It's not a novel concept. Backyard farms and urban agriculture has been around since the dawn of civilization but whether it's beneficial to society and the environment is still up in the air. Research suggests that city farms have not improved hunger incidence or the environment. So should we simply do away with it?

Today, urban farming is widely practiced in the developing world, mostly by low income, food insecure urban residents. In some places, up to 70% of urban residents supplement their food supply with some form of agricultural.

Given the poor transportation in many developing countries, an agricultural side hustle allows access to fresh, nutritious foods that low-income urban residents could otherwise never afford. Surplus can be sold, providing critical income.

Beyond subsistence farming, there isn't much prospects for scaling up city farms. However, they can be maximized by using green roofs. Setting up farms on roofs may be the best way to utilize these small urban farms.

(Image credit: Piush Dahal/Flickr)

Portland, Oregon is known as the knife-making capital. Other states produce fine knives but you can only find some of the most renowned custom-designed knives in Portland. To give you an inkling on Portland's knives, these three blades are what gave it such a moniker.

(Image credit: Wu Yi/Unsplash)

For hobby gamers and board game enthusiasts out there, the Spiel des Jahres has announced their nominees for the award in three categories: Spiel des Jahres, Kennerspiel des Jahres, and Kinderspiel des Jahres.

This year, the jury of German critics went with light, easy-to-teach games for the family-friendly "Spiel des Jahres" award. Just One and Werwörter (Werewords in English) are word-based party games, while L.A.M.A. is a card-shedding game from design legend Reiner Knizia. All three play in under 20 minutes (!).

For the list of games in other categories, you may check them out on the Spiel des Jahres website.

(Image credit: Spiel des Jahres)

Among my passions are the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. As good a fantasy as is his masterwork The Lord of the Rings, it does leave itself wide open for parody, and if you give MAD Magazine an inch of an opening, they'll take a mile. Embedded here are their versions of the three parts of the Lord of the Rings films - Feebleschtick Of Ka-Ching, The Two+ Hours, and Rehash of The Thing.

And if you've really got time on your hands, here is the audiobook version of the old National Lampoon's Bored of the Rings, which came out in the late 1960's, so Tolkien might have read this.

Military surgeon Joseph Fleming served with the British Royal Navy aboard a hospital ship during conflicts in Africa. His notes from 1873 related a peculiar case, in which Captain H. V. B. suffered from some unknown illness, possibly gall bladder trouble, and died aboard the ship. An autopsy was inconclusive as to the exact cause of death, but it revealed a rather curious anomaly in his heart.    

A small hard heavy circular body, about half-an-inch in diameter (which, on examination, proved to be a leaden bullet), is found encysted outside the pericardium, above the right ventricle and between the origin of the pulmonary artery in front and the ascending part of the arch of the aorta behind.

A really surprising place to find a bullet: less than an inch from the heart, and sitting snugly between the two largest blood vessels in the body. Miraculously, it had not damaged any of these delicate structures. By chance, another of the surgeons on board HMS Victor Emmanuel knew how it had happened, since he witnessed the injury – which had occurred thirteen years earlier and on the other side of the globe.

The captain had indeed been shot all those years ago, but since it didn't seem to bother him much, he had been quickly discharged from medical care. Read the story of the heart with a bullet at Thomas Morris.  -via Strange Company

One of the few things that all living things have in common is carbon. What makes this element so universal? Or maybe it's not universal... after all, we don't know about life outside of our planet. Could other life forms use some chemical besides carbon to bind everything together the way carbon does here? Reactions explores the question, even if they can't supply an answer based on observations -just speculation extrapolated from what we know. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Today marks the anniversary of the London debut of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula in 1897. Talk about your best-seller! It soon inspired the first of the vampire films, Nosferatu, which beat Bela Lugosi's Dracula to the silver screen by 9 years.

The vampire Count Orlok is portrayed by actor Max Schreck, which name translates to 'maximum terror'. And you wonder where the name 'Shrek' came from.

The film holds up well after nearly 100 years, and the remastered score is excellent. This film came out in the same time frame of 1925's Phantom of the Opera, during which many theater patrons fainted from the shock of seeing Lon Chaney in full makeup. Read the comments in the YouTube video and you'll see that Nosferatu wasn't far off that mark.

Can you remember these ads on the back of comics? Specs that let you see through clothes. The secrets to super-human strength. Seven-foot tall ghosts. All of this could be yours for a few dollars. At least, that’s what vintage comic-book ads would have you believe.

Via Amaze 

May 15. Nate Roman, 44, came back home from work when he noticed that something was off — somebody broke into his house. (They didn’t “break in” literally, though. Roman accidentally left his back door unlocked, and so nothing was broken). The unknown person did not take anything from the house. He or she only cleaned the house in a thorough manner.

