There have always been natural disasters, some larger than others, some that we haven't quite figured out, and some that happened so long ago that most of us are not even familiar with them. But then civilization came along, and humans have added quite a few more disasters with our constant resource extraction, manufacturing, and shipping. And the disasters just got more bizarre.
In this list of weird disasters, you'll find some that longtime Neatoramanauts know, one, two, three, four, and five. And there are more you've probably never heard of that you can read about, and find links for more information, in a list of pictofacts at Cracked.
Plants, fungi, and even animals sometimes develop fluorescence for one reason or another. We're also familiar with animals who are genetically engineered to glow under a black light. But science has apparently not yet looked for all the biological structures that may fluoresce when the opportunity arises. A team of researchers went out after dark looking through the tropical forests of northern Vietnam (which sounds like quite an adventure in itself) with a black light, and were surprised to find wasps nests that glowed green!
The team initially set out to discover unknown fluorescent insects in tropical rainforests, so they'd come equipped with UV LED torches. "We were not searching for wasp nests in particular," Schöllhorn said. "To our knowledge, this phenomenon has not been observed in the past, neither by scientific researchers nor by any photographers."
When exposed to white light, the nest cocoon caps appear bright white. Their verdant fluorescence begins to appear under normal daylight, and at night under a UV torch, the bright green glow of the nests can be seen up to 65 feet (20 meters) away, the authors wrote in their report, published Tuesday (Aug. 24) in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
The wasps were of the genus Polistes, so the scientists checked out other species of the same genus from France and the Amazon rainforest. Those wasp nests also glowed under a UV light, although with slightly different colors and intensities. The next question is why the wasps evolved to build fluorescent nests. They certainly didn't do it waiting for someone to come along with a blacklight! There are quite a few possibilities, which you can read about at Live Science. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Bernd Schöllhorn and Serge Berthier)
For the last ten years, Mattel has released an annual Barbie Career of the Year doll (with the exception of 2017). Recently, the 2021 career was announced to be a music producer. Barbie dolls and their careers have come a long way since she was purely a fashion model in the 1950s and '60s, and Barbie as a professional long precedes the Career of the Year line. While there have been numerous astronaut Barbies, more recent iterations are tech and business related, with a spate of political Barbies, too, in the last few years. Ada Palmer takes us through the history of the professional Barbie as a marketing tool that reflects our evolving culture.
So, what does the Career of the Year sequence show us about Barbie as a mark of centrist feminism? A few things. One is that women-in-tech is definitely a thing, far more in the minds of the organizers than women-in-STEM, since we haven’t seen biologist Barbie or epidemiologist Barbie showcased, only several iterations of tech Barbies, including software and hardware. It also shows through things like entrepreneur Barbie and architect Barbie that sometimes they look a lot at research, especially about income and what are high-paying careers, and think it’s important that Barbie encourage girls to go into high-paid professions not just exciting ones (beloved-yet-underpaid careers like teacher and nurse have been frequent Barbie careers but not showcase ones). They also sometimes run into challenges in communication, i.e. ‘entrepeneur’ is a very important concept but very difficult to communicate in a doll via clothing and accessories, as is true of many careers.
Watch this cute video clip of Papa Beaver named Mumu-Chan slowly waddle back to his family while carrying a large carrot and an unwieldly head of cabbage (that fell out of his hands a couple of times).
Just like a guy, he thinks that he can make it all in one go ... without any need for a grocery bag!
Sometimes, when you have two problems, they cancel each other out. This is not an endorsement of the Molotov cocktail solution by Jason from The Good Place. It is unusual for two problems to eliminate each other, but surfer Shannon Ainslie experienced just that.
Ainslie writes in The Guardian about a surfing trip in South Africa. A Great White Shark bit him in the hand and dragged him under. Then a different shark tried to bite him:
Under the water, another shark swiped for my head and my shoulders, but missed, because the other had got me first.
That second shark ended up saving my life. Perhaps startled by the competition, the first shark lost its grip on me. I thought I was dreaming; everything seemed to slow down. I started to feel pain and the next thing I knew I was staring a shark straight in the face. I think the shark was confused because it stared back at me for a few moments as if in awe. Its mouth was wide open; I could see a huge set of teeth and a dark black eye. It bolted past me and I felt a shove from behind – it must have brushed along my back, but thankfully it had not bitten me. After it passed, I swam to the surface as fast as I could.
