You know your local scary tales, and you know monsters from the movies. But legendary monsters are everywhere, and the further you look, the more of them you'll find. It's time you got to know the scary monsters that terrify children in places from the Arctic to Australia.
Meet some ghosts, demons, beasts, killers, and monsters from around the world in a pictofacts list at Cracked. Each comes with a link for further exploration.
Singapore Airlines has been hit hard by the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. Last month, it announced plans to launch "flights to nowhere" that just take off, circle the airport, and then land.
Now, to put its grounded planes to good use, the airline is using the jetliners as pop-up restaurants. Since Singapore Airlines has an excellent reputation for in-flight food, this may draw customers. Fast Company reports:
Customers had the option of buying tickets in different classes, with a meal in a first class suite priced at $474 compared to an $39 economy class meal. Both meals will take place on planes at Singapore’s Changi Airport, which is the company’s hub. The airline says it will enforce social distancing, using only half of the 471 seats on the plane.
Image: Singapore Airlines
We still have many things to understand in our Universe before we can say that we know much, and day by day we discover and learn new things around us. Just recently, a new study, led by professors Daniel Scheeres and Jay McMahon was published in the journal Science Adventures. The study contains findings from the OSIRIS-REx, a NASA spacecraft tasked to obtain a small sample from an asteroid named Bennu.
[The findings] suggest that the interior of the asteroid Bennu could be weaker and less dense than its outer layers--like a crème-filled chocolate egg flying [through] space.
[...]
What the team has found may also spell trouble for Bennu. The asteroid's core appears to be weaker than its exterior, a fact that could put its survival at risk in the not-too-distant future.
"You could imagine maybe in a million years or less the whole thing flying apart," said Scheeres, a distinguished professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.
Know more details about this asteroid over at EurekAlert.
(Image Credit: NASA/ Goddard/ University of Arizona/ Wikimedia Commons)
High-touch surfaces are places that need to be disinfected regularly in order to avoid the spread of diseases. It has become common practice lately that you sanitize your hands immediately after touching high-touch surfaces, such as elevator buttons.
This elevator offers you another way to interact with elevator buttons: instead of having to press the buttons with your fingers, you can choose to press using your feet. Unlike regular elevators, this elevator has giant buttons that you can easily access using your feet.
I wonder where this elevator is.
(Image Credit: u/PlasticRuester/ Reddit)
Time to hit the nostalgia button for this one, folks. If you were way too young to experience the early years of the World Wide Web, there’s always an article or two about how that time went. The Internet was gawky, and painfully slow. While people complained about how tedious it was to connect back then, let’s not forget a good aspect when it comes to reminiscing about the old times: web design. The majority of web designers at that time only had experience with designing printed materials, as Mashable details:
Many websites today look the same because there is greater “emphasis on accessibility, applicability and UX at the expense of visual originality,” Kovar said. That’s not a bad thing, added the UX designer based in Prague, but it does leave web designers from the ‘90s like him pining for colorful backgrounds and Comic Sans. Although, that aesthetic wasn't embraced by corporate brands, with many like Amazon, AOL, and AltaVista opting for box grids and just a splash of color just before the new millennium. (AOL was the most vibrant of the bunch at the time.)
While there are many services archiving the web, like the Internet Archive with its influential Wayback Machine, Kovar organizes the historical snapshots to provide better context about the internet’s past. Want to see what porn, music, movie, and soccer websites looked like decades ago? Kovar’s museum has a sampling. The museum also has a collection of search engines from the ‘90s, many of which you’ve probably never heard of. After all, Rough Guides, the travel guidebook brand, didn’t include Google in the index of its internet guidebook in 1999. (Yes, people wrote books for internet tourists back then.)
Image via Mashable
Under most circumstances, a mountain lion will avoid humans. But they are dangerous cats, and will attack if they are frightened or hungry. Kyle Burgess was running a mountain trail in Utah and saw some cats. He thought they were bobcats, but they were cougar kittens, and their mother was not happy about it. From this rather long sequence -six minutes!- we can gather that she was trying to get rid of him more than wanting to kill him. Kyle had the presence of mind to keep facing the cat, because turning his back could have been deadly. He finally threw a rock, and the cat decided it had chased him far enough. -via Digg
I like to call this her “awkward school photo smile” face. #unflatteringcatphotochallenge pic.twitter.com/HnzWxEdOtp
— ℕ𝕒𝕥𝕒𝕤𝕙𝕒 𝕃𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕪 (@nattydelightful) October 9, 2020
Junebug is a cute cat, but not every picture can be purrfect. We love to see funny and cute LOLcats, and looking at adorably beautiful cats can make you feel better after a bad day. But the odd unflattering cat picture can give us a belly laugh that does just as much good! A new Twitter challenge has people digging up that awful picture from years ago to show how weird their cat can look when they're not ready for their picture to be taken.
I've been prepping for this moment my entire life.#unflatteringcatphotochallenge pic.twitter.com/enSRlcrFV7
— Steph but Spooky 🌙 🎃 (@velociraptisart) October 10, 2020
Does this couch make my butt look big? See more of Leo at Instagram. See a roundup of the 30 best pictures (for the purpose) at Bored Panda, and check out the Twitter hashtag #unflatteringcatphotochallenge to see all of them.
