The current pandemic made a lot of us work from home. Most of our houses aren’t conducive to a working environment, maybe some of us are just using our dining room table, or any flat surface where our computers and files can be placed while we work. If you have the same issue, this article might just be a good place to get some inspiration on how to DIY a portion of your home into a ideal home office: 

For four months, Kris McDonald and his wife both crowded around the dining room table to work from home. It was, as he says, “no longer working.” But when his wife put in an order for a new desk to call her own, they both realized that they didn’t actually have a place to put it—yet.

The unfinished attic in their home was sitting empty, so Kris drew up plans to turn it into a small “Jack and Jill” office space that would give them each a desk on opposite sides of the room. That way, they’d have their own space and would be able to retreat to their living areas in off-hours.

Check how Kris McDonald and his wife did the transformation over at Apartment Therapy. 

Image via Apartment Therapy 

The day, regional travel restrictions for Melbourne has been lifted, we took off the Great Ocean Road. And we had been in luck! Right two minutes drive for Apollo Bay, we met a koala sitting low on a gum tree. She looked at us with surprise in her eyes! Seems she did not see any tourists there for a long time.

A team led by Cornell University has developed a technique called “cold spray.” This technique could produce “mechanically robust, porous structures that are 40% stronger than similar materials made with conventional manufacturing processes.” Aside from that, they can also make these structures much faster.

The structures' small size and porosity make them particularly well-suited for building biomedical components, like replacement joints.

The team's paper, "Solid-State Additive Manufacturing of Porous Ti-6Al-4V by Supersonic Impact," published Nov. 9 in Applied Materials Today.

The paper's lead author is Atieh Moridi, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

[...]

The particles were between 45 and 106 microns in diameter (a micron is one-millionth of a meter) and traveled at roughly 600 meters per second, faster than the speed of sound. To put that into perspective, another mainstream additive process, direct energy deposition, delivers powders through a nozzle at a velocity on the order of 10 meters per second, making Moridi's method sixty times faster.

More details about this over at PHYS.org.

This is awesome.

(Image Credit: Cornell University/ PHYS.org)

Marty, a black Maine coon cat that patrolled the highest peak in the northeast U.S. for twelve years has died. The cat was the Mount Washington Observatory's mascot, loved as a special companion for the observers and state park staff, as AP News details:  

The Mount Washington Observatory staff have had a cat at the 6,288-foot (1,915-meter) summit, called the “home of the world’s worst weather,” since 1932. The observatory had recently shared the news that Marty would retire from the mountain early in 2021.

Image via AP News 

Do you struggle when it comes to learning new languages as an adult? Apparently this phenomenon also applies not only to a select few, because scientists found new data on how language learning is notoriously difficult for adults. A new study offers an answer as to how the adult brain processes language learning: 

Their results suggest learning a new language as an adult actually reroutes brain networks, igniting shifts that can have long-term implications on memory and cognitive function.

As skills improve, language comprehension changes how the two halves of the brain split functions, the study suggests. Language production — speaking that language — doesn't cause the same changes. In particular, the language lateralization changes observed were greatest when it came to reading a new language, smaller when it came to listening, and negligible in speaking.

Based on these findings, it appears that language production is hardwired in the left brain — but comprehension is more flexibly shared across hemispheres.

Co-author Kshipra Gurunandan is a researcher at the BCBL Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language. She tells Inverse these findings imply that, in some ways, adult brains are more flexible than previously hypothesized.

"The brain remains flexible enough to learn new languages well into adulthood, even if nailing the accent might get harder with age," Gurunandan says. "We surmise that for an adult, it might be easier to learn a language that has sounds similar to one’s native language."

Image via Inverse 

A two-million-year-old skull has been discovered in South Africa by Australian researchers. According to them, the skull can provide more information on  human evolution. The skull, a male Paranthropus robustus, is believed to be a “cousin species” to Homo erectus, as BBC details: 

The two species lived around the same time, but Paranthropus robustus died out earlier.

