American commuting statistics can be a little disheartening, with the vast majority of U.S. workers relying on their cars to get to their jobs. Some cities, however, have been doing a lot better than others in terms of alternative transportation for rides to and from work.
Source: Bike Rental Central Park
It's funny enough when an unbalanced washing machine gives you a good beat, but this is something else! Kurt Hugo Schneider has a hi-tech washer that has all the electronic tones needed to play the intro to the song "Take On Me" by a-ha. Schneider is a musician, and has also shown us how he can play a microwave, an oven, and a code lock, which you can see at Laughing Squid.
Being a soldier in the middle of an ongoing war is already hard enough. Being an African American soldier in the United States, in the middle of the raging World War 2, is much harder. Despite the difficulty of being segregated and discriminated against, these African American soldiers still gave it their best and fought and died with the Americans, rendering a “separate but equal” service to the country.
Photojournalist Charles “Teenie” Harris documents the lives of many African American soldiers during World War 2. Check them out over at Smithsonian.
(Image Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H25224 / Unknown author / CC-BY-SA 3.0/ Wikimedia Commons)
For almost a year, Christina Koch had been living in the International Space Station. For 328 days, the forty-one-year old astronaut had been busy with hundreds of science experiments and six spacewalks (which makes her very lucky, as only some astronauts are allowed to go outside the spacecraft). After a long time in space, Koch then thought about her next goal, and that is to walk on the beach once she touched back down on Earth. Finally, in February, Koch touched down on Earth safe and sound. There was one thing that would keep her from achieving her goal — the Earth’s gravity.
Astronauts often struggle with even the most routine physical activities, including walking, after experiencing the weightlessness of space. Some have returned from much shorter sojourns than Koch’s feeling so physically weak they collapsed during press conferences. Some have also struggled to ease back into everyday life after the thrill of a space mission. To improve the transition, every astronaut follows a tailored rehabilitation program when they return; in Koch’s case, that probably involved sixty days of training—split between NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston, and her home—to readjust to Earth’s gravity.
Koch’s coach knew that her desire to go to the beach would boost her mental health, and this would get her through the first days of exercises.
A week after landing, Koch tweeted a picture of herself standing on a beach, arms outstretched in triumph.
In other words, her coach knew a thing or two about mental health and how to keep her mind healthy.
In many ways, space can be just as hard on the mind as it is on the body. For astronauts, the isolation, the confinement, and, at times, the uncertainty of space travel can be crushing even though they often spend years preparing for their missions. And, as researchers continue to establish mental health supports for spacebound crews and study travellers who have returned, they’re finding that there’s still much to learn about the long-term psychological effects of these journeys.
More details about this over at The Walrus.
(Image Credit: NASA/ Wikimedia Commons)
With us just staying indoors for most, if not all, of the time, roads have now become quiet and peaceful. And with the sudden quietness and peace that can be found in our cities, some animals decided to stroll around, which resulted in surprising and unexpected sightings of them in our places. Some have interpreted this as nature healing. But is that really the case? Or are we missing something?
This article from Nautilus suggests that we can learn from this sudden development of things, and that is, maybe we could, in the near future, live with more animals in our cities.
More about this over at the site.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Elsemargriet / Pixabay)
Over 70 years ago, researchers who have spearheaded research about artificial intelligence introduced a concept that revolutionized the way we think about how our brain works. That concept was neural networks.
In the human brain, networks of billions of connected neurons make sense of sensory data, allowing us to learn from experience. Artificial neural networks can also filter huge amounts of data through connected layers to make predictions and recognize patterns, following rules they taught themselves.
The application of this concept has been really helpful in the advancement of technology over the years. Now, artificial neural networks are used in pattern recognition (which our phones use to recognize our faces, by the way). Neural networks, however, have difficulty in solving symbolic math problems, which…
include the hallmarks of calculus courses, like integrals or ordinary differential equations. The hurdles arise from the nature of mathematics itself, which demands precise solutions. Neural nets instead tend to excel at probability. They learn to recognize patterns — which Spanish translation sounds best, or what your face looks like — and can generate new ones.
This leads us to a question: can AI do symbolic math?
Surprisingly, the answer is yes, as proven late last year by two computer scientists Guillaume Lample and François Charton.
Their method didn’t involve number crunching or numerical approximations. Instead, they played to the strengths of neural nets, reframing the math problems in terms of a problem that’s practically solved: language translation.
“We both majored in math and statistics,” said Charton, who studies applications of AI to mathematics. “Math was our original language.”
Check out Quanta Magazine to know more about this exciting story.
