Look closer and you’ll have a treat! These miniature pieces by Sidney-based artist Michael Pederson are inconspicuously scattered in various places. From tiny schedule signs about pigeons, to a small sign about spiders. My favorite out of The Poke’s compilation of Pederson’s creations  is the airport-esque pigeon schedule. Check out more of his work here. 

Image via The Poke 

There’s a way to decrease the amount of methane on our planet! For the first time ever, researchers have discovered a unique bacteria that can eat methane. The study, published in Nature Communications, found microbial, methane-eating communities thriving within the bark of a paperbark (Melaleuca quinquenervia), a common Australian tree species. The Conservation  has more details: 

We discovered the bark of paperbark trees provide a unique home for methane-oxidizing bacteria — bacteria that “consumes” methane and turns it into carbon dioxide, a far less potent greenhouse gas.

Remarkably, these bacteria made up to 25% of total microbial communities living in the bark, and were consuming around 36% of the tree’s methane. It appears these microbes make an easy living in the dark, moist and methane-rich environments.

This discovery will revolutionise the way in which we view methane emitting trees and the novel microbes living within them.

Only through understanding why, how, which, when and where trees emit the most methane, may we more effectively plant forests that effectively draw down carbon dioxide while avoiding unwanted methane emissions.

Image via the Conservation 

Colm McGuiness has an beautiful bass voice. You can check his Youtube Channel for more of his 'modern' music works: Game of Thrones, The Hobbit, etc.

Luxor, a long-lost city hailed as the ‘Egyptian Pompeii,’ has finally been discovered by archaeologists. The city was discovered last year, and researchers were impressed with the level of preservation in the site. But what was the mystery behind the golden city? Archaeologists believe that the pharaoh Akhenaten left Thebes for more than 150 years to settle in a industrial royal metropolis within Thebes, which is now dubbed as the “lost golden city of Luxor:" 

“There’s no doubt about it; it really is a phenomenal find,” says Salima Ikram, an archaeologist who leads the American University in Cairo’s Egyptology unit. “It’s very much a snapshot in time—an Egyptian version of Pompeii.”

The site dates from the era of 18th-dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III, who ruled between around 1386 and 1353 B.C. and presided over an era of extraordinary wealth, power and luxury. In Amenhotep III’s final years, he is thought to have briefly reigned alongside his son, Akhenaten.

But a few years after his father’s death, Akhenaten, who ruled from around 1353–1336, broke with everything the late ruler stood for. During his 17-year reign, he upended Egyptian culture, abandoning all of the traditional Egyptian pantheon but one, the sun god Aten. He even changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, which means “devoted to Aten.”  

Structures are packed with everyday items, many of which relate to the artistic and industrial production that supported the pharaoh’s capital city. There are homes where workers might have lived, a bakery and kitchen, items related to metal and glass production, buildings that appear related to administration, and even a cemetery filled with rock-cut tombs.

Image via National Geographic

Children are born to seek sweet nourishment and reject bitterness -it's a part of human survival. But by the time they are adults, they've learned to enjoy things like salsa, seafood, pickles, and salad. Or most do. Your diet would be pretty bland if you only ate what babies want, and it wouldn't be good for you, either.

Acquired tastes are part of practically every culture’s cuisine and some of the world’s most beloved dishes. Without expanding beyond innate preferences in their diet, humans wouldn’t be able to get the nutrients they need to survive. But there’s a good reason people aren’t born with a taste for bitter vegetables and fermented foods. Without knowing any better, seeking out these flavors could be deadly.

Humans have an innate aversion to decay because that odor and flavor signals that a food has gone bad, and may therefore carry dangerous pathogens. But many fermented foods (which are technically decayed) are totally safe to eat and even contain beneficial bacteria. People have no natural instinct for telling “good” decay and “bad” decay apart, so they rely on the process of acquiring taste to learn what’s good to eat. This also applies to bitter flavors, which are present in toxic plants as well as nutritious vegetables.

It's not a matter of taste buds "maturing," even though that what I told my kids and they bought it. It turns out to be a matter of learning. Science says that there are three components to acquiring a taste for foods we wouldn't naturally eat: influence, familiarity, and conditioning. Mental Floss explains these components, and has some tips for those who want to learn to like a certain food. And considering the quote here, let's have a moment for those adventurous individuals in our distant past who determined, say, which mushrooms are okay to eat and how to safely ferment food.

