Namaqualand is an area that extends 600 miles along South Africa's western coast. It is a protected area, home to myriad species of flowers that draw visitors from around the world, despite the fact that there are no tourist accommodations. These flowers have evolved in unique ways because Namaqualand is quite arid, classified as a semidesert!  

There are more bulb flora here than in any other arid region on earth.  Over three and a half thousand plant species live here and it is thought that more than a thousand of those are found nowhere else on the planet. Little wonder that the insect life goes in to something of a breeding frenzy during the time of the daisies.

It certainly does not happen every year. The rains must not only fall but fall in the right way.  Soaking winter rains in early May and June are vital.  This must then be followed up with plenty of showers, at least one each week, through July and August. It is in the later part of that month that the explosion of life happens.

Namaqualand is in the Southern Hemisphere, so late August is at the end of winter. See more gorgeous photographs of the rare yet abundant blooms of Namaqualand at Kuriositas. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Flickr user Malcolm Manners)

Highway 65 in Minnesota has a ditch with its own ducks. These aren't the kinds of ducks that come and go, though. They are decoys, in a rainbow of colors. Is it a joke, an art installation, a local tradition, or a crowdsourced project? It's kind of all the above. The story of how they came to be there is pretty neat. These ducks even have their own Facebook page. -via TYWKIWDBI

As the US did, Canada also forced people of Japanese ancestry away from the west coast and put them in internment camps during World War II. These camps were isolated in the forests of British Columbia, where supply lines were few and unreliable, and the food rations were meager. Inmates in the know turned to a reliable plant called fuki, or Japanese butterbur. It wasn't easy to get, but once established, it's hard to kill.    

During the Second World War, it became crucial: In 1942, racist federal policies dispossessed thousands of Japanese Canadians of their homes, boats, and property and forced them into remote internment camps. Fuki seeds and roots were one of the few items sympathetic—and usually white—former neighbors could mail or deliver to the camps without government interception.

“A lot of [interned] Japanese Canadians wrote back to their [former] white neighbors and asked them: ‘Would you do us a huge favor and send fuki roots or fuki seeds?’ And neighbors or friends would [then] either drive up or ship out the fuki seeds,” says Ryan Ellan, curator at the Tashme Museum in Sunshine Valley, roughly 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) southeast of Hope, B.C., at the site of the former Tashme Internment Camp.

Almost 80 years later, the camps have crumbled, but fuki remains -and still grows as a testament to the history of the camps. The existence of the plant led to the founding of the Tashme Museum. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.

In 1492, the people of Spain completed La Reconquista--the seven centuries-long war of liberation of their land. This highly militarized society then launched wars of conquest in far away lands helpfully discovered by Christopher Columbus later that year. Within a century, Spain was a superpower with vast colonies across the world.

Now, what remains of the Spanish Empire is a few small islands and exclaves off the coast of north Africa. Pictured above is one of them: Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera. An international border between Spain and Morocco lies on the 250-foot sandy stretch of land between the rocky peninsula and the mainland.

-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Ignacio Gavira

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— Lau (@lauravieitez) June 17, 2021

The Foo Fighters have been dabbling in disco, and will release an album called Hail Satin that pays tribute to the Bee Gees. The band's name for this project is the Dee Gees, as in Dave Grohl's initials.

Hail Satin will see the Foos take on the Gibb brothers' 1970s disco classics Night Fever, Tragedy, You Should Be Dancing and More Than a Woman.

It will be released on vinyl for US Record Store Day on 17 July.

Side one of the LP will also include their version of Andy Gibb's Shadow Dancing, which spent seven weeks at number one in the US in 1978.

Side two will feature five live versions of songs from their last album Medicine at Midnight.

Read more of how the Foo Fighters have embraced disco music at BBC. -via reddit

The SCAN-MED corridor runs the length of Europe, mostly in straight lines except for a sticky issue of getting traffic over the Alps. Trains must go slowly due to the inclines and necessary hairpin curves that accommodate those inclines. To save time, a lot of cargo is shipped by truck, which causes traffic jams along highway inclines and hairpins. But a 20-year project called the Brenner Base Tunnel is taking shape underneath the mountains. The tunnel will be 64 kilometers long when it's finished in 2028, and will cut travel time significantly. Watch the video to get an idea of how massive this project is, or read a transcript at The B1M. -via Laughing Squid

Welcome to “The Google Store Chelsea”. It is the first-ever permanent retail store from the tech company, and it just opened on June 17. Here, you can buy stuff that you would normally order at the online Google Store, such as Pixel phones, Google TVs, and Stadia controllers. And if you think that it’s just an “offline version of Google Store”, then you are mistaken.

