A shell is essential for a hermit crab. It helps him protect his soft abdomen, and helps him maintain the proper humidity level. At some point in time, however, a hermit crab has to abandon his home to search for another one, for many reasons. One is when the crab grows too big for its shell. Another reason is when some sort of fungus enters the shell, which makes the crab uncomfortable.
Watch as this hermit crab slowly moves to its new home.
(Video Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)
Qantas said goodbye to its 747 today in style beginning with a low altitude tour of Sydney, a quick visit to retired fleet mate VH-OJA, and then a massive Qantas ‘Roo’ before heading across the Pacific. https://t.co/sDyfwbqKt3 pic.twitter.com/tDZIXChGh2
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) July 23, 2020
The Australian airline Qantas has retired its last Boeing 747 jumbo jet. As the last jet took off Wednesday with six pilots and no passengers, the flight path drew Qantas' distinctive kangaroo logo in the sky.
Over the past week, Qantas operated three “Farewell Jumbo Joy Flights” touring Sydney, Brisbane, and Canberra with passengers on board for the final time. Today’s flight is taking the aircraft from Sydney to Los Angeles, where it will clear customs before continuing on to its final resting place in the California desert.
After making a scenic departure over Sydney and a low pass over the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) in Wollongong, which hosts a retired Qantas 747, QF7474 turned east over the Tasman Sea to draw Qantas’ iconic kangaroo.
The jet was taken to the Mojave Air and Space Port to be stripped for parts. -via BBC
While you've read Mark Twain's works and have probably quoted him, you might not know much about Samuel Clemens' personal life. Clemens made friends with Charles Langdon on his trip to the Holy Land in 1868, and later met his younger sister Olivia. Olivia was educated, devout, progressive, and chronically ill, possibly with tuberculosis.
Eventually Samuel decided Olivia was the girl for him. He had earned a Bohemian reputation that was not necessarily good for a prospective husband and so when he came and stayed for two weeks and then asked Langdon for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he received a “chilled” response from her father. Moreover, Olivia gave him a resounding “no” when he proposed marriage.
The refusal by Olivia did not dishearten Samuel. He began a vibrant epistolary courtship writing 184 courtship letters. Their letters discussed their opinions of authors and books and they also expressed their ideas about what they thought a perfect marriage entailed. Relationships between the sexes and the elements that composed a perfect husband or wife were also among the things Olivia and Samuel debated at length. Interestingly, their opinions were often radically different, and yet despite these differences Samuel became determined to marry Olivia.
Olivia turned down Samuel's proposals twice more before they married in 1870. Read about their romance and the Clemens' family life at Geri Walton's blog. -via Strange Company
Four years ago, we posted the story of Taylor Ann Linko's wedding gown. Then there's a whole other story of what happened afterward. The newlyweds moved to San Diego, and Linko was having trouble turning her art into income.
We thankfully were given a free honeymoon and enough gift/saving money to get us through June…. then July………. things are getting tight now, August, not a single sale in the new city, September….. my time was running out. Trying to be a good wife, trying to get a gig face painting, or a sale at a craft fair, or into a gallery.
I had been so blessed my whole life to chase my dream, to try and be an Artist but time was running out.
I needed to contribute to the bills. No money to fund any new art ventures, no sales, “no followers”, no income, no hope left.
But then someone shared a photograph of her colorful wedding dress, and everything changed. The viral wedding pictures led to a full-time business customizing dresses and selling painted gowns. See more of Linko's work in her gallery. -via reddit
A woman’s medication caused a burning sensation in her legs and the loss of one of her toes. These are symptoms of ergotism (also known as St. Anthony’s fire), a rare condition that cause outbreaks in medieval Europe, as Live Science details:
The 24-year-old woman went to the doctor after she suddenly began to experience a severe burning pain in her legs, from her midthigh down to her toes, according to the report, published Wednesday (July 22) in The New England Journal of Medicine. She also had discoloration in her feet and trouble walking, and both legs were cold to the touch, according to the authors, from Government Medical College in Thiruvananthapuram, a city in southern India. Four days earlier, she had started taking a medication called ergotamine for migraine headaches. The woman was also born with HIV and was taking several antiviral medications to treat the disease.
image via Live Science
No worries, these hackers aren’t targeting personal bank accounts. These clever thieves have found a way to make ATMs spit out massive wads of cash. The process involves “black boxes”- rogue devices that open up programming interfaces inside the machine, as Futurism details:
Jackpotting involves attaching rogue devices called “black boxes” to open up programming interfaces inside the ATM machine’s software and issue commands, forcing it to, proverbially, make it rain.
According to a statement issued by multinational banking solutions corporation Diebold Nixdorf, thieves have worked out a new way to get their hands of copious amounts of cash.
The hacks typically involve a combination of brute force and cyberattack savvy.
“In the recent incidents, attackers are focusing on outdoor systems and are destroying parts of the fascia in order to gain physical access to the head compartment,” reads the security alert. After getting inside of the ATM, the thieves hook up special USB devices, in order to trigger the banking machine to dispense money.
image via Futurism
No, she doesn’t. But people describe the singer’s career trajectory as voodoo-like, as her career had a string of karmic episodes. Her fans have a somewhat problematic term for it as well, calling these karmic episodes as “tayvoodoo,” as Paper Magazine details:
The obvious application of tayvoodoo is Kanye West's ongoing fall from grace, after years of feuding with Swift's camp following that infamous 2009 VMAs incident. But Swifties also use the term to describe how the careers and personal lives of Swift's more minor rivals have declined ever since they sided against her.