(Image credit: Rainer Knäpper, Free Art License)

For an old and underground location, the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Krakow, Poland holds its grace and beauty regardless of the passage of time. Sculpted entirely out of salt, the site now functions as a tourist attraction after mining operations were shut down in 1996: 

Salt in the Middle Ages represented such an important resource. Mines such as Wieliczka were considered nothing short of gold mines, which would explain the sheer enormousness of the place.

If one would take the time to visit all the existent chambers at the Wieliczka salt mine, it would take them approximately two months. There are in total some 2,000 chambers, the deepest of which concealed at approximately 300 meters (1000 feet) below the ground.

Day and night, miners dug the earth to make new shafts and create new caves. They eventually began to create elaborate elements and objects such as sculptures, and later entire chapels. Decorating the dark chambers with something authentically made of materials such as unprocessed salt brightened up the place where they were supposed to spend so much time. One of the earliest salt sculptures inside Wieliczka can be traced back to the 13th-century.

Image via This City Knows 

An interactive list of the world’s most populated cities may surprise you. Imagine living in the midst of 20 million (or more) people! None of the top 20 cities are in the US. None are in Europe, either, unless you count Istanbul, which lies in two continents. Maps Mania has more information and some tips on how to use the map.

The World's Twenty Largest Cities is actually a bit of a misnomer as the map actually allows you to explore the size of thousands of cities around the world. If you scroll to the end of the map presentation you can explore the map for yourself. Zoom out and you will see that cities around the world have pink circle's representing the relative size of the population. If you click on a city's circle you can view details on the city's actual population size.

-via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Ben Morlok)

It's hard enough to keep up with an ever-growing list of passwords with increasingly complex requirements. How would a medieval peasant manage? Alasdair Beckett-King, a comedian and screenwriter, suggests an answer: poorly.

-via Laughing Squid

In Riga, the capital of Latvia, there's a house with cat sculptures on top, as if they were guarding the building. While the Art Nouveau house is now a landmark, its history may be surprising. For some reason, the man who owned the house, built in 1909, was refused membership in the local tradesman's guild, called the Great Guild.  

He happened to own the building across the way from the Guild. So, he ordered two sculptures of black cats made and placed on the roof of his building (Kaķu nams in Latvian). Not only that but he ordered that they should be turned away from the Guild, backside up.

Today it may not seem much of a retort, visual or otherwise. Back then, a pair of black cats showing their posteriors to the parish principals was a public gesture of defiance, distaste and damnification. This feline feud was serious. Put the message in to your own contemporary words.  You got it.

The gesture enraged the members of the Great Guild, and a battle ensued. Read how that turned out, and see plenty of images of the Cat House at Kuriositas.

(Image credit: Flickr user Yusuke Kawasaki)

If you've ever wondered how a courtroom stenographer keeps up with everything that is said in a trial, Isabelle Lumsden is happy to explain. It takes special equipment that require a particular technique. After watching the video, I am impressed, but I still don't know how she does it. -via Digg

Thanks to artificial intelligence, a pair of robot legs was taught how to walk on their own. Well, to be specific, thanks to reinforcement learning (the training technique that teaches AIs complex behavior via trial and error), Cassie learned to walk from scratch. The robot legs are also capable of walking in a crouch and while carrying a load. Unlike the viral robots from Boston Dynamics, Cassie can’t dance, as MIT Technology Review details: 

Reinforcement learning has been used to train bots to walk inside simulations before, but transferring that ability to the real world is hard. “Many of the videos that you see of virtual agents are not at all realistic,” says Chelsea Finn, an AI and robotics researcher at Stanford University, who was not involved in the work. Small differences between the simulated physical laws inside a virtual environment and the real physical laws outside it—such as how friction works between a robot’s feet and the ground—can lead to big failures when a robot tries to apply what it has learned. A heavy two-legged robot can lose balance and fall if its movements are even a tiny bit off.

The real Cassie was able to walk using the model learned in simulation without any extra fine-tuning. It could walk across rough and slippery terrain, carry unexpected loads, and recover from being pushed. During testing, Cassie also damaged two motors in its right leg but was able to adjust its movements to compensate. Finn thinks that this is exciting work. Edward Johns, who leads the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London agrees. “This is one of the most successful examples I have seen,” he says.

