Usually found thriving inside Warp Pipes, the Piranha Plants wait for the perfect opportunity to chomp down the heroes of the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario and Luigi. But this Piranha Plant is different from all of its kind. It doesn’t bite, and it’s friendly towards people.
Paladone’s Piranha Plant lamp comes with its mouth wide open, and looks intimidating as it pokes its head out of a drain pipe. Its green stalk is poseable, so you can bend it to your whim, and aim its light where you want it. Rather than living organic matter, this Piranha Plant is made from plastic, and it’s teeth aren’t sharp enough to break skin. The plant can go anywhere too, since it runs on battery or USB power.
Found in the border between Peru and Bolivia in the Andes Mountains is one of the largest lakes in South America: Lake Titicaca. For the Inca and the Tiwanaku (the people that lived there before the Inca), the lake, which is home to still and reflective waters, is a sacred lake. Currently, the lake is filled with “sunken sacrifices from centuries ago.”
After years of searching, archaeologists have now retrieved the first underwater offering not yet damaged or looted by opportunists: a box of volcanic rock, submerged around 500 years ago.
Upon opening this tightly-sealed sacrifice in front of local Indigenous leaders, the research team discovered an ancient llama, carved from the shell of a spiny mollusc called a spondylus from Ecuador, and a furled sheet of gold, thought to be part of a bracelet.
If historical accounts from the invading Spanish are right, the box may have once even held the blood of children or animals, although no human remains have been found in the lake to date.
Scientists believe that boxes such as this one are lowered on the lake as some sort of sacrifice to the gods.
Jesse Dunietz was surprised as he attended the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics. For decades, natural-language processing (NLP), the AI branch that specializes in creating systems that analyze the human language, has been measuring the ability of these systems through benchmark data sets.
Much of today’s reading comprehension research entails carefully tweaking models to eke out a few more percentage points on the latest data sets. “State of the art” has practically become a proper noun: “We beat SOTA on SQuAD by 2.4 points!”
But during this year’s meeting, Dunietz felt something different.
Attendees’ conversations were unusually introspective about the core methods and objectives of natural-language processing (NLP), the branch of AI focused on creating systems that analyze or generate human language. Papers in this year’s new “Theme” track asked questions like: Are current methods really enough to achieve the field’s ultimate goals? What even are those goals?
For Dunietz and his colleagues, the field needs a “ transformation, not just in system design, but in a less glamorous area: evaluation.”
We all have regrets in our lives. It might be regret in choosing the wrong degree program at our university, regret in making a financial decision that resulted in a huge loss, or regret in a relationship that should have been ended way earlier before things got worse. Regrets come with a lot of “what if” questions and “I should have done this” statements, as well as pain that could either cause us to grow and move forward, or to shrink and stay stuck. Of course, all of us want to grow, but how do we do it properly?
Psychology professor Shawn M. Burn gives us advice on how to deal with our regrets. See her tips over at Psychology Today.
For decades, humans have been using light-emitting devices such as flashlights in order to hunt for prey. Apparently, sudden light causes confusion to animals and makes them freeze. In the past, however, flashlights with incandescent bulbs quickly run out of power, which makes it a costly tool for the hunter. It also makes hunting more difficult. But with the current LED technology, which can emit the same light with less power, hunters have found it easier to hunt. There is a downside, however.
Cheap, powerful flashlights are allowing hunters in tropical jungles around the world to more easily kill nocturnal animals, including endangered species such as pangolins, according to a new study. Scientists warn the new technology threatens to further damage ecosystems already strained by overhunting.
But for forest ecologist Robert Nasi, the problem is not the LED flashlights; it is how people use them.
For example, Gabonese hunters working at night in the vast forests of the Congo reported killing threatened species, including the giant pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) and various small antelopes known as duikers. LEDs could fuel intensive hunting of the sort that can take a toll on jungle ecosystems, Nasi says. But for people hunting to feed themselves, the lights could save time, freeing them up to do other things like fish or tend crops.
In 1992, Pepsi-Cola was in a war with Coca-Cola over the Philippine soda market, and Pepsi was losing badly. So they launched a sweepstakes in which people would collect bottle caps with numbers. The winning number would be worth varying amounts of money, up to a million pesos (worth $68,000 today). Number Fever, as it was called, boosted Pepsi sales as people collected bottle caps with numbers. The winning number was announced on May 25. Marily So tells how her husband located a bottle cap with the winning number, 349, and saw that it was worth a million pesos. There was rejoicing, but the couple did not know that Pepsi had printed 600,000 bottle caps with number 349 on them.
Similar scenes were playing out across the country. A bus driver had three 1 million-peso 349s. A mother of 12 whose children went through 10 bottles of Pepsi a day had won 35 million pesos. Winners raced to the iron gates of Pepsi’s bottling factory in Quezon City, just northeast of Manila, to claim their prizes. As the crowd grew, a secretary dialed the marketing director, Rosemarie Vera. “There seems to be many 349 crowns in circulation among people I know,” the secretary said, according to an account in the Philippine Daily Enquirer. At 10 p.m., someone from the company telephoned the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry and said a mistake had been made.
Within a year, a violent consumer uprising would be under way, with riots and grenade attacks leaving dozens injured and five dead.
Fox Benwell has a postal cat! His cat Linnet waits by the door for the mail to be delivered. Watch as she enthusiastically receives a package, checks to see if anyone is watching, and then steals upstairs to put it in her stash. See more of Linnet at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort
It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of other planets where humans could live was considered a fantasy. Now we have lots of data coming in from exoplanets, those outside our solar system, and they come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors. Could they support life? The common theory is that only planets in which water would be in liquid form are suitable for us to live in, and these fall into the "habitable zone." Our solar system has three such planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Since we can't live on Mars and Venus as they are, you can see that habitability actually depends on many factors.
