Scientists have long known of insects that can survive being frozen and come back to life when thawed. Strangely, other animals do this, too, including some species of snakes, turtles, lizards, and frogs. These are unique species that have adapted to changing conditions and therefore can live in wider range of climates.  

While a scientific understanding of freeze tolerance in insects was first achieved in the 1930s, it wasn’t until 1982 that scientists discovered it also exists in vertebrates—wood frogs in particular, a far-reaching North American species that can be found from the forests of Georgia to just within the Arctic Circle in Alaska.

“It was a huge breakthrough because until that time, it was assumed that vertebrate animals could not survive freezing,” says Jon Costanzo, professor emeritus at Miami University in Ohio, who got interested in cold-temperature adaptations after stumbling across a den of wintering snakes (known as a hibernaculum) while he was a graduate student in Wisconsin.

Wood frogs can survive temperatures as low as -4 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest temperature that any freeze-tolerant species is known to withstand, he says. (A Siberian salamander was reported decades ago to have survived -22 degrees, he adds, but the report is unconfirmed.)

Read about the weird methods animals have developed to protect themselves from the damage of freezing at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: W-van)

A human jaw bone found on a beach last year is about 5,000 years old, police have said.

South Wales Police received a call on 29 November after it was discovered on Aberavon Beach in Port Talbot.

The force was initially unsure whether it was a human or animal bone and sent it away for analysis that showed it was from a human.

Since then, in a bid to find out the person's identity, more investigations determined the age of the bone.

What will this human look like once scientist reconstruct this person? 

How long have you been posting parts of your life on social media? Three years? Ten years? Thirteen years? You may cringe when you think of some of the things you posted when you were younger and braver ...or just dumber. You might think about deleting those posts, but finding them among the thousands of entries in reverse chronological order may be daunting. But there is help, in the form of instructions and apps that will help you clean up your history on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The ease of such a cleaning varies by platform, but some apps will even let you sort by keyword. Learn how to back up your memories on your private files and then clean up what's public at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Today Testing via Wikimedia Commons)

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Tokyo has taken public toilet cleanliness and safety to the next level. Transparent toilets made from coloured glass have been installed in public parks across Japan's capital. But don't be alarmed - once the cubicles are occupied the glass turns opaque to secure privacy. Apart from adding colour to the parks, there are two reasons why the new designs have been a success: people can see how clean they are before going in and they can also see if anyone is secretly waiting inside.

A post shared by The Guardian (@guardian) on Aug 18, 2020 at 9:00am PDT

Shigeru Ban, the architect, says that the new restrooms in a park in Tokyo have "smart glass" that turns opaque when someone is inside.

Do you see someone inside that stall? I do.

Anyway, The Guardian explains that the purpose of using transparent walls, aside from inducing anxiety, is so permit people to know if a stall is unoccupied before attempting to enter:

“There are two concerns with public toilets, especially those located in parks,” it said. “The first is whether it is clean inside, and the second is that no one is secretly waiting inside.”

The glass allegedly becomes opaque after you lock the door. So don't forget to do that.

-via Dave Barry

The National Weather Service recorded the hottest temperature in Death Valley since 1913, when the mercury hit 130°F (54.4C) on Sunday. The temperature has yet to be verified by experts. As you can see, the National Park Service visitor's center at Furnace Creek registered even warmer, although that thermometer is not "official." If it were, they would fix the glitch in that bottom LED.  

The current world record for the hottest temperature recorded on Earth was 134°F and was set by Death Valley back on July 10, 1913. A scorching 131°F was also observed in Kebili, Tunisia, on July 7, 1931. Because some meteorologists believe these two readings may not have been totally accurate, it’s possible the 129°F observed in Death Valley in 2013 and the 129°F recorded in both Kuwait in 2016 and Pakistan in 2017 could be the current highest temperatures. If so, and if the latest temperature can be verified, that would make it the new record holder by one degree.

It stands to reason that today's thermometers would be more accurate than those of the past, but how they will ever figure out whether those readings of decades ago were warmer or cooler is anyone's guess. The upshot is that you should not go into Death Valley in the summer without plenty of water.