(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)
The moment we were all waiting for. #ReleaseTheSnyderCut @ZackSnyder pic.twitter.com/vGwMoPMcUl
— HBO Max (@hbomax) May 21, 2020
March 2017. During the production of the Justice League film, tragedy struck in the life of the film’s director, Zack Snyder. His daughter has taken her own life. Because he knew that his family needed him the most at that time, Zack, along with his wife, Deborah, decided to step away from the production. He, however, declined to delay the release date, and decided to pass the baton to another director, Joss Whedon. Snyder’s dark and gloomy approach to the film, however, collided with Whedon’s “shoe-horned humour and cartoonish interplay”, and this would be seen in the final cut of the movie.
Sadly, the movie turned out to be a mess, and fans were not happy. And so some of them decided to cry out to Warner Bros. to release Snyder’s cut of the film.
The movement’s methods included, but weren’t limited to: flooding every single Warner Bros-related social media post without hesitation, whether it be trailers or obituaries; further petitions, billboards and custom merchandise; and even a plane with a banner of the hashtag gliding over San Diego Comic-Con in the summer of 2019.
The movement did not stop there, however.
More than $200,000 has also been raised for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Now, over two years later, the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement can now finally calm down as their request has been heard by Zack Snyder himself. Snyder’s Justice League will be released on HBO Max next year. The Justice League will finally be given justice.
More details about this story over at UNILAD.
(Video Credit: HBO Max/ Twitter)
Mother Nature is adapting to climate change as best as she can. Bumblebees are waking up earlier in the year now, before the flowers they depend on blossom. Needing pollen, the bees bite the plants, which forces them into earier bloom! Scientists first noticed this bee behavior during an unrelated experiment, and didn't know why bees were biting plants. But they soon found out.
To learn more, the scientists placed hungry bumblebees into mesh cages full of unflowered tomato and mustard plants. Before long, they found the bees using their mandibles to pierce the plants. The team also tried to replicate the bees’ moves by taking razor blades to the plants’ leaves.
The experiment found that all of the punctured plants bloomed more quickly, but the ones the bees damaged produced flowers weeks earlier than the ones the scientists cut. For tomato plants, it was 30 days while mustard plants damaged by the bees saw flowers bloom 14 days earlier.
This suggests that either a chemical in the bees saliva speeds the flowering process, “or our manual imitation of the damage wasn’t accurate enough,” Consuelo De Moraes, a study co-author a professor at the university ETH Zürich and study author, said in a statement.
Maybe that's why my tulips bloomed in March this year, instead of April as they used to. Read more about this discovery at Earther.
(Image credit: Kabir Bakie)
In 1976, Led Zeppelin released a feature-length concert film called The Song Remains the Same. It was supposed to be a concert at Madison Square Garden in New York, where they played for three nights in 1973. The film begins with the group arriving in their private jet and being driven to the venue, where director Joe Massot had a film crew ready to capture the concerts.
The problem was, as the group and their manager Peter Grant found out only after they’d fired Massot from the project, is that he’d gotten inadequate—practically unusable—coverage that wouldn’t sync properly or cut. Some great shots but nothing that could be used to create an edited sequence.
Grant brought in Aussie director Peter Clifton, the guy they probably should have hired in the first place, to see what could made from this mess, but the initial prognosis looked pretty grim until Clifton suggested reshooting the entire running order of the Madison Square Garden show on Madison Square Garden’s stage… recreated at Shepperton Studios in England!
Everyone assumes they’re watching the group at MSG, but in reality what we are watching (for the most part) is Led Zeppelin rocking out on a soundstage in Surrey, southeast of London. Without an audience.
Complicating matters was the fact that Robert Plant had his teeth fixed, and John Paul Jones had cut his hair short in the intervening year. Read the story of how The Song Remains the Same was filmed at Dangerous Minds.
(Image credit: Heinrich Klaffs)
Technology has advanced greatly over the years. Now, it has come to a stage that we are now able to create robots so tiny that they could fit in the human body’s blood vessels.
Using white blood cells as inspiration, scientists at Max Planck Institute were able to create microrobots that are able to move against the current blood flow.
The robots are essentially glass microparticles, less than eight micrometers wide. One half is coated in a thin film of nickel and gold, while the other carries the drug payload. In this test, the payload was anti-cancer molecules as well as antibodies that recognize cancer cells.
Rather than swimming through the blood like other micro-robots, the new ones move by rolling along the walls of blood vessels, much like white blood cells do. The direction of this movement can be controlled from outside the body by way of a magnetic field. When switched on, the metal-coated side pulls the spheres in that direction.
The researchers are hopeful that this method would allow for non-invasive and precise treatments over various diseases.
More details over at New Atlas.
(Image Credit: Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems/ New Atlas)
Nvidia is commonly known to be a computer game company responsible for creating graphics processing units that make games visually appealing. What the company is less known for is that it also conducts research on artificial intelligence.
