Because who doesn’t want to eat when they get served their favorite food? For us humans, our favorite food could vary. Some like sweets, while others like salty food. But for ducks, it would be peas, and boy do they get excited when they see a bowlful of these seeds!
Watch as these ducks, named Pepé and Arnold, gobble up a bowlful of green peas in less than a minute!
Via Laughing Squid
(Image Credit: Pepé and Arnold/ YouTube)
For a long time, common knowledge about human migration held that people who crossed over the Beringian land bridge stayed in the far north until around 13,000 years ago, when they began to populate North America, moving gradually into South America. But subsequent discoveries keep pushing this timeline back further. Now a cave in Mexico has evidence that humans lived there least 26,500 years ago.
Chiquihuite cave is perched high in the Astillero Mountains, 9000 feet above sea level and 3,280 feet higher than the valley below. Excavations there were launched when a 2012 test pit unearthed a few stone artifacts that suggested a human presence dating back to the Last Glacial Maximum between 18,000 and 26,000 years ago. More extensive excavations detailed in the new study were carried out in 2016 and 2017, unearthing some 1,900 stone points or possible tools used for cutting, chopping, scraping, or as weapons.
The artifacts were dated by 46 different radiocarbon samples of adjacent animal bones, charcoal, and sediment samples. To the team, they represent a previously unknown technological tradition of advanced flaking skills. More than 90 percent of the artifacts were of greenish or blackish stone, though those colors are less common locally, suggesting to the authors that they were singled out as desirable. The bulk of the material is from deposits dating to between 13,000 and 16,600 years ago, leading the scientists to hypothesize that the humans may have used the cave for more than 10,000 years.
Evidence from this cave and other sites indicate that people traveled from Asia to the Americas either much earlier than previously thought, or else they traveled across glaciers. Read about the implications of these finds at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Mads Thomsen)
You've probably never seen an image of Earth like this one. It is centered on the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which gives us a taste of just how enormous it is. As Minnesotastan points out at TYWKIWDBI, there are places in the Pacific Ocean for which the antipode is also in the Pacific Ocean. On the bright side, this map features New Zealand prominently, while many omit it.
(Image: Google Earth)
I once lived in a house that had real, functional window shutters, and those things were cool, but heavy! Homes built more recently mostly use shutters as decoration only. The problem is that some people have forgotten what shutters were originally for, and how they worked. Scott Sidler is a historic preservation contractor, so he knows real from fake. He's seen so many poorly-thought-out shutters that he started using the Instagram hashtag #ShudderSunday to draw attention to them.
There are examples of shutters that aren't the right size, aren't in the right place, and would never work if anyone ever tried to cover a window with them. See a ranked gallery of Sidler's worst shutter finds at Bored Panda. Also check out his pictures of not only shutter failures, but also of lovely preservationist renovations at Sidler's Instagram.
With a wristband designed by researchers from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the future of wearable technology is bright. The wristband, called FingerTrak, can track the entire human hand in 3-D space,
...including 20 finger joint positions, using three or four miniature, low-resolution thermal cameras that read contours on the wrist.
This device could be used in various fields such as sign language translation, human-robot interaction, and virtual reality.
"This was a major discovery by our team—that by looking at your wrist contours, the technology could reconstruct in 3-D, with keen accuracy, where your fingers are," said Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science and director of Cornell's new SciFi Lab, where FingerTrak was developed. "It's the first system to reconstruct your full hand posture based on the contours of the wrist."
FingerTrak's breakthrough is a lightweight bracelet, allowing for free movement. Instead of using cameras to directly capture the position of the fingers, the focus of most prior research, FingerTrak uses a combination of thermal imaging and machine learning to virtually reconstruct the hand. The bracelet's four miniature, thermal cameras—each about the size of a pea—snap multiple "silhouette" images to form an outline of the hand.
More details about this amazing gadget over at TechXplore.
(Image Credit: Sambeetarts/ Pixabay)
On May 12, 2019, the small municipality of Loculi in the island of Sardinia assembled this pecorino cheese. The cheese was then subjected to seasoning for the next 12 months, and, after the said period, a Guinness adjudicator officially examined the creation. After the examination...
The massive pecorino was declared to be the largest cheese made from sheep's milk, beating a 1,178.8-pound block of pecorino made in Ascoli Piceno, in Italy's Le Marche region, in 2009.
"The cheese was made with traditional methods and, above and beyond the record, it was a chance to rediscover the local area's artisan skills and food culture," Anna Pitzalis, who designed the wooden wheel holding the record-breaking cheese, told ANSA.
The cheese weighs 1,319.5 pounds.
Yum!
(Image Credit: Corriere dela Sera/ YouTube)
Snakes are unwelcome visitors in anybody’s home, and they could sometimes be the cause of panic and fear to children and adults alike. If snakes can be commonly spotted in your yard, then what should you do to keep them away? Quick and Dirty Tips gives us four ways to keep these slithering creatures away from our yards. You might be surprised at how common kitchen stuff like white vinegar, and even your own hair, could be used as tools to keep these unwelcome visitors away.
But when you do spot a snake crawling in your yard, make sure to immediately call animal control if you suspect that it could be venomous.
See the tips over at the site.
(Image Credit: Tigerpython/ Wikimedia Commons)
Falko One, a street artist from South Africa, leaves elephants, snails, snakes, and more in unusual but perfect places. All of his subjects, such as Mister T, fit just right into their backgrounds. He explains to Colossal:
“My approach is just to add a bit of color to the space without breaking the scenery,” he tells Colossal. “I try not to make them too intrusive. I always respect that for that moment I am just a tourist to that specific community.”
