Celebrities, royals, and businessmen get the privilege to ride private jets. On their luxurious ride in the sky, these privileged people get their every need attended by flight attendants, who, I believe, are one of the most selfless people in the world. These stewards ensure the comfort of the passengers inside the plane.

Despite the perks of being able to travel across the globe, a private flight attendant’s job is very demanding and stressful.

They may serve their passengers every need, but the skills required by flight attendants are much more than that of a waitress -- they're cocktail mixologists, cleaners, personal assistants, caterers and even dog sitters.

Kimberly Benton, who has been working in the industry for nine years, shares her story of what it is like to be a flight attendant.

For her, being a VIP flight attendant is more than just delivering the best possible service to her clients, but about "creating an experience."

"They're expecting you to be a lot more personal," the 32-year-old told CNN Travel. "They expect you to know exactly what they want, when they want it and it could be something as little as as soon as they get on the plane they want a shot of a Nespresso, the foot rest up and their Sunday Times [newspaper] waiting for them."

She's held birthday parties in the sky, after-parties for pop stars who she's flown with for their concert tours, and even put on full banquets for her guests. It's a job that requires her to be constantly adaptable to whatever situation she's in.

Mary Kalymnou, who has been a flight attendant for 13 years, also shares her experience.

On board she's had guests bring exotic parrots, jewels, more than 20 bags of shopping and even guns. She says she's also had dead bodies.

"Three times in my career I had a deceased person on board -- a coffin in the cargo, made out of gold and expensive wood," she recalls.

"They were three very well-known men, [who] obviously traveled in luxury for the last time in their lives."

She says the job of a VIP flight attendant is demanding and one that "requires a lot of sacrifices."

"It requires a lot of patience, flexibility, and for sure -- high levels of self-esteem," Kalymnou explains. "The clients expect the best, the operators demand the highest so you must be willing and of course be able to offer the best of yourself."

Otherwise, she says, you could be easily replaced.

"Every girl could learn this job ... but only a few will eventually stand out. Being professional is not enough -- you must be unique," she says.

Would you consider being a flight attendant?

(Image Credit: Mary Kalymnou)

Since our resources are limited and continue to be depleted as global demand soars, population increases by the minute, and nature struggles to replenish its stores, researchers try to find ways to create materials with similar properties to natural resources as alternatives for the actual thing.

But designers are finding it difficult to replicate the intricate structures and functions that different natural materials possess. Although, there have been successful devices that have the capacity to imitate living creatures' behavior through machine learning like the recent hummingbird drone. It's far from perfect.

One other example of biomimetic inventions is a snapping device mimicking the Venus Flytrap:

A biomimetic “snapping” device made of hydrogel has been invented by an international team of engineers, reports Phys.org. But the device, inspired by the Venus flytrap, is a far cry from its biological counterpart. 

The living plant does far more than snap shut. It incorporates toothed edges that form a cage for its prey, trigger hairs able to distinguish between living and lifeless objects, and digestive juices that obtain nutrients from trapped bugs. Just getting the artificial device to snap quickly was a major challenge.

Perhaps further research and insight from observing the Venus Flytrap would help researchers design a device that would imitate the features of the plant. Also, it depends on the objectives that the researchers set out as well. Whether their purpose is to make an artificial Venus Flytrap or not, and why.

Other materials were also brought into focus. In particular, nacre or mother of pearl because of its versatility and strength. Scientists seek to make a synthetic counterpart of the material. The challenge they face is its uniqueness and the heavy requirements needed to replicate it.

One natural substance scientists have looked to in creating synthetic materials is nacre, also known as mother-of-pearl. An exceptionally tough, stiff material produced by some mollusks and serving as their inner shell layer, it also comprises the outer layer of pearls, giving them their lustrous shine.

But while nacre’s unique properties make it an ideal inspiration in the creation of synthetic materials, most methods used to produce artificial nacre are complex and energy intensive.

Surely, if more resources are given to biomimetic projects then we would be able to reduce our dependence on nature for materials to build things. That is not to say that this is the panacea for our environmental problems but with other efforts, this could help reinvigorate nature and give them time to breathe and restore its lush abundance.

