This is the GyroJogger. The first hands free way to watch your shows while on a run. pic.twitter.com/6v2kvIJaZT
— Unnecessary Inventions (@mattyxb) July 1, 2021
Matt Benedetto, the genius behind Unnecessary Inventions, calls his new device the GyroJogger. This 3D printed head-mounted bracket solves the challenge of watching videos while running. The heads-up display provides a gyroscopically-mounted holder for a cellphone while ensuring that the user is still looking up and forwards.
Beaches in South California might look beautiful at first glance, but a dull landscape full of mud covers the continental shelf a few miles beyond these beaches. The culprits behind the wasteland are cows, according to paleontologist Susan Kidwell. Kidwell and fellow researcher Adam Tomašových stumbled on a lost ecosystem that is absent from the mud-coated shelf today:
Kidwell and Tomašových were perplexed by the stark difference between the shelf’s past and present ecosystem. In a 2017 study, they dated nearly 200 of the fossilized brachiopod shells to reconstruct the demise of these filter-feeders. They predicted this ancient ecosystem gradually declined over thousands of years as California’s sea levels fluctuated. However, the shells told a different story. The population of brachiopods had thrived on the shelf for some 4,000 years before suddenly crashing 150 years ago. “We were completely blown away when we got the results,” Kidwell says. “They survived into the present day only to disappear.”
Then the lightbulb went off for Kidwell. “The only thing it could have been was cows,” she says. According to her research, the arrival of livestock with Spanish missionaries in the 1770s represented the biggest change to Southern California’s coastal ecosystem prior to urbanization. Left to roam free, cattle and horse populations exploded like microbes across a petri dish. By the mid-19th century, the legions of livestock were compacting the soil as they overgrazed native vegetation. Coupled with a general lack of knowledge about soil conservation and Southern California’s semi-arid climate, where dry periods are punctuated by heavy rains that maximize runoff, the conditions led to what Kidwell calls a “perfect storm” for enormous amounts of sediment washing into the ocean.
Image credit:docentjoyce, CC BY 2.0/flickr
Meet the golden snub-nosed monkey, a now endangered species home to the mountainous forests of southwester China. Sadly, only 15,000 of the species remain. Thanks to deforestation and hunters taking their pelts for profits, their population has dwindled over the last 40 years. These monkeys exhibit unique characteristics:
Among primates, golden snub-nosed monkeys exhibit some of the most unique behavioral characteristics. They are known to make 18 varying kinds of vocalizations, from joy and amazement to warnings and alarm. And females have even been known to nurse the young of others.
Moreover, their endangerment threatens a delicate ecosystem — their diet and resulting seed dispersal revitalizes the very forests where they live.
Now, experts estimate only 8,000 to 15,000 remain in the wild. Learn more about these remarkable creatures.
Image credit: Flickr/su neko
White Motorcycle Concepts’ new WMC250EV (now that’s quite a mouthful) is now giving other speedy motorcycles a run for their money. The new hydraulically hub-steered electric motorcycle is claimed to be capable of more than 250 mph (402 km/h). The motorcycle has been specifically designed around Rob White, who has worked on numerous Formula One, Le Mans Prototype, V8 supercar and World Endurance Championship race teams over the last 25-odd years:
Going super fast ends up being much more about aerodynamics than horsepower; the air becomes a ferocious adversary as you move past two or three times highway speed. Motorcycles are aerodynamically ugly without big, streamlined fairings, chiefly because of the big, funny-shaped human on the back.
The WMC250EV has been specifically designed around its rider, none other than Rob White himself. The team laser-scanned White's leather-and-helmet-clad body in an extreme racing crouch, and designed the bike's bodywork such that it matches his personal contours almost to the millimeter.
It's also got a big freakin' hole in it. We've seen plenty of Venturi tunnels on high-end hypercars, but this is the first time we've seen something so extreme attempted on a motorcycle. The entire bike is designed around a cavernous carbon tunnel that punches a huge hole in the bike's frontal aerodynamic profile right where a headlight would normally sit.
WMC has tested this bike, Rob included, at the Horiba MIRA facility near Hinckley, and says the concept reduces drag by an enormous 69 percent compared against "the world leading motorcycle," with a drag coefficient of just 0.118. That's absolutely nuts. Even the mighty SSC Tuatara, currently the world's fastest production car at 282.9 mph (455.3 km/h), can only manage a drag coefficient of 0.279.
Image credit: White Motorcycle Concepts
Voice actor Jay Britton was heartbroken when he heard about the unofficial update to The Witcher 3. The game modder who released the said update, nikich340, apparently trained an AI algorithm to speak new lines of dialogue for the main character of the game (Geralt) and in the voice of his original voice actor, Doug Cockle.
“Yes, AI might be able to replace things but should it?” asked Britton on his tweet. “Replacing actors with AI is not only a legal minefield but an utterly souless choice.”