You wouldn't put up with glitches in your real life, so why put up with them on the internet? That's the premise of this delightful ad from New Zealand. If done right, it could also be recycled into the premise of a horror film. -via Digg

This guy in Australia has set the bar pretty high for devotion to his wife. Chantelle Doyle was surfing with a group at in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Saturday when she was bitten by a shark estimated at between two and three meters long.

Her husband jumped off his surfboard and onto the juvenile great white when it refused to release her.

“This fella paddled over and jumped off his board onto the shark and hit it to get it to release her and then assisted her back into the beach," Surf Life Saving NSW chief executive Steven Pearce said.

Bystanders and paramedics administered first aid, and Doyle was taken to a hospital with severe lacerations on her leg. She underwent surgery and is in stable condition. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Elias Levy)

In 1587, England planted a colony of 117 people on Roanoke Island in North Carolina. Three years later, when an English vessel checked in on the colony, the entire population had vanished and the settlement lay in ruins. The only clue left behind was the word "CROATOAN" carved into a wooden palisade.

What happened to the colony? One of the earliest hypotheses was that it had moved into and joined a Native American community.

After eleven years of research, a team of archaeologists (both amateur and professional) has concluded that this hypothesis is probably correct. They found evidence of a mixed community of Europeans and Native Americans on Hatteras Island. The Virginian-Pilot reports:

Teams have found thousands of artifacts 4-6 feet below the surface that show a mix of English and Indian life. Parts of swords and guns are in the same layer of soil as Indian pottery and arrowheads.

The evidence shows the colony left Roanoke Island with the friendly Croatoans to settle on Hatteras Island. They thrived, ate well, had mixed families and endured for generations. More than a century later, explorer John Lawson found natives with blue eyes who recounted they had ancestors who could “speak out of a book,” Lawson wrote.

The two cultures adapted English earrings into fishhooks and gun barrels into sharp-ended tubes to tap tar from trees.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: PunkToad

If you think that social distancing is a practice made up because of our current situation, think again. Apparently, social distancing is a thing as well in animals, from finches to mandrills, and they practice it when they have to, in order to reduce the risk of disease transmission. This is according to this paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Science chatted with two of the study’s authors—Andrea Townsend, a behavioral ecologist at Hamilton College, and Dana Hawley, a biologist at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University—about how self-isolating works throughout the animal kingdom.

… some animals like house finches use very general behavioral cues, such as lethargy, to assess potential infections and avoid certain individuals.

In other cases, animals have evolved fairly complex cues to induce social distancing. The Caribbean spiny lobster [a social lobster that normally lives in groups] has evolved to detect a chemical cue in the urine of sick lobsters and avoid areas that these sick lobsters occupy.

Read the whole interview over at Science Magazine.

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GPT-3 is the latest and largest AI language model of the AI company OpenAI, which it slowly introduced in mid-July. The predecessor to this algorithm, GPT-2, made headlines in February last year when the company withheld its release for fear that it would be abused. In November, however, OpenAI changed their minds and released it, as it stated that they did not detect any “strong evidence of misuse so far.”

The lab took a different approach with GPT-3; it neither withheld it nor granted public access. Instead, it gave the algorithm to select researchers who applied for a private beta, with the goal of gathering their feedback and commercializing the technology by the end of the year.

A man named Liam Porr submitted an application for the private beta.

He filled out a form with a simple questionnaire about his intended use. But he also didn’t wait around. After reaching out to several members of the Berkeley AI community, he quickly found a PhD student who already had access. Once the graduate student agreed to collaborate, Porr wrote a small script for him to run. It gave GPT-3 the headline and introduction for a blog post and had it spit out several completed versions.

Porr then posted his first blog. Titled “Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking”, the blog reached the number one spot in Hacker News. Porr continued posting AI-generated blogs such as this one with little to no editing.

“From the time that I thought of the idea and got in contact with the PhD student to me actually creating the blog and the first blog going viral—it took maybe a couple of hours,” he says.

And that’s the scary part for Porr, who studies computer science at the University of California, Berkeley: the process was “super easy.”

Porr says he wanted to prove that GPT-3 could be passed off as a human writer. Indeed, despite the algorithm’s somewhat weird writing pattern and occasional errors, only three or four of the dozens of people who commented on his top post on Hacker News raised suspicions that it might have been generated by an algorithm. All those comments were immediately downvoted by other community members.

