Help him scratch his ear, quick! Watch this short video posted by Twitter user @minoovo of a cat happily lying down on the couch. Poor cat was trying to punch itself in the face! It took me a few times of replaying the clip (without reading the original caption) that it was trying to scratch his ear. 

he doesn't realize he can't scratch his ear while lying down pic.twitter.com/lR17ph2VM3

— ياسمين (@minoovo) July 26, 2020

image screenshot via Twitter

The image above is of a painting called Tree Roots. Vincent van Gogh was working on it on July 27, 1890. That evening he shot himself in the chest, and he died the next day. The exact location of the real-life tree roots has recently been discovered, about 150 metres from where van Gogh was staying. The discovery came from examining an old postcard.

The scene in Tree Roots, a painting of trunks and roots growing on a hillside near the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, was first spotted on a card dating from 1900 to 1910 by Wouter van der Veen, the scientific director of the Institut Van Gogh.

Following a comparative study of the painting, the postcard and the current condition of the hillside, researchers at the Van Gogh Museum and Bert Maes, a dendrologist specialising in historical vegetation, concluded that it was “highly plausible” that the place where Van Gogh made his final brushstrokes had been unearthed.

Although it no longer looks the same, the site was located, and a wooden fence was erected around it Tuesday for protection. Read more about the tree roots that inspired van Gogh at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

A list of scary but not gory horror movies will draw the attention of 1. people who like the thrill of horror, but become ill at the sight of blood and gore, 2. those of us who decry the cheap tactics of blood-and-guts movies and long for the days of carefully-crafted suspense and dread, and 3. people who have spent months binge-watching TV series at home and want to try something different. That's probably most of us, in one category or another. The list was compiled by Beth Elderkin, who has a condition that makes her pass out at the sight of blood. Yet she is a movie buff, and keeps watching so that you don't have to.

I used to faint a couple of times per year until I learned to mitigate it, although it can still happen (the latest episode was in January). Since then, I’ve gotten to the point where I can watch an episode of Game of Thrones or Westworld, but I have to close my eyes occasionally. And don’t even get me started on scary movies. Some of the best horror films and franchises of our time, like Get Out, The Witch, American Horror Story, and Crimson Peak are pretty much off the table. I can sometimes work my way around them if I close my eyes a bunch, but what’s the fun in that? Sometimes I want to be free to be scared, without worrying if it’s going to make me keel over.

Check out the ten films at io9.

The Nintendo data leak may have just happened recently, but people combing through the leaked data already have found juicy stuff for gamers all over the world, like the tool that video game programmer Dylan Cuthbert used for StarFox 2 (an SNES game which was supposed to be released in mid-1995), the prototype title screen for Super Mario Kart, a prototype version of Yoshi’s Island, and a hidden Luigi texture in Super Mario 64. And, apparently, Luigi had an unused character graphic asset in Super Mario World, and this shows him giving the player the middle finger.

Know more information about these leaks over at Kotaku.

(Image Credit: axoonium/ Twitter)

Jaden ‘Wolfiez’ Ashman from Essex ranked in the Fortnite World Cup last 2019. The fifteen-year old player was the youngest player to win a million dollars! BBC checks in with Ashman one year later, to see if he fulfilled his promise to buy his mom a house. Check the full video here. 

image via wikimedia commons

Yoora Jung hopped on the trend of sending quizzes to her past crushes. Forget the letters Lara Jean wrote to all her crushes in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, this one takes the cake for being straightforward! She sent a Google Form link to her crushes, which she admitted was out of her comfort zone. If you need the courage to go and confess to your crushes, maybe watching this video can give you the boost! 

Auntie Anne’s Pretzels is famous for their delicious pretzels (which are honestly my favorite snack). But did you know that the founder of the store initially bought a pretzel store to fund her and her husband’s counseling center for women? The origin story of Auntie Anne’s isn’t as bright as you’d expect, as Cracked details: 

She was well on the path to traditional Amish wife-and-motherhood until one of her young daughters was killed in a tractor accident, which -- if any comfort can be found in such a situation -- is at least an extremely Amish way to go.

Because people in some religious communities don't so much as change their underwear without consulting their church leader, Beiler sought help with her grief from her pastor ... who proceeded to rape her and manipulate her into a six-year coercive sexual relationship. When Beiler finally broke her silence, she blew the lid off a jar of theological deceit that was way more full than she ever guessed. It turned out the pastor had been doing the same thing to basically every woman she knew, including all of her sisters. 

That's actually why she bought her first pretzel shop in 1988. Her husband wanted to open a counseling center where women could seek free help that was guaranteed not to end in sexual torture, but the Amish are not known for their vast wealth, so she bought a local pretzel shop that happened to go on the market at a deep discount to fund the venture.

image via wikimedia commons

Regarding the title, one could argue that no one in Britain knows what an inch is now, because they use meters and centimeters. But that's not what this is about. Any measurement must have standards. While measurements are now defined by physics and can be accurately recreated, those standards were once physical. So what happens when the standard prototype is destroyed? That happened when the British Parliament building burned down in 1834. Tom Scott tells the story, and a short history of measuring standards.

During the 1980s, author and map enthusiast Hans Harlén calculated the center of Stockholm. For decades, nobody paid attention to his project.

Fast forward to 2012. Harlén’s project came to the attention of a city guide named Per Haukaas, and a sign was erected on the site that Harlén identified as the center of Sweden’s capital city.

