British artist Matthew Simmonds carves miniature architectural models out of hunks of marble. Most of his models feature ancient ruins and older architectural styles, with grand archways, detailed ceilings, and some even come with mini-statues on display in their halls. Colossal has more details: 

Within the spaces, Simmonds contrasts the rough, jagged edges of the stone with precise angles and detailed flourishes. “Drawing on the formal language and philosophy of architecture the work explores themes of positive and negative form, the significance of light and darkness, and the relationship between nature and human endeavor,” he says in a statement.

See more of the artist’s carved interiors, which are often less than a foot wide, on his site.

Image credit: Matthew Simmonds via Colossal

There are many ways that the intersection of poverty and childcare end in tragedy. Before state-run orphanages and foster care, before licensed daycare centers, there were baby farms, a profit-making industry that preyed on poor mothers.

In an era when the most prevalent form of contraception was abortion, for working-class Victorian women who found themselves unable to care for a child, a less dangerous alternative was to surrender their newborn or, “put them out to nurse” at baby farms for a small weekly fee. Most women who chose this route assumed that their child would be properly cared for and receive a wet nurse, attention, room and board at the very least. After all, as referenced heavily in the writings of Jane Austen, wealthier women were also known to put their infants in the care of wet nurses – women who were not the childrens’ biological mothers, but who would breastfeed the children. The fictional character Grenouille of Perfume, as well as the titular character of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist were both residents of baby farms.

Behind the scenes, there were plenty of practices that boosted profits, like taking in way too many babies and neglecting to feed them. But even worse was the trend to take a one-time fee from the relinquishing mother, which relieved the entrepreneur of the necessity of keeping the child alive at all. Read about the gruesome era of baby farms at Messy Messy Chic.

They say that we should not judge a book by its cover. From the outside, this piece of technology looks like a regular Nintendo GameCube to an unsuspecting person, and I wouldn’t blame him if he made that remark; it does look like a regular Nintendo GameCube. But, as the title says, this is, in reality, a gaming PC made by modder Cityle.

Cityle shared pictures of his one-of-a-kind gaming rig on Reddit..., which is outfitted with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, a Ryzen 5 4500u processor, a 2TB Samsung 860 QVO solid-state drive, and 16GB of HyperX DDR4 RAM.

Cityle published his build log here, and it seems it was no easy feat fitting so many intricate parts into something the size of a GameCube. Though clunky by today’s standards, the console measures just 5.9 × 6.3 × 4.3 inches (150 x 161 x 100 mm). Since it’d be nothing short of impossible to fit a top-tier gaming motherboard inside a case this tiny, they transferred one from a disassembled Asus PN50 Mini PC.

Who would have thought that a powerful computer could fit inside a GameCube? I sure didn’t.

(Image Credit: Cityle/ Reddit/ Gizmodo)

"If It's Got Ugly Babies, It's Medieval"

Melbourne art historian Mary McGillivray found the perfect way to fill her time during lockdown, and went viral with it. She started making TikTok videos about famous artworks and how to easily identify them.

"If It's Got Cute Babies, It's Baroque"

Bored Panda interviewed McGillivray about her viral videos, and gives us a rundown of how to identify art. The list does not require you watch videos, but if you want to they are here. As for the madonna images, the baby at the top isn't nearly as ugly as his mother, and the second baby isn't nearly as cute as his mother.  

In 1899, Mrs. Lester ran a boarding house in Brooklyn. She had three cats, named Tom, Dick, and Harry. Nobody ever suspected that it would be Harry who turned out to be the hero of the family.

Until that fateful day, Harry was never the favorite of the three brother cats. In fact, he was reportedly “so big and fat that its owners never thought it would rise to the occasion of becoming a hero.” Instead of playing with his brothers, Harry preferred to coil up on the bearskin rug in front of the dining room fireplace.

But on the morning of December 10, while  he was lounging in the smoking room of his home, one of the male boarders carelessly threw a lit match. Instead of falling into the cuspidor, it landed on the bottom folds of a lace curtain. In just seconds, the entire curtain was on fire.

