A lot of us spend out whole lives trying to figure out what to do with our lives. Meanwhile, we are growing up, working to make a living, and looking forward to retirement. Sometimes you need to step back and look at your life from another perspective. Kurzgesagt isn't going to tell you what you should do with your life, but they have some statistics to help you understand how important your time really is. -via Kottke

Now that’s a breakthrough! Scientists have managed to partially restore the vision of a 58-year-old man with an inherited eye disease thanks to gene therapy. The scientists injected genetically engineered viruses into his eye. After being blind for decades, the man is now able to see small objects like a staple box when wearing a specialized pair of goggles: 

"These are very exciting results," says Raymond Wong, a stem cell biologist at the University of Melbourne developing treatments for eye diseases who was not affiliated with the study.

While the potential therapeutic benefits are enormous, Wong notes the technique has, so far, only been used in one patient. It forms part of an ongoing clinical trial to test the safety and tolerability of the gene therapy. Continued testing and refinement could see the technique help blind patients navigate day-to-day tasks more effectively. 

How did they do it? By re-engineering cells of the eye to make them more sensitive to light.

To learn more about the in-depth process involved in the man’s eyesight restoration, check the full article here! 

Image credit: Victor Freitas via Unsplash

An international team of over 100 astrophysicists have banded together to create a huge 3D map of the universe (as we know it). The map features details that let us look back at how it expanded and formed its current known state. The project was a result of a 20-year-long survey of the night sky. Not gonna lie, I'm more interested in pivoting around the map and trying to look for different galaxies and clusters that I’m not aware of. Check the full video here. 

Image screenshot via Flipboard 

Do you ever wonder about that one glove you can never find? Redditor Brunson21 spotted a clear case of cat burglary. Esme may have sad memories of when she was a kitten and lost her mittens. With neighbors turning their backs on their gardening gloves for a minute, Esme captured her prey and brought it home. Her owner was not pleased.

The cat owner is making a valiant attempt to reunite the stolen gloves with their rightful owners. But Esme is not unique. Wherever you live, remember to bring your gloves in every time you take a break from yard work.  

Look, some people love adding extra ingredients to their coffee. For example, some like adding cinnamon - which is good for brain health (and it makes coffee taste better). For Morgan Osborne however, she likes to add something unexpected in her coffee -- hot sauce. You read that right, the condiment we usually add to tacos- and with its spicy and slightly sour taste, you really won’t expect it to be added to coffee, right? Well, the director of culinary development at Archer Daniels experimented with it:  

Part of Osborne’s job is experimenting (read: playing around) in the kitchen, and the idea of adding hot sauce to coffee was something she cooked up alongside her colleague and fellow chef John Stephanian. “I’m not going to lie. I was very apprehensive to try hot sauce in coffee at first,” Osborne says. But at the same time, she had a hunch it could be downright delicious. “The concept of combining decadence and heat in places has been a consistent trend in the food industry, such as Mexican hot chocolate and jalapeño margaritas,” she says.

After many hours of experimentation and taste testing, Osborne drilled down a few guidelines that are key to keep in mind when blending hot sauce in coffee. The first step, she says, is choosing the right beans. “I recommend using a light roast, medium roast max, because you don’t want the bitter notes found in darker roasts to overpower the hot sauce,” she says.

Osborne also likes incorporating a few other warming ingredients to the mix for a rich, robust flavor. Specifically, she recommends two to three teaspoons of roasted cardamom seeds and a touch of vanilla. “You can either buy cardamom seeds pre-roasted at the store or you can roast them yourself on the stove,” she says. Cardamom is also good for gut health, so this step is actually making your morning coffee even more nutritious.

Image credit: Devin Avery via Unsplash 

Researchers from Flinders University in Australia have discovered two Viking ship burials thanks to a combination of modern technology and drawings by antiquarian Ole Worm. These drawings, which showed more than 20 ship burials, are dated to be over 400 years old. For reference, at the present time, only ten of those burials have been found:

“Our survey identified two new raised areas that could in fact be ship settings that align with Worm’s drawings from 1650,” said Dr. Erin Sebo, lead author of the study published in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology.

“One appears to be a typical ship setting and the second remains ambiguous but it’s impossible to know without excavation and further survey.”

The recent survey is the first study of the Kalvestene site since the National Museum’s research in the early 20th century. It is the first to pair Ole Worm’s drawings with on-the-ground research.

Sebo and her colleagues used several approaches to survey the site, from studying relevant medieval records and taking aerial photogrammetry to scanning the island of Hjarnø with laser imaging, detection and ranging (lidar).



