The film The Rock was a big hit in summer of 1996. Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery (plus a whole crew of other 90s stars, but not The Rock) do something important at Alcatraz, and there's a lot of action. Screen Junkies gives us the lowdown on whether we should watch The Rock after missing it all those years ago. It's part of their Blockbuster Summer series, which is all they have this summer, so reaching into the vault for a good movie from back when is something we all can do.
Step 2 involves eating a dozen donuts (well, in my version), because you'll need to empty the Krispy Kreme box of its contents.
Andy Clockwise, though, is more straightforward and simply assumes that you have an empty Krispy Kreme box. Follow his simple instructions to make a sweet-smelling face shield.
-via Swiss Miss
Cosplayer Christopher Lavallee, a less famous Tony Stark, built this combat suit inspired by the Doctor's cybernetic foes, the Cybermen. Lavallee properly calls himself a "foamsmith" due to his mastery of foam cutting and molding.
We know Jules Verne, who gave us science fiction and, a century later, steampunk. But he wasn't the first to write about how technology would affect the future. Another was Albert Robida, who wrote in French, but just as wondrously, also drew his visions of the future.
In the late 1800s, the French illustrator and novelist wrote an acclaimed trilogy of futuristic novels, most notably, The Twentieth Century, an important work of early science fiction often overshadowed by the work of Jules Verne, who is generally viewed as one of the creators of the genre of Science Fiction.
Falling somewhere between The Jetsons and Charles Dickens, some of his fanciful predictions recall the overzealous futurism of the 1950s and 60s in response to the Space Age. Robida was of course living through his own “Space Age” of sorts at the end of the 19th century when the first aeronautical expeditions were just taking flight in France.
Robida not only envisioned flying machines, tall skyscrapers, and video phones, but also a world of gender and racial equality. While his works are available online, they are in French. So you might want to read about Robida and see a collection of his futuristic illustrations at Messy Nessy Chic.
A roller coaster ride is usually about two minutes long. ChuggersRCT designed this one with Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 around the song "Bohemian Rhapsody," so it's six minutes of hills, dives, loops, wobbles, twists, and turns! It starts out slowly, but really switches into high gear as the song does. This would probably be fatal if it existed in the real world. -via Geekologie
Why leather armor for a rabbit? Well, a rabbit's key ability is dexterity. Although mail and plate armor may raise a rabbit's armor class, it can also induce a dexterity penalty and cause encumbrance problems if your dungeon master is a stickler for those rules.
So it's best to keep to leather armor or magical armor options for when you must take your rabbit adventuring. Etsy seller The King's Shilling can properly equip you and your furry pal.
-via Technabob
Believe it or not, everything in this koi pond sculpture is edible. Well, the cattail stems are bamboo, but those are technically edible if you chew them enough. Cake artist petrichoro used agar jelly for the water, three types of cake underneath, and sculpted the fish and lilies by hand! See more of her creations at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid
Cargo mask pic.twitter.com/kkqzfXYJIh
— Ingenuous Firebrand (@ING2Firebrand) July 14, 2020
Don't think of your face mask as a burden. It's an opportunity! Twitter user Ingenuous Firebrand proposes sewing on a pocket and using the mask for more everyday carry gear.
I suggest making the mask from heavy canvas to make sure that it doesn't sag too much from the extra weight you store in the pocket.
-via Aelfred the Great
Quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity. Both are pillars of 20th-century physics, and, as pillars go, these scientific fields stand opposite of each other, at least when it comes to the concept of time.
When derived from quantum mechanics, time is a parameter that is ever-flowing at a constant rate. When derived from relativity, however, time can be seen as something relative from two observers. So what really is time?
"We don't know," Martin Bojowald, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, told Live Science. "We know that things change, and we describe that change in terms of time."
But it seems that we're now closer to reconciling the conflicting concepts of time through this new theory of a universal clock.
More details about this over at Live Science.
(Image Credit: FelixMittermeier/ Pixabay)
It was 2014, and the United Arab Emirates announced that it would be launching a mission to Mars by December 2021, the country’s 50th birthday (the United Arab Emirates was founded on December 2, 1971). They had several challenges to overcome before achieving that dream, however, as the country had no space agency or planetary scientists, and it only just launched its first satellite at that time. With only less than a decade as its time limit, and with odds stacked against it like that, one would wonder whether the country could really accomplish their goal.
The rapidly assembled team of engineers, with an average age of 27, frequently heard the same jibe. “You guys are a bunch of kids. How are you going to reach Mars?” says Sarah Al Amiri, originally a computer engineer and the science lead for the project.
But they prevailed.
