Beautiful day with my favorite employee, Rosie! #AnimalCrossing #ACNH #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/mEw2p8lBea

— TomatatoroAC (@TomatatoroA) March 30, 2020

Can't hang out at Denny's, because of social distancing restrictions? That didn't stop one artist from recreating the Denny's experience in Animal Crossing New Horizons. @TomatotaroA even designed little outfits for the workers to make the experience feel more authentic.

Via - Twitter

Looking for the ultimate comfort food? Now you can make official Disney churros at home.

Alex Dunlap, Food and Beverage Communications Coordinator of Disney, is providing a big treat for Disney fans who like to cook. He released an official Disney Churro bites recipe inspired by your favorite park snack.

These past few weeks, we’ve seen many of you sharing Disney recipes and creating your very own magical moments right at home. Being a BIG fan of Disney Parks snacks myself, this has inspired us to share one of my favorite recipes so you can continue creating #DisneyMagicMoments.

The magical recipe is available in a printable version on their blog. 

Via - Disney Parks Blog

Inspired by insect body parts, a group of engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new method for creating soft robots. With this new and innovative method, soft robots can now be created in a fraction of the time usually needed, as well as at a fraction of the usual cost.

The innovation comes from rethinking the way soft robots are built: instead of figuring out how to add soft materials to a rigid robot body, the UC San Diego researchers started with a soft body and added rigid features to key components. The structures were inspired by insect exoskeletons, which have both soft and rigid parts—the researchers called their creations "flexoskeletons."

[...]

One flexoskeleton component takes 10 minutes to print and costs less than $1. Flexoskeleton printing can be done on most low-cost commercially available printers. Printing and assembling a whole robot takes under two hours.

The ultimate goal behind this study is to create swarms of robots that might be able to do as much work as a single massive robot.

The problem, however, that I can see with this one, is how long these tiny robots will last in light of their fragile and exposed parts.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Video Credit: JacobsSchoolNews/ YouTube)

With the big light bar on the front that lights up when it is in use, as well as its handy and sleek design, the DualShock 4, the PS4’s controller, is really futuristic. The controller was almost perfect, had it not had one big problem: its battery. Due to the same big light bar in front of the controller, the DualShock 4’s battery is quickly drained, and if there’s one thing that we all like, it’s long battery life… and DualShock 4 didn’t really meet that standard. But the battery problem is not only exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation; Microsoft’s Xbox has its share of battery problems, too.

Without electrical juice controllers are just paperweights, and Sony and Microsoft continue to take dramatically different approaches to solving that problem.

The problem of batteries in controllers has always been a problem ever since the release of wireless controllers, and now that next-gen consoles are about to be released some time soon, talks about this issue once again return to the surface.

More about this story over at Kotaku.

(Image Credit: InspiredImages/ Pixabay)

July 2017. An amazing phenomenon happened. For 90 seconds, the Australian skies were lit up, as a meteor entered the atmosphere of our planet. But more than its rather long light show in the Australian skies, what’s more amazing is that the meteor did not crash land on Earth. Instead, it went out of the atmosphere, and went back into space. It’s a really puzzling phenomenon, one that leaves one asking “why?”

Scientists from the Desert Fireball Network at Curtin University has found the reason why:

… Earth acted as a slingshot to alter the orbit of a meteor and propel it back into deep outer space near Jupiter.

[...]

"The most intriguing quality about this fireball is that it basically used Earth as a type of slingshot, gaining itself an 'express ticket' to Jupiter, where it will most likely spend around 200 thousand years in an orbit near the gas giant. We estimate it will very likely have a close encounter with Jupiter in 2025."

Intrigued by the meteor, scientists then examined extensive data on this fireball to know more about it.

Details over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: Curtin University/ PHYS.org)

We all make mistakes. Even the involuntary functions of our body are included in the previous statement.

More often than not, however, our mistakes are accompanied by major consequences. The same goes with our body. A single mistake could lead to lifelong consequences, especially if it’s committed in the brain. And in this part of the body, mistakes could greatly affect the way we live.

Improper removal of faulty brain cells during neurodevelopment may cause lifelong behavioral issues, new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine suggests. The finding also could have important implications for a wide range of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

More details about this discovery over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

For years, red giants were thought to have the same peak brightness. Because of this characteristic, scientists have used this knowledge as basis in estimating cosmic distances.

It’s hard to know how far away a star is without knowing its intrinsic brightness — a star may appear dim because it’s very far away, or just because it’s dim, or both. Because red giants always peak at a certain brightness, they can act as distance markers across the universe, giving astronomers cosmic landmarks to measure the space between Earth and far-off galaxies.

But what if some red giants are dimmer than others? This could put previous calculations in doubt.

That slight shift could make a big difference to cosmology, and particularly to estimates of the universe’s expansion rate — a number known as the Hubble constant.

More details about this over ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: ipicgr/ Pixabay)

Architect Keiichiro Sako designed this kindergarten facility in Tianshui, China. Its walls and atrium are adorned with translucent colored panels that allow multicolored lights to dance across the interiors as the sun passes overhead. You can see more photos of this beautiful wonderland for kids at Colossal.

