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!
Look, I just hope the new Windows 11 is better than Windows 10. It doesn’t matter if the new operating system is less aesthetically pleasing, I just want software that doesn't update too many times (and randomly sometimes, too). A build of a supposed ‘new Windows’ software has spread online-- and it appears to be legitimate. The build looks like the discontinued Windows 10X builds, as ZDNet:
The leaked build -- which I first saw via XDA Developers (which credited BetaWorld on Baidu as the source) shows Build 21996.1 as the build number. This is from the "Cobalt" engineering branch. It also shows Windows Feature Experience Pack 321.14700.0.3 alongside the "Windows 11 Pro" dev build.
[...]
Some have speculated that Microsoft could deliver some pieces of Windows 11 via the Feature Experience Pack -- a mechanism Microsoft currently uses to deliver OS components and apps that can be updated independently from the base operating system. According to previous leaks, Microsoft is also expected to overhaul the app store as part of Windows 11. The app store is currently a separate Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app.Windows 11 is expected to include the "Sun Valley" user-interface refresh, as well as some underlying improvements, such as better touch capabilities along with the new app store, based on various leaks. I've heard Microsoft will likely make Windows 11 available to OEM partners this month or next and release it to the mainstream user base this fall.
image credit: BetaWorld (Baidu)
Saqqara is an ancient Egyptian burial ground just 20 miles south of Cairo that never received nearly as much attention as the grand pyramids of Luxor. Tombs at Saqqara had been raided for generations. In 1850, the director of Egypt’s Antiquities Service called it “a spectacle of utter devastation,” due to its ruinous condition. Nevertheless, archaeologists began exploring Saqqara, not realizing that it was much more extensive than it appeared. The further you dig, the more you find, and the further you go, the more pristine the burial conditions are.
One scorching day last fall, Mohammad Youssef, an archaeologist, clung to a rope inside a shaft that had been closed for more than 2,000 years. At the bottom, he shined his flashlight through a gap in the limestone wall and was greeted by a god’s gleaming eyes: a small, painted statue of the composite funerary deity Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, with a golden face and plumed crown. It was Youssef’s first glimpse of a large chamber that was guarded by a heap of figurines, carved wooden chests and piles of blackened linen. Inside, Youssef and his colleagues found signs that the people buried here had wealth and privilege: gilded masks, a finely carved falcon and a painted scarab beetle rolling the sun across the sky. Yet this was no luxurious family tomb, as might have been expected. Instead, the archaeologists were astonished to discover dozens of expensive coffins jammed together, piled to the ceiling as if in a warehouse. Beautifully painted, human-shaped boxes were stacked roughly on top of heavy limestone sarcophagi. Gilded coffins were packed into niches around the walls. The floor itself was covered in rags and bones.
This eerie chamber is one of several “megatombs,” as the archaeologists describe them, discovered last year at Saqqara, the sprawling necropolis that once served the nearby Egyptian capital of Memphis.
The Saqqara burials spanned 3,000 years, and are just beginning to reveal long-buried secrets. Read about the discoveries at Saqqara at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Carole Raddato)
Among skydiving aficionados, it is traditional to complete one's hundredth jump in the nude. But Rian Kanouff of Omaha, Nebraska went much further. He completed 60 nude jumps in 24 hours, thus establishing a Guinness World Record for the most number of nude jumps in a day.
Kanouff did not complete this task alone. He needed a well-organized team of pilots, ground crews, and parachute packers so that, as soon as he landed, he could immediately get airborne again to jump again. KOLN/KGIN News describes the process:
Volunteers who have decades of flying experience were taking him up in down in two different planes. Skydiving pals spent their day packing and re-packing parachutes, so he didn’t spend too much time on the ground. There were even nurses to make sure he wasn’t getting too overexerted. Some of the tents were full of supporters there to cheer him on.
“From the time he loads the plane ‘til he takes off and gets out is about five minutes,” said Scott Dvorak, who helped bring it all together. “Then, about a three-minute descent, so we’re about seven minutes there.”
“He spends about two minutes on the ground re-rigging and getting back in the plane for a total of 10 to 11 minutes per turn. That puts us at about six jumps per hour.”
-via Dave Barry
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.