Six years on, Al Amiri beamed as she admired the country’s fully assembled Mars orbiter while it underwent tests in February. In the bright, clean room at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai, engineers were testing the car-sized orbiter before shipping it to the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. It will launch sometime during a three-week window starting on 15 July.
The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) will be the first interplanetary venture of any Arab nation, but it’s not just a technology demonstrator. Once it arrives at the red planet in February 2021, the orbiter, known as Hope (or Amal in Arabic), will produce the first global map of the Martian atmosphere. And, somewhat unusually for a space mission, the EMM will release its data to the international scientific community without an embargo.
But the battle’s not over yet, as going to space is not the UAE’s main concern, but rather, its economy. But for spectators, the UAE’s future is bright.
More about this over at Scientific American.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Natalie Naccache for Nature/ Scientific American)
Police stationed at Plymouth, UK, were shocked when they saw a man sinking his teeth into a seagull before throwing the bird on the floor. According to the man, the seagull attacked him because it took a taste of his McDonald’s meal, and so he grabbed and bit it . The police immediately rushed into the scene and detained the man.
Around this time, the man volunteered the information that he was under the influence of drugs and it was decided that he should be taken to Derriford Hospital for treatment.
The seagull was clearly injured by the incident but flew off before we were able to check on its welfare. We don't know what happened to it afterwards.
Because seagulls are protected by UK laws, the man, if found guilty, could face six months in jail or a fine of £5000 (around $6300).
Via 9GAG
(Image Credit: JJ Harrison/ Wikimedia Commons)
After 85 years as a museum (since 1934), the Hagia Sophia will turn into a mosque on July 24, as Turkey’s Cabinet of State repealed the order that turned the building into a museum. With this being the case, some are curious as to what Hagia Sophia’s future will be.
The Turkish government has stated that, although Muslim religious services will resume at the site, it will remain open to visitors of all nationalities and faiths—much like the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which has been an active Catholic church as well as a major tourist attraction and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Erdogan’s spokespeople have also stated that Christian iconography inside the Hagia Sophia will continue to be preserved as it has been since the 1930s.
Some say that this was done in order to make a political statement, and this political move could be compared as to how the building was treated in the past: a place of power.
Know more about the intriguing history of the Hagia Sophia over at Ars Technica.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Arild Vågen/ Wikimedia Commons)
When Pluto was downgraded to a “dwarf planet” in 2006, the number of officially known planets in our Solar System decreased from nine to eight. But astronomers have been seeing strange gravitational patterns beyond the planet Neptune. Dubbed as “trans-Neptunian objects”, or TNOs, these objects suggest that there is a ninth planet in our Solar System. Various theories about these TNOs have been offered.
The hypothetical planet, dubbed “Planet Nine,” would orbit our star at hundreds of times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
It’s been a contentious topic, with some writing off the odd behavior of TNOs as being caused by a cluster of much smaller space rocks. Others predict that such a planet would be five times the mass of the Earth, orbiting our star at about 400 times the Earth’s distance from the Sun.
Finally, there’s the possibility that Planet Nine is actually a teeny-tiny black hole left over from the Big Bang. So tiny, in fact, that it’d only measure about five centimeters across — basically impossible to see with any kind of telescope.
“There has been a great deal of speculation concerning alternative explanations for the anomalous orbits observed in the outer solar system,” explained Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student, in a statement. “One of the ideas put forth was the possibility that Planet Nine could be a grapefruit-sized black hole with a mass of five to 10 times that of the Earth.”
But if the so-called “ninth planet” is not really a planet, but a very tiny black hole, then how would astronomers confirm its existence?
Learn more about this intriguing story over at Futurism.
(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)
An odd incident that occured in Sanford, Maine, started a true-crime mystery. A car went onto a baseball field during a game in 2018. This odd incident was the start of a true-crime mystery that was 50 years in the making. ESPN Senior Writer Tom Junod writes the details surrounding the mystery. Check the full piece here.
image screenshot via ESPN
We’ve always entertained the idea of animals being able to think like us. A lot of stories, TV shows, and movies have run on the premise that the animals around us can talk and think like we do. That leaves us with the question: do animals really think like us? Scientists have researched this matter, as Orion magazine detailed:
Not long ago, a question like this would have seemed foolish, if not crazy. How can an octopus know anything, much less form an opinion? Octopuses are, after all, “only” invertebrates — they don’t even belong with the insects, some of whom, like dragonflies and dung beetles, at least seem to show some smarts. Octopuses are classified within the invertebrates in the mollusk family, and many mollusks, like clams, have no brain.
Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals — creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago — have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.
image via wikimedia commons
