We love imagining the future. Whether it comes in tech, setting, or even culture, we love showing off our different takes on how mankind will survive in the coming years. From utopian and dystopian fiction shows and novels to how architects and engineers build cities right now, there is no shortage of how we envision our daily lives in the future. 

In recent years, we’ve noticed a trend of announcements from different firms as they launch new projects that showcase their new take on metropolitan areas. AD has listed their picks for the most interesting projects and proposals for futuristic cities. 

From Mexico’s Smart Forest City to Saudi Arabia’s 100-mile-long linear city called The Line, these areas, once fully built, will definitely be super cool to visit!

Image credit: Stefano Boeri 

Anyone who got flashed with a car’s high beams knows that they are so bright to the point that you can be blinded. We do need them to see dark places, though. 

These blinding headlights are a big reason why people have a hard time seeing clearly while driving at night. Because people keep buying taller vehicles, the headlights will continue to get higher.

Following the taller vehicles are how headlights will be placed. According to Matt Brumbelow, a senior research engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, these fixtures can be misaligned. “There’s no testing to make sure that it’s still aimed properly or that it’s putting out enough light on the road and it’s not glaring other drivers,” he stated.

If we add the height of new vehicles being sold in the market, and how their headlights are placed, then there’s a big chance that these lights can cause more harm than necessary, and can make driving difficult at night. 

A solution is now being pushed to solve this problem. America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has required automakers to sell vehicles that have adaptive driving beam headlights. These new lights can adjust the intensity of their brightness to avoid blinding people.

Image credit: Eliel Frances Etruiste

Carnival season has been going on for a while, and will culminate this coming Tuesday on Mardi Gras. When Americans think of Mardi Gras, they think of New Orleans. While the Big Easy goes all out, it is by no means the only place to catch a great Mardi Gras parade. If you want to avoid the crowds and the expense of New Orleans, or if you're looking for a more family friendly celebration, you may want to catch two days of non-stop parades in Mobile, Alabama, a city that's been celebrating Mardi Gras for 320 years. In Mobile, the parade floats throw out Moon Pies as well as the tradition beads.  

Lake Charles, Louisiana, has a Mardi Gras Children’s Day on the Sunday before Mardi Gras, in addition to the daily parades. St. Tammany Parish has two boat parades and several dog parades. The towns of Lafourche Parish collaborate to stage more than two dozen parades. Read about these unique Mardi Gras celebrations in places that are not New Orleans at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Unskinny Boppy)

So many video game movies follow the story in the game. This one is based on a true story about the game. Tetris follows the work of Henk Rogers (played by Taron Egerton), the Dutch video game designer who pursued the rights to Tetris for the Gameboy from the Soviet Union as the USSR itself was in the process of falling apart. From all accounts, Soviet officials did not understand the concept of intellectual property rights, nor did they see the game's potential. Alexey Pajitnov invented the game in 1984, but did not receive royalties for it until he left Russia in 1991 and founded the Tetris Company with Rogers in 1996.

The history of the rights to Tetris is much more complicated than one movie could possibly illustrate, but this chapter sure looks exciting. Tetris will premiere March 31 on Apple TV+.  -via reddit

If you DO want to see a Tetris movie that involves gameplay AND Soviet history, we've already got that. It's a musical, too!

As a general trend, heterosexual men have an interest in the bodies of attractive women. But to what degree does this interest change seasonally? Polish researchers Boguslaw Pawlowski and Piotr Sorokowski decided to find out.

They asked adult heterosexual men to rate the attractiveness of female faces, breasts photographed by cosmetic surgery clinics, and images of women with pronounced hip-to-waist ratios. They also had the subjects rate their own attractiveness and that of their romantic partners, if they had any. The researchers then followed up every three months for a year to see if their opinions changed over time.

Pawlowski and Sorokowski found that the men were quite keen on women’s breasts and hips during the winter as contrasted to the summer. Why? The researchers speculate that, during the winter, the men had fewer opportunities to look at women’s bodies without heavy protective clothing. The scarcity of such views led to their increased value.

Photo: Pixabay

Chart: Perception, v.37, 2008.

If you'd like to spend a few minutes or a week exploring the universe, check out NASA's Eyes. The website has a menu of interactive places to go and missions to follow. In the solar system, you can look at each planet individually and pull up information about that planet, or change the plane of orbits, zoom in and out, or pick a story from the left side to open. You can take a closer look at earth, or explore exoplanets in the same interactive manner. You can even land on Mars along with the Mars Perseverence rover mission.

