In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and took possession of Crimea on the Black Sea, and later the Donbas region, which contains most of Ukraine's coal mines. Many Ukrainians fled to the west, while Russian nationals and separatists stayed. And the elderly. When you are in your 80s, it's hard to leave the only home you've known all your life. But the checkpoints along the occupation zone may stand between you and your family members -or your pension. So residents line up on both sides of the border at checkpoints, waiting hours for their turn to cross. One checkpoint sees 30,000 people a day. For the elderly, that wait can be deadly. Eighteen civilians have died waiting in these lines since December.   

At Stanytsia Luhanska, the checkpoint in Luhansk, paramedic Natalia Sylkina is struggling to cope.

“It’s been madness today,” she says. She explains that she and her colleagues are bringing people out of the queues who have already fainted, or are on the verge of doing so.

“There’s already been around 30 patients, with six or seven of them fainting.”

The previous day they treated 31 patients, she says.

“They’re all squeezed together. They can’t breathe… We’ve been raising or lowering their blood pressure here or resuscitating them.”

I discover that those who are 80 and over can actually go straight to the front of the queue, but most don’t know about this, or don’t believe it when I tell them - so fearful are they of losing their place.

Read about the deadly wait to cross the border and the reasons behind it at BBC.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Ed Ram)

As disappointing as the Game of Thrones' finale has been, I think nobody can deny that the production value was off the charts. 

The work done on the set design, costumes, makeup, visual effects, sound editing, and other technical aspects of making the show truly shone in the last season and made up for much of its narrative shortcomings. And those behind-the-scenes moments are what the documentary 'The Last Watch' is all about. 

It shows all the work that was done from the table reads to the actual filming and post-production shots of making the show. Far more than the story and its characters, viewers have become invested in everything that Game of Thrones has done. And this documentary is the culmination of that whole journey for all of us.

(Image credit: HBO)

Previous studies regarding the conservation status of many species have only taken into account species in isolation. However, if we were to include how these species interact in an ecological network, then some of their statuses might be taken up a notch and could be at risk of extinction.

With forecasts on the effects of climate change shifting constantly, there is a greater chance that several species would experience this 'domino effect' of extinction within the next 50 years. It makes sense seeing how all species are, in one way or another, interdependent with one another for resources.

First author Jordi Bascompte, a professor in the evolutionary biology and environmental studies department at the University of Zurich, gives a specific example to illustrate the results of the study: “In one of the networks situated in southern Spain, the sage-leaved rock rose has a 52 percent predicted probability of extinction caused by climate change in 2080. 

Should this happen, one of its pollinators, the small carpenter bee, would face a risk of co-extinction as a consequence of losing one of the resources it depends upon. Because the small carpenter bee also pollinates the myrtle, the latter is also under threat of extinction.”

(Image credit: Alex Popovkin/Flickr)

Artists have their own quirks and preferences when it comes to how they want their work spaces to be. Some are fine with smaller and simpler spaces, while others need a little more leg room. Some like having a tidy desk, others want to place all their favorite things where they can see them. To each their own.

Some Japanese artists have been posting photos of how their workstations look like for years. From walls decked with figurines and posters to desks with multiple panels of computer screens, the Japanese has them all. Take a look at some of the work spaces that Japanese artists are showing off, and rightfully so.

(Image credit: pe_co_y0505/Twitter)

It seems a bit far-fetched for someone to claim that a supplement could improve your cognitive function, memory, and other aspects of your mental performance. We probably tend to take these claims with a grain of salt. But some research suggest that certain components of these supplements may enhance cognitive functioning. However, it's still best to take precaution.

The research on brain-boosting supplements is ambiguous itself. While some of the ingredients in brain-boosting supplements have shown to be beneficial, the studies have been inconsistent, explained Dr. Michael Genovese, a clinical psychiatrist and chief medical officer of Acadia Healthcare.

Dr. David J. Puder, medical director of the behavioral health outpatient program at the Loma Linda University, puts it a little more bluntly: “The people making these supplements are not doing randomized controlled trials to determine if they really work,” he said. “They mostly use data about what might work, throw it together and add a bunch of excellent marketing.”

A few ingredients that usually come up in these supplements are caffeine, Omega-3 fatty acids, Bacopa monnieri, and Ginkgo biloba to name a few. You may check out here what some studies say about the possible outcomes of these ingredients.

(Image credit: Pietro Jeng/Pexels)

Have you ever practiced and practiced for a public performance, only to forget what you were supposed to do when it was time for the show?

These kids did. They were supposed to sing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." But, like adorable little Sith apprentices, they set upon the "Imperial March" when their memories failed them. Gina Gibson, the mother of one of these boys, recorded the video.