Image credit: Flinders University  via All That’s Interesting 

Now you can learn how to play the game. Meet the Egyptian Senet, one of the most popular board games of the ancient world. Senet is a game with deep links to the afterlife, played on a board that represents the underworld. The game was featured in tombs, showing the dead playing against friends and family. Senet was loved by Egyptian royals, as Open Culture details: 

“Beloved by such luminaries as the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramesses II,” Meilan Solly notes at Smithsonian, Senet was played on “ornate game boards, examples of which still survive today.” (Four boards were found in Tut’s tomb.) “Those with fewer resources at their disposal made do with grids scratched on stone surfaces, tables or the floor.” As the game became a tool for glimpsing one’s fate, its last five spaces acquired hieroglyphics symbolizing “special playing circumstances. Pieces that landed in square 27’s ‘waters of chaos,’ for example, were sent all the way back to square 15 — or removed from the board entirely,” sort of like hitting the wrong square in Chutes and Ladders.

Senet gameplay was complicated. “Two players determined their moves by throwing casting sticks or bones,” notes the Met. The object was to get all of one’s pieces across square 30 — each move represented an obstacle to the afterlife, trials Egyptians believed the dead had to endure and pass or fail (the game’s name itself means “passing”). “Because of this connection, senet was not just a game; it was also a symbol for the struggle to obtain immortality, or endless life,” as well as a means of understanding what might get in the way of that goal.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a really unique way to tour the United States from a different perspective. If a drop of rain fell anywhere in the US you choose, what path would it take to the ocean? River Runner will show you! I dropped a raindrop in Kentucky and followed it downstream through hills, farmland, cities, and around numerous bends to the Ohio River and into the Mississippi River. Since I live on a river bank, I then went back in and found my home and the path that water takes.   

Explore the waterways of America with this cool application, but keep in mind there are a few places in the US where a raindrop will not make it to the ocean. -via Metafilter

On April 17, 1961, a small army of 1,500 Cuban exiles backed by the US government landed at the Bay of Pigs in the hope of overthrowing the Castro regime. To prepare for this great event that would doubtlessly be the start of a successful military campaign, the CIA struck commemorative coins.

Alas, for the Cuban exile troops and the people of Cuba, Castro's forces knew about the invasion and quickly defeated it. This silver coin was, as a result, never circulated.

-via Super Punch | Photos: CIA

It may seem hard to BEElieve, but a couple of busy BEES were seen working together to remove the lid of a Fanta soda bottle in Brazil. Is this the start of a zomBEE apocalypse? I think I'll not worry and BEE happy since their teamwork is a BEEautiful sight to behold. -YouTube Video Via Viral Hog.

Bee Happy by Tobe Fonseca . Check out the NeatoShop for more bee themed shirts.

Enjoy this amazing lip-sync performance by The Divas In Drag Italian Opera Company. The company is only two guys, who were bored during lockdown and created this video. From their "about" page:

ARE YOU A REAL OPERA COMPANY?

We're as much a real opera company as Maria Callas was a nuclear physicist... not at all.

-via Boing Boing

A survey of 2000 Americans finds that the "average person" thinks they can survive 16 days in the wilderness. The survey, conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Avocado Green Mattress, does not give the percentage of people who make such a claim, but we might assume that a majority of respondents claim a survival time of at least that long. We also don't know if the survey defined wilderness at all, which is important. "Wilderness" can be the Appalachian Trail, the Yukon, or Death Valley. However, the same survey found that only 17% of respondents felt "very confident" in their ability to start a fire with flint. There seems to be a disconnect here. Other results show that people don't know as much about nature as they think they do.

While over half the poll (52%) are confident in their ability to identify different types of plants and trees, researchers put that to the test and discovered many weren’t quite as knowledgeable as they claimed. Only a quarter of respondents could identify a black oak leaf, while just 35 percent correctly spotted poison ivy when seeing it in a photo.

As a lifelong enemy of the poison ivy vine, I find that appalling. I hope the 65% never find themselves answering the call of nature in the woods and looking for something to use for toilet paper. Read more results from the survey at StudyFinds. -via Fark

The slimy, smelly, gelatinous goop called "sea snot" comes and goes in normal times, but now it is seriously gumming up the works in the ocean waters around Turkey, affecting swimming, fishing, and more importantly, killing the plants and animals of the delicate ecosystem.  

The stuff, unofficially and disgustingly known as “sea snot,” was first recorded on the Sea of Marmara in 2007. But there’s more of it now than there has ever been before. For the past six months, it’s spread in a thick, beige layer across the normally deep blue waters.

“I have been traveling here for 15 years and there used to be (snot) at some times,” Burak Yenilmez, who works on a ship, told the Daily Sabah. “But it is worse this year. It is such a dirty sight, and it stinks.”

The strange goo, made of dead overgrown phytoplankton, forms when nutrient-rich water remains still and calm during prolonged periods of heat. Experts think the nutrients came from wastewater, such as untreated sewage, getting dumped into the sea.

The invasion is attributed to climate change and pollution. Read more about sea snot and its effects at Earther.

(Image credit: Annaleida)

Slava Korolev in Palisades Park, New Jersey operates the unique studio named Light Dents. He takes discarded musical instruments and turns them into lovely and eye-catching lamps, candelabras, and wine bottle holders.

Twitter user Melinda in Naples, Florida has access to many bodies of horseshoe crabs. Their hard shells are perfect for painting.