Porr proved that AI models could be used to create mediocre, clickbait content, which would decrease the value of online content. He also proved the possibility that the language model could be misused, a fear that experts have for a long time.

Porr plans to do more experiments with GPT-3. But he’s still waiting to get access from OpenAI. “It’s possible that they’re upset that I did this,” he says. “I mean, it’s a little silly.”

What are your thoughts about this one?

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Usually, when one finds a secret section in any place, they can expect something good. Well, this one is a good find, it’s just not what those mystery novels are about. A Washington state’s library mystery section (yes, it was found where the mystery novels were stored) was found to contain a stash of beer and chewing gum from the 1980s, as UPI detailed: 

The Walla Walla Public Library said employees have been performing renovations at the facility during the COVID-19 shutdown, and they recently removed a corner panel from the shelf housing the mystery book section and found a disintegrated paper bag containing five unopened cans of Hamm's beer and an opened back of Godzilla Heads gum.

Library officials said their research determined Godzilla Heads gum dates from the 1980s and the Hamm's beer cans don't include health warnings that were required from 1988 on, leading staff to believe the snack stash is more than 30 years old.

"It looked like somebody had just stashed it there and maybe thought they could get it later ... but there was no way to get it out," library director Erin Wells told CNN. "There were probably six beers that they bought and there was only five that we found so they might not have been thinking straight when they did it."

The City of Walla Walla said the "artifacts" were transferred "to another city facility."

"The abandoned relics now reside in the Sudbury Landfill," the city said.

Image via UPI

Having some guests over for a long stay? Then this home in Fayette, Missouri is perfect for you and 9 of your friends (or 18 if they double up). That's because this house, which was built in 1875, was originally the home and office of the county sheriff.

A door off the kitchen leads down to the restored 9-cell facility, which is appropriately painted grey.

There's also a booking room, so you can process your guests for their indefinite stay. Each cell lock, the realtor confirms, still works. You can, though, still prank your brother-in-law by pretending that you've lost the key after he's stepped inside one of the cells.

-via Dave Barry | Photos: Travis Kempf

Studies that involve placebos usually do not inform the participants that what they’re taking is an inert substance. Instead, they are made to believe that what they’re taking is the real deal, and this triggers the placebo effect.

[It is] a kind of 'mind over matter' response that seems to induce physiological benefits, even where none should otherwise be felt.

But what happens when you tell the person beforehand that what he’ll be taking is a placebo? New research suggests that it still has a positive effect on the consumer: it helps reduce neural markers of emotional distress.

When researchers conduct experiments involving non-deceptive placebos, participants are clearly informed in advance that they'll only be given a placebo, but may also be told how placebos and the placebo effect can in certain circumstances deliver beneficial physiological outcomes, even in the absence of actual medication.

That knowledge – and people's belief and expectation that placebos may work for them – seems to be enough to trigger the placebo effect all on its own, and all without breaching any ethical boundaries.

That somewhat surprising phenomenon is something we might be able to exploit in real-world health treatments, researchers say.

Learn more details about this research over at ScienceAlert.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Made up of over 2,000 old iPhones (mostly iPhone 6, 7, and 7 plus models) in various colors, and costing over $10,000, this 20 meter-long fence might just be the most expensive fence in the world. This fence was made by a man named Nguyễn Minh Hiền, when he was egged on by his nephew.

Of course, these iPhones are no longer in working condition. If they were, then the project would have cost around $1.3 million.

Regardless of the cost, it’s a rather ridiculous monument to technology and excess.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Tienphong/ Technabob)

It seems that the idiom “raining cats and dogs” can also be used literally in situations such as this one.

On the morning of July 12, pensioner Gao Fenghua went out for a stroll with his golden retriever in the city of Harbin, China, when suddenly a cat seemingly fell out of the sky (but actually from an apartment) and hit Fenghua’s head, causing him to fall on the ground unconscious.

Fenghua spent 23 days in hospital before being discharged this week, with the old man still having to undergo physiotherapy treatment for the injuries sustained in the accident.

The cat in question apparently belongs to his neighbor according to the old man’s son.

Fenghua’s family members and the cat’s owner are reportedly trying to reach an agreement on compensation for the incident, although it’s unclear whether the authorities are involved in the discussions.

Now that’s unexpected indeed.

Watch the clip over at UNILAD.

(Image Credit: Harbin TV/ Real Press)