Crypto art has been receiving a boon on social media, with the recent Beeple sale. Beeple, a computer science graduate named Mike Winkelmann, was able to sell a piece of crypto art at Christie’s for US $69 million. The owner of the $69-million art piece is now named in a digital record, called a nonfungible token or NFT,  that confers ownership that is stored in a global database: 

This database is decentralized using blockchain, so that no single individual or company controls the database. As long as the specific blockchain survives in the world, anyone can read or access it, and no one can change it.

But “ownership” of crypto art confers no actual rights, other than being able to say that you own the work. You don’t own the copyright, you don’t get a physical print, and anyone can look at the image on the web. There is merely a record in a public database saying that you own the work – really, it says you own the work at a specific URL.

Since crypto art is really just a link to a JPEG file, why would anyone spend a lot of money for it? The Conversation dives into the world of crypto art and its significance. Check their full piece here. 

Image via Artnome

The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient fragments of biblical texts dating back almost 2,000 years. A new set of these ancient scrolls have been discovered in the West Bank, the first set of biblical scrolls to be discovered in 60 years. A four-year archaeological project discovered the scrolls, identified to be portions of the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, including the books of Zechariah and Nahum: 

Also uncovered was a 6,000-year-old skeleton of a partially mummified child and a 10,500-year-old basket, which Israeli authorities said could be the oldest in the world. A CT scan revealed the child's age was between 6 and 12 — with the skin, tendons and even hair partially preserved.

Among the recovered texts, which are all in Greek, is Nahum 1:5–6, which says: "The mountains quake because of Him, And the hills melt. The earth heaves before Him, The world and all that dwell therein. Who can stand before His wrath? Who can resist His fury? His anger pours out like fire, and rocks are shattered because of Him."

The authority said these words differ slightly from other Bible versions, shedding a rare light on how biblical text changed over time from its earliest form.

The first set of Dead Sea Scrolls to be discovered were found by a Bedouin shepherd in the same area in 1947 and are considered among the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century, although biblical scholars disagree on their authorship.

Image via NBC News 

Christopher Nolan's breakout film Memento came out in 2000, and introduced a generation to the reverse-chronology plot. That's a storytelling method very different from sci-fi time travel tales or the device of inserting flashbacks when appropriate. Reverse-chronology is when you begin a movie in the present, and then go backward to explain what happened. The narrative only makes sense when the beginning of the story is revealed at the end of the movie. It's very hard to pull off, but when it works, it's remarkable. Mel magazine has a list of eight movie and one TV show that use the reverse-chronology format to tell a tale, some better than others, that will intrigue you even as they confuse you. The movies are appropriately listed in chronological order, beginning in 1927. -via Digg

Wine company Murphy-Goode wine is now offering a job for someone who could pursue their love and enthusiasm for wine in Sonoma. The company is willing to pay a salary of $10,000 a month and pay their rent for a year as the new hire explore their passions for winemaking, as Food and Wine details: 

"The sky is your limit," the company said. In exchange, the company will pay its new employee a $10,000 per month salary, and give them a home to live entirely rent-free in Sonoma for a year as well.

Potential job duties including "pivoting your career/life to create an adventure of a lifetime in the wine industry, acquiring strong knowledge of vineyards, winery operations, and wine in general," and "learning the growing and dynamic world of E-commerce."

According to the company, the new hire will also work with the team to drive awareness and build demand for Murphy-Goode Winery, and must have a "willingness and excitement to learn about various aspects of the wine industry."

Beyond the job, the new hire will also get the chance to explore Sonoma Wine Country and will be tasked with developing working relationships across functions of the winery.

Image via wikimedia commons

The first season of Disney+'s Wandavision is complete. Should you jump on the boat and binge-watch it? Get an idea of what the show is like from Screen Junkies and their Honest Trailer. Be aware that it contains spoilers, but nothing that would deter you from watching. To be perfectly honest, this video is liable to leave you completely confused if you haven't been watching Wandavision.

This 1.7-gigapixel image of the Milky Way took J-P Metsavainio nearly 12 years to create. The Finnish astrophotographer estimates that the exposure time for the photo was 1,250 hours. Wow! Metsavainio started the project way back in 2009, and focused on different areas and objects in the galaxy, as PetaPixel details: 

To complete the ultra-high-resolution view of the Milky Way as a whole, Metsavainio then set out to fill in the gaps that weren’t covered by his original artworks.

“I think this is a first image ever showing the Milky Way in this resolution and depth at all three color channels (H-a, S-II, and O-III),” Metsavainio tells PetaPixel.

