No place is safe from advertisement anymore - not even the restroom.
Mr.Friendly, a Dutch toilet company, has created a high-tech urinal with neat features like waterless/flushless function and anti-bacterial surface. But the unique feature here is the built-in display with an automatic sensor that'll play advertisement while you pee.
Image: Martin Lopez-Garcia, et al./Science Advances
All that glitters is not gold ... sometimes, they're opal.
Researchers at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom have discovered an iridescent algae species called Cystoseira tamariscifolia that got its dazzling colors from its light-controlling crystals inside its cells.
"We have living jewels in the environment," study author Heather Whitney said to Gizmodo, "It’s a Fabergé seaweed":
Looking at it under a microscope reveals a shimmering iridescence. An even closer analysis reveals two to three fat-filled vesicles in each of its cells, according to the paper published last week in Science Advances.
Inside these sacs, lots of spherical fat globules arrange themselves into a three-dimensional lattice, similar to the lattice structure that silicon dioxide takes in opals, to give the alga its special iridescent property. Not only that, but it appears that the algae can choose to order and disorder the spheres to control how light is scattered (or not) inside cells.
No date for the prom? No problem!
When a teenager named Dee found herself without a date to the prom, she decided to bring the man of her dreams - Black Panther actor Michael B. Jordan - albeit in cardboard cutout form.
"After not being able to get a prom date from procrastinating and waiting til the last minute, i spent 3 hours making my sexy prom date," Dee tweeted.
Now, the crafty teen is campaigning to meet the real Michael B. Jordan.
Harvard psychologist Muzafer Sherif was fascinated by group dynamics, and wanted to experiment with social psychology. In 1953, a year before William Golding's Lord of the Flies was published, he set up a summer camp called Middle Grove for 11-year-old boys and manipulated them into forming two opposing groups. He set them up to hate each other, and then planned a fake emergency to see if they would cooperate to overcome it.
Despite his pretence of leaving the 11-year-olds to their own devices, Sherif and his research staff, posing as camp counsellors and caretakers, interfered to engineer the result they wanted. He believed he could make the two groups, called the Pythons and the Panthers, sworn enemies via a series of well-timed “frustration exercises”. These included his assistants stealing items of clothing from the boys’ tents and cutting the rope that held up the Panthers’ homemade flag, in the hope they would blame the Pythons. One of the researchers crushed the Panthers’ tent, flung their suitcases into the bushes and broke a boy’s beloved ukulele. To Sherif’s dismay, however, the children just couldn’t be persuaded to hate each other.
After losing a tug-of-war, the Pythons declared that the Panthers were in fact the better team and deserved to win. The boys concluded that the missing clothes were the result of a mix-up at the laundry. And, after each of the Pythons swore on a Bible that they didn’t cut down the Panthers’ flag, any conflict “fizzled”. By the time of the incident with the suitcases and the ukulele, the boys had worked out that they were being manipulated. Instead of turning on each other, they helped put the tent back up and eyed their “camp counsellors” with suspicion. “Maybe you just wanted to see what our reactions would be,” one of them said.
When the first experiment didn't turn out they way Sherif expected, he held a second summer camp the next year at Robber's Cave where the experimenters manipulated the boys in a different way, and voilà! achieved the expected results. Gina Perry's new book The Lost Boys looks at the process and the ethics of the Robber's Cave experiment, and its lasting legacy.
You can read an excerpt from the book The Lost Boys here. -Thanks, WTM!
— Erin Burr, sir (@erinscafe) April 18, 2018
Erin Burr tells a story about how she went home and found her dog had pooped in the floor because she was late taking him out. But there was a footprint in the poop, and no one had been home all day. That can give you the willies, and rightly so. But that was just the initial feeling of unease about the neighbors that sets up the better parts of the story.
Fast forward to today. I’ve been locking my doors and closing windows because the neighbors are creepy. I lock up, and head out to my car so I can pick up the kids I babysit from school. I’m parked in the alley out back, which is super convenient.
Usually.
Today, however, the end of the alley is blocked off by at least four unmarked police cars. There are a dozen cops. I can kind of see someone handcuffed on the ground. Lots of plainclothes cops. Shit is going down.
It’s a dead-end alley. I’m blocked in. I figure I need to ask them if they can move the arrest over a few feet. Nbd. I set my car keys, phone, and wallet down on the seat of the car. And then, distracted af, I hit the lock button.
And close the door.
You guys.
Have you ever locked your whole life in a car in the middle of a police raid.
I do not recommend it.
I do, however, recommend that read the entire story, which gets much crazier from that point, either at Twitter, or to make it easier, you can read it at Thread Reader.
