Found about 8,000 light years from the Earth, in the constellation Scorpius, is the NGC 6357, which is also known to some as the Lobster Nebula and to others as the War and Peace Nebula. Included in this diffuse nebula is the Pismis 24, an open cluster that is home to massive stars. One of the biggest and brightest stars known to man — Pismis 24-1 — is found here.

This star is the brightest object located just above the gas front in the featured image. Close inspection of images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, however, have shown that Pismis 24-1 derives its brilliant luminosity not from a single star but from three at least. Component stars would still remain near 100 solar masses, making them among the more massive stars currently on record.

Magnificent indeed.

(Image Credit: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (IAA, Spain); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble))

“When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you,” or so the old song goes. That’s how the composer of that song saw the power of a single smile — it is capable of making the whole world smile. Of course, this is just an exaggeration, but, according to this scientific study, a smile is still powerful nonetheless.

The study, published in Experimental Psychology, evaluated the impact of a covert smile on perception of face and body expressions. In both scenarios, a smile was induced by participants holding a pen between their teeth, forcing their facial muscles to replicate the movement of a smile.

The research found that facial muscular activity not only alters the recognition of facial expressions but also body expressions, with both generating more positive emotions.

Lead researcher and human and artificial cognition expert, UniSA's Dr Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos says the finding has important insights for mental health.

"When your muscles say you're happy, you're more likely to see the world around you in a positive way," Dr Marmolejo-Ramos says.

More details about this study over at ScienceDaily.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Pexels/ Pixabay)

It really is scary when you see a baseball bat slipping from the batsman’s hands as he swings it, as it will hurt so much if it hits someone. But maybe if you’ve seen this happen hundreds, if not thousands, of times, then you probably can catch it like it’s nothing just like how this baseball player did. He even catches it without looking.

If that’s not amazing, then I don’t know what is.

(Image Credit: u/ handlewithcareme/ Reddit)

It might look like a silly project, but for Cedrick Tan, it’s worth it. Besides, if you’ve got time to do it, then why not?

“I made a watermelon gameboy! It’s the freshest, most environmentally friendly, fragrant console around! Something fun I worked on before sem started,” wrote Tan on his Instagram post.

“It started off as a joke that I was telling friends and family — it just seemed like something really funny to bring about in public and the icing on the cake would be that its green!” Tan said to AsiaOne.

According to his video, Tan's project original began as a regular RetroPie project. But he soon changed his mind. He wanted something unorthodox and fresh.

And since Singapore is making efforts to become more green, Tan thought "why not use a watermelon?"

And so use a watermelon he did.

Watch how he created MelonBoy on this video.

(Image Credit: Cedishappy/ Mashable)

Chadwick Boseman portrayed iconic historical figures like Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and Thurgood Marshall in movies, but was most familiar to audiences as King T'Challah, aka the Black Panther. Marvel Entertainment released this moving tribute to Boseman, who died Friday at age 43 after a four-year battle with cancer. -via Uproxx

Japanese Twitter user YagyouNEKO is an anime fan and a cat daddy. He also makes costumes for his two very patient cats, who are great models! Many of the costumes are from Studio Ghibli films, which you will probably recognize.

 

See a ranked list of the best YagyouNEKO cat costumes at Bored Panda, and follow his ongoing projects at Twitter.

Watch a Gundam bust a move to a medley of Michael Jackson songs in this super smooth stop-motion video. What dance is he doing? The Robot, of course! Or, more straightforwardly, here's a robot imitating a dancer who used to dance like a robot, created by animator Moouyo. -via reddit

You've seen quite a few time-lapse videos of plants sprouting and growing, and it's always delightful. Here we have a compilation of all kinds of different plants reaching for the sunshine, set to the tune of "Growing Up is Just a Trap" performed by Martin Carlberg featuring Annica Svensson. The music makes it exceedingly pleasant. -via Laughing Squid

Marquetry is the craft of creating decorative patterns and images in wood by the inlay and adhesion of different woods, grains, stains, and colors. Andrea Nyilas, a Hungarian artist, is a master of it. Here is a recent piece displaying the Borg Queen from Star Trek. There is no more Borg Queen because you don't cross Janeway.

The end of World War II played out during the summer of 1945, 75 years ago now. Several different dates are commemorated: VE Day (May 8), VJ Day (August 14), and the formal ceremony of surrender staged on September 2, among others. That final ritual was staged by General MacArthur for the cameras and the history books. No detail would be overlooked.   

