An international team of geologists have found a geological secret under Iceland. Meet ‘Icelandia,’ a sunken continent hidden underneath the country and the surrounding ocean. Scientists now believe that the sunken land mass covers an area ~600,000 km2 . The discovery challenges scientific ideas about the extent of continental crusts in the North Atlantic region, as Phys Org details:

Speaking about the new theory, Professor Foulger said, "Until now Iceland has puzzled geologists, as existing theories that it is built of and surrounded by oceanic crust are not supported by multiplegeological data. For example, the crust under Iceland is over 40 km thick—seven times thicker than normal oceanic crust. This simply could not be explained.

"However, when we considered the possibility that this thick crust is continental, our data suddenly all made sense. This led us immediately to realize that the continental region was much bigger than Iceland itself—there is a hidden continent right there under the sea.

"There is fantastic work to be done to prove the existence of Icelandia but it also opens up a completely new view of our geological understanding of the world. Something similar could be happening at many more places.

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This website has some cool noise machines you can tinker with.

Take your dreams of building an island getaway to a board game! Bear with me, I know that statement doesn’t make sense at first, but hear me out: Animal Crossing Monopoly. Thanks to photos initially shared by reddit user calysunflower, we now know that a Monopoly game has been made inspired by Animal Crossing: New Horizons! The board game will be released in August 2021, and can be preordered here. 

Image credit: calysunflower

This is an interesting story. However, it happened twenty years ago, and there is apparently no video footage from the actual incident -just still photos. So they pulled up a bunch of stock footage of "leopards" and ended up with mostly cheetahs, at least one ocelot, and possibly a margay. Just so we're clear, cheetahs live in Africa, and ocelots and margays live in the Americas. The producers assumed we wouldn't know the difference. Also, there are quite a few different kinds of cows pictured, many of which do not live in Pakistan. Sure, it's a sweet love story, but would this video have racked up three million views in a week without the cheetahs? -via Digg 

There’s no harm in spending a lot of hours on your favorite gadget, provided that you’re doing it in your free time. However, if you’re casually browsing on your phone during work-- then that’s a different story, especially if you’re a politician. An AI is now out for politician’s necks as they call out political figures who spend time on their phones during parliament sessions. The AI, called The Flemish Scrollers, is a computer program that uses facial recognition to automatically call out politicians in the Flemish province of Belgium:

Launched Monday, Depoorter's system monitors daily livestreams of government meetings on YouTube to assess how long a representative has been looking at their phone versus the meeting in progress. If the AI detects a distracted person, it will publicly identify the party by posting the clip — on Instagram @TheFlemishScrollers, and Twitter @FlemishScroller.

The accused representative will be named and shamed with their social media handles. The bot also politely requests they "pls stay focused!"

According to Depoorter's website, if there is no session in progress, the software will begin analyzing and learning from archived livestreams instead. Whether this means the software will routinely post evidence of past distraction wasn't clear. Depoorter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Image credit: Dries Depoorter 

It's true that an army moves on its stomach, since troops who aren't fed won't be able or willing to fight. While there is plenty to complain about in modern-day MREs and the C-rations that came before, those are luxuries compared to what was fed to soldiers of the American Revolution. The rebels had no government infrastructure behind their supplies, but they did the best they could. At the beginning, the Continental Congress declared how much of different foods each man should be allotted, and Washington ordered that each soldier carry two days worth of provisions. But as the war dragged on, food was harder to come by.  

In situations when rations were scarce, which was more often than not, many Continental Army soldiers had to resort to subsisting on what was known as biscuit, fire cake, or hardtack. This simple flour and water dough was baked into hard, flavorless cakes that were often so dry that soldiers had to soak each bite in water, broth, or tea in order to eat it. If Continental soldiers were lucky, the mixture wouldn’t be absolutely ridden with insects. They often weren’t.

