A Dutch team of aerospace engineers led by Henk Hesselink argue that future airports should be built with circular runways rather than linear ones. This would give pilots flexibility during variable weather conditions and allow for an easier traffic flow. In 2017, Hesselink spoke to International Airport Review about these advantages:

This runway is a circle, that has no limitations on where to take-off or land on this circle. This makes it possible to fly in from or out to any direction. The size of the circle is pretty large, its diameter is 3.5 kilometres. Total length of the runway therefore is 10 km. This means that passengers during take-off or landing will not feel like they are in a roller coaster, a maximum of 1.2g forces will be experienced, similar to a train on a curved track. A typical landing only requires a part of the runway with a limited curve.

Current airports operate runways with fixed directions, so a limited number of directions is available for take-off and landing. During a storm, the capacity of the runway is limited because of this. This fixed direction also means that some communities experience more noise than others.

At the Endless Runway, aircraft have the possibility to land anywhere on the circle. This gives the possibility to find always at least one point where there is no crosswind and only headwind. This means that the airport can operate a sustainable capacity.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Netherlands Aerospace Center

#SATELLITE SPOTLIGHT: Here's a closer look at today's total #SolarEclipse from @NOAA's #GOES16🛰️. The moon's shadow tracked over the southern Pacific Ocean, as well as across #Chile and #Argentina, before moving into the southern Atlantic Ocean just before sunset. pic.twitter.com/YoO9N36s7c

— NOAA Satellites - Public Affairs (@NOAASatellitePA) December 14, 2020

On Monday morning, people near the southern tip of South America experienced the only solar eclipse of 2020. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite caught images of the moon's shadow sweeping across the continent, blocking out the sun.

People in areas where the outer part of the moon's shadow falls, called the penumbra, see a partial solar eclipse. For today's eclipse, that included much of South America as well as a small portion of Africa's southwest coast. If the sun were a little bit farther from the Earth, there would be what's called an annular solar eclipse, in which the moon appears to not block the entire sun and a ring of the sun is still visible. An annular solar eclipse was visible in parts of Africa and Asia in June.

Read more about the eclipse and see another video from space at Mashable.

How do you make a classical artwork both 3-dimensional and pixelated? You build it in LEGO blocks! Professional LEGO artist Jumpei Mitsui has completed a recreation of the renowned woodblock print "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Hokusai.

富嶽三十六景 神奈川沖浪裏 をレゴで立体化しました。
長年作りたいテーマで頭の中でイメージはできていたのですが、今回ついに具現化することができました。立体なので色んなアングルから楽しめる作品になっています。

今日から大阪の阪急三番街・HANKYU BRICK MUSEUMで常設展示しています！ pic.twitter.com/fHEXvxfYDT

— 三井淳平 / Jumpei Mitsui (@Jumpei_Mitsui) December 11, 2020

The work has been permanently installed at the Hankyu Brick Museum in Osaka. See more pictures at Brick Fanatics. -via Boing Boing

When she was working on her master's in fine art at the University of Hertfordshire, Regina Valkenborgh made a pinhole camera out of a beer can. She attached it to a telescope at the university's observatory, and then forgot about it. That was in 2012. This year, the can was removed by David Campbell, technical officer at the observatory. Inside was photographic paper that had recorded the path of the sun 2,953 times! It had been exposed for eight years and one month.

Regina Valkenborgh said: “It was a stroke of luck that the picture was left untouched, to be saved by David after all these years. I had tried this technique a couple of times at the Observatory before, but the photographs were often ruined by moisture and the photographic paper curled up. I hadn’t intended to capture an exposure for this length of time and to my surprise, it had survived. It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence.”

-via Kottke

Giant hornets are a threat to Asian honeybees. The hornets scout for bee nests, chew through them, and feed on the poor bees. To stop the hornets from doing this horrible thing, the bees smear animal poop around the entrance of their nest.

It's still not clear how this dung actually protects the colony, but in the field, it appears to stop scouting hornets…

This is the first ever documentation of bees using tools in a natural setting.

Scientists have known for several years that honeybees can learn how to use tools in the lab, but such skills have never been observed in a natural setting with non-plant matter.

[...]

Traditionally, the definition of a tool requires an object to be found externally, before being altered in some way to give it purpose. Wielding this newly arranged material, the animal must then orient the object to make it most effective.

'Faecal spotting', or the smearing of dung on nests, ticks all four of these boxes and is the first clear cut example of bees using a tool in nature.

Learn more about this over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Rushenb/ Wikimedia Commons)

Smartphones, gaming consoles, cash, and computers (including tablets and laptops). These are the most popular gifts that parents plan to give to their teen kids, according to a survey conducted by SellCell in 2019. But are they prepared for such a thing? Can they handle the responsibility of having a smartphone?

