The UK government's space program began in 1952, and has always emphasized unmanned flight, mainly to launch satellites. But decades earlier, there was a private entity called the British Interplanetary Society that advocated for manned space travel. In the 1940s, they even produced a space suit for intrepid travelers to wear while collecting moon rocks! It looks bonkers, considering what came afterward, but was quite clever for its time. By the way, the British Interplanetary Society is still going strong.
Considering how long our species has been roaming the Earth, one would expect our bodies to be well adapted to the environment. Unfortunately, most of us still come with flaws-- allergies, defects, and the like. Biologists would tell us that there is still more room for improvement, as humanity will continue to evolve in response to pressures in the environment. In Alex Bezzerides' Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (or Don't), he tries to explain why we still experience defects regardless of our long history with evolution:
Our eyes evolved originally in the ocean, where ancestral vertebrates dwelled and needed to see underwater. Around 375 million years ago, when they ventured to land, their eyes were already 100 million years old. Gradually, eyes in this lineage became land-adapted, but these organs have retained fluids and, as a result, never achieved the type of light refraction that would result in consistent sharpness of image on land. Light travels more slowly through water than it does through air, but to our advantage in modern times, even more slowly through glass. "Many of us take advantage of this fact by placing glass in front of our eyes to compensate for the imperfect job our corneas and lenses do in bending the light."
Bezzerides offers nifty evolutionary explanations too for why we can distinguish more shades of green than any other color, and why our night vision is poor. He clarifies that it's not only our evolution that makes for vision troubles today, but also our current behavior. Most of us spend way too much time in spaces that lack natural light. "Children who spend greater chunks of their day outside have a lesser risk of developing myopia than children who spend their days inside," he writes. Kids don't even have to be doing healthy things out there, it turns out, because it's the light and not the activity that makes the difference.
Back trouble, the leading cause of disability globally, is directly traceable to primates' leaving the trees for open areas more than 4 million years ago, Bezzerides notes. The move to the forest floor was "a pressure cooker" that caused human ancestors' center of gravity to shift. For the first time, a primate could balance on only two feet; the human spine is shaped quite differently from that of our ape cousins', with curves that cause a "precarious" structure. For example, "The inward, or lordotic, lumbar curve needs to be far enough inward to place the position of the spine under the head and to get the center of gravity above the hips," Bezzerides writes. Back pain, and even intervertebral disc pain, happens all too readily with slight misalignments.
Image via NPR
Healthy recipes are all over social media. Sometimes, I get pressured to actually try and eat something leafy because of these dishes that float online. Listen, don’t be pressured to make those healthy recipes. They’re nice to look at, and the nutrients and other benefits you can get from them are also nice. But did you know that most Internet users who ‘like’ and ‘share’ these recipes end up cooking fatty dishes? Fast Company has the details:
In this new paper, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the researchers point out that social media could be another powerful tool in this effort to shape dietary behavior because, well, we’re all on it. In the United States, 98 million people are active monthly users of Pinterest, which is equivalent to 18% of the adult population. The platform has become a popular recipe sharing site, with more than 60% of users reporting that they’d made a new recipe that was inspired by something they saw on the site. “There’s tremendous opportunities in social media to influence healthy behavior,” Hong Xue, the lead researcher, said in a statement. “We’re only beginning to understand its potential and pitfalls.”
Last summer, the researchers analyzed food-related content on Pinterest. (They did not collaborate directly with the platform on this project but simply gathered publicly available comments, captions, photos, and videos from the site.) They found that there’s a culture of promoting healthy recipes on Pinterest: Nutritious recipes that were low in calories, sodium, and sugar, and high in vegetables and lean meats tended to be rewarded with repins and likes, which motivated users to share more of this content. But when the researchers tracked engagement—which they measured in terms of comments and photos or videos of meals people actually cooked—the majority opted for recipes with more sugar and fat.
Image via Fast Company
Big Cats is an exhibition by photojournalist Steve Winter that shows another side to the wild cats that roam around different jungles and grasslands. The exhibition, which will be featured in the Siena Awards Festival, aims to raise awareness of the plight of these critically endangered animals. In addition, consider: sleepy big cat photos! Digital Camera World has more details:
From the mountaintops of the Himalayas, through India's jungles and grasslands, to the Rockies of the American West and to South America's Amazonian rivers, Steve Winter's amazing 'Big Cats' photos reveal some of the world's most elusive wild cats in their natural habitat.
Originally starting out as a photojournalist for Black Star Photo Agency, Steve has gone on to produce stories for GEO, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Natural History, BusinessWeek and Scientific American, among other publications. He became a National Geographic photojournalist in 1991 and in 2013 National Geographic published his wildlife photography book Tigers Forever: Saving the World's Most Endangered Cat, co-sponsored by Panthera, the world's leader in Big Cat conservation.
