Jigsaw puzzles have faced a huge resurgence in popularity lately. If you want one to spike your anxiety levels (because we all need that right now), then try The Accident by Yelldesign. It looks like glass, but is actually a sheet of acrylic carefully cut to look like a shattered window pane.

-via Colossal

What if dinosaurs actually had heads like cats or dogs? Well, you don't need to imagine any longer!

Do you have pets? Unleash your creativity like these fur parents did!

Image Credits to Sad And Useless

This Untethered Miniature Origami Robot launched by MIT scientists is groundbreaking, and could open up a lot of possibilities for larger-scaled projects in the future.

…we present a novel single-sheet structure that self-folds into a centimeter-sized mobile robot that subsequently walks, swims, and dissolves. The robot is controlled using an external magnetic field exerted by embedded coils underneath the robot. Equipped with just one permanent magnet, the robot features a lightweight body yet can perform many tasks reliably despite its simplicity. The minimal body materials enable the robot to completely dissolve in a liquid environment, a difficult challenge to accomplish if the robot had a more complex architecture. This study is the first to demonstrate that a functional robotic device can be created and operated from the material level, promising versatile applications including use in vivo.

What are the possible applications that you could think of?

Video by Youtube / IEEE Spectrum

Redditor /u/kethtoper is a stained glass artist with a geeky soul. Lately, he's be recreating icons of the Star Wars universe as beautiful glass and wood lamps, such as this AT-ST.

In this photo of our dear planet Earth taken from space, darkness slowly fades away as we Earthlings experience twilight on the planet. As the Latin saying goes, “post tenebras lux” — “after darkness, light”.

With the Sun illuminating the scene from the right, the cloud tops reflect gently reddened sunlight filtered through the dusty troposphere, the lowest layer of the planet's nurturing atmosphere.

Magnificent.

(Image Credit: ISS Expedition 2 Crew, Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, NASA)

Tribute bands and parody bands weren't really a thing in 1964, but with Beatlemania raging around the world, the time was ripe for those wishing to jump on the bandwagon. The manager of a group called the Ardells coaxed them into growing out their hair and changing their name to the American Beetles. It was a joke that paid off well for them, except for that time they were booked for a tour in Argentina as the Beatles.

In the spring of 1964, as Beatlemania swept the world, newspaper headlines announced that The Beatles would be travelling to South America that summer. Millions awaited their arrival with bated breath –  and in July, when four young moptops descended into Buenos Aires Airport, it seemed that teenage dreams were about to come true.

The Beatles were actually nowhere near Argentina at the time. The British group – who split 50 years ago this month – were back home in London, on a rare rest stop between concerts and recording. But with or without their knowledge, four young guys from Florida named Tom, Vic, Bill and Dave had taken their place.

After months of excitement, the deception was immediately apparent, and chaos ensued. Read the story of the American Beetles in Argentina at BBC Culture. -via Damn Interesting

(Image source: YouTube)

It was a late summer morning in the small town of Lewes, Delaware, and Lynn Alleva Lilley was on the beach, taking pictures of the dancing lights on the tide. Suddenly, a long dark object pierced through the waters, and this distracted her from what she was doing. She became curious about this, however.

“Then the tail raised, and I realized it was a horseshoe crab swimming on its back,” Alleva Lilley said. “I had never seen that before. I thought maybe it was warming in the sun or was wounded. I just had to follow this creature. It felt like some benevolent force offered it as a gift and a lifeline.”

This was the beginning of her adventure with these marine creatures that she will come to know and love over the years to come.

See her fascinating story over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Lynn Alleva Lilley/ Atlas Obscura)

For the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day (which was Wednesday), PBS Nature, KQED’s Deep Look, and Ze Frank got together to give awards to the Earth's animals. The categories include Best Dressed, Most Traumatic Early Childhood Experience, and Best Fish Out of Water, so you can assume that Ze Frank came up with them. You'll see some weird critters doing some amazing things. -via Kottke

Magazines give us news, features, essays, feel-good stories, and all kinds of information in a digestible length. Some articles win Pulitzer prizes, while others kind of fade away... until they inspire some screenwriter to adapt it into a full-length feature film, which may or may not resemble the original article. For example, the 2001 movie The Fast and the Furious was based on a 1998 feature article in Vibe titled Racer X.

    “The excitement of going fast is like nothing else,” says Javier Ortega, a Columbian-American who screeches his blue Honda Civic to a halt in front of the store. “Another group gets excitement from doing drugs or whatever. Speed excites us.”

    Few know that excitement like Estevez. Six feet tall with stooped shoulders and a healthy gut, he writes his own rules. Forget about valor, compassion, honor; in his book, that’s all synonymous with second place.

    “People say I cheat all the time,” explains Estevez, a Huck Finn grin spreading across his face. “They say I jump the line, I do this, I do that. Drag racing is war. If you bring a knife, and I bring a machine gun, you’re dead. That’s it.”

