Winter is here, and it doesn't look good. The Wight army are making way for Westeros and nothing is going to stop them. But let's escape the realm of fiction and lore, and delve a bit into the science behind these reanimated corpses.
With some help from a neuroscientist, we will try illuminate what these wights or zombies are, how do they function, whether they eat brains, and all that jazz.
“There’s the socio-cultural definition of zombie from tales in Haitian voodoo, where someone was put into a state similar to death and then ‘brought back to life,’” says Bradley Voytek, avid Game of Thrones fan, neuroscientist at the University of California-San Diego, and co-author of Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep, which uses zombies as the basis for an introduction to serious neuroscience.
A man from Sydney, Australia named William Williamson posted via Facebook a photo of what seemed to be a sushi-like spider sitting on his stairs. This “sparked alarm among some users who had never seen anything like it before.”
'Time to burn the house down,' one person said.
'At first glance I thought this was a piece of sushi,' another said.
The creature was identified as the Magnificent Spider. This is often found in Queensland and New South Wales. According to the Australian Museum, the spider is not harmful to humans.
Can Rammstein get funky? You betcha! It takes a little help from Wild Cherry, Megadeth, and Metallica, but the combination ends up perfect for a disco dance. This clever mashup is from DJ Cummerbund. -via reddit
Unless you have been stranded in the wilderness with no form of connection or communication with the rest of the world, some people would find it an offense for one not to know "common knowledge" about pop culture.
By this, of course, we refer to events, people, or trends that have risen to a certain level of widespread collective consciousness in the context of mainstream pop culture such that it would be improbable for one not to know or even to have heard of them.
But there comes a point when it becomes too much of a chore as people around you constantly tell you that you "must" or "should" watch this or that, otherwise you would be left out. This puts on too much pressure on you, something we now call FOMO, and defeats the purpose of watching, reading, or listening something: for one's enjoyment of it.
Essentializing any form of art limits it, setting parameters on not only what we are supposed to receive, but how. As Wesley Morris wrote of our increasingly moralistic approach to culture, this “robs us of what is messy and tense and chaotic and extrajudicial about art.” Now, instead of approaching everything with a sense of curiosity, we approach with a set of guidelines.
Our response to pop culture has turned from appreciation and personal enjoyment into avoiding being out of the loop and the silent judgment from our friends and colleagues out of our ignorance. And so this elicits a more negative response to pop culture as opposed to a general, neutral stance on any form of art.
Creating art to dominate this discursive landscape turns that art into a chore — in other words, cultural homework. This kind of coercion has been known to cause an extreme side effect — reactance, a psychological phenomenon in which a person who feels their freedom being constricted adopts a combative stance, turning a piece of art we might otherwise be neutral about into an object of derision.
To execute the mission, Munt has agreed to pay $5,000 for a company called Celestis to load a few grams of his cat's remains onto a rocket (whose primary mission is to launch a satellite into orbit) and release them once in space.
Pikachu won't be the first cat to go into space, if this were to happen. That title belongs to Felicette, a French cat who flew into space and parachuted back to Earth.
If all goes according to plan, Pikachu will become the second cat to enter space. The first, a French stray named Félicette, launched in 1963 aboard the Véronique AG1 rocket, and later safely parachuted back to Earth. The space cat received international media attention, and was even featured on stamp collections.
"A spelunker is an explorer of caves. If you hope to one day be a spelunker, you probably have a love of dark, damp spaces and headlamps. This word may seem to have German written all over it but it's actually Latinate: from spelunk, meaning cave." as per:
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/spelunker. For some of the caves listed, you’ll need some good equipment and a support crew. For others, all you’ll need is a pair of sneakers and a few dollars...
NASA plans to send humans back to the moon and then move on to Mars. That was the objective of the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) and the directive given by the late President George H.W. Bush to NASA, 30 years ago. There had already been plans to have human exploration on Mars and beyond three decades before, and yet what happened to those initiatives?
The ambitious plan proposed NASA return to the Moon in a decade and send by human missions to Mars in the 2010s. But distrust between the White House and NASA and a politically disastrous $500 billion initial cost estimate sank the initiative.
Yet here we are, 30 years later, in a familiar set of circumstances: a sudden announcement with details yet to be worked out by NASA, a National Space Council, an involved White House, a promise of additional funds, and the hope that there are new ways of doing business that can somehow lower the cost. With so many similarities, surely the failure of SEI has something to tell us?
There are a few lessons we can learn from these failed initiatives and Casey Dreier lists them down. As there are further plans being made on space exploration in the future, changes in space policy may improve the progress toward reaching beyond our solar system.
If there's one thing we've learned from access to the internet, it's that if a story sounds too weird to be true, there's a good chance that it's not. For example, we know that despite the contemporary rumors (and that Boney M song), Rasputin did not carry on an affair with the Empress of Russia. But the more intriguing story was that of how Rasputin died. He survived poisoning, gunshots, beating, and drowning, only to succumb to freezing -or the cumulative effects of all the above. But how do we know all that? There's only one written eye witness account.
...besides Rasputin (who wasn't really in a state to do much), who would want history to remember him as a badass? His killer, of course. Felix Yusupov, Russian aristocrat and one of the conspirators, later wrote a series of highly sensationalist books about the murder. But he realized that publishing the story of him, a prince, shooting a common holy man in the back of the head because he didn't like the guy would make him come off as a bigger wang than the one Rasputin was packing.
