In all honesty, it’s very satisfying to watch people restore old items and make them look like they never aged a day. It’s also wonderful to be reminded that there’s a way to repair old items so that they could last for a longer time. The Small Workshop restores a rusty knife that they found where their grandpa’s house used to be. They estimate that the knife must be more or less around 100 years old, as the house stood there for 100 years. Watch as they turn the old knife into a small wood carving knife.
The vast majority of work by Mike Batz, an erotic artist, is not for suitable for Neatorama, but his inspired underpants design is a notable exception. He applies the inherent roominess of the croc shoe to the anatomical requirements for male clothing. On hot days, the ventilation is an added bonus.
Well, sort of. It’s not Toy Story in real life, so apologies if you’re disappointed. Lego Vidiyo, made in collaboration with Universal Music Group, looks like the usual Lego toy. You follow the instructions and build a box to carry a Lego figurine in it. But where does the ‘bringing the figurine to life’ action come in? Well, it comes in via an accompanying smartphone app. Once you take a picture of that figurine from the app, it will dance and sing on the application.
In the 1991 horror film The Silence of the Lambs, Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb is a serial killer who captures, mutilates, and murders his victims in grotesque methods. His home was Hell on Earth. Soon, you'll be able to stay there!
Chris Rowan, a theater professional, has purchased the house outside of Pittsburgh used for the movie. He plans to open it to guests as a bed and breakfast. The New York Post reports:
Rowan won’t have to do much to restore the four-bedroom, one-bathroom house to its horror glory — the home outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, already has many of its original features, including its old-fashioned wallpaper, hardwood floors, pocket doors and dark wood trim. And the exterior of the three-story house is the same yellowish-red brick with a wraparound porch as seen in the movie.
For movie fans, though, the house will prove to be a fixer-upper:
But the most important renovation will be the infamous well in the basement where Hollywood’s original psychopathic B&B, played by Levine, traps his victims.
Filmmakers shot the basement well scenes off-site — the house doesn’t actually have a creepy hole in the ground — but the new owner reportedly plans to add one to give guests the full Buffalo Bill experience.
Gizmodo introduces us to the Maxus Life Home V90 Villa, a Chinese-made van RV. It's vertically huge over a tiny footprint. The second story (please lower before driving) has a dining area and a balcony.
Researchers from UNSW Sydney and the South Australian Museum have been studying the rings of ancient New Zealand kauri trees, which can record environmental changes over many thousands of years. They found clues about the last time the earth’s magnetic poles switched, around 42,000 years ago. The environmental effects of the magnetic field thinning to a small fraction of normality would have been cataclysmic not only to the environment, but to people who witnessed it. Solar flares, ionized air, aurora, and electrical storms would have been quite frightening.
The researchers theorise that the dramatic environmental changes may have caused early humans to seek more shelter. This could explain the sudden appearance of cave art around the world roughly 42,000 years ago.
"We think that the sharp increases in UV levels, particularly during solar flares, would suddenly make caves very valuable shelters," says Prof. Cooper. "The common cave art motif of red ochre handprints may signal it was being used as sunscreen, a technique still used today by some groups.
"The amazing images created in the caves during this time have been preserved, while other art out in open areas has since eroded, making it appear that art suddenly starts 42,000 years ago."
While the temporary flipping of the magnetic poles (which lasted 800 years) is called the Laschamps Excursion, the researchers in this study refer to the beginning of the flip 42,000 years ago as the Adams Event, in honor of Douglas Adams, who knew the answer to everything is 42.
"The more we looked at the data, the more everything pointed to 42," says Prof. Turney. "It was uncanny.
"Douglas Adams was clearly on to something, after all."
Tom Bob is trying to spark life into cities by painting over random objects around these cities. From drain pipes to vents, to manhole covers, to pavement, to poles, and to fire hydrants, the graffiti artist paints his signature cartoonish creatures over these random objects to add more character and life to them. Tom started with the streets of New York, and has hopped from city to city to continue his colorful agenda. Bored Panda lists some of his creations here. What’s your favorite piece from the artist?
Fossils tell us a lot about extinct animals from millions of years ago, but DNA sequencing can tell us a lot more, especially when the fossils they come from are only tiny fragments of the original animal. But DNA begins to degrade as soon as a creature dies. There is no readable DNA from dinosaurs, despite what Jurassic Park would have you believe. But a discovery of some teeth from steppe mammoths (an elephant that lived before the wooly mammoth) is setting records for readable DNA.
The clues come from some incredibly old DNA extracted from a trio of molars uncovered in northeastern Siberia. The oldest is nicknamed the Krestovka mammoth, dated to about 1.2 million years ago. The other two molars are nicknamed the Adycha and Chukochya mammoths, dated to 1 million and 500,000 to 800,000 years old, respectively. The fact that the researchers were able to extract and analyze the DNA from these fossils at all is a landmark. Up until now, the oldest look at ancient genes came from an Ice Age horse that lived over 560,000 years ago. The new mammoth samples double that, taking the title for the oldest DNA yet recovered from fossil remains. “We had to deal with DNA that was significantly more degraded compared to the horse,” says Swedish Museum of Natural History paleogeneticist Love Dalén, an author of the new study.