Image via Digital Camera World
自分の居る宿屋の宣伝です。
— ido monta (@IdoMonta) May 10, 2021
日本で3台しかないスキーシミュレーターがあります。（スノボも出来る）
雪欠乏症の皆さんはバーチャル体験で上手になって次シーズン迎えてみませんか？夏遊び、テレワークも出来ます。先日のぴったんこカンカンで役者さんも乗ってましたね。 pic.twitter.com/Sceaaw3ctY
Sora News 24 brings us news of this amazing machine at the Sachinoyu Hotel in the mountains of central Japan. If you want to go snowboarding, you'll need training. That's why the hotel has an advanced snowboarding simulator what whips you around on a tilting snowboard as a screen displays your movements in a virtual environment:
As shown in the above video, the machine can simulate both skiing and snowboarding, and a display provides detailed biomechanical feedback by measuring data such as the angle of the skis/snowboard and the amount of weight the rider is placing on different points. By configuring parameters to simulate different qualities of snow and other conditions, the session can be adjusted to match the user’s skill level, making it a fun and educational experience for beginners and advanced skiers/snowboarders, as well as adults and kids alike.
Oxford researcher Toby Ord has remastered older Apollo mission photos of the Earth, to add to the collection of photographs that showcase the beauty of our planet. Ord’s remaster project started when he found the Saturn photos captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to be wonderful but couldn’t find comparable photographs of Earth, as PetaPixel details:
“It wasn’t that Earth itself was any less beautiful, but that there were no photographs which did justice to that beauty,” Ord writes. “How could this be?”
He discovered that most Earth photos are either taken too close (e.g. from the ISS in low Earth orbit), or with unrealistic computer-aid compositing, or with the wrong cameras (by spacecraft on scientific rather than photographic missions).
The compositions Ord did like were the photographs shot by NASA astronauts on Apollo missions to the Moon.
“To find truly great photographs of the Earth — portraits of our planet — we have to go back to the 1960s and 70s,” Ord says. “The Apollo program, with its nine journeys to the Moon, is the only time humans have ever been beyond low Earth orbit; the only opportunity they have had to take photographs of the whole Earth. They did not waste it.”
Image via PetaPixel
It’s like the lost city of Atlantis! Well, a lost city that finally re-emerged after its disappearance. Unfortunately, no advanced technology or civilization has been found, only remains. After 70 long years, remains of the lost village of Curon have now reappeared in Italy. Initially, the only sign that Curon once existed was a 14th century church spire rising out of the middle of a lake. Now, however, locals around Lago di Resia in South Tyrol, Italy, can see the remains of the submerged city.
Image via Prevention
Bette Nesmith Graham’s story illustrates how business is supposed to work: identify a need, figure out how to fill that need, and profit. However, being a single mother with no high school diploma and no business connections in the 1950s meant doing it the hard way. After her divorce, Bette Nesmith got a job at Texas Bank and Trust, where she was mostly a typist.
Though Graham wasn’t a great typist, she eventually rose to the position of executive secretary — then the highest job available to the bank’s female employees.
At the time, IBM had just come out with a new line of electric typewriters that were faster than previous models and used carbon film ribbons.
But as Graham soon learned, the invention had several downsides:
The sensitive keypad lent itself to more typographical errors.
The carbon ribbons made these errors impossible to erase without leaving smudges all over the paper.
Graham had to find a way to fix her numerous typos. Soon, an idea struck.
Read how Graham invented Liquid Paper, and then manufactured and marketed it herself at the Hustle. -via Nag on the Lake
The color green is usually associated with Mother Nature. This is why we have phrases such as “going green”, which means taking steps that are beneficial for the environment. And when it comes to green things, green tea is something that could come into one’s mind first. With this considered, green tea could be used to encourage people to go green.
Mirume is a new green tea cafe and shop that opened this month in Nagoya. The cafe has in-store offerings but what makes them unique is their morning bottle (朝ボトル) service. For 300 yen, you get a cold-brewed bottle of green tea that can be refilled with water up to 3 times a day. At the end of the day, simply return the bottle into the shop’s stylish concrete slab and pick one up the next morning.
[...]
Mirume’s morning bottle service is open from 8AM – 10AM and those in a hurry can grab their bottle on the go. But if you have a bit more time, step inside and explore the tea leaves they have available for purchase, which are all sourced from the Shinsabo tea farm in Mie Prefecture. You can even sit at the counter and enjoy a hand-poured cup of green tea along with a selection of wagashi sweets.
