I often hear skeptical voices say that today's youth don't have what it takes to thrive in a changing, demanding world. But then I read uplifting stories like this one in the New York Post. Teenagers are taking advantage of masking requirements to disguise themselves as old geezers and buy alcoholic beverages:
The “prank” has taken social-media platform TikTok by storm, with videos of users bedecked as boozehound bubbies — seemingly victorious, bottles in hand — racking up millions of views. [...]
“PSA: use ur fakes as much as possible bc if you wear a mask they can’t see ur whole face lol,” one adolescent posted to her not-of-legal-age brethren.
“Now that we have to wear masks, this is the best time to buy alcohol with a fake ID since the early 80’s . . .” standup comedian Jason Lawhead posted on Twitter.
Toy maker extraordinaire Steve Casino has made, for some happy child, a pull toy that shows the duel between the Beatrix and Gogo in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. Let us hope that it is only the first in a line of toys that will educate young children about Quentin Tarantino's cultural legacy. I'd love to have some toy cars with which to re-enact the car chase scene from Death Proof.
Back in March, Sir Patrick Stewart posted something on Instagram. It was a video of him reading Shakespeare’s sonnet, and the post quickly went viral. Delighted by the response to his video, Stewart decided to post another video the next day, this time reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1.
"When I was a child in the 1940s, my mother would cut up slices of fruit for me (there wasn't much) and as she put it in front of me she would say, 'An apple a day keeps the doctor away,'" tweeted Stewart. "How about, 'A sonnet a day keeps the doctor away?' So, here we go: Sonnet 1."
Ever since then, the legendary actor has been posting videos of himself reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, and just a few days ago he managed to work his way up to Sonnet 80, which was pretty significant to him, because the next day (July 13) would be his 80th birthday.
The rest of his readings can be found on his Twitter feed, along with the glorious news that he's started work on a memoir.
For 200 years, scientists have been studying how the trapping mechanism of venus flytraps work. It is now known today that touching trigger hairs twice within 30 seconds would make the trap snap in an instant. New research from the University of Zurich (UZH) and ETH Zurich, however, found another way that could make the trap snap immediately: by touching it slowly.
"Contrary to popular belief, slowly touching a trigger hair only once can also cause two signals and thus lead to the snapping of the trap," says co-last author Ueli Grossniklaus, director of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UZH.
Scientists theorize that this happens to catch slow-moving larvae and snails.
Cattle farts (and burps) put methane into the atmosphere. And since there are more than 900 millions cows on earth right now, that’s a significant contributor to climate change. Burger King is all for the beef industry, but they are taking baby steps, so to speak, to reduce cows’ methane production by giving them a new diet incorporating lemongrass. You can read more about the research here. Burger King is offering burgers made from cows fed the new diet in select cities now. The rest of us can just enjoy the cow fart song. -via The Takeout
A post shared by Simon Duhamel (@simonduhamel) on Jul 11, 2020 at 5:06pm PDT
For an ad campaign for McDonald's, photographer Simon Duhamel shot arrangements of household goods in the back of a moving truck. From the right angle, they look like iconic McDonald's products.
People have complex relationships with one another. But when compared to relationships between penguins, human relationships would seem much simpler. It can be said that penguin relationships are more dramatic, more intriguing, and more colorful.
Two aquariums in Japan, Kyoto Aquarium and Sumida Aquarium, keep obsessive tabs on their penguins and maintain an updated flowchart that visualizes all their penguin drama.
As Kyoto-based researcher Oliver Jia points out, penguin drama can include serious crushes and heartbreaks but also adultery and egg-stealing. And these Japanese aquariums have it all charted in a flowchart that can be studied for hours.
But how do these aquariums identify the couples and the heartbroken ones?
According to the aquarium’s caretakers, the penguin’s romantic escapades are fairly easy to observe. For example, wing-flapping is a sign of affection and couples can be seen grooming each other. Penguins who are getting over a break-up will often refuse to eat.
Some jigsaw puzzles focus on difficulty. Others focus on giving the player a unique experience. This jigsaw puzzle goes right in between these two categories. The puzzle, called “Herding Cats”, is composed of 224 puzzle pieces which depict felines “as they lounge, stretch out their paws, and jump in the air” that, when gathered together in the correct order, forms one colorful cat.
A few years ago, Dylan Walters of Pensacola, Florida, began experimenting with epoxy molding. He's developed a specialized skill within this carpentry field: crafting the resin so that it looks like waves crashing on beaches. This particular table uses a sheet of parota wood. I'm ready to dive into the water.