Psychology Today provides you five questions to ask yourself before you give a smartphone to your teen kid. See the questions over at the site. For now, here is one of them.

“Does your child know how to manage his digital reputation?”

Everything we post online stays online forever. It can be seen by anyone and everyone, and even if you decide to delete whatever it is you posted, it can be still saved and shared by others. Today, our digital reputation is often the first impression we give the world and the Internet is flooded with examples of kids whose posting mishaps have cost them dearly. Lost opportunities to attend that dream college or to get the perfect job are not uncommon. This may be too much for a new smartphone owner to wrap his young head around. 

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

How is the brain able to recall events in a chronological order? Two studies from UT Southwestern shed light on this question. The findings from these studies could potentially provide a basis for new treatments against memory loss.

Almost ten years ago, a certain group of neurons were discovered in rats. Aptly called “time cells”, these neurons help in recording the time of events, allowing the brain to correctly arrange the events in an episodic memory.

Located in the brain's hippocampus, these cells show a characteristic activity pattern while the animals are encoding and recalling events, explains Bradley Lega, M.D., associate professor of neurological surgery at UTSW and senior author of the PNAS study. By firing in a reproducible sequence, they allow the brain to organize when events happen, Lega says. The timing of their firing is controlled by 5 Hz brain waves, called theta oscillations, in a process known as precession.

Lega investigated whether humans also have time cells by using a memory task that makes strong demands on time-related information.

Learn more about these studies over at MedicalXpress.

(Image Credit: Melissa Logies/ MedicalXpress)

At the pace our technological advancements are going, it will soon be possible to completely copy a human brain and save it digitally. But if your brain is digitally uploaded and saved, does that mean you are immortal? Would your brain be "you," or just a copy of you? For one thing, we cannot really address whether "consciousness" can be uploaded until we completely define consciousness. And we will not know whether that digital consciousness is actually the same as the person until we try it out. That will lead to questions of personality, existence, and soul, which are more complex than even copying a complete brain. What could possibly go wrong? Well, someone might accidentally delete you, or the power may go out. You might upload to 99% and get stuck. You know how that goes. Or it could be worse. The speculation presented here by Kurzgesagt is fascinating, but if the length of the video bothers you, you can skip the first and last minute. -via Geeks Are Sexy

"Get him, Santa!' And Santa Claus does do, tackling a suspect while an elf drew his handgun. This scene took place in Riverside, California, on Friday. Two police officers working undercover outside of a Target store spent their day arresting shoplifters as they left the store. Then they noticed three men stealing a car in the parking lot. NBC 4 News quotes Detective Paul Miranda about the incident:

The elf cornered one very perplexed suspect.

"When I looked over my shoulder I saw Santa running by me going after the second subject," Miranda said.

The driver got away but detectives say they know who he is.

As for the other two suspected thieves...

"They were apologetic and Santa is currently deciding whether they stay on the naughty list," Miranda said,

-via Dave Barry

Twitter user @NBastel posts this photo of a dormitory at Virginia Tech. Yes, those are accessible, not decorative, balconies over indoor space. According to redditor mchoward, who lived near this building during his time at Virginia Tech, the design led to precisely the drunken shenanigans that you're imagining:

About a decade ago, the people that lived in this building used to throw massive parties in this common area. It would get absolutely packed and the cops were always called. One time, the apartment complex sent an employee to take pictures. They then sent the pictures to all the residents to shame them ("Look at how dumb you all look!"), which included pictures of students pouring drinks from the balconies to the people below as well as students climbing into the ceiling tiles to get to different balconies without having to go down (apparently one person fell through the ceiling). Of course, no one was embarrassed by the pictures, and they sent them to their friends which resulted in even bigger parties.

-via Super Punch

An article at Jezebel is ostensibly an opinion piece on whether couples should sleep in the same bed in a shared bedroom, but a large part of it is a history of the bedroom in Western civilization. While poor people always slept communally due to lack of space, even wealthy families all slept together in medieval times, including servants. The concept of dedicating a room for sleeping, separate from other household activities, came about only gradually.  

