Some of us have used VPNs (Virtual Private Networks)  when travelling abroad to access Netflix shows that aren’t available in the place they were visiting, and some are using them to access shows that are not available in their home. However, VPNs are also used to stay safe when using  public Wi-Fi networks. If you don’t want to pay for a proper VPN, then you can always set up your own. Corbin Davenport shares how to make your personal VPN. Check the full piece here! 

Image via Android Police

When pandemic restrictions limited visitors to the nursing home, the staff at Wikwemikong Nursing Home in Ontario went into high gear to relieve the boredom. Recreation manager Emily Barnes tells us about their recent deer hunt, in which workers became deer roaming through the trees.

Each week, Barnes and her team strives to have a full calendar of activities for residents, who are primarily First Nations from Manitoulin Island. This past week included a deer hunting activity after one of the residents said he was experiencing hunting fever. That meant setting up a mini-forest of Christmas trees, staff dressing up in deer costumes, and residents wielding nerf guns.

"He was saying how much he missed being an avid hunter every year, and this year was kind of hard because he felt like he was truly missing out on something important," said Barnes.

"It was so much fun. I'm sure a few might have enjoyed shooting me a little more than they should have. But, it was a really great time."

While it was all tongue-in-cheek, the hunt brought laughter and a bit of competitiveness to the residents. You can see more pictures here.  -via reddit

(Image credit: Wikwemikong Nursing Home at Facebook)

Huh, did aliens drop this? A mysterious metal structure was found lying in the desert of southern Utah. Wildlife resource officers noticed the towering structure as they were flying over the desert. The metal tower was somewhere between 10 and 12 feet, as the Cut details: 

“We just happened to fly directly over the top of it,” Bret Hutchings, the helicopter pilot, told a local outlet. In all his career, Hutchings said, the monolith is “about the strangest thing that I’ve come across.”

In the days since, the helicopter crew has weighed a number of predictable explanations for the miraculous phenomenon: At first, they wondered if the structure belonged to NASA and had fallen from space; after concluding that it appears to be firmly situated in the ground, they decided it must’ve been installed, perhaps by a “new wave artist” or a 2001: A Space Odyssey super-fan. But they haven’t seriously considered, at least publicly, what we are probably all thinking: That the metal structure clearly belongs to our alien neighbors.

Image via The Cut

Located in the steep forest hillsides of Odda, Norway, is this treehouse designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Helen & Hard. The treehouse, called Woodnest, is suspended about 5-6 meters above the forest floor and is fastened to the pine tree with a steel collar.

To reach the woodnest cabin by Helen & Hard, visitors first need to take a 20-minute walk from the town of Odda through the forest via a steep winding path. Once you reach them, the tree houses are accessed via a small timber bridge that leads the visitor off the ground, into the structure and up in to the tree. Featuring just 15 square meters, the structure is organized around the central trunk where four sleeping places, a bathroom, and a kitchen area sit. From here one can lookout and experience the vast view out through the trees, down to the fjord below and across towards the mountains beyond.

Now this is what “dwelling in nature” really means.

Would you live in one when given the chance?

(Image Credit: Helen & Hard/ DesignBoom)

Joy Huang is a master of every tool in the kitchen, but she specializes in breads. Her sourdough loaves can be particularly inventive, such as this Thanksgiving-appropriate loaf shaped like a turkey.

In Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the amusing but vile Sir Toby Belch refers to a sheet of paper that "were big enough for the bed of Ware in England . . . ." This is a reference to the Bed of Ware, an enormous bed that was a tourist attraction in England during Shakespeare's day and remains so today.

Ware is a village north of London. An inn there commissioned the construction of and housed this enormous bed. It's now housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it continues to attract visitors, although you're no longer allowed to sleep in it. Amusing Planet describes the bed:

One of the most famous piece of furniture in history, this spectacular four-poster bed measures ten feet by eleven feet, and is reportedly large enough for four couples to lie side by side without touching each other. [...]

Unfortunately, the bed has been greatly vandalized and defaced by guests, possibly by amorous couples who had spent a night on the bed and found obliged to carve their initials into the wood with a penknife or another sharp object. Some applied red wax seals to mark their night on the bed.

