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.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

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. 

The iconic comic book superhero creator Stan Lee appears in all the Marvel movies, even posthumously in Avengers: Endgame. A reader asked how the tradition of Stan Lee cameos came about, and the answer grew to encompass an entire biography of Lee, which has many fascinating parts, like how he met his wife Joan.    

There are conflicting accounts on whether one of Lee’s friends dared him to ask out some red headed model or his cousin set him up on a blind date with said model. Either way, Lee went to her office to see about that date. However, when he arrived and knocked at the door of the modeling agency, the woman who answered was someone completely different- a hat model from England by the name of Joan Boocock. Joan had come to America after marrying one Sanford Dorf, who had been serving in the UK during the war.

Stunned when he saw her, rather than play it cool, instead Lee apparently almost immediately professed his undying love for her, and then followed this awkward exchange up by telling her he’d had her face in his mind and been drawing it since he was a kid… (According to Lee, this wasn’t any sort of cheesy line, but the absolute truth.)

Rather than finding any of this weird or creepy, despite being married at the time, Joan agreed to go out on a date with Lee.  As to why, despite by her own admission being in a happy marriage, she found it completely boring.  (I guess as you’d expect from marrying someone named Sanford Dorf.)

But Stan Lee, she states, “He wore a marvelous floppy hat and scarf and spouted Omar Khayyam [an 11th/12th century Persian poet] when he took me for a hamburger at Prexy’s. He reminded me of that beautiful man, [British actor] Leslie Howard.”

As for Lee, he said he knew right on his first date he wanted to marry Joan. Two weeks later, not caring in the slightest that she was already married, he proposed and she said yes.

Actually getting to the alter was kind of complicated, but they were married for 69 years until Joan's death. As for the cameos, those were in place before there were any Marvel movies. Read that story and more about Stan Lee at Today I Found Out. 

(Image credit: Alan Light)

It would be wonderful to enjoy a literary work in its original form or to analyze seminal works from great philosophers in their own language. But oftentimes, we don't have the luxury of learning the original language of written works so we rely on translations of that piece.

But as we know, there are certain ideas or concepts that get lost in translation or cannot be fully expressed from one language to another, so we don't get the totality of what is being said.

Throughout centuries, many methods and philosophies of translation have emerged and have been used even until today. So how should we go about translating texts and other works? In this article, Tim Parks takes us through a few ideas on translation and where we are now as regards our concept of translation.

(Image credit: olilynch/Pixabay)

Extraordinary, amazing, super-human!!! Just when we think we’ve reached the limit of human endurance, someone shatters the records. Huge congratulations to Sarah Thomas on swimming the English Channel 4x continuously!!! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏊‍♀️🇫🇷 🏊‍♀️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏊‍♀️🇫🇷🏊‍♀️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 pic.twitter.com/kOa9QlereH

— Lewis Pugh (@LewisPugh) September 17, 2019

When you are given a second chance at life, you would most likely feel very invigorated, spirited, and enthusiastic to enjoy the fullness of life and never let any opportunity pass.

Sarah Thomas was a swimmer before she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Even through her chemotherapy, she swam, only taking a break when she had to undergo radiation.

But after she survived her cancer, she went back to doing the thing she loved best, swimming. And with that, she was able to make the record of being the first person to swim the English Channel four times non-stop.

(Image credit: Lewis Pugh/Twitter)

When you look at statues, sculptures, or paintings of people, you can't help but wonder how they must have looked like when they were alive or if they were flesh and blood. Through the hyperrealistic works of Joongwon Jeong, you will be able to see some of these classical art come to life.

Joongwon Jeong is a Korean painter and a freelance illustrator who specializes in hyperrealism. This time the artist took inspiration from some classical pieces of art and recreated them as hyperrealistic portraits that almost look like photographs.

Check out more of his work on Instagram.

(Image credit: Joongwon Jeong)

Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind brought fame to the band and grunge music to the world. The cover image immediately captivated the public eye. It shows a baby, representing the human race, in instinctive and lifelong covetousness.

The photo was a challenging one for Kirk Weddle. To execute his premise, he called up a friend who was the father of a 4-month old baby. He had about 15 seconds to capture the baby before he started bawling. Flashbak describes the shoot:

“A 4-month-old baby was cast and I conducted the shoot with just his parents and a lifeguard present. I placed a camera with a motor drive , in an underwater housing, mounted on a tripod at the bottom of a pool. Since kids are always an unknown at shoots, I did several prelight and prefocus passes with a doll. Once I felt I had the framing, light, and exposure dialed in; the parents slipped the child into the water. I took seven frames on the first pass and four frames on the second. As expected, the baby started to cry, this had been the babies first time underwater, and we wrapped the shoot. The dollar bill and the fishhook were stripped in in post. The result was one of the most iconic album covers in the last 25 years. The music inside wasn’t too bad either; to date it has sold over 30 million copies.”

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “art installation”, the gold toilet “America” has been stolen from its wood-panelled room over the weekend. A report of the burglary at the Oxfordshire country house was received by the Thames Valley Police just before 5 A.M on Saturday, September 14.

“The piece of art that has been stolen is a high-value toilet made out of gold that was on display at the palace,” Detective Inspector Jess Milne said (in a statement she probably never expected to utter).

“Due to the toilet being plumbed in to the building, this has caused significant damage and flooding,” Milne added.

[...]

The toilet is reportedly worth £4.8 million (nearly $6 million).