-via Super Punch

Mention the word "UFO" and chances are people will think that you're talking about alien spacecrafts, X-Files paranormal phenomena or tin foil hat-worthy conspiracies. But who'd have thought that the U.S. Navy would have records of this kind of stuff?

The New York Times explains:

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

What could the flying objects be?

(Image Credit: Thor_Deichmann/ Pixabay)

Leeman Kessler has his own channel on YouTube, where he features a regular 'Ask Lovecraft' series of short videos, with himself portraying HPL discussing a wide variety of contemporary topics. Want to know what he thinks of J.R.R. Tolkien? How about My Little Pony? Or maybe his opinion on Pixie & Brutus would pique your interest? Sex too!

These videos are all short, six minutes or less, and so you have time to listen to Providence's famous son wax eloquent. I must say that his video on 'Cthulhu vs. Galactus' piqued my interest.

Have you ever seen an elderly porcupine? Probably not. Their average lifespan is around eight years, but Kemosabe, who lives at Animal Wonders in Montana, is eleven. The porcupine has been battling serous dental problems that left him with only one tooth. As he fought an infection, Kemosabe was on a not-quite-natural soft diet. Now that he's been medically cleared, it's time to find out what fruits he can handle on his own, and which ones he likes best. Listen to his voice- it sounds like a human voice at double speed, like Dave Seville's Chipmunks. See another video of Kemosabe at Laughing Squid.

Eduardo "Duda" Lozano, a tattoo artist in São Paulo, Brazil, is so good at his craft that he can render photo-realistic tattoos that look exactly like embroidered patches. They even have loose threads! In an interview with Tattoo Life, he described his style:

Long ago I had already worked with logos creation for caps and embroidered shirts, but the tattoo inspiration came soon. I always tried to do something to differentiate myself from so many artists and this was the moment when I remembered the time I worked with embroidery. Yeah, I think I could find the differential!

You can see many more of Lozano's tattoos on his Instagram page.

-via Twisted Sifter

Poor Sherwood Schwartz! Having struck gold with Gilligan's Island, he essentially spent the rest of his professional life in vain attempts to replicate its success by using the same formula over and over. We've already seen his most impressive failure in Dusty's Trail, but a close second has to be another of his sitcoms from the 60's, this being It's About Time. From the IMDb:

The series featured two astronauts, whose space capsule made a wrong turn somewhere in outer space and cracked the time barrier. The astronauts discover that they are now in a world quite different from the one they had left; they landed in a swamp smack in the middle of the Stone Age, and not far from a tribe of friendly cave dwellers.

This was a standard silly concept of a show that was designed for its target audience of children, who got some good laughs and outrageous comedy from its two main characters, who each week got into one mischief situation after another with one astronaut as the 'Skipper' and the other as 'Gilligan'.

Schwartz was determined that the same 'Gilligan' formula would work again, but he left out one important element - chemistry. The two main cavemen, Imogene Coca and Joe E. Ross, couldn't stand one another, much as happened between Vivian Vance and William Frawley, and it shows. Desperate to pull the rock-bottom-rated series out of its malaise, Schwartz pulled an about-face the beginning of the second season, where the astronauts return to 1967 with cavemen in tow. This plot flip didn't work and It's About Time was Out of Time early in its last season.

YouTube features this old and obscure series and a couple of episodes are embedded below. Lord knows what Sherwood Schwartz was thinking, but today I find his later efforts painful to watch.

Javier Larragoiti had just started college in Mexico City when he learned that his father had been diagnosed with diabetes. The teenager was studying chemical engineering, and decided to put his studies to work to make it easier for his father to avoid sugar.

“It’s only when you know someone with this sickness that you realise how common it is and how sugar intake plays a huge role,” he says. “My dad tried to use stevia and sucralose, just hated the taste, and kept cheating on his diet.”

The young chemist started dabbling with xylitol, a sweet-tasting alcohol commonly extracted from birch wood and used in products such as chewing gum.

“It has so many good properties for human health, and the same flavour as sugar, but the problem was that producing it was so expensive,” he says. “So I decided to start working on a cheaper process to make it accessible to everyone.”

Ten years later, Larragoiti has patented a process to make xylitol that will also contribute to saving the environment. He nows runs a business he named Xilinat to produce xylitol. Read that story at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image: Courtesy of Xilinat)

Galileo did experiments to prove that heavy objects and lighter objects will fall at the same rate. This meant that, taken to extremes, a hammer and a feather should fall at the same speed. However, a feather tends to float slowly because of air resistance. During the Apollo 15 moon mission in 1971, astronaut David Scott had the perfect opportunity to prove Gaileo's point, because there was no air to cause drag on the feather. And some falcon on earth never knew how far a part of him flew. How about that? -via reddit