After all this time, Paul Davis was not expecting that he’ll be reunited with his wallet that he lost on New Year’s Eve in 1994. Earlier this week, the wallet was washed up on the beach. Surprisingly, Paul’s bank cards, ID, and even his cash, were still inside the wallet.
After the wallet was found, photos of it were shared to a local Facebook page, which ended up getting the attention of Paul.
Hey, how else can you reach the younger generation but with games? Evangelists are now using streaming platforms to spread the gospel. Yes, this means that they’re playing Fortnite while lecturing about religion. No, I’m not joking. The gaming community, according to Catie Dexter, has some people that need Christ:
Dexter is the chief operating officer of God Mode Activated (GMA), a group dedicated to “activating gamers in faith.”
GMA’s stated goal is to create a community for both believers and nonbelievers to experience Christianity in the context of gaming. Dexter, also known by her Twitch handle Catastrophic, described the ministry’s approach to OneZero as a “network” of GMA affiliates, each of whom is offered free rein to stream whatever games they like — as long as they use their Twitch platform to share Christian content and encourage their audiences to join the GMA Discord server. Sometimes, affiliates hold Bible studies on their streams. In other instances, gamers gather impromptu on the GMA Discord server to chat about personal life while playing games together.
Pastors and evangelists, some of them genuine gamers themselves, are taking to the video game streaming platform because it represents a new mission field for approaching people with the Gospel.
They’re also downright hilarious. Listen, I know how difficult it is to maintain and remember a lot of passwords for different websites, and sometimes some may just decide to have one password for everything. That is a security risk right there. Hopefully though, your password isn’t part of NordPass’ 200 most used passwords for 2020. Check PC Magazine’s piece on what you can do to avoid easily compromised passwords.
Familiar with the Harry Potter fanfiction ‘My Immortal’? No? I’ll be honest here and say you were spared reading that hell of a fic, but at the same time, how can you miss such a beloved Internet masterpiece? Red Bard takes her viewers into a full length discussion of the fanfiction’s plot and the mystery behind its author . If you’re curious as to what ‘My Immortal’ is, this video is a good way to learn more about it (if you don’t want to read the actual piece).
CNN reports a new twist has been introduced to these flights, speed dating. The same company that brought you the Hello Kitty themed airplane, Taiwan carrier EVA Air, is coupling up with the travel experience company Mobius on a campaign called "Fly! Love is in the Air." They are scheduled to take off on Christmas Day, New Year's Eve and New Year Day. The itineraries of each flight will vary slightly.
However, each of the dating experiences includes a three-hour flight that departs from Taipei's Taoyuan International Airport and circles the airspace above Taiwan, plus another two hours of a romantic date back on land.
Participants are encouraged to have in-depth conversations with each other on board while sampling meals prepared by Michelin-starred chef Motoke Nakamura. They are also encouraged to keep masks on when they're not eating or drinking.
The fee for each trip is TWD8388 ($295) per person. The flight for Christmas day is sold out and the flights for New Year's Eve and New Year Day are currently accepting applications.
Not just any singles could join the flights, however. Each flight seats only 40 passengers -- 20 men and 20 women. Participants have to be university graduates with citizenship in Taiwan. The event welcomes men between 28 and 38 years old and women between 24 and 35.
Scientists theorized that dinosaurs were on the decline before the asteroid that completely wiped them out 66 million years ago hit the Earth. It seems that their theories are about to be proven wrong! Researchers in a new study suggests that the huge beasts had been thriving instead, as Daily Mail details:
Previous works used fossil records to assess diversity of dinosaurs, but researchers in the latest study say how bones are preserved and other factors produce sampling bias.
Teams from the University of Bath and the Natural History Museum collected a set of different dinosaur family trees and used statistical modelling to assess if each of the main dinosaur groups was able to produce new species at the time.
This allowed them to examine the rates of speciation of dinosaur families rather than counting the number of species belonging to the family, revealing some groups, such as hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, were flourishing on Earth before the mass extinction.
Here’s a spoiler alert: they’re still the company’s popular Powerbeats, but they just glow in the dark. Beats, in collaboration with design label Ambush, has released a new special edition Powerbeats. Inspired by Tokyo’s energetic nightlife, Ambush wanted to capture the city’s energy when someone is outside late at night listening to music:
While glow in the dark earphones may seem unnecessary, especially when they cost $50 more than the regular Powerbeats, we won't be surprised if they do find buyers. Firstly, it's admittedly cool and will easily draw attention (if you want that kind of stuff). And speaking of attention, city runners could definitely find utility in these for their night runs.
The new variant sports a minty green colour of sorts which glows bright green in the dark. Another aesthetic difference is that there is now an Ambush logo stamped on the earbuds, right alongside a red Beats logo.
Apart from these aesthetic differences, this is still very much the Powerbeats Pro. They last up to 15 hours on a single charge, offer IPX4 sweat-resistance, and ear-hooks which make them suitable for workouts. In terms of sound they're comparable to the more expensive Powerbeats Pro. They also have an Apple H1 chip which lets it seamlessly connect to Apple devices and access to 'Hey Siri' for hands-free control.
The Ambush x Powerbeats cost $199.95 and go on sale in the US from November 18.
More that 60 percent of Americans are considered either obese or overweight. It’s odd for the country to have such a huge percentage when there are fitness areas scattered in most areas, along with the rise of weight-loss and nutritional supplements. Obesity is a major public health issue, as observed by Dr. Rajiv Shah, a leading Minneapolis-based nephrologist and kidney specialist. Researchers are now looking at gene mapping to learn what causes weight gain, as Observer details:
Enter Dr. Andrés Acosta, a soft-spoken Ecuadorian-born research physician and scientist at the world-famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. What began as a research project at Mayo has gradually been spun out into a separate company called Phenomix, which is now taking on venture capital from major physician-led associations and health insurers. If successful in its mission, Phenomix may end up forcing large swaths of the traditional weight-loss industry to go belly up.
