Neonicotinoid is the most widely used pesticide in the world. It has been implicated to have caused the dropping of bee populations, and now new research suggests another harmful effect of the pesticide, this time on birds.

… [The pesticide] could also have a hand in the decline of songbird populations across North America. From 1966 to 2013, the populations of nearly three-quarters of farmland bird species across the continent have precipitously dropped.

When the researchers fed some of the birds seeds coated with neonicotinoids, this is what happened.

Within hours, the dosed birds began to lose weight and ate less food, researchers report in the Sept. 13 Science. Birds given the higher amount of imidacloprid (3.9 milligrams per kilogram of body mass) lost 6 percent of their body mass within six hours. That’s about 1.6 grams for an average bird weighing 27 grams. Tracking the birds (Zonotrichia leucophrys) revealed that the pesticide-treated sparrows also lagged behind the others when continuing their migration to their summer mating grounds.

Find out more about the study over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: M. Eng/ ScienceNews)

If you're an architecture geek, you'll love this!

In its 150^th anniversary, University of Melbourne hosted a competition in baking. The theme “Batter, Bake & Build” challenged the bakers to faithfully replicate the iconic structures from Melbourne’s City Centre. This is to celebrate the similarities between baking and architecture.

Here are the cakes that won the Top 5 slots:

First Prize: Flinders Street Station by Zarah Noriel—$1,500 Australian Dollars (AUD)

Second Prize: Southbank Theatre by Monica Nam—$700 AUD

Third Prize: Storey Hall Annex by Sharyn Frantz—$300 AUD

Student Prize: Arts Centre by Caroline Lee—$1,000 AUD

People’s Choice Award: Manchester Unity by Xin Ying Choo—$1,000 AUD

Go to this website to see more photos.

Image Credit: University of Melbourne

A Pennsylvania urban legend about a green man, or "Charlie No Face," has been circulating in western Pennsylvania since the 1950s. It seems like just a campfire story, but there's a kernel of truth behind it. Simon Whistler has the real story. He also explains goosebumps.  

The Annals of Improbable Research awarded their 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes on Thursday evening in a ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. These are bestowed every year for research that makes one laugh, and then makes one think. The most attention-grabbing winner was a study called "Thermal Asymmetry of the Human Scrotum," in which the temperature of the male subjects' left testicle was compared to the temperature of the right testicle. The Anatomy prize went to Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa for their efforts. Continue reading for more winners.

Taking a photo of a lightning takes extreme patience and high-tech camera equipment. However, successfully capturing lightning is well worth it.

Now, researchers also capture lightning, but using a method way different than photography. It turns out that lightning can be used to shed light on storm cell behavior, which gives forecasters new tools for predicting lightning hazards, as this new study showed.

The new technique is "essentially lightning-based tomography, similar to a medical X-ray," said Michael Peterson, an atmospheric physicist at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico and author of the new study, published in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

"Using lightning flashes as the light source, we can identify contrasts in cloud layers that are indicative of dense regions, such as ones that might be laden with hail," he said.

Peterson drew upon data gathered by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) on NOAA's GOES satellites. The GLM was designed to measure total lightning activity and provide that data to forecasters in real-time, but the products used in operations are only a small portion of GLM's capabilities.

[...]

This deeper dive into the GLM data can also help identify storm systems that may produce especially dangerous lightning, like horizontal flashes that can seem to strike out of the blue, Peterson said.

More details of this one over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: WKIDESIGN/ Pixabay)

NASA is giving its best in getting its new, moon-bound rocket and spacecraft ready for its next space mission, Artemis 1, which aims to eventually land people on the lunar surface. The new video from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center goes in detail through the new Space Launch System (SLS), piece by piece, from top to bottom. The SLS is the rocket expected to bring astronauts to the Moon, and spacecraft faraway places in our Solar System, like Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

Watch the video over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: Tyler Martin/NASA)

I just realized Scooby-Doo is only 10 months older than me. Most of my life I've had the impression that the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon was younger than me. Fifty years ago today, on Sept. 13, 1969, Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Machine Gang hit the airwaves. Scooby, Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy certainly have been pop culture icons for decades.