So instead, Yusupov turned Rasputin into a demonic Terminator who could not be killed, even returning from the dead to attack his assassins, making Yusupov look like a real-life Van Helsing instead of a common backstabber.
Read the rest of that story and four other historical myths that don't hold water. Now, the article at Cracked isn't saying that these stories are completely false, but it does shed light on the lack of evidence that they are true.
The Big Apple is still one of the most visited cities in the world. It bears a lot of history and culture, through its streets, the architectural design of its buildings, and the faces of the people walking by.
Spanish photographer Manel Armengol wanted to capture the essence of what New York was and is. It culminated in his album of black-and-white New York City photographs which shows the landscape, the scenes, the people, the parks, the cars, and the streets on which he traversed.
Japanese pro soccer players Hotaru Yamaguchi, Hiroshi Kiyotake and Yosuke Ideguchi went head to head against 100 kids. Who do you think will win?
Do you think 3 pro soccer players can beat a swarm of kids? Wait till you see how the kids guard the goal ... I won't spoil it for you - you've just got to watch.
The fabella bone found in our primate ancestors was once rare in humans and scientists believed that we might have lost this primordial knee bone during evolution. However, a recent study from Imperial College of London found an increasing occurrence - this bone is now three times more common in humans than it was a hundred years ago.
The fabella bone is a small bone behind the knee and up until now nobody knows its function.
"We don't know what the fabella's function is – nobody has ever looked into it," says one of the team, Michael Berthaume.
"The fabella may behave like other sesamoid bones to help reduce friction within tendons, redirecting muscle forces, or, as in the case of the kneecap, increasing the mechanical force of that muscle. Or it could be doing nothing at all."
What we do know is that the fabella is linked to knee pain and arthritis, though it doesn't necessarily cause it – people with osteoarthritis of the knee are twice as likely to have a fabella than people without osteoarthritis, for example.
Real estate and home renovation TV shows have pushed the benefits of the open plan home for years. They are big and airy and make the whole family seem like they're together even when everyone is doing their own thing. Some people thrive in a "great room" that includes living room, dining room, and kitchen all-in-one, while others grow to hate it. But you've bought the house. What can you do about it? You could put the walls back in, but if that's beyond your budget, Lifehacker has a few ideas you can try to reduce the noise and the exposure.
I wouldn't dare go near any snake but apparently someone from 450 CE not only went near a rattlesnake, out of all the snakes, and ate it whole. How were archaeologists able to say that? Well, they have poo to prove it.
The desiccated coprolite—archaeologists’ term for ancient poop—contained the scales and bones of the snake along with remnants of a small rodent and an assortment of edible desert plants. It’s a great example of how coprolites can give archaeologist a direct (sometimes unnervingly direct) look at what ancient people ate.
The remains were found in the Chihuahuan Desert and scientists are trying to figure out how this came about. Was it a normal part of those ancient peoples' diet? Or perhaps it might have had some cultural or religious significance, as in a ritual of some sort?
For now, there is no way of knowing why, until they can excavate further artifacts that may serve as a clue to figure out why somebody had eaten a rattlesnake whole. Nonetheless, it must have been a very difficult feat to do. Even though there are people who eat snakes, eating one whole is unheard of. So we will have to wait and see what comes up in the research.
Ripples or disturbances in space-time called gravitational waves have been theorized by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity but they have only been recently detected, confirming their existence. The first instance was in August 2016 which was recorded by astronomers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). This was followed up by its detection of a neutron star merger in 2017.
The second such case of gravitational wave detection was believed to have occurred last Thursday. Astronomers say that the gravitational waves might have been caused by a neutron star merger, also the second time that such merger was picked up.
LIGO’s first detection of a neutron star merger came in August 2017, when scientists detected gravitational ripples from a collision that occurred about 130 million light-years away. Astronomers around the world immediately turned their telescopes to the collision’s location in the sky, allowing them to gather a range of observations across the electromagnetic spectrum.
The 2017 detection was the first time an astronomical event had been observed with both light and gravitational waves, ushering in a new era of “multi-messenger astronomy.” The resulting information gave scientists invaluable data on how heavy elements are created, a direct measurement of the expansion of the universe and evidence that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, among other things.
This second observation appears to have been slightly too far away for astronomers to get some of of the data they had hoped for, such as how nuclear matter behaves during the intense explosions.
May Day brings a peculiar spring ritual in Padstow, Cornwall. It begins at midnight on May first, when the villagers erect a May Pole and sing to awaken the Hobby Horse, or 'Obby 'Oss in the local dialect.
In the morning, the ‘Obby ‘Oss emerges. It consists of a large round platform supporting a black apron. The man who carries the beast puts his head through a whole at the centre of the structure. He wears a mask with a tall pointed cap, a menacing otherworldly image. At one end of the platform is a tail and at the other, a stylized head with snapping jaws. Simpson and Roud have noted that, ‘by no stretch of the imagination does it look like a horse’.
The costume-wearing man cavorts along the streets, accompanied by a ‘teaser’ who leads the ‘Oss in a traditional dance to the sound of accordions and pounding drums as the participants sing the ‘Day Song’.
The tradition has it that any woman caught beneath the apron will be married or pregnant within the next year. There is some speculation that the 'Obby 'Oss is more of a dragon than a horse, which harks back to the possible origins of the ritual. There's more to the Padstow May Day festivities, which you can read about at Folklore Thursday. -via Strange Company
