The most remote place in Alaska is St. Matthew Island, halfway between the North American mainland and Siberia. The nearest town is a 24-hour boat ride away. The island was "discovered" several times, and there is evidence of a prehistoric home, but no one ever stays there long. Once a home for polar bears, it still teems with wildlife, both on land and in the water. But no humans call it home.

Even after the bears were gone, the archipelago remained a difficult place for people. The fog was endless; the weather, a banshee; the isolation, extreme. In 1916, the Arctic power schooner Great Bear ran afoul of the mists and wrecked on Pinnacle. The crew used whaleboats to move about 20 tonnes of supplies to St. Matthew to set up a camp and wait for help. A man named N. H. Bokum managed to build a sort of transmitter from odds and ends, and climbed each night to a clifftop to tap out SOS calls. But he gave up after concluding that the soggy air interfered with its operation. Growing restless as the weeks passed, men brandished knives over the ham when the cook tried to ration it. Had they not been rescued after 18 days, Great Bear owner John Borden later said, this desperation would have been “the first taste of what the winter would have brought.”

U.S. servicemen stationed on St. Matthew during the Second World War got a more thorough sampling of the island’s winter extremes. In 1943, the U.S. Coast Guard established a long-range navigation (Loran) site on the southwestern coast of the island, part of a network that helped fighter planes and warships orient on the Pacific with the help of regular pulses of radio waves. Snow at the Loran station drifted up to around eight meters deep, and “blizzards of hurricane velocity” lasted an average of 10 days. Sea ice surrounded the island for about seven months of the year. When a plane dropped the mail several kilometers away during the coldest time of year, the men had to form three crews and rotate in shifts just to retrieve it, dragging a toboggan of survival supplies as they went.

Sarah Gilman visited this inhospitable island, and gives us an almost poetic tour along with the history of the Alaskan outpost of St. Matthew Island. -via Smithsonian

As NASA is currently in the process of colonizing the Moon by 2024 and Mars in the 2030’s, is it really a good idea to do so?

Yea, there are hazards on the Moon and Mars worth considering:

The Moon — extreme radiations; extreme cold and hot temperatures and micrometeorites the size of sand grains that travel at 10 miles per second. 

Mars — radiation, toxic soils, cold temperatures and low amounts of water. But, despite these hazards, NASA can, hopefully, figure out a way to live on these astronomical bodies through extensive studies over the course of many hard fought years.

We’ve spent excessive amounts of money to explore the Moon and Mars, dating back to at least 1969 when Apollo 11 was the first crewed mission to land on the Moon. The Apollo program cost over $25 billion dollars. And it costs about $6 billion to bring four people to Mars. The concern here is that If NASA and the Pentagon know that aliens exist — with their advanced UFO technology and advanced civilization on other planets — then why haven’t they considered the fact that Aliens haven’t colonized the Moon or Mars?

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Let’s go, women! The winners for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry have been announced, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of France and Jennifer Doudna of the United States are the winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their genome editing research. Both of them will receive a gold medal and share a cash award of a whopping $1.12 million, as NPR details: 

The winners are Emmanuelle Charpentier of France, and Jennifer Doudna of the United States. Charpentier is at the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, and Doudna is at the University of California, Berkeley.

As is customary, the winners were announced at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. The formal ceremonies in December will take place online because of the pandemic.

Image via NPR 

When I was young and moving from one rental home to another about once a year, moving meant taking down the TV aerial, the shower head, and the ceiling fans, and re-installing the original overhead lights. A new place always needed some repairs. Now I have kids for those sorts of chores. If you've never replaced a light switch, you might be surprised to find it's easier than you think -just make sure the power is off first.

Lifehacker has instructions for eight household electrical fixes that non-electricians do all the time, from changing a light fixture to replacing an electrical outlet. Just make sure the power is off.