At any rate, the extracted DNA from the step mammoths revealed some surprising findings, such as their long hair (which makes the illustration above obsolete) and their relationship to other mammoths. Read about the mammoth findings and the feat of extracting million-year-old DNA at Smithsonian.
The US government, in setting standards for food quality based on appearance, also shaped our perception of what is acceptable to eat. This does not always line up with reality. But having set the standards, the government then had to deal with food producers who took shortcuts to make food appear better to the consumer. What kind of added food coloring is acceptable or necessary? The first three minutes of this video is about the margarine wars, which you may remember from a previous post. But regulating the color of food goes way beyond that. While food safety is of paramount importance, it might be better for the public to get used to the way food looks before it is converted to Instagram quality in order to attract our eyes at the grocery store. -via Digg
Instructables member Jade Pullen made this amazing globe that turns on and off live radio broadcasts around the world based on how the globe is physically oriented. It's a whole world filled with many different voices available with the flick of a finger. Sometimes, Pullen writes, the experience of using RadioGlobe is quite jarring:
Part of the magic is the the tension between familiarity and the unfamiliarity: It's both shocking how many radio stations play Western pop music, but then with a turn of the jog wheel, you find an alternatives (in the same location) - and you navigate from Boosh FM's Drum & Bass, to listening to a native dialect of New Zealand. [...]
News is another revelation - it's all too easy to lapse into thinking my 'international' news is 'the benchmark'. I found myself listening to the same global updates on COVID-19, but rather than my usual BBC News, I heard a local DJ discussing it in a chat radio station in South Africa - framing things in, frankly, a more gritty take... It's certainly different to what I'm used to, and that's the point.
There is snow on the ground here in Texas. But, I have heard, it also snows elsewhere. So it is hard to know precisely where this video was recorded. The man featured acts very Texan, so we shall claim him as our own.
True story: a few nights ago, when the heaviest of the snowfall was upon us, my wife commented that it was odd that one of our neighbors, who is prone to shoot off fireworks at seemingly random moments, had not decided that a record-braking blizzard was not the perfect moment for a fireworks show. 30 seconds later, the fireworks started. Because Texas.
Venice is one of the world’s premiere places to be for Carnival, the two-week period leading up to Lent. The city goes all out with elaborate costumes, entertainment, and celebrations for the thousands of tourists want to experience a one-of-a-kind Carnival. But this year is different. Italy was hit pretty hard by the coronavirus last year, and no one wants to see a repeat of that.
The Venetian Carnival in the time of COVID is decidedly different, not least because all public celebrations have been cancelled and are instead being streamed online. Restaurants are closed at 6 p.m. and the city must button up at 10 p.m. by law due to a nationwide curfew thanks to the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Normally, Carnival is a time when many Venetians head out of town due to the influx of tourists, but with travel between Italian regions prohibited and tourism from abroad at a standstill, Carnival this year is very local indeed and for some Venetians, it is the first time in years they have not skipped town. On the last Sunday of the Carnival season, St. Mark’s Square was full of locals. “It’s so odd to only hear Italian being spoken here,” a masked Venetian woman dressed as a courtesan told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know if I like it this way. It just doesn’t seem like Carnival.”
It is a rare privilege to see Venetians celebrate this year’s Carnival alone due to COVID restrictions, and one that—as amazing as it is—no one really wants to see ever happen again. “Of course we can’t deny how magical it is to see Venice like this without the usual onslaught of foreign tourists,” a shop owner who sells hand-pressed paper off St. Mark’s Square told The Daily Beast. “But once in a lifetime is enough.”
While this looping animation by Lord Victor Haegelin shows half a dozen Leonardo DiCaprio movies, it’s far from all of them. He’s acted in 30 feature films! However, you should be able to name all of these, despite the cool but vertigo-inducing transitions. -via Digg
British Antarctic Survey scientist Huw Griffiths explained how a team of geologists drilling through the ice to collect sediment samples found something quite unexpected half a mile under the Antarctic ice shelf:
“We were expecting to retrieve a sediment core from under the ice shelf, so it came as a bit of a surprise when we hit the boulder and saw from the video footage that there were animals living on it.”
There are many kinds of walls, and even among those built on a country estate, designs vary according to their purpose. One rather ingenious wall design is the ha-ha, possibly called that because that’s what people said when they saw how it worked. From the grounds of well-kept estate, it was barely visible, and what you saw was not only minimal, but aesthetically pleasing. What you didn’t see was a barrier that kept animals out of the yard.
In those early days, before mechanical lawn mowers, sheep and cattle were often allowed to graze on the ground to keep the grassland trimmed. A ha-ha was typically constructed between the estate's gardens and grounds to prevent grazing animals from crossing over to the manicured lawn and gardens adjoining the house, while generating a continuous vista of the garden and landscape beyond. Unlike an ordinary trench, which may turn into a moat or become overgrown with vegetation, a ha-ha keeps the estate ground in an impeccable state by allowing livestock to graze right up to the stonewall.
Find out how a ha-ha works, and see examples of its use at Amusing Planet.
