Single-cell organisms grow, engulf other cells, split, decline, and die. So do empires. Pedro M. Cruz and Penousal Machado created a visualization that illustrates the historical timeline of the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires as cells undergoing mitosis. You can see how this idea of independent countries really caught on over time. -via Everlasting Blort
Photographer David Ngo snapped this funny and punny cosplayer at DragonCon last year. Now Wonder Woman gains her powers not from Queen Hippolyta's magic but eating as much Wonder Bread as she can.
Nichelle Nichols portrayed communications officer Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek TV series (and six later films). Her role as a professional black woman in a science fiction story was a breakthrough in 1966, and it took Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to convince Nichols of the importance of her influence. After the series was cancelled, she volunteered to recruit women and minority astronauts for NASA. This film from 1977 is one of the recruitment pitches she made, introducing the space shuttle program to potential new astronauts.
The program was a success. Among those recruited were Dr. Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut, and United States Air Force Colonel Guion Bluford, the first African-American astronaut, as well as Dr. Judith Resnik and Dr. Ronald McNair, who both flew successful missions during the Space Shuttle program before their deaths in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986. Recruits also included Charles Bolden, the former NASA administrator and veteran of four shuttle missions, Frederick D. Gregory, former deputy administrator and a veteran of three shuttle missions and Lori Garver, former deputy administrator.
-via Boing Boing
007: From Russia with Whale (2019) https://t.co/D4EEyaOxHm
— Tony Romm (@TonyRomm) April 29, 2019
Norwegian fishermen were surprised when a beluga whale approached their boat with its mouth open, as if it were asking for food. As the tame whale hung around the boat for several days, the fishermen noticed it had a harness. They managed to remove the harness, which had a GoPro camera attached and was labeled "Equipment St. Petersburg." Scientists say that it doesn't seem to be a science experiment, but could belong to the Russian Navy, which bases its fleet in Murmansk, 415km (258 miles) away from where the whale found the fishing boat. Could this whale be a trained spy? Not likely, but it is a mystery.
Interviewed by Russian broadcaster Govorit Moskva, Col Viktor Baranets said "if we were using this animal for spying do you really think we'd attach a mobile phone number with the message 'please call this number'?"
"We have military dolphins for combat roles, we don't cover that up," he said.
"In Sevastopol (in Crimea) we have a centre for military dolphins, trained to solve various tasks, from analysing the seabed to protecting a stretch of water, killing foreign divers, attaching mines to the hulls of foreign ships."
-via The Daily Dot
Over half of the respondents from the U.S — approximately 55% — have reported feelings of high stress the day before the Gallup’s annual survey was conducted. According to Gallup’s press release, 45 percent of the respondents worry much of the day, while 22 percent get angry multiple times a day.
Americans’ stress levels were significantly higher than the global average of 35 percent, leaving the U.S. tied for fourth (alongside Albania, Iran and Sri Lanka) in Gallup’s ranking of the world’s most stressed populations. Greece topped the list at 59 percent, while the Philippines and Tanzania finished in second and third with 58 and 57 percent, respectively.
In terms of worry, the U.S.’ 45 percent was ahead of the global average of 39 percent. Comparatively, 63 percent of the world’s most worried population, Mozambique, reported strong feelings of worry the day prior.
Despite these reports of high levels of negative emotion, Americans stated as well that they experience positive experiences more than the global average.
(Image Credit: Ben White/ Unsplash)
Did you know that every state in the USA has its own slogan?
Of course you did.
What you probably didn't know is that some of these slogans are quite cinematographic.
That gave us an idea.
What if someone were to write a movie titled "Life Elevated" (Utah's slogan) What would be the genre of the movie? What would the poster look like?
Maybe something like this.
See this poster (and 5 other fictional movie posters) here: https://www.netcredit.com/blog/if-6-us-states-were-films/
Source: https://www.netcredit.com/blog/if-6-us-states-were-films/
Fictional Movie Poster for Texas' slogan
Fictional Movie Poster for South Carolina's slogan
Fictional Movie Poster for Maryland's slogan
Fictional Movie Poster for New Hampshire's slogan
Fictional Movie Poster for Montana's slogan
Envisioning an ideal utopia of not just a flourishing Earth and its people, but also a prosperous “God-free Great Beyond”, the artists of the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s drew these inspiring posters.
Why don’t you check them out?
(Image Credit: Flashbak)
"Let's conquer Space!"
"In the name of peace."
For a long time now, plans have been in the pipeline for a high-speed railway system in the United States which would speed up logistics and hopefully, integrate lines to connect different states to make transportation and travel easier and faster.
However, high speed rail has faced staunch opposition from the legal to the political, and now to issues on semantics.
Despite having everything laid out for the Texas High Speed Rail to come into fruition and begin its construction, Texas Central Railway is facing an existential question posed by the opposition: whether it's a railroad at all.
“Simply self-declaring that you are a railroad does not make it so,” Kyle Workman, the president of the opposition group Texans Against High-Speed Rail, told the Houston Chronicle in February.
The terminology is important for reasons beyond its own sake. Being a railroad or not determines whether Texas Central is entitled to use eminent domain as it surveys and acquires property. State law allows railroads and certain other private companies to use eminent domain to seize land for projects in the public interest.
Unfortunately, a judge ruled that Texas Central did not have the right of eminent domain because they do not operate a rail system yet. But that's not all. There are other legal hurdles dealing with property rights and right-of-way that Texas Central has to overcome.
Hopefully, if these would be cleared, the plans would be underway by late 2019.
(Image credit: Sui-setz/Wikimedia Commons)
Takumi, a Japanese illustrator who previously created the Ghibli Theme Park conceptual art, now gives us some stunning artworks — the Avengers characters rendered in Ukiyo-e, a genre of Japanese art which became popular from the 17th century to the 19th century.
Featured in his artwork are Captain Marvel, Captain America, Thanos, Thor, Ant-Man, and many more.
Check them out on Spoon & Tamago.
(Image Credit: Takumi™ / Twitter)
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.
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
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.
(Image Credit: William Williamson/ Facebook)
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.
(Image credit: Huntley Patton/Flickr; C. Jonel/Wikimedia Commons)
In honor of his cat Pikachu, Steve Munt is raising funds to send Pikachu's remains into space through a space memorial company's service.
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.
(Image credit: NASA/Wikimedia Commons)
"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...
