Have you ever wondered what things look like inside your car tire as you drive your car to places? If yes, then YouTuber Warped Perception has a treat for you: he shows you just that by putting a GoPro inside a car tire and then driving the car around. He found out how the tire adapts to the road’s imperfections, as well as what happens inside when you drive slowly, quickly, and when you hit turns.
Via The Awesomer
(Video Credit: Warped Perception/ YouTube)
Located near the brainstem and sitting under the cortex in the hindbrain is one of the more versatile parts of the brain: the cerebellum. Despite its name, which means “little brain” in Latin, it contributes much in the brain and in the human body — “to our five senses as well as pain, movements, thought, and emotion.” This study published this week in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) sheds more light on the said part of the brain.
Until now, the cerebellum was thought to be involved mainly in basic functions like movement, but its expansion over time and its new inputs from cortical areas involved in cognition suggest that it can also process advanced concepts like mathematical equations.
Learn more about this study over at MedicalXpress.
(Image Credit: Dr. Johannes Sobotta/ Wikimedia Commons)
Turkish artist Garip Ay shows us the art of ecru, or paper marbling. He paints on top of water, where the paint can be manipulated before transferring the work to a stable surface such as paper. His works are not just patterns or abstract art, but also representative pictures, and often a combination of all those. Subtitled in English. -via Twisted Sifter
This story is about penises, but it's also about science itself. Science is supposed to be the study of the world through observation and experiment. But who is doing those observations? And how important is the truth of those observations to the observer?
For years, researchers asked men to self-report the length of their erect penises by measuring along the top from the abdomen to the tip, and over that time, men consistently informed researchers that their members ranged from roughly 6.1 to 6.5 inches.
Can you see the problem with this procedure? Asking men to accurately report the size of their penises is like trying to eclipse the speed of light in a junker car: it's not gonna happen.
Whether because of measurement error, respondent selection bias (only men with larger penises want to participate in research), or good old fashioned misreporting (i.e. lying), it seems that studies employing self-report to find the length of the average erect penis have given us the wrong answer for decades.
Turns out the real average penis is shorter, which raises the issue of all those average men who read the science and think they are below average. Knowing how important that number is, it's no wonder guys are spending way too much money on sketchy enhancement devices and supplements. Find out the real average penis size and the research behind it at Real Clear Science.
(Image credit: victorgrigas)
Aliens in TV shows and movies often have the same size and shape as human beings, which correlates somewhat with the production's budget. But in the real universe, we have no idea what alien life would look like, even intelligent life. What if intelligent life already exists, but those beings are so different from us that we can't even recognize that they exist, much less what they are like? They may know we exist, but why would they bother to communicate with us if we are no more important to them than insects are to us? Kurzgesagt gives us some food for thought.
Sisyphus Squirrel > Pizza Rat pic.twitter.com/XJUNE86GtI
— Nover (@YoungNobler) August 2, 2020
The squirrel can never hope to run down along the up-rolling escalator, and so Twitter user Nover has appropriately dubbed him "Sisyphus Squirrel." He was last spotted at 55 Water Street in Manhattan.
-via Nag on the Lake
What's stopping you from firing up your time machine and traveling back in time to alter the past so that you benefit your current self? Well, you're probably worried about the Butterfly Effect, which is the concern among time travelers that they, through some small, unintended action, may set in motion a cascade of events with major negative consequences.
Good news, everyone! Quantum physicists (quantum physics is like physics, only more so) at Los Alamos National Laboratory say that there's nothing to worry about:
Using a quantum computer to simulate time travel, researchers have demonstrated that, in the quantum realm, there is no “butterfly effect.” In the research, information—qubits, or quantum bits—“time travel” into the simulated past. One of them is then strongly damaged, like stepping on a butterfly, metaphorically speaking. Surprisingly, when all qubits return to the “present,” they appear largely unaltered, as if reality is self-healing.
“On a quantum computer, there is no problem simulating opposite-in-time evolution, or simulating running a process backwards into the past,” said Nikolai Sinitsyn, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and coauthor of the paper with Bin Yan, a post doc in the Center for Nonlinear Studies, also at Los Alamos. “So we can actually see what happens with a complex quantum world if we travel back in time, add small damage, and return. We found that our world survives, which means there’s no butterfly effect in quantum mechanics.”
So what are you waiting for? Let's grab the keys to the DeLorean.
-via Instapundit | Image: Universal Pictures
Being a soldier deployed in World War II, or any war at that, is one of the most stressful things a man can experience. Not only is he far from his family, he also is uncertain if he will return home from the battlefield alive. To keep themselves close to the people they left as they went to the battlefield, soldiers back in those days would put pictures of their families or sweethearts on clear grips. These grips would then be known as “sweetheart grips”.
(Image Credit: u/hwesty/ Reddit)
One of the most difficult things to do today is trying to socially distance yourself from other people, especially in large gatherings or places that are filled with people. It is not impossible, however; every person in that place just has to cooperate.
One especially striking example of this has come from those starting the annual Muslim Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca.
[...]
This year, taking social distancing measures into account, the event was downsized by Saudi officials to allow a limited number of people to the event — last year saw 2.5 million attend, while this year's number is 10,000, and they must be already living in Saudi Arabia. According to the Washington Post, people over 50 or those with terminal illnesses were not allowed to attend.