Humanity being as it is, it is inevitable that, at some point, one person will murder another in space. Legally speaking, how will that criminal case be adjudicated? Popular author Sam Kean writes in Slate that one possible precedent may be a 1970 murder perpetrated by one scientist upon another in a temporary Arctic research station. It all began when Mario Escamilla shot Bennie Lightsy, his boss, over a bottle of raisin wine. The locations of the murder was unusual:
Escamilla worked on T-3, also known as Fletcher’s ice island, a Manhattan-size hunk of ice that at the time was floating north of Canada in the Arctic Ocean, roughly 350 miles from the North Pole. T-3 had been occupied off and on since the 1950s, and 19 scientists and technicians were stationed there during the summer of 1970, studying ocean currents and wind and weather patterns.
Which nation had legal jurisdiction? It was unclear:
T-3 was technically run by the U.S. Air Force, but Escamilla was a civilian, so they couldn’t court-martial him. The nearest land mass was Canada, but T-3 lay well outside Canada’s territorial waters, so it had no jurisdiction there. Perhaps the United States could have claimed the ice island—similar to the many uninhabited “Guano Islands” full of rich, natural fertilizer that the U.S. government seized during the 1800s. But unlike the Guano Islands, T-3 was temporary—it would melt away in the 1980s—so under international law, no nation could claim it. Perhaps the law of the sea applied? After all, T-3 was in some sense the literal high seas, being high-latitude frozen seawater. Except, the law of the sea applies only to navigable areas, and T-3 wasn’t navigable.
A few days later, US Marshals arrested Escamilla and brought him back to the United States. Federal prosecutors in Virginia charged him, which was legally messy:
First, there was the question of whether the government even had the right to try Escamilla, given T-3’s legal limbo. Second, there was the question of venue. Technically, the marshals and Escamilla had landed in Greenland first on the trip back home, so according to international law, he should have been tried there. The U.S. government simply ignored this. Federal prosecutors also attempted to charge Escamilla under special maritime law for crimes committed on vessels, despite the fact that T-3 wasn’t a “vessel” in any real sense.
After an initial conviction and then appeals, Escamilla ultimately went free. But the case, Kean (who is not an attorney, I should note) argues, may suggest how complicated resolving space crimes could become:
About the only existing law governing space is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. But the treaty focuses almost entirely on what nation-states can and cannot do (e.g., deploy nuclear bombs, seize celestial bodies). It’s virtually silent on what private companies or individuals can do—which suddenly seems like a glaring loophole given the rise of private space companies like SpaceX, which recently transported its first astronauts to the International Space Station. These private vessels are far murkier in a legal sense. [...] So consider this scenario: a German woman poisons a Congolese man on a spaceship owned by a Chinese-Belgian conglomerate that’s headquartered in Luxembourg. Who the hell’s in charge then?
A 31-year-old fugitive fled from the authorities and hid in the Black Forest, a vast and forested mountain range in Germany. The German police launched a huge manhunt to catch Yves Etienne Rausch who disarmed four officers in broad daylight, as RT News detailed:
The suspect is “violent and armed with several firearms,” police in the southwestern German state of Baden Wuertemberg were warning, urging people in the town of Oppenau, not far from the border with France, to stay at home. People were also being urged to avoid forest areas as well as not to take any hitchhikers in the area, under any circumstances.
All their efforts during more than 24 hours have, however, been in vain. The fugitive, quickly dubbed ‘forest Rambo’ by some media, has vanished without a trace in the Black Forest – a large, forested mountain range stretching along Germany’s border with France.
Rausch had “no permanent” residence in the area, according to police. The German media reported he’d been evicted from an apartment for not paying his rent about a year ago and was actually homeless ever since. He also reportedly lived in a hut on the forest edge for weeks and, apparently, had enough time to study the terrain.
Are you a big fan of the Harry Potter franchise? Time to test your inner Potterhead by taking the Harry Potter screenshot test! Guess the movie where the screenshots came from here. Did you get a perfect score?
It’s not a big surprise that companies take inspiration from their rivals, but to realize that most features in Apple and Android smartphones are similar is a slight surprise! Both smartphones advertise their operating systems as different from one another in terms of features and functionality, but it’s actually the opposite. Check out the list of similarities by Popular Science here.
Buzzfeed Multiplayer’s Kelsey Impicciche is known for her Sims videos, where she does challenges in the game. Impicciche takes the challenge to her kitchen as she tries to cook Baked Alaska featured in the game. Will she succeed?
If a kid encountered a thrill ride called Rough Riders today, she'd probably think it was ride on a rough track. That wasn't why the roller coaster that debuted at Coney Island in 1907 was named that. It was a tribute to the current president, Theodore Roosevelt, who led the unit called the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War.
Beyond the creative theme, the ride also offered guests an exciting format. Unlike most other Coney Island coasters, which were propelled by gravity, this one ran on an electric third rail—much like a subway car. “Conductors” were assigned to each train, and they had control over how fast the cars moved over inclines and around curves.
As it turned out, technology invented to safely transport the public wasn’t the best fit for an amusement park. Because the cars had to be operated manually by park employees, there was no way to regulate how fast they went. Many operators pushed the ride vehicles to their limits; instead of slowing down on drops and sharp turns, they often went ahead at full speed.
