When the Nazis occupied much of Europe in the 1940s, they built 10-foot-tall concrete walls along the beaches to thwart invading Allies. To breach these walls, the British military came up with the Panjandrum, a rocket-powered device on two wheels that was filled with explosives. Aim it at the wall, and it would rush up and demolish it. Or that was the idea. A series of tests highlighted all the things that could possibly go wrong. Fortunately, those tests were filmed. Twitter user Dreadnought Holiday tells the story of the Great Panjandrum, illustrated with actual footage of the device plus unrelated memes that make the tale resemble a Three Stooges short. -via Metafilter
Even if you are a true-crime literature fan, there are plenty of horrific murderers who were never the subject of a bestselling book or a hit movie. They may have killed long before local news became global news. You've heard of some of them, but I would bet not all of them. For example, there are the men pictured above.
5. Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris (the Tool Box Killers) kidnapped, raped, and killed five teenage girls in Southern California. In addition to those heinous crimes, they also tortured their victims with items found in household toolboxes — like ice picks, screwdrivers, and pliers.
Check out the list of 26 real-life serial killers at Buzzfeed. The list only gives an overview of each, but there are links to read more.
Okay, for the record, they aren’t actual gigantic humans. A black and white image of dancers performing a tango-inspired dip can be seen from Residences at La Colombe d’Or, a 34-story apartment and boutique hotel tower on Montrose Boulevard. Called ‘Last Tango,’ the artwork is Blek le Rat’s largest mural, which he completed at the age of 69. The Houston Chronicle has more details:
“I don’t want to make horrible, aggressive images,” Blek says. “I prefer to give people some happiness.” He purchased the tango image from a British photographer and has adapted it recently in smaller murals in France, Germany and Italy — minus the dove with golden wings. “This image is about something positive,” Blek says.
The partners liked Blek’s design because it reflects the ethos of the Residences at La Colombe d’Or project. “This is a place where people can come together and enjoy life. That appealed to us more than abstract possibilities or landscapes,” says Dan Zimmerman, who redeveloped his family’s property with his older brother, Steve Zimmerman.
The image strikes a balance between fine and street art and also the brothers’ slightly different generations, adds Lea Weingarten, the consultant. “It’s an art historical image being used as street art.” Zimmerman notes that tango is inherently democratic, often performed in the streets, so the image also speaks to the democracy of street art — and his project. “This is on a major street where everybody can enjoy it…. It’s a surprise, a gift for a lot of people,” he says.
It’s always a heartbreaking moment, for the clothes, at least, when you have to give them to the launderer for him/her to wash them. You might feel the same way, too, and so it is heartwarming to see this laundry bag communicate for them through this ode written on it.
Neanderthal DNA is quite rare. Most of the samples we have are from women. But a deep dive into what male DNA is available shows that the Y chromosome from Neanderthal men came to resemble that of modern men more than that of Denisovans, another group of extinct humans that lived in the same era. This implies that when modern humans mated with Neanderthals, eventually the Neanderthal Y chromosome was pretty much wiped out.
The Y chromosome data—the first from Denisovans and the first high-coverage from Neanderthals—suggest that earlier Neanderthals had a Denisovan-like Y chromosome, but that this was replaced by the Y chromosome of modern humans after Neanderthals interbred with them between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago.
“It’s a really a great surprise,” says Mikkel Heide Schierup, an evolutionary biologist at Aarhus University who did not participate in the study but wrote an accompanying commentary. Only a few percent of the rest of the Neanderthal genome appears to be made up of modern human DNA, yet this study found that three different Neanderthal individuals, unearthed at sites spread across Eurasia and dating to periods tens of thousands of years apart, all carried modern human–like Y chromosomes. This suggests the widespread replacement of the Y across the Neanderthal population, he explains. “It’s a pretty dramatic event.”
There is now speculation that the modern human Y chromosome may have had some advantage in survival or reproduction. The Neanderthals suffered from a low population compared to other human species, which may have multiplied harmful mutations. Read about the study at TheScientist. -via Smithsonian
An art project called Traverse is a series of self-guided tours around murals created by the city of Guelph’s local artists. This campaign is part of the city’s new tourism initiative to encourage their residents to explore their own community. Thirty-nine transit shelters across the city have been turned into exhibits, with each one displaying a different mural, as Guelph Today details;
The bus shelters are scattered throughout the six wards, along routes set up to provide different sights, entertainment, drink or food options for residents to experience.
All artists asked to be part of Traverse were selected by the city based on past performance and involvement in other city initiatives. These artists are Abby Novakowski, Chanel DesRoches, Christopher Cape, Greg Denton, Jessie Buchanan, and Robert John Paterson. To learn more about murals, click here.
According to a release from the city, residents can drive, bike or walk these tour routes from
September 25 to November 25.
Traverse aligns with Culture Days, a national celebration of arts and culture, which is celebrated at the end of September.
The release adds that Traverse was made possible by The Regional Relief and Recovery Fund (RRRF), who offer financial relief and supports economic recovery efforts in the Tourism sector due to impacts from COVID-19.
