Twitter user Kat (@bbykaat ) was enjoying her meal when her lovely companion Soda took a chunk of her boiled eggs. Kat shared the photo of her cat caught in the act, looking a bit surprised as it chomps on her boiled egg. It’s both funny and adorable!
egg thief!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/X3ySQ3zhWp
— kat (@bbykaat) August 16, 2020
image via Twitter
Oh, I thought that the “phantom of the opera” was just a fictional character. It turns out that a real opera ghost exists, but he isn’t the masked character we see in the play, no - he’s just a sneaky theater tech. Organ enthusiast Joe Patten repaired the Fox Theatre’s Mighty Mo, the second largest organ in the world, which was broken for fifteen years. He earned his reputation as a ghost by spending his time in the theatre maintaining its instruments and moving like a ghost through the structure, as Cracked detailed:
In return, the Fox eventually made Patten its Technical Director and, since he "was spending 16 hours a day at the theatre anyway," let him live there rent-free. The Phantom chose a series of abandoned offices as his lair, which he remodeled into a 3000 square foot luxury apartment. Through a gate with a hidden lock that only a password could open, several winding steps would lead only Patten to a Moorish Rococo abode that would've fit perfectly in a Gaston Leroux novel. (This blog has a gorgeous photo gallery of the apartment in all its theatrical grandeur). It even had a revolving bookcase that led to a secret closet -- if he ever needed a place to stash billowing capes and sinister half-masks.
Image via Cracked
Over the past weeks, some people have been given the privilege to test Starlink, a satellite-broadband service by SpaceX. Anonymized speed tests by these Starlink beta users were released by a Reddit user almost a week ago, and it seems that the satellite-broadband is showing promising speeds.
Beta users of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-broadband service are getting download speeds ranging from 11Mbps to 60Mbps, according to tests conducted using Ookla's speedtest.net tool. Speed tests showed upload speeds ranging from 5Mbps to 18Mbps.
The tests showed good ping speed as well.
SpaceX has told the Federal Communications Commission that Starlink would eventually hit gigabit speeds, saying in its 2016 application to the FCC that "once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally." SpaceX has launched about 600 satellites so far and has FCC permission to launch nearly 12,000.
While 60Mbps isn't a gigabit, it's on par with some of the lower cable speed tiers and is much higher than speeds offered by many DSL services in the rural areas where SpaceX is likely to see plenty of interest.
In March, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said, "We're targeting latency below 20 milliseconds, so somebody could play a fast-response video game at a competitive level." SpaceX satellites have low-Earth orbits of 540km to 570km, making them capable of much lower latency than geostationary satellites that orbit at about 35,000km.
What a time to be alive!
(Image Credit: u/ Snnackss/ Reddit/ Ars Technica)
What would change if we humans could live for a million years? For Avi Loeb, it would change a lot of things, like how we process faculty appointments at our universities, as well as how we put candles on our birthday cakes. Aside from that, our perspective and goals would change as well, and we would probably be able to achieve greater things.
An extended life experience could make us wiser and more risk-averse since there is much more at stake. It would make little sense to send young soldiers to wars, or initiate wars in the first place.
This is just wishful thinking, however, but hey, it’s nice to try and widen our perspective once in a while.
Check out Loeb’s article over at Scientific American.
Well, what do you think?
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
On February 24, 1987, a supernova was detected on the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The supernova was dubbed SN 1987A. It seems that a star was formed following this massive explosion, and it didn’t collapse in on itself to form a black hole.
If confirmed to have survived, this star would then be the youngest star known to mankind, being only 33 years old.
To date, the youngest supernova remnant is the 330 years old Cassiopeia A, about 11,000 light-years away from Earth inside the Milky Way.
Analyzing high-resolution imagery from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of astronomers was able to get a closer look at what was left behind following SN 1987A.
They found a hot “blob” inside the core of the supernova, likely a gas cloud shrouding the neutron star. The star itself would be far too small to be detected directly, as it’s extremely small and dense — the mass of 1.4 times the Sun inside a sphere that’s only 15 miles across.
More details about this stellar story over at Futurism.
(Image Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/A. Angelich. Visible light image: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. X-Ray image: The NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory/ Wikimedia Commons)
When biologist Kory Evans was digitizing X-rays of fish skeletons last August 10, he was not expecting to find something horrific in one particular wrasse. "Mondays aren't usually this eventful," he said on the tweet he posted on that day. What he found was “a "vampire" crustacean [that] had devoured, then replaced, its host's tongue.”
The buglike isopod, also called a tongue biter or tongue-eating louse, keeps sucking its blood meals from a fish's tongue until the entire structure withers away. Then the true horror begins, as the parasite assumes the organ's place in the still-living fish's mouth.
But how does this isopod do this? Find out over at Live Science.
Creepy!
(Image Credit: Kory Evans PhD/ Twitter)
It seems that this dog is well aware of what he has done, and he doesn’t want to show it to her mom. What did he do? I won’t say it directly but it’s related to eating and carpets.
Apparently, he was out of his crate and home alone.
(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)
One of the things that we value much, especially in this day and age, is privacy. But cats couldn’t care less for such a human concept, and therefore don’t give a rip about it. So if ever you decide to take a cat to your home, be prepared to have your privacy compromised, as they will always follow you wherever you go.
Check out these pictures of hoomans who had their privacy compromised, over at Sad and Useless.
(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)
Pummeling a guy on a railroad track is never a good idea, unless you really want to kill the guy. Upon doing so, however, you also risk killing yourself in the process, so it would be good if you have a friend who would lasso you out of danger when the train comes. This just happened on this clip taken from an online game.
The clip was shared on the Red Dead Online subreddit… by user SomeRandomChillGuy and quickly became popular...
Unfortunately for the man who was being tackled, the lasso can only grab one person at a time and so the man did find out the hard way what happens when you get hit by a train. (It’s not great!)
That guy is a hero.
Watch the clip over at Kotaku.
(Image Credit: u/SomeRandomChillGuy/ Reddit)
The second largest species in the world, the fin whale, has been captured on camera off the Irish coast. The whale is capable of reaching up to 65 feet in length, only second in size to the blue whale! Mammal ecologist Emer Keaveney was able to take video footage of a fin whale enjoying its swim, as the Irish Post detailed:
A large and streamlined mammal, fin whales are characterised by their pointed heads, pectoral fin and tall, curved, dorsal fin.
Keaveney is only the second person to captured a fin whale on drone camera in Irish waters.
In fact, just over 60 fin whales have been photographed in Irish waters to date, with the majority coming on the South coast of Ireland.
ORC Ireland's Fluke Follow Project was set up to further examine the health and behaviour of otherwise elusive animal species.
Image via the Irish Post
When a proper haircut costs too much or is not available, it's pretty easy to put a bowl over someone's head and cut off what sticks out from under it. But rarely does it look good. Still, it's such an obvious idea that it goes way back, long before it became Moe's signature look as he performed with the Three Stooges.
The origins of the bowl cut extend far beyond Moe Howard. The style was common among European men in the 12th through 15th centuries as well as Russian serfs in the 18th century. The appeal was simple: It was a style that could be achieved with no skill, no brushing, and at virtually no cost. It also straddled the line between the longer styles that went in and out of vogue in the Middle Ages and the shorter cuts favored by soldiers and religious leaders. Men of greater means often accessorized the cut with elaborate hats.
So the bowl cut had its up and downs, so to speak, which you can read about at Mental Floss. It includes the story of how Moe first came to wear the bowl cut.
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)
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
