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)

The Egyptian pyramids at Giza are ancient, breathtaking, and mysterious. Despite centuries of study, there's a lot we still don't know about them. How did the people of ancient Egypt carve the stones so precisely, transport them, lift them, and keep such a massive structure level? Yeah, some say it was aliens from outer space, but French materials scientist Joseph Davidovits came up with a more plausible idea.

According to Davidovits’ theory, the blocks were not quarried and transported to Giza but rather cast in place in wooden molds. This would account for the extreme precision of the pyramid’s construction, as the initial liquid state of the limestone concrete would have made the blocks self-levelling and allowed for extremely thin seams between blocks. This technique was also ideal for use on the Giza plateau, which has abundant supplies of soft, crumbly limestone otherwise unsuited to large-scale construction.

Davidovits tested his idea by making blocks out of materials that would have been available to the pyramid builders. He presented his theory to the public in 1988, and immediately encountered the wrath of Egyptologists. So are the building blocks of the Great Pyramid made of stone or some composite material? Read the tale of Davidovits’ theory at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: L-BBE)

Jane M. Haining was an outstanding student at Dumfries Academy who spent ten years as a secretary before she decided to become a missionary. After training, she went to the Church of Scotland mission in Budapest, Hungary, where she headed a school for girls. She was in charge of around 400 students, both Christian and Jewish. When World War II broke out in 1939, Haining refused to leave her post, even as the mission's pastor returned to Scotland. She protected her students as best she could as restrictions tightened around Jews in the years to come. In August of 1944, word of her status got back to Scotland, although months late. From the August 12 edition of The Scotsman:

Through official sources the Church of Scotland Overseas Department recently received word that Miss Jane M. Haining, superintendent of the Girls’ Home in the Church of Scotland Mission, Budapest, Hungary, had been arrested. This action was taken early in May, following the taking over of Hungary by the Germans. Further news has now been received that Miss Haining has been sent to an internment camp for women at Auschwitz.

The word "Auschwitz" meant nothing to the people of Scotland at the time. It was only after the war that the horrors of the concentration camp system were revealed to the world. Read the story of Jane Haining at the British Newspaper Archive. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: The Gloucester Citizen)  

The picture we all know so well of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out was taken on his 72nd birthday. He was in the back of a limousine, leaving an event in his honor, sitting between Frank and Marie Aydelotte. Annoyed by the paparazzi, he gave them a funny face.

However, it was not the photographer who helped the photo achieve worldwide fame, but Einstein himself. He ordered numerous prints and cropped it so the Aydelotte couple could no longer be seen. He sent dozens of the photos to colleagues, friends and acquaintances. "The outstretched tongue reflects my political views," he wrote to his friend Johanna Fantova. In 2009, an original signed copy was sold for $74,324 (€62,677) at auction, making it the most expensive photo of the genius ever.

Read the sequence of events that led to the photo, and how it became so universal afterward, at DW. -via Damn Interesting

Yeah, I know that it's hard. There are days when you just don't want to. But you have to follow your dreams. So get up, get out, and get back to ovulating!

Does that make sense to you? It does to InspiroBot, an AI that provides inspiring posters appropriate for both the home and the workplace.

Will a set of photos make you have an existential crisis? Maybe these photos will. Alternatively, marvel at how the Earth looks from outer space! The World Economic Forum compiled stunning photographs of our home planet. Either be at awe at how marvelous the photos look or have a mini-crisis about how we are just a small speck of dust in a huge mass of heavenly bodies. 

Image via World Economic Forum 

Photographer Kendra Smith sent pictures and a video of a white raccoon to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. This is not an albino raccoon, which would be white with a pink nose and paws. This one has black paws and a black nose, so it's not completely devoid of coloring. It is instead a leucistic raccoon, meaning it lacks pigment from the parts we would expect color. Like its mask. Which makes it hard for us to recognize as a raccoon at all, but apparently other raccoons know.

So, how rare is this? It’s difficult to say. There are probably many leucistic raccoons, but with this type of coloration, few would make it to adulthood. But enough do to keep it popping up in raccoon populations from time to time. No, really, how rare is this? In short, nobody at ODFW has seen a nearly completely white raccoon in the wild before.

The Department calls this particular raccoon Moby Rick. Click to the right on the image above to see the other pictures; the last image is a video. -via Laughing Squid

Ida Holdgreve answered an ad in a Dayton, Ohio, newspaper that said "plain sewing wanted." But it was a typo that should have said "plane" sewing. That's how the dressmaker ended up sewing airplane parts for the Wright Brothers.

