Well, these gas canisters do store alcohol, just a different kind. A number of artists on Etsy are repurposing jerry cans as alcohol cabinets. Some of these mini-bars have wooden dividers or elastic straps to keep your drinks organized. Now you can store your favorite drinks (and some glasses too)!
image via The Awesomer
The oldest vertebrate tracks were discovered in the Grand Canyon after a cliff collapsed in the park. The fossil footprints were about 313 million years old. The footprints were hidden in plain sight until geology professor Allan Krill noticed them during a hike, as News Observer detailed:
“These are by far the oldest vertebrate tracks in Grand Canyon, which is known for its abundant fossil tracks” Stephen Rowland, a paleontologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said in the news release. “More significantly, they are among the oldest tracks on Earth of shelled-egg-laying animals, such as reptiles, and the earliest evidence of vertebrate animals walking in sand dunes.”
Researchers said the footprints show two separate animals passing on the slope of a sand dune, which is significant because of the “distinct arrangement of footprints.”
Image via wikimedia commons
Maps are helpful tools that let us navigate to unknown places, or get information about other areas that we aren’t that familiar with. They exist in different forms, and some are more difficult to understand than others. This one however, is just horrible. The map is well-constructed, and the information is easy to understand, but it's just very scary. Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases released a map that shows emerging diseases that pose a threat to our health, as Gizmodo details:
The paper, released over the weekend as a preprint in the journal Cell (meaning it may be revised before its final publication), is intended to lay out the environmental and human factors that led to covid-19 erupting on the world stage in late 2019. Fauci’s co-author is David Morens, senior scientific advisor at Office of the Director at NIAID. It’s an educational read, delving into how newly emerging diseases like covid-19 and familiar enemies like influenza can become so dangerous to humankind.
Image via Gizmodo
I don't know where this video came from, but some recognize the setting as Italy. It's pretty old, but joyously funny. -via reddit
A very brave and heroic poem that inspires you to never quit, and to stand up for what you believe in. I love this!
Funeral rites were held in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1890 that no one present would forget for the rest other lives. Mrs. John Peterson had passed away from dropsy. Her final arrangements were complicated by the fact that Mrs. Peterson was around 300 pounds at the time of her death. From a contemporary newspaper account:
Immediately after Mrs. Peterson's death arrangements were made for the funeral. The largest casket that could be procured in the city was the exact measure required at the time of her death, but as it was not delivered until Friday morning the corpse had swollen so much that it was crowded into the narrow case with difficulty. The lid was screwed down and the remains left in that condition for burial.
The funeral services were set for Saturday afternoon, and, as is customary, a number of neighbors acted as watchers on Friday night. Just as the stillness of midnight was approaching, the watchers were startled by a loud report in the parlor, where the coffin was placed. The women screamed and ran out of the house. but the men plucked up enough courage to go into the parlor.
Yes, the coffin had exploded. Read the rest of the horrifying details, including a burial where the word "dropsy" might apply again, at Strange Company.
What better way to spice up the roads in your time by decorating some parts of them with your favorite anime characters? Some manhole covers in Tokorozawa, Tokyo, were decorated with characters that glow in the dark. Some designs included characters from Neon Genesis Evangelion, as Reuters detailed:
The city installed the covers, which include designs from animation series such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and Gundam, this month to advertise a new entertainment complex focusing on Japanese popular culture that is scheduled to open in November.
“My commute back home is enjoyable,” said 22-year-old resident Kotaro Kodaira. “I can look at them on the ground so the (walking) time seems shorter than before.”
The 27 designs are illuminated by solar-powered LED lights, according to the city’s Waterworks and Sewerage department.
Image via Reuters
Ah, the power of optical illusions! If you have small or dark spaces, there are ways to renovate your personal space without spending a lot of money. Sometimes, all you need is a bucket of paint to make a cramped space feel brighter and wider. Family Handyman shares tips and tricks on how to revamped different places in one’s home. Check the full piece here.
image via Family Handyman
This new design from Hong Kong is promoting the concept of a driverless tram. The tram, called the Island, also features a touchless entry and exit, circular benches with seating designed to have minimal contact between passengers. The Island is the perfect tram to facilitate social distancing, as Travel and Leisure details:
The double-decker tram idea is a perfect fix to facilitate social distancing on board with sleek lines creating a spacious interior where people can spread out. And the curved windows on all sides ensure the views of the busy city — already known for its efficient public transportation system — will be spectacular day or night.
“Usually, good design comes from limitations. So in a way, this period has been really good for design — not necessarily for business, but certainly for the imagination,” Andrea Ponti, the founder of Ponti Design Studio, told CNN earlier this month. “During and after the pandemic, I think designers will propose many new, different ways to use public spaces and interact with the environment."
It has not yet been determined where the tram would travel between.
“Hong Kongers are dedicated to keeping the city and its people safe from COVID-19, so innovative local designers and architects have shared some creative solutions, illustrating what socially-distanced and responsible public transit could look like in a post-pandemic Hong Kong,” Bill Flora, the director for the USA of the Hong Kong Tourism Board, told T+L.
