We see dogs lend their talents towards rescue missions and police operations, but did you know that they can also help dig up archaeological artifacts? Archaeologist Vedrana Glavaš from the University of Zadar in Croatia partnered up with dog trainer Andrea Pintar to uncover parts of a 3,000-year-old hill fort and necropolis, as The Atlantic details: 

 She teamed up with dog trainer Andrea Pintar, whose company Canine Caffe offers specialized “cadaver” dogs that have helped sniff out cold cases for police and find mass graves for local officials.

“Some of the police cases Andrea has worked on are 30 years old,” explains Glavaš. “We both wondered how far back in time her dogs could smell.” What they did not expect was that the dogs would lead them to remains that had been buried in the eighth century B.C.

image via The Atlantic

Look, we’re halfway through 2020 and we can all admit that this year hasn’t been really great for us. With the rising conflicts around the globe, also with the current pandemic forcing us to stay at home for our safety, news and trends tend to be a bit depressing. It seems that there is one trend that’s happier than most: the comeback of drive-in movie theaters. Vogue has more details: 

the drive-in has returned with a force over the last few months, popping up outside a diner in Astoria, on the waterfront in Greenpoint, and attracting a crush of new patrons in states like Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where a few theatres have remained in operation all along. (Over the decades, the format had fallen out of favor for a few different reasons; among them the costs associated with projecting digital film, and the rise of mall culture—which allowed patrons to shop, eat, and catch a movie all in the same place.) Embracing the trend, Tribeca Enterprises announced a new “Tribeca Drive-In” series, rolling out across venues in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, and Arlington, Texas over the next month. (A portion of the programming’s proceeds will go to Black Lives Matter.) “The Tribeca Drive-In series is a tribute to movies and the shared experience of watching them, even if from our cars,” Tribeca Enterprises co-founder Robert DeNiro said in a statement.

image via Vogue

Distilleries have stopped their productions of alcoholic beverages to produce another alcohol that is much more needed in this pressing time. Christmas City Spirits in Bethlehem, Pa., responded to St. Luke’s University Health iNetwork, which faced a shortage of hand sanitizer by producing 27 gallons and giving it to the hospital. The company turned its first batch of rum into a 160-proof cleaning solution, as The Washington Post details: 

Over the next three months, the boutique distillery suspended production of all alcohol and produced approximately 800 gallons of hand sanitizer for organizations, charities and workers risking their lives to combat the virus.

According to the Distilled Spirits Council, 831 distilleries across the nation have made hand sanitizer for local communities. Only one distillery, however, has the distinction of producing it strictly for donation. Not a single one of the 4,000 four-ounce bottles of Christmas City Spirits’ hand sanitizer, aptly named “Corona Bullet,” was sold for profit.

“We just felt like we were doing the right thing at the right time,” said Brett Biggs, one of the distillery’s four co-owners.

image via The Washington Post

One thing about furloughs and isolation and social distancing, it gives creative people plenty of time for those off-the-wall projects they'd never thought they'd get around to. Even a dumb idea has plenty of time to blossom, like ranking movies that have little in common besides a few title words. K. Thor Jensen did it.  

One night, I was thinking about how weird it was to wander the empty streets during the pandemic, which made me think about the 1984 post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie Night of the Comet, which made me think of other movies that use “Night of the” in the title. Then some guy on Twitter said I should rank them. I said I would.

This was a foolish choice. There are a lot of movies that use “Night of the” in the title, even if you cut out short films and TV movies. But hey, I’m in lockdown.

He found 82 such movies! Of course, you thought of Night of the Living Dead, and probably Night of the Lepus, but have you ever heard of Night of the Wererooster? It came in dead last. In fact, if you were to throw a random word out, there has probably been a movie named Night of the (Random Word). They include horror, comedies, drama, porn, and science fiction. Try to guess the top ones and then see the clip-filled list at Polygon. -via Metafilter

Decades ago, America first dreamed of sending humans to other places in space. German-American rocket engineer Wernher von Braun was one man who had that dream. He pictured sending dozens of people to Mars via a huge spacecraft.

He envisioned a winged craft soaring through the Red Planet’s atmosphere, landing gently on the rust-colored surface. And though earthlings quickly learned that traveling to another planet isn’t so easy, the fantasy of flying on Mars never died.

