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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just look at this door! How utterly fabulous! The quality of construction of the church and all of the carved detailing is extremely (and unusually) high, and some think it may have been built as a chantry chapel for Robert de Tattershall. pic.twitter.com/3AVEm8HNim
Jay Hulme got an invitation to go see an old church in the English countryside, but he received no address. Just the coordinates (latitude and longitude). It turns out the church is so far out in the middle of nowhere, it doesn't have a street address. Or a street. Hulme had to hike the last half a kilometer or so.
St. Leonard's is around 800 years old. Before the pandemic, it had services only once a month. No one had been there for six months when Hulme visited. He got to see the beautiful architectural details and even explored a tiny staircase leading to the roof. Take a tour of St. Leonard's with plenty of pictures posted at Threadreader. -via Metafilter
A woman from Southwestern China became an online star for dancing on a river. No, she can’t miraculously make herself float above water; Yang Liu dances on a single bamboo pole. Now that’s impeccable balance and talent! Besides dancing, Liu can also perform splits while standing on a bamboo pole. Amazing, right?
If you’re familiar with the concept of plate tectonics (the outermost layer of our planet, where we live on, is a collection of plates that continuously move around each other), then it’s no surprise to you that millions of years ago, your present-day address was not in the same place it is now. Thanks to an online tool, we can now trace where a location on Earth was a long time ago. The Ancient Earth simulation allows you to type in the name of a city, highlight it, and then select an ancient date from a drop-down menu to see where it was back at some point in the distant past, as How Stuff Works detailed:
Ancient Earth was created by Ian Webster, a software engineer who is the founder and chief technology officer of Zenysis, a San Francisco-based company that does analytics and visualizations of data designed to improve the delivery of health care in developing countries. He previously worked as an engineer at Google and also at NASA and for other companies in the space industry. He's also the creator of Dinosaurpictures.org, which allows you to search through a database of images of the ancient creatures, and even view a random dinosaur.
In addition to being interested in paleogeography, Webster also likes to explore the power of turning data into images.
What's more fun than a barrel of monkeys? A wheelbarrow of orangutans! These youngsters live at the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. They are rescued orphans taking part in Orangutan Jungle School, where they are taught the skills they will need to live in the wild on their own when they are old enough. After a day of jungle activity, they catch a ride back to the shelter in wheelbarrows!
The school is the subject of a TV series, aired on different platforms in different countries. You can see clips from Orangutan Jungle Schoolat YouTube, and here's a full introductory episode if you want to learn about the orangutans. -via Metafilter
After getting “a little scrappy” with a man who suddenly mentioned his Asian wife as a way to disagree with her in a conversation, international relations researcher Rui Zhong decided that she’s had enough.
"I was doodling around on my tablet and was like, you know, I'm really sick of people using Asian wives as some kind of credential," Zhong said.
And so, she wrote these words.
"I drew it out, slapped it on one of those T-shirt websites, and I guess people sort of connected with that kind of feeling." By July, Zhong's shirt was real, sold through her store Cancel Couture, and boosts from popular figures in Asian Twitter had earned it a level of viral fame.
Lots of people tweeted about Zhong’s shirt. Those tweets became viral, and this shocked Zhong.
"I made this as a joke—what is happening?"
The "wife guy" is well-known: a man who "defines himself through a kind of overreaction to being married," the New York Times's Amanda Hess wrote last summer, necessitated by the year's establishment of the "cliff wife guy," the "elf wife guy," and the "fake wife guy."…
But as Zhong's shirt and the response to it have articulated, there's a very particular kind of wife guy well-known to people of Asian descent, if not yet the rest of the world: the "Asian wife guy," whose outward identity is formed not on his own culture but on his wife's (or his girlfriend's or his former partner's). Through that relationship, the "Asian wife guy" absorbs elements of his wife's culture, often reimagining himself as an authority on that culture.
For Asians, this isn’t just some joke t-shirt — it’s a statement against the objectification of Asian women.
Despite the fact that he was never president of the United States, Benjamin Franklin is arguably the most interesting of the Founding Fathers. Or at least the most fun to study. Franklin had a varied career which made him a wealthy man. In his will, he bequeathed his various properties to many family members and organizations. An addendum to the will also laid out an investment plan for two cities close to his heart.
Less than a year before his death on April 17, 1790, Benjamin Franklin added a codicil, or addendum, to his will. In it, he bequeathed 1000 pounds sterling, or what would have been the equivalent of $4000, to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. (Franklin had been born and raised in Boston but left for Philadelphia when he was 17, making both cities near to his heart.)
The money, he wrote, was to be handled in a very particular way. For the first 100 years, each of the 1000 pounds sterling would accrue interest and be used to fund loans for young tradesmen starting out in business. Franklin, who had become a printer as the result of a loan given to him, valued resources for apprentices.
At the end of the 100 years, the cities could take 75 percent of the principal and spend it in public works. Boston, he suggested, should invest in a trade school. Philadelphia could possibly pay for water pipes connected to Wissahickon Creek. The remaining 25 percent would be left until another century had passed, at which point the cities and their respective states could spend the funds in whatever way they wished. But after 200 years, would the economic needs of the modern world match up with Franklin’s wishes?
The legacy of that money makes an interesting story, as changing customs, government bodies, and laws have affected how the money was handled. Read what happened to Franklin's bequests over two centuries at Mental Floss.