Cool!
(Image Credit: Ryo Yahara/ Spoon & Tamago)
Well, it looks like you can read fanfiction and play games on Archive Of Our Own! Not that I needed any more reasons to spend hours on that website, geez. In a feat of genius, Twitter user Andrew Sillers shared his creation of the world’s first-ever GIF-based port of Doom. You can actually visit the AO3 link and play the game here.
Image via Andrew Sillers on Twitter
Oh, look! It’s just a cat staring into nothingness… But wait! Why is its shadow so long, and why is the shadow not reflecting its current state?
There are many mysteries in this strange photograph, but everything will make sense when you give it a second look.
Image via Important Animal Images on Facebook
Found some 22,000-25,000 light years away from Earth is the Hercules Globular Cluster, which is also known as Messier 13 (and is designated as NGC 2605). Consisting of several hundred thousand stars, the Hercules Globular Cluster is one of the brightest star clusters in the northern sky.
Martin Dufour has been taking pictures of this cluster every year since 2011. This is his 2021 version.
(Image Credit: Martin Dufour/ NASA)
A samurai in full armor, holding a bow in his right hand and a spear in his left, stands on what seems to be the shoulder of a gigantic robot. In front of him is the gigantic robot’s head with one of its eyes gouged out.
This cardboard sculpture by Greg Olijnyk is called “David vs G 2.0”. It is a retelling of the story of David and Goliath. And, to fit into his current series, Olijnyk retells the story with a sci-fi twist.
Fully articulate and outfitted with LED lights and glass where necessary, the extraordinarily detailed works are futuristic, slightly dystopic, and part of larger world-building narratives. The architectural constructions, for example, are “the start of a series of pieces exploring the fear, fascination, and curiosity aroused by the stranger in our midst. The weird presence out of place. The building of unknown purpose with no windows and with lights flickering at night,” he says. “What’s going on in there?”
Check out Olijnyk’s cardboard sculptures over at Colossal, and check out even more of them over at his Instagram account.
(Image Credit: Greg Olijnyk/ Colossal)
Jennifer George wanted to have a closer look on the animals that she saw by her window, and so she set up an outdoor camera in 2019. One day, George noticed a family of coyote pups from her outdoor camera, and noting that that day was a hot one, she decided to set up some water for them. Little did she know that not only will she help those coyotes, but also other animals as well.
“It started with just a metal bowl of water,” George told The Dodo. “We thought that would be a harmless way to get [the animals] in front of the camera. That brought birds at first — mostly scrub jays. Then other animals started showing up, and I wanted to improve the accommodations for them and bought a bigger bowl and a solar fountain.”
George’s makeshift fountain has quickly become a gathering place for feathered, furry and scaly creatures alike.
Visitors range from a snake going for a swim to a family of quail taking a bath, as well as turkey vultures, long-tailed weasels, skunks, coyotes and bobcats.
“The birds particularly like the moving water, especially hummingbirds,” George said. “Right now I'm hoping to see this year's coyote puppies — we saw a pregnant female a few weeks ago.”
So wholesome.
(Image Credit: Jennifer George/ The Dodo)
So does that mean our current clocks aren’t accurate? They are, but there’s always room for more accuracy. Unfortunately, it comes at a price. According to scientists working on proving a relationship between time and entropy, the more accurate a clock runs, the more entropy it generates. Basically, we create more disorder to the universe as we increase the accuracy of our clocks:
As we go forward in time, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system must increase. Known as the "arrow of time," entropy is one of the few quantities in physics that sets time to go in a particular direction — from the past, where entropy was low, to the future, where it will be high.
This tendency for disorder to grow in the universe explains many things, such as why it’s easier to mix ingredients together than separate them out, or why headphone wires get so intricately tangled together in pants pockets. It’s also through this growing disorder that entropy is wedded so intimately to our sense of time. A famous scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" demonstrates how differently entropy makes one direction of time look to the other by playing World War II in reverse: Bullets are sucked from wounded men; fires are shrunk, gathered into bombs, stacked in neat rows, and separated into composite minerals; and the reversed arrow of time undoes the disorder and devastation of war.
This intimate connection between time and entropy has fascinated scientists for decades. Machines, such as clocks, also produce entropy in the form of heat dissipated to their surroundings. Physicists have been able to prove that a tiny quantum clock — a type of atomic clock that uses laser-cooled atoms that jump at highly regular intervals — creates more disorder the more accurately it measures time. But until now, it has been very difficult to prove that larger, more mechanically complex clocks create more entropy the more accurate they get, even if the idea sounds good in theory.
Image via Live Science
