Though our daily lives are now bombarded with technology from running water to processed food, not to mention the myriad of devices and systems that make modern living supposedly more convenient, there is just some kind of appeal to living a simple life without them.
An Irish man wanted to simply do away with all of that and went off the grid three years ago. His name is Mark Boyle and he was interviewed by RTE's Ryan Tubridy to know what it was like.
"I think life is left. We kind of forget sometimes that when we accept one thing, we reject another thing. I think when we bring all of these technologies into our lives, we’re rejecting a lot of life."
British artist Richard Wilkinson turns Star Wars characters, ships, and creatures, into a collection of insects in his work “Anthropoda Iconicus” series.
Each beetle and bug from the series not only uses Star Wars as an inspiration for colorful camouflage—although some are more obvious than others—but also comes complete with genus, family, and species names to complete the imaginary insect.
Here are some of the stunning images from the collection!
Reddit user BCThai posted 4 days ago on a reddit forum a photo of a human (on left) and dolphin brain (on right). As seen on photo, it looks like the dolphin brain hemispheres are not connected. A reddit user sheds light on this:
From Reddit:
As some of you have pointed out, "the two halves aren't connected." In reality, they are connected, but the corpus callosum is very thin. Dolphins do that thing called unihemispheric slow‐wave sleep, and are able to remain vigilant even with only one hemisphere awake. Positron emission tomography (PET) scans during this type of sleep show that there's also lateralization in cerebellar activity. However, the fact that dolphins can remain vigilant even with one hemisphere asleep implies that there is no extreme lateralization of function that would cause severe impairment.
Pew pew pew! Tiny mangrove saplings are now roughly 20 inches tall in a field south of Yangon, Myanmar. These trees were planted by drones on September last year.
“We now have a case confirmed of what species we can plant and in what conditions,” says Irina Fedorenko, cofounder of Biocarbon Engineering, the startup that makes the drones. The right combination of species and specific environmental conditions made the restoration work. “We are now ready to scale up our planting and replicate this success.”
The startup, which also uses drones to plant trees and grasses at abandoned mines in Australia and on sites in other parts of the world, is working with a nonprofit in Myanmar called Worldview International Foundation. To date, the nonprofit has worked with villagers to plant trees by hand. The project began in 2012, after the government began opening the country’s borders to international business. More than six million trees have been planted so far, and the nonprofit plans to plant another four million by the end of 2019. But it also recognizes that humans can’t easily cover the amount of land that could potentially be restored.
In theory, two operators working on 10 drones can up to 400,000 years per day. But of course, humans also have a crucial role in this endeavor to restore the environment.
Find out more details on the story on Fast Company!
The a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama) has unveiled their Passover song for 2019. It's a holiday medley set to the tunes of "The Circle of Life," "I Just Can't Wait to Be King," and "Hakuna Matata" from The Lion King. Passover begins this Friday at sundown, and continues through April 27.
The Brothers Grimm did not write all those fairy tales from scratch, but adapted older folk tales and published them. Their versions were changed and edited over several decades, in which they softened the stories up a bit by, for one thing, changing evil parents into evil stepparents. For example, in the original 1810 manuscript for the Snow White story, the princess is a mere seven years old when her evil biological mother decides the child is too pretty to remain alive. She directs a huntsman to kill Snow White and and bring back her lungs and liver as evidence. He does not, but uses the organs of a wild boar instead.
The subsequent event has been largely forgotten – and rarely shown in film adaptations. When the queen receives her daughter’s viscera, she decides she’ll have them salted and boiled, then feasts upon them with epicurean pleasure, convinced that they’re Snow White’s. The root of her pleasure rests on two facts: she has obliterated her daughter, her rival, but also, crucially, this anthropophagic act preserves the essence of ritual cannibalism – the ancient belief that eating the enemies’ flesh was a source of spiritual and physical strength. By eating Snow White, she believes she will embody her characteristics. The choice of organs is relevant: lungs represent the breath, the spirit; and the liver is a symbol of purification, as it cleanses the blood. In The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar points out that different versions include different “gifts”: the most remembered one is the heart; but in Spain, it’s “a bottle of blood stoppered with the girl’s toe”, whereas in Italy, the huntsman must return with “her intestines and her blood-soaked shirt” or her eyes and a bottle of her blood.