Some game studios are already embracing voice AI technology. At Obsidian, for instance, algorithmic dialogue doesn’t make the final cut. Instead, the studio uses it to listen to dialogue out loud before taking up an actor’s time, according to Input, not unlike how storyboarding helps set up visual shots.
But the decision to build out an entirely new game mod and use AI to churn out new lines in a real actor’s voice is a notable step further, and it will be interesting to see whether the practice makes its way into mainstream use.
Personally, I believe that there should always be some kind of human touch in this type of work. But what are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: lincerta/ Pixabay)
Located only about 130 light years away is the white dwarf star named ZTF J1901+1458. The star may be only slightly larger than the size of our Moon, but its mass is heavier than the Sun (about 1.35 times), making it the most massive white dwarf star ever discovered. And that’s not all. The said star also seems to be a very special case.
Its dense and mass place it right on the verge of the Chandrasekhar limit - the maximum mass a white dwarf can be before it becomes so unstable that it blows up in a spectacular supernova.
"We caught this very interesting object that wasn't quite massive enough to explode," said theoretical astrophysicist Ilaria Caiazzo of Caltech. "We are truly probing how massive a white dwarf can be."
Up to the Chandrasekhar limit, around 1.4 solar masses, something called electron degeneracy pressure keeps the white dwarf from collapsing further under its own gravity. At a certain pressure level, electrons are stripped from their atomic nuclei - and, because identical electrons can't occupy the same space, these electrons supply the outward pressure that keeps the star from collapsing.
More about this intriguing star over at ScienceAlert.
(Image Credit: Giuseppe Parisi)
The 1940s was a rough time for China. It is said that during that decade, over 30 million cases of malaria were reported every year in the country. A lot of people probably died during this time.
The 1950s saw a determined China, however. During these years, health authorities provided preventive antimalarial medicines for the people in order to prevent the spread of malaria, while those who caught the disease were given treatment. This was the start of China’s quest to eliminate malaria in their country.
By the end of 1990, the number of malaria cases in China had plummeted to 117 000, and deaths were reduced by 95%. With support from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, beginning in 2003, China stepped up training, staffing, laboratory equipment, medicines and mosquito control, an effort that led to a further reduction in cases; within 10 years, the number of cases had fallen to about 5000 annually.
In 2020, after reporting 4 consecutive years of zero indigenous cases, China applied for an official WHO certification of malaria elimination. Members of the independent Malaria Elimination Certification Panel travelled to China in May 2021 to verify the country’s malaria-free status as well as its programme to prevent re-establishment of the disease.
The World Health Organization has recently awarded China the malaria-free certification. After 70 years of blood, sweat, and tears, China has finally rid itself of malaria.
Find out more about this exciting news over at the World Health Organization.
(Image Credit: NIAID/ Wikimedia Commons)
Talk about giving your all for journalism! At a track meet in China, a student cameraman from Datong University ran alongside the 100-meter sprint to get the perfect video.
Despite holding the camera rig (which reportedly weighed over 8.8lbs/4kg), not being appropriately dressed for a sprint, and continually looking over his shoulder, the videographer was apparently able to keep pace with the runners, maintain the gap, and cross the finish line first.
You may think you've seen this happen before, as it was the point of a humorous old Powerade ad. -via Bits and Pieces
You don’t need to really know the context of this snippet from the end of the webseries Critical Role’s second campaign. Just watch as voice actor and the campaign’s current dungeon master, Matthew Mercer, scare the living shit out of his fellow DnD players with his voice. Before you claim that's an edit, it’s not, he actually performed it live. It’s just amazing that he did it without any post-processing help at all!
This adorable photo looks like it was straight from a Disney film. It’s not, it was taken in real life! Johnny Kääpä earned the trust of some squirrels who approached his camera and pose for some good photos. The Swedish photographer spent years befriending red squirrels to capture their candid moments, as My Modern Met details:
Taken throughout the seasons, Kääpä’s photos reveal the intimate lives of squirrels all-year-round. From foraging nuts to climbing trees, these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed squirrels are certainly busy. However, they have plenty of time for play, too. Kääpä’s photos show how inquisitive they are when it comes to his camera. They come right up and peer straight into his lens, resulting in brilliant portraits that capture their expressive faces in detail.
Squirrels are also extremely agile creatures, and love to jump around between the trees. One of Kääpä’s images in particular captures this characteristic in the most hilarious way. Titled Super Hero, the image shows a squirrel who looks like it just made a landing akin to Superman. The worthy snapshot was one of the finalists in The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, and is sure to bring a smile to your face. In fact, that’s exactly what Kääpä hopes for. He told My Modern Met, “I have a bit of a following on social media and I once calculated that if I make my follower smile for just one second, it's a smile that lasts for three hours, every day.”
