“Five years ago, I stopped showering.” This was the bold confession that James Hamblin, physician and staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote in his book titled Clean: The New Science of Skin. 

“At least, by most modern definitions of the word,” he clarifies. 

“I still get my hair wet occasionally, but I quit shampooing or conditioning, or using soap, except on my hands,” Hamblin continues. He has also stopped using products that he had always associated with “being clean”, such as exfoliants, moisturizers and deodorants. This just might be one of the most shocking revelations a person can tell you. But he doesn’t recommend this practice to everyone.

In polite company, Hamblin’s confession tends to land like the Hindenburg, which reveals just how obsessed we’ve become with surface notions of cleanliness — and how reluctant we are to disavow them. But Hamblin thinks the sensible-sounding idea that we should scrub up regularly is both simplistic and wrongheaded. When you take a soap-slathered loofah to your greasy pelt, he says, you’re actually destroying an interdependent microbial universe, or microbiome, on the surface of your skin.

“When we clean ourselves,” Hamblin writes, “we at least temporarily alter the microscopic populations — either by removing them or by altering the resources available to them.” By chasing that born-again post-shower rush, in other words, we stymie one of evolution’s best strategies to shield us from disease and keep out invaders.

Hamblin may have stopped showering, and he may have stopped using beauty products, but it doesn’t mean that his skin and hygiene has gotten worse. In fact, it has become better. He states that his skin has become less oily, and he has got fewer patches of eczema.

That’s why Hamblin plans to continue his shower-free routine for now— as long as his odor doesn’t send others fleeing from the room. It hasn’t so far, he reports: “I didn’t smell like pine trees or lavender, but I also didn’t smell like the oniony body odor that I used to get when my armpits, used to being plastered with deodorant, suddenly went a day without it.”

Know more details about Hamblin’s revelation over at Undark.

(Image Credit: tookapic/ Pixabay)

With the recent release of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 2, foldable smartphones are slowly becoming mainstream. This foldable feature is also slowly making its way to e-readers.

The E Ink Corporation, the company behind the digital paper tech found in the majority of e-readers, is trying to make it happen. The firm’s R&D lab has been developing foldable e-ink screens for a while, and its latest prototype clearly demonstrates the idea’s potential.

[...]

The overall concept is intriguing. As with folding smartphones, a foldable e reader promises more screen real estate in a smaller package. There’s also the pleasing familiarity of the folding format, making the device more like a book or notepad. Add in the capacity to take notes and sync reading material and you’d have an extremely useful bit of kit.

The concept, however, currently has lots of room for improvement. It would probably be years before this technology overtakes the pen and paper.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: GoodEReader.com/ The Verge)

Found at the north end of New Zealand’s South Island is a narrow and treacherous stretch of water known as the French Pass. Currents here are so strong it can drag ships easily and smash them against the rocks. Thus, sailors always avoided this stretch of water.

The very first European attempt to navigate through these narrows was a near disaster.

French Admiral Jules Dumont d'Urville was mapping the coast of the South Island in 1827 when he instructed his navigator to enter the pass. Situated between Rangitoto ki te Tonga, also known as D'Urville Island (after the Admiral himself), and the mainland coast, the French Pass saves about 15 miles of distance for those wishing to sail between the North and the South Islands. The alternative is to go around D'Urville Island and through heavy cross seas.

As d'Urville’s ship Astrolabe, a formidable warship of the French Navy, approached the narrowest part of the pass, the vessel swung sideward and the rising tide took the ship towards the rocky shore. Even as the ship’s crew struggled to regain control of the vessel, Astrolabe struck rocks twice, and was washed over the reef. After the incident, d'Urville suggested that no one should attempt to navigate French Pass except in extreme.

Over sixty years would pass before the French Pass became a natural route for sailors who travel between Wellington and Nelson. But it wasn’t because ships were more navigable after six decades, nor was it because sailors became more skillful. Rather, it was because of a dolphin called Pelorus Jack, who, for 24 years, guided almost every ship that went through the Pass.

Learn more about this dolphin over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

For every TV show that makes it onto broadcast (or streaming), there are countless others that went into development but were never aired. Some even had episodes ready to go before the plug was pulled. Commando Nanny sounds like it may have just as well been forgotten even without all the mishaps, since the trope of "family hires funny maid/nanny/butler who shakes things up" trope has been used a million times already. Others just sound like a bad idea from the beginning.