Who could imagine that Ortega and Estevez would inspire an entire series of movies? You can read that original article online, and 24 others that inspired big movies, linked in a list at Longreads. -via Metafilter

The eating disorder anorexia nervosa only became familiar to us in the last few decades, but documented cases go back to antiquity. It wasn't quite recognized as a mental illness because sufferers appeared to be completely rational, even when their behavior was self-destructive. Accounts tell of holy women, some of them saints, who transcended earthly flesh by not eating. One of them was Catherine of Siena (1347-80).

By the age of 15, her already frugal diet was reduced to small quantities of bread and raw vegetables. Five years or so later, following the death of her father and more visions of Christ, Catherine cut out the bread, and, from her mid-20s, apparently ate ‘nothing’ other than sacramental wafers at Holy Communion. She was dead from self-starvation by the age of 33. According to Raymond, during those last years of severe starvation, not only did she have no need of food but the very act of eating was physically unbearable. ‘If she forced herself to eat, her body suffered extremely, her digestion would not function, and the food had to come out with an effort by the way it had gone in.’ In other words, she was forcing herself to vomit, which she did by swallowing branches of fennel or other bitter herbs. Despite her frailty, she remained physically energetic to the last and, indeed, seems to have been prone to bursts of hyperactivity. In Raymond’s words: ‘She did not know the meaning of fatigue.’

Neuropsychologist Paul Broks compares the modern diagnosis of anorexia nervosa to the medieval anorexia mirabilis, or holy anorexia, in terms of the struggle between the body and the soul at Aeon.  -via Strange Company
 
(Image credit: Didier Descouens)

For its 70th anniversary, Dior paid tribute to Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, and Maria Grazia Chiuri. The major exhibit was presented in 2017 in the heart of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, but now, it's available for viewing for everyone via Youtube!

Named Christian Dior, Designer of Dreams, the exhibition focused on the designer's influence on his contemporaries, embodied in a sublime series of mythical creations imagined by the talented creative directors who have been at the helm of the French house for more than 70 years. An exhibition that triggered a veritable Diormania in the capital, from July 2017 to January 2018. Every day, the pavement in front of 107 rue de Rivoli was packed with people. Breaking all records, the exhibition attracted more than 708,000 spectators.

Image by Adrien Dirand

Way back in the 1600s, physicists were already amazed by the strength of this object. The strength of this tadpole-shaped object, the Prince Rupert’s drop, when demonstrated, is still a sight to behold even now in the 21st century.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Prince Rupert's drop, this weird, scientific enigma is a seemingly simple glass object created by dripping molten glass into very cold water.

That process creates all kinds of crazy physical properties, which we'll go into later, but the end result is a teardrop-shaped piece of glass that's practically unbreakable at its bulbous 'drop' end, but will shatter from the slightest pressure at the elongated tail end.

So just how strong is the bulbous end of the Prince Rupert’s drop? VERY strong.

Spoiler: Prince Rupert's drops are so strong, they actually cause the bullet to shatter.

Watch this amazing video made by Destin over at his channel SmarterEveryDay.

Via ScienceAlert

(Video Credit: SmarterEveryDay/ YouTube)

Want to make pretty, yummy, and healthy sandwiches for your loved ones or for yourself? TasteMade Japan has got you covered!

Here are the ingredients, which you can adjust according to what you have at home:

Bread (12 slices, white milk bread is recommended)

Fresh cream (200 milliliters/ 6.7 ounces)

Mascarpone cheese (200 grams/ 7 ounces)

Granulated sugar (30 grams/ 1 ounce)

Fruit (Use whatever fresh fruit you have available. Tastemade Japan recommends strawberries, mandarins, green kiwi fruit, yellow kiwi fruit, mango, seedless green grapes, seedless red grapes, and bananas.)

- via My Modern Met

Image and Video by TasteMade Japan / Youtube

When the first Star Wars movie came out, it was fairly clear that Chewbacca was included to keep the story from being totally human-centric and to show that there were other sentient species in that galaxy far, far away. But 43 years and a dozen movies later Chewbacca is a beloved character fans care about and want to make sense of. So you may as well learn more about him. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A society of people now called the Cucuteni-Trypillians lived in Eastern Europe five to eight thousand years ago. Evidence of their huge Neolithic settlements was only uncovered in the late 19th century. We know very little about them, as they left no evidence of a written language (and history is written by those who write), but their artifacts indicate they were quite civilized. Another barrier to learning about them was their habit of completely burning down their cities every few decades.

To intentionally torch an entire settlement, huge amounts of whatever they were using for fuel would have been required, as well as a highly organised community effort. There have been some experiments to try to replicate the results of these ancient settlement burnings, but according to the research, “no modern experiment has yet managed to successfully reproduce the conditions that would leave behind the type of evidence that is found in these burned Neolithic sites, had the structures burned under normal conditions.”

Termites, maybe? Or possibly disease? The burnings could have had a cultural importance, or could have been just a general urban renewal project. Read some of what we do know about the Cucuteni-Trypillians at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Kenny Arne Lang Antonsen)