(Image credit: Creidieki)

If you ever encounter a hand stretched out in front of you, try not giving anything. This short comic / story made by Shencomix  at Owl Turd has left me awake at night, thinking about open palms and candies. A recommended read. Narrative wise, it manages to instill suspense and fear in just short sentences. 

Image via Tumblr 

Zinc energy-storage technologies are cheaper and safer than lithium-ion, according to researchers. California officials are expecting zinc batteries to hold more charge, with some being able to store 25 to 50 hours worth of energy. The shift to zinc from lithium-ion can help the state to attain 100-percent clean energy by 2045, as Forbes details: 

“Some of them are looking to provide residential homes the storage they need to ride through these PSPS (public-safety power shut-off) events that California has, or to provide the reliability and resiliency that a home should have, and they're in the size that they would fit in your garage, or they would fit something about the size of your outside air conditioner.”

California recently invested $16.8 million in energy-storage technologies beyond lithium-ion, many of which employ zinc.

“If you look past lithium ion, probably zinc is the next metal that's the most popular for energy storage, and it it does appear to be able to provide performance equal to or better than lithium if given a chance,” Gravely said in a webinar hosted by the Clean Energy States Alliance. “So we have projects where we're doing zinc batteries at the residential level, the commercial level, and the industrial level.”

The state plans to install 2,400 megawatts of energy-storage through 2023, about 90 percent of which are based on lithium-ion technologies. But state officials estimate they will need another 20,000 to 30,000 MW of energy storage by 2045.

Image via Forbes 

NVIDIA’s new AI-powered suite can improve the quality of video calls and reduce bandwidth usage. God knows how much bandwidth is spent in video calls! How, you ask? Simple. The AI platform just generates a fake version of you. The NVIDIA Maxine creates a model of a speaker's face, and then only update their expressions as they happen in real time, as Input Magazine details: 

Put together, all the enhancements provided by Maxine should save money for developers and help workers better contend with home settings that aren't always conducive to professional-grade teleconferencing.

Because streaming video can quickly get expensive, Nvidia found a way to analyze the key facial features of everyone on a call and intelligently re-animate them in the cloud instead of streaming an entire screen of pixels. Maxine also converts lower resolutions streams to higher resolution video in real-time and can compress the resulting feed by 90 percent more than the current H.264 standard can manage. The result is that the amount data being sent back and forth is significantly reduced without compromising on image quality.

Image via Input Magazine 

We have been staying at home for many months now, but it doesn’t mean that we got less busy. We still live very busy lives even at our own homes. We are so busy that we don’t even have time to stay fit. But there’s still hope. It seems that by reserving as little as ten minutes for exercise, you can improve your overall athletic ability. While doing this might not make your body as muscular as athletes, at the very least, it helps you to stay physically active.

Check out how to do this 10-minute workout over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: Hayden Carpenter/ Outside Online)

Batzorig Vaanchig is a renowned musician. He is a master of Tuvan throat singing (a type of singing in which the performer has to sustain a low note and sing a high note at the same time) and he uploads his performances over at his YouTube channel. But this performance that he recently posted is unlike the others, for this time, he sings with his daughter.

Seated beside his little girl on the family sofa, Vaanchig plays the tovshuur, a Western Mongolian lute with two strings, as he treats her to some incredible Tuvan throat singing.

Very wholesome.

Via Classic FM

(Image Credit: Batzorig Vaanchig/ YouTube)

Fingerprints and facial features are two of the most popular methods in confirming a person’s identity. But perhaps in the near future, this method — which is scanning finger veins — might soon be used for biometric authentication. This might also be integrated in smartphones soon.

“The 3D finger vein biometric authentication method we developed enables levels of specificity and anti-spoofing that were not possible before,” says Jun Xia, from University at Buffalo in the US, lead author of a paper in the journal Applied Optics.

“Since no two people have exactly the same 3D vein pattern, faking a vein biometric authentication would require creating an exact 3D replica of a person’s finger veins, which is basically not possible.”