Different dogs and cats are painted on a wall in Northumberland. From pets who have died, to the furry companions that provided companionship during the lockdown, these paintings are all for a good cause. Created by Sally Pattison, the money raised from the paintings will be given to help protect local wildlife. Pattison donates the proceeds to Northumbrian Hedgehog Rescue Trust, who rescue, care and rehabilitate hedgehogs, as the Chronicle Live details:
Sally, 43, from Bebside, in Northumberland, said: "People have been bringing their dogs to meet their painting and all of the portraits are of pets from the local area so it's been really nice for the community to see."
The mural, which is currently being created on the corner of a disused building on Front Street, in Bebside, is the latest in a series of creations from Sally, who discovered her talent while studying art at school.
Her first mural was created in 2017 in preparation for the Tour of Britain passing through the area, which featured three cyclists racing.
Fumi Higaki taught her cat Ebisu to imitate her actions. It wasn't just a set of actions that the cat learned, it was the act of copying whatever Higaki did. A team of scientists tested the cat with new, novel actions and found that she really was mapping out Higaki's actions and imitating them, in a study published in the journal Animal Cognition. Gizmodo has more.
All told, through 18 trials, Ebisu seemingly proved capable of imitating Higaki’s behaviors 81% of the time. These behaviors included spinning around, touching the same toy, opening a small drawer, and laying down horizontally. What made the mimicry even more interesting was that Ebisu seemed capable of seeing her owner’s not very cat-like motions and figuring out how she would do the same thing as a cat, such as when Higaki raised her arms up high and Ebisu then stood up on her hind legs and lifted both her paws up.
The guy from the Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) has a Venus flytrap plant, and is willing to use it as a guinea pig. Would it eat a jellybean? That may be a dumb question, but he has reason to think that it might. -via Boing Boing
Lumberjacks in the forest may fell giant trees whole, but in an urban area, you have to be careful not to take out the whole neighborhood. When a tree gets too tall, the best thing is to take it down a section at a time. This palm tree in San Bernardino, California, got so tall that it was bending over, so it was better to take it down than to wait for it to fall. But the job wasn't without danger, as you can see. -via Laughing Squid
Parkour is a sport that grew out of military obstacle course training- the word parkour actually derives from the phrase parcours du combattant, or obstacle course. It was invented by David Belle in the 1980s, but its origins go much further back, to George Hébert, who developed a physical training regimen he called his "Natural Method" in the early 1900s.
More than a century later, the training discipline Hébert developed has become the standard system of physical education in modern militaries around the world and it’s even been suggested that we can trace modern adventure playground equipment back to his original obstacle designs in the early 1900s.
Hébert himself was influenced by the observations he made untrained native tribes in Africa while travelling the world pre-WWI: “Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skilful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in gymnastics but their lives in nature”, he wrote.
What if your favorite couch had a life on its own, like a Transformer? Visual artist Max Siedentopf’s studio took that concept and created a goofy series called Mundane Machines. The series illustrates what happens when the most mundane objects in our home turn into machines, from hamburgers, to sneakers, to cigarette boxes, Siedentoph displays what would happen if these objects became life-sized machines. It’s lowkey scary, so hopefully this doesn’t happen in the future.
Warsaw-based artist Nespoon created an artwork that covered a side of the Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode. It features delicate mesh and floral elements, as if the artwork is a huge lace blanket covering the museum. Nespoon chose the lace motif from the institution’s archive, which dates back to 1894. The artist then spray-painted the intricate details onto the building.
The annual Fat Bear Week of Katmai National Park and Preserve will finally begin this Wednesday, and it is as exciting as the other Fat Bear Weeks that have been held over the years.
This year, people will vote on 12 of the heftiest and hunkiest bears that have traveled to the park’s Brooks River to feast on salmon this summer, including last year’s winner “Number 435,” also known as Holly.
The Fat Bear Week has been an annual event of the park ever since 2014. Ever since then,...
“[The event] has grown beyond my wildest expectations when I first conceived the idea while working as a ranger at Katmai National Park,” Mike Fitz, a former ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve, said in an email. “I think there are several reasons why people seem to love Fat Bear Week. It’s positive and provides a brief reprieve from the negativity that often dominates our social media feed. It highlights known, identifiable bears at Brooks River, which people can watch every day on the Explore.org bearcams.”
Know more about the event, as well as the bears that reside in the river, over at Gizmodo.
The worst thing that you could do when playing an online game is use cheats. Sure, it helps you win the game, but it is unfair for the other players who just want a fair game that they can enjoy. This is why game developers, such as Activision, do their best to keep cheaters away from their game.
Just as millions of players of Call of Duty: Warzone were gearing up for a new season of the popular online multiplayer game, thousands of them were banned because they were allegedly using an app to help them cheat.
On Monday, Activision de-activated the accounts of around 20,000 Warzone players after the company detected a popular cheat, according to people familiar with the matter.