The pastry is called Kouign-amann, which comes from the words for butter and cake. It's like a sugar-butter pie. Great Big Story travels to the town of Douarnenez, France, to learn the history and recipe for Kouign-amann -and to try it out.
Cats are not that much of a problem when you have a few of them in your campus. But it’s a different story when you have over 50 of them, with most of them not being fed well. Thus, they become malnourished and sick. Such is the case of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU). The Protecting Animal Wellness Society (PAWS), tried to solve the escalating population, with Katerina Bourova, the president of PAWS, on the lead.
From The Daytona Beach News Journal:
“They’re like little babies,” said Bourova, 22, who is the president and founder of the student organization Protecting Animal Wellness Society (PAWS). “They scream at you. It was quite an experience.”
While a few cats might not pose a problem, ERAU’s cat colony numbered more than 50. Besides not being fixed, the cats’ growth was spurred on in part by well-intentioned students who fed the hungry felines burritos and other leftovers, PAWS founding member Kevin Schiffli said.
With the cat population escalating, the university began to take measures to control it. Seeing this, Bourova decided to help, founding the now roughly 20-member PAWS group in 2017.
“I didn’t just want to stand around and do nothing,” she said. “Especially since this was a living animal.”
To curb the proliferation of cats, PAWS members partnered with the Halifax Humane Society to trap, spay/neuter them, and give them shots to protect against rabies, feline AIDS and leukemia. Younger, sick, or highly social cats were put up for adoption, while older or less social cats were released back on campus, Bourova said, noting that cats are less likely to be adopted than dogs.
The effort paid off. Now there are 25 cats on campus — a reduction of more than half, Schiffli said.
For more details of the story, head on to the article!
In 1911, the New York City Tenement House Department (now the NYC Housing Authority) was busy enforcing regulations to improve the slums that housed several million people. The office also had a cat.
The THD office cat was just “a plain yellow cat” that had somehow managed to get on the city payroll even though he did not take the required civil service exam. For the cat’s services as office mouser, he was rewarded with five cents’ worth of meat and five cents’ worth of milk every day.
When the cat’s total expenses had reached $2.30, Commissioner Murphy submitted a bill to City Comptroller William Ambrose Prendergast. The bill, which covered a period from April 5 to April 31, was delivered to the comptroller by James McKeon, a messenger.
The comptroller responded with a letter questioning the legitimacy of the expenditures, which made the papers and amused New Yorkers of the day. Was a the cat indigent, or was he an employee? One newspaper pointed out the lack of competitive bidding for the cat's services. Read the story of the Tenement House Department and their cat at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company
Starbucks has 277,000 employees at 24,000 outlets. That's a lot of coffee, and a lot of baristas, although the company refers to them as "partners." A partner in Florida named AJ lets us in on some of the things that go on behind the scenes, from the other side of the counter, so to speak.
Starbucks has drawn criticism for using Italian words for their drink sizes. A tall is 12 ounces; a grande is 16 ounces; a venti hot, 20 ounces; a venti cold, 24 ounces; and a trenta (only available for certain drinks), 31 ounces. Owing to confusion or indifference, many customers still use the more common "small, medium, large" terms. If you're wondering whether that irritates partners, the answer is no. “I would say 30 percent of people use our terms and know what they mean,” AJ says. Others use the more common sizes, or whatever size they happen to see on the menu. The problem, AJ adds, is when customers order a size in Italian and then complain they didn’t know what it meant, necessitating a time-consuming change in the order.