(Image credit: Hannes Grobe/AWI; Wikimedia Commons, CC by SA 3.0)

Nova Scotia, Canada — Police, public works and a resident rescued five ducklings from a storm drain in the town of Truro, while the worried mother duck waited patiently, pacing back and forth on the scene. Constable Wendy Cormier said that the police got a call from a man who noticed a mother duck in the street about to be hit by a car. After investigating a little, the man stated that he heard some chirping coming from the drain. Upon heading on the drain, there the man saw the ducklings.

A public works staffer was on the scene within minutes to help remove the drain cover.

The constable did not hesitate to jump inside the storm drain upon heading to the scene.

"I couldn't get to the call fast enough actually to get them outta there," said Cormier. "I was the smallest one there, so I got picked to go down and fish them out."

When she got inside, she saw that the ducklings were walking in a pipe between drains.

The public works staffer got in the other drain and retrieved one duckling. Cormier rescued the other four while the mother duck stayed nearby.

"Once we got them out it was almost like she knew we had them and that they were safe," said Cormier, who put the ducklings in a box.

(Image Credit: Truro Police)

A "Mary Sue" is a female protagonist of a story who is perfect, naturally able to accomplish great things, and can do no wrong. You may have heard the term referring to Rey in the new Star Wars trilogy, but the name goes back to the '70s, when Paula Smith and Sharon Ferraro analyzed fan fiction submitted to the Star Trek fanzine they founded. The concept behind the name goes back much further.  

The “Mary Sue” character, introduced in 1973 by Smith in the second issue of Menagerie (named after a two-parter from the show's first season), articulated a particular trope that exists far beyond the “Star Trek” universe. Mary Sues can be found throughout the history of literature, standing on the shoulders of earlier fill-in characters, like Pollyanna, the unfailingly optimistic protagonist from Eleanor H. Porter’s children’s books from the 1910s. More recently, cousins to the term can be found in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as coined by Nathan Rabin in his review of the Cameron Crowe film Elizabethtown, and the Jennifer Lawrence-personified “Cool Girl.”

It’s no accident that all of these examples are women. Smith and Ferraro also threw around terms like Murray Sue or Marty Sue when they corresponded with editors of other zines, but male fill-in characters, it seemed, could be brave and handsome and smart without reproach. “Characters like Superman were placeholders for the writers, too,” Smith points out. “But those were boys. It was OK for [men] to have placeholder characters that were incredibly able.”

Placeholder characters are those that the reader can imagine embodying, and have existed in fiction since the beginning of fiction. However, a female protagonist is more likely to draw criticism, whether they are too perfect, like Ray, or not perfect enough, like Daenerys Targaryen. Read about the fiction trope and its history at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Menagerie)

Cats will find the darnedest places to give birth. That was unfortunate for a cat somewhere around Haywood, California. Her litter of five kittens was born inside a 60-foot steel beam that was then transported to a San Diego construction site 500 miles away. Luckily, workers heard the kittens' mewing, and tipped the beam to get them out. The Humane Society estimated them to be one week old, and have already lined up a couple of construction workers as adoptive cat owners when the kittens are old enough. -via Fark

The plague called the Black Death affected millions of Europeans in the 14th century. Doctors were terrified of treating patients, but did the best they could (which wasn't much) and developed a kind of hazmat suit that they hoped would protect them. It may have helped somewhat. If you prefer to read text instead of watching the video, you can at Strange Ago.  -via Strange Company

A few years ago, Simone Giertz introduced us to her chopping machine. The guys at Megabots (previously at Neatorama) were so impressed, they recreated the knife-waving contraption in giant robot style! The robot proves to be about as dangerously inept as Giertz's original version, but her delight makes it all worthwhile. -via Metafilter

See more videos from Simone Giertz.

Redditor ThUltimateGuy says that his grandmother made this work of jello art. That's 21 layers! Because they're so thin, each one required only 5 to 10 minutes of freezing. But that's still a loooooong project!

As time passes, things change, get replaced, and decay. From a bustling city filled commerce, activity, and people, some spaces in the city and buildings become abandoned and forgotten. Some are torn down while others just dilapidate and fade away into the background. But some people find new ways to breathe life into these buildings and city spaces by repurposing them.

We love witnessing the creative repurposing of such abandoned city spaces — factories that become cool lofts and offices, hotels that spring up out of old warehouses, and parks built atop old subway tracks. 

