What does “working at home” mean for a house cat? An invasion of space, for one thing. That computer-generated voice usually drives me away from a video, but this time it stands in for the cat’s voice, and the cat really has some good things to say. Or at least funny things.
“I’m not sure what I did to deserve having my life ruined. I’ve been a perfectly adequate cat for most of my life.”
Enjoy this feline POV video from The Dodo.
Russian matryoshka dolls fit inside one another. You might be surprised to learn they aren’t all that ancient- the first set was made in 1892. But how many dolls can you fit inside other dolls? The answer at this point is 51. Youlia Bereznitskaia holds the world record for her hand-painted set of Russian nesting dolls, shown above. The largest is one foot, 9.25 inches (53.97 cm) and the smallest is 0.125 inches (0.31 cm) tall. When I first learned that, I wondered why Bereznitskaia didn’t keep building them larger or smaller after gaining the world record in 2003, but there are more than 60 dolls in this picture, so maybe she did. -via TYWKIWDBI
Enjoying live music is rare or nonexistent these days, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. This new startup, called the Vertical Theater Group, hopes to let people experience live performances, and save the industry behind it as well. The company aims to launch touring performances by bringing a pop-up, prefabricated theater, which mandates social distancing by design:
The building itself is designed by Stufish Entertainment Architects, which has crafted tour stages for everyone from Monty Python to Beyoncé. Its core premise is to turn nearly every seat into a private balcony, squeezing groups of 4 to 12 people into each pod, adding up to a max capacity of 2,400. The floor level could be seated with six feet of social distance, or packed tighter if and when a pandemic isn’t our chief concern. The structure is made to adapt to acceptable densities over time.
Meanwhile, fresh air constantly flows in through its open-walled design (the structure can be wrapped during winter, but it’s more of a three-seasons design at heart), and a simple roof protects from rain. None of these eliminate the risk of contracting COVID-19, of course.
Image via Fast Company
Hopefully the world doesn’t burn before the house finally gives up, right? The family home was a collaboration between Walton Architecture + Engineering, Crestwood Construction and interior designer Denise Kuriger. Located in Truckee, Nevada, the house is quite big, to say the least, with a large floor plan, from cozy window nooks to several outdoor areas:
The large floor-to-ceiling windows create a strong connection between the interior and the surroundings, allowing natural light to fill every single room. The entrance is marked by a wooden pivot door and reveals an open and airy social area with lots of comfortable seating, a big dining table and a stylish kitchen.
A big pine tree had to be removed from the plot during construction is order for the garage to be built. However, it didn’t go to waste and it was never forgotten. It became a 30′ long picnic table which is now in the backyard, a place for everyone to gather around and enjoy beautiful moments together. Because the house occupies the back corner of the plot, that made it possible to remain very open to the outdoors while also being a private and intimate retreat. This along with the way in which the house is structured turn it into a timeless and ideal family home truly built to last for generations.
Image via Homedit
The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, also known as the Sagano Bamboo Forest, is located in Kyoto, Japan. This is Japan’s most famous bamboo forest, and one of the most popular tourist spots in the country. The forest has also been displayed in different merchandise, such as planners, shower curtains, tote bags, maxi dresses, neck gaiters and ruffled bathing suits . But does the actual location hold up to what can be seen in photos? CNBC found out:
Though reviews are positive — the forest gets 4.5 out of five stars on TripAdvisor’s traveler ratings — Arashiyama Bamboo Grove is rarely as quiet as photos suggest.
“Although it was raining and there were a lot of people,” said a recent TripAdvisor review, which added that “the whole experience was very enjoyable.”
Another was more blunt, stating: “Let’s be clear, it’s a nice place. But most of the time, you will not enjoy a peaceful stroll in a bamboo grove, feeling like you traveled the old days of the samurai. Instead, you will be surrounded by Instagram photo-snapping tourists … and most yukata-wearing girls you’ll see will be tourists.”
Image via CNBC
It’s less of the death of the Internet in general, but the death of the Internet as we know it. States are now weaponizing information to gain advantage against other countries and seed misinformation to disrupt another country’s peace or structure. So what’s the connection with the Internet that we know and love? Well, for starters, these countries will develop standards and technology that will separate their nations from the general or globally-used technology:
This will be more than the different “flavours” of the internet we are already seeing emerge. It will be a fundamental shift in how technology is developed, owned, accessed and leveraged by nation states and companies.
In 2021, new alliances will form around the creation of indigenous and sovereign versions of the technology we use to communicate and manage modern life. We will see standards bodies fragment and supply chains and infrastructure redesigned to align with these new realities.
States will start to take more drastic action to ensure that their supply chains are protected, and that their sovereign “silicon-to-service” technology stacks are insulated from the actions of others and enforce their national values.
The global debate around 5G security has led to a position where we will likely see two independent camps moving forward, ostensibly led by the US and China. They are likely to develop the standard in slightly different ways, driven by national requirements and values. China will accelerate its “Made in China 2025” strategy to ensure it owns and builds critical technologies. As a result, other nations will have to decide which camp better serves their national interest, since the only companies that produce this technology are bound to those countries. This will establish a pattern which will be repeated across other critical technologies.
Image via Wired
This dog just saved an infant’s life! Junrell Fuentes Revilla was chased by a dog trying to get his attention while he was riding through the mountains of Cebu in the Philippines. Revilla’s curiosity won over and he followed the dog as it led Revilla to the top of the mountain. It’s a good thing that he followed the dog, or else he would have failed to find an abandoned infant at the dump site on top of the mountain!
Revilla immediately lent his assistance to the newborn and got it to the local police station. From there, the Department of Social Welfare got involved.
