Is it just me or does the hand soap kind of solidified? I think it’s too cold in this bathroom. Might be best to turn the heater on, or else someone might suffer from hypothermia.
When it comes to modern horror video games, there is one element that gets used a lot, and that element is jumpscares. But jumpscares aren’t the only thing that can make a video game scary. In fact, you can make a video game scary without using them. But how? The answer lies in great sound design and storytelling.
In this video, YouTuber Bricky reviews Darkwood and explains why it is the best horror game with no jumpscares.
(Image Credit: Bricky/ YouTube)
Science says that having an alter ego, a different persona than the one you inhabit every day, can boost confidence and reduce anxiety. I can attest to that, as I used a stage name on radio and another on the internet. Batman probably got a lot of courage in hiding behind a batsuit. And others have tried that method of overcoming stage fright.
Beyoncé’s was the assertive and empowered ‘Sasha Fierce’, who allowed her to perform with extra self-confidence and sensuality. “Usually when I hear the chords, when I put on my stilettos, like the moment right before when you’re nervous… then Sasha Fierce appears, and my posture and the way I speak and everything is different,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2008. It was a strategy that she continued to use until 2010, when she felt she had matured enough to avoid the psychological crutch.
Inspired by an emotional meeting with Beyoncé herself, Adele followed suit, telling Rolling Stone magazine in 2011 about her creation of ‘Sasha Carter’. The persona was a combination of Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce persona and the (real) country music star June Carter. Adele said the strategy helped her give her best to every performance during her breakout year.
Although the embodiment of a fictional persona may seem like a gimmick for pop stars, new research suggests there may be some real psychological benefits to the strategy. Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of ‘self-distancing’, which involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to view a situation more dispassionately.
“Self-distancing gives us a little bit of extra space to think rationally about the situation,” says Rachel White, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York State. It allows us to rein in undesirable feelings like anxiety, increases our perseverance on challenging tasks, and boosts our self-control.
Of course, that confidence isn't always used for good, as any internet comment section reader can tell you. Read about the experiments that led scientists to these conclusions at BBC. -via Damn Interesting
(Image source: Shed On The Moon)
John C. Worsley does a Star Trek Christmas song every year. We've seen them here! He edits Star Trek clips to fashion 23rd-century versions of classic Christmas songs. This year Worsley took on the challenge of recreating Mariah Carey's mega-hit "All I Want for Christmas is You," sung by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (and friends). The entire song is covered, the editing is the best he's done, and there are some lyrical surprises to make you grin.
It's the age old problem: how do you keep your snacks warm while keeping Agent 47 busy on his killing spree? Kentucky Fried Chicken has now solved that conundrum by designing a console with a built-in chicken warmer.
It's not exactly an original idea. Gamers have been heating food on overly-hot consoles for years. But what the KFConsole does is conveniently and intentionally conduct the machine's heat to the food. CNN reports:
Your chicken will be kept hot thanks to a custom-built cooling system that keeps the console hardware at a regular temperature while using heat produced by its components to warm the chicken chamber. [...]
The console can handle virtual reality games and offers smooth gameplay thanks to 240 frames per second frame rate and 4K display compatibility, according to details published by Cooler Master.
-via Dave Barry | Photos: KFConsole
Meet the anyon (yes, that’s how it’s spelled), a one of a kind, extraordinary subatomic particle that only shows up in specific conditions. Scientists believe that this flat particle could be the key that will unlock quantum computing. The anyon only arise in realms confined to two dimensions, and at temperatures near absolute zero and in the presence of a strong magnetic field:
Scientists have theorized about these flat, peculiar “particle-like objects” since the 1980s, and the very nature of them has made it sometimes seem impossible to ever verify them. But the qualities scientists believe anyons have also made them sound very valuable to quantum research and, now, quantum
The objects have many possible positions and "remember," in a way, what has happened. In a press release earlier this fall, Purdue University explains more about the value of anyons:
“Anyons have characteristics not seen in other subatomic particles, including exhibiting fractional charge and fractional statistics that maintain a ‘memory’ of their interactions with other quasiparticles by inducing quantum mechanical phase changes. Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, professor of physics at MIT, gave these quasiparticles the tongue-in-cheek name ‘anyon’" due to their strange behavior because unlike other types of particles, they can adopt ‘any’ quantum phase when their positions are exchanged.”