These reuses support the community and revive the decaying parts of a changing city, making it feel alive and whole again. By recycling materials, restoring historic details, and even wildly reimagining what a certain space could be, derelict buildings are allowed to live a second, purposeful life and, in turn, revitalize entire neighborhoods.

Uproxx gives us a list of some breathtaking projects that turn old buildings into artistic and modern landscapes.

(Image credit: Koetjuh/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Cancer research has made strides in trying to understand how these cells mutate as well as how our bodies fight off these cancer cells. Recently, a collaboration between researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center have developed tools that can detect and track the epigenetic evolution of cancer.

Described in papers May 15 in Nature and April 23 in Nature Communications, the new approach allows researchers to isolate individual cancer cells sampled from patients and map the epigenetic marks on the cells’ chromosomes. Epigenetic marks are chemical marks on DNA or on DNA-support proteins (called histones) that help control which genes are switched “on” and which are switched “off” in a cell. They essentially program what the cell does and what it doesn’t do.

The first step that researchers need to know about the mutation of cancer cells is exactly where it starts, what the exact triggers are, and how the mutated cells respond to various treatments. Their findings can also help in formulating treatments that would target the specific cause of the cancer as well as prevent them from spreading. But it will be a challenge.

Landau and other researchers have previously shown how a diversification occurs at the genetic level in cancers, such that different cells within a tumor contain distinct sets of gene mutations. 

“This enormous diversity within each cancerous cell population means that in each patient, we’re dealing with thousands of variants of the cancer rather than just one entity, and all this variation increases the cancer’s potential to adapt to challenges such as drug therapy,” said Landau, who’s an oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “Here we’re extending that concept to show that there is epigenetic diversity as well.”

(Image credit: Susan Arnold/National Institutes of Health, Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

Paris is experiencing a boom in tech startups recently fueled by the newly introduced policies of the Macron government to attract tech entrepreneurs and investors. Along with the growing discontent, rising living costs, and disparities in the tech circles of Silicon Valley, France is propping itself up to become the hub for tech in Europe.

Driving this shift is a growing contrast in France’s approach toward global tech innovations to the U.K. and the U.S., experts say. On the one hand, London’s status as a financial and innovation hub stands challenged by Brexit’s enduring uncertainties. And America and Britain are tightening up on immigration. On the other hand, the French government is aggressively courting tech entrepreneurs and investments — a strategy that’s showing results.

In 2017, the Emmanuel Macron government introduced a program that fast-tracks four-year residence visas for tech entrepreneurs and their families. Since then, French tech startups are witnessing a dramatic increase in funding: There were 743 French startups raising money in 2017, a 45 percent increase from 2016, according to CB Insights. Global giants are taking notice, with both Facebook and Google opening new AI research centers in Paris. Google has even announced plans to create local “hubs” to teach digital skills in other French cities, such as Rennes, with the goal of getting more people online (and using Google products).

Still though, Europe isn't necessarily riding a big wave when it comes to the technology industry unlike neighboring Asia where big tech companies are soaring because of increasing demand and purchasing power from its consumers as well as lower production costs among other investments needed to build and expand one's business. But this is an important first step.

With these initiatives, we might see an increasing need for Europe to open itself up to the business of tech and perhaps relaxing their stringent policies with regard to the internet and doing business through digital platforms. It might also be great for having collaboration and diversity in an industry which has been criticized for its inequality and toxic corporate culture.

We have yet to see how these efforts will make the tech industry as a whole flourish and encourage more innovation that would benefit society at large without incurring the ills of what Silicon Valley turned out to be, but at the very least this is a promising start.

(Image credit: Augustin de Montesquiou/Unsplash)

Hershey’s design of chocolate bars with its logo embossed on the middle has remained unchanged for a century and a quarter. Now, after 125 long years, the chocolate company redesigned the iconic bar, and the design is dedicated to the texting generation of today. The new design removes the logo, and instead replaces it with emojis.

The new emoji chocolate bars, which will be available for a limited time starting this summer, will feature 25 of “the most popular emojis” engraved in the bar’s squares. “In today’s text savvy world, many conversations start (and end) with an emoji,” Hershey’s senior brand manager Kriston Ohm told People. “By adding an emoji design to each pip of chocolate, we hope that parents and kids are inspired to share a chocolate emoji and make a connection with someone new.”

