For most of us, hiccups are nothing but a minor inconvenience. When we’re suddenly having hiccups, we can always just drink upside down or eat a spoonful of sugar. (It should be noted, however, that these “cures” are unreliable, contrary to popular belief). But for some of us who suffer from hiccups regularly, hiccups are a nightmare. Now there is hope for those people in the form of this specialized straw called HiccAway, which was invented by a neurologist.

… in a newly published research letter in JAMA Network Open, survey results from 249 volunteers around the world indicate that 90 percent of the users think this thing works better than traditional remedies.

The straw has a mouthpiece at one end and a pressure valve at the other, which requires you to suck harder than you would through a normal straw. This pressure causes your diaphragm to contract, stopping the uncontrollable influxes of air which rhythmically slam your vocal cords shut and cause the classic sound of a hiccup. 

All that's required to stop these 'burps of the throat' is to submerge HiccAway in half a glass of water and begin sucking. Those who have used the device say it takes as few as one or two attempts for the hiccups to fade.

The Kickstarter product is currently patent-pending.

Learn more about this device over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: HiccAway)

Talk about a serendipitous discovery! A ‘miniature Pompeii’ was randomly discovered by construction workers during renovations of an abandoned cinema in Verona, Italy. The buried ruins contained charred wooden furniture and the collapsed remains of a ceiling. Experts theorize that the site was probably abandoned after a fire: 

The ancient site was probably abandoned after a fire, but “the environment was preserved intact, with the magnificent colors of the frescoed walls dating back to the second century,” Superintendency of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Verona, Rovigo, and Vicenza said in a statement, noting that the newly discovered artwork “evokes a miniature Pompeii.”

The modern-day building, the former Astra cinema, has been closed for 20 years, with construction first turning up signs of the lost Roman structure back in 2005.

image credit: Superintendency of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Verona, Rovigo, and Vicenza. 

There are existing applications that turn a photo into a video. From Photoshop, to Premiere Pro, to After Effects, there are also plugins and other predictive algorithms that can do this task. This new algorithm however, aims to be the better version of the current applications for turning a photo to a video. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a deep learning method that only needs a single photo to make a believable video, as DIY Photography details:  

Aleksander Hołyński explains that turning a photo into a video requires the algorithm to predict the future. “And in the real world, there are nearly infinite possibilities of what might happen next,” he adds. So, he and his team trained a neural network with thousands of videos of waterfalls, rivers, oceans, and other material with fluid motion. They would first ask the network to predict the motion of a video only by the first frame. Then, it would compare its prediction with the actual video, which helped it learn to identify clues that tell it what was going to happen next (such as ripples in a stream, for example).

The researchers tried to use “splatting,” a technique that moves each pixel according to its predicted motion. However, it posed another set of challenges. “Think about a flowing waterfall,” Hołyński told UW News. “If you just move the pixels down the waterfall, after a few frames of the video, you’ll have no pixels at the top!” So they had to come up with a solution for this, and they called it “symmetric splatting.” It doesn’t only predict the future, but also “the past” of an image, creating a seamless animation.

image credit: Sarah McQuate/University of Washington

Rémy Vicarini has an intense bond with his cat Cathode. As he explains their life together, things get more and more bizarre, but you'll enjoy every minute. See more of Cathode at YouTube and Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake

Set and scene designers for Star Trek couldn't invent everything that appeared on the show. So they selected real-life everyday objects from our time that would fit into their image of the future. In this case, Captain Janeway's office chair is a Signét 8400 Chair by HÅG, which is Norwegian design firm.

I found this information on Star Trek + Design, a website created by a Trekkie with time on his hands during the pandemic. The author, Eno, has carefully researched many of the objects, such as furniture and tableware, that appear in the Star Trek franchise.

-via Kottke

Parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction in which an egg can grow and develop into an embryo without being fertilized by sperm. This kind of reproduction keeps the gene pool undiluted, and it doesn’t waste both energy and time on mating. There are also disadvantages in parthenogenesis. The first is the loss of genetic diversity, which helps in the survival of a species, especially in changing environments. The second disadvantage is recombination of genetic materials, which can result in birth defects or non-productive eggs.