In 1910 and 1911, two odd buildings began to rise a mile-and-a-half west of the Wright brothers’ West Dayton home. Bowed parapets bookended the long one-story structures, their midsections arching like the crooks of serpents’ spines; wide windows reflected the pastoral world outside. This was the Wright Company factory, the first American airplane factory, and behind the buildings’ painted brick walls, Holdgreve sewed surfaces for some of the world’s first airplanes, making her a pioneer in the aviation industry.

“As far as I know, she was the only woman who worked on the Wright Company factory floor,” says aviation writer Timothy R. Gaffney, author of The Dayton Flight Factory: The Wright Brothers & The Birth of Aviation. “And she was earning her living making airplane parts. Since I haven’t found a woman working in this capacity any earlier, as far as I know, Ida Holdgreve was the first female American aerospace worker.”

Holdgreve learned to build airplanes, stretching countless yards of muslin over their frames. As the industry grew, her expertise was recognized, and in World War I, Holgreve supervised a crew of seamstresses turning out more advanced airplanes for the war effort. Yet strangely, she never flew in an airplane herself until 1969! Read the story of Ida Holgreve at Smithsonian.

(Image source: Wright State University Libraries' Special Collections & Archives)

In the grand scheme of things, it hasn't been all that long that Western women were "allowed" to wear pants. It was only in 2013 that a French law forbidding women to wear trousers was repealed! (True, it hadn't been enforced for a long time.) A women wearing pants was scandalous until the 20th century, but the desire for practical clothing was always there. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went to Constantinople in 1716 as her husband was the British ambassador, and was struck by the trousers worn by Turkish women.  

Lady Mary returned from her trip with trunks of clothing worn by the Muslim women she encountered, sharing them with members of her social circle, even posing for public portraits modelling the garments.

She wrote about her experiences and observations, creating intrigue amongst the fashionable elite. Her letters and firsthand accounts invoked honest conversations about freedom of dress, property rights, and other social, economic, legal, and marital freedoms that women were denied in Europe. As more women began to travel and discovering foreign cultures, it seemed Western society, which held a strong Eurocentric bias, was falling behind the East regarding women’s rights issues.

It was a couple of hundred years after Montague's travels before women in pants became common in the West. Read the ups and downs of the fashion at Messy Nessy Chic.

Meet the specialized tool that can let you know who owns a website, without spending a long time looking through Google search results! The WhoIs lookup tool returns whatever available information there is about “who is” responsible for the site, regardless of how old the website is. There is certain private information that would not appear in the results for every site. Popular Science lists information people will find when running the tool: 

• Name: This is simply the domain name for the website you looked up.
• Internationalized domain name: If the domain is linked to a location that doesn’t use the Latin characters present in English and other European languages, you may see its name displayed here in Arabic, Greek, or another type of script.
• Registry domain ID: This is the unique name that the website’s home registry uses to identify the domain.

View the rest at Popular Science.

Image via Popular Science 

Ocean researcher Tomoko Narazaki noticed that a turtle population that they were tracking for a study often swam in circles for no apparent reason. It is more efficient for marine animals to swim in straight lines, and the way these turtles swam as they navigated across the ocean seemed odd, so Narazaki and her colleagues looked at different data from other sea creatures, and to their surprise, found that other than turtles, sharks, seals, penguins, and whales also swim in circles:

The discovery, which was made possible thanks to advances in tagging and 3D-biologging technologies, reveals that swimming in circles is a widespread adaptation that may serve many ecological functions, according to a study published in iScience on Thursday.

“Analysis of animal tracks provides our understanding of navigation, moving capacity, and internal state of moving animals, as well as identifying the effect of external factors affecting their movements,” said Narazaki and her colleagues in the study. 

“Marine animals move through an inherently 3D environment, yet their movements have been primarily examined in less dimensions,” the team added, a discrepancy that is “due to logistical and technical difficulties primarily derived from seawater’s impermeability to radio waves.” 

In other words, collecting high-resolution information about the motions of marine animals in three dimensions has been an entrenched technological challenge for scientists. But within the past decade or so, the advent of sensors that can record detailed geographic and behavioral data has allowed scientists to hone in on precise features of animal movements such as pitch, heading, and small changes in depth. These biologging innovations now enable scientists to capture behaviors like the circle-swimming described in the new study.

