To make sure nobody shares a photo of you, put a GettyImages® watermark on your face mask. pic.twitter.com/zSCkyic3LV

— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) June 14, 2020

Perhaps you can protect your privacy by informally copyrighting your face. Danielle Baskin made this face mask with iconic Getty Images stock photo logo on it. I wouldn't be surprised if it successfully tricked bots made to weed out copyrighted photos.

Sure, you can make a gourmet macaroni and cheese casserole that contains several types of artisanal cheeses lovingly blended into a Béchamel sauce and baked for an hour, but you probably have some Kraft mac and cheese in the cupboard all the same. Despite its reputation as a kids’ food, many of us keep boxes of macaroni and cheese (Kraft dinner to Canadians) around in case we need some quick comfort food. You might wonder where it came from. People have been eating cheese with pasta for hundreds of years, but the box the with orange powder is a 20th-century development, an offshoot of research into preserving cheese for longer periods of time.    

Credit for inventing processed cheese should go to a pair of Swiss food chemists named Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler who, in 1913, were looking for a way to improve the shelf life of Emmenthaler cheese using sodium citrate. When they heated up the treated cheese, they noticed it melted better as well. But Chicago cheese salesman James L. Kraft was awarded the first patent for processed cheese in 1916.

Kraft understood the spoilage problem and had tried various solutions to it. He tried putting it tin foil packages, sealing it in jars, even canning it. But none of these solutions caught on with the public.

He eventually realized that the same bacteria that made cheese age nicely was also the bacteria that ultimately caused it to go bad. So he took some cheddar cheese scraps, heated them to kill the bacteria, ground them up with some sodium phosphate as an emulsifier and voila—Kraft processed cheese was born.

Still, it was another 30 years before processed cheese was made into a powder to reconstitute with macaroni. Read the rest of the story of boxed macaroni and cheese at Smithsonian.

Nothing like a good game to beat out boredom! If you don’t have a gaming console like a Playstation or a Nintendo Switch, worry not! There are still good games available for the PC! While it will take a long time for you to go through the available games to find the right one, here’s Kotaku’s pick of the best PC games to get you on the track!

image via Kotaku

Vogue Italia invited kids aged two to ten years old to illustrate what they think a magazine cover should look like. The magazine sought 100 kids to reimagine the looks of the season. Eight artworks were then chosen to be the cover of the magazine’s June issue. Chief editor of Vogue Italia shares the reason behind the concept:

“Kids have been the most overlooked and least obvious victims of the pandemic,” said Emanuele Farneti, chief editor of Vogue Italia in a statement. “We’re starting from them to imagine a new world.”

image via Fast Company

For me, the real horror lies in the Masterchef for adults, where the pressure of wanting to win the competition drives the competitors almost insane, and you also have Gordon Ramsay chewing them out like a drill sergeant. But it seems that even though Masterchef Junior is wholesome in some aspects, Cracked’s Dan Duddy lists three reasons why the show is like a lowkey horror show.

image via Cracked

The PS5 hardware has been revealed. Along with the console’s specifications, a lot of games that will be released for the PS5 were also announced. One of the new games for the console is Spiderman: Miles Morales. Check out the teaser as shared by GameSpot! If you’ve seen the previous Spiderman games, then this one will certainly pique your interest. It has certainly piqued mine. Now I just gotta figure out if I can actually afford the console. 

MILES MORALES SPIDER-MAN GAME! MILES MORALES SPIDER-MAN GAME! 🕷🕷🕷 #PS5Reveal pic.twitter.com/J49KZWSRyk

— GameSpot (@GameSpot) June 11, 2020

image via Twitter

The song Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen has been considered by many as the greatest song ever written. Even until now, the song still remains popular both to the young and the old. If you’re one of the people who loved, and still love this song, then you might have sung the song a few times in your life. But are you sure that the lyrics that you’re singing are the correct ones? Mental Floss has a 52-item quiz for you to test your accuracy.

This might be my first time to perfect a Mental Floss quiz. Why don’t you take it, too, and then tell your scores in the comments below.