Polar bears might be extinct by 2100 if climate change continues, according to research. With the shrinking sea ice cutting short the time bears have for hunting seals, polar bears are now being driven into starvation. If polar bears are starved, their chances of surviving Arctic winters without food plummet, as Rappler details:
"The bears face an ever longer fasting period before the ice refreezes and they can head back out to feed," Steven Amstrup, who conceived the study and is chief scientist of Polar Bears International, told the Agence France-Presse (AFP).
On current trends, the study concluded, polar bears in 12 of 13 subpopulations analyzed will have been decimated within 80 years by the galloping pace of change in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the planet as a whole.
There is not enough data for 6 others to make a determination as to their fate.
"By 2100, recruitment" – new births – "will be severely compromised or impossible everywhere except perhaps in the Queen Elizabeth Island subpopulation," in Canada's Arctic Archipelago, said Amstrup.
image via wikimedia commons
Some people are tasked to stay standing up and wait near the customer as he or she picks his/her order from the menu. These people are called “waiters.” Others, on the other hand, are tasked to float beside the customer as he or she picks an order. These people are called “waitless,” and oftentimes they can be a bit impatient, and thus the name. This sushi restaurant at Tucson Arizona seems to be looking for both types of restaurant servers.
Which one is you?
Image via Engrish.com
It was a fine afternoon in the rural town of Kita Hiroshimacho in Japan’s Hiroshima Prefecture, and Rumiko Sasaki and her husband were taking advantage of the long daylight hours weeding their backyard. Suddenly, at around 5:30 in the afternoon, a bear came to Rumiko’s backyard. Rumiko’s husband then alerted her of the wild animal’s presence.
...and when Rumiko looked up from where she’d been pulling weeds, sure enough, that’s what she saw. “When I stood up, there was a bear standing there, and it came right at me, aiming right at my face [with its claws],” she says.
But instead of cowering in fear, Rumiko faced the bear head-on.
“So I went ‘Aaaahhh!’ and tossed him off me and sent him flying. I think I hit him a few times too. Then he went running away.”
According to the 82-year-old woman’s estimate, the bear was about a 150 centimeters tall (around 4’ 11”).
After Rumiko’s counterattack, the bear fled into the nearby woods, and hasn’t been seen since. The local hunting club, called Kuma Rangers (“Bear Rangers,” like they’re a tokusatsu team), has set up three capture cages in the forest, and is also patrolling the area.
Although Rumiko suffered several scratches to her face in her encounter with the bear, she was still in good spirits when she was interviewed.
Now that’s a brave woman.
(Image Credit: news24ntv/ Twitter)
【80代の女性 自宅裏庭でクマに襲われる】
— 日テレNEWS / 日本テレビのニュース・速報 (@news24ntv) July 17, 2020
被害者の女性「立ち上がってみたらクマがそこにいて。私の顔をめがけてバッと来て『キャーッ』っと言って私が吹っ飛ばして叩いたみたいな気がする」#北広島町 #広島 pic.twitter.com/syUewT3nmD
With us staying home for many weeks, we've gotten bored due to the lack of variety in our everyday lives. As the same things happen day in and day out, it's only normal for us to desire something new… and something random, and that’s what this app, called Randonautica, is all about: taking us into random places.
Randonauting is… simple. You can do it using the free app Randonautica, which asks you for your location, prompts you to select one of a handful of different “entropy” generators—which one you choose should not really matter—and then asks you to focus your mind on your “intent.” Then it spits out a set of coordinates that could, allegedly, be influenced by your mind interacting with the machine, or not, and you can choose to go there, or not, and submit a report of what you find, or not. (You can generate 10 sets of coordinates a day for free and pay to generate more.) The app’s logo, fittingly, is an owl, because owls see in the dark; randonauts see what other people don’t. In particular, they see what they otherwise wouldn’t.
Through these months, this app has led people to weird, if not creepy, places such as abandoned houses and quiet forests. Aside from that, it has led people to disgusting objects such as water bottles filled with pee, and horrifying discoveries such as a suitcase containing corpses.
With its rather strange gimmicks, the app was downloaded 6 million times since the beginning of April.
The allure of Randonautica is bigger than “It allows me to be outdoors and kill time,” however. It is janky-looking, sure, and does not always load. And the science behind it—the idea that human thoughts can influence random-number generators—does not make a lot of sense. But it plays with concepts that people tend to love: that we can do something amazing whenever we feel like it, that the universe will talk to us if we try to listen, and that randomness can be tamed if we have a good attitude and a clear mind.
More details about this app over at The Atlantic.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Megan_Rexazin/ Pixabay)
Propane was always here. Before man was, propane waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
*cracks open a can of Alamo*
Yep. Cormac McCarthy saw it all coming, as told by cartoonist R.E. Parrish.
-via Aelfred the Great
Yumiko Ukon and her late husband have been serving rice balls since 1960. Their restaurant, Onigiri Bongo, makes 1,500 rice balls a day in fifty-five flavors. Customers who crave for the classic snack in non-traditional flavors will have to wait up to five hours in line just to get them.
Canadian artists Catherine King and Wayne Adams live on an enormous floating island they built out of discarded and recycled materials on the west coast of Vancouver Island. They have lived there for almost thirty years now. The island, dubbed Freedom Cove, is 25 miles (by boat) from the nearest town, and doesn't have electricity, but it has what the couple needs.
The compound has everything you could possibly think of and more: a dance floor, an art gallery, a candle factory, four greenhouses, six solar panels, and access to a small waterfall that provides constant running water.
Read about Freedom Cove and how it came about at CNN. -via Digg
