Brad Goldpaint won the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018 with this amazing photo above. Titled "Transport the Soul," Goldpaint captured the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way and the canyons of the Moab, Utah all in one shot.
Check out these fantastic rubber band ball/sphere sculptures by Joshua Hudson. This one above is titled "Radial Eminence" and is 10-inch in diameter.
"Phaup's Legacy" rubber band sphere, 18 inch diameter.
Owl be darned! This incredible sculpture of an owl is made out of pumpkins!
The life cycle of the conopid fly reads like a horror movie script. The fly attacks a bumblebee, the bee is knocked to the ground, but then assumes the fight is over and flies off. Only now the bee is carrying a fly egg that was forcibly inserted into her abdomen during the attack.
The egg’s new home is the bee’s fat stores. What was meant to be a source of energy for the bee becomes a source of nutrition for the fly larva. After devouring the fat stores, the growing larva continues to hollow out the bee’s body. It consumes internal tissues as if clearing furniture from someone’s apartment. The bee’s body is both the fly’s food and its home.
This micro-nightmare remains private for around 10 days, until the bee succumbs to its fate. It lands on the ground and digs itself into the soil. In a zombie-like motion, it uses its little bee legs to tunnel into its own grave, and die.
What appears to be torture and doom for the individual bumblebee is the normal survival scheme for conopid flies. How much damage could these flies do to the bees that pollinate our crops? Rosemary Malfi conducted a study to determine just that -and the results may surprise you. Read about the parasitic conopid fly at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: André Karwath)
At 560 lb, Darren "Dibsy" McClintock so severely overweight that doctor told the 27-year-old man that he was "eating himself to death."
When Dibsy started working with trainer Mike Hind to lose weight, the personal trainer decided to do something a bit unusual: he printed and distributed posters to local restaurants, telling them not to serve Dibsy!
The strategy is working - coupled with diet and exercise, Dibsy has lost 10% of his body weight so far.
Read the rest of the story over at The Sun and follow Dibsy's weight loss progress over at his Instagram.
The Sun has the video clip "The 40-Stone Man Banned From Takeaways."
Photo: This Morning TV Show/video capture
Check out this video of a forest in Sacre-Coeur, Quebec, Canada, that shows how heavy winds make the forest floor looks like it's breathing.
The Weather Network interviewed arborist Mark Vanderwouw who explained:
"During a rain and windstorm event the ground becomes saturated, 'loosening' the soil's cohesion with the roots as the wind is blowing on a tree's crown," he said.
"The wind is trying to 'push' the trees over, and as the force is transferred to the roots, the ground begins to 'heave'. If the winds were strong enough and lasted long enough more roots would start to break and eventually some of the trees would topple."
What do Disney princesses look like if they were modern day millennials?
Kiev-based illustrator Daria Artemieva shows us over at her Instagram page.
Things are just different in Silicon Valley.
In rural America, keeping chickens is a good way to get free fresh eggs, but in Silicon Valley, having them is a status symbol!
Peter Holley has the scoop overa at The Washington Post:
It’s not uncommon here to see chickens roaming in their owners’ homes or even roosting in bedrooms, often with diapers on, according to Leslie Citroen, 54, one of the Bay Area’s most sought after “chicken whisperers,” who does everything from selling upscale chickens and building coops to providing consultation to backyard bird owners. Her services cost $225 an hour. ...
At least one of Citroen’s clients has a personal chef who cooks for her chickens. Because they eat their birds’ eggs — if not the birds — chicken health is a top priority, Citroen said. Her clients spend “thousands” for surgeries and X-rays to keep them alive after predator attacks and illnesses.
(Photo: Christie Hemm Klok)
Books are great for reading ... and for making awesome art.
Elizabeth Sagan shows us how she turns her book collection into intricate scenes straight out of our favorite fictions.
Now that's what we call "literary art"!
Check out more book art over at Sagan's Instagram.
