Anybody who has gone into business knows you need to have grit and an undying sense of finding opportunities to address a need or create one which you would then sell to others. Suzy Batiz, owner and founder of Poo-Pourri knows exactly what it's like. The 54-year-old entrepreneur went through two bankruptcies before hitting the jackpot.

She came up with two business ventures, one during her teenage years, and another later on after she got married and had kids. The first one was a bridal shop she bought at 19 but tanked because nobody wanted to buy the designs. The second one was an online recruitment business in the late 90s but after the dot-com bubble popped, that too went down the drain. She filed for bankruptcy a second time.

She vowed not only to never take on debt or investors again but also to never start another business. For four years—what she calls her “spiritual sabbatical”—she kept her promise. That changed after a fateful family dinner in 2006 during which someone stunk up the bathroom; her then-brother-in-law wondered aloud if bathroom odor could be trapped.

For nine months, she researched oils and natural ways to fight stink. She mixed concoctions in her kitchen and had anyone using the bathroom in her house test them. Finally, her husband walked out of the bathroom one day with good news. “His famous words were, ‘Oh my god, we’re going to be millionaires,’” Batiz recalls.

Read more of her story on Forbes.

(Image credit: Suzy Batiz/Twitter)

President Trump meets with Prime Ministers Modi and Abe. #G20 pic.twitter.com/VgDuWjg3eR

— The Hill (@thehill) June 28, 2019

Nothing is ever conventional with Donald Trump. You'll never know what to expect. But during the G20 Summit, he had a funny and possibly quite awkward exchange with PM Shinzo Abe of Japan and PM Narendra Modi of India. When the three were about to exchange greetings, PM Abe held out his hand to shake Trump's but was met with an outstretched fist instead.

President Donald Trump ditched his usual bizarre and domineering handshaking technique during a photo session at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on Friday. Instead, Trump initiated a strange three-way fist bump with the prime ministers of Japan (Shinzo Abe) and India (Narendra Modi) ahead of their trilateral talks.

The awkward gesture was “an example of a good way Trump is upsetting the global order,” David Nakamura, a reporter for The Washington Post, tweeted.

(Image credit: The Hill/Twitter)

The dinosaurs have long been extinct but we still find a lot of evidence of the time they roamed around earth. About ten years ago, scientists were able to excavate a long trackway of dinosaur footprints created by a sauropod found in the village of Plagne in France. It is said that these set of footprints were made around 150 million years ago.

Dinosaur trackways have been discovered in many parts around the world. What makes this particular tracks interesting is they are the longest tracks to be discovered belonging to the largest class of dinosaurs. The tracks run for a length of 155 meters and has 110 individual footprints.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

You can learn a second language. You can even become fluent. But working as a translator is a whole other endeavor that requires a particular set of skills. Arturo Castro stars in this sketch from his Comedy Central sketch show Alternatino. -via Laughing Squid

In the year 2017, the space mission Cassini-Huygens (commonly known as just “Cassini”) executed its “Grand Finale” by diving into the space between Saturn and the rings of the said planet. Before it did its finale, the spacecraft had a few flybys with Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Years before its Grand Finale, Cassini released a probe (the Huygens probe) to Titan and the probe landed on Saturn’s largest moon in 2005.

The data provided by the Hyugens probe, which was part of the Cassini mission, suggested that Titan was the perfect candidate for further exploration.

Now, a new NASA spacecraft, called the Dragonfly, would explore more of Saturn’s moon.

"It's the first drone lander and it can fly over 100 miles through Titan's thick atmosphere," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in a statement. "Titan is most comparable to early Earth. Dragonfly's instruments will help evaluate organic chemistry and the chemical signatures of past or present life. We will launch Dragonfly to explore the frontiers of human knowledge for the benefit of all humanity."

[...]

It will launch in 2026, but won't reach Titan until the [sic] 2034 because Saturn is so far from us.