Researchers have found workers of a species of honeybee in South Africa that produce asexually via parthenogenesis. Even more amazing is the fact that these honeybees seem to have found a way to avoid recombinations, which make their offspring nearly identical to themselves.

More testing showed that one line of worker bees in the hive had been cloning themselves for approximately 30 years—a clear sign that workers in the hive were not suffering from birth defects or an inability to produce viable offspring.

Cool!

(Image Credit: PollyDot/ Pixabay)

For the third anniversary of their song "Youngblood," Michael Clifford, the lead guitarist of the band 5 Seconds of Summer, contacted Seth Everman and asked him if he wanted to do something with them. Together with the whole band, Seth recreated the chorus of the song, but with stuff that you can’t even imagine being used as percussion instruments.

(Image Credit: SethEverman/ YouTube)

This is a brain tissue sample from a 45-year-old woman undergoing surgery for epilepsy. The sample, which was smaller than a sesame seed, is about a millionth of an entire brain’s volume. The sample was preserved, and then stained with heavy metals, which revealed the cellular structures.

Computational programs stitched the resulting images back together and artificial intelligence programs helped scientists analyze them. A short description of the resulting view was published as a preprint May 30 to bioRxiv.org. The full dataset is freely available online.

Charting the varied shapes of some 50,000 cells and the 130 million connections between them, neuroscientist Clay Reid describes the image as “absolutely beautiful.”

“In the best possible way, it’s the beginning of something very exciting.”

More about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Lichtman Lab/ Harvard University/ Connectomics Team/ Google)

After expending massive manpower and resources into developing a nuclear bomb to end World War II, the US was pretty proud of the scientific breakthrough. But once the war was over, what could we do with this amazing ability besides killing people and flattening cities? The sunk cost was way too much to abandon. So how could we harness nuclear energy for something good?

What has to be the most spectacularly violent infrastructure proposal in American history came out of the federal government's Project Plowshare, conceived in 1951 as a way of, well, "beating atomic arms into plowshares." It was our exploration of constructive uses for nuclear weaponry. Bombs detonated underground, officials theorized, could make for cheap ways of moving large volumes of earth—be it for mining, hollowing out caverns to store natural gas, or prepping for other kinds of infrastructure. Dams and reservoirs could be created with single bombs, while dozens-long chains of detonations could carve new canals or even entire harbors.

Project Plowshare was running alongside another massive federal effort in the 1950s and '60s: the birth and rapid expansion of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System. Really, it was a matter of time before the those twin ambitious would collide. And collide they did, in a rugged stretch of the Bristol Mountains in southeast California through which highway planners hoped to route the yet-to-be-completed I-40 as one of America's major east-west corridors and a replacement for dinky old Route 66.

It sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but progress often takes dead end turns along the way. Read the story of the nuclear highway project called Carryall at The Drive. -via Damn Interesting

Ah, well, not to put spoilers on this article, but this AI believing it's a god is reminiscent of the main conflict of a particular Persona game (no I will not elaborate on which it is).  Lab technician Travis DeShazo has created a bot that was trained to generate pseudo-biblical verses. The AI, called GPT-2 Religion A.I., learns from its massive inventory of religious training texts and churns out new bible-esque verses. The results from the AI is posted on the Twitter account for the AI: 

The results are fairly convincing, too, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. “Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god of wisdom,” reads one message, posted on the @gods_txt Twitter feed for GPT-2 Religion A.I. “This is the knowledge of divinity that I, the Supreme Being, impart to you. When a man learns this, he attains what the rest of mankind has not, and becomes a true god. Obedience to Me! Obey!”

Another message, this time important enough to be pinned to the top of the timeline, proclaims: “My sayings are a remedy for all your biological ills. Go out of this place and meditate. Perhaps some day your blood will be warm and your bones will grow strong.”

