Most of us live in noisy places. All day long, we’re surrounded by noise wherever we are may it be in the office, the streets, or even our own homes. As I write these sentences, I can hear a car beeping, and I can hear my air condition vibrate. Have you ever been so irritated to the sounds surrounding you that you just want to cover your ears for everything to be quiet? Perhaps this is the place for you — the quietest chamber so quiet it is in negative decibels. A place so quiet where you can hear your own heart, lungs, and stomach. A word of warning, though: this place may drive you crazy.
If you were to be pulled over while driving and then approached by a robot cop, you'd probably wonder if you really are too drunk to drive (even if you don't drink). This video from SRI International introduces their robotic police officer, who is actually an extension of a human cop who stays in the police car during the traffic stop. Through the robot, he can video chat with the driver, examine documents, and print out a ticket. It's not quite the badass Peter Weller cyborg we've come to expect from movies. -via Digg
What color do you see here- is the shoe gray with teal laces, or is it pink with white laces? People are pretty well split on the answer.
OK, what do you guys see? For picture 1, I see gray and teal, my husband sees pink and white. BUT if I add a filter to it I can actually see the pink and white (picture 2). pic.twitter.com/OVesggOr7Z
Does it help when you notice there's a hand in the picture, and it's not the right color? Why did she have to apply filters to get the colors to look true? It might be a matter of color consistency. Or it might just be the bad lighting, which is really the same thing. How do people see the first picture as pink and white, when I can only see gray and teal? On the other hand, when I enlarged the photo on Twitter to download it, I saw the pink and white. Aaaagh!
One of the differences between the American and Soviet space programs was that the US launched rockets over water and landed capsules into the ocean, while the Soviets did so over land. The result was a widely-spread junkyard of rocket boosters and fuel tanks in Russian forests. All that tempting scrap metal among poor country folk, and the eyes of the Communist Party everywhere.
They never dared scavenge the junk for scrap until the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union began to fall. At first, they told Tereshin, they hacked the metal with axes. Then someone got the bright idea to use a circular saw. Still, it could take more than a week to dismantle a single booster, sometimes sleeping inside for warmth. They sold the metal—aluminum, gold, silver, copper, and titanium—for cash in the capital Arkhangelsk and also hammered it into whatever they happened to need: flat-bottomed boats (dubbed "ракетаs" or rockets), hunting sleds, fencing, gutters, and even saunas—infusing a region otherwise known for its traditional Russian culture and folklore with a touch of space punk.
In 1989, 22-year-old Tracy Edwards organized an all-woman team to enter the Whitbread Race to sail around the world. It had never been done before, and when Edwards served as a cook in her first Whitbread experience, there were only four women among the 230 crew members in the race. But she didn't put together the Maiden team as a stunt, or to prove they could do it. Edwards figured that in an all-female crew, none of the sailors could be singled out as "the woman" on board to be taken less than seriously, as was her personal experience. However, their goals evolved.
Maiden struggled to find financial backing, with executives either disdainful of the endeavor or terrified that their names would forever be attached to a fatal disaster. As Edwards fought to keep the project on track, she was met with a chorus of discouragement and doubt. The sailing world treated Maiden like a foolish pipe dream, and the media covered it like a stunt.
“It just became a battle of wills,” Edwards recalled, positing that if her efforts hadn’t faced such resounding, sexist backlash, she might not have seen the project through: “Yeah, that helped.”
In interview clips from the time, questions range from patronizing to all-out sexist. Edwards and her crew were rarely asked about sailing, underlining the fact that the world didn’t see them as sailors at all—more like an all-female sideshow act. “It gave us great direction, if nothing else. It really focused our minds. Whereas before we were a bit like, you know, let’s just give it a go. This sounds so weird, but it wasn't about women sailing. We just wanted to race around the world on an equal playing field. Then it became about women.”
Read Edwards' story, which is told in the documentary Maiden thirty years after the race.
Because it was located in the heart of Capital Forest, the logging town of Bordeaux, Washington prospered for 60 years. Here towering fir and cedar trees provided beams for buildings, spars for sailing ships and shingles for roofs.
Via Amaze | Image: Kinsey Brothers Photographs of the Lumber Industry and the Pacific Northwest/Wikimedia
To most people, a cubic zirconium can pass for a diamond if it's not too gaudy and you're not too invested in it. And so it has always been. Scientists studying ancient jewelry found in southern Europe assumed that six beads were made of amber, the gemstone formed from naturally-hardened tree sap, but have now discovered that they are manufactured fakes. Archaeologist Carlos Odriozola tells the story.
Odriozola and colleagues unearthed amber-looking beads from two burial sites in Spain. Two beads were found in an archaeological site near Seville in southern Spain called La Molina that dates to the third millennium B.C. Four other beads came from Cova del Gegant near Barcelona and date to the second millennium B.C. The beads looked so much like the real thing that the researchers didn’t notice they were fake until a chemical analysis revealed differently.
“Indeed, these beads resemble amber so well that we got first confused when [the analysis] did not match an amber pattern,” Odriozola said. “At that moment, we got very excited about the possibility of having found an amber fake.”
