A program manager at the Surrey Wildlife Trust has spotted a spider thought to have been extinct in an undeveloped portion of a British military base. The spider, known as the great-fox spider (Alopecosa fabrilis), was last seen 27 years ago, in 1993.

"It's a gorgeous spider, if you're into that kind of thing," the program manager Mike Waite told The Guardian.

[...]

Waite found several male spiders, one female and possibly some immature spiderlings, though the latter were difficult to identify conclusively.

The adult spiders have gray-and-brown furry bodies. They can spin silk, but instead of making webs, they use that silk to line the burrows that they dig in order to hibernate over the winter. Great fox-spiders are critically endangered, but they are also found on the European mainland, particularly on coastal sand dunes in Holland and Denmark, according to The Guardian.

Know more about the great-fox spiders over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Mike Waite/ Surrey Wildlife Trust)

On November 12, 1970 the Oregon Highway Division had a whale of a task on their hands. How were they going to go about removing a whale carcass that had washed up on the beach in Florence, Oregon?

They could not bury it because they were afraid that the smell of rotting whale flesh would continue to permeate. Neither could the carcass be burned. Nor was anyone willing to cut up and bury odoriferous, decaying remnants of the Cetacean behemoth. Finally, the highway workers had a bright idea, they settled on using a half ton of dynamite to disintegrate the whale remains. However, the idea wasn't so bright after all. Things did not go as planned.

Watch the video for KATU reporter Paul Linnman's color commentary. Be sure to read the amusing comment thread including this one:

Showed this just now to my husband, who has somehow never seen it. I said, “All these men around, and not ONE of them said, ‘Hey, this isn’t a good idea,” My husband, without missing a beat, replied, “They wanted to see the explosion."

Video Credit: KATU Classic - YOUTUBE

Shop for whale themed t-shirts including netflix and krill by louisros at the NeatoShop!

ESTO #NoEsRestauración. Es una intervención NO profesional.
👎

Polémica en Palencia por una restauración que deja hecho un «cristo» el relieve de una fachada https://t.co/18pEBXjKH4

— ACRE (@A_CR_E) November 9, 2020

Spain is full of wonderful art that spans hundreds, if not thousands of years. Why are so many art restorations in the country entrusted to people who aren't art restoration experts? First we had Ecce Homo, then St. George, and even the Virgin Mary. Now a statue in the town of Palencia has gone viral for its new face that resembles a potato or something.

The Palencia statue, which formerly was of a smiling lady placed within a country scene, adorns part of the facade of a bank in this city of some 78,000 in the country's north. The Art Newspaper reports that the statue was originally unveiled in 1923.

In Spain, professional art restorers and conservationists are once again calling for stricter oversight. On Twitter, the Madrid-based organization of professional restorers and conservators, ACRE, deplored the work in Palencia, writing that the rehab was not professional.

Read about the incident, and see what the statue is supposed to look like at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting

This dog named Monkey should be on American Ninja Warrior! Monkey's trainer, Omar von Muller, built an obstacle course that would confound humans and dogs alike, but this dog has it down. He takes on a tightrope, balance bean, seesaw, ladder, and all manner of apparatus, and even throws some mustard on his performance with a sideways walking handstand! That's a good dog. -via Laughing Squid

War leaves many scars. A person who returns from war is no longer the person he used to be before. As a result of the many horrors that the veteran has experienced throughout his time in the battlefield, he might find it hard to talk about it with his loved ones.

Often family members are afraid of saying the wrong thing, pushing too hard, or worry that starting this conversation will open a Pandora's box of memories and harm the veteran.

While these conversations need to be handled with care, they do not have to be forbidden.

Regina Koepp from Psychology Today gives us some tips on how to talk with veterans about their experiences. Here is one of her tips:

Create a space to talk. Let the veteran know that all aspects of their life are important, the positive and the painful, and ask if they’d be willing to share about their military experiences. 

Don’t expect this conversation to happen in public. Military experiences can be emotional, and people don’t want to be vulnerable in public. Consider sharing a meal together and allow the conversation to happen naturally. Or, do an activity together, like a walk or a hike, or working on a puzzle together, and then ask if they’d be willing to share.

Check out more of these over at the site.

(Image Credit: centaur60/ Pixabay)

This is Norm, a pug who loves traveling with his hooman Jeremy Veach. In each of their travels, Veach always makes sure to take photos of Norm, some cool, and others silly, if not hilarious.

Check out some of the photos over at Sad and Useless. You may also check Veach’s Instagram account if you want to see more.

