It seems that many people in the UK have decided to learn a new hobby while on lockdown, as sales of musical instruments and equipment in the country have increased by 80 percent between April and June.

According to Gear4Music’s chief exec Andrew Wass, electric and acoustic guitar starter packs were a go-to for many people looking to pick up a new instrument. And electric pianos and keyboards were also right up there in terms of instruments people chose…

Speaking to BBC, Wass pointed out that people over lockdown seemed keen to have a hobby “they can get into”.

“Maybe they played music at school and have found themselves indoors and decided to come back to it,” he said.

Knowing that music has great benefits to one’s mental health, I can see why people started to learn or get back to music in these challenging times.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: FirmBee/ Pixabay)

People in both the United States and the United Kingdom generally speak English, but there are plenty of words whose definitions have changed on one side of the pond or the other. If you are going to communicate with someone who speaks a different dialect than what you are used to, it would help to know which words may be confusing. Here are a few examples.  

3. Pants

It’s fine for a man to wander outside in America wearing nothing but pants. In Britain? Not so much. In the U.S., pants go on top of underpants or underwear, which are called pants in the UK. Brits wear trousers over pants.

4. Jumper

If you’re an American who read the British version of the Harry Potter series, you probably wondered why all the boys so often wore jumpers. In the UK, a jumper is a sweater, not a sleeveless dress that goes over a blouse (that’s a pinafore).

The list at Mental Floss covers more than just clothing, but it doesn't explain why a man named Randy should go by Randall when visiting Britain, nor exactly which body part a fanny is. But it will tell you something you probably don't already know.

James Defty salvaged an engine nacelle from a Vickers VC10 operated by the Royal Air Force. He converted it into a camping trailer.

A strange 12th-century incident occurred in what is now Germany that I had never heard before, and might pique your interest.

The Erfurt latrine disaster was an event that occurred in Erfurt, Duchy of Thuringia in 1184. A number of nobles from across the Holy Roman Empire were meeting in a room at the Church of St. Peter, when their combined weight caused the floor to collapse into the latrine beneath the cellar and led to dozens of nobles drowning in liquid excrement. At least 60 people died in the accident.[1]

Now, we can assume that many of those 60 people died from injuries incurred in the fall, but drowning in a latrine has to be one of the worst ways to go. Read more about this tragedy at Wikipedia. And then be thankful for modern building codes and sanitary plumbing.  -via reddit

(Image credit: GFreihalter)

Neatorama readers are familiar with Colma, the town built as a graveyard to store San Francisco's dead when the city ran out of room around 1900. The same thing happened even earlier in London. Even though Europe's burial practices included exhuming the dead so that graves could be used again, there was a limit to how many could be interred at once. London decided to solve the problem by opening a huge graveyard outside the city.    

As a result a proposal was drawn up to use the emerging technology of mechanised transport to resolve the crisis. The scheme entailed buying a single very large tract of land around 23 miles from London to be called  the London Necropolis (now Brookwood Cemetery). At this distance, the land would be far beyond the maximum projected size of the city's growth. If the practice of only burying a single family in each grave were abandoned and the traditional practice for pauper burials of ten burials per grave were adopted, the site was capable of accommodating 28,500,000 bodies. Even with the prohibition of mass graves it would take over 350 years to fill a single layer of this monstrous cemetery!

Using parts of the existing London and South Western Railway, trains could ship bodies and mourners from London to the site easily and cheaply. Its founders envisaged dedicated coffin trains, each carrying 50–60 bodies, travelling from London to the new Necropolis in the early morning or late at night, and the coffins being stored on the cemetery site until the time of the funeral. Mourners would then be carried to the appropriate part of the cemetery by a dedicated passenger train during the day.

The scheme found widespread support, although the Bishop of London considered it inappropriate that the families of people from very different backgrounds would potentially have to share a train, and felt that it demeaned the dignity of the deceased for the bodies of respectable members of the community to be carried on a train also carrying the bodies and relatives of those who had led immoral lives.

The new cemetery opened in 1854. Funerals and transport varied in price depending on one's station in life. Read about the rise and fall of London's Necropolis Railway at  HistoryASM. -via Strange Company

With no humans visiting the zoo to keep them occupied, staff at the Newquay Zoo in Cornwall, England had been looking for ways to keep their resident penguins entertained. Thankfully, a patron donated a bubble machine to the zoo, and the zoo staff used the device wisely.

Penguin caretaker Dan Trevelyan said the bubbles help to keep the penguins’s predatory reflexes sharp.

“In the wild, these guys are marine predators who are very sensitive to objects and movement,” said Trevelyan. “The bubble machine is fantastic, as all the movement and new shapes and colors really stimulate these guys. They have a great time chasing them around. And all these donations are really appreciated.”

The bubbles, which cause no harm to the animals, have in the past also proved popular with the Zoo’s squirrel monkeys and Sulawesi crested macaques.

Wholesome!