Google also notes that it will "have experts on hand to help visitors get the most out of their device, such as troubleshooting an issue, fixing a cracked Pixel screen, or helping with installations."

"Sandbox" areas for Pixel, Stadia, and Nest will pitch customers on the benefits of each product line. The Pixel area shows off the phone's camera technology with various lighting effects; the Stadia area is one of the only places the public can actually try the game streaming service; and the Nest section is a big living room full of smart home devices. A "workshop" space will host regular events and lessons. There's also a rotating exhibit called the "Google Imagination Space," a "17-foot-tall circular glass structure" that surrounds a visitor with several vertical screens. Right now, it's pitching Google Translate, and visitors can "experience real-time translation of your speech into 24 languages simultaneously and then learn how this all happens on the back end using several Google technologies."

The Google Store Chelsea is located at Google’s New York city campus.

Learn more over at Ars Technica.

This looks gorgeous!

(Image Credit: Google/ Ars Technica)

Digital audio sampling and virtual instruments have improved so much over the years that we’re now at a point where we can’t tell if the sound of an instrument is virtual or real. The piano, the drums, and the bass are some of the instruments affected by the current reality in the music world. The question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it depends on the person.

In this video, Davie504 reveals to us iconic song basslines that, apparently, were not really played on bass.

(Image Credit: egonkling/ Pixabay)

It is already established that killer whales are intelligent beings, and they have attributes common to us human beings, such as traveling with family groups and taking care of grandchildren after menopause. They can even imitate human speech. But their intelligence does not end there. Marine biologists recently discovered that they are able to form strong and fast friendships with other killer whales. It seems that they also have the concept of a best friend.

[The] new study suggests the whales rival chimpanzees, macaques, and even humans when it comes to the kinds of “social touching” that indicates strong bonds.

The study marks “a very important contribution to the field” of social behavior in dolphins and whales, says José Zamorano-Abramson, a comparative psychologist at the Complutense University of Madrid who wasn’t involved in the work. “These new images show lots of touching of many different types, probably related to different kinds of emotions, much like the complex social dynamics we see in great apes.”

… the researchers recorded more than 800 instances of physical contact between individuals, they report this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Those included slippery hugs, back-to-back and nose-to-nose rubs, and “flipper slaps” between pairs of whales, all dispersed around bouts of leaping out of the water in perfect synchrony. Other whales playfully tossed calves into the air, letting them splash back into the water next to them.

Learn more about this study at Science Magazine.

Wholesome!

(Image Credit: NOAA/ Wikimedia Commons)

In a town of 1200 people, you can guess that everyone knows almost everyone else, and their lives are quite interconnected. However, when someone in the town of Lonaconing, Maryland, bought a lottery ticket worth $731 million, they decided to keep the news to themself. See, Maryland is one of the few states where a lottery winner can choose to remain anonymous, but the store where the ticket was sold is known. Determining the identity of the winner(s) has become the town's main activity.

Gold diggers poured into town. People showed up from Georgia and Ohio and Arkansas, asking for a piece of the prize to care for an ailing relative, or to save their struggling farm, or to pay for that European trip they’ve yearned to take.

A woman in Georgia wrote to the owner of Coney Market asking him to buy her a couple of chain saws for her farm. Another supplicant wanted a piece of the lottery winnings to get her driveway paved.

“They say, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get,’ ” said the guy being asked, Richard Ravenscroft, who owns the market. “People don’t know the winner’s name. I’m the person whose name they do know, so they ask me.”

People from thousands of miles away have sent money in envelopes asking the market staff to send them lottery tickets from the lucky shop. (Lottery sales at the market, usually a modest $4,000 a week, briefly soared, then returned to earth, Ravenscroft said.)