(Image Credit: Jeremy Veach/ Sad and Useless)

This minimalistic structure doubles as a functional closet and stylish furniture. Meet Ori’s Pocket Closet, the winner of the A+Product Award for the Smart Building & Technology category. This movable wall is built smart indeed, as it provides a huge amount of storage space for clothes and other items while not grabbing a lot of your home’s surface area: 

Ori’s smart space technology allows building space to be used more efficiently, optimizing designs with flexibility to enable the allocation of more units. Ori’s Pocket Closet is a smart, transformable spatial solution and divider that meets residential needs by increasing storage, privacy and room division — creating a walk-in closet, an entertainment center, home office and additional storage to any residential unit.

Born out of the MIT Media Lab, Ori’s sophisticated smart space technology enhances functionality and comfort through space optimization, increasing organization potential and space utility. Architects and designers now have a viable system that can be integrated earlier in the design process, reducing construction time while maximizing storage potential and square footage.

Image via Architizer 

Because penicillin is so good against various bacterial infections, it is often used as the first line of defense against such infections. However, not all people can benefit from penicillin, as they are allergic to it.

Around 10 percent of people say they’ve had an allergic reaction to penicillin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The question is, why is this the case? It seems the answer can be found in the genes of these people.

… researchers have found a genetic link to the hypersensitivity, which, while rarely fatal, can cause hives, wheezing, arrythmias and more.  

People who report penicillin allergies can have a genetic variation on an immune system gene that helps the body distinguish between our own cells and harmful bacteria and viruses. That hot spot is on the major histocompatibility complex gene HLA-B, said Kristi Krebs, a pharmacogenomics researcher for the Estonian Genome Center at the University of Tartu. She presented the finding October 26 at the American Society of Human Genetics 2020 virtual meeting. The research was also published online October 1 in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

However, while we might have identified a gene linked to penicillin allergy, Krebs states that it’s too soon to say that additional studies will “lead to better understanding of penicillin allergy and also better prediction.”

More details about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Cacycle/ Wikimedia Commons)

Under is a Michelin-starred restaurant located in Lindesnes, Norway. The restaurant is partially submerged five and a half meters below sea level in the North Sea. Dining inside makes you feel like you’re in a submarine, watching sea creatures swim along. Monte Cristo Magazine describes the restaurant as a grey whale in mid-dive, describing how the structure liquefies into the space between land and water. They relay how this one-of-a-kind restaurant tries to survive during the pandemic:  

All is quiet, the lapping of waves hushed above. Ellitsgaard sits in the dining hall in chef’s whites and linen apron, his left arm outstretched and crawling with tattoos. He is framed by the 27-square-metre window that opens onto the wonders of the sea: sugar kelp forests, silvered pollack, and a lumpfish Ellitsgaard and his team affectionately call Ernie.

Forced to remain at home, the head chef grew restless after the first week. “I was building a garden, a project that would have taken me two years to finish but now I could do it in a week, and painting some stuff in the house. Then I didn’t know what else to do.” Like many businesses in Norway, the restaurant was buoyed up by a robust government support scheme. Staff stayed in the village and spent some days on Under’s fishing boat, Knipseren, watching fishermen pull up stone crab and langoustine. Ellitsgaard dove for sea urchin, the restaurant manager foraged for sorrel leaves. The restaurant itself was transformed into a sub-sea stage for livestreamed concerts, including a music video collaboration between composer Hans Zimmer and Norwegian DJ Alan Walker.

Ellitsgaard started visiting the restaurant, too, in the same way one sits beside a loved one in the hospital. The undercurrent of uncertainty loomed—but it felt good to be back. With his sous-chef on the other line, they tested and tasted and sketched out menus, as if Under itself were daring them to push harder.

Image via MonteCristo Magazine 

Now this is just adorable. It’s nice to see how much love and attachment kids have with their furry companions. The little boy who can be seen sneaking out of bed to cuddle with his dog was usually found asleep next to his dog by his parents. They were curious to see how the little boy sneaked out to cuddle, so they set up a camera to record the whole ordeal. This is just adorable, really! Let the dog sleep next to him on his bed, please! 

Image screenshot via LAD Bible

The Storm King Art Center’s picturesque views have attracted more visitors to Upstate New York. From the view atop the center’s Museum Hill to the intimate installations that can be spotted, such as Mark di Suvero’s sculpture Pyramidian (1987–98), the sculpture park is now accommodating more pieces to attract more visitors. During the pandemic, the center has become a hot destination, as Art News details: 

During the current pandemic, with indoor museums seeming less appealing, the art center has become a bona fide destination—tickets are now selling out weeks in advance, making Storm King one of the hottest New York art spaces right now.

But before it became the sensation it is currently, Storm King started out relatively small. “The project began as a family-led institution,” John Stern, the president of Storm King since 2008, told ARTnews. “My grandfather started this from his love of the Hudson Highlands.”

