Rob the Original, an artist in San Antonio, Texas, works with hair, salt, dollar bills, wood burned tortillas -- well, there aren't many media that he doesn't use. Much of his work is on the heads of people in San Antonio, as he operate a barbershop there. Or perhaps it should be better called a hair art studio, considering what he can do with your locks.
Obviously, the answer is no, but that’s what he thinks he is. In this short clip, Einstein the Texan Talking Parrot calls himself a chicken many times and then proceeds to make chicken noises.
That’s a weird-looking chicken right there.
See the clip over at Laughing Squid.
(Image Credit: Einstein the Talking Texan Parrot/ Laughing Squid)
After finding inspiration in nature, engineers at UNSW Sydney have developed this soft fabric robotic gripper that can grip and pick up objects without breaking them, similar to how an elephant’s trunk behaves. The engineers state that this technology could be applied in sectors where fragile objects are handled, such as in agriculture, and even in human rescue operations.
Dr. Thanh Nho Do, Scientia Lecturer and UNSW Medical Robotics Lab director, said the gripper could be commercially available in the next 12 to 16 months, if his team secured an industry partner.
He is the senior author of a study featuring the invention, published in Advanced Materials Technologies this month.
[...]
"Animals such as an elephant, python or octopus use the soft, continuum structures of their bodies to coil their grip around objects while increasing contact and stability—it's easy for them to explore, grasp and manipulate objects," he said.
"These animals can do this because of a combination of highly sensitive organs, sense of touch and the strength of thousands of muscles without rigid bone—for example, an elephant's trunk has up to 40,000 muscles. So, we wanted to mimic these gripping capabilities—holding and manipulating objects are essential motor skills for many robots."
Researchers have demonstrated in a test that a gripper prototype weighing only 8.2 grams could carry up to 1.8 kilograms, which is over 220 times its own mass.
Amazing!
Learn more details about this device over at TechXplore.
(Image Credit: UNSW Engineering/ TechXplore)
Whatever it is that’s inside this thing, I’m sure that it is something that we are not yet ready to see. But for now, we can only guess.
What do you think is in there?
Image via Engrish.com
In the 19th century, when sugar was an expensive treat, Swedish people used candy for important occasions, such as weddings, baptisms, and anniversaries, wrapped in bright colors and adorned with celebratory images. They also used candies for funerals.
But funeral confectionery design was often downright macabre. There may have been sweets inside the wrappers, but the candies did little to sugar-coat the sad occasion, with wrappers carrying lithographs of skulls, graves, and skeletons.
“The thinking was, ‘We’re dealing with death here and a great loss,’ so visually the expressions were gloomy and morbid,” says Ulrika Torell, a curator at the Nordiska Museum and the author of Sugar and Sweet Things: A Cultural-Historical Study of Sugar Consumption in Sweden. “You were not making something milder than it really was.”
These funeral candies were treated as precious souvenirs, and were not often eaten. But over time, changes in culture changed the custom of funerary candy until it has become a lost art. Read about Swedish funeral candy at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Karolina Kristensson/Nordiska Museet)
BetaSmash used Melodyne Autotune to turn the sounds of a cat fight into music. The point is to showcase how cats use tone, rhythm, and tempo to communicate their feelings, as we are more likely to listen when the caterwauling has been made a bit more pleasant. Still, I was impressed at how this ”cat fight” turned out to be more of one cat lecturing another about his place in the pecking order. There is a bit of violence about halfway through. Still, the animal kingdom has a way of winning and losing fights without causing too much damage; gotta look out for the survival of the species, after all. -via Boing Boing
At around 1:34 AM on election night, Emily Harrington began her free climb of El Capitan’s Golden Gate route. Her goal: to finish the whole climb within a day. Was she able to achieve her goal? Yes, she was, and it was nothing short of amazing.
Of course, Harrington knew that it was going to be difficult, as she already attempted this route twice last year. But this time, she just knew that she could do it, and her intuition was correct.
Over the course of the next 21 hours, 13 minutes, and 51 seconds, Harrington motored up the 3,000-foot line, becoming the first woman to achieve this feat, as well as only the fourth woman ever to free-climb El Capitan in a day, on any route. (In 1994, Lynn Hill became the first person to free-climb the Nose in under 24 hours. Steph Davis and Mayan Smith-Gobat have each climbed Freerider, in 2004 and 2011, respectively, in a day.)
More details about her climb over at Outside Online.
(Image Credit: Jon Glassberg/ Wikimedia Commons)
While Dr. Seuss is best known for his timeless children’s books, he created plenty of other things, like advertising copy and political cartoons. These were projects he did for a living, but there was also a hidden series he called the Midnight Paintings, which were personal, experimental, and sometimes surreal artworks that show us a different side of Dr. Seuss. -via Digg
A St. Louis couple is not only facing felony gun charges for pointing guns at protestors, they are also in another legal dispute with a photographer who shot a viral photo of them. It turns out that the couple, attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey used a viral photo of them shot by United Press International (UPI) photojournalist William Greenblatt:
He hadn’t given the couple permission to use his photo in any way, and therefore their cards seemed to be a clear-cut case of copyright infringement.