It could be said that von Braun was very dedicated, if not obsessed, with his dream of sending many people to space. With help from his friend Willy Ley, von Braun was able to publish his concepts, with many of them becoming a reality throughout the years. Clearly, he was a visionary, and it seems that his dream is one step closer towards reality.

On July 22, NASA plans to launch its Mars Perseverance rover. But there’s also a robotic hitchhiker onboard; this small, solar-powered helicopter, named Ingenuity, is on a mission totally independent from the rover. While Perseverance searches for signs of alien life, Ingenuity will prove it’s possible to fly in Mars’ thin atmosphere. The data it gathers will help engineers build even larger helicopter drones for the Red Planet. And if it works, the long-term impact could be a game changer for Mars exploration.

Learn more about this solar-powered helicopter over at Discover Magazine.

(Image Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/ YouTube)

With their very sharp ears, bats can handle themselves pretty well and look for food even in the pitch-black darkness. By clearly distinguishing one echo from another, they are able to navigate through the night. But how do they do it? Scientists from Brown University may have figured it out. They refer to it as frequency hopping, which involves focusing on the echoes’ lowest frequencies.

And it has potential, neuroscientist James Simmons and colleagues suggest in a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“By incorporating this feature into an existing auditory model of FM biosonar, the model can reject echoes that lack the lowest frequencies in the most recent broadcast, thus suppressing echoes of an earlier broadcast that has slightly higher low-end frequencies,” they write.

Bats locate objects by emitting ultrasonic sounds called broadcasts, which contain frequencies ranging from 25 kHz to 110 kHz, and listening to the returning echoes.

Occasionally, an initial broadcast elicits a long-delay echo reflected from a distant object, and a closely successive broadcast triggers a short-delay echo from a nearby object. They reach the bat’s ears at about the same time, but the bat deals with the potential ambiguity in matching the echo to the correct broadcast.

It’s just amazing how bats can do this quickly.

More details about this study over at Cosmos Magazine.

(Image Credit: BatLab/ Cosmos Magazine)

In the late 1960s, young Alex Heard was at a family reunion, and there he would meet someone cranking up a strange machine. It was an ice cream maker, “the kind that looks like a big wooden bucket with a metal handle on top.”

At the reunion, I was fascinated by this gizmo, and I soon pitched in and did a long session of cranking, which was hard work. I didn’t mind. It was fun, and I wanted to share in the cheers that I figured would rain down when we were done.

Which is exactly what happened. The ice cream we produced was a bit soupy but delicious. Somebody suggested I put syrupy sliced yellow peaches on mine. I did. That made it even better.

This might have been what inspired him to make his own ice cream at home, and, decades later, he still does it, but now with his own ice cream maker at home.

Now, he has written a simple guide on how to make delicious ice cream at your own home. Check out his guide over at Outside Online.

Have you made your own ice cream before?

(Image Credit: Counselling/ Pixabay)

He was known for his phenomenal music in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, as well as his other magnificent musical works on hundreds of other films and television productions. His name: Ennio Morricone. While he may have passed away, his legacy — his compositions — will continue to live on.

Morricone died Monday in Rome at the age of 91. The Italian cultural ministry confirmed his death in a statement that called him "a musician of refined skill who with his melodies has been able to excite and make the whole world dream."

When Morricone wrote a score for a Western, he used sneaky tricks to make those evocative sounds, like whistles, animal calls, creaks, gunshots and groans…

Know more about Morricone and his life over at NPR.

(Image Credit: Georges Biard/ Wikimedia Commons)

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it,” said Bill Gates once. That realization couldn’t have been more true: lazy people will always find an easy way, whether in the workplace, their own homes and lawns.

Check out this video of a man who probably got so tired of mowing his lawn that he decided to attach it on his SUV.

I don’t know if I should be happy or angry about this. But one thing’s for sure: whoever’s driving that car is indeed innovative.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

Multiplying a dog’s age by 7 is a common method used to know how old a dog is based on human years. This, however, is an inaccurate method. Now, scientists have developed a new molecular tool, which, according to them, can tell a more accurate picture of a dog’s age in human years. The tool, which they describe as an “epigenetic clock”, drills into the rate of molecular changes in the DNA.

The work was carried out by scientists at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, who worked with genome experts to examine blood samples taken from 105 Labrador retrievers, ranging in age from a few weeks to 16 years old.

[...]

