In an attempt to boost the country’s tourism amidst the pandemic, Iceland is now inviting people to send their screams of frustration to be played over loudspeakers in a remote part of the country. Iceland is now channeling the power of “scream therapy,” as seven speakers are being set up around the country for the new campaign. Participants can choose locations such as the peak of Festarfjall in Reykjanes Peninsula and Skogafoss waterfall.

image via Sky News

Be careful when you’re going through a museum, or you’ll end up paying a lot of money if you break something in there like these two children! The kids were chasing each other in the Shanghai Museum of Glass when they damaged a glass castle worth about 420,000 yuan ($60,000), as the Global Times detailed: 

The announcement said that on May 30, the tower of the castle collapsed and broke, and other parts were damaged to different degrees when two children climbed over the fence of the exhibition area and ran into the exhibition cabinet while chasing each other.

The glass castle, modelled after the Shanghai Disneyland Castle, is part of the museum's permanent collection and took US artists more than 500 hours to complete. The 60-kilogram glass castle contains nearly 30,000 parts and is decorated with 24-karat gold, according to a report from the Paper based in Shanghai.

The news sparked public concern over how to protect exhibits from such accidents. The exact amount of compensation has not been announced.

image via Global Times

Have you ever seen your cat blink slowly at you after staring at it for a long time? If you did, then your cat probably feels safe and comfortable with you.

While animal experts can’t say conclusively, the slow blink is probably a good thing. Speaking with Inverse, Mikel Delgado, a cat researcher at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, says cats often express negative emotions by avoiding eye contact. If they’re afraid or feel threatened, they won’t stare. If they’re focused on something without blinking, chances are they’re feeling aggressive. Therefore, one way cats can hold eye contact without signaling you’re about to be attacked is to blink.

[...]

While it may not exactly be an expression of love, it is likely a sign of contentment. If a cat is feeling comfortable around a human, closing its eyes is an indication it doesn’t need to monitor you as a possible threat.

It is also advised to blink while staring at your cat’s eyes, as staring at the cat without blinking could be perceived as a threat by the feline.

Good to know!

(Image Credit: Chikilino/ Pixabay)

V1 Analytics gives us a map visualization of the top trending Google searches, state-by-state, for every day from the beginning of 2010 to a couple of weeks ago. It's mesmerizing to see what everyone suddenly wanted to find out more about, or else what song or TV show they wanted to pull up and enjoy when nothing else was happening. It also appears that our curiosity gets satisfied pretty quickly, which just tells us that the Google machine has all the answers. -via Metafilter

New Technologies and Face Mask Innovations is the title of a project by artist Kit Layfield. Hey, if we're going to wear face masks, they may as well do double duty by providing carbon dioxide to a personal terrarium, right? Not all the designs make quite as much sense, though.



There are quite a few more of these fantastical face masks at Layfield's Instagram page. -via Laughing Squid

No, the cat did not lead them to a hidden treasure worth $50,000. A couple won a $50,000 lottery jackpot while they were buying food for their feline friend. They have been buying food for the cat for three years, and they usually buy scratch-off lottery tickets after getting some cat food. So the cat indirectly led them to the big prize! Now that’s a real lucky cat! 

image via UPI

Around 3,000 years ago, the Babylonians invented the twelve signs of the zodiac, dividing the ecliptic (the sun’s apparent path) into twelve equal parts, with each sign having 30° celestial longitude. In doing so, however, the Babylonians left out a major constellation — Ophiuchus — as incorporating it would have resulted in an irregular division. (The Sun passed at least 13, not 12, Babylonian constellations, but the Babylonians ignored that fact for the sake of their neat pie chart).

Fast forward to 2016, astronomers discovered the very same constellation. And upon discovering this constellation, as well as the fact that the Earth’s axis has already changed, the people over at NASA decided to do the math to somehow fix what the Babylonians did wrong. In other words, NASA did not come up with a new constellation: they were just being factual and mathematical about it. At least that’s how they explain it over at their blog post.

But some people are not happy with the sudden change in the zodiac sign order, with some saying that they won’t listen to what NASA is saying and that they will stick to the sign they previously had. Some embraced their new star sign, while others just laughed it off.

If you’re interested in knowing the new zodiac sign dates, head over at The Sun.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Tauʻolunga/ Wikimedia Commons)

Australia — A team of conservation scientists stepped out of a military helicopter on the east coast of Victoria. Standing on an active fireground, they had their mission in their mind — to evacuate 15-20 bristlebirds to Melbourne Zoo. Rescuing this many bristlebirds “would provide an insurance population of this globally endangered species if their habitat was razed by the approaching fire.”

As climate change grows ever worse, such rescues will be more common. Ours showed how it can be done.

Such a rescue may seem like a lot of effort for a small, plain brown bird. But eastern bristlebirds are important to Australia’s biodiversity.

These days, coastal development has shrunk the eastern bristlebird’s habitat. The birds are feeble flyers, and so populations die out when their habitat patches become too small.

Fewer than 2,500 individuals remain, spread across three locations on Australia’s east coast including a 400-strong population that straddles the Victoria-New South Wales border at Cape Howe. Losing them would be a huge blow to the species’ long term prospects.

This is why the rescue was necessary.

More details about this over at The Conversation.

(Image Credit: JJ Harrison/ Wikimedia Commons)

Drug abuse is a major problem around the world. Organizations and governments try their best to solve this problem, and free a portion of their respective population from suffering under substance use disorder. One of the ways that they do this is by creating rehabilitation programs. But it doesn’t mean that a person who has undergone rehab is already out of the woods, as he could experience drug relapse. But maybe with this new method, we could finally make things easier for the former drug user.

