Researchers from the University of Reading are looking into the mechanisms in which Earth's climate would transition from a warm one to a very cold one through the fluctuations in solar radiation.
They believe that the Earth enters a "melancholia" state once every ten million years where the whole of Earth's surface will be blanketed in ice. They looked into two feedback mechanisms which would account for these phenomena. You may see the entire research on Physical Review Letters.
ESPN covered the annual Sasquatch Calling Festival in Whitehall, New York, which of course includes a Saquatch calling competition. What does a Sasquatch sounds like? These folks all have their ideas, but who knows which is most accurate? No Bigfoot responded to any of the calls. The eventual winner sounded a lot like a police siren. -via Boing Boing
It was said at one time that television is a vast wasteland, and there is ample proof to support that statement. On the other hand, sometimes a really good TV show is ahead of its time, and that can be as fatal as being an awful TV series. Case in point - He & She of 1967. From the IMDb:
I have mentioned the failure of the above-average GOOD MORNING, WORLD, that was on Tuesday nights in 1967 - 1968. Ironically the same year that that fine program failed, a Wednesday night comedy which was superbly funny and original failed as well - despite critical acclaim. HE & SHE was set in Manhattan, where Dick and Paula Hollister (Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss) lived in an apartment in a building where the super was Andrew Hummell (Hamilton Camp) and their closest friend was Harry Zarakados (Kenneth Mars) lives next door (Harry is a fireman, who enters their apartment through a board balanced between his window sill and the Hollisters). Mars, when not fighting fires, frequently dropped over to see them - which sounds like Cosmo Kramer's frequently dashing into Jerry's apartment in the later series SEINFELD.
Dick was a cartoonist who did a cartoon called JETMAN, which had just been turned into a successful television series starring Oscar North (Jack Cassidy). It was an obvious spoof of the then popular series BATMAN (starring Adam West), but Cassidy's "North" was not like Adam West, who from all accounts is a gentleman and very professional. Cassidy's North was a very egotistical type, who hired an elderly man (in one episode) as his new sidekick because he would not steal scenes like an alternative child actor or a trained animal. The elderly man (who could only speak Greek) would have no dialog in his part, and would be called "Mr. Shush".
The show featured a well acted ensemble cast, and it should have succeeded. Instead it lasted just the one season. A year later it was shown in reruns, and the T.V. Guide (when it returned) said it just may have been too far ahead of its time.
I have to agree. This was an excellent TV series but it was canceled nonetheless, being replaced by quite possibly the worst series ever to appear on television. More on that in an upcoming article.
YouTube seems to feature all episodes and I have embedded the premier episode below. take a look and see just how good commercial television could be 50 years ago.
If you are into outdoors adventure, this is for you. After a moderately-rough hike through a canyon just south of Salmon, Idaho, you will find a hidden gem known as the Goldbug Hot Springs. These springs are a collection of five or six pools complete with waterfalls that offer an idyllic experience, off the beaten track with a view over an unforgettable valley landscape.
This research aims to help patients who have lower back pain. Aside from this earthly benefits, it could also help benefit astronauts who undergo muscle loss when in space. It is difficult to retain muscle mass and bone density in space.
From Science Minister Chris Skidmore (via gov.uk):
“By learning about how to tackle muscle wasting in astronauts who experience zero gravity in space, this pioneering research hopes to lessen the impact on future spaceflights, something which will be particularly important if we ever send humans on the long journey to Mars.
“It has benefits on Earth too, helping the thousands of patients who develop muscle weakness from lengthy stays in a hospital bed.”
The project is also supported by various aerospace institutions such as the European Space Station (ESA), NASA, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
Yep. It’s not a mistype. It really is “Pepperoni Chicken.” Chicken covered in pizza toppings. Sounds strange, but it sure would be tasty. After all, it is chicken and pizza at the same time.
From The Kitchn:
It turns out that putting pizza toppings on chicken is a great idea. People have put cheese and pepperoni on top of all types of crust substitutes made from pea flour to cauliflower over the years, but this recipe gets rid of the idea of a “crust” entirely to combine the pizza flavors people love in an easy, low-carb, gluten-free, keto-friendly weeknight dinner that cooks in about half an hour.
Yum! Tasty and healthy at the same time! What more can you say?
Want to know how to make one? Find out how on The Kitchn!
Piornal, Spain, is a village of only 1600 people, but this past February, the population swelled to 14,000 for the festival of Jarramplas. The character of Jarramplas is a man dressed as a demon, who walks the village streets while being pelted with turnips by excited crowds. The ritual has been around for hundreds of years, and its origins are murky. Is it a pagan fertility ritual? A welcome for spring? A ritual scapegoating? No one is really sure, but they do have fun with it. Despite the physical ordeal, volunteers who become Jarramplas consider it an honor.
With the fall of fascism in Spain in 1978, the festival began to gain popularity again. It got modernized along the way. Originally, Jarramplas was only protected by layers of clothes. But in the 1990s, tired of seeing volunteers emerge black and blue every year, Díaz says, Piornalegos commissioned a nearby factory to make a fiberglass suit of armor. (Ironically, because the armor weighs so much, Jarramplas now can’t run away from his pursuers very well, and still gets a pretty serious beating.) The original dogskin drum has been replaced with plastic and canvas, and the traditional mask—cardboard decorated with animal blood, charcoal, and olive juice—is now just painted fiberglass topped with horsehair. Instead of gathering leftover turnips, the town council now buys them in mass quantities—this year it was almost 30 tons—from a farmer in a nearby town.