Image via Popular Mechanics
Over the years, televisions have increased dramatically in size, but is it necessary? Shall we make our televisions bigger, or is time to decrease the size? If you’re not a fan of big TV screens, then you might like this miniature television from TinyCircuits. You have to build it on your own, however.
Introducing the $64 TinyTV DIY Kit from TinyCircuits, it comes with everything you need to assemble your own miniature television in five minutes and with no skill required. My kind of project!
The TinyTV DIY Kit can store up to 4 hours of video on its microSD card, which you can control with the included remote’s channel up (next video) and channel down (previous video) buttons. Or you can just do what I always do and lose the remote in the sofa and give up on ever watching TV again.
The television’s 3D printed console comes in white, but you can paint it whatever color you’d like for added realism.
Well, what do you think?
(Image Credit: TinyCircuits/ Technabob)
When you were young and shy and awkward and felt the world was against you, there may have been someone who told you that good things would happen to you eventually. It wasn't much comfort to hear right then, but time has a way of making it come true. Weird Al Yankovic was a shy and awkward 12-year-old with a crush on the girl who sat in front of him in school. Click the "see more" button, or click through to Facebook to read the story of his interaction with Patrice, and how he reconnected with her almost 50 years later. The story is a ray of sunshine. -via Bored Panda
"A planet near you" is relative, of course, as 300 million miles is still quite a journey. NASA's Perseverance rover launched in July, and is scheduled to land in the Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18. The landing will be covered live, and to drum up enthusiasm, NASA released a "trailer" for the landing, with all the drama you might expect for a blockbuster event. Perseverance's mission is to:
Seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for possible return to Earth.
They named the mission Mars 2020, which was probably unavoidable but still seems unfortunate. Catch up on what the mission is all about at NASA. -via Mashable
When you make cookies in specific shapes, you roll out the dough and use a cookie cutter. There's always negative space involved, meaning leftover dough. So after you cut cookies, you gather up the leftover pieces and roll the dough out again. This is how it's done, but it's not the most efficient way to do it. Chemist Martin Lersch runs a blog called Khymos in which he explores the science of cooking. One of his projects has been to find the most efficient cookie cutter to make Christmas cookies with little to no dough left over to roll out again. He looked at it as a form of packing problem, in which a tessellated shape would be the most efficient. Others have described limitations to this kind of project.
This didn’t stop Lersch, though, who created his own Christmas-themed tessellations of bells, Christmas trees, and other shapes using the free-to-use platform Tess. With help from a friend, he 3D-printed several cookie cutters and mixed up some dough. Lersch’s cookie of choice, pepperkake, is a sumptuous Norwegian gingerbread. Lersch, primarily a chemist, notes that it was once made with ammonium carbonate from ground deer antlers, though most people substitute baking powder these days.
After deciding on the Christmas tree as the most efficient shape, Lersch then got to work. Emulating Escher’s patterns, he stamped every other tree shape right-side-up, to fit perfectly with the trees around it, which he stamped upside-down. The result? Interlocking rows of cookies, with no leftover dough left between their lines.
Read about Lersch's tessellated Christmas tree cookies and why this kind of efficiency matters beyond baking, at Atlas Obscura.
Oh yeah, the recipes for the cookies is here.
(Image credit: Martin Lersch)
It's been more than four years since Fabrice Mathieu brought us the surreal short Darth by Darthwest, in which Cary Grant was chased down by a TIE fighter in a mashup of North by Northwest and Star Wars. Now we have episode 2! Roger Thornhill (Grant) is taken aboard the Millennium Falcon for a ride. He bonds with C-3PO and Chewbacca, gets chased by pilots of the Empire, and is finally safety deposited at Mount Rushmore. -via Digg
This artifact was finally found after 70 years! A 5-inch-long (13 centimeters) piece of cedar was one of the only three objects to have been removed from the Queen’s Chamber at Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza. The wood was discovered in a cigar box at the University of Aberdeen Museums (UAM) in Scotland, as Live Science details:
Back in the 19th century, British engineer Waynman Dixon was constructing a bridge in Cairo when he was contacted by Charles Piazzi Smyth, astronomer royal for Scotland, to assist in a survey of the Great Pyramid with the permission of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, according to the NMS. During the 1872 survey, Dixon removed three objects from the Queen's Chamber: a piece of cedar, a ball and a hook. Together, they became known as the "Dixon relics," and while the ball and hook were later housed in the collection of The British Museum, the piece of wood embarked on a different journey, according to the UAM statement.