The photo is 100,000 pixels wide and comprises 234 individual panels stitched together.

Image via PetaPixel 

I wish my slumber was as deep and long as this walrus’s was! A rare walrus was spotted on the western shore of Ireland, and experts assume that the animal most likely fell asleep on an iceberg in the Arctic and managed to wake up on Ireland after its nap. The walrus was first spotted by Alan Houlihan and his five-year-old daughter, as Travel and Leisure details: 

"I thought it was a seal at first and then we saw the tusks. He kind of jumped up on the rocks. He was massive. He was about the size of a bull or a cow, pretty similar in size, he's big, big," Houlihan said. "He was right beside us, less than 50 meters away from us. He went off again for a while and he came back and went back to the rocks."

While absolutely adorable, Flannery noted that the animal is likely very tired, and very hungry, after such a long journey. He urged the public to make sure to give the animal plenty of space if they encounter it.

"Hopefully he'll get a few scallops around Valentia. But at this point, he wants to rest. He's come from the North Pole, possibly off Greenland," Flanner said. "He could also be island-hopping and went to Iceland and on to Shetland but that's unlikely. I'd say he came in out of the Atlantic. It's thousands of miles away. If he regains his strength hopefully he'll make his way back up."

Image via wikimedia commons

Rina Jones' mother often traveled from Vermont to visit her daughter and Rina's husband Brandon in Baltimore. On every trip, they would eat at Ekiben because Mom loved their tempura broccoli. She jokingly mentioned she wanted to eat it on her deathbed. But then Tina's mom fell ill with cancer, and decided to decline treatment. Rina and Brandon prepared for the six-hour drive to Vermont, and wanted to take something that would make Mom happy.

How on earth could they make that tempura broccoli from Ekiben for her? Surely it would turn soggy on the drive.

Brandon, a 37-year-old engineer, emailed Ekiben’s owners and co-founders, Steve Chu and Ephrem Abebe, hoping they could offer some tips. He added one caveat: He’s not a great cook.

Reading his message, Chu thought to himself: “Well … you’re not cooking this.”

Chu wrote back with an offer. He and Abebe would meet them in Vermont. They would cook it themselves.

And so they did. The restauranteurs made the 12-hour round trip to Vermont and set up their fryers outside in the cold Vermont weather. Read the rest of the story at the Baltimore Sun. -via Fark

Vorkuta is a small town in Russia that gets plagued by temperatures as low as -45 degrees Celsius. The city has one of the fastest dwindling populations in all of Russia. Photographer Arseniy Kotov visited the city and was able to snap photos of how abandoned the city is. His photographs show the dilapidated structures covered by feet-long icicles and snow:  

Relics from former residents and the chipped, blue paint peek through the frost, much of which clings to the stairs and banisters and climbs the walls.

Kotov tells Colossal that often, buildings are transformed into similarly chilling caves when pipes burst due to lack of maintenance, leading to splashes of hot water, subsequent high humidity, and then ice growth on every surface. At the time of his visit, one family remained in the Severniy-district building, which was still connected to the central heating system that runs through Russian cities, making it easier to pass through some of the walkways thanks to warmth from the radiators. Although Kotov wasn’t able to meet the sole occupants, he did hear that they moved not long after his tour, saying:

As I know, locals said that after one week as I visited this building, he and his wife were resettled to another apartment, and this whole building was cut off from all the communications (water, heating, electricity). This is a usual story in Vorkuta: as less and less people are left, it becomes unprofitable to heat an entire building, and people are gradually moved to others where there are more inhabitable apartments. Local authorities call it a “managed compression strategy.”

Image via the Colossal

The world's only successful slave rebellion was the Haitian Revolution, ending in 1804, which led that nation to be the first on earth to abolish slavery. Haiti paid an enormous cost for its independence from France. Immediately after the revolution, there was a power struggle between the new nation's founding fathers: a president, an emperor, and a king.

Here are the key players to know: founding fathers Jean-Jacques Dessalines (who became Emperor Jacques I), Alexandre Pétion (who became President) and General Henry Christophe, (who later became King Henry I). Like all burgeoning nations throughout history, there was a power struggle between the three, and within just a few years of independence, Haiti’s new Emperor, Jacques I, had been assassinated by his own generals. His death led to the country’s temporary partition, with Henry declaring himself King the north and Pétion, leader of the south. And with that, the building of King Henry I’s Haitian Kingdom in the north began…

Six richly adorned châteaux, a massive citadel and eight beautiful palaces were constructed to rival the most opulent structures in old Europe during his short reign between 1811 and 1820. Haiti’s “Sans-Souci Palace”, meaning ‘Carefree’ – was the largest of the palaces commissioned. Its gardens were immense, complete with artificial springs and a system of waterworks. Inside, there was said to be mahogany floors throughout, flowing silk curtains and at the top of the grand staircase, a fountain with a gilded sun inscribed with the motto “Je vois tout, et tout voit par moi dans l’univers” (I see everything, and everything in the universe is seen by me”).