And if you liked that story, read about the time Burr's refrigerator was stolen, and how it was later returned. -via Metafilter
At the end of World War II, thousands of women lost their jobs to make room for returning soldiers. Jay C. Hormel of Hormel Foods, like many manufacturers, had promised those men they could return to their jobs when the war ended. But what about the women who had served in the military? There was also the problem of the company losing the wartime military as its biggest SPAM customer. The solution was to form a drum and bugle corps consisting of 48 women who had been GI musicians during the war: the Hormel Girls.
On August 29 [1946], the Hormel Girls completed their first month of training. Their test was the 29th American Legion National Drum and Bugle Corps Championship, held in New York. In neat uniforms, they played hits such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” As the competition’s first female team, they finished 13th. There was avid media interest, both positive and negative. The New York Times reported on an injunction brought by noise-sensitive neighbors near the Corps’s Connecticut training grounds, but that was outweighed by the spectacle of the musicians performing and on parade. Hormel soon realized that the group was an advertising powerhouse.
The Hormel Girls' mission was to make people feel patriotic when they bought SPAM. Their duties expanded to include travel, radio programs, stage shows, and direct SPAM sales. Read about the Hormel Girls at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Hormel Foods)
If you are in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, and see Darth Vader coming toward you, you aren't necessarily hallucinating. Allan Carver built his own TIE fighter that he can drive around the neighborhood! He says it's roughly a third of the size of Vader's vehicle, and doesn't fly, but it tools around at a maximum of six miles per hour. He still wears a helmet while driving -you can guess what kind. The TIE fighter is powered by several wheelchair motors (hence the speed) controlled by a Sabertooth dual-motor driver and a DX8 remote control receiver, so it can go whether he's in it or not. Read more about the TIE fighter at the YouTube link and at Carver's website. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Being a librarian is a great job for someone who loves books, but a career in the library requires more than that. Librarians must be dedicated to curating and protecting the library's collection, and at the same time, be an advocate for the public's access to those materials. And it's more than books, as public libraries lend out many other types of materials. They also work to promote public participation and literacy. Then there are all the smaller things you don't know about a librarian's work. Here's a sample.
5. THEY LOVE HELPING TO SETTLE A BET.
There’s a mundane occurrence to delight every librarian. “Especially if there are language barriers, I love when someone musters the courage to ask me a question and we can go back and forth to make sure I connect them to the right resources,” Krakowski says. For Paolini, it’s when “someone comes in nervous, expecting us to be mean, then they tell me, ‘You guys are so nice … and I didn’t know you had e-books!”
But Paolini's favorite thing of all is getting a call at the phone reference desk from a sports bar where two buddies are arguing over player stats: “I’m like, ‘This is great that you’re calling the library to settle a bet!'”
9. THEY WISH YOU WOULDN'T USE BACON AS A BOOKMARK ...
Librarians find all kinds of objects wedged between the pages of books—$100 bills, Broadway tickets, condoms, paychecks, love letters, drugs, hatchets, knives, and even a vial labeled “smallpox sample.” Messiest of all, though, might be the food left in books, like crumbled Cheetos, slices of pickles, and whole strips of bacon (both cooked and raw).
Read the rest of the 19 secrets of public librarians at Mental Floss.
Three old friends in Durham, North Carolina, staged a pop-up museum project at the Durham Hotel called "O Moldy Night," featuring premiere dishes of molded food from 40 experienced chefs, home cooks, and artists. The idea of molded food was dominated by tributes to old family recipes involving Jell-O, agar, or aspic, but it was not limited to those ingredients. Some were molded of chocolate or cooked beans. The dish pictured is “Jell-O by the Sea” by Kate Fulbright.
Medium: Agar agar, Jell-O, coconut milk, Swedish Fish, graham crackers, sprinkles
Inspired by an episode of “Rugrats,” I set out to make a grand, wiggly-jiggly mold of the ocean. Using Swedish fish to represent ocean life, and a combination of tapioca balls and zigzags representing bubbles and kelp, I suspended this all in layers of agar agar (a gelatin derived from algae). Crushed graham crackers and sprinkles adorning the edge as sand and seashells completed the tableau.
The dishes ranged from the nostalgic (“Nothing Says I Love You Like Green Jell-O”) to the exotic (“Big in Japan”) to the alcoholic (“Jiggle Gin Fizz”) to the disgusting (“I Would Heart for You to Trotter on Over and Vent Your Spleen”). The best-named dish was certainly "Congealed Item." You can see the most notable of the molded foods at Bitter Southerner. -via Metafilter
This video contains NSFW language. An address from President Obama, in which he says things that he would never say in public, is revealed to be a collaboration between filmmaker Jordan Peele and his brother-in-law Jonah Peretti, the CEO of Buzzfeed (who knew?).
