There’s a lot that can be said on how people selectively celebrate and remember certain points in history. In many cases, women and their discoveries and accomplishments go unnoticed. Lilian Bland is one of those unique women forgotten or ignored. Bland was the first woman to design, build, and fly her own plane. She designed the Mayfly, an aircraft that could successfully fly short distances with or without an engine. Her forgotten story makes us ask, why are women like her who are innovators and intelligent beings remain obscured? Historian  Dr. Bettany Hughes explained that a lot of women we remember and are part of recorded history are there because they are portrayed as highly sexu in alized, as Jalopnik detailed: 

She goes on further to add: A lot of the women that we think of, like Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, one of the reasons their stories have lasted is that they are portrayed as highly sexualized. They are exciting, but the danger of their influence has also become a warped morality tale; we remember them as creatures who draw men towards their beds and towards their death.

Often women aren’t allowed to be characters in history, they have to be stereotypes. Cleopatra was a poet and a philosopher, she was incredibly good at maths; she wasn’t that much of a looker. But when we think of her, we think: big breasted seductress bathing in milk. Often, even when women have made their mark and they are remembered by history, we are offered a fantasy version of their lives.

In other cases, history is more likely to remember tragedy. Amelia Earhart was the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean, but as I’ve shown through the history of women in racing, being the first or best woman to do something doesn’t necessarily guarantee your place in the stories we tell decades later. Do we remember Earhart as an investor? One of the heirs to her grandmother’s fortune? Do we remember the details of her flights that weren’t record breaking or the cause of her death? Often, we don’t.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

For four decades, Richard Burnham has been commercially harvesting salmon in the Alaska village of Katlag. Over the years, however, Burnham, as well as the fishermen, noticed something was off with their catch.

“At first, it was just a general comment by everybody: ‘The fish, yeah, I didn’t get any big ones this year,’”

It wasn’t bad luck, however. The fish really had become smaller over the years. 

… a new study has borne out those observations on a huge scale, documenting body size declines in fish across the entire state of Alaska in four different species of salmon: chinook, sockeye, silver and chum.

Alaska is “the last largely pristine North American salmon-producing region”, the authors write. Yet the size of the Yukon region chinooks – the largest of the four salmon species – has diminished the most, by 10% compared with those caught before 1990.

The bodies of commercially valuable sockeye shrank by 2% statewide, and silver salmon grew 3% physically smaller.

But why?

It would seem that there are two reasons why the fish have become smaller: climate change, and competition.

One likely factor, the authors say, is climate crisis-driven changes in the quality or availability of the fishes’ food. A second constant, albeit weak, dynamic was that all four species were smaller when they were competing with larger numbers of a fifth species of Alaska salmon, the hatchery-raised pink.

Learn more details about this study over at The Guardian.

(Image Credit: Andrew Hendry/ Reuters/ The Guardian)

1927. The Germans had a new toy on their hands. It was a fearsome cruiser 174 meters (571 feet) in length, and with many turrets and cannons. The ship’s name: Karlsruhe. 

Throughout its lifetime, the Karlsruhe was used as a training cruiser for naval cadets. It was also used for non-intervention patrols. It sank, however, only 13 years after its launch, and nobody knew where it sank… until this year, 80 years later.

The wreckage of a German warship that was struck by a British torpedo in 1940 has been discovered off the coast [of] Norway. Norwegian power grid operator Statnett said the cruiser Karlsruhe was identified more than 1,600 feet underwater from sonar images.

Launched in 1927, the 571-foot ship led the attack on the southern Norwegian port of Kristiansand during the invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940. With nine cannons and three triple turrets, it was "the largest and most fearsome ship in the attack group," Statnett said.

[...]

"You can find Karlsruhe's fate in history books, but no one has known exactly where the ship sunk," Norwegian Maritime Museum archaeologist Frode Kvaloe said. "After all these years we finally know where the graveyard to this important warship is."

More details over at CBS News.

(Image Credit: Stattnet/ CBS News)

The ACH160 is Airbus’ luxury version of the H160 helicopter. Guess what, you can grab a unit for yourself if you’re willing to pay a whopping $14 million for it. The luxury aircraft can accommodate up to ten passengers. It is also customizable! Buyers can choose between bench-style seats, individual seats, or a mix of both. Check out more photos of the ACH160 at Business Insider. 

Image via Business Insider

With the current pandemic, most food establishments are predicted to close. Lee Sungwook has designed a food truck designed to work during the pandemic. Meet the Streat is a conceptual food truck that operates on a low-risk, low maintenance model that can drive itself. Yanko Design has more details: 

The Streat comes outfitted with a fully functional kitchen on the inside, big enough for as many as 3-4 cooks. The modular kitchen counter allows you to customize it based on the appliance you need, choosing between fryers, ovens, grills, hobs, and even fridges and deep-freezers for storing produce. A semi-transparent clad sits on top of the truck, illuminating it with sun-light to reduce energy consumption, while allowing patrons outside to see their food be prepared. Set your truck up with an online food-ordering system and you prevent the need for people lining up outside the truck. Moreover, the truck can even travel directly to deliver food to people, eliminating the need for delivery agents… and basically operating quite like a takeaway restaurant, but without the risk of one.