Details about this study are at Cosmos Magazine.

(Image Credit: Jun Xia/ University at Buffalo/ Cosmos)

When it comes to a typical Japanese anime, you’ll usually encounter at least two types of characters: a “tsundere” and a “yandere”. The former is the character who is cold at the start but warms up as the series progresses. The latter, on the other hand, expresses intense love through insane, or even violent, means.

Just as there are real-life tsundere, there are real-life yandere, too, and this story is an example of the real-life yandere.

Here’s the translation of the accompanying note:

“Long time no see, ex-boyfriend!

Do you know who this is?

I slipped into you and your girlfriend’s little love nest.

Is she cooking good food for you?

It’s been a while since I’ve made a homemade meal for you, so I did my best to whip some up!

I’ll slip in every now and then from here on, so eat up *3”

Ah yes, the old “break into your ex-lover’s house and leave them a meal that you made on the table along with a cryptic note” method of communication. Something that perfectly normal human beings do every single day!

…right?

Some Japanese netizens commented that this is a terrifying story. Others commented that it’s better than having convenience store food every day.

As far as @hanahanakaidou’s response to the situation, this is what he had to say when someone asked if he’d contacted the police:

“For now, I’ve just decided to eat the meals.”

(Image Credit: @hanahanakaidou/ Twitter)

The "Missed Connections" section of Craigslist has been a source of humor and fantasy for years, and maybe some happy endings that we'll never know about. One such ad inspired Patrick Dias to fill in some of the blanks and make an animated short called Missed Connections: "Was that your limb? - w4m".

With narration sourced from a real Craigslist Missed connections ad, and visually wrapped with a fictional narrative—this is a story of a space captain late for his own launch, and the woman who was at the right place but at the wrong time.

I only wish we could get a sequel with a real-life resolution. -via Laughing Squid

Using some cars, plastic sheeting, as well as a large tarpaulin, local residents of the Chilean town of Puerto Cisnes, along with the Police and the Chilean Navy officials, successfully guided a lost elephant seal back to the sea.

The huge animal managed to lumber down ten blocks of a residential area of Puerto Cisnes, in the country's southern Patagonian region, before returning to its natural habitat with a little bit of help from the locals.

Other Good Samaritans threw buckets of water over the confused animal to keep it hydrated.

[...]

“It was a great effort. The seal is safe now and out of danger from humans and dogs that could do it damage.”

More details about this amazing story over at DailyMail.

(Image Credit: Manuel Novoa/ DailyMail)

Worried about how people with dementia were coping during the lockdown, three teenagers developed an app that uses music to comfort its users. The Nigerian-Irish trio (Rachael, 16, Margaret, 17, and Joy, 17) decided to launch the application, called Memory Haven, when their mentor, Evelyn Nomayo, lost her mother to dementia. The app beat 1,500 entries from across 62 countries at Technovation, a prestigious technology competition, as Inews details: 

The app uses facial recognition. It will detect the person’s mood by reading their facial expression and tailor the music it plays accordingly.

It has five other main features as well as the music which include a health check, a photo wallet, reminder alerts, a memory game feature and a reach-out feature that can be used to contact friends, families, caregivers, doctors or emergency services.

They want as many people as possible to benefit from their app.

“The main aim for all of us was to try and help as many families, individuals and communities because we know firsthand how tough it is knowing somebody living with dementia,” they explain. “We hope the app can go global one day and reach millions of people who are affected by dementia and help make their lives somewhat easier.”

Image via Inews 

Yandy is notorious for offering sexy Halloween costumes, and every year, in addition to the classic horror and pop culture characters, they come up with the most ridiculous versions of whatever is in the news. This year is no exception. For 2020, behold, the sexy mail-in ballot costume! But that isn't the only new one this year. See the sexy hand sanitizer costume, the sexy murder hornet costume, the sexy postal babe costume, and the sexy Tiger King costume (available for both men and women) at Geeks Are Sexy.