From any point in your journey, you can suddenly switch gears and try something else. Every step of the way, you'll be able to access information about what you are looking at. It would take months to explore all the information made available to use in these apps. Pull up the menu to begin here.  -via Boing Boing

Robots can be scary, robot spiders are always scary, and they fly now. The University of Tokyo's robotics department has developed a terrifying and impressive robot that walks on four extended legs and flies, too. They call it SPIDAR, which is a tortured acronym for "SPherIcally vectorable and Distributed rotors assisted Air-ground amphibious quadruped Robot." It probably doesn't work any better in Japanese. The word "amphibious" usually means maneuvering in both land and water, but in this case they apparently mean both land and air. The challenge of this robot was to make it powerful enough to walk and fly while keeping the weight low enough for air travel. SPIDAR uses 16 thrusters to fly, and to assist the small servo motors used for walking. This is a prototype that's not all that efficient, and it's extremely loud. But it accomplished its purpose, and will no doubt be refined to make it actually threatening.

💣 Help me, R2-D2 nuclear bunker. You're my only hope to survive a nuclear blast. (Image: hrnick/Atlas Obscura)

🎃 Halloween is just 258 days away, so we better hurry and get all these gruesomely cool props from the TransWorld's Halloween & Attraction Show.

🕹️ Violating the Geneva Convention? Sounds pretty sus to me but that's what happened to the popular online game Among Us.

🌹 The prettiest dumplings you'll ever see - behold, the Rose Dumplings (from our new site TastyTastic, where we feature wonderful and weird food from around the world. Check it out!)

🤣 Love Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix? Here's how to make that movie better: just add Muppets.

🐍 How NOT to remove GIANT snakes from the ceiling of your house.

🍔 Nice buns: 8 Great T-Shirts for the Hamburger Lover in Your Life

☘️ And looking ahead to March, here's 7 Funny St. Patrick's Day Tees and Big & Tall T-Shirts

👕 Limited time special from the NeatoShop: Get up to 20% off all Movies T-Shirts, TV Shows Tees and Comics & Cartoons Shirts.

Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story "The Black Cat" was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in August of 1843. It concerns a man who abuses his one-eyed black cat, and in so doing manages to kill his wife. He tries to cover up the murder by hiding her body in the wall of the cellar, closing up the wall before the police arrive. But the cat manages to get revenge. You can read the entire story online.

"The Black Cat" is fiction, but Poe took inspiration from real events. It just so happened that the year before, a sensational story about a woman's remains found plastered into a cellar wall was syndicated in newspapers across the the country. Poe's account expands upon the crime, and adds the twist of the cat, but the bones of the story are there in a real life report from Connecticut. Tales immediately grew up around the true crime, and were even published, many of which have since been debunked. Read what we know and what has never been discovered about the case that inspired Poe's terrifying tale at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Byam Shaw)

The chess piece above is the bishop. Some sets have a cleft in the bishop and others don't. The classic Staunton chess set has the cleft. Redditor BroodyDoggo asked what it is for in the AnarchyChess subreddit. The answers they got were priceless.

Keep doritos in them for a midgame snack. A rook can be used to hold very small amount of salsa.
insert a coin there to power up your bishop
To use as a whistle when the opponent breaks rules
It's for holding the card you can apply to a bishop for bonusses
It's obviously the mouth
If you want to give your date (the chess term for "opponent") your number/note after a sexy match.
It’s a scar from a previous game
Aerodynamics, for when the bishop “Whooshes” across the board
Bottle opener

But the real answer is that it is made to resemble a Catholic bishop's mitre, a headress which has a front and back separated by a cleft. That's when we found out that more people than you'd suspect had never associated the bishop in a chess set with the church hierarchy. As a practical matter, the cleft makes it easier to distinguish the bishop from a pawn.

However, if we go further back into chess history, we find that the piece only became known as the bishop when the game spread to European cultures in the Middle Ages, and it got its name because it looked like a mitre to people familiar with bishops. Before that, it was the elephant, and indeed is still called the elephant in many countries. The Middle Eastern chess sets of the time were highly stylized, and the elephant was not a recognizable shape to Europeans. In some countries, this piece is called the camel. Now you know.

