Kevin James' short comedic videos have become so popular that he's expanding his scope and getting his friends involved. Nature Planet is a sendup of overly dramatic nature documentaries focusing on the critically endangered Silver-Breasted Montle, played by James. Adam Sandler does his best impression of Sir David Attenborough as the narrator. -via Nag on the Lake

If I could summarize it one word, it would be “noisy.” Think about it. Everything in anime has sounds, even those which shouldn’t have, like nodding, and, ironically, silence (which is usually represented as three dots). Voice actor Joe Zieja gives us a glimpse of what voice acting in anime is like in this funny short.

(Image Credit: Joe Zieja/ YouTube)

Dr. Stone is an anime series about a man named Senku who plans to rebuild civilization from scratch after all of humanity turned to stone for 3,700 years. One of the great things about the series is that it is scientifically accurate. One can learn many things from the series, such as why we smoke food, and how to make stuff like wires and light bulbs. But the “invention” that piqued the curiosity of many is the Senku Cola.

Does it taste good?

Find out on this video by CHEFPK.

(Image Credit: CHEFPK/ YouTube)

You might not believe it, but our brain remembers where you put your junk food easier than where you put your healthy snacks. The question is, why is this the case?

This is what some scientists call 'optimal foraging theory', and it suggests our spatial memory, or our 'cognitive maps', have evolved to prioritise the most calorically rewarding snacks.

For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who never knew when their next meal would come, these mental 'drop pins' would likely have come in handy. For the modern person rummaging through their kitchen, new research suggests it can sometimes be a curse.

By testing the spatial memory of 512 participants, scientists found out that our brain is “implicitly biased toward high-calorie foods.”

When put through a maze of food items, participants were more likely to remember the locations of chocolate brownies and potato chips than healthy foods like apples and tomatoes.

More details about this study over at ScienceAlert.

Yikes.

(Image Credit: Fotorech/ Pixabay)

With pancakes filled with strawberries and a mountain of whipped cream, this cute dog knows that it is in front of a yummy masterpiece. Just look at his reaction.

I just wonder if he was able to finish it all up.

Image via Important Animal Images on Facebook

The property at 34-36 Tirangi Road in Wellington, New Zealand, served as the air traffic control tower for the Wellington Airport from 1959 to 2018, and then was replaced by a new tower. Now the old tower, which the neighbors call "Arnold," is for sale. It is listed as having one bedroom and one bathroom, an interior space of 290 square meters, a land area of 941 square meters, and an outstanding view of the airport runways. The price right now is $895,000 (US$596,000), and the buyer will have to upgrade it with earthquake reinforcement and asbestos abatement, so the real estate company thinks it will most likely be torn down by developers, unless someone really, really wants to live in an air traffic control tower. -via Metafilter

Jack Hoopes is a veterinary radiation specialist at Dartmouth College, who spends a lot of time with dying dogs. For decades, he has been spending his time trying many methods to treat canine cancers, as these experimental therapies could lead to the development of human treatments.

Recently, many of Hoopes’ furry patients have come to him with a relatively common oral cancer that will almost certainly kill them within a few months if left untreated. Even if the cancer goes into remission after radiation treatment, there’s a very high chance it will soon re-emerge.

But Hoopes has a new experimental therapy for these dogs, a new cancer therapy based on a common plant virus.

After receiving the viral therapy, several of the dogs had their tumors disappear entirely and lived into old age without recurring cancer. Given that around 85 percent of dogs with oral cancer will develop a new tumor within a year of radiation therapy, the results were striking. The treatment, Hoopes felt, had the potential to be a breakthrough that could save lives, both human and canine.

“If a treatment works in dog cancer, it has a very good chance of working, at some level, in human patients,” says Hoopes.

More details about this over at Ars Technica.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Thomas Splettstoesser/ Wikimedia Commons)

Less clutter, of course! But I know that it’s difficult to actually start decluttering, especially if we think that there’s nothing to be tidied up (most of the time, there might be something to throw away or to put away). In a new survey that studied the tidying habits of 2,000 Americans, 70 percent of those surveyed swear by cleaning to feel accomplished, 61 percent use it to de-stress, and 54 percent do it to feel relaxed afterward. Domino offers a list of benefits that we can get by simply decluttering. Check their list here! 

Image via Domino

It’s scary to know that our love for being always online has great potential risks. Take for example, our personal information stolen by hackers. Keeping track of apps and websites that access your information is difficult, and it’s also a hassle to read through long explanations of privacy agreements. If we leave our information floating around the web, well, hopefully it won’t get stolen, right? So what can we do to cover our digital tracks? Creative Bloq shares ex-hacker and Twitter user @somenerdliam’s tips on how to do so: 

Luckily, ex-hacker and Twitter user @somenerdliam stepped in last year, with his thread "How to delete 99.9% of your digital footprint from the internet", and the grateful Twitterverse went wild for it. Since posting, it's been retweeted 114,000 times and received over 425.1 likes. It's vital information for the modern world, and we think everyone should know about it.

While his advice isn't going to help you disappear completely (the author admits his knowledge isn't completely up to date, and the "99.9" claim in his title isn't a practical claim), the tips in the thread are a good starting point when it comes to monitoring your digital hygiene.