Voice actor Frank Welker recounts how he got the job of voicing Fred:

By Welker’s own account, his Scooby-Doo career was a happy accident. In 1969, the Colorado-born performer was making appearances at stand-up comedy clubs around L.A., and part of his 20-minute set included a three-minute gag where he simulated the sounds of cats and dogs fighting. A commercial casting agent heard that routine and instantly called him in to provide those same growls and hisses for a Friskies dog food ad. But the job offers didn’t stop there. “It just so happened that his fiancé was casting a show at CBS called Scooby-Doo,” Welker remembers. “So I went over to Hanna-Barbera, and Joe Barbera was doing the session. He told me not to worry about Scooby, but wanted me to read for Shaggy and Fred.” A quick glance at the early character sketches for both characters left Welker with a clear preference. “Shaggy looked like a funny character — Fred was just a guy in an ascot.”

Five decades later, Welker actually has two jobs aboard the Mystery Machine: Since 2002, Welker has provided the voices of both Fred and Scooby-Doo, the latter being a role originated by one of Welker’s earliest mentors in the business, Don Messick.

Read about the history of Scooby-Doo and its various incarnations at Yahoo Entertainment.

Image Credit: Hanna Barbera, Warner Bros. Animation/Wikimedia Commons

Image Credit: Photo: Everett Collection

Cilla Carden, a vegan from Perth, was frustrated with her two neighbors cooking meat barbeque in their own backyards. This moved her to bring them to court!

According to Carden, she couldn’t enjoy her backyard walk anymore because she can smell the smoke coming from her neighbors’ barbeque. She even claimed that they deliberately allow their barbeque smoke to waft into her yard.

After her claims were rejected by a tribunal earlier this year on lack of evidence, she applied to the Supreme Court of Western Australia for right of appeal. It was also turned down in July.

Lawyer John Hammond said going to the Supreme Court was an “extreme option” — but it hadn’t stopped Ms Carden from further appealing the case.

She told Nine News she believed her neighbors were “absolutely deliberate” in allowing their smells to cross into her yard.

It’s absolutely okay to demand for your right to live your life in peace. But where do you draw the line so as not to deprive others their right to enjoy their own lives as well?

Find out more of this story here.

Image Credit: Nine News

Remember the creepy clown scare of 2016? Even before that, there was a viral clown that you may have missed. In 2014, a surveillance video of a clown hiding under a child's bed caused a stir. As strange as that was, the truth is even stranger: the parents hired Wrinkles the Clown to pull off the stunt and scare their daughter into behaving. Wrinkles is a retired Florida man who will appear as a creepy clown for any reason you want to pay for, and became national news after the bedroom video went viral.

Now Wrinkles is the subject of a horror film, set to hit theaters on October fourth. This one should give Pennywise a run for his money in the creep competition, because this movie is a documentary. -via Mental Floss

There are days where we have the strong urge to laze around and do nothing. Doing nothing might consist of you lying around until the late afternoon, or just browsing on the Internet. But is that really doing nothing? By browsing or lying on your bed, that is actually doing something. How can one really do nothing? In a keynote talk at EYEO 2017 in Minneapolis, Jenny Odell shares her thoughts on doing nothing: 

1. making nothing

I want to backtrack a little here just to say that I’ve long had an appreciation of doing nothing — or more properly, making nothing. I’m not lazy, but the most I have ever made or constructed is a new context for, or perspective on, something that already existed.

2. the architecture of nothing

The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. 

3. the precarity of nothing

There’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege. It’s possible to understand the practice of doing nothing solely as a self-indulgent luxury, the equivalent of taking a mental health day if you’re lucky enough to work at a place that has those.

4. nothing for something

That’s a strategic function of nothing, and in that sense, you simply could file my talk simply under the heading of self care. But if you do, make it “self care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s — self preservation as an act of political warfare – and not what it means when it’s been appropriated for commercial ends. As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop (a Goop parody book) put it, self care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

image credit: Rembrandt via wikimedia commons

PlayStation players, here’s a revelation for you: your heavily-used X button should not be called the “X” button. According to a tweet from PlayStation UK, it’s supposed to be referred to as the “cross” button. However, this might just be a UK thing, where they say “cross” instead of “X”. 