Read how Harry saved the day, and how the house on Remson street underwent another disaster only a couple of months later at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Like the previous entries in the franchise, Age of Empires III did not disappoint in its music when it was released way back in 2005. But of all the tracks in this game, the track that almost made me cry was the credits track, titled “There Is Weather/ Decisions Are Made”. It just sounds so… beautiful. And apparently, this piece also is a particular favorite of Stephen Rippy and Kevin Mcmullan, the composers of the game’s music.

Try to give this track a listen.

If you want to hear the original version, click here.

(Image Credit: Kevin Mcmullan/ YouTube)

Over a decade ago on an internet forum for mineral collectors, Alysson Rowan stumbled upon a post from another user. The man said in his post that he’s terrified because some of the mineral specimens that he bought were apparently radioactive. Fortunately, Rowan is a radiation safety professional, and, in response to the man’s post, she wrote an article about nuclear safety and the reality of radioactivity. Naturally, Rowan’s article became popular for many radioaction enthusiasts, but with more readers came more follow-up questions. Rowan could have answered these questions one by one, but she followed someone’s advice.

‘Look, forget about these bits and pieces: Just compile this all into a book,” Rowan says. “And so that’s what I did.”

And so, Rowan wrote a book titled Here Be Dragons: The Care and Feeding of Radioactive Mineral Species. The better news? The book is free!

Just like her article which introduced people to nuclear safety, Rowan’s book also became popular and is now the “go-to resource for the radioactive rockhound community.”

Learn more about the book, as well as stories from various collectors, over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Andrey Stoev/ Atlas Obscura)

About 18 years ago, entomologist Andrea Colla received a strange request to survey the secret tunnels under the Italian city of Trieste. The said secret tunnels were a Nazi-raid shelter during the Second World War, and it eventually became a museum managed by cave enthusiasts of the Trieste Alpine Club. But what was inside the now not-so-secret tunnels aside from the usual tourists and school groups? That’s what Colla went to find out.

Colla did not expect much from his investigation. And he was right. What he found out inside the bunker were “standard basement crickets and spiders.”

So he was taken aback in 2019 when one of the air-raid tunnel guides sent him a snapshot of a cartoonishly evil-looking creature — like a cross between a tarantula and a crab, with skin-crawlingly long legs, barbed pincers, and a brownish coat of armor. To Colla, it was unmistakable. This was a harmless arachnid called an amblypygid, sometimes known as a whip spider or tailless whip scorpion, which was neither spider nor scorpion. And it was not supposed to be in Italy at all.

Amblypygids were popping up elsewhere, too. In 2018, an undergraduate in suburban Athens found a few scuttling through his bathroom and kitchen — now he’s credited with uncovering the species’ presence in continental Europe. In 2019, there was the first confirmed record of amblypygids in Jordan, also in a bathroom. In both cases, the person who helped identify the critters was Brazilian arachnologist Gustavo de Miranda. And he’s just outdone himself: Last year he submitted a paper, the publication of which is forthcoming, describing 33 new amblypygid species, one of which has only ever been seen in the pipes and storage sheds of a Rio de Janeiro museum.

The question is, where are these whip spiders coming from?

Learn more about this story over at Undark.

(Image Credit: Graham Wise/ Wikimedia Commons)

Javier Báez.
El Mago.
The Magician. pic.twitter.com/yZX7HgUFCU

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) May 27, 2021

The Pirates infielders were not on their game Thursday. There were two outs in the third inning when Javier Báez of the Cubs got a hit. First baseman Will Craig only had to tag the base, but he did not. The rest of the play needs a Yakety Sax soundtrack! See it from different angles here. If you don't know how baseball works, here's a layman's explanation. 

The Cubs ended up beating the Pirates 5-3. This video induced Mefites to reminisce about the dumbest play they remember from their Little League games.   

Having a cat in your home is good, but having two cats is infinitely much better. Of course, this would mean that your stress, cat food, and your expenses, will be doubled, so don’t keep a second cat if you’re not ready for the commitment. But if you can, then go.

Bored Panda provides us with 50 photos which prove to us why keeping two cats is much better than just keeping one. See them all over at the site.

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

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