel room, you should assume that your drive has been copied, says Bruce McIndoe, founder of WorldAware, a travel risk management firm. "Only take the bare essentials when you are traveling," he advises. "A travel laptop stripped of any nonessential files is a good strategy. Keep your laptop locked up when you are leaving your room. Do not leave it or any electronic devices unattended."
In 2006, an elephant only 5 months old was found all alone by Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (SWT) in Kenya. The organization decided to hand-raise this elephant, which they named Loijuk, until she was old enough to be released back to the wild.
Despite the many years that have passed, Loijuk still has a close bond with her rescuers. Every month, she returns to the sanctuary to visit. This month, however, is different: she surprised her human family with a newborn calf in tow.
It was clear the proud elephant mom couldn’t wait to show off her baby. The calf, who has since been named Lili, was only hours old — likely born only the night before.
Loijuk has never forgotten the kindness of those who helped her. She even invited Benjamin Kyalo, the head keeper, to have a special moment with her newborn calf.
“Benjamin was able to get close to Lili (who nestled into his legs), stroke her delicate newborn skin and breathe into her trunk, thereby letting her know who he was via his scent,” Rob Brandford, executive director of SWT, told The Dodo. “Elephants have an incredible memory and sense of smell and our keepers will often breathe into the orphans’ trunks so they can recognize who they are.”
Aboard his vessel named Force of Habit, Captain Daryl Dunham recently caught this peculiar lobster in Stonington, Maine. It’s a little speckled on one side, and creamsicle-orange on the other, and an unnaturally straight line meets both of these sides right down at the middle. What’s going on with this lobster?
Lobsters can be a variety of colors, from brown to blue to yellow, depending on the proteins that bind to astaxanthin, a carotenoid pigment, says Richard Wahle, director of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine. “A variety a proteins bind with astaxanthin and mask it to varying degrees,” he says, resulting in that wide spectrum of possibilities. (When a lobster of any shade is steamed or plunged into scalding water, it will turn red, he adds.)
A two-toned exoskeleton like this one is not new to science. Back in 1959, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution and University of New Hampshire trawled through past papers and discussed specimens that were, among other mashed-up palettes, “half normal color and half light sky blue” and “half greenish black and half light orange.” And these colorways can be a clue that something else is going on, too. “Split-color lobsters are often also split sexes,” Wahle says.
The job of a Hollywood prop master is creative, ever-changing, and challenging. It's also show business! But the world of props is like housework- people only notice when you don't do it right. Prop masters spend countless hours finding or crafting just the right things for films, which can be challenging for period films. People will notice if The Social Network had Mark Zuckerberg using a laptop that wasn't developed until after the events of the film. And some directors are very picky about their props. Robin L. Miller gives us an example.
I did Grand Budapest Hotel, which is one of the most creative things you can ever do. To work with Wes Anderson is just insane — the level of his interest in everything visual. Every single prop in that was a design or fabrication.
The box that has the pastry in it, the beautiful pink box — it took so much work to create that. Oh my God. Because everything you do with Wes, he starts out with an image, or maybe four images. And he’ll tell you what he’s getting closer to. And then you take it from there and you refine it a little more. Then he’ll say, “Yeah, I like this, but maybe here for a shape.” And then you just keep going until you’ve got the shape. Color-wise, palette-wise, he knows color like crazy.
[For] the graphics, he has a wonderful woman who works with him [Annie Atkins]. She’s been with him on a number of shows. What he had her do [is] come up with concepts for that box. The ribbon. I had samples from, I don’t know, four or five European cities. I was getting every sample imaginable of this blue ribbon. Just to see what was perfect for the lighting and the texture and the shade. The box was this kind of blush pink. Not to mention, it had to be rigged. Then a version of it had to be made that all came open at once into different pieces and reassemble itself. I had a brilliant crew in Berlin who could figure that one out.
It’s unbelievable what went into that. And we ended up with that wonderful, perfect box.
Sherry Tina Uwanawich, a 28-year-old woman from South Florida, was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for a $1.6 million curse scam. The scam involved her asking a Texas woman to pay her large sums of money to remove a curse from her family, that the money is needed for crystals and candles to perform meditations that will lift the curse.
Uwanawich gained the woman’s trust and managed to convince her that a curse was placed on her and her family when she met her in 2007. In addition to imprisonment, Uwanawich must also pay for restitution, as court records detailed.
A new device can produce electricity from the cool air of the evening, according to University of California Los Angeles materials scientist Aaswath Raman and Stanford University engineers Wei Li and Shanhui Fan. In a prototype they created, the device generated around 0.8 milliwatts of power, enough to keep a hearing aid working. The prototype can operate at hours when solar cells cannot, making nighttime an optimal source of renewable power, as ScienceAlert detailed:
Using a material called a thermocouple, engineers can convert a change in temperature into a difference in voltage. This demands something relatively toasty on one side and a place for that heat energy to escape to on the other.
They put together a cheap thermoelectric generator and linked it with a black aluminium disk to shed heat in the night air as it faced the sky. The generator was placed inside a polystyrene enclosure sealed with a window transparent to infrared light, and linked to a single tiny LED.