(Image Credit: Mental Floss)

When Twitter user radtoria decided to buy a Danny DeVito cutout as a gag gift for her boyfriend, she wasn’t expecting another certain someone to become so smitten. It was her cat, Quincy.

"I started putting it in the window to spice up our neighbors' walks. Then I'd take it down at night to close the blinds," radtoria told The Dodo. "Time and time again, I'd wake up to find Quincy snuggling with it."

What’s more amazing is Quincy takes good care of the cutout.

… the little DeVito has been totally unharmed by the cat's constant attention. For Quincy, this cardboard cutout isn't just some plaything.

"He's very gentle with it. He never bites it. He never roughhouses with it. It's like he sees it as a special toy," radtoria said. "If I try to remove it from him (which I don't bother with anymore), he just extends his paws over it and gives a 'don't mess with me' kind of look."

If that’s not love, then I don’t know what is.

(Image Credit: @radtoria/ The Dodo)

YouTuber akita 2nd recreates the many sounds of various Windows operating systems from the newest one (Windows 10) to the oldest (Windows 3.1). Akita not only recreates the startup sounds, but also the error sounds that can be heard on each operating system. However, while the video is titled “Windows ALL Startup Sounds on Piano”, akita also inserts the startup sound for the Mac.

Well, what do you think of the recreations?

(Video Credit: akita 2nd/ YouTube)

New York City. 1914. It was a time where the coroner system — a system in which a government official is appointed as coroner — reigned in the city. Unfortunately, it was a “grossly inefficient and corrupt” system, according to the investigation of Leonard Wallstein (the city’s commissioner of accounts) that year.

Of the 65 coroners holding office at the time, “not one was thoroughly qualified by training or experience for the adequate performance of his duties,” he wrote in his report. The few who had medical degrees were “drawn from the ranks of mediocrity,” motivated only by the money they could extort from police, prosecutors, or the accused.

Thankfully, this system was replaced by the medical examiner system, which is a much more faithful system.

Unlike coroners, medical examiners were required to have some kind of post-secondary education, as well as specialized training in forensic pathology — learning to decipher clues like ligature marks, decomposition, and lividity to determine the time, manner, and cause of death.

One of the most notable people that advocated for the medical examiner system was Frances Glessner Lee.

Lee is perhaps best known for creating the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” dioramas of crime scenes in miniature — macabre dollhouses — depicting victims of arson, stabbing, hanging, carbon monoxide poisoning, and more. She handcrafted most of the furniture, clothing, and other minutiae herself to get each detail just right, accurately illustrating traces of physical evidence left at real crime scenes. Stored today at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, the Nutshell Studies are still dusted off once a year and used as training tools for the Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation.

Learn more about her story over at Undark.

(Image Credit: Lorie Shaull/ Wikimedia Commons)

“Kick the bucket”, “take the cake,” “chew the fat,” and “pull someone’s leg.” These are just some of the idiomatic expressions that we use in our daily lives. The question is, why do we use these expressions instead of stating what we really mean directly? Turns out, “there’s still something about [these expressions], and others like [them].”

Idiomatic expressions may well be old and shabby language, but they are our own speech, from the Greek idios, “one’s own.” Fossilized idiomatic language, like the newest of new slang in an exclusive subculture, has a special power to draw two people together in a kind of linguistic intimacy, to express intensities of thought and feeling about their uncertain and sometimes unjust worlds, when the literal meaning of things just doesn’t cut it.

Check out JSTOR Daily’s article and learn more about idioms.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Just as walking on a hard road is much easier than walking on soft sand, which means that less energy is spent, this study conducted by MIT scientists suggests that trucks would find stiffer roads easier to traverse on, and they would use less fuel.

Asphalt may not seem particularly soft to us as we walk on it, but that's only because we don't weigh several thousand pounds. The heavy weight of a transport truck, on the other hand, causes the asphalt to deflect downwards slightly beneath each wheel.

As a result, the truck is perpetually in a state of trying to climb out of an ever-so-slight depression in the road. This means that it burns more fuel than it would otherwise, producing more carbon dioxide emissions in the process. According to MIT researchers Hessam Azarijafari, Jeremy Gregory and Randolph Kirchain, this problem could be alleviated if roads were made of stiffer materials.