The research team described the find as exciting.

"Most of the fossil record is just a single tooth here and there so to have something like this is very rare, very lucky," Dr Angeline Leece told the BBC.

The researchers, from Melbourne's La Trobe University, found the skull's fragments in 2018 at the Drimolen archaeological site north of Johannesburg.

It was uncovered just metres away from a spot where a similarly aged Homo erectus skull of a child was discovered in 2015.

Archaeologists then spent the past few years piecing together and analysing the fossil. Their findings were published in the Nature, Ecology and Evolution journal on Tuesday.

Co-researcher Jesse Martin told the BBC that handling the fossil pieces was like working with "wet cardboard", adding he had used plastic straws to suck the last traces of dirt off them.

Image via BBC 

Remember the Four Seasons location where Trump supporters were supposed to address the press? It turns out their staff made the wrong booking, and booked a Philadelphia landscaping business smack dab between a crematorium and a sex shop (instead of the hotel). The Internet had a field day laughing at the whole event, but it seems that even after former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and other supporters of President Donald Trump addressed the press, they still hadn’t had enough. Now the location exists in virtual reality (VR) and furries are rejoicing in the location: 

Now, it exists in VR — complete with weathered detailing and a last-minute Trump 2020 podium. And rejoicing furries.

Coopertom, a fursuiter and popular YouTuber, posted a video on Twitter on Monday morning of furries circling the scene in joy on the massively multiplayer virtual reality platform VRChat.

According to a tweet, virtual versions of a neighboring crematorium and sex shop are “in the works.”

Image via Buzzfeed 

Have you ever wondered how big video game maps would be in real life? Alternatively, how do in-game maps compare to each other? Well, worry no more as MrRanker compares the in-game maps of different games. I was watching the entire thing as I waited for the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s map to show up. Did you see the map from your favorite game? 

Okay, maybe exercise some caution instead, if you don’t want to think twice. According to experts, you really don’t have to regularly clean your ears. Dr. Kris Jatana, M.D., says that it might do us more harm than good because the ear canals are usually self-cleaning. Ear wax actually works to protect your ears from dirt and dust while keeping the inside of your ear moisturized: 

As Dr. Kris Jatana, M.D., told MedicineNet, "The two biggest misconceptions I hear as an otolaryngologist are that the ear canals need to be cleaned in the home setting, and that cotton tip applicators should be used to clean them — both of those are incorrect." 

"Using cotton tip applicators to clean the ear canal not only pushes wax closer to the ear drum, but there is a significant risk of causing minor to severe injury to the ear," Jatana warned. According to ear specialist Dr. Yu-Tung Wong, doing so may bring on punctured eardrums and hearing loss. "In severe cases, the cotton swab can damage many sensitive structures behind the ear canal and cause complete deafness, prolonged vertigo with nausea and vomiting, loss of taste function, and even facial paralysis," he told Cedars-Sinai.

Image via Health Digest 

AC/DC has always been a straightforward band. Their songs are about rock ’n’ roll, partying, and sex, with no deeper message. The year 1980 launched them into global stardom, with the death of singer Bon Scott, the new guy Brian Johnson, their biggest album Back in Black, and their biggest hit song ever- “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Forty years later, everyone sings along when the anthem is played at weddings. What made that particular song stand out from the rest? For one thing, it was the first song Brian Johnson wrote for the band.    

What was different, though, was the noticeable affection that Johnson shows to his object of lust. AC/DC reveled in bad-boy sex songs full of locker-room talk. “We were in Australia, which at that time was still a bit outback,” Malcolm Young explained in 1989. “It was just a way of life, a way of talking, and that’s how we communicated with the audience.” Sure, it could be sexist and objectifying — judging by the stories they bragged about, AC/DC was definitely a boy’s club in which women were sometimes treated like playthings — but the band also evinced a sense of humor that suggested that, at least in the music, it was all just a bit of naughty fun, so what was the harm? (As music journalist Phil Stucliffe, who spent time with the band in the mid-1970s, put it decades later, “They stand for everything I disagree with about our chauvinist view of the woman’s role, yet they’re so totally honest, open and funny about it that I got carried away with liking them.”)