Image credit: Johnny Kääpä
Our understanding of history is shaped by our perspective. Our world history classes are often limited to the history of Western civilization, in which the narrative is centered in Europe. But there were plenty of other civilizations with their own perspectives. When Verena Krebs researched the relationship between Europe and Ethiopia in the medieval era, she found a perspective that changed the entire focus of the book she was writing. Ethiopia was an early adopter of Christianity, and by the 15th century had formed a Christian empire in East Africa.
The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged trans-regional connections. They “discovered” the kingdoms of late medieval Europe, not the other way around. It was the Africans who, in the early-15th century, sent ambassadors out into strange and distant lands. They sought curiosities and sacred relics from foreign leaders that could serve as symbols of prestige and greatness. Their emissaries descended onto a territory that they saw as more or less a uniform “other,” even if locals knew it to be a diverse land of many peoples. At the beginning of the so-called Age of Exploration, a narrative that paints European rulers as heroes for sending out their ships to foreign lands, Krebs has found evidence that the kings of Ethiopia were sponsoring their own missions of diplomacy, faith and commerce.
Just as Europe saw Africa as an exotic monolith to be explored and exploited, the kings of Ethiopia regarded Europe as an interesting but less-civilized region of relatively new Christians and possible trading partners. Read about how Krebs' book flips the script on medieval relations between continents at Smithsonian.
We Texans know how to respond to bad weather: with a smile and alcohol. On April 28 of this year, there was a hailstorm outside of San Antonio. The National Weather Service has confirmed that this hailstone, which measures 6.4 inches across, is officially the largest hailstone in Texas history.
That's officially the largest hailstone.
But it's probably not the biggest. Residents of the town of Hondo claim to have found a hailstone from the same storm measuring 6.57 inches across. They could have waited for the National Weather Service to measure and verify their claim. But, the San Antonio Express-News reports, the owners broke up the ice to make margaritas.
-via Super Punch | Photo: National Weather Service
"This was the era of the gangster, the bootlegger, the racketeer. Prohibition and a thirst for illicit alcohol were allowing organized crime groups to flourish." https://t.co/5QHEQrpfcX
— Narratively (@Narratively) July 1, 2021
The Duffy brothers, Tommy and Joe, made a living through armed robbery in the Roaring Twenties. After serving a few years in prison, they were deported to Scotland in 1930. The brothers wanted to make enough money to get back to the US, but honest work was hard and not at all lucrative. So they decided to rob a bank.
For the Duffys, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England, must have represented an even more appetizing target. It was more compact and less hectic than London, with fewer police officers — none of them armed with anything more than a truncheon. Importantly, the town was situated on the main road and rail routes between the brothers’ primary haunts of London and Edinburgh. The Cattle Market branch of Lloyds Bank seemed particularly vulnerable. It was small but busy. Late on a Friday afternoon, it was likely to be piled high with weekly deposits — including takings from Friday’s wholesale meat market. The Duffys planned to march through the front door, terrify the occupants into submission with their guns, and walk out the back door with the cash.
But Newcastle, a medieval walled city, had a long history of fending off aggressors, from marauding Viking raiders to invading Scottish armies. Proud of its relentless production of coal, ships and Newcastle Brown Ale, neglected by the government and disregarded by the rest of the country, this was a tough-as-nails city that was used to looking after itself. Its residents — known as Geordies — spoke in a dialect that was mostly impenetrable to outsiders. They were fiercely protective of their community. By 1933, the global depression was biting the city hard. Times were tough, and every penny was wrought from sweat and blood. The people of Newcastle would not give up their hard-earned money without a fight.
The Duffy brothers soon found out that robbing a bank in Newcastle was nothing at all like a typical American bank robbery of the 1920s. It was more like those movies where everything that can possibly go wrong happens, which you can read about at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting
Karma is a ցӀìէçհ pic.twitter.com/0G20aDezO8
— Silent Rocco (@silentrocco) June 17, 2021
Silent Rocco is a master mime artist. Watch his videos to see astonishingly precise displays of physical movement that appear to defy gravity and reality. This video, which Rocco posted on reddit, demonstrates how he can perfectly balance himself so that unreal objects appear to become tangible.
Some of us start to grow gray hair in our 30s, while there are others who begin some years earlier than that. Why is that the case? Aside from natural aging and genetics, there is also another factor that seems to play a role in the graying of hair: psychological stress. According to research, stress may accelerate the hair’s aging process.
But can the graying process of the hair be reversed? This recent study shows that it can, and similar to stress, relaxation plays a role in this reversal.
This analysis revealed that the times when graying or reversal occurred corresponded to periods of significant stress or relaxation. In one individual, a 35-year-old man with auburn hair, five strands of hair underwent graying reversal during the same time span, which coincided with a two-week vacation. Another subject, a 30-year-old woman with black hair, had one strand that contained a white segment that corresponded to two months during which she underwent marital separation and relocation—her highest-stress period in the year.
More about this fascinating study over at Scientific American.
(Image Credit: Renee Olmsted Photography/ Pixabay)
