It’s not real, don’t worry. Let’s take the time to appreciate the craftsmanship in these hand blown glass spider sculptures! Created by Lampwork artist Nikita Drachuk, these glass spiders come in different species, each so stunningly realistic that it could strike fear at first glance. Laughing Squid has more details: 

Glass Symphony is a three-generation family business dedicated to an art that takes years of training.

Glass Symphony» is a small family private studio. We’ve been engaged with glass figures for three generations. My grandpa taught this craft to my father who in turn taught me. …We deal with art called ‘lampwork’. It is the art of making glass figurines melted in the flame of a gas burner glass. This is the process of creating exclusive glass figurines and compositions. They are exclusive because all the compositions are handmade.

These and other glass creatures are available for purchase through Drachuk’s Etsy shop.

Image via Laughing Squid

Amanda and Thomas Evans thought long and hard about how to greet their new neighbors after moving to their new home at Cape Coral, Florida. Should they bring their neighbors some cookies or pie? Or should they invite them to dinner? These options are what we would choose under normal circumstances, but this wasn’t an ordinary circumstance. This was during a global health crisis, and the couple wasn’t sure how their neighbors were feeling. And so, they just decided to create a flyer.

“Hi, we’re new to the neighborhood and would like to meet our lovely neighbors. We will be in our driveway with drinks, ready to meet any neighbors who would like to stop by. We can’t wait to meet you.”

Her husband wasn’t sure anyone would show up. But once the “Free Beer” sign was placed outside, the neighbors started venturing over.

“It’s always funny to see a sign on the table that says free beer, just to get people to stop and turn their head and drive by and say what did that sign just say. We had a few people do a double take, free beer is a pretty easy way to get people to show up,” said Thomas Evans.

They say it’s a great ice-breaker for anyone who is new to a neighborhood.

Now I know what to do when I move into another place.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Sure, the furniture and furnishings from Design Toscano are expensive. But if you want to decorate your home, office, or school in a way that's memorable, it's the store to shop at. Can you telepathically command all crabs? Then this chair belongs in your supervillain lair.

An artistic depiction of it at least. It also serves as a great decorative piece for your space! Multiple variations of these galaxy orbs are sold in shops. Encapsulated in blown glass, some are small enough to be worn as a pendant for a necklace, or big enough to decorate your desk. My Modern Met lists some of the different variations of the galaxy orbs. Check them here! 

Image via My Modern Met 

Saturn’s moon Titan is rich in two essential ingredients for life to flourish: hydrocarbons and liquid water. Just from these two components alone, we can already say that Titan could be the next pit stop for space travelers! However, the moon is so far from the sun and so cold that the water on the heavenly body is actually covered in ice. So how do we try to solve all the rising problems? Well, new research suggests that there is a way that these hydrocarbons and this liquid water could mix:

The international team of researchers from Brazil, Canada, the U.S., and France, looked at the impact craters which can be seen on Titan’s surface and investigated what would happen when an asteroid or comet struck the moon. They found that these impacts would generate heat which would melt a puddle in the icy crust and allow the organic compounds to interact with liquid water.

“If you have a lot of liquid water creating a temporary warm pool on the surface, then you can have conditions that would be favorable for life,” Titan expert Léa Bonnefoy said to Science Magazine. “If you have organic material cycling from the surface into the ocean, then that makes the ocean a bit more habitable.”

The researchers simulated an impact similar to the one which created the moon’s largest crater, Menrva, which is 264 miles wide. The liquid water generated by such an impact wouldn’t last forever, but would last for around 1 million years — which could be long enough for bacteria to evolve.

Titan does have other liquids on its surface, and if you popped by for a visit you’d see features that look familiar like lakes and weather systems including rain. But these aren’t composed of water — they’re composed of liquid methane. These features are still of interest to researchers though, as recent discoveries found that Titan’s largest sea of liquid methane, Kraken Mare, is at least 1,000 feet deep and could be explored by a submarine.

Image via Digital Trends 

Well, the gaming community is always finding new ways to enjoy a game that was released four years ago! The speedrun, called Butter Dog Dog Wit Da Butter on Him% (whoever coined this title, I give you my loudest applause, as it is funny as hell), times the player as he gets butter and places it on the first dog they see in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Watch PointCrow as he attempts the speedrun, and aims to at least reach the top five. I’m just there for the laughs, honestly (but the speedrun techniques are amazing)! 

Great advertising is the key towards a great business. In order to be a great advertiser, you have to make ordinary things extraordinary, and make boring things interesting.

These photos of funny fast food signs, which were compiled by Sad and Useless, are great examples.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

It’s not really a big secret, but it’s a feature that is usually overlooked. Hell, I didn’t even know it existed until a friend pointed it out for me when I needed to submit a document online. Add that to the fact that I’ve owned an iPhone for two years now! CNET gives a step by step process on how to scan documents from the phone’s notes app. Check the full piece here. 