Check the full piece here. 

Image via Creative Bloq 

With Starlink’s plan to provide near-global internet service through the use of tens of thousands of communications satellites, optical astronomers are worried that these satellites will block their view of the cosmos. But it’s not just optical astronomers who are worried; radio astronomers are, too.

The 197 radio astronomy dishes of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in South Africa will sit within a radio-quiet zone the size of Pennsylvania where even a cellphone is forbidden, to preserve the array’s views of the heavens. Yet that precaution won’t save the telescope, due to be completed in the late 2020s, from what may soon be overhead: tens of thousands of communications satellites beaming down radio signals straight from the heavens. “The sky will be full of these things,” says SKA Director General Phil Diamond.

This week, SKA released an analysis of the impact that Starlink and other constellations would have on the array. It finds they would interfere with one of the radio channels SKA plans to use, hampering searches for organic molecules in space as well as water molecules used as a key marker in cosmology.

Details about this over at Science Magazine.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: ESA-SCIENCE-OFFICE/ Science Magazine)

What’s in our blood, and why do mosquitoes love it? Why is it tasty for them? A team of scientists led by Leslie Vosshall genetically modified mosquitoes in order for them to identify “which neurons fire when a mosquito tastes blood.”

“This is definitely a technical tour de force,” says neuroscientist Chris Potter of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who studies mosquito repellents. Identifying the specific taste neurons associated with blood might be something “we could use against the mosquito,” he says.

How can this knowledge be used against mosquitoes, you ask?

One possibility might sound like science fiction, Vosshall says, but there is precedent. “I just gave my dogs their monthly flea and tick medication, which is oral,” she says. Perhaps something similar could eventually be done for mosquitoes – a drug that humans could take before going to a mosquito-infested area that would interfere with mosquito’s taste for blood.

So what characteristics does our blood have? How does it taste like to mosquitoes?

Answers over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: CDC/ Wikimedia Commons)

Imgur user dooctorpond has "a job with a boss that screams at me all day."

That sort of experience grinds down your soul.

So it's a good thing that her husband draws doodles on their bathroom mirror to provide a spark of joy in a dark existence.

That's good husbanding right there.

Surprisingly, this is a thing. Berlin-based artist Klara Liden climbs and contorts her body over some scaffolding as the camera rotates around to capture her movements. The whole unexpected crossover between art and parkour is still new to me, but somehow Liden mashes the two different worlds together for her exhibition in London called Turn Me On. Check out Art Review’s description of her exhibition: 

It’s a repetitive, strained bunch of movements Liden puts herself through, an interminable scaling of the carapace of some unnamed city. And the urban environment, its hidden grimy bits especially, are the sooty stars of this show. You’re greeted downstairs by three enormous glowing, floating oil tanks: big, plastic, flesh-coloured containers with a hole right through the middle, like the bellybuttons of concrete giants.

Upstairs you find a row of dirt-encrusted, graffitied junction boxes, plastic housing for a city’s wires and fuses. This is urbanity’s electric pulse, its high voltage heartbeat. Each is covered with the symbols of the street it once lived on: football stickers, the rushed tags of local gangs, the mould of damp weather, the accumulated grey smudge of pollution. The pollution and mould are the best things about the works: all those years of cars chugging by, of buses and taxis and cigarette smoke, inscribed darkly on the once pristine plastic of the boxes. It’s urban history in filth.

Image via Art Review 

It may seem absurd to think that plants have a short-term memory, but considering the way that Venus flytraps know when to snap shut on a bug, the alternate explanation is that they can tell time. So, memory it is. See, one touch of a flytrap plant will not ignite the leaf-closing reflex. That would drain too much energy on false alarms. The flytrap shuts when a second touch sensation is detected within 30 seconds.

The researchers added genes to the Venus flytraps that produce a protein, which glows green when exposed to calcium. When the team tapped one of the trap’s sensory hairs, the base of that hair began glowing, and then the glow spread through the leaf before beginning to fade. When the researchers touched the hair a second time — or touched a different hair on the leaf — within about 30 seconds, the trap’s leaves lit up even brighter than before, and the plant quickly snapped shut.

The results show that the flytrap’s short-term memory is a waxing and waning of calcium within leaves’ cells, the researchers say. Each time a sensory hair is triggered, it signals the release of calcium. When the calcium concentration reaches a certain level, achieved by that second, faster surge of calcium, the trap closes.

However, there is a second system in the flytrap that involves electricity, which means more research is needed. Read more about the experiment at ScienceNews.   -via Boing Boing

Electric cars are becoming popular lately because they are better for the environment compared to gas-powered cars. But a team from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands decided to take the concept of environment-friendly cars to the next level — by creating an electric car that’s mostly made out of recycled waste.

“With this car, we want to show that waste is a valuable material, even in complex applications like a car,” team member Matthijs van Wijk said in a statement.

The car, nicknamed “Luca,” features an electric powertrain, with two electric motors allowing it to reach a top speed of 90 kmh (56 mph).

Now that’s cool.

Learn more details about this car over at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Via Futurism

(Image Credit: Bart van Overbeeke/ Futurism)