Are you having a hard time focusing recently? If so, then fat might be the culprit behind your inability to concentrate these days. According to this study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, eating food high in saturated fat could hinder a person’s ability to concentrate.

The study compared how 51 women performed on a test of their attention after they ate either a meal high in saturated fat or the same meal made with sunflower oil, which is high in unsaturated fat.

Their performance on the test was worse after eating the high-saturated-fat meal than after they ate the meal containing a healthier fat, signaling a link between that fatty food and the brain.

[...]

The loss of focus after a single meal was eye-opening for the researchers.

Yikes!

More details about this study over at ScienceDaily.

(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)

Yes, this was a response to COVID-19, but it's a pretty good idea anyway, right? In addition to keeping bar patrons at least 6 feet apart, it also provides a measure of safety to intoxicated people moving around. The New York Post reports that, Fish Tales, a bar in Ocean City, Maryland, thinks that these tables will allow it to open to more than just takeout customers.

-via Dave Barry

Researchers discovered that dogs appear to have a difficult teenage period. Dogs are also frustrated with their owners and trainers when they reach five months old. In an experiment with Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, and their cross breeds, the researchers found out that dogs at eight months old were more reluctant to respond to a command given by their caregiver. ScienceAlert has the details: 

"This is a very important time in a dog's life," says animal behaviour researcher Lucy Asher, from Newcastle University in the UK. "This is when dogs are often rehomed because they are no longer a cute little puppy and suddenly, their owners find they are more challenging and they can no longer control them or train them."

"But as with human teenage children, owners need to be aware that their dog is going through a phase and it will pass."

The researchers found further evidence of this effect in survey data gathered on 285 Labradors, golden retrievers, German shepherds and their cross breeds. Dog owners and trainers less familiar with the dogs were asked to evaluate the animals' 'trainability' by answering questions on obedience and how quickly commands were responded to.

image via wikimedia commons

We’ve heard of scientists creating human hybrids in fiction. Hybrid creation also exists in real life, as scientists attempt to create hybrids for medical research. A team of scientists have created the most thoroughly-integrated mouse-human hybrid yet. The doctors hope that their hybrid could serve as accurate models for medical research, as Futurism details: 

The human cells spread out and wove themselves into organs like the heart and liver, while most ended up as red blood cells.

None of the human cells, however, seemed likely to become sperm or egg cells, Science News reports. That means that had the mice been brought to term — the embryos were terminated after 17 days — their offspring would have been perfectly normal mice.

image via wikimedia commons

We may give a dog many things like a good place to sleep, but it doesn’t take much for a cat to take ownership of the dog’s bed. And once they do take ownership, the dog won’t be able to do anything but stare at the bed that was once his, and feel helpless.

Sad and Useless has compiled various photos showing cats lying down on dogs’ beds. See them all over at the site.

“Nice bed, doggo. Mine now!”

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

In a minute-and-a-half, this animated story encompasses the themes of love, commitment, aging, fear of the unknown, and the simple pleasures of life. One Twitter user said,

Why does this commercial have a better plot than half of the shows y’all be watching?

The company that uses it has a slew of other heart-tugging stories, which you'll find linked at Metafilter. Along the way, you might even find out what they're trying to sell you.

Recognizing faces is not that hard when you see the same face for a long time. Surprisingly, this ability is not unique to humans. There are animals, like birds and monkeys, which are also capable of doing this, even from just a collection of photographs. But what of domesticated animals, like horses, that humans have tamed for thousands of years? 

Ethologist Léa Lansade of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment did an experiment to find out how well horses can recognize individual people in photographs. 

She and her team first taught the horses how to “choose” between two side-by-side images by touching their noses to a computer screen. The horses were then shown photos of their current keeper alongside faces of unfamiliar humans. They had never seen photos of any of the people before. The horses correctly identified their current keeper and ignored the stranger’s face about 75 percent of the time, significantly better than chance.

What’s even more surprising is that these same horses also recognize their previous owners that they haven’t seen for about half a year. These findings suggest two things: that horses can differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar faces, and they recognize photographs as just representations of real life.

And they’re even better at this than our oldest animal companion: the domestic dog.

But how will horses react when they are shown faces of people that they have had a bad experience with? That’s what researchers would like to find out in the near future.

(Image Credit: Chiemsee2016/ Pixabay)

People call Debra Dawson a crazy cat lady. Dawson lives in a ghost town in New Mexico with her kittens. The 65-year-old woman is the only resident who lives among the town’s (named Yeso) crumbling structures. Yeso was long deserted before Dawson moved in with her husband, as Outside detailed: 

She is one of just a handful of people known to permanently live in the ruins of the many ghost towns sprinkled across the West’s high plains.

“Hard to imagine 300 families here,” Dawson says, walking through one of Yeso’s collapsing adobe neighborhoods, shadowed by her dogs, Duchess and Missy. Dawson has bright blue eyes and shoulder-length blond hair that she wears tied back. She is sporting an Army green jacket that conceals a well-used Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon hoodie. It’s an unseasonably cold day in October, and a fog has settled on the landscape, coating the mesquite, sagebrush cacti, and grasses in dew. As the weather grows colder, the air freezes, leaving the plants covered in tiny icicles that reflect the afternoon sun and vibrate in the steady wind. “If it’s windy anywhere in New Mexico, it’s windy here,” says Dawson. “But it sure is pretty.”

image via Outside

The photos from space are more than just representations of scientific data. They are more than pictures that explain the vast universe beyond our planet. The photos are comparable to western paintings, according to Elizabeth Kessler, a Stanford University lecturer. The Hubble space photos transcend their scientific purpose. The Hubble Telescope photos, just like landscape paintings from Thomas Moran, evoke a powerful aesthetic response, as Atlas Obscura details: 

“[Hubble’s] views of ethereal nebulae and glittering galaxies and star fields—they’re not just compelling visualizations of scientific data,” Kessler said during a recent online lecture for the American Institute of Physics. “Like the 19th-century paintings, they evoke a powerful aesthetic response. They encourage us to see the universe as sublime.”