The supply situation got so bad that soldiers were impelled to steal food from civilian settlements. The British had their own problems with food supplies as well. Read about the difficulties of getting enough to eat during the American Revolutionary War at The Drive. -via Fark

(Image credit: National Park Service Digital Image Archives)

Sharks get dandruff? Now that’s something I never knew until today! Smithsonian scientists revealed that a shark’s shedded dermal denticles can protect coral reefs from declining. The denticles are microscopic scales that cover a shark’s body, which protects them from abrasion by hard substances and ectoparasite attachment. Scientists hope that the denticles can be used for innovative reef conservation strategies: 

Just as humans shed dry skin and dandruff, sharks shed their denticles, which accumulate in marine sediments. The oldest denticles found so far, in the Harding Sandstone of Colorado, are about 455 million years old.

STRI paleobiologist, Aaron O’Dea, pieces together clues from fossil- and modern coral reefs to reconstruct baseline conditions before human colonization, and to understand how ecological and evolutionary processes change through time.

“Placoderms in the Paleozoic, and then marine reptiles in the Mesozoic, were larger and ate sharks.” O’Dea explained. “Placoderms ruled the oceans for around 70 million years and marine reptiles of the Mesozoic ruled for more than 100 million years. Sharks are only top predators now because extinction events preferentially took out other groups but allowed sharks to survive. Sharks seem to have remarkable evolutionary resilience and I was fascinated to work on a technique that would help us explore how sharks have fared more recently when humans step into the picture.”

Image credit: STRI

The Phoenician empire thrived as one of the most influential and advanced civilizations in the Mediterranean during ancient times. Phoenician merchants participated in trade by exchanging cedarwood, olive oil, metals, ivory, and Phoenician purple dye, the most coveted of their wares. Also called Tyrian purple, the dye was popular until the days of the Roman empire, symbolising  wealth, abundance, and royalty. The production of the dye took a lot of resources and manpower, as This City Knows details:

Production of fabric in antiquity demanded substantial labor, more so than other crafts. In the case of Phoenician purple, extracting this dye required tens of thousands of sea snails, called Murex initially. The process further demanded an army of laborers. 

The biological pigment was extracted from the snail mucus. It was pretty difficult to acquire, but the end result was various shades of lasting colors that hardly ever fade but instead become brighter with wearing and exposure to elements. 

The Phoenicians were generally secretive about their method of manufacture, however, some ancient sources such as the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder did account for it.

Pliny notes in his first century A.D. book Natural History that two types of sea snails, Murex trunculus and Murex brandaris, were used to extract raw muddy liquid the snails leeched from the mucus glands. The first type was used to make blue-purple dye known as royal blue, while the second gave the more distinctive Tyrian purple.

Image credit: TeKaBe, CC BY-SA 4.0

London’s police boxes are getting a redesign! Details for the new police box design have been unveiled by the government. A competition was launched to find a ‘modern and multifunctional’ replacement of the staple structures of the city. The winning design, called The London Stones, is from architecture and design studio Unknown Works, as Design Week details: 

Each hub will feature digital information screens, “essential” communication technology and space for the storage of life-saving emergency equipment.

Unknown Works’ winning design will also seek to celebrate the aesthetic and cultural heritage of the surrounding city.

Details from “buildings, stories and images of the past, present and future” will be collected and digitally carved into the stone exterior of each hub. The City of London says this will provide “an active and engaging addition to the public realm”.

“Our starting point was the London Stone [a limestone block landmark located on Canon Street], a humble fragment of the City’s past that’s been watching the City grow for thousands of years,” says Unknown Works director and co-founder Theo Games Petrohilos. “It’s mottled skin hums with myth and wonder – something we hope to echo in The London Stones.”

