The way these sculptures move along with the wind is mesmerizing. If someone used a video of Anthony Howe’s kinetic sculptures for hypnotizing anyone, it could work. The Washington-based artist’s sculptures weigh hundreds of pounds, but they can move with the slightest breeze. Just watch how his artworks move on his YouTube channel. Honestly, it’s very pleasing to watch. 

Image via Colossal 

In 2010, New Mexico's Forrest Fenn buried a treasure chest, containing a million dollars worth of gold and jewelry, and launched a nationwide treasure hunt. Thousands of people tried to decipher the clues and find the box. In June of 2020, Fenn announced that someone had found and retrieved the treasure, but wished to remain anonymous. After all, lots of people had spent years on the quest, several had died, and there were lawsuits pending. Forrest Fenn himself had endured harassment and threats over the treasure hunt. Fenn confirmed the find with photographs, and then died in September. Writer Daniel Barbarisi was one of those who tried to solve the clues and find the treasure. After the announcement, he switched gears and tried to find the winner. He did, and began a correspondence.

So despite exchanging dozens of emails with the finder, and discussing the details of the chest and what locating it meant to him, I never pressed him about who he was, and he never volunteered.

Last week, he told me the situation had changed. Fenn had been targeted by lawsuits both before and after the chest was found, by hunters claiming that the treasure was rightfully theirs. One of the lawsuits, filed immediately after Fenn announced the hunt was over, also targets the unknown finder as a defendant, claiming that he had stolen the plaintiff’s solve and used it to find the chest. That litigation had advanced to a procedural stage during which the finder expected his name would likely come out in court. So while he remained guarded about his solve and the location where he discovered the treasure, he now didn’t mind telling me who he really was.

Strangely, the finder is someone you may have heard of. Read about the Forrest Fenn treasure, the guy who found it, and what's happened since then at Outside Online. -via Damn Interesting

This bear tries to test its balancing skills on a log, while another bear watches it from a distance.

Can this bear walk across the log without falling into the water? Can it maintain its balance all throughout?

Watch this video from ViralHog to find out.

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

The International Olympic Committee would like to make the games "more gender balanced, more youthful and more urban." So it has decided to add breakdancing as a sport, along with surfing and skateboarding. Top contenders in those sports will journey to Tokyo next summer to prove their skills. The Guardian reports:

Breakdancing – or breaking as it is known – evolved in New York in the 1960s and 70s as a way for rival street gangs to fight for turf. It made its Olympic debut at the 2018 Summer Youth Games in Buenos Aires. The IOC has confirmed it will be staged at a prestigious downtown venue, joining sport climbing and 3-on-3 basketball at Place de la Concorde.

Personally, I would like to see the return of cannon shooting to the Olympics.

-via Althouse | Photo: M. Johnson

Don’t have a place to park your scooter? That won’t bother you anymore if you have this electric scooter made by the startup company WheelKinetic. The scooter, called BooZter, can be folded to a size that can fit inside a backpack or a laptop bag. It can also be carried by its integrated handle if you don’t have a bag.

Constructed using carbon fiber, titanium and aluminum, the 14-lb (6.5-kg) electric scoot is small enough to fit in a backpack or even a laptop bag when folded down to 10 x 18.5 inches (26 x 47 cm) in around 10 seconds, or can be carried by hand using a convenient integrated handle. And interestingly, when the ride is folded down, its wheels sit inside the unit to potentially lock away any dirt accumulated while scooting.

[...]

Kickstarter pledges for the BooZter start at US$899, with the estimated retail price being $1,300. The usual crowdfunding caveats apply, but if all goes to plan, shipping is estimated to start in August 2021.

Learn more details about this over at New Atlas.

Cool!

(Image Credit: WheelKinetic/ New Atlas)

This is the Gara Medouar, a geological formation near Sijilmasa, Morocco. You might have seen this place in the films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, whose stories were set in Egypt, but were largely filmed in this place. The Gara Medouar is also featured in the 2015 Bond film Spectre as the evil lair of the villain.

Gara Medouar, literally “the round mountain”, is the eroded remains of a large limestone massif that, at its current state, rises 50 meters above the desert and encompasses an area of about 50 hectares. But there is no plateau. Instead, the central region is collapsed to form a valley, and the resulting circular formation is broken by a ravine that provides entrance into the heart of the massif. The interior is flat and any loose material has long been washed away, presumably by water, although there is no source of water nearby in the desert today. Most of the perimeter consists of vertical rocks with loose gravel at the bottom.

Learn more about the Gara Medouar and how it was used in history over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Piefke La Belle/ Flickr)

It was 1872, and the United States was still expanding westward, when suddenly, a virus spread from Canada to Central America. While the virus did not affect people physically, their social and economic life were still heavily affected by the virus. But why was this the case? It was because the virus targeted horses.