Excited about a fake? Oh yeah. While real amber jewelry is rare, manufactured amber intended to pass as the real thing can tell us a lot about the culture that produced it. Read about the discovery of the counterfeit amber at Discover magazine. -via reddit
We don't have a cure for HIV yet but a study has found that by using antiretroviral treatments (ART), the spread of the virus could be suppressed to effectively zero transmissions.
Researchers involved in the massive study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, believe this could be the definitive study on whether current antiretroviral drugs are effective at stopping HIV.
The research studied around 1,000 couples with one being HIV-positive and the other negative. Throughout eight years of the study, not one was infected with the virus. There were some who got infected but that was due to extraneous factors, that is, they contracted the virus from HIV-positive people who didn't take antiretroviral drugs.
Such conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of the drugs “is necessary to promote the benefits of early testing and treatment and to tackle stigma, discrimination, and criminalisation laws that continue to affect HIV-positive people,” the authors wrote.
The Lancet provided a formal comment on the study from Myron Cohen, a physician with the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases. These important findings, he said, should “serve to inspire and challenge us” to overcome the roadblocks that prevent HIV-positive people from receiving treatment.
Mathematicians prefer Hagoromo Fulltouch chalk for its high quality and ease of use. But then the Japanese company went out of business in 2015, citing low sales due to new technology like whiteboards and computer screens. What to do? Mathematicians brought up all the Hagoromo Fulltouch chalk they could, and will try to make it last. Great Big Story reports on the fanatical fans of this premium chalk. -via Metafilter
As the number of men who work in the kitchen, cooking food and making a living out of it, the language surrounding the activity has changed. From being a chore or drudgery, it is now being seen and discussed as a technical practice.
But the thing is, it has always been that way. Women just aren't credited or celebrated for the daily grind of preparing meals for their families, the private sphere, whereas male chefs boast about their latest new creation or mastery of such and such technique, and get lauded for it in the public sphere.
The trend of men cooking at home is one that’s been growing for a while, and a lot of it is undeniably positive. But “more time” doesn’t mean “equal time.” Either way, it’s clear that getting men onboard with domestic drudgery required a complete change to the discourse.
According to Onstad, “masculine power” lent credibility to the job, which would ultimately lead to the rise of the male restaurant chef. “In public, men were lauded for the craft of cooking, while private food preparation in the family kitchen remained mostly unheralded women’s work,” writes Onstad.
Cooking then became acceptable for men in the context of a technical set of tasks, rewarded with a salary, rather than a form of obligatory nurturing within the home. And that’s how it stayed for some time: Men gained prestige running restaurant kitchens while women silently fed the children.
Making cooking a more technically-oriented task doesn't fix the issue however, as the concept of cooking didn't really need this makeover. Rather, the root of the issue is that though cooking may be an art form, it's still painstaking labor and if you have to do it every single day, it becomes a burden that hopefully, men would be able to share equitably.
Children who suffer strokes as infants often go on with their lives having certain impairments that go unnoticed. With the help of a wristwatch-like motion-tracking device, these impairments can be detected long before they cause any irreversible damage.
“I had a teenager come into my clinic because he was trying on gloves at a sporting-goods store, and the store owner noticed he was struggling to put his baseball glove on,” says senior author Nico Dosenbach, assistant professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis, who sees patients at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
“They thought he’d hurt his elbow playing baseball. But it turned out he’d had a massive stroke as an infant that damaged the motor parts of his brain, and no one had ever noticed until the store owner said something. I sent him to therapy, but he had only partial recovery. Perhaps if we’d sent him to therapy when he was a toddler instead of a teenager, it might have made a bigger difference.”
Researchers wanted to eliminate the difficulty of detecting these impairments so they developed an algorithm that would take the data gathered by the device to see whether there is a significantly disproportionate ratio between using their left and right arm, which would signal possible motor impairments.
“Many of the children with impairments used one arm only 60 to 80 percent as much as the other, which is really abnormal,” says Dosenbach, who is also an assistant professor of occupational therapy and of pediatrics. “Even that level of impairment is not always easy for a pediatrician to detect, because children often behave totally differently in the doctor’s office than they do normally.”
Hopefully the device can aid pediatricians and others to promptly address these issues before they become a part of children's lives until they grow old.
The longest running prime time show on TV is COPS, which is still running. It's been on for 30 years now! What you might not know is how COPS was born from the idea of producing a TV show without professional writers or actors. It didn't have to be good, as long as it was cheap. But people became obsessed with watching real-life drama go down. And thus, reality TV was born. -via Tastefully Offensive
Meteorologist Grace Legge of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology became a Jedi to forecast the weather for Star Wars Day. Let's see how many Star Wars references she can squeeze into about 80 seconds. (via Laughing Squid)
Will you be having a party for Star Wars Day, or are you just going to use it as an excuse to see a movie or two? In case you want to see all the available Star Wars movies, Den of Geek has a streaming guide. Go here to keep track of all the upcoming Star Wars movies and TV shows, from The Mandalorian to the yet-unnamed movies of the future. They also have updates on currently available TV shows and games. There's even a rundown of Star Wars gifts. You can see all these links at the Star Wars section at Den of Geek. And May the Fourth be with you.
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