Photos from Mecca's Grand Mosque are something to behold, a true snapshot of this challenging time we're in.
Check out the photos over at Mashable.
(Image Credit: Mashable)
Ranking the cuisine of various countries is a mission fraught with danger, as food is a matter of both national pride and personal opinion. And it really doesn't matter, as long as you can get something good to eat. But Uproxx still published a top ten list, based on an online survey of 450,000 people willing to rank world cuisines. The descriptions are based heavily on street food, which tells us what you might expect to see if you ever get to travel to those nations. But even if you can't travel, a lot of the dishes mentioned are available in US cities. Check out the top ten and an overview of each nation's food at Uproxx.
In Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree, a tree gives its all to a boy it loves, expecting nothing in return. While you admire the tree for its unconditional love, you also feel sorry for it, and the boy comes across as a real ass.
Playwright Topher Payne gives us a different ending for the book, one in which the tree actually teaches the boy to become a better person. They are both better off for the tree's efforts, and so is the world around them. You can read it by clicking on the image here.
It's part of Payne's series called Topher Fixed It, which also includes a new ending for Rainbow Fish. -via Digg
We’ve had our fair share of clickbait articles these past few months, and most of us don’t believe news is true if it has a sketchy title. Intrigued? Yes, but is it believable? Highly unlikely. It’s a good way to get clicks though. However, some stories are unexpectedly true even when they are so bizarre. For example, would you believe a strip club in Miami sold a stolen Russian military submarine to a Columbian drug cartel? No? Unfortunately, it’s true, as Cracked details:
Together with a part-time Cuban spy and full-time cocaine trafficker named Nelson Yester-Garrido, they hit on a brilliant plan: The Soviet Union had just broken up and corrupt Russian military officers were selling Red Army equipment cheap. It was a golden period for arms dealers, when you couldn't even walk down the street in Moscow without a guy in a trenchcoat offering to sell you a mechanized infantry division, with a cybernetic bomb-sniffing dolphin thrown in to seal the deal. Tarzan suggested using his Russian connections to obtain military hardware for cocaine traffickers. Which is how Porky's, the strip club with the dildo car, wound up under investigation for selling a Soviet military submarine to the Medellin Cartel.
Check out more unbelievably true crime stories here.
image via Cracked
Would you quit a well-paying job, in the middle of a pandemic, in order to find something that would make you feel more fulfilled? Some feel free to do so just to have more meaning to their life than working at a desk for hours. Bryan Schatz and Patrick Hutchison did exactly that. They were two people with arguably good careers, but felt caged and overwhelmed by the same, tiring routine brought by their jobs, so they tried out something different, as Outside detailed:
We laid out our plan, which was: we didn’t really have a plan. We’d build a cabin for sure, but whether we’d keep it or rent it or sell it wasn’t clear. We hadn’t actually priced anything out, but we figured we could get it done for about $20,000, maybe less. We’d pool our money saved from working and go in on it together, splitting up the investment equally. Dan couldn’t quit his job—he was building a career in the maritime industry in Seattle, getting hours toward his captain’s license—but he’d help out on weekends when he could.
Three weeks later, we found a quarter-acre of raw land near Pat’s tiny off-grid in the Cascades. It was a sloping meadow of ferns a short walk from the Skykomish River, festooned with mature Douglas fir, big leaf maple, and cedar. We put down an impossibly low offer of $3,000, certain the sellers wouldn’t take it seriously. If they accepted, we’d consider it a sign from the universe.
They accepted almost immediately. It was early spring.
Check out the full piece here.
image via Outside
A lot of industries, establishments, and sports are now forced to operate at a minimum, or not operate at all. For professional baseball, some players who are not on the top rosters aren’t able to play due to a lot of games being cancelled. Minor league players don’t have the chance to play and further hone their skills this year, and some believe that players may be less talented next year because of the cancellations. FiveThirtyEight compared the performance of players who missed a full season to players who were called to serve during WWII:
We don’t have a huge sample to look at. There were 98 players who lost at least one full season to military service between 1939 and 1946. Of that group, there were 30 hitters to reach 150 plate appearances in their first year before service and also in their first season back. There were 15 pitchers to total at least 70 innings in their last year before WWII participation and in their first year playing after the war. All of those players returned in either the 1945, 1946 or 1947 MLB seasons. (There were 343 total MLB players who played in 1944 and 1945, so many returnees were facing players who did not miss time in previous seasons).
The hitters suffered some performance decline, relative to the league average. As a group, their OPS+ — which adjusts for the run-scoring environment and ballpark factors — declined by 5.2 percent, from an average of 118.1 pre-service to 111.9 in their first season back. But there were also cases like that of Ted Williams, who missed his age-24, 25 and 26 seasons and returned in 1946 to win the AL MVP award. Perhaps there was some aging effect in the group, but the average age of players in their return was 30.1 years, which likely placed near their prime performance years.
image via FiveThirtyEight
It was a technical glitch, but hey, at least we can say that Mickey Mouse signed checks to over 200 people in Rhode Island! These people received tax refund checks signed by none other than Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. Rhode Island officials have clarified that the checks signed with the famous duo’s signature was a technical glitch, and officials have mailed new checks signed by the right people.
image via TMZ