Dragonfly will also explore Titan's atmosphere, surface properties, subsurface ocean and liquid on the surface.

But why are scientists so interested in Titan?

Find out on CNN.

(Image Credit: JHU-APL/ NASA)

got another capitalism greatest hit. i will give you one hundred thousand dollars if you can guess the brand by the end pic.twitter.com/bwfJJLabg4

— Ryan Simmons (@rysimmons) June 27, 2019

This video might remind you of Richard Linklater's movie Boyhood. But it's a real advertisement, produced by an agency in Brazil. A shortened version with a bit more product was used in media a couple of years ago; you can see it at Buzzfeed. You know what they say in advertising, it doesn't matter what you show them as long as they remember what the ad is for. Although the actual product is not revealed until the end, it's such a yank in a different direction that you will remember it.

Songkhla, Thailand — June 21. Rescuers were trying to go to a man’s house and get him to the hospital as he already felt pain in his chest. Unfortunately, they got lost. Thankfully, 24-year old Saranpat Paengsri, an employee from Thailand Post, found them and eventually led the ambulance to the man’s house. The man was safely delivered to the hospital shortly after.

The team had been struggling to find the man’s location because of the neighborhood’s many soi. After receiving directions from Saranpat, the ambulance appeared take wrong turns, so Saranpat intervened and guided the medics to the correct address on his motorcycle.

The patient was safely delivered to the hospital thanks to Saranpat’s help, rescue worker Boonrit Thongkert said.

Saranpat was showered with praise from netizens because of his act.

(Image Credit: Khaosod English)

Luigi Kemo Volo is an graphic designer and illustrator in Naples, Italy. He loves Disney characters, so he interacts with them through the magic of Photoshop. Here, his fishing mishap starts a chilly relationship with Ariel.

WE ON https://t.co/M2rNlpeR1U !!! Of Tenants And Tentacles: 'BTTM FDRS' Confronts Gentrification In Comic Horror Form https://t.co/rmphp1C3k1

— Ezra Claytan Daniels @ SDCC (@ezracdaniels) June 27, 2019

Many cities and neighborhoods nowadays are getting gentrified and there are some real horrors that come about with those kinds of developments especially for people who are still struggling to get by in life.

Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore wanted to talk about that in a way that wouldn't alienate people but also show them the reality of the situation. And that's why they decided to create a graphic novel about it called BTTM FDRS.

Daniels shares his inspiration to writing about gentrification:

A lot of the book is a love letter to my time in my early 20s in Chicago. It's very true to my experience of Chicago, which obviously isn't everyone's experience. I moved to Chicago from Portland, Oregon, and I'm a person of color. I was moving to neighborhoods that were cheap because that's all I could afford.

And why they chose horror as the genre to write with:

Well, first of all I just like horror and I feel really comfortable with that genre. But I think historically, horror and science fiction have both been used to approach difficult topics ... look at something like The Twilight Zone, which was historically a way Rod Sterling could approach ideas like race, racial inequality, gender inequality through the sci-fi lens so he could get it past the censors; so he could actually get these ideas aired ... That's always been a huge influence on my work.

Read more on NPR.

(Image credit: Ezra Claytan Daniels/Twitter via Fantagraphics)

What’s up with humans these days that we find animals having a sharp object on their heads? Just recently, in Texas, an alligator was found with a knife on its head. Now, in Florida, a sea turtle was found dead as it floated on Biscayne National Park. As you can see in the image, a spear shaft can be seen to have pierced through the poor turtle’s head.

The turtle, believed to be a green sea turtle, was discovered by fishermen on the ocean side of Elliot Key Friday afternoon, a park’s service law enforcement ranger told the Miami Herald.

[...]

“If you have any information about the poached sea turtle, please contact Biscayne National Park dispatch at 305-242-7740,” the park posted on its Facebook page.