(Image Credit: SWNS/ Good News Network)

Back in March, toilet paper suddenly disappeared from stores. The demand skyrocketed as the US locked down against the pandemic. Business Insider explains why that happened, and how TP companies responded to try to meet the demand. -via Damn Interesting

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tamara (@toucheconomy) on Jun 15, 2020 at 7:42am PDT

Photographer and designer Tamara invents new uses for common objects, including her braided pigtails. They're ideal for holding small items, such as earbuds and eating utensils, so that she can keep her hands free.

Batman vs. Predator is a three-part comic series written by Dave Gibbons and illustrated by Andy and Adam Kubert. Before you judge the comic for being a simple cash grab from two fandoms, this particular comic won an Eisner award (yes, it won a prestigious comic award)! Of course, preference is subjective, so if you want to read for yourself to know if the crossover comic is really good, you can still catch it on digital platforms. 

image via Polygon

If you’ve noticed a few days ago that verified accounts on Twitter were unable to post for a few hours, that’s because of a massive hack targeted to verified users. Hackers took control of dozens of accounts and made them post a tweet to send bitcoins to a wallet with an unlikely promise to send back more cryptocurrency. Twitter was able to regain control and return the control back to the original owners of the accounts, as Vice detailed: 

In an email sent to victims of the massive hack, Twitter apologizes, informs them of what happened, and suggests a series of actions to keep their accounts safe.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mike Bloomberg, Apple, Jeff Bezos, Wiz Khalifa, as well as several cryptocurrency companies are among the victims of the massive hack. On Wednesday, Twitter reached out directly to the victims via email informing them of the hack, apologizing for it, and suggesting a series of actions to make sure the compromised accounts stay safe. As Motherboard reported, hackers used an internal user administration tool to take control of the accounts.

Earlier Thursday, Twitter revealed that the hackers accessed the Direct Messages inbox of up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, and they downloaded the accounts’ “Your Twitter Data”—an archive of information on the account, including tweets, DMs, Moments, media, and more—of eight of all the hacked accounts, according to a series of updates on its Twitter Support account.

image via Vice

Can you solve Rubik’s cubes while juggling them? I can’t juggle nor solve one, and it’s impressive to see one person do these actions at the same time! Que Jianyu set the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to solve three Rubik’s cubes while juggling at two minutes and forty-three seconds.

It isn’t a Super Mario game, or any of the retro titles you were familiar with. The first ever video game in history was a 1958 tennis game similar to the 1970s game Pong. Tennis For Two was created in 1985 by physicist William Higinbotham, as Ryan Fan detailed: 

He wanted to capture visitors’ interests by creating an interactive demonstration, later telling reporters that:

“It might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society.”

The game simply involved players adjusting a knob to alter the angle of the ball, and then pushing a button to hit it to another player. They couldn’t miss the ball as long as they pressed the button when it was on their side of the net, but if they angled it poorly, it could hit the net or be out of bounds.

There was nothing fancy about the game, and the graphics simply had a cathode ray tube display that had two lines, one representing the ground, and another representing the net. The ball was just a dot.

Players couldn’t even keep score. They had to do that themselves. The circuitry of the game involved resistors, capacitors, and relays, and it used some transistors for fast switching, especially when the ball was in play.

image via Medium

With extraordinary talent honed through countless hours of training, Taiwanese artist Han Tsu Tung makes wooden sculptures that seem to have come from another world, but unfortunately glitched as they arrived in our dimension.

Wow!

See his amazing masterpieces over at his Instagram account.

(Image Credit: han_tsu_tung/ Instagram)

With the anime Yu Yu Hakusho now available on Netflix, fans of the series can now watch the show again, and those who haven’t seen it yet now have a new series on their list of what to watch while they stay at home. With its great story and memorable characters, it is indeed a classic masterpiece, although a bit underrated, overshadowed by other shonen like Dragon Ball (DB). But what makes Yu Yu Hakusho a memorable show? It is how the story is told to the audience.

[It has] a one-two punch of arcs that both glorify anime violence and then call into question the glorification of it.

[...]

Yoshihiro Togashi's Yu Yu Hakusho took all of DB's messages about pride and angst… and ran with them, creating a seemingly effortless tale about warriors that find themselves in combat, but lose themselves as well.

More details about this over at Cracked.com.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In 1928, the first true antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming. This event inspired hope in people: hope that we had a chance to fight against deadly germs, enemies that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, humanity was thrust into what was known as the antibiotic era, a time in history in which many antibiotic classes were discovered.

But much has changed since those times. The bacteria with which we have waged war against have become much stronger and resilient. If there was something that would disprove the phrase that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” it would be these microscopic organisms. And now, it seems that we’re losing this war, and immediate action is much needed.

How did bacteria become resistant in the first place, and what can we do about it? Scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and the MRC Centre for Molecular Bacteriology and Infection at Imperial College London might have an answer.

More details about this over at MedicalXpress.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)