Meghann Winters of The Ohio State University is a hero for our times. Sure, you carry a few strips of bacon in your everyday carry kit. But what if you run out and don't have time to cook more? That's when you need to stop by the bacon vending machine.

Winters, an employee of the Ohio Pork Council (it's sort of like a state legislature--or it was when I lived in Ohio), was tasked with finding a new way to deliver bacon into the hands of the needy. OSU reports:

“Originally, we were going to rent a vending machine, but that didn’t make much sense financially. So I ended up finding an old, used one on Facebook,” she said.

The next task proved to be much toughter: “baconify” the vending machine. [...]

“There was a lot of trial and error involved in that,” she said. 

Configuring the bacon packages to fit within the rows and coils and then fall into the bottom bin proved to be quite tricky. 

“Most vending machines are made for candy bars, not necessarily bacon,” she said. “We had to make sure the packaging didn’t get caught as it was falling out. We also had to find shelf-friendly bacon.”

So the machine does not cook bacon on the spot and then drop it out of the slot, but provides pre-cooked bacon in packages. That's okay because it just provides the heroic Winters with a new goal to aim for.

The machine, which is located in the Animal Sciences Building, has been hugely popular:

“We couldn’t keep it stocked fast enough,” said Lyda Garcia, an assistant professor of meat science, and faculty advisor to the Meat Science Club. The club worked to keep the machine stocked and available to students during finals week last December.

Four to five times a day, bacon had to be added. As a result, about 275 pounds of bacon were sold over the eight days the machine was on campus.  

-via Weird Universe | Photo: OSU

The world’s attention is now on the Amazon, the “lungs of the planet,” with wildfires ripping through the forest. The fires are now spurring groups and governments all over the world to call for a boycott on beef, believing that the culprits for the fires are cattle ranchers who want more land. However, cattle ranching is not the only factor in the destruction of the Amazon forest. It’s also the gold mining industry, Buzzfeed details: 

A map compiled by environmental group Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network shows 2,312 illegal mining sites in 245 areas across six countries, which the group called an “epidemic.”

Fueling that demand is not just the world’s appetite for gold bars and jewelry — the largest categories for which gold is used — but also high tech. Tiny electrical currents are constantly running through your iPhone, Alexa speaker, and laptop — and carrying those currents is gold, a fantastic conductor of electricity that’s also resistant to corrosion. While there isn’t much gold inside a single device — an iPhone 6, for example, contains 0.014 grams, or around 50 cents’ worth — in the aggregate, the amount is staggering. According to market researcher Gartner, over 1.5 billion smartphones were sold last year, with 1.3 billion of them being Android devices. It was followed by 215 million iOS devices.

So the tech industry, which consumes nearly 335 tons of gold yearly, will only need more and more of the metal. “There’s a gold rush in the Amazon right now that’s just like the gold rush that happened in California in the 1850s,” said Silman.

image credit: Afp | AFP | Getty Images via Buzzfeed

A red-tailed hawk shrieks in the background. Upon hearing the shriek, the squirrels shift into danger mode, as they alternately freeze in place to search the skies, or flee.

New research suggests that these rodents are not solely aware of avian alarms. According to a PLoS One journal report by three scientists from Ohio’s Berlin College, squirrels also rely on the sounds of everyday bird calls in order to sense whether threats have passed. In other words, they eavesdrop on the environment.

As Katherine J. Wu of NOVA Next reports, the researchers found that squirrels wary of predators resume their normal activities more quickly after hearing nearby birds’ casual chatter. Distinct from “all clear” alerts, these exchanges essentially act as background noise, signaling a return to normalcy for animals in the vicinity.

“There’s a lot of information in alarm calls,” explains Oberlin behavioral ecologist Keith Tarvin. “It dawned on us that cues of safety might be equally informative.”

More details of this study over at Smithsonian.com.

What clever little creatures!

(Image Credit: tpa/ Pixabay)

In the 1946 film The Big Sleep, private detective Philip Marlowe is called to the house of General Sternwood to discuss matters about the latter’s daughters. The two sit in the greenhouse, and the general recounts a blackmail incident involving his younger daughter. At one point of the conversation, Marlowe suddenly gives an interesting and knowing “hmm”, to which Sternwood asks, “What does that mean?”