For its latest project, Nvidia researchers taught an AI system to recreate the game of Pac-Man simply by watching it being played.
There’s no coding involved, no pre-rendered images for the software to draw on. The AI model is simply fed visual data of the game in action along with the accompanying controller inputs and then recreates it frame by frame from this information. The resulting game is playable by humans, and Nvidia says it will be releasing it online in the near future.
While the AI has only made a blurry version of the video game, and was unable to capture the personality of each ghost, it was able to deduce the basic mechanics of the game, such as Pac-Man having to eat pellets while avoiding ghosts.
Nvidia says work like this shows how artificial intelligence will be used for game design in the future. Developers can input their work into the AI and use it to create variations or maybe design new levels. “You could use this to mash different games together,” Sanja Fidler, director of Nvidia’s Toronto research lab, told journalists, “giving additional power to games developers by [letting them] blend together different games.”
More details about this over at The Verge.
Amazing!
(Image Credit: Nvidia/ The Verge)
Back in the year 1914, when World War 1 broke out, tanks did not exist yet. While there were already several armored vehicles even before this year, they did not prove useful in traversing soft ground and crossing obstacles, due to their immense weight. Thanks to the invention of caterpillar tracks, however, this issue was solved as the caterpillar tracks helped in the vehicle’s weight distribution. Ever since then…
Caterpillar tracks have become the standard for all tanks manufactured to this day.
But before caterpillar tracks were adapted for armored combat vehicles, a man named Nikolai Lebedenko had a different picture of a tank in mind. What he pictured was something gigantic.
It was 30 foot tall and looked like a giant tricycle, with two giant front wheels and a much smaller rear wheel. In between them, the wheels supported an elongated hull lined with steel armor, and equipped with two 76.2mm cannons and a line of 7.62mm machine guns to protect the tank from enemy infantry. Each wheel was powered by a 250 horsepower internal combustion engine.
Lebedenko likened the design to a hanging bat, and called his invention Netopyr', which is a genus of bat.
“With such machines, the entire German front will be broken through in one night, and Russia will win the war,” Lebedenko claimed.
Unfortunately, the Tsar Tank would immediately be abandoned because of its faulty and impractical design.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Can’t believe this fella kept moving all afternoon...
— That Millwall Podcast (@1885Podcast) May 21, 2020
Its boring sitting in the Crain all day and very hot..
This definitely beats flicking yoghurt out the window watching people’s reaction to them thinking a bird shat on them...😂#Antisunbathingcrew #FakeNewsAlert #Craincrew pic.twitter.com/FCM0KiUtsp
Because sitting all day in the crane proved to be boring, this crane operator decided to have some fun with the gigantic machine that he operated. Using the controls, the operator moved the crane to where the sunbathing man was, throwing literal shade at him. When the man transferred to another place, the crane operator immediately followed with his machine.
Via 9GAG
(Video Credit: That Millwall Podcast/ Twitter)
Business Insider reports that the fast food chain Burger King has found a new purpose for its iconic paper crowns given to kids. By massively expanding their size, the crowns enforce social distancing rules. These are available at selected outlets in Germany.
The Italian division of Burger King is taking a very different but possibly more effective approach. Its "Social Distancing Whoppers" come with three times the normal amount of onions, thereby encouraging people to avoid the diner's toxic odor.
-via Design Boom | Photo: Burger King Germany
Luring industry to your town can involve "sweetening the pot," as in giving corporations tax breaks to bring in factories and jobs. Often the gain in jobs does not offset the loss in tax revenue, but that's not the only way to gain a CEO's attention. In order to lure a Tesla Cybertruck factory to Tulsa, they've repainted a 75-foot statue of an oilman, called The Golden Driller, to resemble Tesla's founder Elon Musk!
The gargantuan statue, unveiled earlier this week at a community event and on Bynum’s social media, now features a red Tesla logo painted on its chest. The Driller’s 48-foot belt, which once read “TULSA,” was changed to read “TESLA.” If you squint, the statue’s head now looks like a low-budget YouTube cartoon of Musk. “I was told onsite it was an ‘Elon Musk Face Skin,’” one worker wrote on Facebook. “It went on like a fruit roll-up.”
“It’s this weird, ghostly, white mask-like thing,” said Lucas Wrench, a 28-year-old Tulsa Artist Fellow, who runs an arts space called OK #1. “It sort of looks like if you FaceSwapped with some creature. I just couldn’t believe it. I’m shocked at how transparent it is—the kind of a symbol they created in putting this enormous billionaire, literally a giant towering billionaire in Tulsa—the lack of self-awareness. They’re groveling.”
Read the story of the "Golden Elon" at The Daily Beast. -via Digg