Charter Group Birdcams in Israel gives us a glimpse into barn owl nests as they raise their young. Sometimes there is real drama. See, barn owl parents leave the nest during the day and return at night. In the above video, from June 8, a pigeon enters a nest with seven owlets of various sizes. The pigeon decides to stay, regardless of the other residents. She even lays an egg! But then the parents come home, bringing rodents for the kids, and do not take well to the home intruder.
In a second video, taken June 29, a couple of pigeons invade another owl's nest with four nestlings, but these are larger owlets who defend their home even before mama gets back.
In the third video of this trilogy, recorded on July 5, the pigeons tried setting up shop in an owl's nest in which the owlets have fledged, but they still consider this box their home. They will defend it.
Despite the violence, the pigeons appear to be ultimately successful in this last attempt to take over an owl's nest, as the owlets are old enough to leave the nest for good. Persistence pays off, but at some cost. -via Nag on the Lake
Tom Breihan is in the middle a long series of music reviews for Stereogum. To be specific, he is reviewing every song that was #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart since 1958. You can see them all here. This week, he is up to December of 1989, in which "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel was #1 for two weeks. Breihan doesn't hold back.
I hate “We Didn’t Start The Fire” so much. I hate it with my whole being, my entire soul. I hear that nattering keyboard riff and those hyperactive bongos and “Harry Truman Doris Day,” and I become a different being. My blood becomes lava. My teeth become knives. In seconds, I could reduce a rhinoceros to ashen bone with the sheer acidity of my stomach bile. As a song, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” is a cursed and godforsaken work of torment, a towering abomination. Its sheer musical unpleasantness is, in its own way, almost impressive. If Billy Joel had actually set out to create eardrum-stabbing experimental hell-music, he couldn’t have done any better.
Okay, now tell us what you really think. I always considered “We Didn’t Start The Fire” to be a so-so song with a catchy chorus and nonsensical lyrics. To be honest, I had no great expectations for a Billy Joel song by 1989. But Breihan explains his hatred for the song, and then adds a few videos of cultural references and parodies spun from “We Didn’t Start The Fire” at Stereogum. -via Metafilter
Archaeologists from Petrozavodsk State University in Russia have discovered a burial site of an ‘amber man’ who was painted with ocher, a red pigment used to mark a grave so it wouldn’t be disturbed. In addition to the distinctive paint job, the man, who was estimated to be from the Copper Age, was also buried with more than 100 pieces of jewelry. The man must have been rich when he was alive! Artnet has more details:
The man buried in the chamber was almost certainly of high social standing, and may have been a trader himself from the Eastern Baltic States.
The objects included pendants, discs, and amber buttons “arranged in rows face down” and sewn onto a covering made of leather and placed over the body. Another two tiers of amber buttons were found along the edges of the small grave.
The flint chips found are likely from tools placed over the body and “are clearly so-called votive items—offerings apparently symbolizing whole knives and arrowheads,” researchers said in their paper.
The unique aspect of this particular burial, they said, is that it is an individual grave. Other burials dating to the Mesolithic era and found in the forest belt of Europe are large cemeteries.
Burials with such a large number of jewels were previously unheard of in this area of Karelia, nor have they been uncovered in nearby northwestern regions.
If you’re planning to take some awesome photos in the upcoming fall, this tool might be of help to you! An interactive fall foliage prediction map shows the peak periods when leaves will be at their most colorful in each region. The Smoky Mountains portal designed the fall foliage prediction map for tourists:
The visual planning guide allows users to click through one week at a time, starting from August 30 to November 15, and shows the change in foliage across the United States, from “No Change” with leaves still green and all the way to “Past Peak” when leaves begin to fall.
The company uses a model that ingests a multitude of data sources including historical precipitation, NOAA precipitation forecasts, elevation, actual temperatures, temperature forecasts, and average daylight exposure to develop a baseline fall date for each county in the continental United States. Next, the model consumes hundreds-of-thousands of additional data points from a variety of government and non-government sources and layers this data over its own historical data from past years and, finally, with a high degree of accuracy, the algorithm produces nearly 50,000 date outputs indicating the progression of fall for every county in a graphical presentation that is easy to digest.