“70 percent of all people who try to lose weight either fail to lose any or lose some and gain it back quickly,” comments Acosta. “And that has massive healthcare implications from heart disease to type 2 diabetes to stroke. Instead of looking at how to lose weight, we should first understand why people are gaining weight.”
The why, as it turns out, comes down to combining two somewhat distinct areas of human science: genotyping, the process of determining differences in the genetic make-up of an individual’s DNA, and metabolomics, the scientific study of chemical processes driving our unique metabolic profiles when the genotype interacts with the environment. Together, by looking at our unique genetic and metabolic fingerprints, the Mayo team has created a roadmap for understanding each human’s unique chemical and genetic profile that can not only predict obesity but better address and contain it.
Look, we all thought the main protagonist of Home Alone was a genius for subjecting the two robbers to multiple traps and accidents in the movie. However, many fans realize that Kevin McCallister’s booby traps would have done more damage in real life than what was depicted in the film. Vsauce’s Jake Roper tested some of the traps in real life, and the effects are far more frightening:
In a recreation of the McCallister home, Roper set out to test the hand-burning hot doorknob, the swinging paint cans both Wet Bandits received to their faces, and the crowbar to the chest that Marv doles out to Harry.
The results of the tests are… frightening, to say the least. Turns out, the doorknob is substantially more dangerous to Kevin than to the bandits. The temperatures needed to transfer enough heat to the outside knob would likely melt the door, or at least set it on fire. A crowbar to the chest would send Harry to the morgue. That blow could puncture his lungs and heart, but he’d already be dead. That paint can trap would have definitely killed Harry and Marv. Roper’s video demonstrates how a swinging paint could knock your head clean off your shoulders.
One of the questions that astronomers have been trying to answer for decades is whether or not the universe itself produces a glow.If we take out all the stars, galaxies, and other heavenly bodies that produce their own light, will the universe just be a dark, barren space? It seems that Tod Lauer and other researchers with NASA's New Horizons space mission have finally been able to answer that question:
To try to detect the faint glow of the universe, researchers went through images taken by the spacecraft's simple telescope and camera and looked for ones that were incredibly boring.
"The images were all of what you just simply call blank sky. There's a sprinkling of faint stars, there's a sprinkling of faint galaxies, but it looks random," says Lauer. "What you want is a place that doesn't have many bright stars in the images or bright stars even outside the field that can scatter light back into the camera."
Then they processed these images to remove all known sources of visible light. Once they'd subtracted out the light from stars, plus scattered light from the Milky Way and any stray light that might be a result of camera quirks, they were left with light coming in from beyond our own galaxy.
They then went a step further still, subtracting out light that they could attribute to all the galaxies thought to be out there. And it turns out, once that was done, there was still plenty of unexplained light.
In fact, the amount of light coming from mysterious sources was about equal to all the light coming in from the known galaxies, says Marc Postman, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. So maybe there are unrecognized galaxies out there, he says, "or some other source of light that we don't yet know what it is."
Artificial mountains dot the terrain earth wide. Some are built to add a new feature to the landscape. But most are the consequence of manufacturing processes and piled construction and mining waste. Artificial mountains can be formed from slag, the molten rock separated from iron ore during steel production. Slag is then dumped in a waste pile, which hardens into concrete-like rock when cooled. Other artificial mountains have been created from the leftover remnants of producing cement.
The majority of the artificial mountains found in the United States are the byproducts of cement and steel production, created at the pinnacle of those industries between the late 1800s and mid-20th century. They can be humongous in size. Brown’s Dump in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, for example, was over 200 feet tall and covered the equivalent of 130 city blocks. These mountains have been described as toxic nightmares. And tragedies have resulted from them collapsing.
Piles of the rock extracted during mining, also called spoil tips, can rise hundreds of feet into the air. Their loose composition can make them unstable and quite dangerous. In 1966, more than 115 children were killed when a mountain made from coal mining debris slid into a school in Wales. A similar disaster occurred in late 2015 when a steep mountain made from building construction leftovers in Shenzen, China collapsed, sent a landslide of mud and concrete onto the factories and neighborhoods below, and caused more than 85 people to go missing. In 2016, an artificial mountain built to extend an airport runway in Charleston, West Virginia collapsed and destroyed a church and a home.
Dismantling those that do exist can be tremendously difficult and expensive, but there is potential money to be made from re-purposing them. One mountain recycler says his business is like “having a license to print money.” Read further about the danger, beauty, and potential of artificial mountains at Atlas Obscura.
The Tree Root Cave, also known as The Tree of Life, The Runaway Tree, and the Kalaloch Tree is can be found on the coast of Washington State at Kalaloch.
The tree pictured is a Sitka spruce. There's a lot of mystery surrounded both the tree and the natural phenomenon that allows it to hang there so delicately without collapsing. Especially since it is buffeted by storms rolling in from the Pacific Ocean. It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "hanging by a limb"!
So how does this mysterious tree stay green, you might ask? If you go inside the cave, you'll see a stream fall into it and flow out into the ocean. The stream washes out the soil underneath the roots, keeping everything fresh.
The tree is located in the Olympic National Forest, which is also home to the world's largest Sitka spruce. According to Olympic National Parks, this Sitka Spruce is one of 6 record-breaking trees located in the Quinault Valley. I grew up in a neighboring community and can attest it is an impressive tree.