And since trucks would use less fuel on stiffer roads, that would also mean that the carbon dioxide emissions produced by these big vehicles would be reduced. While the costs of making the roads stiffer would be initially expensive, it would be a great investment in the long run, as stiffer roads are stronger and require fewer repairs.

More details over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: falco/ Pixabay)

To go or not to go? That is the question.

I want to go now to the grocery to restock the supplies I have at home. But if everybody does the same, then the grocery might be full, and so it would be best if I don’t go. But if everybody else decides to not go and just stay at home, then the store will be empty, and so I should go because it’s ideal for me. And thus I go back and forth and be stuck in a loop, and spend all day at home theorizing whether I should go or not.

Turns out there is a way to get out of this loop, and that is through a game theory in 1994 by W. Brain Arthur.

He figured out what he called the El Farol Bar problem, based on a Santa Fe bar that had a popular music event on Thursday evenings. The problem assumes a group of 100 people who do not know what the others will do. In this problem, if more than 60 people (60 percent) show up, the overcrowding in the finite space would cause a displeasing evening. Guests will have a more enjoyable time if they stay home. Yet if less than 60 people show up, the attendees would have a better time going than staying home. They want to go, but not if the bar is too crowded. They need to decide…

Sounds similar to our grocery problem up there, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. You just have to know your own variables such as an estimate of how many people go to the same store as you.

Unfortunately, you’d have to be familiar with statistics in order to solve your own grocery problem.

Learn more about how to do this over at Nautilus.

As for me, I’ll just go anyway, and leave everything up to chance.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Nautilus)

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, trappers and traders prized sea otters because of their thick and waterproof fur. Back in that time, some people were willing to pay a handsome sum of money just to get their hands on otter pelts. And so the once common sea otter (Enhydra lutris) was nearly hunted to extinction in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Fortunately, thanks to conservation efforts, sea otter numbers have rebounded. However, they aren’t welcomed back to the world, because they compete with people for shellfish. It was “a conflict that has provoked debate about balancing the need protections for the otters with the economic impact of their presence in the coastal waters.”

A study published … in Science finds that in economic terms, the otters' effect on their ecosystem—including increasing populations of fish, carbon capture and tourism—far outweigh the costs to the commercial shellfish fisheries with which they compete for tasty clams and crabs.

Check out Smithsonian Magazine for more details about this study.

(Image Credit: Marshal Hedin/ Wikimedia Commons)

1955. An exhibit was shown to the assembled guests at the meeting of the Moscow Surgical Society. It was a surgery nobody had thought of. A large white dog was brought in the platform.

The dog looked happy, cheerfully wagging its tail, and [unintimidated] by the large crowd of eager guests in front of him. He seemed particularly unconcerned by the unnatural appendage protruding from the side of his neck.

The unnatural appendage was a tiny head of a brown-haired puppy, which was attached to the white dog by the Soviet scientist Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov a few days before the meeting.

Both the hound and the decapitated head of the puppy were alive and reacting to stimuli. And even as the surgeons watched, the puppy's head gave the ear of its host a nasty bite. The white head snarled.

But why would Demikhov create such a “medical monstrosity”, you might ask? The answer is, because he had a vision for the future.

“The final goal of our experiments was to make transplantation of the heart and other organs in humans possible,” Demikhov wrote in a monograph.

Throughout his life, he has made invaluable early contributions to coronary surgery. Unfortunately, he usually doesn’t get the recognition he very much deserves, as he is just mostly known as the scientist who conducted two-headed dog experiments.

In 1937, at the age of only 21 and still a student, the young Vladimir had shocked his professors by creating the first artificial heart, which he successfully implanted into a dog. The dog survived for five hours. After graduation, Demikhov continued his experimental research, eventually performing successful heart and lung transplants, and later, liver and kidney transplantation on dogs and cats.

If there was a man deserving to be “The Father of Heart and Lung of Transplantation”, it would be Demikhov, according to Doctor Christiaan Barnard, the man who performed the world’s first successful heart transplant in 1967.

More about Demikhov’s life over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Amusing Planet)