“Being lawyers, they should know copyright laws, but apparently they feel like they don’t need to adhere to any of that,” Greenblatt tells PetaPixel.
In response to the cards, Greenblatt sent the couple a bill while UPI sent a cease-and-desist letter.
“I am in the business of selling images,” Greenblatt writes. “I do not give them away for free. Enclosed you will find an invoice for $1500.00, a normal charge for an image such as yours.”
Mark McCloskey responded by posting the letter to Facebook.
“This made my day: the photographer that trespassed into my neighborhood and stole a photo of us has sent us a bill!!!!!” McCloskey writes. “Now be nice and don’t bother him, but what chutzpah.”
Greenblatt says the couple has yet to respond to his letter, and that it’s not money he’s after — he simply wants to protect his copyright as a photographer.
“People steal work all the time. They take it and feel that it’s theirs. […] It makes me mad that they feel they can use the image just because it’s of them,” the photographer says. “It’s not even the money. I could care less about the money.
Image via PetaPixel
Let’s get real, it’s hard to keep up with a healthy diet. Some of us might not have enough resources or time to prepare a well-balanced diet. But there are other ways to look out for our health, too. Cardiologist Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University, shared what nutrients to look out for when you’re buying packaged food. Check out Well and Good’s full piece here to know more!
Image via Well and Good
About 3 years ago, Arnie Lloyd of Elmsdale bought a 1948 Ford F1 car from a family. Aside from the car, he also bought some boxes of truck parts from the same family.
Recently, as he was going through one of the boxes, Lloyd found a hand-written letter by a Canadian soldier named Arnold Weisner. The letter, which was dated Nov. 4, 1944, was addressed to one Clark Armstrong of Beechville.
Lloyd said he found numerous other items bearing Armstrong's name in the box, including love letters, old pay stubs and a driver's license from the early 1900s.
Lloyd currently plans on reuniting the items with Weisner’s family.
"If a grandson or granddaughter gets to read that letter, they get a piece of history that maybe their father or grandfather didn't get a chance to talk about," Lloyd told CTV News.
But according to the curator for the Army Museum Halifax Citadel, Ken Hynes, Lloyd might find it difficult to find the Canadian soldier’s official records, as the Library and Archives Canada haven’t released the records to the public, as some veterans are still alive to this day. Lloyd, however, is determined to search for Weisner’s relatives.
I wonder how the letters ended up in the box of truck parts.
What do you think?
(Image Credit: Arnie Lloyd/ Facebook)
Kristy Scott knows that Desmond, her gamer husband, tends to be too focused when playing video games to the point that he is "never aware of what is going on around him". To see how engrossed Desmond is when he plays video games, Kristy then decided to test her husband if he would notice his own baby.
… she purchased a realistic doll - which she says was made funnier by the fact it looked nothing like their child - and dressed it in her son's clothes, wrapping it in a blanket and hat to better hide its true identity.
Kristy waits until her husband is fully distracted by the game before asking Desmond to look after their son and placing the doll in his lap.
What happened next? Find out on this short video.
Via Mirror
(Image Credit: The SCOTTS/ YouTube)
In 2004, British billionaire Richard Branson established Virgin Galactic, with a rather ambitious goal in mind: to make it possible for hundreds of people to become astronauts without training from NASA.
Branson is the only one among the group of the so-called space barons, the group of space-loving billionaires that includes Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who has publicly pledged to take a ride in the near future aboard a spacecraft he has bankrolled.
Bezos' company, Blue Origin, is working on a competing suborbital space tourism rocket. Musk's SpaceX, however, is focused on transporting astronauts and perhaps one day tourists on days-long missions to Earth's orbit.
Over the past decade, Branson announced virtually every year that his company would be flying customers in a year or so, but that promise was broken time and time again, for many reasons.
On Thursday, however, Virgin Galactic set yet another deadline for Branson's flight: Sometime between January and March of 2021.
Notably, that declaration didn't come from Branson. This time it came from Michael Colglazier, the recently installed CEO of Virgin Galactic whose goal is to guide the company as it grows from an engineering project in the California desert into a multibillion-dollar space tourism business. Colglazier was speaking not to reporters, but to Virgin Galactic investors who bought into Branson's vision after the company made its stock market debut in late 2019. (The company's valuation has grown to $4.5 billion, though it's still burning through more than $20 million per month as it trudges through the final stages of SpaceShipTwo's testing and certification process.)
More details about this over at CNN.
What are your thoughts about this one? Do you think Branson’s space flight will finally take off next year?
(Image Credit: Chatham House/ Wikimedia Commons)
The famous toy artist Dan Polydoris is back with more funny action figures inspired by unexpected sources. Most recently, at Gallery 1988, he exhibited several mint on card figures with characters from The Simpsons. With each one, there is one needful element missing. For Mr. Burns, it's his lifelong companion Waylon Smithers.