Image via MIT Technology Review

If you've ever had to give a pill to a cat, you know that it can involve lots of time, possible injury (to you, not the cat), and may land you on the cat's enemies list. Now imagine giving medication to a wide variety of wild animals, some of which have the ability to kill you.  

The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute is home to hundreds of animals comprising a wide variety of taxa, from bugs to bison, salamanders to siamangs, prairie dogs to pandas, and everything in between. Regardless, all of our animals receive veterinary care, and often that means an animal needs to take medicine.

Our Department of Wildlife Health Sciences includes veterinarians, technicians, pathologists and nutritionists that ensure every single animal receives the highest level of care. They examine the animals in our care and prescribe the best course of action for any ailment. An animal may have a new problem, like a wound that needs attention, or a chronic problem, like arthritis. Medication can take several forms — pills, capsules, liquid suspensions (medicine mixed into a liquid) or even injections. Ensuring that an animal receives its full dose of medicine, as often as necessary, takes a bit of creativity.

Read about the National Zoo's animals and see videos on giving medication to a gecko, a red panda, an orangutan, sea lions, monkeys, onagers, and avocets at Smithsonian. Bonus: find out what onagers and avocets are.

In 1936, actress Mary Astor and her ex-husband Dr. Franklyn Thorpe went to court to fight over custody of their daughter Marylyn. It had been a particularly acrimonious divorce, and the custody battle became a sensation, mainly because of Astor’s diaries.  

Her estranged husband stole her private diaries, called the Purple or Lavender Diary, to use in a bitter custody battle. It was reported that Astor wrote breathless accounts of her many love affairs in its pages. As the press salivated for details, Astor appeared in court to face a hostile lawyer hellbent on proving she was an unfit mother. People flooded the courthouse and vendors sold hot dogs and ice cream to the crowds.

Astor's diary was the first major Hollywood sex scandal, "a sensation the likes of which had never been seen before," writes Joseph Egan in The Purple Diaries. Astor faced losing her career, daughter, and reputation, but she wouldn't be shamed. When faced with these challenges, Astor fought back.

Astor’s affairs became public knowledge during the trial, but so did Thorpe’s. The press couldn’t get hold of the actual diaries, so they published false excerpts. And the diaries weren’t even purple: they were written in brown ink in blue notebooks. In any case, the details of the case were both salacious and gripping, but the fallout what not what you would have expected from the early days of Hollywood. Read the story of the purple diaries at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: CINELANDIA magazine)

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama brings fun and vibrant colors to the New York Botanical Garden thanks to the exhibition, “Kusama: Cosmic Infinity.” Different kinds of exhibitions are now being unveiled at the garden after a one year delay. Kusama’s exhibit celebrates and reminds people that the city is still standing despite the struggles: 

Unlike her wildly popular museum exhibitions, where visitors queue for hours for the chance to spend 30 seconds inside one of Kusama’s mirrored “infinity rooms,” most of the art here can be experienced outdoors without long lines, making it ideal for the age of social distancing.

“It’s a refreshing experience since we don’t normally see art that way. You go from one gallery to the next,” curator Mika Yoshitake said at the exhibition’s press preview. “Kusama’s work really enhances the botanical landscape.”

The setting is a fitting one for the artist, who grew up in a seed nursery, and for whom flowers are a recurring motif.

Image via Artnet 

Talk about reusing trash items, right? Researchers have discovered a way to convert discarded tires into a strengthening material for concrete. The rubber from tires was turned into nanomaterial graphene, a strong carbon that can make concrete tougher and more sustainable. Anthropocene Magazine has the details: 

The team from Rice University and C-Crete Technologies in Stafford, TX decided to convert waste tires into graphene, which has been shown before to strengthen concrete.

They used a graphene-production technique developed at Rice called flash heating, which involves superheating carbon sources such as food waste or plastic with a jolt of electricity. The process removes everything else besides carbon atoms, which rearrange into graphene flakes.

The team found that rubber is harder to turn into graphene. So they used the black waste material that is leftover after tires have gone through a recycling process to extract oil. They could convert about 70 percent of this carbon black residue into graphene with flash heating.

Next, they added tiny amounts of this graphene to Portland cement and used it to make concrete cylinders. After seven days of curing, tests showed that the graphene-infused cylinders were 30 percent stronger than regular concrete.

Flash heating is an easy and inexpensive way to produce graphene from rubber tire waste that would otherwise be burned for fuel or disposed in landfills, the researchers write in the paper,

Image via Anthropocene Magazine