The main PlayStation account has not weighed in on this situation but instead posted a Twitter poll on what people should call the “cross” button, with 81 percent of respondents choosing “X” button.  At the end of the day, it’s up to you on what to call the “X” or “cross” button. 

(via The Verge)

image credit: via wikimedia commons

In an age when technology can make information easily and readily available for users, along with the age of an “information cornucopia”, one of the main problems the world has faced is the emergence of fake news. No matter how hard the media, the government, and academia tell users how to discern whether the information they retrieve is legitimate or not, there are cases where users decide wrongly. But why are we susceptible to fake information? It might be because of an information storm, BBC’s Tom Chatfield detailed:

the information suffusion of digital culture has introduced something new into this ancient psychological equation: a whole new level of reliance upon social information; and a whole new set of hazards and anxieties around errors, manipulation and cascades of influence.

Danish researchers Vincent F Hendricks and Pelle G Hansen give these tumultuous processes a name – an “information storm”, or infostorm, in the sense of a sudden and tempestuous flow of social information – and suggest an intriguing alternative to the narratives of human folly and unreason so often applied to fake news and tribal divisions online. 

“when you don’t possess sufficient information to solve a given problem, or if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof”. When we either know very little about something, or the information surrounding it is overwhelming, it makes excellent sense to look to others’ apparent beliefs as an indication of what is going on. In fact, this is often the most reasonable response, so long as we have good reason to believe that others have access to accurate information; and that what they seem to think and what they actually believe are the same.

image credit: Unsplash via wikimedia commons

Pizza is a perfect and stable comfort food for anyone, especially for someone whose ideal way to spend the night is watching anime while eating food. Domino’s Pizza in Japan, to cater to the otaku market, is now selling the world’s first Tsundere pizza (tsundere refers to an anime character/personality type of running hot and cold with one’s affections)! Soranews24 details on what makes this pizza tsundere: 

So what makes a pizza tsundere? Well, first you’ve got to have the hateful tsuntsun part. See the massive pile of circular toppings atop the pizza? Those aren’t sliced mushrooms, they’re jalapenos! With the volume of spicy peppers almost equal to that of the entire rest of the pizza, so just like if you’re going to get into a romance with a tsundere, if you’re entering a gastronomic relationship with a Tsundere Pizza, you probably should expect it to hurt.

you can’t have the tsun without the dere. Domino’s Pizza promises that the Tsundere Pizza’s cheese coating will lovingly spare you from the full fire of the triple portion of jalapenos, and that the resulting flavor is “nice and mild,” though we wonder if that’s an assurance we should take at face value or not, given tsunderes’ proclivity for downplaying the sharpness of their tsuntsun actions. 

image credit: Domino's Pizza via Soranews24

A fourth-grader was bullied for wearing a handmade University of Tennessee shirt, an orange t-shirt pinned with a hand-drawn “U.T.” label. The elementary student, who wore the shirt to a College Colors Day at Altamonte Elementary School in Florida to represent their favourite university, returned to Laura Snyder’s classroom in tears. Snyder shared this heartbreaking event on Facebook, as Buzzfeed detailed: 

"He was DEVASTATED. I know kids can be cruel, I am aware that it’s not the fanciest sign, BUT this kid used the resources he had available to him to participate in a spirit day."

Snyder wrote that she was going to buy her student an official UT shirt, and ended the post by asking if any of her Facebook friends had any connections to the school so she could "make it a little extra special for him."

The university store's official Twitter account shared a picture of the pack's contents Thursday afternoon, which included jerseys, hats, notes from school officials, and a football signed by head coach Jeremy Pruitt for the student himself, along with items like notebooks, pens, and water bottles for Snyder's entire class.

The university announced Friday that they would be making the student's hand-drawn design into an official T-shirt and donating a portion of the proceeds to an anti-bullying foundation.

image credit: via Buzzfeed

The Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition has announced its 2019 winners. The competition, now in its 11th year, is a collaboration between the Royal Observatory Greenwich, Insight Investment, and BBC Sky at Night Magazine. There are many categories, and the winner in the People and Space category is shown above. Titled “Ben, Floyd and the Core,” it features British photographer Ben Bush and his dog Floyd underneath Mars, Saturn, and the galactic core of the Milky Way. See the overall winner and the top photos in the various categories at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Ben Bush)