Image via CNET 

What happens when you let the Internet decide how book covers should look like? Well, you get a lot of funny yet straight-to-the-point book covers - if you know the story and how the chosen photo plays into the story. Tumblr users have discovered a Penguin Classics cover generator, where it lets you pick an image, along with the matching title and author for it. The generated covers are both witty and hilarious. Check the other covers here and see for yourself! 

(via Tumblr)

Image via Tumblr  

The notion that our ancestors could only communicate by beating their chests and grunting is false, according to scientists who have studied how Neanderthals talked to each other. The ear structures in Neanderthal skulls revealed that our ancestors could hear wavelengths related with human language. Maybe they couldn’t speak our current language, but they probably had a language of their own: 

 “The study of audition in fossil hominids is of great interest given its relationship with intraspecific vocal communication…[but] less is known about the hearing abilities of the Neanderthals,” said a multidisciplinary team of researchers who were able to prove that what may seem like as a brute prototype of a human being was smarter than most of us might have thought. Their study was recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. 

Neanderthals or Homo neanderthalensis are our closest predecessors. They are thought to have died out because they could not adapt to chasing smaller, swifter prey with their spears and growing vegetables after the megafauna (such as mammoths and woolly rhinos) they hunted died out. Some argue that because Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, they are not technically extinct because their bloodline never really died out. Many of us have a small percentage of Neanderthal blood running through our veins and don’t even know it.

Image via Syfy 

Different creatures such as filterers, sea cucumbers, sea stars, mollusks, five fish species and two squid species were discovered by German researchers along the Antarctic seafloor. The discovery was made after a massive iceberg calved from the continent's ice sheet. Scientists from  the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and other international partners studied the iceberg, dubbed A-74:  

"Once-in-a-lifetime" photographs captured by the crew revealed an "amazing level of biodiversity and sediment samples taken from the seafloor are "expected to provide more detailed insights into the ecosystem."

In addition, geochemical analysis of the water samples collected will allow conclusions to be made regarding its nutrient content and ocean currents.

Video footage and an extensive collection of photos taken using the OFOBS (Ocean Floor Observation and Bathymetry System) exposed life deep below the surface and numerous organisms surrounded by a silty landscape.

Image via Fox News

Photographer Sally Davies has released a book about the different type of homes of New Yorkers. From frilly, pink, and wide apartments to small and industrial homes, Davies has documented (through her photographs) the homes of different city dwellers in “New Yorkers”, as the New York Post details: 

“I began to wonder who the hell lived in these buildings that I had always photographed,” Davies (inset) told The Post. “I decided . . . I would get off the streets after 35 years, and I would photograph New Yorkers in their apartments — in all their unusual, beautiful, strange, boring and ­authentic glory.”

There are 76 portraits and tales of cabbies, artists, doctors, Broadway denizens, tattoo artists and even avant-garde artist/musician Laurie Anderson.

“Everyone in the book tells a singular and amazing story,”  said Davies. But, just like a city, it’s everyone together that makes it special: “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Here are a few of her fascinating subjects.

Image via the New York Post

The American cartoon G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero depicted a US special forces team fighting a terrorist organization called Cobra. The purpose of the cartoon was to sell toys based on the figures and machines featured on the show.

Consequently, many of the vehicles and weapons were, from a practical standpoint, ridiculous. Adam Elder of Mel Magazine interviewed several veterans and experts on military equipment about the flaws and benefits of G.I. Joe designs. Here's Sergeant Major Daniel Sebby's evaluation of the Rolling Thunder, which is pictured above:

Oh God, what the hell is this? First of all, the thrust from those vertical rockets would burn up the vehicle. Then you have all those missiles on a turntable. What do you think’s gonna happen when you fire a missile, with the exhaust, to the missiles behind it? Same with the yellow rockets on the underside. And that little 6×6 go-kart: completely superfluous to the mission. Mounting a missile on the barrel of a tank gun? That’s dumb. They tried to make this thing a tank, a ballistic missile launcher and some sort of equipment carrier. Too many missions for one vehicle. Yeah, this thing is so wrong. 

-via Super Punch

Fagradalsfjall is a volcano about 25 kilometres from Reykjavík, Iceland, which has been dormant for 6,000 years. On Friday, a new vent opened up just to the south at Geldingadalir, which is forming a new volcano right now. This is the first eruption on Iceland’s Southern Peninsula in 800 years. And we can watch it happening! RÚV has set up a live webcam to monitor and record the eruption, and give people around the world a bird’s eye view of the volcano. If you pull up the videostream to full size, you can see people walking around in the edges of the video, giving you a sense of scale. If you are just joining in, here’s a time-lapse of eruption recorded on Saturday, daytime and nighttime.

https://t.co/yerueeyiut

— Arinbjörn (@arinbjornkol) March 21, 2021

-via Metafilter

It's strange how less testosterone makes one desire pink things, at least in the minds of advertising copy writers. This picture is from a collection gleaned from the subreddit pointlessly gendered products. See more of the 17 Sexist Designs Guaranteed To Boil Your Blood at Buzzfeed.

(Image source: sausageliver)