Hellen Die of Eat the Dead (formerly the Necro NomNomNomicon) celebrates the 25th anniversary of the movie Hocus Pocus with a recipe.
In one scene in the film, Winifred Sanderson is working on whipping up a batch of her famous potion, with Mary and Sarah Sanderson helping her out. One of the critical ingredients is a dead man’s toe. Mary drops one in, but not before Sarah helps herself to a few to snack on.
After trying a few, Die decided to make hers out of chocolate instead. On a stick. There's something rather appealing about a recipe that starts with "wash your feet," even if you don't plan to make these treats yourself. All the instructions for Chocolate Dead Man's Toes are at Eat the Dead. There's also a roundup of posts from elsewhere about the movie Hocus Pocus.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it's fairly impossible to define. That doesn't mean we haven't tried. An easier question would be how did we come to value beauty as much as we have -and not just in people, but in everything around us. Kurzgesagt tries to answer that question. -via Boing Boing
I love this awesome D.I.Y. Pumpkin Millennium Falcon using simple red L.E.D. lights.
B.T.W., L.E.D. stands for light emitting diode, and you should totally check out the video below from Today I Found Out to learn more about L.E.D.s, & how they work.
Read more on Nerdist.com
There have been very few shipwrecks found that were part of the global slave trade. In 2008, the Slave Wrecks Project began the search for more of the sunken ships. One in particular was the São José Paquete d’Africa, which foundered in 1794 off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Marine archaeologist Jaco Boshoff studied documents and discovered that a misidentified shipwreck discovered in the early 1980s was actually the São José.
An archival document found in the Arquivo Historico Ultramarino archive in Lisbon, Portugal, by Dr Lubkemann states that the São José left Lisbon on 27 April 1794 for Mozambique via Cape Town with 1,400 iron ballast bars in its cargo. According to Boshoff, the members of the Slave Wrecks Project think the bulk of the bars were used to pay for slaves from Mozambique, but some were left on board to offset the weight of the human ‘cargo’ on the ship.
On 3 December 1794, Captain Manuel Joao Perreira sailed from Mozambique for Brazil’s Maranhão state. Perreira was planning a stop in Cape Town to take on provisions before crossing the Atlantic, where he intended to sell the 512 slaves. However, the ship ran into trouble off the Cape Peninsula and foundered. More than 200 slaves died, while the survivors were sold into slavery in Cape Town.
The ship with its shackles and iron bars was hidden on the ocean floor for more than 200 years. Boshoff and his team have been studying and documenting the shipwreck for the past few years, and have brought some evidence to the surface. Artifacts from the São José will go on display in December at Cape Town’s Slave Lodge history museum. Read the story of the São José and its discovery in a gallery of text, images, and video at BBC Travel. -via Digg
(Image credit: SkyPixels)
This painting is called Edmond de Belamy and despite being a bit blurry, it's actually remarkable because it's the first painting produced by Artificial Intelligence that's going up for sale at a major auction house.
From Christie's:
This portrait, however, is not the product of a human mind. It was created by an artificial intelligence, an algorithm defined by that algebraic formula with its many parentheses.
The painting, if that is the right term, is one of a group of portraits of the fictional Belamy family created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier. They are engaged in exploring the interface between art and artificial intelligence, and their method goes by the acronym GAN, which stands for ‘generative adversarial network’.
Photo: Christie's
The rhyming children's book The Wonky Donky , written by Craig Smith and illustrated by Katz Cowley, has been made into a music video. Derek Thunders created the video with the permission of the author. It had me guffawing at 2:01.
He was a stinky dinky lanky honky tonky winky wonky donkey
Watch The Scottish Granny viral video of her trying to read the book to her nonplussed, infant grandson and cracking up at the rhymes.
According to USA Today 100,000 copies in the United States this fall because of the viral video of the granny.
I, for one, am going to put the book on my list as a must have gift for expectant grannies!