Lonaconing itself, with a 24% poverty rate, would also like to ask for a donation. The winners, said to be a group called the Power Pack, claimed the award in May and since then are laying low. Read how a windfall turned the community upside-down at US News. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Tony Webster)

When you think of polar bears, you think of Canada, Greenland, or other Arctic locales. But then we must remember Knut, the polar bear born at the Berlin Zoo in 2006 that became an internet sensation. It wasn't the first time that Germany went wild for polar bears.

As the story goes, some time in the early 1920s, two (actual) polar bears arrived at the Berlin Zoo and became the talk of the town. Families came from all over the country to see the bears and to get their pictures taken with the zoo’s mascots (a couple of guys in costumes who stood outside the gates to welcome tourists). The trend took off from there and gave rise to a nationwide phenomenon which lasted until the 1970s, spanning a whole period from pre-war to to post-war Germany. It’s safe to say that vacation photo albums of the era just weren’t complete without a snap with a fake polar bear.

French collector Jean-Marie Donat has procured thousands of pictures of these polar bear characters since 1980. They were published in a limited-edition book called TeddyBär, which is sold out, but you can see a sampling of the images that illustrate the odd German craze at Messy Nessy Chic.

Finland's allegiance in the second world war was complicated, as they fought for both sides at one time or another, mainly because they opposed the incursions of the Soviet Union. During the time they were allied with the Nazis, a Finnish soldier named Aimo Koivunen was on ski patrol with his unit when they were attacked by Soviets. They escaped, and led the Red Army unit on a ski chase.

The patrol had been equipped with a stockpile of methamphetamine pills to keep their energy up in the heat of battle. Ironically, Koivunen had always strongly disapproved of these drugs, which was why he was considered trustworthy enough to carry the whole stash. Now, with his life on the line, he reached for the meth. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to get a lone pill out of the bottle with his clumsy winter mittens. And taking them off would have slowed him down, plus made his fingers cold. So he just dumped out the entire bottle and swallowed all 30 pills. Which was supposed to be enough to last an entire patrol for weeks. And that's when things got weird.

Weird indeed. Koivunen skied ahead so fast that he was separated from his unit and became lost. Over the next couple of weeks he suffered delusions, injuries, starvation, and the kind of bad luck you'd recognize from a Looney Tunes short. Yet remarkably, he survived it all. Read Koivunen's story told in the colorful hyperbolic language of Cracked.

(Image credit: Komischn)

In the ancient industrial zone of Yavneh, Israel, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) stumbled across an extremely rare object: a 1,000-year-old chicken egg, which lay on the cesspit of the ancient city’s industrial zone, untouched and undisturbed.

“We were astonished to find it,” IAA archaeologist Alla Nagorsky told the [Haaretz] newspaper. “From time to time we find fragments of eggshells, but a whole egg is extraordinary.”

Even more surprising, the egg did not decay or rot, as it was encased in soft waste.

Unfortunately, the said archaeologists accidentally broke the egg in the lab. Nagorsky, however, comforted the world, saying that the egg had to be broken at some point anyway. Fortunately, some yolk remained in the shell and that yolk “is now being tested for DNA.”

Despite the accidental lab omelet, the archeologists are excited by the astonishing find.

(Image Credit: Yoli Schwartz/ Israel Antiquities Authority/ Haaretz)

The Dendrohyrax interfluvialis is a new species of a tree hyrax. Recently announced by scientists this week, it was actually initially discovered in 2009 by researchers in Nigeria. The researchers noticed a bark-like call in the night, and they discovered the species. But why did it take years to fully confirm its existence? It turns out that when it comes to an elusive, nocturnal, forest-dwelling animal in a remote region the process would not be easy. Check the video above to learn more! 

(via Mashable)

It’s less of an official game and more of a fan-made crossover. Meet Yong Yi Lee, an artist who has worked with major gaming studies such as Ubisoft and Treyarch. Yi Lee has published his take on what Sesame Street characters would look like in the world of Bloodborne, and the results are, frankly, horrifying. Creative, yes- but it shatters the nostalgic image of these fluffy and funny puppets as the artist depicts them as cursed monsters with a lot of sharp teeth. Scary, but great art! 

image credit: Yong Yi Lee