For centuries, horses had provided essential energy to build and operate cities. Now the equine flu made clear just how important that partnership was. When infected horses stopped working, nothing worked without them. The pandemic triggered a social and economic paralysis comparable to what would happen today if gas pumps ran dry or the electric grid went down.

Learn more about the horse flu epidemic over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: WolfBlur/ Pixabay)

Pavlov is known for discovering classical conditioning, the process in which a person or animal learns a new response when two stimuli are linked together. Could Pavlov have conditioned himself during his own experiment unknowingly? We can only speculate.

Well, what do you think?

Image via Longings of Life on Facebook

What do officials mean by inappropriate, anyway? While Salma El-Shimy was not arrested because of indecency, authorities still claim that the Egyptian model and influencer’s outfit,  a short white dress with a pharaonic beaded belt and necklace, was “inappropriate.” She was actually arrested for having a photoshoot at an archaeological site in Giza without a permit. She has been released from arrest and is now awaiting trial. 

(via Art Net)

Image via Art Net

Are you waiting for Marvel’s phase 4 of movies to come out? If you want to keep the hype train running, you might want to rewatch all previously-released Marvel movies, in chronological order (I mean, you could still watch them in their release order, but maybe some movies wouldn’t make sense in the whole cinematic universe’s timeline...and that could get confusing). Alternatively, if you’re looking for another reason to watch the huge heap of Marvel movies, maybe you could finally watch them in  chronological order! Regardless of motivations, ShortList has got us covered with their guide on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Check it out and have fun! 

Image via ShortList

We will probably continue evolving until our species is fully wiped from the Earth. Surprisingly, human evolution hasn’t stopped after Homo sapien became the last hominid to exist. Thanks to our environment constantly changing, along with natural selection, our bodies are trying to adapt to changes- just not in very obvious ways. Inverse writes about the three ways modern humans are evolving. Check the full piece here. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to remote sensing equipment, experts have discovered an ancient landscape of mounded villages in the Amazon. The ancient villages, which could only be seen below the rainforest canopy, were laid out like a clock face. These mounded villages were estimated to have been built between 1300 and 1700 AD: 

This is further evidence the rainforest has long-been occupied by indigenous communities, whose cultures rose, fell, transformed, and rose again, long before Europeans made an impact in the Americas. The research shows after the abandonment of the large geometrically patterned ceremonial earthworks, around AD 950, a new culture arose with communities living in mounded villages with highly defined concepts of social and architectural space.

The circular mound villages are connected across the wider landscape through paired sunken roads with high banks that radiate from the village circle like the marks of a clock or the rays of the sun. The villages have both minor roads and principal roads, which were deeper and wider with higher banks. Most villages have paired cardinally orientated principal roads, two leaving in a northward direction and two leaving in a southward direction. The survey reveals that the straight roads often connect one village to another, creating a network of communities over many kilometers.

Image via Phys.org 

And I mean that literally. 20 Slices consists of twenty slices of American cheese wrapped in plastic sheets.

It's the work of Ben Denzer, an artist and designer who is fascinated with book production. He makes books out of unusual materials and content sources, such as fortune cookie fortunes, ice cream, and ketchup packets.

Some libraries have acquired 20 Slices. At Atlas Obscura, Abigail Cain writes about Denzer's works and how libraries have processed it and made it accessible to patrons. Jamie Lausch Vander Broek, a librarian at the University of Michigan, who bought it for her library, describes student reactions:

“One student was like, ‘Well, you know, I think the cheese was already a book,’ and I thought that was a really astute observation,” Vander Broek says. “I think that what [Denzer] is doing is elevating things that already want to be books because they formally exhibit the characteristics of a book. There’s so much there to talk about that really gets at the nuance of ‘What is a book, exactly?’”

I wonder if could request a copy of 20 Slices through interlibrary loan after the pandemic subsides and ILL service reopens. Currently, I can get only digital ILL materials, so I could probably request a photocopy the pages of 20 Slices.

Photo: Ben Denzer

Maybe researchers can discover the dimensions Dr. Strange can travel in and out of, damn. All jokes (or references) aside, a new study shows that the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest atom smasher, could open a window to learning more about gravity, and possibly, unknown dimensions. Space gives us details on the wild theory that our universe may be studded with small black holes that they could exist in between atoms! Check the full piece here to learn more. 

Image via Space 

Alice Springs lies in the middle of the Australian desert. The Todd River has water only during the occasional rainfall. But that doesn't stop residents from enjoying a good boat race there. The Henley on Todd Regatta is perhaps the world's most unusual boat race because the participants have to carry their boats on foot through the desert sands.

There are several boating events, such as the team race embedded above. There's also land surfing, hamster wheel racing, and sand shoveling.

-via Amusing Planet | Photo: Alli Polin