Photography can be documentary- recording the world as it is, or it can be an art medium. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, as many great photographers combine the two. Arthur Tress is known for both his artful documentary photos and his photographic art. But between 2010 and 2013, he had fun with a new hobby, or a game, as he calls is, combining art and photography in a different way. Tress took children's coloring books from flea markets and thrift shops and combined them with found photos he's collected over the years to make collages that are simple and sweet, but can be read to have deeper meaning.
“It would be an evening’s recreation to match up coloring-book pages with photographs,” Tress says of the photocollages he made during those years. “It became sort of a game, almost like Old Maid.”
The game was played as follows: “I’d put a coloring-book page on a table and then pull a photograph from one of my little white envelopes,” he says of the everyday containers he uses to organize his collection of hundreds of found photographs into categories such as children playing games, animals, buildings with geometric shapes, and World War I. “A lot of the pairings ended up being by chance, depending on what I happened to pull,” he says, “but I did have the choice of doing the collages in a surrealistic way, where there would be dissonance between the found photos and the coloring-book subjects, or in a way where the photos and subjects would be similar. I decided to make the pairings congruous.”
Local clothing store owner and adoption advocate Scott Poore purchased a billboard to help a shelter dog find a home! Poore purchased a 30-foot structure and featured the smiling face of Sally Sue, an 11-year-old pit bull mix who has lived in a Kansas City shelter for 500 days. Poore hopes that with the billboard, Sally’s story can reach through to people who are not active on social media.
The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Germany revealed the results of their restoration of a Johannes Vermeer artwork, and there was a hidden detail in the painting all along! The museum took two and a half years to restore Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. Thanks to a research project in 2017, it was revealed that the blank wall in the painting was not done by Vermeer. Instead, the overpainting was completed several decades after the canvas was finished. This conclusion motivated art historians to uncover what was covered up:
Once the work was completed in early 2021, art historians could gain a new appreciation for the painting. “With the recovery of Cupid in the background, the actual intention of the Delft painter becomes recognizable,” states Stephan Koja, director of the Old Masters Picture Gallery. “Beyond the ostensibly amorous context, it is about a fundamental statement about the nature of true love. So before what we looked at was only rudimentary. Now we understand it as a key image in his oeuvre.” In fact, as Koja points out, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window stands at the beginning of a series of painting in which Vermeer shows a woman in a quiet, reflective moment.
Now, thanks to the restoration, art lovers around the world will be able to enjoy the artwork as Vermeer intended. To celebrate the finished restoration, the painting has been placed at the centerpiece of a new exhibition at the museum. Johannes Vermeer. On pausing will run from September 10, 2021 to January 2, 2022 and will include nine other paintings by Vermeer closely related to the restored artwork.
Image credit: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Wolfgang Kreische
Meet the WaterPod, a sustainable floating pod that converts seawater into drinking water. Designed by Bennie Beh Hue May, Yap Chun Yoon, and Loo Xin Yang, the contraption can generate drinkable water through a natural desalination process. The team of designers was recognized by The James Dyson Award for their conceptual design. Here’s how the pod would operate:
WaterPod operates as a self-cleaning solar desalination system that absorbs seawater via underwater wicks, inspired by mangrove trees, which then passes through a condensation and evaporation process to remove the salt particles from the seawater. Just like mangrove trees, WaterPod’s underwater wicks fill the pod with seawater until its water levels reach the pod’s black fabric dome. Inside the dome, seawater undergoes evaporation as water vapors gradually flow from the transparent covering and collect in WaterPod’s storage compartment. Then, users can pump drinking water from the storage compartment’s recess. While the desalination process takes place, the WaterPod remains floating atop the water in a similar fashion to a conventional buoy. WaterPod’s top lid is filled with expanded polyurethane foam for thermal insulation and flotation enhancement while a cement base offers buoyancy stability.
Enjoy the Eurythmics hit played by various gadgets and appliances, such as a toaster, printer, electric toothbrushes, and calculators. The steam iron adds both a good hiss and visual effects, but it's the googly eyes that really make the video special. Another cool video from the Device Orchestra. -via reddit
We've been adding more neat posts over at our new sites as we build 'em up. Because we can't post every single one of them here on Neatorama, how about a recap?
Don't miss these science and tech posts over at Pictojam:
