The Universal Waste Management System is probably the most expensive toilet in the universe. Probably the toilet with the longest name too. NASA spent $23 million on the waste system. The newest space toilet is smaller and lighter than the old version, and easier to maintain, especially when it springs a leak. One of the biggest upgrades this toilet has compared to the previous iterations of space toilets is that it allows astronauts to pee and poop at the same time, which also means that female astronauts can finally use the toilet with ease: 

This matters more for the women in the astronaut corps, for whom the two bodily functions can be trickier to separate. For years, women astronauts have been carefully positioning themselves over the bowl, exchanging tips with their colleagues on best practices, and trying to make do with hardware that wasn’t built for their bodies.

Space toilets don’t look quite like the one in your bathroom. With the older latrine models on the ISS, astronauts urinate into a handheld funnel and defecate into a device that looks like a smaller version of a traditional toilet seat. A fan inside each apparatus suctions the waste away from the body, an important function in an environment where everything floats. The urine is transformed into the next day’s water, while the feces are compressed in a removable container and eventually dispatched on a special trash spacecraft that burns up in the atmosphere in the majestic manner of a shooting star. It’s careful business for men and women alike. Hold the funnel too close to the body, cutting off airflow, and liquid can end up pooling near the top. Lose contact with the seat, and waste might escape. Forget to turn on those fans before you start, and things can get messy.

Image via The Atlantic 

The first planes before and during World War I didn’t pose much danger. Back then, they were only used for reconnaissance and surveillance of enemy territory. Information back then was as valuable as it is today. However, once opposing forces used the same tactic against each other, there became a realization to add weapons on the rather new invention. With the addition of weapons on planes came dogfights.

The first dogfights were made with pistols. The pilot held the airplane’s control stick with one hand and fired off his pistol to the sides with the other. Then a second crew member, the gunner, was added. Sitting on the backseat, his job was to operate a movable machine gun leaving the flying to the pilot. It was German aviator August Euler, who first saw the advantage of a forward-firing gun that could bring down an enemy from behind. Euler patented his design in 1910—four years before war started.

Euler’s design was met with criticism, however.

“The idea of coupling the firing mechanism to the propeller's rotation is an affectation. The objection is the same as to any gun position which is fixed along the longitudinal axis of the aircraft: the pilot is forced to fly directly at the enemy in order to fire. Under certain circumstances this is highly undesirable”, wrote German Major Siegert.

Nevertheless, airplane designers continued to file patents.

But putting a forward-firing gun on a plane proved to be very difficult. It wasn’t until Anthony Fokker came into the scene with his synchronization gear that the first true fighter aircraft would be born.

More about this over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: The Illustrated London News/ Amusing Planet)

A small colony of short-tailed chinchillas live quietly in the mountains of northern Chile. During the 19th and 20th centuries, these rodents were hunted down almost to extinction because of their ultra-soft fur. These recent years have been good to them, perhaps, the most peaceful time, for them. But maybe this peace won’t last long, as…

The colony in question sits atop 3.5 million ounces of extractable gold, a resource set to be developed by Gold Fields, a South African-based gold mining company. Gold Fields’ CEO Nick Holland said in 2017 at a mining conference in Cape Town that the chinchillas were one of the main obstacles to the project but the company was determined to find a way to protect the colony.

Big mining initiatives take years to roll, with conservation compliance an increasingly crucial part of the package. Gold Fields’ environmental permit for the Salares Norte mining project — which has an $860 million construction price tag — hinged on it finding a way to move the chinchillas, which are protected under Chilean law. The result is a kind of mini Noah’s Ark initiative high in the mountains of northern Chile.

While the plan to relocate the chinchillas can be seen as a good thing, the same cannot be said about the effects of relocation on the animals.

Relocations for animals big and small have a mixed record. In 2018, for example, conservationists relocated six rare black rhinos from South Africa to a national park in the Central African nation of Chad, part of the species’ former range. Four of the animals died within months of the transfer.

Closer to the chinchillas in size and habitat is the American pika, a mountain-dwelling relative of rabbits and hares. A 2015 study in the journal Biodiversity found experimental translocations of the species between alpine habitats in the 1970s had “mixed results.” But it concluded pikas were “a good candidate species” for relocation projects in cases where the animals’ habitats were threatened by climate change.

More details about this over at Undark.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Luis Ortega/ Undark)

Apple often announces that their new phones have better cameras than their previous ones. The announcement of the iPhone 12 is no different. In fact, the phone has the biggest advances compared to the previous models that the company has released.

Hardware-wise, there doesn’t appear to be much difference between the iPhone 12, 12 mini, and 12 Pro when compared to the 11 and 11 Pro. All of these phones use the same-sized 12 megapixel sensors for wide, ultrawide, and the Pro model’s telephoto cameras, while the shape and size of the camera bump remains essentially the same.

The biggest hardware change is a new seven-element f/1.6 lens for the primary wide camera. That’s a modest aperture increase on the iPhone 11’s six-element f/1.8 lens; Apple says it improves the lens’ light-gathering ability by 27 percent, which should enable slightly faster shutter speeds or less grainy ISO settings in low light. There are often compromises to sharpness and performance when designing lenses with larger apertures, but the new seven-element structure will “maintain sharp detail in your photo from edge to edge,” according to Apple.