"I'm not really sure how it originated," the admin of Swift stan account @breathincruel tells me over DM. "But it's based off the fact that every celebrity who does her wrong gets wronged somewhere down the road, whether it has to do with the drama they gave her or not." Meanwhile, Taylor "just stays in her lane and lets karma do its job." On Urban Dictionary, the symptoms of tayvoodoo are listed as "crippling of mental/physical health, diminishing professional success, bags stopped, comments flooded, your name trending on twitter (along with #YourNameIsOverParty), irrelevance."
West aside, some of tayvoodoo's most high-profile supposed victims include the singer-songwriter's former beau Calvin Harris and chart rival Kacey Musgraves. Harris, @breathincruel points out, "hasn't been nearly as popular" since he disputed her songwriting credit on their hit track "This Is What You Came For" in 2016. Musgraves, who recently announced her impending divorce from Ruston Kelly (a tragedy, given their relationship inspired one of the most gorgeously romantic albums of all time), was perceived to slight Swift by allegedly "liking" an Instagram post by Scooter Braun at the apex of his and Swift's battle over her former label Big Machine. (Musgraves has never publicly commented on the feud.)
image via wikimedia commons
What better way to inform people about the pandemic by dressing up as Grim Reaper? It sure will get the message across that the sickness can cause severe deaths! A Florida man donned a “Grim Reaper” costume and warned beachgoers about the pandemic.
image via wikimedia commons
It depends on the location. Sharks are missing from 19% of the world’s coral reefs. This number is the highest percentage of reef shark decline ever recorded. The decline of sharks is caused by overfishing, according to a new study. Don’t worry, sharks aren’t fully extinct, this means that some reefs in the world have no sharks, as Science Magazine details:
”This study is a tour de force,” says Nick Dulvy, a conservation biologist at Simon Fraser University. “It’s the most comprehensive study that’s ever been done to look at shark abundance,” adds Ellen Pikitch, a marine biologist at Stony Brook University. Both say the findings bolster the conclusion that fishing has profoundly depleted reef shark populations in many places. (Neither was involved in the project.)
Like other large animals, sharks are vulnerable to overfishing because they grow slowly and don’t have many offspring. Demand for shark fins has grown, along with consumption, by a burgeoning Asian middle class. In other places, fishing communities are eating more shark meat as other species have declined. Researchers know shark populations have dropped in many places, but these studies are difficult to compare.
image via wikimedia commons
A telescope was able to capture a portrait of another solar system with two planets orbiting around a star. Sound familiar? It’s like our solar system (but with fewer planets involved)! The portrait was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The sun and the two giant gas planets are fairly close to each other, as US News detailed:
What makes this group shot so appealing is it’s a “very young version of our own sun,” said Alexander Bohn of the Netherlands' Leiden University, who led the study.
Bohn said he was “extremely excited" about the discovery. “This is the first time astronomers were able to capture such a shot,” he said in an email.
The observations can help scientists better understand the evolution of our own solar system.
Astronomers typically confirm worlds around other stars by observing brief but periodic dimming of the starlight, indicating an orbiting planet. Such indirect observations have identified thousands planets in our Milky Way galaxy.
image via US News
As someone of Asian descent, I can say that a part of me died when the woman did not wash the rice before cooking, and then washing it after it was cooked. That’s clearly not the right way to cook rice. Aside from that, metal should not be used to scrape the saucepan.
If there’s something on the Internet that could trigger an Asian, it might just be BBC’s Egg Fried Rice Video.
In the words of Uncle Roger, “who cooks rice like this?”
(Image Credit: mrnigelng/ YouTube)
Naomi SV was recording her harp performance of "The Sound of Silence" when she was surprised by a videobomber the rest of us were watching since the beginning. She says,
My harp session turned into a Disney movie.
She labeled this video a "blooper," since she didn't finish the song, but this outtake has six times as many views as the completed song. -via Metafilter
My Heritage is offering a free online photo enhancer that uses artificial intelligence to sharpen blurry photographs, and even add color if you like. PetPixel explains.
Of course, we’ve seen this kind of AI-powered tech before, but the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer puts it all together into a one-click tool that does a surprisingly good job. And since it’s free to try it out, it’s helping to introduce this kind of technology to people who didn’t know that AI photo enhancement has gotten so advanced.
You can even zero in on the specific faces in each photo, downloading the full enhanced result or individual enhanced “headshots” for everybody in the photo. For this reason, the tool doesn’t enhance landscape photo since it has to detect at least once face to work properly.
For an example, I pulled up a rare photo of myself at age two. You can tell that my parents saved money on a haircut in order to afford the portrait sitting. Try out the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer yourself. -via Nag on the Lake
It’s all thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). Photo and film restoration specialist DutchSteamMachine was able to enhance the original Apollo film, making the footage strikingly clear and vivid. Now people can watch footage of several moon missions in high definition! If you’re curious as to how DutchSteamMachine managed to restore the footage check out the ScienceAlert’s full piece on the topic here.
image via ScienceAlert
The Photography Deck is a camera reference guide printed on a deck of playing cards. So not only can you play card games with your friends, you can also relearn some photography concepts as you play! Creator Eric Bohring organized the contents of the resource by sorting the concepts into each suit, as My Modern Met detailed:
To organize this resource, creator Eric Bohring assigned each suit its own category of information: spades represent camera basics; hearts are about composition; clubs tell you about technical aspects; and diamonds highlight shooting styles. This array of knowledge gets to the nitty-gritty of photography and discusses concrete topics like ISO and shutter speeds as well as more subjective aspects such as finding negative space or patterns in a composition. Each card highlights this information through custom artwork that is minimalist in style to let the tricks and tips shine.
The Photography Deck is now available for pre-order. There are a variety of deck designs available, including a variant that is extra waterproof and can withstand a day at the beach. Select your deck by visiting the deck’s Kickstarter page.
image via My Modern Met