The 2020 fall semester is different, so Duke University Library wanted something catchy to explain to students how to get the library materials they need. Luckily, they had a music composer on staff, librarian Jamie Keesecker, who was working from home while caring for his three-year-old daughter. He started writing music as a teenager.
And he kept writing music, for more than 17 years. He got a master’s in music composition from Duke in 2011 and a doctorate in 2016, but worried constantly about his career. He realized he would make a better hobbyist composer than professional.
Keesecker began work at the library, where his work felt refreshingly regular. He didn’t need to invent things from scratch.
But this project he started completely from scratch, and ended up with a cute hand-drawn animation and an earworm song that is now available on Spotify and Apple Music. -via reddit
Earlier this year Tom Scott told us about the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant, which was built but never used. To be exact, it was never used as a nuclear power plant. With a little imagination, it has become something much more fun.
Newcastle-based graphic designer Sean Ford’s Foil Series is minimalistic and beautiful. The series is actually an experiment that explores geometric forms and patterns and various foils and textures. It’s wonderful to see the different combinations of colors and textures in the background, along with a bright but simple geometric pattern. I’d like to have one as an art print, not gonna lie.
Image via Sean Ford
It seems like 2010 was only yesterday. It was a time when many of us posted stuff about our virtual farms on Facebook. Back then, we would brag about these farms to our friends. But those are now the good old days. FarmVille will soon be gone, but it seems that nobody remembers it anymore. At least, that’s what Ellie Gibson of Eurogamer believes.
Alright, let's be honest: FarmVille isn't officially gone till 31 December, but it's already forgotten. I just paid a visit to an old Facebook group where I used to hang out with a load of players, back when hanging out in Facebook groups wasn't just for old people.
[...]
Oh yeah, I was in deep. I had forgotten how deep, in fact, until reading one of my old posts today. "Need two horseshoes and five harnesses. Also bottles and blankets," I wrote, on 23 July 2010. The eve of my wedding. Yep, I was still focused on horse admin, at a time when I should have been getting my nails done and cutting a hole in a sheet.
But what happened? Why did people suddenly forget about it? Ellie herself doesn’t know the answer.
Probably, we just happened upon some new distraction, as is the way of humans. Everything gets old eventually…
And to that, I agree. Everything does get old, and everything will disappear eventually. Before FarmVille is gone, Ellie writes her goodbyes to the game over at the site.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
You had fun with the initial release of Fall Guys. Now prepare for the 2nd season, as the game introduces new stages for you to play and have fun and get frustrated with. The game’s recent update adds four new mini-games: Hoopsie Legends, Egg Siege, Wall Guys, and Knight Fever.
Details over at Kotaku.
Sounds fun!
(Image Credit: Mediatonic/ Kotaku)
No one expects to get a bomb from the sea out of nowhere,right? Well, an unexploded 45 kilogram bomb was found on Lord Howe Island’s Elizabeth Reef by a fisherman (imagine his freight upon seeing it). The angler was about 550 kilometers off the coast of the island and discovered the bomb, He quickly photographed his discovery and reported it to the authorities, as The Guardian details:
Navy divers aboard HMAS Adelaide carefully removed the abandoned explosive on 25 September by floating it to the surface and towing it further out to sea where it was dropped into 550-metre-deep waters.
“That depth is really safe. It’s not going to ever get washed back up onto the reef,” senior marine parks officer John Pritchard said.
“There’s no deep-sea fishing or trawling allowed out there. It’s a recreational fishing zone only.
“The chances of that UXO (unexploded ordinance) ever coming back to the surface is negligible.”
The origin of the bomb is not known and divers couldn’t estimate its age owing to deterioration, a spokesman for the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, said.
Image via The Guardian
One of the many emotions that we humans have is sympathy. But this emotion isn’t exclusive to us humans; animals can show sympathy, too. In a study recently published in Scientific Reports, researchers found out that birds share their food with other birds that are less fortunate.
They seem to [take each] other's perspective into account in their decision, and thus seem to show sympathy," said Utrecht-based biologist Jorg Massen in an experiment with azure-winged magpies.
[...]
The researchers discovered that the magpies are inclined to share food with their peers. They differentiate, however, between whether others have food or do not have food, and subsequently cater to that lack. "Females mainly shared with the others if they had nothing. The males always shared. We think the latter has to do with 'advertisement': 'Look at me being generous.' With the females, it's mainly to help the other if they have nothing."
The azure-winged magpies are more inclined to share food as a response to begging, but it turns out that even without begging, the magpies share food with conspecifics that are less fortunate. This shows that azure-winged magpies might truly notice the need of others, even without begging behavior.
Amazing.
Learn more details about this study over at PHYS.org.
(Image Credit: Utrecht University/ PHYS.org)
Potatoes have phosphoric acid. Insert a source of zinc and the two will react to produce a small amount of electrical current.
Very small. Will a potato run the video game Doom? No, but if you use about 700 potato pieces, YouTube user Equalo discovered, you can run Doom on a graphing calculator:
This was a long, difficult project that Equalo completed while working a full-time job. As a result, the potato pieces became moldy and stinky by the end of the six-day effort.