Know more about the features of the iPhone 12 over at The Verge.

(Image Credit: Apple/ YouTube)

If you look at the photo real close, maybe you can find the well camouflaged snake. This photo was posted a few years ago by Twitter user @SssnakeySci, a PhD student studying pythons, boas, and pit vipers, but has gained traction on Twitter because most users are trying their best to spot the snake hidden in plain sight. Can you see the snake? 

Image via Prevention

To be able to keep yourself awake for eleven days is nothing but amazing. To be able to keep yourself awake for eleven days while flying is even more amazing. A male bar-tailed godwit was just recorded doing those things as it migrated from Alaska to New Zealand. The bird flew over the Pacific Ocean and covered over 7,500 miles.

Last year, researchers from the Global Flyway Network, a conservation group that tracks the migration of shorebirds, tracked the bird by outfitting it with a custom set of colorful bands around its legs. The bird—known as 4BBRW for the colors of the bands on its legs: two blue, one red, and one white—was also equipped with a tiny satellite tag that tracked its every move. The data revealed that the bird reached a max speed of 55 miles per hour and flew nonstop for 11 days, likely without sleeping, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.

The previous record was set by a female bar-tailed godwit in 2007 who flew 7,250 miles during her migration, reports Chris Baynes for the Independent. Scientists say that for this year’s record-breaker, strong easterly winds likely lengthened his journey, helping him break the record.

Now that’s awesome!

(Image Credit: Paul van de Velde/ Wikimedia Commons)

This is Maki, an elderly ring-tailed lemur who lives at the San Francisco Zoo. He was stolen from his enclosure last week. Fortunately, a sharp-eyed 5-year old boy named James Trinh spotted him as he left his preschool, which is about 5 miles from the zoo. The AP reports how the school director, Cynthia Huang, responded when James cried out "There's a lemur! There's a lemur!":

Huang was skeptical at first. “I thought, Are you sure it’s not a raccoon?” she said.

Maki scurried from the parking lot into the school’s playground and took refuge in a miniature play house, as the school called police who quickly alerted animal control and zoo officials. The children, parents and teachers watched as caretakers arrived and coaxed the lemur into a transport cage, Huang said.

Police have arrested a suspect in the case. Zoo officials have rewarded James with a lifetime membership at their facility.

-via Instapundit | Photo: San Francisco Zoo

Composting is good for the environment for many reasons. Just to name one, composting enriches the soil, and this could lead to healthy plant growth.

There are two problems when making compost, however. One, it takes a long time. Two, it produces an undesirable smell that could attract pests. But a German team has developed a device that addresses both problems.

Created by a German team of "material scientists, engineers, and hobby gardeners," Kalea is about the size of a kitchen garbage can and it sits (appropriately enough) in the kitchen. As users generate food waste – including meat, fish or dairy products – they deposit those items in a lidded bin on top of the device.

Once activated via the press of a button, Kalea starts by dropping the waste from the bin into a chamber where it's shredded and dried. Once that process is complete, the organic material is dropped into a second chamber where it's tumbled.

It is said that the device can produce compost in just two days. It has also been said that there is not much odor involved in the composting process.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Kalea/ New Atlas)

Back in 2018, there was a viral video of a female orca in the Pacific Northwest. The orca, named Tahlequah, had just lost her calf, but she did not abandon the corpse. Instead, she kept on pushing it around for over 17 days. It was almost as if the orca was grieving for the loss of her calf. But is the orca really grieving?

Scientists are tempted to draw those conclusions, too. But even if researchers feel that an animal’s behaviors mean it is mourning, that’s not how their job works. “We need documented evidence that this is indeed an analogue to grief,” says Elizabeth Lonsdorf, a primatologist at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, that proof is hard to get. “In terms of emotion, animal cognition is tricky,” she says. “It would be a lot nicer if you could ask them what they’re feeling.”

Since that option is off the table, scientists resort to observations, analysis and testing hypotheses to figure out why animals interact with their dead, and whether those interactions count as grief. And it’s going to take a lot more than just observations in the wild to get an answer. “The short answer is this is one of these great scientific problems that will take people working from all areas to sort out,” Lonsdorf says.

More details about this over at Discover Magazine.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Foto-Rabe/ Pixabay)

Water usually flows faster than honey. But when liquids are put in narrow tubes coated with liquid-repelling compounds, liquids with higher viscosity, flow faster.

And that’s more than just a physics fun fact. The speed at which fluids flow through pipes is important for a large range of applications, from industrial processes to biological systems.

Scientists were surprised to find this out when they experimented with superhydrophobic coatings. Their findings are reported in the journal Science Advances.

“A superhydrophobic surface consists of tiny bumps that trap air within the coating, so that a liquid droplet that rests on the surface sits as if on a cushion of air,” says research leader Robin Ras.