There are plenty of weird TV shows that we never got to see, and almost as many reasons for giving up on them. Read about 21, er, make that 20 of them in a Cracked pictofacts list.

Do you get frustrated when you can’t defeat the AI player in chess? It seems that your opponents are always one step ahead of you. While we make mistakes, computers can master games; they're able to run enough simulations to anticipate every move of the player. That’s how they’re able to defeat a normal player, and why some of us groan in frustration. Popular Science details the history of how machines are able to beat humans at their own games. Check the full piece here.  

image via Popular Science

In November, NASA will mark twenty years of continuous occupation of the International Space Station with the anniversary of Expedition 1. Since then, there has always been someone orbiting the earth on the ISS. From the YouTube link:

"What if we built a bridge, between and above all nations, to jointly discover the galaxy's great unknowns?" Join us this fall as we prepare to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station. As a global endeavor, 240 people from 19 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory, which has hosted more than 2,800 research investigations from scientists  in over 100 nations.

In celebration of the anniversary, NASA has been posting space station news of 20 years ago at their website. Although there doesn't seem to be a tag to load all the historical posts at once, there are links to the left to read more. -via Geeks Are Sexy

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5년동안 그려왔음에도 매순간 고민하고 도전하게 해주는 특별한 #thestarrynight

A post shared by 이강빈 (@leekangbin91) on Sep 2, 2019 at 6:33pm PDT

Lee Kang Bin is a food artist in Korea. He focuses primarily on colorful lattes, but also works with pastries. I'm struck by his departure from the often monochromatic use of latte art into a world of color. He imitates great artists with works you will recognize, but also makes original images of flowers.

If you’re tired of the quality smartphones come in nowadays, or would just like the idea of building gadgets on your own, the Zero Terminal project might catch your interest! The project is a Raspberry Pi Zero connected to a 5.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a 1,200mAh battery. It has a USB port, a microSD slot for the operating system, a mini-USB port, and a power switch. Input Magazine has more details: 

New in the latest iteration of Zero Terminal are 40-pin sockets that can be used to connect additional I/O connections, like extra USB ports or HDMI video out. In the video above showing off the device, the creator of the Zero Terminal connected a slide-out keyboard. The modularity allows for all kinds of possibilities.

You can't run some powerful operating systems like Windows on the Raspberry Pi Zero, of course – it has a very small 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM. But slap a radio on there and you can get a little mobile computer for completing basic computing tasks. Even from the Raspberry Pi OS, you could use the terminal to connect to services like Twitter and send out messages and then disconnect the radio to dip off the grid. If you really wanted to make this a powerful pocket computer you could use a Raspberry Pi 4, which features a quad-core ARM processor and supports up to 8GB of RAM.

image via Input Magazine

Camping was once a way for people to experience life without the modern marvels of technology. That’s still an option today, but some prefer unfolding their portable ovens and making sure that their phones remain charged. With the rise of glamping and festivals, people are now packing more than just their traditional camping gear, as The Guardian details: 

“People are making things a bit more bespoke,” said Mike Attwooll, product buyer at the camp shop Attwoolls. “You go out for the day and back to your base at night and it’s like home.”

Ten years ago electrical hook-ups were unusual, but now they are the norm, he said, as campers look to plug in phones and run equipment they would previously have left behind. He had recently seen photos of someone holding a film night in their tent using a mini-projector, he said.

James Warner Smith of the website Cool Camping said technology had brought modern campers a whole range of choices. “Some guys have developed a folding pizza oven that you can take with you. It does rotisserie chicken too,” he said. “There’s a no-electricity coffee maker, and there are quite few stoves that have USB ports in them so you can charge your phone while you are cooking.” 