The cedar chip ended up in the possession of Dr. James Grant, a Scottish doctor who practiced medicine in Egypt during the late 19th century; he assisted Dixon with the Great Pyramid survey and was with Dixon when he found the so-called relics, UAM representatives said. Their records showed that Grant's daughter donated a "five-inch piece of cedar" to the museum in 1946.
Image via Live Science
Traditional Islamic wood carving is a dying tradition, according to Mohammad Mohdar Anwar. Anwar is the founder of Mahajati, a company dedicated to preserving wood carving and making art more accessible at the same time. Anwar and his company are doing their utmost effort to promote the beauty of traditional Islamic wood carving, from their decorative wall pieces in full or partial 3D, to a large scale model of Mecca, as My Modern Met details:
The main collections for sale include mubkhars, or incense burners, and decorative wall pieces that are either fully 3D or partially 3D with a flat back. While these are popular, Mahajati's greatest artistic achievement (which has garnered them global attention) is a large-scale model of Makkah al-Mukarramah, or Mecca. The photos of their process show artisans working at an impressive scale with unusual angles as buildings seem to peel off of a single piece of wood. Detailed façade work and rough textures across the extruded surfaces further help the piece stand out, and showcases the wide range of methods used to complete the composition.
The Makkah model is proof that though this art is traditional and has a long history, this does not mean that the work is static. The work is constantly changing and improving with more intricate and unique pieces constantly being produced. “Our artisans devote lots of time to learning and exploring,” Anwar explains. “In the pursuit of perfection, they find their voice to express emotions and ideas through shapes, colors, and textures on wood.” Mahajati's founder goes on to say that their products are different from ordinary wall art. “Every piece you purchase is not only an art, but it has identity, meaning, and purpose.”
Image via My Modern Met
The remains of a long-lost Byzantine church that is believed to have been near the site of the Last Supper has been uncovered in Jerusalem. In addition to the church, archaeologists have also found the foundations of a 2,000-year-old Jewish ritual bath. The area, known as the Church of the Agony and the Church of All Nations, was built on the spot where Judas is thought to have betrayed Jesus with a famous kiss:
The church is decorated with finely carved stone elements, indicating its importance. Alluding to Jesus’s sacrifice, Greek inscriptions on the building’s floor read: “for the memory and repose of the lovers of Christ… accept the offering of your servants and give them remission of sins.”
The bath, or mikveh, emerged during a construction project, and while many such baths have been found in ancient Jerusalem, this is the only one to have emerged in Gethsemane, reports Haaretz.
Gethsemane means “oil press” in Hebrew, and the name has been interpreted to refer to the manufacture of olive oil.
“The Jewish laws of purification obliged workers involved in oil and wine production to purify themselves,” Amit Re’em, an archaeologist for the Israel Antiquities Authority, said in the statement.
“The discovery of the ritual bath may therefore hint at the origin of the place’s ancient name, Gethsemane (Gat Shemanim, ‘oil press’), a place where ritually pure oil was produced near the city.”
“This is a significant discovery, shedding new light on how Gethsemane was used at the time it is mentioned in the Gospels,” says archaeologist Ken Dark, who recently identified what he believes may have been Jesus’s childhood home in Nazareth, about 95 miles to the north.
Image via ArtNet
The Veal family of Indianapolis has bushes growing near the pond on their property. For every winter since 1961, they have sprayed pond water with food coloring onto the bushes (now an artificial scaffold), encasing them in layers of colored ice. They carve steps into the back so that family members can climb it to trim the ice into the vivid sculpture you see above. You can see photos from this ongoing project on their Instagram page or learn how to visit it in person here.
How does the Veal family manage to create this sculpture? This 2018 local news video illustrates the process after one daring reporter climbs the ice tree to inspect it.
-via Design You Trust