(Image Credit: Biscayne National Park/ Facebook)

Giant birds have been known to roam the Earth for quite some time. One of these birds were the elephant bird, the largest known giant bird, which were over nine feet tall and weighed over a thousand pounds. They became extinct 1,000 years ago. There is also the Australian mihirung or “thunder birds”, 7-foot tall birds weighing around 500 to 1,000 pounds, which disappeared 50,000 years ago.

But until now, no one had ever found evidence of these towering avians in Europe.

Today, researchers describe the first fossil of a giant bird found in Crimea in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Dated at around 1.8 million years old, the specimen makes experts question previous assumptions that giant birds were not part of the region’s fauna when early human ancestors first arrived in Europe.

[...]

Based on the femur’s dimensions, the team calculated that the bird would have weighed around 992 pounds—as much as an adult polar bear—making it the third largest bird ever recorded.

Know more of this astounding discovery over at Smithsonian.

(Image Credit: Audrey Atuchin)

Freezing, melting, and evaporation. These are some of the everyday phase transitions (meaning, from one state of matter to another) that we see. These transitions start from a process called “nucleation”, “in which tiny clusters of atoms or molecules (called "nuclei") begin to coalesce.” This process plays a large role in many circumstances like the formation of clouds, boiling, and the start of neurodegenerative diseases.

A UCLA-led team has gained a never-before-seen view of nucleation—capturing how the atoms rearrange at 4-D atomic resolution (that is, in three dimensions of space and across time). The findings, published in the journal Nature, differ from predictions based on the classical theory of nucleation that has long appeared in textbooks.

"This is truly a groundbreaking experiment—we not only locate and identify individual atoms with high precision, but also monitor their motion in 4-D for the first time," said senior author Jianwei "John" Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, who is the deputy director of the STROBE National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

Find out more about this groundbreaking experiment over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: Alexander Tokarev)

Salt pans are one of the usual means to harvest salt but there are other ways too. Seawater may also be processed so that we can separate the salt from the water and with the help of some solar ovens, Brian and Shaena McMahon have been producing salt through this method.

While much of the commonly-used table salt today is mined on land, that salt originally came from seawater—the ancient oceans that later dried up, leaving behind residue. Large-scale salt mining companies usually use trucks and other big machinery powered by gasoline. The commercial sea salt harvesting process is also energy-intensive. “It’s usually boiled or baked using fossil fuels, and moved using big trucks,” Brian says.

Before the Industrial Revolution, however, solar salt making was all the rage in the United States. At Syracuse brine springs, where water was originally evaporated using fires, salt-makers first tried solar evaporation in 1822—and then fully switched to this method. The McMahons are following the same ideology at Hatteras Saltworks.

(Image credit: Aaron Tuelle/JStor)

Crocodiles are terrifying creatures. They lurk underwater looking for their next meal and if you happen to be caught unawares, you might find yourself in a very tight spot. That's why it's surprising to hear that some ancient crocodiles not only were able to eat leafy greens but also preferred a vegetarian diet.

The research, which was published in Current Biology, is based on fossils that survived long after many of the ancient crocodile species became extinct. The study reveals that forks in the crocodile family tree resulted in species that favored plants at least three times in history.

(Image credit: pixel2013/Pixabay)

NASA just recently took photos of Raikoke volcano's eruption and seen from above, the phenomenon looks stunning. The satellite photo shows a plume of grayish brown smoke rising above the sea of clouds and those taken by astronauts from space show a streak of brown amidst converging clouds and wind patterns.

On June 22nd, 2019, the Raikoke Volcano on Russia's Kuril Islands, which last exploded in 1924, suddenly let out a giant plume of ash and gas from its 700-meter crater. Astronauts were able to take pics of the narrow column of the plume as it rose and expanded over an area called the umbrella region.

Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers in Tokyo and Anchorage reported that the ash had reached as high as 13 kilometers (8 miles). Data from the CALIPSO satellite shows that some segments of the plume reached the altitude of 17 kilometers (10 miles).

(Image credit: NASA)