To see how the throat of a singer is different than that of someone who doesn't sing you have to watch the singer belt out a tune while inside an MRI machine, so you can see how the vocal tract changes as they sing.
What you’re looking at here are comparative images of the same vowel being sung at the same moment in each vocal style. …take a moment to see for yourself how the anatomical features of the vocal tract that we can see here align differently in each style. How does the tongue position differently? How about the view on the mouth opening? How about the height of the larynx?
If someone is looking too hard for a deeper meaning or motivation that doesn't exist, we call it "overthinking" or "bean plating" or "conspiracy theory." In Argentina, you might hear "You're looking for the fifth leg of the cat." It's different, but it makes plenty of sense when you think about it. Every culture has idioms or old sayings that convey a common truth, but can be surprising to outsiders. Eloisa Bielsa, along with Povilas Daknys and the creative team at NeoMam Studios took 12 such idioms from all over the world and illustrated them in pictograms for Expedia. Check out the tomato glasses, singing apples, and cooked carrots (and what they mean) here.
The ridiculously funny mashup video HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA (later renamed Fabulous Secret Powers) brought He-Man back into the spotlight for the online community, making him relevant for millennials and increasing his gay icon creds by 9000.
Anyone who has seen the original video knows it's a full-blown earworm that really gets stuck in your head, making it a one-time-only video and a great video to pull out when trolling.
But the live-action remake created by Tommy Gnall back in 2014 can be watched over and over again, plus old Batman and a Power Ranger make an appearance!
A pair of conjoined twins were born with a shared pelvis, liver, and blood supply, but each had their own heart, lungs, and stomach. The one-year-old girls had three legs between them. Would it be possible to separate them? Pediatric surgeon Allan Goldstein at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston agreed to examine them and consider the possibility. He discovered that one of the girls had a congenital heart defect. And then while she was in Boston, she developed a respiratory tract infection, which endangered not only her life, but her sister's.
But what did that mean for the upcoming operation? For one girl, her seriously ill sister posed a life-threatening danger. If she died, the other would live only a few more hours. For the other, however, the healthy sister was a life support. The 3-D model we made of the skeleton and the blood vessels of the twins clearly shows the artery running from one body to the other right across the lower chest, supplying it with oxygen-rich blood. We knew that if we separated them, we would have to cut that lifeline.
We sought advice from the pediatric ethics committee of our hospital. In many extensive conversations, I learned how important it is how to frame such a situation: Our intent was not to end the life of one girl, but rather to save the other's. The difference is subtle, because the result would be the same: We would push two living children into the operating room and leave it with only one.
Not all of us followed the argument. Three doctors -- two surgeons and one anesthesiologist -- stepped back. They said they could not participate in such a thing. The idea that our intervention would likely lead to the death of the weaker girl seemed unfathomable to them. We respected this decision.
Seeing a silverback gorilla in the middle of the road is enough to make any driver hightail it in the opposite direction, because movies have made us believe gorillas hate humans and go on destructive rampages.
But BBC cameraman Gordon Buchanan learned firsthand that gorillas are actually caring and gentle creatures who keep to themselves and don't generally attack humans unless provoked.
In fact, one massive silverback named Chimanuka had proven he had a huge heart when he adopted a young orphan gorilla and tended to it like his own:
The baby, whose name was Marhale, was in dire need of a caregiver—so Chimanuka stepped in. He groomed the little ape and let him follow closely so that he could learn how to find food for himself.
Though other male gorillas have been known to care for young, this was the only recorded example of Chimanuka’s particular subspecies, Bauer’s gorilla, acting this way.
When Gordon spotted Chimanuka in the bushes by the side of a road in the Democratic Republic of Congo he knew Chimanuka had a good reason for showing himself, so the BBC Earth crew stopped traffic to help him out.
And as the massive male silverback lumbered into the road the reason became clear- he was helping his big gorilla family safely cross the road:
Chimanuka had been nervous and tense because he needed to bring his entire family across the road. That included his adopted baby, Marhale; a one-handed ape named Mugaruka; and a few more mama gorillas and their babies.
When the final ape crossed the road, Gordon summed up the scene quite nicely. “The boss,” he said of Chimanuka, “showing us that despite the road running through, this is still his jungle.” Even with human life so close, animal life continued.
Chimanuka is truly a god among gorillas, and somebody needs to get him a reflective vest and crossing guard pole stat!
The 2016 thriller The Girl on the Train stars Emily Blunt as a divorced alcoholic who spends her time riding a train to spy on the people from her former, happier life. She witnesses events that might -or might not- be evidence in a murder. She tries to piece the mystery together, which puts her in danger, but her drinking habit make her memory unreliable. The movie was a box office hit, and Blunt received critical praise for her role. But there are things you might not know about The Girl on the Train.
10. Emily Blunt was pregnant when they started shooting.
She didn’t tell anyone except one of her costars and by the time the film was done shooting she was five months along, and she had to tell them since her bump was quite noticeable.
9. Blunt would wear bloodshot contacts and cheek prostheses.
This was to give her the look of being severely inebriated and to make certain that it looked like the alcoholism had affected her in some way.
David Tran escaped Vietnam in 1978 and gave us Sriracha sauce. He concentrated on the product instead of building a successful company, but things happen. Huy Fong Foods is a wildly successful company in spite of their business practices -because the product is what consumers want.
Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains how Tran, the serious cook and laid-back businessman, achieved incredible success without advertiusing, patents, copyright, or even the original rooster. -via Laughing Squid
Maybe not, but it can explain why you’re such a sleepyhead (which may or may not be of interest to your boss). “There are morning people and evening people,” says Sonia Ancoli-Israel, director of education at UC-San Diego’s Sleep Medicine Center. “We call them larks and owls.” Which one you are has to do with your circadian system.