The bed stayed in Ware for nearly three centuries, passing around several inns before it moved to Hoddesdon in 1870 and became a bank holiday attraction during the boom in rail travel.

| Photo: veronikab

Going high isn’t an exclusive activity for present-day people. Scientists have discovered the first evidence of prehistoric people taking hallucinogens. Indigenous Californians who  gathered in a cave would look up the ceiling, where a pinwheel and a big-eyed moth were painted in red: 

This mysterious "pinwheel," is likely a depiction of the delicate, white flower of Datura wrightii, a powerful hallucinogen that the Chumash people took not only for ceremonial purposes but also for medicinal and supernatural ones, according to a new study.

The moth is likely a species of hawk moth, known for its "loopy" intoxicated flight after slurping up Datura's nectar, the researchers said.

Chewed globs that humans stuck to the cave's ceiling provided more evidence of these ancient trips; these up to 400-year-old lumps, known as quids, contained the mind-altering drugs scopolamine and atropine, which are found in Datura, the researchers said.

Image via ScienceAlert

If you're joining relatives by Zoom for Thanksgiving this year, you'll want to show off your cooking in the only way you can -by the way it looks. I was completely taken with this glowing dessert, and I'm sure your kinfolk would be too.

This isn’t a cheat, and it’s not an optical illusion — these are simply gin and tonic jellos made by adding gelatin to G&T and leaving them to set. So why are they glowing that fantastic ghostly color? The answer is that quinine (the bitter flavoring in tonic water) glows under UV fluorescent light. If you want to serve this to kids or teetotallers, it works just as well without the gin.

You'll find the recipe for Fluorescent Jello at The Splendid Table. And you'll find links to eight other recipes that will add visual flourish to your table, like cranberry lime pie, green deviled eggs, and ombré apple pie at Fast Company. -via Digg

Because we only have a limited amount of energy and resources in the universe, scientists are always developing devices that can run for a longer period of time while using less energy. This sensor is an example of such devices.

The latest sensor to be invented in the lab can go for a whole year on a single burst of energy, aided by a physics phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling.

The tunnelling aspect means that with the help of a 50-million-electron jumpstart, this simple and inexpensive device (made up of just four capacitors and two transistors) can keep going for an extended period of time.

The quantum rules of physics, applying at the smallest atomic scales, means that electrons can behave both as particles and as waves, and the scientists were able to tap into that behaviour to precisely control electron flow from one side of a circuit to the other.

Learn more details about this device over at ScienceAlert.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Chakrabartty Lab/ ScienceAlert)

In this video, YouTube channel GameRiot compares the original release version of Marvel’s Spider-Man (for the PS4) with the PS5 remastered version of the game. Many differences can be seen in the version, such as the lighting and environment details. But perhaps the greatest difference that can be seen is Peter Parker’s face, which many people have criticized, because in this game, Peter Parker is already 23 years old, and has been Spider-Man for about eight years.

Which version do you think is better overall?

(Image Credit: GameRiot/ YouTube)

When this corpse of a thresher shark was found washed up onshore, it didn’t take researchers that long to figure out the cause of the shark’s death, as a “sword” was found sticking out of its body. It was clear enough that a swordfish was this shark’s killer, but it is still unclear why it stabbed the shark. According to the researchers, it was possible that, at that time, the two ocean predators were competing for prey.

"The most likely scenario is that both species were hunting on a school of fish or on squids in the deep," said study lead researcher Patrick Jambura, a doctoral student in the Department of Paleontology at the University of Vienna. 

It's also possible the two ocean predators were fighting over territory, or that the swordfish accidentally stabbed the thresher shark and left nearly 12 inches (30.1 centimeters) of its "sword" in the victim, he said. 

News of the fight's deadly aftermath spread when the shark's body washed up on the Mediterranean coast of Libya, near the town of Brega in April 2020. A local citizen scientist group learned about photos and video taken of the 14.5-foot-long (4.5 meters) dead shark, and after seeing the evidence "I was just stunned for a few moments," Jambura told Live Science in an email. Swordfish (Xiphias gladius) are known to defend themselves against blue sharks (Prionace glauca) and mako sharks (Isurus oxyrinchus), as these sharks prey on swordfish. 