Today, a facilities crew with fewer than a dozen members maintains the giant complex. They trim trees, replant native flora, and refurbish the sculptures. It often takes a full day to mow Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, a 240,000-square-foot rolling swell of grass. At any given time, the grounds contain around 115 sculptures, including permanent installations by Alexander Calder, Sol DeWitt, Isamu Noguchi, and Nam June Paik. Storm King senior curator Nora Lawrence explained that commissioned artists are encouraged to create works in tandem with the environment, with the understanding that the demands of the land may inform the final outcome. (Mercurial Upstate New York weather exerts its own will, too.)

Unlike conventional museums, Storm King will grapple with more existential threats in the coming years, as climate change demands new strategies of preservation. In the meantime, the institution faces expected challenges, such as how to be a better community partner or keep programming incisive. “We all want to continue to present people with what they’ve always loved about Storm King, but help evolve the idea of what outdoor sculpture can be,” Lawrence said.

Image via Art News 

Yes, that's a tiny version of the Intrepid-class Voyager from Star Trek: Voyager. Captain Janeway's projected 75-year trip back home might have taken a bit longer if her ship was reduced to the size of this model made by physicists in the Netherlands. The scientists 3D printed microswimmers, which are particles that chemically react to their surroundings in order to move, into the iconic shape. CNN reports:

The miniature Voyager, which measures 15 micrometers (0.015 millimeters) long, is part of a project researchers at Leiden University conducted to understand how shape affects the motion and interactions of microswimmers.

Microswimmers are small particles that can move through liquid on their own by interacting with their environment through chemical reactions. The platinum coating on the microswimmers reacts to a hydrogen peroxide solution they are placed in, and that propels them through the liquid.

-via Dave Barry

In the movie Armageddon, NASA enlisted a team of deep-sea oil drillers to destroy an asteroid that was threatening Earth, turning them into astronauts in the process. The real story of earth-moving engineers who helped NASA is much more plausible. See, the space program built these huge Saturn rockets that weighed 3000 tons (that's six million pounds), and had to somehow get them from the assembly plant to the launch pad. They were not only heavy, but relatively fragile and very expensive. The rocket scientists consulted transportation engineers, but they should have gone straight to the ones who were already doing this kind of work because it's profitable.  

On January 1962, the American Machine & Foundry Company, one of America’s largest recreational equipment manufacturer who produced everything from garden equipment, to atomic reactors, to yachts, presented a plan that involved using a rail-barge combination where the weight of the rocket was supported by barges but propulsion was achieved by rails. The details were still being worked out when the Deputy Chief of the Future Launch Systems Study Office received a phone call from Barry Schlenk, a representative of the Bucyrus-Erie Company, a mining equipment manufacturer. Schlenk had heard about NASA’s transport problems, and offering to help, he sent the Deputy Chief photographs of Bucyrus-Erie's steamshovel crawler used in the Kentucky coal fields. The vehicle seemed suited to NASA’s needs, especially its capability to level and balance a load on uneven terrain.

NASA sent their engineers to the coal town of Paradise, Kentucky, to observe the steam shovel crawler in action, and we're impressed. Read how strip mining technology was drafted to haul Saturn rockets at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: NASA)

Jon Rahm had the most astonishing golf shot at the Masters in Augusta; too bad it was during a practice round and not actual play. The perfect spin led the ball to skip across the pond, once, twice, onto the green, curving around, and even seems to speed up approaching the hole and it's a hole in one! -Thanks WTM!

This may literally be a shaggy dog story, but it doesn't have that kind of punch line. Redditor SwarmTendon told the tale of the time she got to have a dog even though she doesn't have a dog. A stranger thought her dog-friendly office was a dog daycare center and left her Basset hound Otis there all day.

At the end of the day the woman, thank God, came back. She said “Thanks, you’re a lifesaver. How was he?” And I said “He was a champ.” And was about to say “But why is he here” when she said “Thats a relief. Most kennels say he gets anxious around other dogs. I heard you operated at a much higher capacity, I was thrilled to see you had so few clients in the room at one time. So, how much do I owe?” And that’s when I realized she thought we were a dog daycare.

Now, I probably should’ve corrected her. But I loved my day with the office dog and I did want to get paid for supervising this strange dog all day. I just threw out the number that sounded fair and appropriate “That’ll be $20.” I said.

She replied “Reaalllly?!” In this very high tone, and I couldn’t tell if I’d overshot or undershot. But she paid me and left.

But the kicker is that the lady returned and left Otis again and again, for months before she found out what was really going on. In that time, Otis was named employee of the month more often than SwarmTendon was and also appeared in the office Christmas card. Read the story of how the ruse was exposed and what happened to SwarmTendon afterward at reddit. -via Bored Panda 

(Unrelated image credit: Carlos Alejo)