Messy Nessy Chic gives us a look at Sans-Souci Palace, with the short version of Haiti's royal history included.

(Image credit: Iconem)

Antarctica is unique in a lot of ways, like being cold, hard to put on a world map, and fairly uninhabitable. It defies successful colonization for a variety of reasons -even mapping the continent is difficult because every direction is north. In this video, comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones go into the sticky question of continent "ownership," but also the history and geography of Antarctica, in a rather entertaining way.  The video is less than seven minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Laughing Squid

What's the definition of a musical instrument? That's a question with an open answer if you consult Spanish musician Xavier Lozano. He specializes in turning everyday objects, such as rifles and bicycle wheels, into playable flutes. In the above video, he's performing with an old street barricade better than I've ever seen anyone else do.

-via The Awesomer

Through most of the 20th century, the Barbizon Hotel in Manhattan was a place where single women, mostly those new to New York City, could live in safety. Historian Paulina Bren has published a book on the history of the Barbizon and its illustrious residents, The Barbizon, The New York Hotel That Set Women Free, for which HBO has already secured the TV rights.   

In the 1920s and 30s the Barbizon advertised its role in protecting young working women from predatory men, the “wolves of New York”, capitalising on the influx of women to Manhattan after the First World War, but after the Great Depression it offered a different kind of sanctuary. “Working women were considered deeply suspect for taking a job away from a ‘real breadwinner’,” explains Bren. “If you were walking around New York and you looked like you were going to work, it could be a pretty hostile environment.” Nevertheless, some persisted. The respectable Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School took over three floors of the hotel for its students, as it filled up with young women “determined to type their way out of small-town America”.

But it was the 1950s, the hotel’s “dollhouse” era, when hundreds of young, aspiring models and actresses found their way to the Barbizon, that Bren most enjoyed exploring. “It was an era when women were supposed to be so prim and proper, but there was a bubbling sexuality,” she says.

Notable Barbizon residents included Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, Jaclyn Smith, Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, and Tippi Hedren. While the hotel opened to men in 1981 and was converted to apartments in 2007, there are five women from the hotel's mid-century heyday still living there. Read an overview of the Barbizon's history at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Dmadeo)

Covehithe is a village on the coast of Suffolk in the UK. It's been there a thousand years, but is doomed to be completely washed away by the sea somewhere between thirty and eighty years from now. But there are no plans to save the village. Imagine being a landowner there and trying to get insurance! But practically, what you'd really be looking for is a new home. Tom Scott explains, and single-handedly turns Covehithe into a tourist attraction against its will.  

While it's not true that pasta first came to Italy from China with Marco Polo, it did travel across the world due to its portability. It was in Italy that pasta was made into an art form, and there are way more pasta shapes than most Americans have ever heard of. Each of these pasta shapes has a story, although some are old and historically murky and others are recent and well-documented, such as Celentano and cavatappi.   

Cavatappi didn’t arrive on the scene until the 1960s. That’s when the Italian pasta brand Barilla introduced a new tubular, corkscrew-shaped pasta called Cellentani. The name is a reference to Adriano Celentano, an Italian pop singer whose energetic stage presence earned him the nickname moleggiato, or “springs.” Barilla writes on its website: “As the shape resembles a coiled spring, it all made sense.” The name cavatappi was actually coined later as a generic term for the pasta shape because Celentano was trademarked by Barilla.

You are probably already familiar with Adriano Celentano. Read the stories behind 14 other pasta shapes, and a brief history of pasta in general at Mental Floss. While the list will introduce you to new pastas, the origin stories are not totally comprehensive. For example, Wikipedia tells us exactly how Cellentani came about.

This particular shape was born in the 1970s at Barilla in Parma[2] when a set of pasta dies had been mistakenly made with a spiral (instead of straight) set of lines. These produced pasta in a spiral or spring (molla in Italian) shape.

So consider the list at Mental Floss to be a portal that may take you down the internet rabbit hole. That's what happened to me.

(Image credit: Francesco Foglieri)