“You Shook Me All Night Long” was hardly chaste or sappy, but it felt far more admiring, practically worshiping this woman. It was as close as AC/DC ever got to writing an actual love song, not that it was actually all that close.

There’s more to it. To this day, many believe that the deceased Bon Scott had a hand in creating the song. And some see a feminist message in it. Read about AC/DC’s biggest hit, how it came about, and what it means at Mel magazine.

Meet the Azzam, the world’s most expensive luxury yacht that belongs to Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of UAE. The yacht is far bigger than a football field, and larger than US Navy ships. A luxury water vehicle of this size and grandeur doesn’t come cheap at all, as the Azzam is estimated to have cost around $605 million : 

On average, a 100-meter superyacht can fall between $100-200 million. The Azzam is nearly six times this size. That’s hint number one.

Then there is the annual upkeep, usually standing at about 10% of the yacht’s, value, easily running into thousands of dollars, sometimes also touching millions. Being Middle East royalty helps in one living the good life. Of course, this is also the country where you get to see the craziest cars on the road, especially in Dubai.

Maintaining a yacht is no cakewalk. When you calculate dockage fees, annual maintenance and repairs, staff salaries, insurance premiums, and gas charges, one realizes that a yacht is much like a white elephant. Of not much use, but a lot of expense. Most yachts, therefore, can only be owned by the super-rich as a means to show off their wealth and also reap its harvests.

Considering it belongs to the president of the UAE, the details of what went inside are confidential for obvious security purposes.

That said; Azzam employs a staff of 50. The construction of the interior was by Germany’s Lürssen Yachts while for the exterior design, Italian firm Nauta Yachts were hired.

Image via Hot Cars 

Unfortunately, people outside of France can’t experience this latest feature yet. Netflix is now testing a feature that can give its users an ability to let the service take over and tell them what to watch. Direct is a new, always-running feature that serves as a real-time TV channel populated with shows, movies, and more from the service: 

For now, the feature is only being tested in France, where Netflix says it is being “gradually deployed” as of Thursday, November 5th, and will eventually be accessible to everyone in the country by early December. As the company says in a news release, traditional TV viewing is still very popular in France, and subscribers there want to have the option to view content on the service without having to choose what to watch first.

Not only is this a great way to avoid the stress of having to decide what to watch, but as Netflix puts it, “you can let yourself be carried away without having to choose a particular title and let yourself be surprised by the diversity of the Netflix catalog.” As an aside, this quote has been Google-translated from French, so it might not actually be a perfect translation. Regardless, having a “live TV channel” of Netflix content does seem like a great way to introduce people to shows and movies they might not have even considered watching before seeing them on Direct.

Image via BGR 

Who knew that you could turn something as boring as a napkin holder into a thing of beauty? I sure didn’t, but whoever made this sure did. The napkin holder looks a bit sharp, however, and it might wound a person if he’s careless.

What do you think?

(Image Credit: u/AlexRid3r427/ Reddit)

Listen, you really wouldn’t want to act like an asshole in a country that you’re just visiting, right? Pretty sure most of us would like a peaceful tourist experience once we get the chance to get out of our homes. If you’re planning to visit Japan in the future, make sure not to do certain things (that may offend or be considered rude by the residents). Check Live Japan’s list of rules and customs you should observe while visiting! 

Image via Live Japan 

おもしろい pic.twitter.com/0mON48Gt2H

— 中国最新情報(xChina) (@xChina4) November 9, 2020

This video from China shows kids playing a novel game. The two teams do shuttle runs back and form to a giant gameboard, where they take turns playing tic-tac-toe. Because it's both a physical and mental challenge, you could describe it as chessboxing for kids.

-via Super Punch