Image via Vice 

A new theory suggests that black holes aren’t black in color, or holes at all! Surprising, I know. According to the theory, black holes may be dark stars with hearts of extremely dense, exotic matter. At the center of a black hole lies what scientists call a singularity, a infinitely small and dense point where the pull of gravity is so strong that it surpasses the speed of light: 

The problem? The singularity appears to be physically impossible, because matter isn’t capable of collapsing into an infinitely small point.

Physicists have cleverly dodged this issue by inventing their own singularity-free black holes, which they call “dark stars”. These imaginative creations appear like black holes on the outside, but inside, they contain an extremely (but not infinitely) dense core of matter compressed to the tiniest possible scale, or a “Planck core”. It borrows its name from the incredibly small fundamental unit of measurement called the Planck length, which is on the order of 10^-35 meters, or roughly 100 trillion times smaller than a proton.

Without a singularity at its center, a dark star could theoretically allow light to escape its powerful gravitational grasp. Any light that would escape the black hole would be stretched like a slinky from the dark star’s gravitational pull, an observable phenomenon scientists call redshift.

“In strong gravitational fields, [dark stars] behave interestingly,” physicist Igor Nikitin, of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Scientific Algorithms and Computing, writes in his new paper, which appears on the preprint server arXiv:

“First of all, the event horizon, typical for real black holes, is erased. Instead, a deep gravitational well is formed, where the values of the redshift become enormously large. As a result, for an external observer the star looks black, like a real black hole.”

Image via Popular Mechanics 

The METL tire, developed by Smart Tire Company, utilizes the technology that NASA developed for its lunar missions. The airless bike tires are made of the Shape Memory Alloy Radial Technology (SMART), a lightweight and ultra-elastic material that “rearranges its molecular structure when you bend it, but instantly goes back to its original shape, perfectly” which could make you not worry about flat tires at all: 

They are basically, shape-memory tires that have almost 30 times the recoverable strain limit of the steel, thereby making them ideal for any kind of rough terrain. The metal of these tires will not come in contact with the tarmac as they will be coated with a new kind of rubber-like material called Polyurethanium, which’s crafted for all king of weather conditions and has a long-lasting tread and grip for superior handling.

Since the tires are going to be targeted towards next-gen buyers, the design is as important as function. Therefore, Smart Tire Company has made it a point to embellish them in white, gold, silver, and metallic blue colorways. They plan to bring the METL tires to the consumer market in early 2022, but there is no word about the cost of these tires yet. As per Earl Cole, CEO of The Smart Tire Company, “The unique combination of these advanced materials, coupled with a next-generation, eco-friendly design make for a revolutionary product.” This shape memory alloy technology looks promising and will make it beyond just the bicycle tires for sure.

As Santo Padula, a materials science engineer at NASA pointed out, “Shape memory alloys look extremely promising in revolutionizing the entire terrestrial tire industry.” In fact, that’s just a starting point and these could make it to the four-wheelers and commercial vehicles – changing the landscape of commuting to another dimension. After all, who doesn’t want to fit their bicycle, car, or truck with wheels that will never go flat or need to be changed in a lifetime!

Image via Yanko Design 

Can you imagine a life without a refrigerator? In the part of the world where I'm in, it's already summer and I can't live without very cold water. Can't imagine life without the fridge! So, here's a bit of history for all of us.

The concept of mechanical refrigeration began when William Cullen, a Scottish doctor, observed that evaporation had a cooling effect in the 1720s. He demonstrated his ideas in 1748 by evaporating ethyl ether in a vacuum, according to Peak Mechanical Partnership, a plumbing and heating company based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. 

Oliver Evans, an American inventor, designed but did not build a refrigeration machine that used vapor instead of liquid in 1805. In 1820, English scientist Michael Faraday used liquefied ammonia to cause cooling. 

Jacob Perkins, who worked with Evans, received a patent for a vapor-compression cycle using liquid ammonia in 1835, according to History of Refrigeration. For that, he is sometimes called the "father of the refrigerator."

John Gorrie, an America doctor, also built a machine similar to Evans' design in 1842. Gorrie used his refrigerator, which created ice, to cool down patients with yellow fever in a Florida hospital. Gorrie received the first U.S. patent for his method of artificially creating ice in 1851.

Read more about how refrigerators work and the future of refrigerators here.

Image Credit: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons

When you're feeding the opossum in the window some tasty jam, you may as well sing a song about it. Eric Stix adapted the tune of "The Wellermen" sea shanty to fit the occasion. The clever lyrics are enhanced by the animal's pleasure and Stix's obvious affection for his visitor. -via Digg