(Image credit: MichaelMaggs)

Flaco, the escaped Central Park Zoo Eurasian eagle-owl, with a rat shortly after catching it this past weekend.

* Long exposure night-time photo taken under ambient light with a telephoto lens. Only a small dark silhouette to the naked eye!#birds #birdwatching #nature #birdcpp pic.twitter.com/7Ug1aZUK1u

— David Lei (@davidlei) February 14, 2023

On February 2, a Eurasian eagle owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan after someone cut into his wire enclosure. The owl was spotted and tracked by zoo staff, but every time they got close, he flew away. Over the next two weeks, Flaco was seen and photographed numerous times but refused to be approached. He has become the most elusive celebrity in the city, but doesn't mind the paparazzi as long as they don't get close enough to touch.

However, Flaco had been at the zoo since 2010, arriving at less than a year old, and zoo officials worried that he wouldn't be able to fend for himself.   

Flaco's many fans were very heartened this past weekend to see that Flaco procured a rat, which indicates that he is learning to hunt and might be able to survive on his own.

Shortly before Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl caught a rat, he was playing shallow right field—on the Heckscher Fields of Central Park on Saturday night. What a thrill to see Flaco adapt so quickly to living in the wild! pic.twitter.com/Gnrlc0vGHM

— Manhattan Bird Alert (@BirdCentralPark) February 12, 2023

The Twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert is keeping up with Flaco's daily adventures, and also gives us plenty of other city birds to watch. You can also see many pictures of Flaco under his Twitter hashtag.

Thailand is now in the works for creating a city near the country’s Vietnam War–era U-Tapao airport. The government will be spending around $8.8 billion to create the new “Eastern Aviation City.” 

Even though the government will be spending a huge amount of money, the benefits after the city is established will outweigh the costs. The new transport hub, upon completion, will reportedly create 15,6000 jobs in the first five years. Additionally, the new city will bolster the country’s tourism and aviation industries. 

Aside from being linked to Don Muang, a budget airport, as well as the country’s main airport, Suvarnabhumi, the Eastern Aviation City will include a free trade zone in its area. The expansion will allow U-Tapao International Airport to welcome 60 million to 75 million passengers per annum. 

Image credit: One Works

Artificial intelligence is good, to some extent. It can help us determine certain issues in our body that cannot easily be determined by doctors at a single glance. It can assist us with maneuvering certainly daily tasks. They can be taught to do things that will eventually not be done by humans anymore. 

However, these bundles of code do pose some danger. We’re seeing it right now, especially in the field of art and creativity, where tech bros utilize these machines to steal the artworks of others and shuffle them around to make them their own (and monetize them). 

It turns out that even in ancient times, there have been tales that serve as warning on how many problems these programs and robots can give us. These old tales are compiled by historian Adrienne Mayor in her new book. According to her, these stories can help us find an alternative way to process some questions about intelligent machines. These include the looming moral and practical implications of AI. 

Learn more about these tales and AI here!

Image credit: jimmy teoh/Pexels

A new detection method has shined some light on the fortress walls of Xi’an, China. These thick structures are measured to be 12 meters high and up to 18 meters thick. They served as great defenses for the residents of the city, but they are also impervious to analysis and scanning. 

One type of subatomic particle was found to be able to bypass the thickness of the fortress walls. These particles, called muons, can now be used to assess the structural integrity of the walls so they can be preserved in more years to come. 

New muon scans of the walls revealed density fluctuations inside one of the sections of the walls. These fluctuations could be signs of two things: dangerous flaws that should be repaired or hidden structures. According to nuclear physicist Zhiyi Liu of Lanzhou University, the latter could be “archaeologically interesting for discovery and investigation.”

Read more about the fortress walls here!

Image via: wikimedia commons 

In grade school, we learned that living things are made up of cells, which are powered by mitochondria, and that plants cells have a cell wall. We learned to label those things, and the next year we learned it all over again, which was pretty much all the biology we got before high school. Unless you were lucky and had a couple of days of sex education.  

But cells are way more complex than that. The way a cell does its job involves proteins that form amino acids that form structures, machines, and messenger compounds that are more complex than most of us could ever imagine. To make that into something understandable, Kurzgesagt uses language as a metaphor for the basic inner workings of a cell. From an alphabet of 26 letters comes the works of Shakespeare, although building those works requires some amazing things to happen. -via Digg