"The most difficult part of treating addiction is to prevent relapse, especially for opioids," explains Xiaoke Chen, an associate professor at Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences and lead for a new study."To prevent relapse, we really need to deal with the withdrawal."

According to Chen, both the reward of the high and the alleviation of agonizing withdrawal symptoms can serve as memory cues that trigger the drug cravings that lead to relapse. Because of this, he and his team have taken a look at drug addiction as a memory problem.

The method, which had been tested among mice, involves erasing drug-associated memories. This method proved to be promising on mice who became dependent on morphine.

More details about this over at Big Think.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Robina Weermeijer/ Unsplash)

Don’t we just love and adore cats so much that we decide to buy them gifts to make them feel more comfortable at home? Unfortunately, they don’t use our gifts that much, and oftentimes they don’t use them at all.

At the end of the day, they are the ones who lord over the house, and we’re merely their servants.

Check out these pictures of cats using something better than your gifts over at Sad and Useless.

Has your cat ever slept on its cat bed?

(Image Credit: Sad And Useless)

In this day and age when many of us now work from home, it would seem that we must resort to this thing that most of us hate — bragging.

…tooting your own horn to your boss and colleagues may be necessary in order to get credit and recognition.

But how do you brag without sounding conceited? Meredith Fineman, author of Brag Better: Master the Art of Fearless Self-Promotion, provides us some tips over at Fast Company. Here are some of them.

When sharing your accomplishments, Fineman recommends using three pillars: proud, loud, and strategic. ”

Being proud is most difficult for some people,” she says. “Acknowledge what you’ve done and be proud of it.”

Being loud about your accomplishments isn’t about volume. It’s about repetition and consistency.

See more tips over at the site.

(Image Credit: cheskapoon/ Pixabay)

Women have worked in lighthouses for as long as there have been lighthouses, usually toiling alongside her husband the lighthouse keeper, who was the one who got paid for it. But there have been quite a few women who were totally in charge of lighthouses, like Harriet Colfax, who worked her lighthouse for more than 40 years, Mary Ryan, who kept a diary of her work and misery, and Ida Lewis, who saved numerous lives.

But most of her counterparts lived and died in obscurity. Lighthousekeeping was one of few jobs available to women in the 18th and 19th centuries, provided they inherited the post from a husband, father, or other male family member. “The lighthouse service thought the easiest thing to do would be to let the widows take over, because they were so familiar with the operation,” says DeWire. The actual job remained the same. “What really struck me was that they immediately took a reduction in pay, because they were women,” she says. They were also not permitted to wear the brass-buttoned lighthouse keeper uniforms, introduced in the 1880s. “That’s why I always called them ‘keepers in skirts.’”

Today, there is only one lighthouse keeper who is a woman. That would be Sally Snowman, who cannot wait to get back to her duties at Boston Light. Read about her life and those of other women lighthouse keepers at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: US Coast Guard)

Marine biologist Karen Osborn just got her hands on a fish with a mouth “full of nasty, big, pointy teeth”. Realizing that this fangtooth was a rare specimen, she decided to document the fish using her camera. When she got the pictures, however, she realized that what she only got were terrible silhouettes. What’s going on?

This wasn’t her first photo shoot with a deep-sea fish, so it couldn’t be operator error. But wait a second, Osborn figured. “I had tried to take pictures of deep-sea fish before and got nothing but these really horrible pictures, where you can't see any detail,” she says. “How is it that I can shine two strobe lights at them and all that light just disappears?”

It disappears because the fangtooth, along with 15 other species that Osborn and her colleagues have found so far, camouflage themselves with “ultra-black” skin, the deep-sea version of Vantablack, the famous human-made material that absorbs almost all the light you shine at it. These fish have evolved a different and devilishly clever way of going ultra-black with incredible efficiency: One species the researchers found absorbs 99.956 percent of the light that hits it, making it nearly as black as Vantablack.

What makes the skins of these sea creatures ultra-black, and why did they evolve like this? Answers over at Wired.

(Image Credit: Karen Osborn/ Smithsonian/ Wired)

According to popular belief, men can safely tolerate more alcohol due to their larger average body size. This is why it is advised that men should limit their alcoholic consumption to two drinks, while women are advised to limit themselves to only one. But increasing evidence suggests that men cannot tolerate more alcohol than women, which means that both genders should limit their alcoholic consumption to just one drink.

The conventional wisdom has been that men can safely tolerate more alcohol than women, possibly due to their larger average body size. But increasing evidence is starting to show that the limits of safe drinking are lower than we’ve assumed—“safe” meaning that it won’t significantly increase the risk of heart disease, cancer, injuries, violence, and other health problems associated with alcohol. Men also tend to suffer the most harm from alcohol-related disorders and have higher rates of binge and chronic drinking.

In keeping with previous recommendations, the committee doesn’t advise people to start drinking because they think it might have health benefits. They also state that there is now evidence to “tighten” up the guidelines for men, and advise both men and women to drink only once a day when they do drink.

More details about this over at Gizmodo.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

At around 10PM on the 8th of July, Cheez Goh stumbled upon a rare scene on her way home: two rats fighting. Unfortunately, Goh was not able to capture the fight, as the rats went their separate ways. But both of them wanted a second round, and so they went back and fought against each other again, and this time, Goh was able to film it. Meanwhile, a cat watches silently from a distance.

“The two rats just gave up and went separate ways,” Cheez told Bored Panda. “One ran away from the camera, one came towards the camera where I was standing. It didn’t seem to notice I was filming the process and ran towards me. I freaked out as it was approaching me, causing a sudden movement. The rat then ran for its life and that’s when the cat saw that the rat was running and charged towards it. However, the cat missed because the rat went under the drain. The rat was really fast!”

I hope those rats are in good terms now.

(Image Credit: Cheez Goh/ Facebook)