The local news story soon spread and caught the attention of Hope For Strays volunteers who were touched by the heroic dog’s actions in saving the abandoned newborn. They sent a group of searchers to the site in order to see if they could find the dog. And they did.
But what they weren’t expecting, was that the dog, named Blacky, wasn’t a stray at all. He actually lived with a family who loved him. Their family even had three other dogs.
Image via The Animal Rescue Site
The TV doctor answers your questions about covid vaccines until the real world starts to creep in. The parody PSA is only 3.5 minutes long; the rest is outtakes. -via reddit
How about a nice relaxing game? The game called Knots is a series of puzzles in which you are challenged to move tiles around to reveal continuous outlines, revealing loops that can take any shape. As you'd expect, they start out simple and become harder as you go. Level eight presents the above mess that you rearrange by clicking a tile and then its destination to reveal this image.
I don't know how many levels there are, since I haven't made it to the end yet, but there are at least 32, and somewhere along the way, you are confronted with more than one shape of the same color. You can turn the music off with a button in the lower left. -via Metafilter
About spells, charms and incantations. #spells pic.twitter.com/ydVXIBUHSB
— Roger Acosta Villanueva (@1989rav) January 29, 2021
The above picture, taken from the 1971 book The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft by Kathryn Paulsen, has been making the rounds of the internet over the past week or so. You have to admit that cheese is magical -it can turn a hamburger into a cheeseburger and make nachos irresistible. The spell as written seems a bit dumb, but it is only out of date. Cheese has been thought of in supernatural terms for a long, long time.
It’s not entirely clear why cheese is seen to have magical properties. It might be to do with the fact it’s made from milk, a powerful substance in itself, with the ability to give life and strength to the young. It might also be because the process by which cheese is made is a little bit magical. The 12th-century mystic, Hildegard von Bingen, compared cheese making to the miracle of life in the way that it forms curds (or solid matter) from something insubstantial.
In the early modern period (roughly 1450-1750) the creation of the universe was also thought of by some in terms of cheesemaking: “all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” The connection with life and the mysterious way that cheese is made, therefore, puts it in a good position to claim magical properties.
Cheese has been used to produce dreams, to reveal those guilty of crimes, and to tempt people into sin. Witches were blamed for stealing milk or spoiling it, and were accused of using cheese in their nefarious magic.
I like cheese. pic.twitter.com/VxBrxewlVK
— Jay Gravatte (@thatKYWitch) January 29, 2021
Read the details of how cheese and witchcraft go together at The Conversation. -via Strange Company
Also check out the previous post 4 Holy Women Transformed by Cheese.
In 2018, an Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to researchers who studied why wombat poop comes out in cubes. The full research paper has now been published in the journal Soft Matter (even though wombat poop is hard matter). The 2018 paper was based on a necropsy of one wombat.
In the new study, the researchers dissected two further wombats and tested the guts’ layers of muscle and tissue, finding regions of varied thickness and stiffness. They then created a 2D mathematical model to simulate how the regions expand and contract with the rhythms of digestion. The intestinal sections contract over several days, squeezing the poop as the gut pulls nutrients and water out of the feces, the team reports today in the aptly titled journal Soft Matter.
The stiffer portions are “like a stiff rubber band—[they’re] going to contract faster than the soft regions,” says David Hu, a biomechanics researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author on the study. Softer intestinal regions squeeze slowly and mold the final corners of the cube, the team found. In other mammals, the wavelike peristalsis of the intestinal muscles are consistent in all directions. But in the wombat, the grooved tissue and the irregular contractions over many cycles shape firm, flat-sided cubes.
So in short, the wombat's intestines have muscles that squeeze hard on four sides, but less so between those muscles in the region that will become the corners. Read more about wombat poop at Science magazine.
(Imagecredit: JJ Harrison)
The diamond is known to be the hardest mineral in the world. Well, after being under a lot of pressure and under high temperatures, who wouldn’t be made tough? But when it comes to hardness, diamonds can’t get any harder. Scientists have discovered that the mineral in question is “metastable”.
In a series of new experiments, scientists have found that diamonds retain their crystal structure at pressures five times higher than that of Earth's core.
This contradicts predictions that diamond should transform into an even more stable structure under extremely high pressure, suggesting that diamond sticks to a form under conditions where another structure would be more stable, what is referred to as being 'metastable'.
The discovery has implications for modelling high-pressure environments such as the cores of planets rich in carbon.
More details about this over at ScienceAlert.
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
A great sleep and dreams of chicken and gravy. If you’re the person who longs for these things, then you might consider getting yourself the Mocchiri Juicy Karaage (“Springy Juicy Fried Chicken”) pillow made by the Japanese brand Fellisimo. The pillows, which cost around $32 apiece, are available in three sizes.
The pillows include a pouch to hold your smartphone, and you’re encouraged to play the ASMR YouTube video of chicken sizzling and frying provided by Fellisimo…
Careful not to get hungry, though.
(Image Credit: Fellisimo/ Technabob)
Have you ever wondered how the thumb, the most important finger in your hand, evolved? Scientists also wonder the same about the said finger, and they might finally have an answer to that question through this study modeling muscle in fossilized thumbs.
It’s a “thorough, robust analysis,” says Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Kent who was not involved with the work. But she and others caution that the research is too preliminary to provide a true smoking gun.
Figuring out how ancient thumbs worked isn’t easy. Fossils don’t preserve muscles, so most previous attempts to estimate ancient dexterity relied on how closely our ancient relatives’ hand bones resembled our own. Hand bones are also small and relatively rare in the fossil record. But resemblance can be deceiving: Depending on how the muscles are connected, some species with similar bone anatomy might have very different grip strengths, and vice versa.
Learn more about the study over at Science Magazine.
(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)