What are your thoughts on this new design?

(Image Credit: Hershey’s)

An unknown heavenly body has been blasting holes in our galaxy. However, this “dark impactor” is unseen. It can be speculated that this is not made of normal matter. Not even our telescopes can detect this unknown entity, but it sure is out there.

"It's a dense bullet of something," said Ana Bonaca, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who discovered evidence for the impactor.

Bonaca's evidence for the dark impactor, which she presented April 15 at the conference of the American Physical Society in Denver, is a series of holes in our galaxy's longest stellar stream, GD-1. Stellar streams are lines of stars moving together across galaxies, often originating in smaller blobs of stars that collided with the galaxy in question. The stars in GD-1, remnants of a "globular cluster" that plunged into the Milky Way a long time ago, are stretched out in a long line across our sky.

Under normal conditions, the stream should be more or less a single line, stretched out by our galaxy's gravity, she said in her presentation. Astronomers would expect a single gap in the stream, at the point where the original globular cluster was before its stars drifted away in two directions. But Bonaca showed that GD-1 has a second gap. And that gap has a ragged edge — a region Bonaca called GD-1's "spur" — as if something huge plunged through the stream not long ago, dragging stars in its wake with its enormous gravity. GD-1, it seems, was hit with that unseen bullet.

"We can't map [the impactor] to any luminous object that we have observed," Bonaca told Live Science. "It's much more massive than a star… Something like a million times the mass of the sun. So there are just no stars of that mass. We can rule that out. And if it were a black hole, it would be a supermassive black hole of the kind we find at the center of our own galaxy."

It's not impossible that there's a second supermassive black hole in our galaxy, Bonaca said. But we'd expect to see some sign of it, like flares or radiation from its accretion disk. And most large galaxies seem to have just a single supermassive black hole at their center.

What do you think is this invisible culprit?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

2012. Immunologist Jacob Glanville left his prestigious job at Pfizer to start his own company, Distributed Bio, while also being Stanford Academy’s first Ph.D in computational immunology. Five years later, in 2017, Glanville has developed a method of catalyzing the creation of new drugs, and that is by “extracting patients’ antibodies, the blood proteins vertebrates use to counteract the threat of viruses, bacteria, and toxins.” Glanville thinks he might be able to use this technique in cancer research someday.

Meanwhile, unknown to Glanville, a man has been working to be immune to snakes since 2000 — Tim Friede. His way of immunizing is giving himself small dosages of snake venom, and letting his snakes bite him. Fate would later bring the two men to each other.

Back to Glanville in March 2017.

...one day, while sitting with a meditative view at San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden, he took to Google in search of a melanoma survivor. Chasing a thought, he typed in “repeat venom survivor” instead and found Friede.

Friede, who has spent 19 years promoting his quest to help researchers create a universal antivenom, takes up an inordinate amount of space on the internet. Glanville soon stumbled upon a newspaper story that described a YouTube video of Friede’s favorite stunt, the one he says proves his immunity to two of the deadliest snakes in existence. In the video, Friede holds the head of a Papua New Guinea taipan, one of the world’s most potently venomous snakes, against his forearm. Blood is already dripping from fang marks on his right arm, left there moments earlier by a ten-foot-long black mamba. Now the taipan bites. An attack from either snake can stop a person’s heart in a couple of hours. Other symptoms, including drooping eyelids and paralysis of the tongue, develop in seconds. But Friede calmly puts the snake back in its cage and says to the camera, “I love it. I love it. I love it.”

Glanville watched this with the appropriate mix of discomfort and grim fascination. “Jesus f***, this is my guy,” he said. Friede’s immune system, it seemed, was able to neutralize dozens of different toxins. Glanville wondered whether he could use his new antibody-­extraction method on Friede to create a universal antivenom.

Hear more about Glanville and Friede in this amazing narrative at Outside.

(Image Credit: Boris Smokrovic/ Unsplash)

When you think of a pool filled with Jell-O, you might think "That's really dumb but kind of cool." Then you realize that Jell-O has to be boiled to dissolve, and then refrigerated to set. How can you do that in quantities necessary for a pool? Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) was determined to make it work, and takes us on his journey. -via Tastefully Offensive