The Hubble Heritage Project, formed in 1998 by a small group of astronomers and image processors at the Space Telescope Science Institute, regularly invoked landscape tropes when releasing new images and descriptions of celestial phenomena. For the “Pillars of Creation,” for instance—an astonishing image showing those massive plumes of gas in a region of the Eagle Nebula—the star-formation process was compared to the forces that shape the buttes of the American Southwest, notes Kessler.

The aim of the project, like those 19th-century Western landscape painters, was to create aesthetically rich images of exploratory observations. Today, astronomers and astrophotographers work closely together on the cosmic images that have revolutionized the way we perceive the universe.

image via Atlas Obscura

The periodic table of elements hosts so many elements that it’s difficult for some to memorize all the elements by name alone. Even though that seems like a lot, we are actually running out of elements. Each element added in the periodic table was from technological efforts. Some elements cannot be man-made, so researchers are looking for places where they can mine the materials we need, as Discover Magazine details:  

Europium and indium are crucial for televisions and touch screens. Rhenium is necessary in fighter jet engines. And to avoid some of the effects of climate change, we need lithium and cobalt for electric vehicle batteries, tellurium for solar panels and dysprosium for wind turbines. 

Yet we cannot make these elements — they formed, along with Earth, billions of years ago. To replenish our dwindling stores and keep up with a growing, modernizing world, we must mine for more. 

hey’re looking for natural ores in places once considered too remote to mine, before the materials’ demand justified the costs and arduous journeys: the Arctic, the deep sea and even the asteroids nearest Earth. 

But after a century of heavy industrial activity, we also have a wealth of human waste 

Head on to their website to see the list of locations where researchers are looking for elements! 

image via Discover Magazine

How many generations must pass before an American is considered to be American? That often depends on one's appearance or name. After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor which drew the US into World War II, people with Japanese ancestry were looked upon with suspicion, whether they were recent immigrants or were descended from immigrants of several generations before. Those of Japanese descent were rounded up from the West Coast and interned in camps. Volunteer fighters were eventually granted the opportunity to serve, although in segregated units. And then there was Ben Kuroki.  

After Pearl Harbor, a Nebraska farm boy named Ben Kuroki volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps. He could not have been more American: born in the breadbasket of America, one of ten children, growing up in a small town of with a population of about 500, vice-president of his high school senior class. His parents had come to the United States from Japan, started a family, and settled into a happy life in their adopted country. Outraged as an American when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Ben Kuroki and his brother Fred enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Kuroki somehow slipped through the filter that placed all Japanese American enlistees in segregated units and he became a gunner in a B-24 squadron based in Europe. He served with distinction and completed 30 combat missions, more than the standard full tour of 25. He returned to the United States for rest and recuperation, and as a war hero made appearances to engender support for the war. In particular, he was toured through the Japanese American incarceration camps to garner support and recruitment of other Japanese Americans to fight. He quickly found himself at the center of a firestorm of controversy—exploited by the government and distrusted by his fellow Japanese Americans wrongfully imprisoned in camps.

Read the story of Ben Kuroki and what he was willing to give for America at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: San Diego Air & Space Museum)

The ocean gives, and the ocean takes away. Or is it the other way around? Ever since humans invented the boat, they've wrecked, capsized, or lost their cargo in the sea, and whatever was inside can ride the currents until it lands in some far-off shore, maybe soon, maybe decades later. And some of that cargo is pretty strange.

Some of the stuff that washes up is natural, as in unidentified sea creatures, and some are legends from long ago. Read about 15 odd beach finds at Cracked.

Bubble milk tea. Durian. Scallion pancake. Crab roe.

Sixth Tone reviews the good, the bad, and the ugly of Shanghai’s unconventional ice cream flavors.https://t.co/56wApbFotG

— Sixth Tone (@SixthTone) May 15, 2020

Ice cream makers know the value of shock, and that's why they come out with new flavors that no one in their right mind would ever associate with ice cream. Whether they last past the "I dare you to try it" phase is all up to the consumers. Strangely, some become classics. Sixth Tone introduces us to Shanghai's new ice cream flavors: bubble milk tea, durian, scallion pancakes, calamari, and crab roe. They ate them (and pass along reviews) so that you won't have to. -via Nag on the Lake

In 2002, Elon Musk founded the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, which will be commonly known as SpaceX. Over the course of 18 years, this company would launch numerous rockets, from the Falcon 1 to the Falcon 9, into space, along with the spacecraft series Dragon.

Space.com documents how the rockets’ designs have evolved over the years. See the photos over at the site.

(Image Credit: SpaceX/ Wikimedia Commons)

Have you ever wondered where your trash, like your water bottle that you threw away years ago, would end up? Cracked.com has listed some places where your trash might end up, and these places might surprise you.

For example, if you are living in Japan and you threw away an old cell phone, then some parts of it may find its way toward a medal that will be placed on an Olympian’s neck in the Olympics, which will be held next year in July 2021. Crazy, right?

Check out the list over at the site to know more about where your trash might potentially go.

(Image Credit: MatthewGollop/ Pixabay)