Marlowe lets out a clipped chuckle and says: ‘It means, “Hmm”.’

Despite the private detective’s reply being impertinent and evasive, it is also an accurate reply. The word “hmm” does mean “hmm”.

Our language is full of interjections and verbal gestures that don’t necessarily mean anything beyond themselves. Most of our words – ‘baseball’, ‘thunder’, ‘ideology’ – seem to have a meaning outside themselves – to designate or stand for some concept. The way the word looks and sounds is only arbitrarily connected to the concept that it represents.

But the meanings of other expressions – including our hmms, hars and huhs – seem much more closely tied to the individual utterance. The meaning is inseparable from or immanent in the expression. These kinds of expressions seem to have meaning more how a particular action might have meaning.

Head over to Aeon as Alexander Stern discusses how our words mean.

(Image Credit: Devanath/ Pixabay)

Robert Sapolsky has been able to fix the floatation device on the toilet water tank the other day, which was a rare moment for him. As he called what he did a good day’s work, he smugly thought to himself, “There. It’s not just chimps who can use tools.”

We humans are unique in ways more than one, or rather, we used to be. Throughout time, we were the only species able to create tools, pass on culture, and kill each other. These traits which were identified to be unique to us have now been demonstrated by other species, so it seems that we’re not so unique after all. However, we still stand alone in some ways, and of these is “hugely important” — the capacity to think symbolically.

Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. We kill for symbols, die for them. Yet symbols generate one of the most magnificent human inventions: art.

[...]

Symbols serve as a simplifying stand-in for something complex. (A rectangle of cloth with stars and stripes represents all of American history and values.) And this is very useful. To see why, start by considering basic language—communication without a lot of symbolic content. Suppose you are being menaced by something terrifying and so scream your head off. Someone listening can’t tell if the blood-curdling “Aiiiii!” means an approaching comet, right-wing death squad, or Komodo dragon. It just means that things are majorly not right, a generic scream where the message is the meaning. This present-tense emotionality is what communication by animals is mostly about.

Symbolic language brought huge evolutionary advantages. This can be seen even in the baby steps of symbolism of other species. When vervet monkeys, for instance, spot a predator, they don’t just generically scream. They use distinct vocalizations, different “proto-words,” where one means, “Aiiiiii!, predator on the ground, run up the tree,” and the other means, “Aiiiiii!, predator in the air, run down the tree.” It’s mighty useful to have evolved the cognitive capacity to make that distinction. Who would want to guess wrong and dash up to the top of a tree when the problem is a raptor swooping down?

Learn more about this over at Nautilus.

(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)

For much of his life, Blair Bigham thought that there was an irrefutable line between alive and dead. When he worked for a decade as a paramedic in the Toronto area, he saw the body as simple: Oxygen would flow into the lungs, absorbed into the blood, got pumped to cells which broke it down along with glucose absorbed from the gut, and then goes down to create the microscopic bits of energy a person needs to live. He thought death as something simple as well. For him, it was the time “when no new energy was generated, when the batteries drained, and when the lights went out.”

I had pronounced dozens of people dead. In particularly horrific cases, when someone had, for example, been the victim of a house fire or blunt-force head trauma, I didn’t even need to check a pulse. The pallid colour of the skin, the emptiness of the eyes, and the body’s acquiescence to gravity said it all.

But when he began medical school in 2012, his way of thinking was challenged.

In the hospital, people seemed to die, well, slower than they did in the field. There were often no car accidents or bullets or torn aortas that I could point to as the cause of their demise. Death was no longer sudden. Instead, I tended to people who were dying—a process that could take days, weeks, months, or even years. The line between life and death started to feel blurry. When I started working in the intensive-care unit (ICU) as a senior medical student, that line became even harder to bring into focus.

Inside the hospital, Bigham would experience something that would shake his view about life and death down to its core. Know more about his experience over at The Walrus.

(Image Credit: RyanMcGuire/ Pixabay)

When the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, and the Mysoreans entered the conflict for their own reasons, the American Revolutionary War became a worldwide conflict that stretched as far as India and Senegal. During that time, the French dusted off plans for an amphibious invasion of Britain. To defend against that possibility, the British prepared militia forces that would be mobilized in the event of a French landing.

That militia consisted entirely of men.