For the project, Peretti enlisted BuzzFeed video producer Jared Sosa, who was able to manipulate and digitally alter the footage of Obama to a script written and performed by Peele.
The fakery was built using Adobe After Effects, a readily available piece of video software, and FakeApp, an artificial intelligence program that made headlines in January when it was used to transplant actor Nicolas Cage’s face into several movies in which he hadn’t appeared.
Sosa first pasted Peele’s mouth over Obama’s, then replaced the former president’s jawline with one that moved with Peele’s mouth movements. He then used FakeApp to smooth over and refine the footage — a rendering that took more than 56 hours of automatic processing.
If you watched this in high-definition, you probably found it to be an obvious fake from the beginning. But you are on Neatorama, so you are a discerning internet user already. Now imagine someone who is not so internet savvy watching this on a smartphone or in a more compressed format. Then imagine that person is already inclined to believe the contents of what they are seeing. It would be easy to fool a lot of people. On the other hand, imagine a lot of people watching a real video and not believing their eyes because they know how easy it is to fake a video. Read more about the project at Buzzfeed.
Image: Ileana Micarelli et al./Journal of Anthropological Sciences
Even Captain Hook would be so jealous of this medieval man!
Archaeologist Ileana Micarelli from the University of Rome discovered a tomb at the Longobard necropolis of Povegliano Veronese in Veneto, Italy, which contained the remains of a medieval man who had attached a sword to his amputated right arm.
He had his right arm bent at the elbow, the arm laid across his torso. Next to it was a knife blade, the butt aligned with his amputated wrist. Also at the amputation site, archaeologists found a D-shaped buckle, and decomposed organic material - most likely leather.
This suggests a leather cap over the amputated limb, a buckle used for fastening - and a knife attached to the cap, although the purpose is unclear. However, given the advanced healing of the bone, it is clear the man lived for a long time after his hand had been amputated.
Read the full story over at Science Alert.
There's a million bucks worth of golf carts in the picture above (image:
Justin Chin/Bloomberg)
Forget Teslas and Porsches! There's a new hot ride in Hong Kong that's more expensive than luxury cars: golf carts!
Want one? It'll cost you more than a quarter million dollars.
Anjali Cordeiro of Bloomberg has the story:
On the two-lane streets of Discovery Bay — a residential development about a 30-minute ferry ride from downtown Hong Kong — the golf carts are both the transportation of choice and an investment play for the wealthy. The buggies can sell for more than HK$2 million ($255,000) in the upscale neighborhood that’s home to airline pilots, bankers and lawyers.
Business executives drive them, expatriates love them and nannies ferry kids to school in them. Private passenger cars aren’t allowed in this neighborhood, and the Transport Department has capped golf-cart licenses at about 500. The supply crunch has transformed these slow gas-guzzlers into luxury transportation. Some buyers view them as investments — renting them out or reselling to make money.
Let's face it: nothing makes sense in the topsy turvy world of quantum physics. Light can be both wave and particle. Schrödinger's cat is both dead and alive. Things can simultaneously sync up, even when they're separated by a large distance.
Why, it's enough to make Einstein throw up his hands and despair!
Well, add this to the weirdness that is quantum physics: quantum systems can heat up by cooling down.
Nemoto and her team examined a double sub-domain system coupled to a single constant temperature reservoir. Each sub-domain contained multiple spins -- a form of angular momentum carried by elementary particles such as electrons and nuclei. The researchers considered the situation where the spins within each sub-domain are aligned with respect to each other but the sub-domains themselves are oppositely aligned (for instance all up in one and all down in the second). This creates a certain symmetry in the system.
As time progresses, the components of the subdomain decay in a process called relaxation.
"Usually, we expect both domains to decay to the reservoir temperature; however, when the two domains coupled with a reservoir maintain a certain symmetry, the decay process can apparently heat the smaller domain up, even beyond the high temperature limit," Nemoto said.
See if you can understand what's going on in this article over at Science Daily, then tell the rest of the class, mkay? (Image: Future Quantum Physicist by Mike Jacobsen)
KFC Hong Kong's new ad campaign for their "Hot & Spicy" fried chicken is ON FIRE!
Designed by art director John Koay of Ogilvy & Mather Hong Kong, the print campaign uses fried chicken instead of fiery explosions. Clever (and yummy!)
via Campaign Brief Asia and Design Taxi
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