More details on Geek.com.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Blenheim Palace/ Geek.com)

The image above shows us the entire contents of a firetruck in Geneva, Switzerland, sorted and categorized, including the crew. This is an example of a very popular Instagram meme called knolling.   

So knolling is a type of flat-lay photography, where different objects are arranged at 90-degree angles from each other, then photographed from above. The look is symmetrical and pleasing to the eye and allows people to see a variety of objects in a single picture; perfect for demonstrating equipment or an inventory, for example. The process has been further popularized through LEGO, where builders carefully arranged their bricks by shape, style and color before getting to work on construction.

Knolling of emergency service vehicles is also known as the Tetris Challenge. Here is a Boxer MRAV of the Royal Netherlands Army.



Considering how well-equipped modern emergency services are, a glimpse of what they have is intriguing, even if we don't understand most of what we are seeing. Once a few crews did this, everyone wanted to get involved. Below is a police van in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. We assume that they enlisted someone innocent to play the part of an arrestee.  



You can see 30 ranked images of emergency service knolling at Bored Panda. You can also explore more through the hashtag #tetrischallenge at Instagram.

-via Metafilter

There are still so many rare cases of diseases that we don't know which may be due to genetic mutations or alterations. One such case involved an infant who was less than a year old diagnosed with juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML).

Standard treatments had no effect while his body continued to deteriorate. When doctors conducted a new genetic test called the UCSF500 to identify the cause of his rare cancer, they found an alteration which were more common in adult cancers than in infants.

With this insight, they had wanted to try one last ditch effort of using the same type of treatment for the adult cancer to see if his body would respond in the same way.

While Quincy recovered from his splenectomy surgery, Stieglitz approached his parents about trying an oral medication called sorafenib, an FLT3 inhibitor that has been effective in treating many adult liver and kidney cancer patients whose cancers are driven by changes in FLT3.

The drug had never been tested in clinical trials for infants, so even the proper dosage was unknown. In fact, an earlier study even recommended against sorafenib for JMML because it had found no FLT3 alterations in a group of patients with the disease.

Thankfully, the drug worked. Quincy's white blood cell count normalized and when he was healthy enough, they performed a bone marrow stem cell transplant on him. Now, he is in complete molecular remission.

(Image credit: Barbara Ries)

Art can be a useful means to inspire people to take action for certain causes. And in the new art exhibit Arcadia Earth, we not only get some stunning displays of various natural scenery but also a call to action, reminding us of our responsibility to take care of our planet.

“Arcadia Earth” is an exhibit for the Instagram generation — it’s colorful, immersive, and just playful enough for phone-clad millennials to throw themselves at it. But it would be unfair to say that the exhibit is nothing but a pretty background for selfies.

The exhibit is, first and foremost, a show with a purpose: opening visitors’ eyes to the state of our planet through immersive art installations and giving them tips on how to reduce their impact.

And there’s truly nothing like walking into a coral-like tunnel made of 44,000 discarded plastic bags (the number used in New York City every minute) to make you think about our responsibility in the whole mess that is our planet currently.

(Image credit: Arcadia Earth)

While the music festival near Area 51 was canceled and substituted with a party in Las Vegas, that was a separate venture from the original Facebook event called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,” scheduled for this Friday, September 20. More than two million people have responded that they are going, but most of those responses came months ago. The military has no idea how many people will still try to get into Area 51, so they are instituting defense measures, including temporary flight restrictions (TFRs).

The TFR will be active from September 19th to the 23rd and range from the ground all the way to 18,000 feet. Only military aircraft are allowed overhead and even law enforcement and medical helicopters are subject to tight restrictions in order to enter the closed-off airspace. One can only imagine that the military will have plenty of airborne assets in place to tightly monitor the border with Area 51 in this area. The base already has a cadre of resident HH-60 Pave Hawks that run security operations over the base's sprawling territory and beyond.

The other TFR that has been posted is to the south, along the southern reach of the Nevada Test And Training Range where primary access to the Department Of Energy's Nevada Test Site, now known as the Nevada National Security Site, is located. It was just last week that a pair of Dutch Youtubers were arrested for trespassing beyond the site's perimeter. Another deeper incursion into the area last January ended with the driver being shot dead.

As you can see from the map above, Area 51 is completely surrounded by Department of Defense properties, with varying levels of access. So don't expect to see live aerial footage of whatever may happen on September 20th. Read more about the preparations for the possible storming at The Drive.   -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Finlay McWalter)

If you can’t see a trash can along the road, do you just throw away the peel of the banana you just ate on the ground? If you think to yourself that it’s fine and “it will just decompose anyway,” think again. While it does decompose, you might be wrong in assuming that it decomposes quickly. 

For this matter, Popular Mechanics interviewed Rhonda Sherman, an extension solid waste specialist at North Carolina State University’s Department of Horticultural Science. She also authored a book entitled “Backyard Composting of Yard, Garden, and Food Discards.”

Before we go any further, let’s take a look at the decomposition process. The first thing that happens after you toss your peel is that microorganisms start breaking it down by secreting enzymes that cause the decomposition, Sherman says. But because microorganisms don’t have mouths or teeth, this doesn’t happen quickly.

… while weather does play a role—things decompose more quickly in tropics than, say, a desert—when all is said and done, food waste can take years to decompose, not just a few weeks like many people may think.

If your banana peel is just laying on the ground for two years, it’s not good for the environment. Plain and simple.

So where do we throw our banana peels, or any kind of food waste? We throw it in the trash bin. Or even better, we can compost it.

Find out more about this topic over at the site.

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)