Roman looked around and saw that they neatly made the beds, vacuumed the rugs, and scrubbed the toilets. They even crafted ornate origami roses on the toilet paper rolls in his bathrooms, he said. Every room in his house was cleaned, except for the kitchen.

He thought the whole thing was “weird and creepy,” and reported the incident to police.

(Image Credit: Nate Roman)

When we go to the bathroom, we usually expect the standard facilities to be available or at the very least, be ordinary. But for some reason or another, some bathrooms have mirrors that are awkward to look at or simply useless. From mirrors that are poorly designed to those that are inappropriately placed, Sad and Useless gives us here a collection of funny bathroom mirrors.

(Image credit: Sad and Useless)

If you see a line of lights straddling along the night sky, then this might be the first set of Starlink satellites that SpaceX recently launched in order to provide internet coverage to the world. Marco Langbroek eagerly anticipated these low-orbit satellites and after making calculations, his location was close enough to view this satellite train.

He wrote on his blog:

On 24 May 2019 at 2:30 UT, SpaceX launched STARLINK, a series of 60 satellites that is the first launch of many that will create a large constellation of satellites meant to provide global internet access.

Just short of a day after the launch, near 22:55 UT on May 24, this resulted in a spectacular view over northwestern Europe, when a ‘train’ of bright satellites, all moving close together in a line, moved across the sky. It rained UFO reports as a result, and the press picked it up as well.

(Image credit: SpaceX/Starlink Mission; Wikimedia Commons)

It doesn't happen often, but every once in a great while, some everyday working stiff gets a chance to impress everyone. It takes hard work, timing, talent, and luck, but the stories of those who did it give us all inspiration.  

When Richard Montanez was a boy, he was embarrassed to bring burritos to school because the other kids had never seen them before. His mom's solution was to pack him an extra burrito each day, so he could give one away and make friends. Richard ended up selling burritos to classmates for a quarter each. So is this the prologue to the story of him becoming an entrepreneur and starting his own tortilla empire? Nope! Richard dropped out of school and got hired as a gardener.

And a car washer, and a chicken slaughterer. Then he got a job as janitor in a Frito-Lay plant, until one day the machinery broke down and he got to live the dream: taking home a bunch of undusted Cheetos. Having sadly neglected to stock his kitchen with jars of spare cheese crumbs, Richard rolled the Cheetos in chili powder in the style of elote, a Mexican chili corn snack. And he liked the result so much that he figured Frito-Lay should mass-produce it. He decided to pitch the idea directly to the CEO of PepsiCo, Roger Enrico.

You know how the idea took off, but what you don't know is that Enrico was so excited about the idea that he promoted the janitor, and Montanez later rose to executive vice president. Read five other stories like his at Cracked.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jan Videren)

Thank Samsung for that.

Moscow, Russia — Researchers at the Samsung AI Center developed a way to create moving portraits using only a small dataset. The dataset can be so small that even one photograph is enough to make a moving portrait — a “living portrait.”

Because they only need one source image, the researchers were able to animate paintings and famous portraits, with eerie results. Fyodor Dostoevsky—who died well before motion picture cameras became commercially available—moves and talks in black and white. The Mona Lisa silently moves her mouth and eyes, a slight smile on her face. Salvador Dali rants on, mustache twitching.

This technology far more exceeds than that of deepfakes, which only pastes faces over another face.

Do you think technology has gone too far on this one?

Via Vice

(Video Credit: Egor Zakharov/ YouTube)

Despite being many in numbers, ants still value the life of each of their brethren. When one of them gets trapped in a spider web, its comrades immediately go and rescue the unlucky ant.

Veromessor pergandei harvester ants, which thrive in colonies tens of thousands strong in the southwestern United States, usually walk a single route each day to collect seeds. Christina Kwapich and Bert Hölldobler at Arizona State University in Tempe monitored the ants’ response when one of their own became ensnared in a spider web.

If the entangled ant released a chemical alarm signal, its companions rescued it, carried it back to the nest and cleaned the silk from its body. Ants also tugged on the web itself until they had destroyed it. In laboratory tests, ants needed between 30 minutes and 2 hours to demolish a single web.

(Image Credit: C. L. Kwapich)

By extracting six strains of the yeast from old pottery discovered in the Holy Land, researchers from the Antiquities Authority and three Israeli universities have been able to recreate beer “believed to be similar to beverages enjoyed by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt.”

The team said it hoped to make the drink available in shops one day.

"I remember that when we first brought out the beer we sat around the table and drank... and I said either we'll be good or we'll all be dead in five minutes," said Aren Maeir, an archaeologist with Bar-Ilan University. "We lived to tell the story".

(Image Credit: EPA)