The coatings themselves don’t speed up the flow of the more viscous liquids, Ras explains. If you place a drop of honey and a drop of water on a coated surface then tilt it to let gravity do its work, the low-viscosity water will flow more quickly.

However, when a droplet is confined to one of the very narrow tubes used in microfluidics, things change drastically. The superhydrophobic coating creates a small air gap between the inside wall of the tube and the outside of the droplet.

More about this over at Cosmos Magazine.

(Image Credit: Aalto University)

Bryant Hoban of O'Fallon, Missouri refers to his business model as "investment sandwiches." He buys fast food menu items right before they are dropped from a menu, freezes them, then sells them at huge markups in online auctions.

Pictured above are Hoban's three Potato Soft Tacos from Taco Bell, a culinary delight that lives on only in our memories since Taco Bell discontinued them in July. Hoban sold two of these tacos at $70 each when he couldn't find a buyer for the entire set. The River Front Times talked to the taco baron about his business:

"These babies are rare!" the ad reads. "Never been eaten!"

We reached out to the seller, Bryant Hoban of O'Fallon, Missouri, and learned that the entrepreneurial scheme is part of a larger frozen-fast-food business idea for which the Potato Soft Tacos are simply a trial run.

"I've had this idea of 'investment sandwiches' where, like, you'd buy a limited-offer sandwich in bulk, freeze it, and then sell it later for a profit," Hoban explains. "You know, like the McRib — McDonald's only offers it once a year, but the demand doesn't go away. So then when I heard Taco Bell was discontinuing the Potato Soft, I decided it'd be a good opportunity to test this idea out before McRib season."

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Facebook

Today, if you smell like human excrement, people would tell you that you stink. But if you are in 18th century France, people in that era would remark that you are fashionable. The French art historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc would even tell you that your scent reminds him of good times. I know. Pretty weird, right?

It was an era of less scrupulous sanitation. The malodor of privies and cesspools was no doubt part of the distinctive bouquet that jogged the lady’s memory. But it wasn’t just the chamber pots that reeked. In the era of Louis XV, it was fashionable to drench oneself in “animal scents:” musk from the scent glands of fanged Himalayan deer; civet from the perineal glands of civet cats; and ambergris from the intestines of sperm whales. Noblemen perfumed themselves with the same reeks that wild beasts used to mark their territory.

In their natural state, each of these substances smell about as bad as you would expect. The noxiousness of civet, for instance, can be indicated by the fact that early settlers of Virginia thought the skunks they smelled around the woods were a local variety of civet cat, and proposed bottling and selling their secretions for “good profit.” In the same vein, human excrement was occasionally referred to as “occidental Civet,” as the historian Karl H. Dannenfeldt notes in the Journal of the History of Biology.

But why did this happen? Why did such scents become popular that time?

Learn more about this over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: John William Godward/ Wikimedia Commons)

An awful lot of people are far from blind, but have trouble reading text in certain circumstances, like the ubiquitous "small print." Others have low vision, meaning they aren't totally blind, but could use some help in navigating text. While typographers design fonts for readability as well as beauty, a new font developed by Applied Design Works and the Braille Institute is designed specifically to help those with low vision. Atkinson Hyperlegible was named in honor of J. Robert Atkinson, the founder of the Braille Institute.

“Typefaces that have more character are generally easier to read,” says Craig Dobie, founding creative director at Applied Design Works. Traditional serif faces like Times New Roman have some of that character, but the Braille Institute needed a more contemporary typeface like Helvetica, Dobie says, because the organization is modernizing for the 21st century.

The challenge for modern, sans serif faces is that they accept a certain level of ambiguity. For example: When “Illness” is capitalized in Helvetica, the first three letters look identical. Atkinson Hyperlegible’s small, serif-like flourishes remove these ambiguities.

“It does some things a modernist font doesn't usually do, so it's breaking the rules a little bit,” Dobie says. “But it's breaking the rules for the right reason — to increase legibility.”

Read more about the font at All About Vision. You can download the free font here. -via Kottke

(Image credit: The Braille Institute)

If you want to prepare yourself for Halloween with plenty of creepy stories, there's no fiction that's scarier than the news. These stories happened in different years in different places all over, but together they will make your skin crawl.

As they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Cracked has a list of pictofacts that will set up the facts (and the goosebumps) with a link for each in case you want to read more.

Tobe Hooper's 1974 slasher film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a classic of the genre. And it's a good thing, considering what the cast and crew went through to get it filmed. Shot in the summer of 1973 in remote Texas locations, they put up with 120 degree heat, the smell of rotting flesh (cheaper than having props made), and performing stunts they were not used to. Marilyn Burns, who played Sally, was particularly affected.

    “She (Burns) had a few accidents on the set. After running through the thicket, she had to go to a plastic surgeon to have thorns removed from her breasts.”
 
So, as it pertains to Burns’ famous screaming in TCM, in this particular instance (and others in the thicket), Burns’ screams are all too real, and the blood on her shirt is largely her own. Talk about taking one for the team.

But that was just the beginning. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, had never used a chainsaw before, What could possibly go wrong? Read about the filming of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at Dangerous Minds.

(Image credit: The NeatoShop)