Neatorama

The PAC dance team at Walden Grove High School in Sahuarita, Arizona, gave us a Wizard of Oz dance routine and a Harry Potter dance routine that really impressed us in previous years. They've set our expectations pretty high, and still came through with a production featuring the heroes and villains of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for this year's homecoming assembly. -via Digg

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Have you heard about the chess diet? It's not simply "barely moving," as the title indicates. Grandmasters do their best to keep in shape for upcoming tournaments, but when they sit down to competition, they are working out even while they appear to to do nothing but think. You might be surprised at how many calories the world's best chess players expend doing what they do.

The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.

In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess -- or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

To combat the depletion, the world's top chess players are very particular about the calories they consume, both during competition and the rest of their time. Read about the physical demands of chess at ESPN. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Vysotsky)

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Some of our history we learn as facts, which give us some knowledge but often without perspective. Other things we learn as anecdotes passed along without much evidence behind it, often stories that grew further from the truth as time passed. And as you know, history is colored by who teaches it, and from which perspective.

Read all 25 pictofacts with things you might know (some of them have been covered here at Neatorama) and some thing you didn't know, at Cracked.

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It’s been about 2 decades ever since the time when we still had to use 3.5” floppy disks for almost everything computer-related. Now that those days are gone, what do we do with the floppy disks that we have at home?

When Paul Strauss of Technabob realized that he had no more use of his floppy disks, he thought that they would make good drink coasters. Unfortunately for him, the moisture got inside the disks, and the disks scratched his coffee table.

Fortunately, someone had the same idea as Strauss, but he made sure that no moisture would get in the disks, and the coffee table safe from scratches.

TechnoChic makes these fun retro coasters from old floppies which have been covered in vinyl, then backed with cork.

You can grab a set of five floppy coasters over on TechnoChic’s Etsy shop for $25. They’re also available in colors if you’re looking for something a little more vibrant.

(Image Credit: Technochic/ Technabob)

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We all know the strict set of rules for a proper game of hide-and-seek. For example, midway through the game, the “seeker” cannot switch to become a “hider”, and hiders should stay put until they’re found.

Scientists through this study have discovered that lab rats can play hide-and-seek properly. What’s more, these rats seem to enjoy playing the game with people.

Neuroscientist Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin got the idea for his experiment from YouTube. “There are all these YouTube videos from pet owners that say their animals love to do this,” he says. Although it’s well known that rats play lots of rough-and-tumble games, hide-and-seek is so much more elaborate that Brecht wondered whether they could really do it.

See more of this study over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: sibya/ Pixabay)

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Grief and loss still remain as one of our society’s greatest taboos. We even hesitate to use the word “death” and instead use euphemism like “passing away.'' After all, it is a difficult and painful subject to discuss. Reluctance to discuss this subject, however, can provide space for myths to spread, which makes grieving all the more difficult. Psychology Today presents to us five myths about grief that we might be believing. Here is one of them:

Myth #1: Grief is an emotion.

One of the most common misconceptions about grief is that it’s a feeling. Given that grief occurs in some of the most painful situations anyone can imagine, we generally associate it with depression. But grief is actually a process composed of many emotions, including expected ones like sadness, as well as more surprising ones like anger, frustration, guilt, or even shock.

It’s common during grief to experience positive feelings, as well, such as relief that our loved one is out of pain. At times, people also can feel numb, almost like the death hadn’t happened. What’s important to know is that all of these emotions—at least in measured amounts—are normal.

Check out the others over at the site.

(Image Credit: PublicDomainPictures/ Pixabay)

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A shopping cart corral isn't a terrible place to park. It's close to the store and covered from the heat of the sun.

Perhaps that's what the driver of this Peugeot thought when he parked amidst the shopping carts at a Coto store in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Infuriated employees retaliated by lining up carts from the actual parking lot, surrounding the car.

Another shopper, Arnold Angelini, photographed the trapped car and said on Facebook:

“The truth is someone has to be a moron to have parked in the section for ‘shopping charts’,” Angelini said in a Facebook post. “You can’t be such an SOB and leave it anywhere. You can tell that no one respects nothing much less an undue place.”

He added: “Applause to the employees who left the vehicle closed off.”

-via Dave Barry

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Just when you thought that Vantablack is the blackest material known to science, another comes in to take its place. Researchers just unveiled “a material that takes black to a whole new level of blackness.”

The new, as-yet-unnamed ultra-black material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), microscopic carbon strings that are a little like a fuzzy forest of tiny trees, according to the team behind the project.

The CNT material is stated to absorb over 99.995 of incoming light, which is greater than the 99.96 percent that Vantablack can absorb.

"In other words, it reflected 10 times less light than all other superblack materials, including Vantablack," explains an MIT release.

The amazing thing about this is this was discovered by accident, just like some of the best scientific discoveries. Check out the story over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: R. Capanna / A. Berlato / A. Pinato/ ScienceAlert)

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Going inside any startup or university lab where quantum computers are being constructed is like time traveling to the 1960s, the time of mainframe computing. Inside these labs are groups of technicians managing the machines the size of entire rooms.

Each kind of equipment, ranging from super-accurate lasers to supercooled refrigerators, is needed in harnessing the forces of quantum mechanics for data processing.