Image via Yanko Design

Hokusai. The name might not be familiar to you, but I’m sure that the picture above is. The picture, called The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, or simply The Wave, is the most famous work of Hokusai, the non-Western world’s most famous artist.

Hokusai lived from 1760 to 1849. It was still a time when “sakoku” — the policy in which no Japanese can come out, and no foreigners can come into 99 percent of the country — was still implemented in Japan. Thus, the Japanese had very little knowledge of the outside world, with all of their knowledge coming from outdated books. This could be one of the reasons why Hokusai tried to make the Great Picture Book of Everything. Unfortunately, he was not able to finish it.

The project was abandoned in the 1830s – either because of cost or possibly because Hokusai insisted on reproduction standards that were difficult to attain.

The Great Picture Book of Everything was to have been a comprehensive way for the Japanese to have access to images of people, cultures and nature around the world – at a time when virtually no Japanese people had been allowed out of Japan for some two centuries - and virtually no foreigners had been allowed into 99 per cent of the country.

In that ultra-restrictive atmosphere, the project was to have given people an opportunity to explore a highly stylised printed version of the outside world as well as Japan itself.

However, so limited was Hokusai's access to up-to-date images of foreigners and foreign cultures, that he often had to use very old pictures as his source material – which led to him portraying much of the outside world as it would have looked several hundred years earlier.

Today, the Great Picture Book of Everything is considered as one of the world’s most important collections of art. And after having been lost for over 70 years, it has now re-emerged.

See some pictures from the book over at Independent.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

It’s always a great experience to be in the kitchen as a child. You get to learn how to cook, and you get to learn the texture and taste of each and every ingredient. You also get to snack on these uncooked ingredients, like this kid who immediately grabs what his grandma puts in the mixing bowl, including the raw eggs and the flour.

Yum!

(Image Credit: Today)

David Klein was the founder of the Jelly Belly jellybeans, although he parted ways with the company in 1980. Now he has launched a contest, actually a treasure hunt, in which he plans to give away a 4,000-square-foot property containing a candy factory in Florida. Yes, it sounds like the plot of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but this is real. Fast Company has more details.

You have to pay $49.99 to enter the statewide treasure hunts, and each one is limited to 1,000 participants. As the news release describes it, “David and his partner have started going across the USA hiding gold style tickets in the form of necklaces in places they come across with an interesting story. Plans are to have multiple treasure hunts for these gold tickets in each state.”

Those who pay will get clues on Facebook as to the location of the golden ticket (worth $5,000) in their state, but it's not clear what will happen when someone who did not enter the contest finds one of the hidden gold dog tags. State winners will compete in some fashion for the grand prize.   

As of now, some of the pages at the contest site are returning errors, possibly because of too much traffic. There is a Facebook group where people can ask questions, but it seems to be mostly complaints about the website not working and the difficulty of buying tickets. -via Boing Boing

With the current situation, most of us are required to stay at home for our own safety. The work at home situation is quite a difficult transition for most businesses. Over a single weekend, Adobe had to shift their workforce of 22,000 people to working remotely. Changing a company’s processes and workflows takes more than a weekend, though. VentureBeat details the steps the company took to ensure that its workers can work smoothly at home: 

We realized pretty quickly that the only way to meet their needs was to completely rethink our support infrastructure.

Our first step was to launch an organization-wide open Slack channel that would tie together the IT organization and the entire Adobe employee community. Our 24×7 global IT help desk would front the support on that channel, while the rest of IT was made available for rapid event escalation.

As we began building the framework and interfaces on our Slack Channel, we realized the same, specific questions and issues were coming up frequently. By focusing on the most common and weighty issues, we decided to optimize our support for frequently asked questions and issues. We dubbed this AI and machine-learning-based Slack channel “#wfh-support,” and it had built-in natural language processing (NLP).

The chatbot’s answers could be as simple as directing employees to an existing knowledge base article or FAQ, or walking them through steps to solve a problem, such as setting up a virtual private network. We chose to focus first on the eight most frequently reported topics, and today we’re continuing to add capabilities as we learn what works and what delivers the biggest benefits.

Image via VentureBeat 

Some people just want to watch the world burn, and this person, whom we just know by his Reddit username, Benjolia, is one of those people. He does not play the game Fall Guys to win, but rather to annoy some, if not all the people who were unlucky enough to be matched with him. He will make sure that players will either go back to the starting line or get eliminated for the next round, by blocking their paths, or by grabbing them and then pushing them at the edge of a platform.

