Alaska-based artist Ryota Kajita took some amazing photos of natural ice formations in the waters of Fairbanks, Alaska. The alien-like structures are formed as rivers and lakes freeze from the surface down, trapping bubbles that formed in the water.
Check out Kaijta's series Ice Formations over at his website - via Brain Pickings
Above: Frozen Bubbles#2, Ice Formations (all images by the artist)
Frozen Bubbles#26, Ice Formations
Frozen Bubbles #27, Ice Formations
Gold has been valued for its rarity and beauty since antiquity, and regarded highly for its stability. It does not corrode like other metals. That led to the logical assumption that ingesting gold could imbue the human body with its anti-corrosiveness, and stop the aging process.
According to Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen’s book Quackery, gold-drinking evolved from curiosity to downright fervor during the medieval era, when an alchemist figured out how to dissolve solid gold into a liquid. Aurum potabile (sometimes known as aurum potable), as drinkable gold was known around the 16th century, was advertised as a cure-all for everything from epilepsy to mania.
Gold-imbued recipes made their way into chemistry manuals by the likes of French medical professionals Jean Beguin and Christophe Glaser, and even the short-lived Portuguese Pope John XXI. In 1578, he wrote a laborious recipe for a gold-laced, youth-preserving water. It involved taking gold, silver, iron, copper, iron, steel, and lead filings, then placing that mixture “in the urine of a virgin child on the first day,” then white wine, fennel juice, egg whites, in a nursing woman’s milk, in red wine, then again in egg whites, in that order, for the following six days.
In a sense, it worked, because the alternative to aging is early death. Read about the trend of drinking gold and some of its more prominent victims at Atlas Obscura.
The years 1793 and 1794 during the French Revolution were known as the "Reign of Terror." During that time, there were over 16,000 official executions by beheading using the guillotine.
And in a macabre way, fashion and style followed the events of the day, and guillotine earrings became all the rage.
From Cult of Weird:
Barbaric or not, people loved the guillotine. When the Reign of Terror began taking heads on an average of 46 per day, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the terrifying instrument of swift death became part of everyday life. It was the subject of art, music, and fashion.
“It was depicted, recounted, and bandied about by popular songs with their series of refrains on ‘the widow,’ ‘the national razor,’ ‘the patriotic haircut,’ ‘the sword of equality,’ and ‘the altar of the nation,'” says Murat. “People no longer referred to ‘being guillotined’ but spoke of ‘sticking your head through the cat-flap,’ ‘poking through the window,’ or ‘sneezing into the basket.'”
“Like tricolor skirts and nosegays, or jewelry set with chunks from the Bastille,” Jane Merrill and Chris Filstrup write in I Love Those Earrings, “the guillotines testified to a person’s daring (unmistakably they were symbols of castration) and being on the winning side.”
( Photo: @hannahtraining )
A new study led by Dr Marcus Smith of the University of Chichester showed that drumming could help children diagnosed with autism learn in school:
Preliminary results showed:
A vast improvement in movement control while playing the drums, including dexterity, rhythm, timing.
Movement control was also enhanced while performing daily tasks outside the school environment, including an improved ability to concentrate during homework.
A range of positive changes in behaviour within school environment, which were observed and reported by teachers, such as improved concentration and enhanced communication with peers and adults.
The study was actually a continuation of research done by a group of researchers which include Clem Burke, the drummer of band Blondie.
(Photo: University of Chichester)
Some people like to dress up when they travel, and other people like to dress for comfort. German artist Menja Stevenson, on the other hand, decided to coordinate her clothes with her mode of transportation.
For her 2008 art project "Bustour," Stevenson decided to wear clothes made from the same fabric as the bus seats to see if anyone noticed:
“I couldn’t believe that many people didn’t realise the connection seeing me and the seats together,” Stevenson says. “Did they think that it was sheer coincidence? Some curious people at least talked to me, and a very few laughed, but most passengers would look shyly at me and quickly look the other way again.”
It may look like a scribble on a rock, but according to archaeologists, it's the earliest known drawing created by man:
Dating back some 73,000 years, the mysterious picture consists of three lines intersected by six angled lines, like a more complicated version of the hashtag (#).
The picture was unearthed at Blombos Cave, a site about 300 kilometers east of Cape Town. The cave was frequented by humans as early as 100,000 years ago and is packed with evidence of tool-making and symbolic designs.
The cute cliff-dwelling Porg from the planet Ahch-To in the Star Wars universe has invaded planet Earth as cute life-size LEGO set. Details and build photos over at The Brothers Brick.