The idea of a habitable zone is a bit squishy, because having liquid water depends on a laundry list of other things, including the existence of an atmosphere, what’s in it, and more. But it’s a useful concept as long as you don’t look at it too closely†.
So technically, three planets orbit the Sun in its habitable zone. But how many could you fit in there?
At some number you’d hit a limit. The finite region of space means planets would get too close together. They’d interact gravitationally, and celestial hijinks would ensue: They’d create chaos, and some planet or planets would have their orbit messed up, dropping them into the Sun or ejecting them from the system entirely.
Scientists have crunched the numbers to find out how many planets could be in a system's habitable zone. It depends on the size and heat of the star, and a few other factors. But the answer will have you imagining a system where people could send mail to their relatives on the next planet over. Read how it might work at Bad Astronomy.
If you want to get really away from it all, keep the rest of the world at bay, and have plenty of space to spread out, you might be interested in a property for sale near Fairdale, North Dakota. The brutalist architecture envelopes an interior steampunk aesthetic.
Unique opportunity to own a bit of Cold War history! Located in Fairdale ND, this Walsh County Sprint Missile site offers a nostalgic Cold War experience. Site needs some repair, but could provide that extra privacy, security and protection when needed. The site is surrounded by dual fences and sits on 3 parcels totaling 49.48 acres. There is a cement entry building, a command bunker, and 14 sprint launch tubes. Current owner utilizes portable power and water tanks. Power is available nearby and a well could be drilled for water requirements. Property will be offered as one total unit.
From the outside, the facility looks like a 20th-century Stonehenge. Before you purchase, you should read some of its history at Atlas Obscura. Then see lots of pictures at the auction listing. The missile silos will be auctioned off on August 11.
US Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky demonstrates perfect body control as she swims the length of a pool while balancing a glass of chocolate milk on her head. Without the glass, it would look like an easy lap. It is only with this additional challenge that we can understand what she has managed to achieve through decades of effort.
The problem with making a satirical movie is that if you are at all subtle, the satire can be completely missed. And so it was with the 1997 film Starship Troopers. It was supposed to be a sendup of overly militaristic speculative fiction, but ended up way too close to what it was supposed to satirize. It fulfilled the audience's desire for space aliens, sex, and carnage so well that they didn't care what the aim was. Or was it a case that the movie was just so bad that director Paul Verhoeven came up with the excuse that it was a satire after the fact? In any case, you can see from this Honest Trailer how the audience might have been confused. Sure, the plot, characters, and themes were over-the-top, but so were many other steroid-laden movies of the time. The lesson to take from Starship Troopers is that if you are going to make a satire of a movie genre, do like Mel Brooks or the Zucker brothers and put some laughs into it.
We've read plenty of horror stories from nature about animal parasites infecting other animals and causing them to behave in ways that benefit the parasite. Funguses can do that, too. The parasitic fungus Massospora will infect a male cicada and then cause it to flirt like a female cicada. When a male cicada approaches, the fungus spreads to a new, healthy host.
“Essentially, the cicadas are luring others into becoming infected because their healthy counterparts are interested in mating,” said Brian Lovett, study co-author and post-doctoral researcher with the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design. “The bioactive compounds may manipulate the insect to stay awake and continue to transmit the pathogen for longer.”
These actions persist amid a disturbing display of B-horror movie proportions: Massospora spores gnaw away at a cicada’s genitals, butt and abdomen, replacing them with fungal spores. Then they “wear away like an eraser on a pencil,” Lovett said.
That's some pretty sophisticated chicanery for a fungus. You might think the fungus couldn't be too smart, or they would infect a species that didn't lay dormant for 17 years, but Massospora has adapted to that, too, which you can read about at WVU Today. -via Boing Boing
When I hear the word "herpes," I automatically think "the gift that keeps on giving." But maybe I should switch that to "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." People with latent herpes hiding in their cells may have some advantages in their immune system. In our world of modern medicine, it's most certainly not worth contracting a case, but research into how our bodies harness the virus might someday lead to replicating the good effects without the bad. -Thanks, SnowMan!
If you want to know if a person prefers to eat veggies or meat, then you might consider analyzing his hair. This study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that chemical traces of proteins from food can be found in hair strands.
"This information can be used to quantify dietary trends in ways that surveys cannot capture," says distinguished professor Jim Ehleringer, of the U's School of Biological Sciences. "We would like to see the health community begin to assess dietary patterns using hair isotope surveys, especially across different economic groups within the US."
More details about this hair-splitting study over at PHYS.org.
Traveling great distances while not spending much time has been man’s dream ever since the distant past. As time goes by, transportation vehicles evolve and become much faster than before, allowing us to spend less time on travel and more time on things that matter more. And it would seem that we will go much much faster in the near future. How fast? Faster than sound itself.
The private spaceflight company Virgin Galactic and Rolls-Royce have teamed up to create a supersonic jet for high-speed passenger flights.
The Spaceship Company (TSC), Virgin Galactic's aerospace-system manufacturing arm that builds the company's SpaceShipTwo space planes, is now working to develop a high-speed commercial aircraft capable of flying at Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound.
[On Aug. 3], TSC announced the completion of a mission concept review and unveiled the initial design concept for a high-speed aircraft. They also announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding with Rolls-Royce to collaborate in design and development for the craft.
More details about this exciting news over at Space.com.