The September 2, 1945, ceremony aboard the 45,000-ton battleship USS Missouri was a logistical nightmare for MacArthur’s staff and the ship’s crew. Men scrubbed the warship white-glove spotless. Hard-boiled combat leaders played the role of exasperated headmasters, fretting over the appearance, placement, and proper behavior of thousands of marines and sailors scheduled to be in attendance. The operation involved hundreds of documents, dignitaries, and delegates, not to mention the precise coordination of four U.S. destroyers deployed as water taxis for shuttling VIPs to the Missouri. On top of that, America’s fighting forces had to attend to the needs of 225 news correspondents and 75 photographers.

Read how the US pulled out all the stops for the photo op that documented Japan's surrender at Air & Space magazine.

(Image credit: National Archives)

An artist who works with a medium at 200 degrees Fahrenheit is certainly brave, but a skilled Amezaiku artist can turn hot sugar into something exquisite. Using various tools, including one's hands, the molten candy is converted into a realistic, if somewhat transparent, animal.   

Amezaiku is an ancient Japanese tradition dating back to the Heian period (794 to 1185 CE), when people would leave the hardened taffy creations as temple offerings. In the Edo period (1603 to 1868), the confection became more popular thanks to traveling street vendors, who would regale passersby with candymaking, stories, and music. Songs and poems celebrated the art; however, they offered little in the way of detailed descriptions that allowed future generations to carry on the craft.

Shinri Tezuka is a modern day Amezaiku artist trying to keep the tradition alive. Read about his craft at Mental Floss.

Rastra are dip pens that composers use (or used in the past) to draw musical staff. They were common among European composers in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Some, such as the one above, survive as prized antiques. Rastrum is the Latin word for, appropriately, "rake".

-via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: Worthpoint

Websites always remind us to create a strong password, one that has numbers, upper and lowercase letters, as well as symbols. There are even some websites which measure the strength of a password, if it’s very weak or very strong. And then there are sites who would not accept your password if it doesn’t have the elements that make a strong password. But have you ever wondered why the constant reminder?

This infographic from Hive Systems shows how long it takes before a hacker can crack your password.

So how much time will a hacker take before he can crack your password?

Via Facebook

(Image Credit: Hive Systems/ Reddit)

Over thousands of years, Stonehenge has been used as a temple, a memorial, a burial ground, and plenty of other things. It may also have been an amphitheater of sorts. New research shows that acoustics of the original structure are such that sound produced inside the stone circle was amplified people inside, and barely audible to anyone outside the circle. A team of researchers reconstructed what is believed to be the original structure of the monument at 1/12 scale and put it inside an acoustic chamber.  

Despite many gaps between stones, sounds briefly lingered inside Stonehenge Lego, the team found. Reverberation time, a measure of the time it takes sound to decay by 60 decibels, averaged about 0.6 seconds inside the model for mid-frequency sounds. That effect would have boosted the ability to hear voices and enhanced sounds of drums or other musical instruments, Cox says. For comparison, reverberation time reaches about 0.4 seconds in a living room, around two seconds in a large concert hall and roughly eight seconds in a large cathedral.

Stonehenge Lego did not project sounds into the surrounding area or boost the quality of sounds coming from external speakers. And sounds did not echo in the scale model. Inner groups of simulated stones obscured and scattered sounds reflected off the outer sarsen circle, blocking echo formation.

Read more about the experiment at ScienceNews.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Acoustics Research Centre/Univ. of Salford)

You may have heard at one time or another that dogs are colorblind. It's more complicated than that; they see colors, but not all the same colors we see. It's the same with cats, and there's a reason for it.  

From a physiology standpoint, the unique view comes down to types of light receptors in the eye itself. “Because dogs and cats are predators, they don’t have to be able to tell the difference between some similar shades,” Houpt explains. “As primates, we have to know whether that persimmon is ripe or not. We’re better at color discrimination in order to find the correct foods.” In other words, a grey rabbit is just as tasty as a brown one.

When it comes to clarity, humans also have an advantage over our domesticated pals. If a dog can make out an object from 20 feet away, a human can see it from 60 feet. The difference is even more pronounced for cats—what a cat can see from 20 feet, a human can see from 100 or even 200 feet out. Our pets aren’t built to process crystal clear images of the world around them.

But that doesn't necessarily handicap a dog or cat. They excel in other senses, and even other facets of their vision. Read about the differences between our vision and our pets' vision at Popular Science. -via Digg

(Image credit: Stan Horaczek)