2. How does my circadian system work?
A region of 20,000 nerve cells in your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus keeps your body on schedule throughout the day, regulating everything from hormone levels to when you digest food.And, of course, when you feel sleepy.
The Brooklyn Bridge, which was called the East River Bridge at the time, opened to traffic on May 24, 1883. Newspapers were full of the festivities, and recorded the people who had the honor of being the first to travel across. Emily Warren Roebling, the chief engineer's wife, was the very first to cross in a horse-drawn carriage. Presumably her driver was technically first, but his name was not recorded. Two men staged a foot race when the general public was allowed to cross. But they didn't know that a cat had already crossed over the new bridge -a whole month before the official opening.
C.W. McAuliffe, a New York saloon keeper and renowned Republican supporter, had requested the first cat to be persuaded to cross the new Brooklyn Bridge. Alderman James J. Mooney went in search among the stray Brooklyn cats, and found a grey cat “that was inclined to see the world.”
The surviving record does not explain why he wanted a cat to cross the bridge, but it probably had something to do with luck. Or maybe publicity for McAuliffe's saloon. And so a stray cat was found and persuaded to cross the bridge, which earned him the name Ned. Read Ned's story at The Hatching Cat.
It's something you think about every time you get on an airline flight. What if the door opens while we're flying? What if something were to affect the structural integrity of the plane? Our paranoid thoughts go to that one plane, you know the one. There was only one fatality because the passengers had their seatbelts on, but a flight attendant got sucked out of the plane at an altitude of seven miles. That's the nightmare, but it's only the worst of the bad things that can happen if your plane pops open.
According to AsapSCIENCE, the good news is that it's not likely to happen. And as usual, they tell us we are safer flying than driving. That's honestly not much comfort, because most of us have experienced our share of auto accidents already. You can't help but wonder if your number will come up while you're too far from the ground to survive. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The strange events that transpired in Hawkins, Indiana back in 1985 somehow ended up being a good thing, as the creatures from the bleak Upside Down got to live on our much greener side and humanity was introduced to the coolest new pets around- the demodogs. Soon every family was in the market for a demodog of their own, and a show called Rude Demodog and Dustin's Dweebs took the airwaves by storm one Saturday morning at a time.
Add some radical color to your geeky wardrobe with this Rude Demodog t-shirt by ClayGrahamArt, it's the perfect combination of retro 80s nostalgia and new school sci-fi cool!
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
A study from the Royal Veterinary College in the UK takes us to the plains of Africa, where a team studied the athleticism of predator and prey. They put biometric collars on five cheetahs, seven impala, nine lions, and seven zebras. Since the original paper is behind a paywall, we don't know exactly how they managed to do that, but it would have been interesting to see ("Here, kitty, kitty!"). The collars recorded the speed and acceleration of each animal during a chase. They recorded data from 5,562 chase incidents, none of them involving two animals that both wore collars. But they got some interesting findings. Believe it or not, it's to the prey's advantage to keep the speed down.
As the new study notes, the prey animal establishes the speed and route taken during the chase, but it’s the predator’s job to upset that strategy. Lions and cheetahs actually like it when their prey tries to beat them in a flat-out race. At full tilt, a prey’s movement becomes predictable—it can’t speed up any further, or make quick turns. Predators also tend to be faster than their prey. But if the prey animal runs slowly, it has more options, like twists and turns to make its movements less predictable. Incredibly, prey animals move at about half of their maximum capable speed during a chase. Predators, meanwhile, are always running faster than their prey, trying to close the gap. But when their prey makes an evasive maneuver, they have to slow down to follow the twists and turns of their target.
Using computer models, the researchers confirmed that lower speed wasn’t a terrible disadvantage for prey, and that the best escape strategy is to turn at the last possible moment, taking a path the predator couldn’t possibly follow. Ironically, the faster the predator is going, the better it is for the prey—even if it’s caught. An exhausted predator may not be able to hold onto its prey.
Watch him ski over sand, dirt, grass, volcanic ash, rock, bricks, brush, and water in some of the most beautiful places on earth. And he gets serious air when the mood strikes him. All for a car ad. But when you've got a sponsor who'll send you to such places, you go! -Thanks, Ken D!
Finding out your dog eats poop is one of the most disgusting discoveries a dog owner can make, and most owners can't look at their dog in the same light, or let their dog lick their face, after seeing them snacking on a turd.
Some studies say dogs eat poop out of boredom, others say dogs who have an enzyme deficiency, pancreatic sufficiency or parasites are more likely to be a poop eater, but a new study shows there more be a more ancient reason:
Since their poop has a high chance of containing intestinal parasites, wolves poop far from their dens. But if a sick wolf doesn't quite make it out of the den in time, they might do their business too close to home. A healthier wolf might eat this poop, but the parasite eggs wouldn't have hatched within the first day or two of the feces being dropped. Thus, the healthy wolf would carry the risk of infection away from the den, depositing the eggs they had consumed away in their own, subsequent bowel movements at an appropriate distance before the eggs had the chance to hatch into larvae and transmit the parasite to the pack.
Domestic dogs may just be enacting this behavior instinctively—only for them, there isn't as much danger of them picking up a parasite at home.
It’s like all you were trying to do was bring your kid up to the fancy, planet-killing space station where you work, show him off to some of your co-workers, and see if had any interest in pursuing the family business.
Then the next thing you know he’s trying to decapitate your boss with his green laser sword, things get crazy, and you get into huge battle.
That's just the beginning. The rest of the story is there, if you can decipher it. -via Boing Boing