In the 17th century Dutch or English colonial American home, the master bedroom doubled as the entry parlor, where a family kept all its nicest possessions, including the home’s “best bed,” typically reserved for the master and mistress, according to Elizabeth Collins Cromley in “A History of American Beds and Bedrooms.” But by the mid-18th century, upper-class New Englanders had adopted the English trend of adding landings, hallways, and centrally located staircases to homes in order to create dedicated rooms for different purposes. In America, however, for the upper and middle classes, the home’s main bedroom was still connected to rooms used for entertaining, though more private, dedicated spaces for servants and children were often found upstairs. But trends toward individualizing sleeping spaces by decorating children’s rooms according to gender also had the trick of making them more private, and the “Mother’s room” (which was the term for what we now call the master bedroom) was generally tailored to a wife’s needs rather than a husband’s:

The custom of keeping the master bedroom on the first floor will not go away, because children grow up and leave, but the folks left behind get older and don't want to climb stairs. We also learn about the evolution of sleeping configurations, including sleeping porches and arranging a bed halfway out of a window, which is hard to picture. Read about the evolution of the master bedroom at Jezebel.

The website Every Movie Cough is "The world's most complete collection of cinematic coughs (and sneezes)." Mike Lacher and Jason Eppink put a lot of work into this compilation.

Since the beginning of motion pictures, filmmakers have trained their cameras at whooping, wheezing, sneezing, sniffling, hacking humans. Some of these expulsions are pivotal to the narrative. Many are purely incidental. But today, they all take on a new significance as vectors for disease. That’s why we believe now is the moment to examine them together in isolation, to see how their depictions vary across history and genre, and to understand how they’re shaped by the lens of the present.

You can see all the collected movie coughs in a mega-video, browse the gallery for individual clips, or check out the categories of gross coughs, drowning coughs, Spielberg coughs, and background coughs, or sneezes by themselves. You can even play a game of identifying the movie from an audio clip of a cough, if you think you're an expert on such things. -via Everlasting Blort

You may look upon the face of this cat and think he's about to attack you, or at least judge you harshly from a distance. Meet Giggles, who went viral even before he was adopted from a shelter in Akron, Ohio. It was Riggi Rescue who gave him that perverse name. But Giggles only looks angry; according to his new owner, he's really a sweetie. It appears that he has a puffy forehead that gives him a permanently angry look, what has been called "resting bitch face." Read Giggles' story and see a ranked list of his best pictures at Bored Panda. You can keep up with Giggles in his new home at Instagram.

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A post shared by NenanaIceClassicFanpage (@nenanaiceclassicfanpage)

Pictured above is a tripod that rests on top of the frozen Tenana River in Nenana, Alaska. People all over Alaska place bets on when they think the ice will break and the tripod will tip over, marking the reopening of the river in the spring. The person who gets closest wins the Nenana Ice Classic and a portion of the pot. Last year, the winner got $311,000. The rest of the proceeds went to charities.

The lottery began in 1917 to encourage town residents to watch the river during construction of a railroad across the river when broken ice could endanger the work. Now anyone in Alaska can buy a ticket for $2.50. Bailey Berg of Atlas Obscura writes about what this tradition means to the people of Nenana:

For two months a year, people place their bets in special red cans that are returned to Nenana in early April. There, teams of locals sort the guesses by hand, entering the tickets into an elaborate analog database that’s checked and cross-checked by myriad workers for accuracy. Even though there are roughly 100 employees working six- or eight-hour shifts, it’s so time consuming that in recent years the contest has been over well before the tickets are all accounted for. [...]

The Classic is a hold-over from Alaska’s more Wild West, pre-statehood years. Before becoming the 49th state in 1959, Alaska had a robust gambling culture. Membership in the union changed that. The Alaska Legislature legalized charitable lottery-style games in 1960, largely to allow the Classic to continue (and making it one of the oldest continuously running betting events in the country). Sixteen percent of all ticket sales are used for scholarship programs, local causes, and sporting groups, and a handful of larger medical charities. Last year the Ice Classic was able to donate $90,000.

"The Absent Advisor: How One Professor's Endless Trekking Overseas Destroyed Marshall College's Archaeology Department" https://t.co/45DuqMUR96

— Michael 🌨️ Albani, ABD (@MJJAlbani) December 12, 2020

Amid the news that 78-year-old Harrison Ford has signed up for a fifth Indiana Jones movie, it occurs to us that it's about time for Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. to retire from the fictional Marshall College. His colleagues, fellow archaeologists, and movie fans got together on Twitter to propose chapters for a book honoring his work. It's a long thread, considering Jones' varied adventures and issues in the field of archaeology. Proposed entries include:

"Guerrilla tactics and Archaeology, Weapons and combat training for the field archaeologist."

"Collection Management Strategies in the Era of Warehouse 13: A Post-Colonial Analysis"

"That Belongs In A Museum, But Which One?: The Art of Repatriation."

“The importance of stylish fedora wear while fighting Nazis.”

"Why does it have to be Herpetology?"

Is this a name of a book?

— Caleb Scott Awe (@Caleb59841684) December 13, 2020

Read the still-growing Twitter thread, and add your own ideas for the potentially huge volume. -via Metafilter