Image courtesy of Travis DeShazo 

At some point imitation pieces were sure to appear. This doesn’t come as a surprise. With Crocs rising to be the new trendy shoe, copycat versions of the rubber shoes are now all over the market. The company, of course, filed a 175-page complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission to fight against the fakes, as Input magazine details: 

Although Crocs have been around for years, the shoe’s recent popularity explains why other brands might be seeking to make a profit off the chunky silhouette. Collaborations with Post Malone, Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber, Diplo, and even Balenciaga have marketed the rubber clogs to nearly every consumer available — and have done so successfully, selling out drops in minutes and leading Crocs’ share price to an all-time high. According to TFL, the hype surrounding Croc’s offerings is so great that the brand alleges that “the Classic Clog garnered nearly 25 billion observed media impressions in 2020, alone.” Now is the perfect time to cash in on the growing demand for the clog, if court cases allow.

[...]

As a result, Crocs claims its shoes, including its “CROCS” word mark, “the three-dimensional configuration of the outside of an upper of a shoe, the textured strip on the heel of the shoe, [and] the decorative band along the length of the heel strap,” are all distinctive enough to be recognized as belonging to the brand, TFL writes. And in a not so humble note, Crocs also claims that there are already an “infinite number” of footwear styles similar to its rubber clogs — so much so that the copycat market “requires constant attention,” and as a result, “each year, customs and other enforcement officials around the world seize hundreds of thousands of shoes that improperly bear” Croc’s trademarks.

Image courtesy of Crocs 

Meet Marty and Doc, the main characters of the Back to the Future franchise, reimagined as rubber duckie figures by Numskull Designs. The TUBBZ duck collectibles have four figures: Marty with a video camera and the other in his radiation suit. The other two are Doc figures, one with his brain wave analyzer, and the other with the remote control.

Fingers crossed they continue the series with Back to the Future II characters as well.

Cute!

(Image Credit: UCS LLC/ Numskull/ Technabob)

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have created a material that could be an alternative to single-use plastics that are used in today’s households. The material, a polymer film, mimics the properties of spider silk, one of the strongest materials in nature.

The material was created using a new approach for assembling plant proteins into materials which mimic silk on a molecular level. The energy-efficient method, which uses sustainable ingredients, results in a plastic-like free-standing film, which can be made at industrial scale. Non-fading 'structural' colour can be added to the polymer, and it can also be used to make water-resistant coatings.

The material is home compostable, whereas other types of bioplastics require industrial composting facilities to degrade. In addition, the Cambridge-developed material requires no chemical modifications to its natural building blocks, so that it can safely degrade in most natural environments.

The new product will be commercialised by Xampla, a University of Cambridge spin-out company developing replacements for single-use plastic and microplastics. The company will introduce a range of single-use sachets and capsules later this year, which can replace the plastic used in everyday products like dishwasher tablets and laundry detergent capsules. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

This is a great scientific achievement, but I hope that its price will be reasonable when it is finally released in the market.

More details about the research over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Xampla/ EurekAlert)

What is this spirit which appears in the fog? Is it approaching you? No, it's just an unusual meteorological phenomenon called a Brocken Spectre. Les Crowley explains at Atmosphere Optics that the image is the viewer's own shadow cast on the mist:

The Brocken Spectre appears when a low sun is behind a climber who is looking downwards into mist from a ridge or peak. The "spectre" is the shadowy figure - the glow and rings are of course a glory centered directly opposite the sun at the antisolar point. But how is the ghostly figure produced? It is no more than the shadow of the climber projected forward through the mist. All shadows converge towards the antisolar point where the glory also shines. The sometimes odd triangular shape is a perspective effect. The Brocken Spectre is a similar effect to anti-crepuscular rays and cloud shadows.

-via Super Punch | Photo: P. Leedell

While you're not likely to study the history of toilets in school, the story of what we don't normally talk about logically follows what we already know about historical eras. Public sanitation systems were sophisticated (if weird) during the Roman Empire, but were lost during the Dark Ages. Later developments led to better hygiene, but only for communities that could afford it, leading to global inequalities that continue today. By the way, this TED-Ed video shows cartoon defecation, in case that bothers you.