Epigenetics has emerged as a valuable tool for tracking the physiological age of humans, and the UCSD team set out to explore its potential in doing the same for canines. The analysis of the 105 Labradors enabled them to tease out patterns of methylation change that revealed a truer picture of their [physiological] age.

[...]

One limitation of the research, as the scientists note, is that it was focused on one breed of dog, something they plan to expand on through further work. They hope that the formula could become a valuable tool for veterinarians as a way of offering improved diagnostics for dogs and treatment plans.

More details about this study over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: Chiemsee2016/ Pixabay)

View this post on Instagram

fan bra concept

A post shared by nm (@nicolemclaughlin) on Jul 7, 2020 at 9:01am PDT

Need to stay cool this summer? I'm a fan of Nicole McLaughlin's product idea. Her functional fan bra is adjustable so that you can tilt the rotors directly at your face.

If you're not in a hot climate, then you might prefer McLaughlin's croissant bra, juicebox bra, cleaning wipes bra, or her sandwich bra.

Screen Junkies continues its series about summer blockbusters with a look at the Indiana Jones trilogy. Some might argue that there are four Indiana Jones movies, while others would tell them they are wrong. Anyway, in this video, the narrator tells us about three great films: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, while we get to see the best action scenes from each of them. That in itself is worth a watch!

Who knew that you burned blueberry bushes in the spring to spur yield? The process was developed by the Passamaquoddy people of Maine long before Europeans arrived, and is still in use, although most commercial growers have mechanized the process. Not Nicolas Lindholm of Blue Hill Berry Company. He is among the few growers who burn the fields by hand, using a crew of volunteers, to produce organic blueberries.  

As Lindholm explains, the 12-14 inch tall blueberry bush we see above ground is only about one-third of the actual plant. Underground is a network of rhizomes—storage houses of energy and food—which work alongside certain strains of fungus to extract what few nutrients subside in the gravelly, acidic Maine soil. “There’s this whole underground world we can’t see, and burning everything aboveground helps enrich the whole thing.” In Lindholm’s case, burning also precludes the use of pesticides and herbicides he’d otherwise need to control pests and competing plant life.

Both hand- and mechanized burning preserve energy within the rhizomes of wild blueberry plants and produce higher yields the following year, but the ease of mechanized burners—often affixed to the back of a tractor—comes at a cost. “The oil that industrial growers use burns at a higher temperature that destroys a lot more of the duff layer,” says Lindholm, referring to the top layer of soil made of decomposed leaves and other organic material. A vast majority of growers today (Lindholm estimates more than 90 percent), including the Passamaquoddy themselves, burn in this fashion. Lindholm, on the other hand, spreads locally sourced straw over his fields to burn. By burning at a lower temperature, the straw protects a crucial soil layer while minimizing Lindholm’s ecological footprint.

Read about the difficult but rewarding process of growing blueberries in the traditional manner at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Greta Rybus)

For those who are planning to homeschool their kids, CNN has listed 9 educational documentaries for different subject areas. However, these are also good considerations for adults!

Their list includes Spellbound, He Named Me Malala, Jane, Apollo 11, Underwater Dreams, Chasing Coral, Elephant, Babies, and Elián.

What are your favorite educational movies and documentaries?

Image Credit: Evert F. Baumgardner via Wikimedia Commons

View this post on Instagram

Having to be productive after Sunday funday 👈🏻

A post shared by Bacon (@thebaconator) on Jul 30, 2018 at 7:45am PDT

We've read about a cat that has a sad face as an illusion. Now, here's a dog with RCF (Resting Concerned Face)... and it's not an illusion!

Part Pekingese, Dachshund, and Chihuahua, Old Man Bacon (complete with a white beard) has an Instagram account that is chock-full of him looking concerned and confused—like he’s just come to the realization that something has gone horribly awry. (Or, like the Jean Ralphio meme, he’s just realized that he’s taken on too much responsibility.) If you’re a chronic over-thinker or a worry wart, Bacon is bound to be your spirit animal.

View this post on Instagram

It wasn’t me! I did not eat dirt in the backyard!

A post shared by Bacon (@thebaconator) on Aug 8, 2018 at 11:33am PDT

Don't worry, though! He's a happy dog despite looking worried all the time. Here's a proof:

View this post on Instagram

Having a sleep over with a puppy has got me like 👅

A post shared by Bacon (@thebaconator) on Jan 9, 2018 at 10:48am PST

Image Credit: thebaconator via Instagram