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。
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

— ido monta (@IdoMonta) May 10, 2021

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 

Fossil remains of a plant that seems to be an early example of cycads (or cycadales) has been discovered by scientists. The fossil came from the southern part of a rock layer known as the Irati Formation. Researchers named the preserved species Iratinia australis. While the discovered pieces were small, they were enough to prove the similarities between the remains and the current surviving cycads. Oh, and did you know that this particular fossil served as dinosaur food? The New York Times has more details: 

The surviving cycadales are often called “living fossils,” much like present-day coelacanth fish, which retain many of the same characteristics as ancestral fish from hundreds of millions of years ago.

This lineage endured a pair of cataclysms when most life was killed off the planet. The first occurred at the end of the Permian geological period 250 million years ago and is often called the Great Dying. It was the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, opening the evolutionary door to the rise of dinosaurs. The other was the extinction 66 million years ago that brought the age of dinosaurs to an end.

“It’s a really long history on Earth,” said André Jasper, a biology professor at the University of Taquari Valley in Brazil and an author of the paper. “You can find it, this kind of plant, in Australia, in Asia, in Africa, in America. It spread all over the world.”

Cycadales never dominated the plant kingdom, although they have thrived in certain places. Their heyday was more than 120 million years ago before they, and even older plants like conifer trees, were overtaken by the advent of flowering plants, which were quicker to reproduce and adapt to changing ecological niches.

“These guys were dinosaur food,” said Dennis Stevenson, an emeritus senior curator at the New York Botanical Garden and an expert on cycadales who was not involved with the research.

Image via The New York Times 

Now this is just amazing. Meet Derm Assist, a web-based app that can identify skin conditions  with just a photo! Developed by Google, it is targeted to be launched starting in the European Union by the end of the year. So, how does the application work? CNET has the details: 

You spot a rash, lesion or strange-looking mole on your skin, snap a few photos of it, upload those pictures to Derm Assist. Google's artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities analyze the photos and look for a match in a database of 288 skin conditions. It then presents a handful of possible skin conditions you might have with an accuracy rate of up to 97%, the company says.

Derm Assist only needs three photos to match you with a few possible skin conditions, but to get more precise results, you can fill out an optional questionnaire that goes into more detail about your skin condition.

Google makes it clear that this is not a diagnostic tool, but rather a way to help narrow down possible conditions so you can determine if you should see a doctor or just grab some cream from the drugstore.

Image via CNET