Image credit: Unknown Works

Don’t worry, it’s not literally a land made of Swiss cheese. Within a few weeks, a weird phenomenon has occurred in different villages in north-east Croatia. Sinkholes of varying depths and sizes have popped up suddenly and without warning in the villages of Mečenčani and Borojovići. While an earthquake happened before the appearance of the sinkholes, experts were still baffled as almost 100 sinkholes materialized a month after the earthquake: 

Sinkholes are not the most common consequence of powerful seismic shocks but they do occur, especially in the areas with hidden underground cavities. After the devastating earthquake near the Italian city L'Aquila in 2009, two sinkholes immediately opened on roads in the old part of the city. Experts at the time suspected that a previous excavation of vertical trenches for a sewage conduit weakened the conglomerate roof of the underground cave, contributing to the collapse.

"The real anomaly in Croatia's case is a very high number of sinkholes with significant dimension," says Italian geologist Antonio Santo at University of Naples Federico II.

Image credit: AFP/Getty Images

The new MCU film Black Widow opens in theaters this weekend. This post has nothing to do with the Avengers, but the movie opening is a good excuse to learn something about the real black widow spider. As with many of the earth's creatures, our common knowledge about them turns out to be less than true.

Black widows earned their name because scientists witnessed the females eat their mates after copulation. But research has shown that in a related species, redback spiders, females only cannibalize their mates about two percent of the time, so experts suspect that American black widows have similar rates of cannibalism in the wild.

The widows’ cannibalistic behavior was first observed in the lab, where males had nowhere to run away from their larger, hungrier counterparts. But in the spiders’ natural habitats, males have the opportunity to make an escape.

Male black widows also have strategies to avoid riskier sexual encounters in the first place; for instance, research suggests they can tell whether or not a female is hungry by her pheromones, so they can avoid potential mates who seem a bit peckish.

Learn more about the black widow spider at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Ken Thomas)

Well, hopefully the lynx doesn’t accidentally destroy it, right? Surprisingly enough, when wildlife ecologists conducted a study on a Canada lynx, the mic they used wasn’t smashed into smithereens! Researchers delved deeper into the lives of these elusive predators through safely attaching a small microphone to lynx collars: 

Much to our excitement, these recorders were very effective at capturing the behavior of the lynx: “cats being cats” (grooming, sleeping); social behavior (aggressive interactions, purring, long-distance social calls); and hunting behavior (chases, kills, feeding).

Over the five years of our study in the Yukon’s Kluane region, we collected over 14,000 hours of audio recordings from 26 individual lynx. After using various methods of data processing, we were able to identify kills by Canada lynx with 87 percent accuracy — an impressive feat.

Previously, to know that a single kill had been made often required a full day of intensive snowshoeing and tracking during the short winter days in the Yukon. But by recording multiple lynx, we could collect information 24 hours a day, while we warmed our feet by a wood stove in a rustic cabin.

In addition to audio recorders, we also attached accelerometers — small devices that measure activity over time like you would find in a FitBit. Together with GPS tracking devices, these “biologging technologies” provide unprecedented insight into the complex behaviors of these cats.

Image credit: Zdeněk Macháček (Unsplash) 

Titus Poplawski’s analog photos invoke a sense of nostalgia, longing, and mystery. His photos are full of character, and as The Phoblographer states, ‘his analog photography is some of the best we’ve seen.’ You know what, they’re absolutely right. Looking through his images, from the composition to the colors, these photos make you conjure a story for each of them. Check out the Phoblographer’s full interview with the photographer to learn about him and his works here! 

Image credit: Titus Poplawski 

The Slinky is an amazing toy. It's just a metal spring, but you can do so many things with it! The guy from Action Lab shows us how weird slinkys are when you drop them vertically, thanks to slow-motion video. Someone in the comments compared the slinky's behavior to a Loony Tunes character, recreated in the real world where physics is a thing. -via Digg

Lady with an Ermine is a commissioned portrait that is a classic example of High Renaissance portraiture. The artwork is mostly unheard of or forgotten as it preceded the better-known Mona Lisa. However, Lady with an Ermine is an excellent display of Da Vinci’s fixation with anatomical realism. In addition, Da Vinci uses the ermine as a symbol with meanings related to the subject of the portrait. Check out My Modern Met’s full analysis on the oil painting here! 

Image via wikimedia commons