This distressed a woman writing pseudonymously as "Thalestris" in the Morning Post in July of 1778. Jim Piecuch writes in the Journal of the American Revolution:

Evidently Thalestris had given a great deal of consideration to the specific elements of her women’s corps. She proposed that the enlisted ranks be recruited from “every stout, well-made woman, measuring six foot, in London, and different parts of the country.” Once “formed in regiments, and habited en militaire, they would make as noble, and formidable an appearance as the Grenadiers.” The officers “of the female army, should consist of persons of all sizes, that every one might be allowed to serve in some capacity or other; a consideration, apparently in favour of myself, being but five feet three and half.” Thalestris did not intend to allow her short stature to deprive her of the opportunity to perform military service.[7]

The women’s corps, the writer declared, might be “equally successful” in battle as the most famous existing regiments. She added facetiously that their enemies might be “struck with wonder and admiration at the dazzling sight” of female soldiers, and that there was no “nation so savage, but would yield their arms, and acknowledge the power of all conquering beauty.”

Some historians think that the letter is actually a work of satire rather than a serious proposal.

Image: actress Charlotte Walpole dressed as a soldier for a play.

Got an idea for a food truck? Awesome! Can you afford to buy a food truck? Probably not.

And that fact prevents many culinary entrepreneurs from getting started. That's why Amsterdam community organizations Mama Louise and HOBU created this food truck. It's called De Grote Wisseltruck. Every six months, it's loaned to a different entrepreneur to experiment with his or her idea for a successful business. Pop-Up City explains:

The goal is to kickstart local entrepreneurship in several areas in the city. With support from business and marketing professionals, local entrepreneurs and cooks get the opportunity to test their food concept at a very low risk. After half a year it’s time for a new entrepreneur — whether the business turned out to be successful or not. The ambition of the project is to help find a permanent location for successful concepts.

Photo: HOBU

Forest pathologist Bob Marra traveled to the back of a barn in Hamden, Connecticut, which belongs to the state’s Agricultural Experiment Station. There, stacks of wooden sticks, all that remains of 39 trees that were taken down in 2014 from the state’s Great Mountain Forest, can be found.

These cross-sections of tree trunks, known as stem disks — or more informally as cookies — are telling a potentially worrisome tale about the ability of forests to be critical hedges against accelerating climate change. As anyone following the fires burning in the Amazon rainforest knows by now, trees play an important role in helping to offset global warming by storing carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide — a major contributor to rising temperatures — in their wood, leaves, and roots. The worldwide level of CO2 is currently averaging more than 400 parts per million — the highest amount by far in the last 800,000 years.

But it seems that we have been overestimating the trees and their ability to store carbon, as Marrra’s study suggested that internal decay significantly reduces the amount of carbon stored within a tree.

Find out more about this on Undark. 

(Image Credit: Jan Ellen Spiegel)

UK photographer Caron Steele took the top prize as Bird Photographer of the Year with her stunning photo of a Dalmatian Pelican. The Bird Photographer of the Year contest, now in its fourth year, saw over 13,500 avian images submitted from 63 different countries. Steele’s winning photo was taken at Lake Kerkini, Greece which had frozen for the first time in 16 years. Steele seized this opportunity as she took the photo of a pelican attempting to navigate the Lake’s frozen surface for the first time. 

The competition, which aims for the public’s deeper understanding of birds worldwide, introduced more awards besides the top prize, as My Modern Met detailed:

The winning shots give the public a deeper understanding of the state of birds around the world today. To celebrate the inspiration that can come from contact with wildlife, BPOTY introduced a new special award for the 2019 competition. With his photograph of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica, Martin Grace was named the recipient of the inaugural Inspirational Encounters Award. In sharing his moving experience with these penguins, Grace celebrates the positive impact of the avian world on humanity.

image credit: Caron Steele via My Modern Met

Kirsty Elson is a multimedia artist from Cornwall, England, who uses bits of seaside scraps to create unique sculptures. Using bits of driftwood,shells, bottle caps, rusted nails, and metal washers, Elson creates sculptures that imitate surrounding seaside homes. She explains the inspiration for these pieces on an interview with Studio Wallop on her website: 

“I tend to let the materials lead me, rather than having an idea in my head and trying to find a piece to fit my idea… I let the materials do the work really.”