Rising waters continue to threaten many communities near coasts as well as those islands in the Pacific. Floating cities was an idea tossed around several years back wherein rich people could find a safe haven.
It was scrapped of course but now, the idea has re-emerged, this time as a place of refuge for those who are in danger of the creeping tides.
Dreamed up by Marc Collins Chen, an entrepreneur who was involved with efforts to bring Thiel’s vision to French Polynesia, the plan was rolled out at a United Nations roundtable last week — complete with luxe architectural renderings from the Brooklyn- and Copenhagen-based Bjarke Ingels Group.
Designed to house 10,000 people, Oceanix City, as it’s called, is a self-sustaining cluster of islands fit for an Instagram honeymoon. There are vertical farms, underwater seafood-harvesting cages, and aquaponics systems fertilized by fish poop (every newlywed’s dream!). It’s got the power to extract potable water from the air, and its island components can be rearranged for optimal heating and cooling across seasons. Garbage is whisked away in pneumonic trash-tubes. There’s nary a car in sight.
It's a paradise basically that is also functional. Trying to build this would take a lot of effort, the planning and the construction as well as the political will needed to make it happen. But if it turns out how it is expected, then it could be viable, albeit temporary, solution in the face of climate change. -via Digg
That's called the "Zoo Hypothesis" which basically states that the aliens wherever they are in space can see us but we can't see them. They don't want to mingle with us because they don't want to tamper with the natural order of things.
They’ve kept their distance not because we’re imperfect, but because of our right to pursue our own destiny. Diversity is something that everyone in the cosmos is assumed to value, so life-bearing worlds should be left to their own evolutionary development.
It's certainly an interesting hypothesis especially with all the fiction illustrating abductions and experimentation by these aliens or world domination in some respects. So it is plausible that aliens are keeping their hands off in order to let nature have its course.
But you would think then that we are imputing arbitrarily characteristics to these entities. Who's to say that they are an advanced and benevolent extraterrestrial civilization who would rather treat us animals in a zoo, needing protection from the rest of the universe?
It still stands that if there are aliens, they just might think it equally reasonable to invade our planet considering we haven't found anything remotely close to Earth's environment in outer space. It's a question for those who study the stars.
Scientists have recently named a new species whose fossils they just discovered which they say are related to living cucumbers. They named it Sollasina cthulhu after H.P. Lovecraft's fictional sea monster.
The new cthulhu, Sollasina, had 45 tentacle-like tube feet, which it used to crawl along the ocean floor and capture food. The creature was small, about the size of a large spider. It was found in the Herefordshire Lagerstätte in the United Kingdom, a site that has proven to be a trove of fossilized ancient sea animals.
(Image credit: Elissa Martin/Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History)
Cats are an invasive species in Australia, and are killing off the native species. This guy has a wildlife sanctuary of sorts in his back yard, which was discovered by feral cats. So he built a device to deter them from entering. This is not your regular dry DIY video. Sure, he built the device, but the rather entertaining story involves not only a water hose and arduino, but also Kentucky Fried Chicken, a suspected gas leak, yogurt, and polygamous kookaburras.
Earlier this month, 74-year-old Bill Heine passed away as a result of cancer. You might not know him by name, but you certainly know about his house. Heine bought a home in Oxford in 1986, and asked a friend if he could think of something to "liven it up."
His friend, the sculptor John Buckley, provided an answer in the shape of an eight-metre (25ft) shark which would sit on his roof, perpetually appearing as though it had just crashed into the house from the sky. The fibreglass fish, which became known as the Headington Shark after the Oxford suburb, led Heine, a local journalist and businessman who died last week, into a six-year legal battle with the local council.
The process turned a relatively unremarkable street into a beloved local landmark and resulted in one of the most notable triumphs of British eccentricity over petty bureaucracy.
You know how that battle turned out, since the shark is still crashing through the roof 33 years later, but you'll enjoy learning the details of how the Headington Shark came about, at the Guardian. -via Nag on the Lake