How evil!

See the video on Reddit.

Via Gamology on Facebook

(Image Credit: u/Benjolia/ Reddit)

Gerald Maguire is a psychiatrist at the University of California. When you talk to him, you won’t notice a problem with his speech, as he talks rather smoothly, and he only stutters when you try to make him pronounce multisyllabic words like “statistically”. But in reality, Maguire always stuttered, ever since childhood. So what happened?

For the past 25 years, Maguire… has been treating his disorder with antipsychotic medications not officially approved for the condition.

Maguire has plenty of company: More than 70 million people worldwide, including about 3 million Americans, stutter — that is, they have difficulty with the starting and timing of speech, resulting in halting and repetition. That number includes approximately 5 percent of children, many of whom outgrow the condition, and 1 percent of adults. Their numbers include presidential candidate Joe Biden, deep-voiced actor James Earl Jones and actress Emily Blunt. Though those people and many others, including Maguire, have achieved career success, stuttering can contribute to social anxiety and draw ridicule or discrimination by others.

But what causes stuttering? Therapists from the past believed that stuttering is caused by defects of the tongue and voice box, as well as anxiety and trauma. Some people today still believe that. But others believe that stuttering is caused by neurological problems.

The first data to back up that hunch came in 1991, Yaruss says, when researchers reported altered blood flow in the brains of people who stuttered. Over the past two decades, continuing research has made it more apparent that stuttering is all in the brain.

More about this over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: RyanMcGuire/ Pixabay)

A couple of minutes of "All Star" sung by the movies. Which movies? There's a list in this comment. Mashups like this where the movies sing a song once took an enormous amount of work because the editor had to find clips where the lip synching matched the song. Now, deep fake technology does a lot of that work. The results are still intriguing, even if you hate the song by now. -via Metafilter

It is said that in about four billion years, the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with a neighboring galaxy, which is none other than our Milky Way Galaxy, and the phenomenon will cause a makeover in this part of the universe. But it seems that this wasn’t an accurate calculation.

Earlier this week, researchers working on a sky-mapping project called AMIGA reported that the early stages of the Andromeda-Milky Way collision will happen long before the main event. You don't have to wait 4 billion years to watch a galaxy smash-up. With a little vision enhancement, you can sense it happening right now... because the Andromeda-Milky Way collision has already begun.

But why did this happen way way earlier than expected?

The reason the collision is happening a few billion years ahead of schedule is that the Andromeda Galaxy is much bigger than it appears. The galaxy's bright, starry disk is about 120,000 light years in diameter, making it slightly larger than the Milky Way. In recent years, deep studies of Andromeda using the giant Keck telescopes in Hawaii revealed an extended population of stars that stretched the galaxy's total diameter to about 200,000 light years. That's nothing compared to what the latest study shows, however.

Nicolas Lehner of the University of Notre Dame and his colleagues determined that Andromeda's halo — its outer envelope of extremely thin, hot gas, kind of like a galactic atmosphere — keeps going up to 2 million light years away from its center.

More details about this surprising news over at Discover Magazine.

(Image Credit: Adam Evans/ Wikimedia Commons)

The lyrebird is a bird of many talents. This bird can mimic songs of other birds, which, I believe, is already amazing. It can also mimic artificial sounds, such as a camera click, which is more amazing, in my opinion. But compared to these talents, this ability of the lyrebird might just be the most amazing and most wonderful: the ability to shape ecosystems. This bird “moves more soil globally than any other land animal.”

Lead researcher Alex Maisley, from Australia’s La Trobe University, tracked wild superb lyrebirds for two years across three locations – Sherbrooke Forest, Yarra Ranges National Park and Britannia Creek catchment – in the Central Highlands of Victoria.

“In just one year, we calculated that each lyrebird in Sherbrooke Forest moved a load equivalent to that carried by 11 standard dump trucks,” he says.

“While seeking invertebrate prey, they use their sharp claws to expose bare earth, and mix and bury litter.”

As they move soil to search for food, the lyrebirds change litter decomposition and the structure of the soil on the forest floor, creating microhabitats for invertebrates as well as encouraging seed germination.

Amazing indeed.

Learn more about the lyrebird over at Cosmos Magazine.

(Image Credit: BBC Studios/ YouTube)

One of the first things that you have to consider when camping is the type of knife that you will bring to your journey. Of all the many tools that you will bring, the knife is the handiest of them all. It could be used to prepare food, start fires, cut ropes, and even ward off wild animals — a true survival tool indeed.

Wes Siler states that there are three questions that you should ask yourself in order for you to know the ideal knife to buy for your camping trip. The three questions are:

• How are you going to carry it?
• How are you going to sharpen it?
• What are you going to use it for?

More details about this over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: LUM3N/ Pixabay)