(via Colossal)

image credit: via Colossal

Google has been around with us now for 21 years, carrying out over 5.4 billion searches a day. It has influenced us in our search habits that we no longer just search for something — we Google it.

Over the 21 years of the search engine, Google has been the focus of several lawsuits, controversies, and accusations of misconduct, which range from tracking our movements, to mishandling advertisements, to spreading fake news.

Many of Google’s issues ultimately stem from its search engine, from the role it plays controlling our attention. Google, along with other tech companies and platforms, has helped to create the attention economy, in which we all have endless options and everyone involved is trying to profit from what we choose to spend our precious time on.

Know more about this over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: ElisaRiva/ Pixabay)

One of the saddest design projects a person can create is making a poster for a lost pet. But it is also perhaps one of the most beautiful creations a person can make. After all, it came from the heart.

… as Canadian artist Ian Phillips reveals in Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World, many of these posters end up as moving artistic homages to our animals. “The posters are like little mystery stories,” Philips writes in an email. “They’re quickly made and filled with so many emotions.”

In the 1990s, after helping his roommate find her lost cat, Philips became obsessed with finding and collecting missing pet posters–he sent out an open call for people around the world to send them to him, to be compiled in a zine circulated among his art-world friends. His collection, now published in a book, comes from six continents, harvested from telephone poles, car windshields, and bulletin boards. (Phillips instructed submitters to make photocopies of the posters they sent and to hang up more than they took down.)

Via Amusing Planet

Have you made a missing pet poster before? How was your experience in doing so?

(Image Credit: The Amusing Planet)

If you’re the type of person to avoid public restrooms at all costs, then you might have considered peeing in an ocean at some point. But is it actually okay for you to pee in an ocean? The answer is, yes! You can actually relieve yourself in the ocean.

It’s safe for the fish living in the system, as our urine has the same components as the ocean. In addition, our urine can also contribute to the ocean’s life cycle, so no fish will be harmed! While you can pee on the ocean, there are some locations that are an exception, as Refinery29 details: 

Never pee near a coral reef. CNN reported that reefs near Mexico’s Quintana Roo province are suffering because of human waste spilled into the ocean by hotels tourists visit in the region. "There are a lot of nutrients going into the ground water caused by treated water from the hotels and municipal waste water treatment plants," environmentalist Paul Sanchez-Navarro told CNN. "They inject the water into the ground and that makes its way into the aquifer... We've found way too many nutrients — nitrates and phosphates — and that comes from human waste, mostly urine.”

Business Insider points out that small lakes are another place you shouldn’t tinkle. You might want to just get out of the water and find a toilet. TIME Magazine reported in 2012 that a lake in Germany had to close because of "an algae bloom that poisoned over 500 fish.” Some researchers blamed this on a ton of urine in the lake.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

The word "dinosaur" wasn't coined until 1842, but fossilized bones of extinct creatures have been encountered for as long as humans have been digging in the ground. Those who found them would ascribe their origin to whatever they could relate to, such as dragons or giants. Which leads us to a chicken-or-egg question: did the legends come from the fossils, or were the fossils just further evidence of the legends? However, the science of paleontology inched forward over time, with some wonderful stories along the way, like that of the first Megalosaurus bones that were seriously studied.  

But before it was called the Megalosaurus, it had a rather more humorous name. You see, in 1763 a physician called Richard Brookes studying Plot’s drawings dubbed it “Scrotum Humanum” because he thought it looked like a set of petrified testicles. (To be clear, Brookes knew it wasn’t a fossil of a giant scrotum, but nevertheless decided to name it thus because apparently men of all eras of human history can’t help but make genital jokes at every opportunity.)

While hilarious, in the 20th century, this posed a problem for the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature when it eventually came time to formally classify the Megalosaurus as such. The problem was, of course, that Brookes had named it first.

Eventually the ICZN decided that since nobody after Brookes had called it Scrotum Humanum, even though he was the first to name it, that name could safely be deemed invalid. Thus Megalosaurus won out, which is unfortunate because discussion of the rather large Scrotum Humanum would have provided great companion jokes to ones about Uranus in science classes the world over.

Read about how the science of dinosaurs developed at Today I Found Out.