Google has recently announced one of its newest products and one that would impact the landscape of cloud computing technology in years to come. They have introduced their first ever entry into the enterprise data center, Anthos.
Anthos is different from other public cloud services. It’s not just a product but an umbrella brand for multiple services aligned with the themes of application modernization, cloud migration, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud management.
To get a clearer picture of what Anthos offers, this article by Janakiram MSV of Forbes attempts to elucidate its finer points.
AKQA, a company who provides digital services and products, claims that they used an AI to create a new sport. This sport is named “Speedgate” — a sport that “pulls the best of rugby, soccer, ultimate frisbee and croquet.”
From Anthony Ha of TechCrunch:
… Creative Director Whitney Jenkins explained that the digital agency wanted to do something “really ambitious” for Design Week Portland, and given the team’s work with Nike (and its general “love of sports or athleticism”), it made sense to ask: “What if we invented the next basketball, the next football?”
To do that, AKQA says it used an existing recurrent neural network architecture, feeding it data about 400 sports, which were then used to generate sports concepts and rules.
Many of those ideas, Jenkins said, were simply not feasible. The AI was good at coming up with descriptions for sports like “underwater parkour,” an exploding Frisbee game and one where players pass a ball back-and-forth while in hot air balloons and on a tightrope. But it took a back-and-forth process with the human team at AKQA to narrow the list down to the final three for playtesting, and then to refine the rules into something people might actually want to play.
How did the AI manage to create rules and even make a logo? Find out at TechCrunch.
Notre Dame is in the news these days, what with the devastating fire this week. it is such an icon that it is hard to imagine Paris without it; Victor Hugo evidently thought so when he wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831. That novel shamed the King of France to order its restoration in 1844. And here we are again.
We are slowly inching our way toward piecing together the puzzle of the universe's origins. Scientists have been making a lot of headway as of late regarding the beginning.
There was DNA found in stardust. And now, a comet's building blocks have been found in a meteorite. The placement of the material was intriguing. Apart from it being inside a meteorite, comets are usually formed in the outer reaches of our Solar System.
For a comet material to find its way into a meteorite that eventually landed on Earth is groundbreaking.
A particularly primitive class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites are thought to have formed beyond Jupiter. One such meteorite, discovered in Antarctica’s LaPaz Icefield, is a particularly pristine example with minimal weathering since its landing on Earth’s surface.
Inside the LaPaz meteorite, Nittler’s team found a very carbon-rich slice of primitive material that bears some striking similarities to extraterrestrial dust particles that are thought to have originated in comets that formed near the Solar System’s outer edges.
This is a worthy find and one that would give scientists much insight into the space objects that are usually beyond our reach. This also furnishes details on how planets and our Solar System was formed.
(Image credit: Carles Moyano-Cambero/Institute of Space Sciences)
Pesticides are the most common ways of controlling a wide range of pests but it is a double-edged sword, capable of controlling pests but posing risks for the environment, humans, and other animals.
Researchers have found that a potential alternative for controlling one particular pest, the yellow fever mosquito, in edible plant oils.
To explore plant oils as safe and environmentally friendly alternatives to chemical pesticides, Teresia Njoroge and May Berenbaum, Ph.D., at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tested the lethal effects of several edible plant oils on Aedes aegypti.
The goal of the study, Noroge says, was to “test the concept that edible oils can be an effective, non-toxic tool for the control of container-dwelling Aedes aegypti in the drinking water storage containers of people in settings that lack piped water systems.”
They recorded several results but generally the edible oils were potent enough in certain concentrations with certain compounds to control the mosquitoes. The results are published in the Journal of Medical Entomology.
Engaging Data has an interactive graph that breaks down where American households get their money, and where it goes. At the website, you can change the graph to show subgroups, like the five quintiles of income level or the age of the head of household. There are some interesting differences. In the lowest two quintiles, there's a category called "borrowing and savings," where money is drawn from either the past or the future, that doesn't appear in the other income groups. The lowest quintile has no budget category for savings, while the top quintile saves 26% of income. In every subset, the biggest expense is housing. -via Digg
“The homeless have their own way of living too. We can have a very decent life,” says Simon Lee, a 52-year old man who decided to leave his middle-class status to live happily on the streets. Despite having a degree in chemistry and having a stable job, he decided to leave this all behind to pursue a liberating life.
“In the many years since I’ve been homeless, I’ve never met any other person who was homeless by choice. I’m a bit of an oddball,” the eloquent and soft-spoken Lee says.
…
Lee lived on social aid back in Hong Kong, including Comprehensive Social Security Assistance, and slept in a public shelter for five months.
But he did not like his surroundings as other residents often fought with one another.
He therefore decided to try and emulate his vagrant Macau lifestyle by sleeping in Victoria Park.
“To me, it’s liberating. I don’t pay rent, I don’t have to buy a house, I can sleep anywhere. Street sleeping solved a lot of my problems,” he says.
Rather than shunning away from negative press, the Hans Brinker Hotel embraces its reputation as ‘the worst hostel in the world’ and offers guests knowingly substandard accommodation in the heart of Amsterdam.