A little more than half of American adults live in middle-class households, but it seems like almost everyone thinks they are middle-class. The Pew Research Center constructed a handy calculator that will let you know for sure. It takes your income into account, of course, but also your household size and where you live, because the cost of living varies so much in different parts of the country. Enter your data, and try not to be too disappointed with the results. -via Mental Floss
(Image credit: Jax 0677)
Blair Braverman came home to some "minor tornado damage," meaning there were tree branches all over the yard, so she put her puppies -and some grown dogs, too- to work. After all, dogs are great at fetching sticks!
I HALP pic.twitter.com/jiIBKOi8jP
— Blair Braverman (@BlairBraverman) July 6, 2018
The clean-up project was so adorable that the neighbors had to come by for a cuddle. But the best part of the day was the bedtime story that Braverman told the puppies about their grandfather (told to us complete with pictures). It's a tale you don't want to miss at Threadreader. -via Metafilter
This apple cake looks as delicious as the fruit but yummier as it's made of mousse with Callebaut gold chocolate, apple vanilla compote, almond sponge cake, shortcrust dough and raspberry sauce.
It's created by pastry chef Dinara Kasko (previously on Neatorama).
Ouija board is parlor game, albeit one with no rules, strategy, or goal. What it does have is whiff of the supernatural, which is enough to make it a long-lasting hit. Vox brings us the history of the Ouija board, as part of its series called "Overrated." -via Tastefully Offensive
The metamorphosis of Escher is an online interactive adventure
Take a tour tough the interactive documentary of the famous artist M. C. Escher. Never before has Escher’s work been available online in such great detail. You can move through his work, zoom in and learn more about Escher’s life, his technique and his work from the perspective of art history through audio tours.
Use the Metamorphosis Machine to make your very own piece of Escherian art. Rotate, mirror and move around your creation and then morph this into a new image. You can add your created work to a digital Collaborative Artwork; an infinite online metamorphosis.
Chris Poole and his wife have adopted two new kittens! We don't know Jugg's story yet, but Zig Zag was rescued from underneath a car, where she had taken shelter from a busy road.
Zig Zag was scared, sick, and hungry, but has taken well to her new home, and has now joined Cole and Marmalade (and Jugg), the world's luckiest cats, inside the house. Poole also fosters kittens from a shelter, so Cole and Marmalade are used to extra cats around. Zig Zag and Jugg, however, are there for good.
On the one hand, you can enjoy the movie Crazy Rich Asians without knowing a thing about Singapore. It's a modern romantic comedy with a main character, Rachel Chu, who is much more than a hot mess or a passive damsel in distress. It's also a long-overdue representative breakthrough for Hollywood. On the other hand, you might be interested in learning how the world of fabulous wealth that Rachel travels to became that way.
The most prominent family in Kwan’s story are the Youngs, whose original fortune dates back to Nick’s Chinese-born great-grandmother, presumably at the turn of the 20th century. The Youngs got in on the ground floor of an older, Victorian-era wealth, viewed by its caretakers as sociologically distinct from the newer elites found across the Asia-Pacific. The unstated irony is that owning lots of land in Singapore—and Malaysia and China, not to mention London and Hawaii—made the Young family this fabulously wealthy only because the rest of Asia, along with its nouveau riche, made the region so economically productive in recent decades. These tensions across geography and generation appear at the margins of the romantic plot. Nick’s cousin explains to Rachel that in Asia’s richest circles, you will find Hong Kongers, “Taiwan Tycoons,” and “Beijing Billionaires.” These families are not equals.
While the story is fictional, the setting is not. Get a short course in Asian economics and how it gave birth to modern Singapore and its fabulous wealth at n+1 magazine.
These five young squirrels have been saved after their tails became entangled in a "Gordian Knot". A “caring finder” found the infants, known as kits, and took them to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre at the Wisconsin Humane Society. Here they were put under general anesthetic and quickly operated on. “It was impossible to tell whose tail was whose, and we were increasingly concerned because all of them had suffered from varying degrees of tissue damage to their tails caused by circulatory impairment,” the centre said. After about 20 minutes of careful cutting the knot began to undo and the squirrels were left to recover from their anesthetic. “Now, one day later, they are all bright-eyed, and three of the five are ‘bushy-tailed’, but we’ll need to monitor all of them for a couple of days to watch for tail necrosis caused by impaired blood flow,” the centre said.