For six hours one evening, the box was left to cool on a roof-top in Stanford as the temperature fell just below freezing. As the heat flowed from the ground into the sky, the small generator produced just enough current to make the light flicker to life.
Disneyland in Shanghai, China, is now allowing outside food after a lawsuit in March. A student named Wang filed the said lawsuit against Shanghai Disneyland in March after being barred from bringing her own food. The theme park’s rules were criticized online as discrimination against Asians, since Europe and US Disneyland parks allow visitors to bring in outside food. The new policy now allows guests to bring outside edible items, except for the ones with bad odors, as Reuters detailed:
"We value the feedback from our visitors. The updated food-carrying guidelines are implemented based on the point of safety and ensuring visitors' satisfaction," Shanghai Disneyland staff told AFP on the phone.
The new policy states "guests are allowed to bring outside food and beverage items into the Park for self-consumption," provided that they do not need to be reheated or refrigerated and "do not have pungent odors" such as durian fruit.
Whole watermelons and stinky tofu are also excluded, according to state newspaper People's Daily.
The company's website shows it will continue to check all personal belongings and require all guests to pass through a metal detector in accordance with the law, despite public concerns over privacy.
Area 51 is the Air Force facility best known for UFO conspiracies and alien encounters, and it isn’t a surprise that the location attracts a lot of curious minds. Curiosity killed two cats this time, as two Dutch YouTube vloggers ended up in jail for trespassing the Nevada National Security Site outside Area 51, with the two vloggers chalking up the trespassing allegations as a misunderstanding. The Washington Post has the details:
Ties Granzier, 20, and Govert Sweep, 21, were each charged with trespassing and held at the Nye County Detention Center, roughly 250 miles north of Las Vegas, according to the Nye County Sheriff’s Office.
Despite seeing a sign barring entry, Sweep said he interpreted the warning as applying to nonresidents, and thought they could ask a live person if they might enter anyway. Though both of the men read, write and speak English, Sweep chalked up their alleged trespass to a simple misunderstanding.
The NNSS website describes the Mercury location as a “premier outdoor, indoor, and underground national laboratory” located in a “remote, highly secure area of southern Nevada.” While scheduled tours are open to the public, foreign nationals are required to submit advance paperwork to visit — and all visitors are barred from bringing recording devices such as cameras, cellphones and laptops.
The short film Battle at Big Rock is a Jurassic World scene, written by Colin Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael and directed by Trevorrow, that acts as a bridge between Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and the next sequel, which should be in theaters sometime in 2021. The Daily Dot tells us more.
Fallen Kingdom ended with Jurassic World’s dinosaurs escaping into the wild, adding a dangerous new element to the ecosystem. Battle at Big Rock is our first look at that strange new world, with a young family confronting some unexpected dinosaurs while on a camping trip. It’s a cool scene, but if anything, the credits are better, sharing some found footage clips of dinosaurs out there in the real world.
I have so many questions. When did people stop being afraid of dinosaurs? Who goes camping in a world where giant predators roam? You really should watch this in full screen mode. Stay through the credits for more glimpses of dinosaurs.
When I was younger, I thought dyslexia only meant that a person had trouble reading because they mix up the letters in words. But I found out later on that it was much more complicated than that.
People with dyslexia struggle not just to read words but also to identify speech sounds and to associate those with words and letters. So it's not just about having a hard time reading. It can hinder someone's communication and absorption of ideas and concepts.
But there's still more that we don't know about dyslexia, so through a research alliance between UC San Francisco and UC Berkley with the support of Charles Schwab, dyslexia and other learning disabilities will be further examined so that we might know how it starts, which parts of the brain it affects, and so on.
The new center, with clinical and research efforts at both Bay Area campuses, will break down barriers between disciplines such as medicine and education, and create and provide the best evidence-based interventions in the clinic, classroom, workplace, and home.
Known as the UCSF-UC Berkeley Schwab Dyslexia and Cognitive Diversity Center, the new initiative will draw on the deep and diverse strengths of both campuses – in child and adolescent psychiatry, psychology, neurology, neuroscience, education and public health – to accelerate research; develop and implement better screening and assessment tools; test new interventions; and reduce the social stigma surrounding dyslexia and other learning disorders.
(Image credit: E. Caverzasi & R. Bogley/UCSF Dyslexia Center)
Film critic Jeremy Smith admits he doesn't know as much as he should about Bollywood films, but otherwise, he's got an encyclopedic knowledge of movies made around the world, and movies made about places around the world. In this list, he selected the movie that most embodies the culture and feel of major cities. Some are recent, some are very old, and with each entry, he offers several alternatives for your viewing pleasure. For example:
Johannesburg - "District 9"
Neill Blomkamp’s surprise sci-fi hit of 2009 posits an alternate South African history in which extraterrestrial “prawns” become oppressed refugees during the apartheid era. When one of the weapons manufacturers charged with relocating the prawns comes into contact with a liquid with transformative properties, he finds himself subject to the same prejudice — and worse — inflicted on the aliens. One day, there will be a definitive film on apartheid. Honorable mention: Hood’s “Tsotsi," Korda’s “Cry, the Beloved Country” and Menges’ “A World Apart."
Check out the list and see if your opinions agree with his. You might want to guess which film will be listed for your city before you read it.