However, Jambura states that the thresher shark preys upon small food, and it may not have been a threat to the swordfish. So why did the latter stab it? It is still quite puzzling.

More details about this story over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: The Ichthyological Society of Japan 2020/ Live Science)

Many of our physical movements can be telltale signs of who we are as a person. In this study, scientists have revealed that how a person moves a computer mouse can be used to reveal how much of a risk-taker that person is. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We could see the conflict people were feeling making the choice through their hand movements with the mouse,” said Paul Stillman, lead author of the study who received his Ph.D. in psychology at The Ohio State University.

“How much their hand is drawn to the choice they didn’t make can reveal a lot about how difficult the decision was for them,” said Stillman, who is now a postdoctoral researcher in marketing at Yale University.

Stillman conducted the study with Ian Krajbich, associate professor of psychology and economics at Ohio State, and Melissa Ferguson, professor of psychology at Yale...

The researchers were surprised at how accurate mouse tracking was at predicting how people would react to other similar risk choices.

“In many cases, we could accurately predict how people would behave in the future after we observed them just once choosing to take a gamble or not,”...

“It is rare to get predictive accuracy with just a single decision in an experiment like this.”

Learn more about how the researchers measured risk-taking, and what type of test they made participants take, over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

You probably have seen Uncle Roger work at two places now, one at a restaurant, and one at a food truck. Unfortunately, he got fired from both after just a day of working for them. But Uncle Roger takes another job once again, this time at a bubble tea shop in Sweden.

Check out his first (and probably final) day at this bubble tea shop, through this video.

(Image Credit: mrnigelng/ YouTube)

Paul Koudounaris’ beloved feline companion Baba is the narrator and model for his new book, A Cat’s Tale: A Journey Through Feline History. The book tackles the different events in our history, from ancient Egypt to the Enlightenment and the New World. While some history books focus only on the people that contributed to history, Koudounaris also shines the spotlight on the heroic, tragic, and heartwarming stories of cats! The Smithsonian has more details: 

A Cat’s Tale is one of dozens of books about the history of cats. But the richly illustrated volume stands out because it’s actually told through the voice of a cat. Baba acts not only as narrator but also Cindy Sherman-like impersonator, appearing throughout the book dressed as historic individuals and caricatures. Her voice and visage make Koudounaris’ take on the subject truly singular, mimicking oral storytelling more than an academic treatise. As Baba declares in the first chapter, “We cats have been allies to humankind for a very long time, and while you have reserved the sobriquet ‘man’s best friend’ for the dog, I may now provide you reasons to judge differently.” Letting Baba carry the book also allows Koudounaris to make a larger point about the subjectivity of history, including which stories get told and whose point of view and agenda they convey.

“Ostensibly, it’s a feline history book, but it’s also at its heart something more: a challenge to history as being a homo-centric monologue,” Koudounaris says. Underneath Baba’s narratorial sass and charm is “a plea to include other species that have been left out of history,” he adds. “We’re all in this together, and we’re all connected.”

Image via the Smithsonian

McDonald's is not exactly known for gourmet food, but most people will agree that their french fries are pretty good- for the five minutes it takes to eat them before they get cold. But they were once better. The McDonald brothers sold a thousand pounds of fries every day even before Ray Kroc turned their operation into a franchise. So what happened to the those extra-tasty McDonald's fries?

McDonald’s original french fries were cooked in beef tallow. For that fact, they were bullied out of production by a well-funded, well-intentioned businessman and self-proclaimed health advocate named Phil Sokolof, who unknowingly dethroned what many fans claim was the greatest french fry to ever meet mass production. “The french fries were very good,” [Julia] Child said in a 1995 interview, “and then the nutritionists got at them … and they’ve been limp ever since … I’m always very strong about criticizing them, hoping maybe they’ll change.”

Child never lived to see McDonald’s fries return to their former glory, and sadly, and there’s no indication they ever will. That’s why I set out on a quest to find the original recipe.

Luke Fater not only found what he believes to be the original recipe, he also cooked them to see if they were as good as he'd heard. See that and read the history of McDonald's french fries at Atlas Obscura.