Image via Travel And Leisure
We all know mud as that icky, brown clump of soil that’s difficult to remove from our footwear or clothes. Alternatively, some refer to mud as wet soil. Geologists define mud as tiny particles that stick together when wet. For the experts, mud isn’t just composed of soil, as broken down rocks are also considered mud. Experts are now researching how mud was initially formed, and how did plant life increase the production of mud, as Knowable Magazine details:
Before plants arrived on land, mud was around — it was just mostly sent to the seafloor by rivers. Once plants showed up, they not only held sediments in place but their roots also physically broke down rock and released chemicals that further crumbled it. In these ways, plants accelerated what geologists refer to as the “continental mud factory.”
Before plants, rivers would have stripped continents of silt and clay — key constituents of mud — and sent these sediments to the seafloor. This would have left continents full of barren rock, and seas with smothered fish.
Once plants arrived on land, things began to change. Mud clung to vegetation along riverbanks and stuck around rather than shuttling straight to the seafloor. Davies, now at the UK’s University of Cambridge, and his colleagues have found that the expansion of land plants between about 458 million and 359 million years ago coincides with a more than tenfold increase in mud on land — and a significant shift in the ways that rivers flowed. The arrival of first plants and then mud “fundamentally changed the way the world operates,” he says.
Image via Knowable Magazine
Transform your boring spreadsheets into cool apps with this tool created by a group of former Microsoft employees. With this tool, even those who have no programming knowledge can create apps, as this tool does not require that.
Their startup, Glide, lets you turn any Google Sheets spreadsheet into a real mobile app with absolutely no coding and shockingly little effort. Saying you don’t need any programming knowledge is almost an understatement. This thing is deliberately designed for anyone—and I do mean anyone—to use.
“We spent six years watching the wealthiest companies in the world fail to make good apps,” says Glide CEO and cofounder David Siegel. “We thought, ‘Can we make a much simpler approach to this whole phenomenon—of making an app, getting data into it, improving it, and sharing it?'”
The answer to that question was a clear yes. With this tool,…
All you do is select an existing spreadsheet from your Google Sheets account—or even easier yet, start a new sheet using one of Glide’s ready-to-roll templates—and then use the website’s visual editing tool to determine where different rows of data should go and how they’ll be presented.
Learn more details about this tool, and how to access it, over at Fast Company.
(Image Credit: Fast Company)
If you’ve ever played with a tape measure before when you were a kid, then you know how fascinating it is to watch the metal ruler go back quickly in its default place. But it’s not just kids who find this mechanism fascinating; scientists do, too. In fact, they were so fascinated and inspired by this that they created this chameleon-like robot that can snatch objects quickly from a distance.
Snatcher, as the robot’s called, wasn’t just inspired by tape measures. If you look closely the tongue part that shoots out and retracts is the metal ruler salvaged from an actual tape measure because of its ability to neatly roll up very quickly. The rest of the robo-chameleon weighs in at less than 120 grams and features a custom wind-up spring-powered mechanism with a special clutch that can quickly alternate between powering a gear that extends the long metal tongue and a gear that retracts it.
The results are analogous to how a chameleon’s tongue works, although Mother Nature’s approach is more refined and far more accurate than this prototype.
These scientists state believe that this device could be useful for people who have physical disabilities. It still has lots of room for improvement, however.
The simple hook on the end of the tongue the prototype uses isn’t necessarily ideal for this purpose as objects can be easily dropped. But the researchers are looking into upgrading it with a gripper that would securely close once making contact with a target, maintaining its grasp until fully retracted.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: IEEE Spectrum/ Gizmodo)
We’ve always been told that brushing alone is not enough, and that we must floss as well. Perhaps the reason why people promote flossing that much is not because it keeps the mouth healthy, but because it can help remove plagues.
Image via Engrish.com
Keeping ourselves safe from coronavirus is having all kinds of unexpected effects on our daily lives. Comedian Karan Menon considered how social distancing is affecting your local school bullies, for schools that are opening in-person. The normal obnoxious activities of these two aggressive young men are suddenly quite complicated. Contains NSFW language. -via Mashable
Human beings have changed the earth in many ways, from driving other species to extinction to plundering natural resources to building massive cities. What would happen if all the humans suddenly were gone? We got a taste of that when scientists noticed wildlife moving into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone after the 1986 nuclear accident forced humans out. We've also heard stories of animals returning to places where they had been crowded out by tourists after the pandemic restricted travel. But there is a lot more to consider when everyone is gone. Author and journalist Alan Weisman tells us more.
In Weisman's own research, this question took him firstly into cities, where some of the most dramatic and immediate changes would unfold, thanks to a sudden lack of human maintenance. Without people to run pumps that divert rainfall and rising groundwater, the subways of huge sprawling cities like London and New York would flood within hours of our disappearance, Weisman learned during his research. "[Engineers] have told me that it would take about 36 hours for the subways to flood completely," he said.
Lacking human oversight, glitches in oil refineries and nuclear plants would go unchecked, likely resulting in massive fires, nuclear explosions and devastating nuclear fallout. "There's going to be a gush of radiation if suddenly we disappear. And that's a real wildcard, it's almost impossible to predict what that's going to do," Weisman said. Similarly, in the wake of our demise, we'd leave behind mountains of waste — much of it plastic, which would likely persist for thousands of years, with effects on wildlife that we are only now beginning to understand.
But that's just the beginning of the story. Nature will find a way to deal with our planet without humans, as laid out at LiveScience. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Zenithwhy)
