Emanuele Magini, a furniture designer and scenographer in Italy, calls this chair the Lazy Basketball. It suggests a helpful distraction for the workplace or a possible prank to play on unsuspecting users just looking for a place to sit.

-via Toxel

Bully Maguire is an entire genre of internet videos that set Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker into various worlds other than Spider-Man. The latest entry is a genius Mork mix of Maguire answering Steve Harvey's questions on the game show Family Feud. This works better than it has any right to. -via reddit

You probably know a dog or cat who waits eagerly by their food bowl, or even passes up steak for their everyday dog or cat food. That's because the pet food business is very competitive, and companies go above and beyond the call of complete nutrition to make their kibble and gushy noms taste good to the consumer.

Many animals rely heavily on smell to navigate the world around them, and this is often the main sense that's targeted. While human noses contain around 50 million olfactory receptors, cats have 67 million, rabbits have 100 million and dogs have around 220 million. On the other hand, their sense of taste is generally less discriminating than ours – our relatively high density of taste receptors is thought to have evolved to help us cope with our diverse omnivorous diets.

The catch is that appealing to animals that find the smell of roadkill, sweaty socks, and vomit utterly enchanting – as carnivorous pets often do – while not making their human companions feel violently ill, is extremely tricky. "There is a slight paradox there, because the smells that cats particularly but also dogs seem to like are often the opposite of what humans like," says Logan.

There is no one secret ingredient that makes dogs drool over dog food, or cats caterwaul over cat food, but rather a whole library of additives that appeal to the cat or dog palate. Read about them, and the history of pet food, at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Flickr user bambe1964)

David Hockney’s new art exhibit, titled The Arrival Of Spring, showcases 116 works in praise of the natural world. While his artworks look simple, they’re still wonderful to look at! Hockney used an iPad and a stylus to create these paintings. The original works featured in the exhibition are a demonstration in uniformity, though - all the 116 works are identically sized, in similar color palette of neon yellow, shocking pink, felt-pen lime and turquoise: 

Hockney uses the free app Brushes, and it shows in every millimetre of these huge enlargements. Forget the virtuoso subtlety of his draughtsmanship in the 60s and 70s, or the originality of his American paintings. What you are looking at here is the expressive limitation of his virtual tool box.

A graze of parallel lines stands for a leaf or cloud; dots of different density are used for seeds, flowers or rising suns; grass comes ribbed, knitted or in sharp little toothpicks. Ready-made motifs proliferate. Blossoms are arrays of danish pastry whorls, both ugly and unpersuasive. Even the innately beautiful structure of a tree is undermined by the stick-figure lines, which lack all eloquence or fluidity. The register is as false and fudged as an electronic signature.

Image via The Guardian 

It’s cliched and a disaster, apparently. The popular trend is people building beds into the back of their cars and traveling on their own. Dmarge’s James Booth decided to follow this trend by making a bed in the back of his 2006 Subaru Forester on his own. Booth shares his struggles on DIY-ing furniture that was not included in his car: 

This meant the basic design I chose (see: above) was still fraught with potential for f*ck ups (especially in my incapable hands).

I went with a design that involves a plywood base, with a hinge that allows you to flip the front third back when driving (and is propped up by two stilts when down). The whole bed is also supposed to be supported by three rectangular pieces of wood underneath, allowing for storage.

I abandoned the idea of storage space underneath when I realised how much glue (and how many screws) would be required, as well as hearing horror stories from friends whose beds had collapsed in the middle of the night and destroyed much-loved surfboards.

Instead, I chose to prop mine up with loose offcuts of wood (one in each corner). This also means when I park on an angle I can adjust my bed depending on the slope (the offcuts are of varying sizes).

To read more about his full experience, check the full piece here. 

Image via Dmarge 

The guy from The Action Lab just blew our minds. Fumed silica is a desiccant, meaning it can keep things dry. It can even make water droplets hydrophobic! So what if you put those hydrophobic water droplets in a blender? The first thing you might think of is that this could be an amazing money-making toy, but alas, fumed silica is not healthy for the lungs. The video above is just the most amazing minute of this full presentation.

-via reddit

The trend of revamping old vehicles into tiny homes has gone big on the Internet. Remember the US Army veteran who turned an old bus into a house on wheels? Well, architecture student  Caleb Brackney’s own project is similar to that previous renovation project. Brackney made a split-second decision and bought an old bus on Facebook, which he then turned into his own personal home: 

Inspired by a former mentor at school, Caleb bought the 26-year-old bus on Facebook Marketplace for $3,000 (€2,500) and spent another $7,000 (€5,760 ) on turning it into his home. He named it 'Roamer'.

"The name 'Roamer' also came from the town where I bought the bus. It was named Rome, Georgia."

After eight months of hard graft and lessons learned the hard way, he moved in.

"I definitely underestimated how long it would take to take everything out," says Caleb, recalling that "There were over 1000 screws holding the bus together," many of which were covered in rust.

Caleb plans to live in the tiny house for the next few years while he finishes his studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. "I want to be able to provide a perfect case study. I have enough to be happy. I'm content and live a really great life," he says.

Image screenshot via Euronews 

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。
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