Now the center is marked for all to see, and unlike most city centers, it’s a charming and calm park located around a roundabout.

The park is a three minute-walk from Alvik, a residential district in Stockholm.

(Image Credit: Coolcrab/ Atlas Obscura)

Are you a healthy person who’s afraid of overeating on certain occasions, such as Thanksgiving and birthdays? If yes, then let me tell you this: you don’t need to be afraid of overeating occasionally. A recent study, published last April by the Cambridge University Press, suggests that binge eating occasionally does not have immediate negative consequences, as the body can cope “remarkably well when faced with a massive and sudden calorie excess.”

The over-fed body fails in one category: energy level. The overeaters were lethargic for a prolonged period of over four hours. So the price you pay for a pizza binge is a so-called food coma.

The take-home: “This study shows that if an otherwise healthy person overindulges occasionally, for example eating a large buffet meal or Christmas lunch, then there are no immediate negative consequences in terms of losing metabolic control,”...

More details about this study over at Fast Company.

(Image Credit: Pexels/ Pixabay)

Because data is now the world’s most valuable resource, it is not surprising that companies want their hands on every kind of data that they can get. It seems that car companies are no longer just interested in making profit through cars; they are now also interested in making money through gathering information.

To the public and to legislators, automakers market the systems as safety features. If a car can detect that a driver is angry or looking at their phone immediately before a crash, these companies reason, the onboard AI may be able to offer a warning the next time it senses similar behavior. Or, if it can determine how a child is positioned in the back seat, the car might deploy airbags more effectively in the event of a collision.

But safety is only one attraction of in-cabin monitoring. The systems also hold huge potential for harvesting the kind of behavioral data that Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists have exploited to target ads and influence purchasing habits.

More details about this over at Vice.com.

What are your thoughts about this one? Do you think they have gone too far?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

They say that life begins at 40, and as I grow older I have come to realize how truthful this statement is. People who are now in their forties have enough wisdom and the necessary life skills to survive and enjoy life. And now that they truly have experienced life, they give these useful life lessons to the next generation.

A few months ago, a Reddit user named peeledraspberry asked all the folks over 40, who feel happy about their lives, to share some of their best advice to all the lost twentysomethings out there.

See the many life lessons over at Bored Panda.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

It's one thing to modify DNA to reflect different genetic traits. It's quite another to use DNA as a data storage device. But that's what scientists at the University of Texas have manged to do. They encoded an Esperanto translation of L. Frank Baum's novel The Wizard of Oz onto DNA. IEEE Spectrum explains why this task is so challenging:

To make a workable DNA data storage standard, you need instead to worry about substitutions, insertions and deletions. The first is similar to a bit flip in which, say, an A nucleotide is substituted in the place where a T nucleotide used to be. (A, C, T and G and not 0 and 1 are the base language of DNA information.) The latter two classes of error represent cases, as the names suggest, where DNA base pairs are inserted or deleted from a strand.

Crucially, however, with DNA there is no reliable, inherent way of knowing that the strand you’re reading off contains any substitution, insertion or deletion errors. There’s no such thing as a countable and quantifiable DNA “memory register.” Every base pair is just another nucleotide in a long sequence. And together they all form just another strand of DNA.

After separating the text into nucleotide sequences, the scientists then had to encode it:

Encoding The Wizard of Oz into DNA, then, involved passing the data through an “outer” coding layer and an “inner” coding layer. (Think of these steps as two separate algorithms in a complex cryptographic standard.)

The outer layer diagonalized the source data so that any given strand of DNA would contain shards of many portions of the message. The inner layer, HEDGES, then translates each bit into an A, C, T or G according to an algorithm that depends both on the zero or one value of that bit plus additional information about its place in the data stream as well as the data bits immediately preceding it.

They then subjected the DNA to stresses. It proved to be remarkably durable, thus evidencing the utility of DNA for data storage.

-via Instapundit | Photo: Drümmkopf

Seeing these photos can make you feel bad for the person involved, or may just make you feel slightly better on a crappy day. The people in these photos had a stroke of bad luck. One was going to clean up a massive olive oil spill in the supermarket. Do you know how greasy those are? Check out the other photos on Buzzfeed. 

image via Buzzfeed

In the fall of 1940, the German army rounded up Jewish people in Warsaw, Poland, and restricted them to a scant 1.3 square mile area. This become known as the Warsaw Ghetto, where 400,000 people were forced to live in a density more than ten times that of New York City. How does one fight disease in such conditions?  

German officials knew enough about the spread of typhus to know that by overcrowding, starving and depriving the Jewish residents of basic necessities, the ghetto would become a breeding ground for infection. Additional food supplies were blocked until May 1941, at which point rations provided by authorities amounted to no more than 200 calories per day, per person. The starvation made fighting any disease that did emerge near impossible, and louse vectors spread easily due to a lack of adequate sanitation and an abundance of hosts.

More than 100,000 Jews were infected by typhus and at least 25,000 died directly from it. But, just before the winter of 1941, as an epidemic in the ghetto was breaking out, something remarkable happened: cases dropped exponentially when they should have continued to rise.

A new study of data from health records, diaries, and other archives from the ghetto show how Jewish doctors led a public health campaign that used what little they had to combat typhus: information. That included not only managing the inhabitants of the ghetto, but also running a clandestine medical school and lying to the Germans. Read about the fight against typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto at Smithsonian.