Image via The Guardian

It’s a little closer to every cyberpunk fan’s dream. The construction for what looks like a massive Gundam model was finished July 29, 2020. The giant now stands at the Gundam Factory in Yokohama, outside of Tokyo, Japan. The Gundam robot stands 18 meters (59 feet) tall and weighs 25 metric tons (approx. 55,000 pounds).

image screenshot via CNET

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Nach dem Revival der Autokinos in diesem Jahr gibt es nun auch ein erstes Freiluftkino auf dem Wasser. 38 Elektroboote mit Platz für bis zu sechs Personen dümpeln derzeit am Seine-Ufer in Paris. Während so auf dem Fluss Mindestabstandsregeln befolgt werden können, gibt es auf einer großen Leinwand die französische Komödie „Le Grand Bain“ zu sehen. Obwohl konventionelle Kinos in Frankreich mittlerweile wieder geöffnet haben, ist das Interesse am „Le Cinema Sur L’ Eau“ (Kino auf dem Wasser) hoch. Fotos: Reuters • • • #openairkino #freiluftkino #autkino #bootkino #seine #paris #parisplages #legrandbain #frankreich

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Dornob tells us about a new movie theater arrangement in Paris designed to be a bit safer than getting packed into a crowded hall. The Bassin de la Villette, an artificial lake in Paris connected to the Seine by a canal, hosted an outdoor viewing of a movie on July 18.

Organizers conducted a raffle for the audience. Winners got to watch the movie from boats. Losers still got to watch the movie, but from deck chairs onshore. Together, they watched Le Grand Bain, a 2018 French dramedy about a men's synchronized swimming team.

The YouTuber with the account name There I Ruined It did something you would never, ever think of. He did a bluegrass version of Michael Jackson's "Bad" and made it synch with the original video. As one commenter said, "This is both unforgivable, and amazing." The creator apologized in the YouTube description. -via reddit

Ben Sizemore was checking for invasive plants in the woods and spotted a camera trap aimed at a moss-covered log. Not one to pass up an opportunity, he posed in front of it and let the motion-sensor camera take a series of pictures. The owner of the camera, wildlife photographer Jeff Wirth, was completely delighted to find clear pictures of the most dangerous animal species: homo sapiens. Click on the right arrow to see the photo that Wirth was really trying for.  

After posting the pictures on Twitter and Instagram, Sizemore made himself known to Wirth. Read the full story and see more of Wirth's camera trap images at Bored Panda.

The Eiffel Tower was the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the world's fair in Paris. Although originally slated to be demolished after 20 years, it still stands, 131 years later, recognizable to folks around the globe. Strange to think it could have been something completely different.

Gustave Eiffel’s Tower was just one of 300 to 700 submitted pitches (estimates vary) vying to be Paris’ world’s fair centerpiece.

Yet the spire that was ultimately erected on the Champ de Mars was an order of magnitude less audacious than one of the most peculiar also-rans: a 1,000-foot-tall guillotine that would have commemorated France’s headless-horseman history, when at least 17,000 people were guillotined during the Reign of Terror, including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Little is recorded of the ornamental, Godzilla-sized pillar with a blade — no contemporary illustrations, no manifesto behind its conception, no specs on the size of the cutting edge, only enough stray details to tease us with what might have been.

One can hardly imagine such a structure becoming a permanent part of the Paris skyline. The Eiffel Tower is just one of many iconic buildings that originated from world's fairs, and others were also in competition against some really strange alternatives. Read about the weirdest of those competitors at Ozy. -via Digg

The Weekly World News held a unique place in the supermarket tabloid display as the epitome of fake news. What it lacked in celebrities and color, it made up in sensationalism. The headlines were never believable, and rarely had much to do with the actual story, but they worked because they made you want to read more. For 28 years, the Weekly World News worked to outdo itself, because who doesn't want to know more about Bat Boy, aliens hobnobbing with politicians, and the still-alive Elvis? Strangely, but not surprisingly, the genesis of the tabloid was an attempt to make a buck off obsolete equipment.  

Generoso Pope Jr. could be considered the father of the modern supermarket tabloid newspaper. With the aid of a $25,000 down payment reportedly borrowed from the mob, Pope purchased The New York Evening Enquirer (which later became The National Enquirer) in 1952. The lurid paper specialized in tawdry headlines like “Starving Mom Eats Own Child” before softening its content to gain retail space at grocery stores in the 1970s.

When rival tabloid The Star went to a color format, Pope was forced to follow suit. That left him with an unused black-and-white printing press, which he saw as an opportunity to return to the bizarre news of the early Enquirer. In the summer of 1979, a small staff supervised by editor Phil Bunton, stationed inside the Enquirer offices in Lantana, Florida, began work on what would become Weekly World News.

Mental Floss spoke with more than a dozen former editors, managers, and writers to piece together the story of how the Weekly World News became the king of fake news, which you can read here.