Cables connecting various bits of gear form multicolored spaghetti that spills over floors and runs across ceilings. Physicists and engineers swarm around banks of screens, constantly monitoring and tweaking the performance of the computers.

Mainframes ushered in the information revolution, and the hope is that quantum computers will prove game-changers too. Their immense processing power promises to outstrip that of even the most capable conventional supercomputers, potentially delivering advances in everything from drug discovery to materials science and artificial intelligence.

The huge challenge in this developing industry, however, is creating machines which can be scaled up both reliably and relatively cheaply.

Generating and managing the quantum bits, or qubits, that carry information in the computers is hard. Even the tiniest vibrations or changes in temperature—phenomena known as “noise” in quantum jargon—can cause qubits to lose their fragile quantum state. And when that happens, errors creep into calculations.

The common response to this problem is to create quantum computers with as many qubits as possible on a single chip. However, the error rates become extreme. The largest chips of today have fewer than a hundred qubits, but if scientists want to produce the same result as a single error-free qubit, thousands or even tens of thousands of qubits would be needed. What’s more, since each qubit needs its own control wiring, the system becomes more complex and more difficult to manage as more qubits are added. Not only does the system become more complex; it also becomes more costly.

A Yale professor named Robert Schoelkopf, believes that there is a better way to approach this challenge. Instead of trying to pack lots of qubits onto a single chip, Quantum Circuits, a startup which Schoelkopf started in 2017, is developing mini quantum machines which “can be networked together via specialized interfaces, a bit like very high-tech Lego bricks.”

Schoelkopf says this approach helps produce lower error rates, so fewer qubits—and therefore less supporting hardware—will be needed to create powerful quantum machines.

Find out more about this topic over at Technology Review.

(Image Credit: Quantum Circuits)

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Far Rockaway, Queens — This woman was surrounded by her family at Beach Gardens Rehab and Nursing Center as she celebrated her 112th birthday on Thursday.

The woman, Ermisna Theodore, came to the US from Haiti. Theodore has five sons and dozens of grandkids, not to mention her many great grandchildren.

What’s her secret to old age? Find out on Pix11.

(Image Credit: Pix11)

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There are several studies that shows how pet ownership can produce lower stress, improved mood and overall better physical health. Sadly, not everyone can own a pet. Some are allergic. Some are just not mobile enough to take care for another creature.

Fortunately we are in the era of improving technology! Yukai Engineering, a Japanese company, brings Qoobo which is a “tailed pillow that heals your heart.”

When you stroke the device, the tail rhythmically responds to your motions. It sways pendulously from left to right, just like a cat would, matching the direction of your stroking.

This is a reminder that the improving innovation of technology shouldn’t be focused in clock speeds, touchscreens, and megapixels, but primarily in making people’s lives better.

Read more of this innovation here.

Image Credit: Yukai Engineering

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Winter, a contract programmer, claimed that he has visited at least 15,061 Starbucks locations on four continents since 1997. It was his goal to visit them all.

He usually asks for a sample of drip coffee wherever he goes. If they don't have that, he'll take an espresso. He'll snap some photos, add them to his website and go visit another one. He's repeated this 15,000-plus times, and he's only halfway through.

He used to spend every weekend to “Starbucking,” to visit a new store. But his quest slowed down when he started taking care of his ill mother. His love for coffee also decreases over time.

"It's hard to talk about a favorite Starbucks item because I don't enjoy the taste of Starbucks anymore," he said. "It's either tolerable or OK, but it's never good or great coffee anymore."

For Winter, his quest is more than coffee. It gave him an opportunity to meet new people who eventually became his circle of friends.

His Plano Starbucks was a second home where he could meet fellow caffeine fiends. And for the man who said it's difficult to make friends, meeting fellow coffee lovers on different continents gave him the connections he'd been missing.

Image Credit: Scottie Andrew / CNN

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Of course, you've already heard of New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but America is home to a number of incredibly underrated cities and places that often go overlooked.

Using data from Niche.com, TripAdvisor and Google Maps, we crunched the numbers to identify 50 hidden gems across America, with highly-rated landmarks and activities.

From Moscow (Idaho) to Sugar Land (Texas), we've found the most underrated place in each state (and the best thing to do while you're there)

Source: https://www.netcredit.com/blog/most-underrated-place-visit-every-state/

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Yale researchers in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Biology reported that a woman’s bone marrow may dictate if a woman will be able to start and sustain pregnancy. According to the study, when the egg is fertilized, the stem cells go from the bone marrow to the uterus via traveling in the bloodstream. In the uterus, those stem cells help in transforming the uterine lining for implantation. Should the lining fail through this essential transformation, the embryo will be unable to implant, and the body will terminate the pregnancy.

“We have always known that two kind of things were necessary for pregnancy,” says Dr. Hugh Taylor, senior author and the Anita O'Keeffe Young Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at Yale. “You must have ovaries to make eggs, and you must also have a uterus to receive the embryo. But knowing that bone marrow has a significant role is a paradigm shift.”

Previous research has indicated that, in small numbers, bone marrow-derived stem cells contribute to the non-immune environment of the non-pregnant uterus, but it’s remained unknown if and how stem cells affect a pregnant uterus. In this study, the researchers were able to prove the physiological relevance of stem cells to pregnancy.

Head over to YaleNews to know more about the study.

(Image Credit: Kaz/ Pixabay)

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