The guy from You Suck at Cooking (previously at Neatorma) shows us some culinary tips and tricks for preparing fresh fruits and vegetables. If you start to think this is a one-joke video, keep watching. Not only does he take vegetables apart, he sometimes puts them back together again. His leek actually leaks. And we find out why one asparagus is called a spear. -via Digg

Peru, Indiana, only has 11,000 people, but an inordinate number of them are circus performers or otherwise have the circus in their blood. The town is the home of the Circus Hall of Fame, a school for children who want to learn everything from putting up a tent to walking the high wires, and an annual right-day circus festival.

Peru got its first taste of the circus in 1884, when Civil War veteran and established livery owner Benjamin Wallace acquired a few rail cars worth of circus equipment and started his own show. It was called Wallace and Company’s Great World Menagerie, Grand International Mardi Gras, Highway Holiday Hidalgo and Alliance of Novelties. While the name wasn’t exactly catchy, the show proved successful. Wallace solidified his victory when he purchased the rights to the famous Hagenbeck Circus and rebranded as The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. Each spring the tour began in Peru with a parade featuring the circus band and exotic animal menagerie.

Circus troupes and acts like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show once lived like family at the Winter Quarters where Wallace kept his livery, just outside Peru along the Mississinewa River. Wallace built his village and painted every inch yellow, opening to his circus employees and animals in 1892. There were barns for the elephants and big cat standards, but also for ostriches, giraffes, camels, and even a hippo. There were equipment sheds, wagon shops, a clubhouse, and hospital. The community was quiet in the summer months, but every fall the railcars rolled in and circus migrants strode back through town toward the winter quarters to the tune of “Back Home Again in Indiana” streaming from the calliope.

More than a hundred years later, descendants of those circus performers live in Peru, and some of them carry on the family business. Other circus performers made their way to Peru over the years, and established lives among their kindred spirits. Read about the "Circus Capital of the World" at Atlas Obscura.

Joel Sutherland got his wife and kids together and pulled out their old Simpsons Halloween costumes for a family project. They made a video re-enacting the opening of The Simpsons TV show! A few changes were necessary, as in there were no other participants besides the family, but they did a pretty good job. -via io9

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway had a wife (his first, Hadley), a three-year-old son named Jack (who they called Bumby), and was having an affair with heiress Pauline Pfeiffer. Hadley knew about Pfeiffer and was quite upset at the betrayal. When Hadley took Bumby to visit Gerald and Sara Murphy (previously) on the French Riviera, Bumby was diagnosed with whooping cough. They were sent to a nearby house owned by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to protect the Murphy's children. Hadley and Bumby were eventually joined by Pauline Pfeiffer and then by Hemingway.   

The idea of sharing a two-bedroom house with his mistress, an angry wife, a contagious, sick toddler, and a hovering nanny might have brought a lesser man to his knees, but Hemingway later described the setting as “a splendid place to write.”

The Murphys and the Fitzgeralds did what they could to keep up the morale at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer homestead. In the early evenings at cocktail hour, they would park their cars on the road in front of the house have a drink by the fence lining the small front yard. Hemingway, Hadley, and Pfeiffer held up their end of the party from the veranda.

They were indeed social distancing pioneers, and it gave the Fitzgeralds and Murphys front-row seats to the drama of the Hemingways’ unconventional new arrangement—their “domestic difficulties,” as Zelda put it. At the end of each evening, the group mounted their empty bottles upside down on the fence spikes. By the time the Hemingways and Pfeiffer left a few weeks later, these trophies ran the entire length of the fence.

Read the story of this strange arrangement during that strange summer at Town & Country magazine. -via Damn Interesting

This is what boredom does. Hot Guys of Tech is an anonymously created website and Twitter account  that, as its name suggests, ranks the hottest men in Silicon Valley. The list aims to find the biggest heartthrobs in Silicon Valley. Some of the people in the list are bachelors, as Forbes details: 

Hot Guys’ criteria seem determinedly hard to pin down. The website only offers this by way of explanation: “We scour the industry to find the biggest heart throbs in Silicon Valley. Set your target on these boys.” Its Twitter bio is more direct, calling its roll nothing less than “The Definitive List of Silicon Valley’s Biggest Heart Throbs.” A little more specifically, Hot Guys contains quite a few VCs and investors, as well as several tech executives and founders. Some are bachelors, but not all listees are single.

Soon after Hot Guys’ launch yesterday, Silicon Valley seemed to accept the ranking as its latest measure of status and celebritydom in good humor.

Do you agree with the rankings on the list? 

image via Forbes

If you’ve watched an episode of BBC’s Sherlock, you’d know that fake houses exist. I’m not going to tell you which episode I'm talking about, because I might potentially spoil it. Let’s just say one of the characters stumbles upon a fake house. That’s it. Anyway, there are a lot of fake houses around the world, each with their own significance. Watch the video to see more fake houses! 

The Internet recommends you play games to combat boredom during the quarantine. Maybe its Animal Crossing New Horizons, or any other mainstream game. There is no harm in playing those games, but how about something big and dumb. A big and dumb game is a game that will take hours to finish and you can play it while ignoring the narrative. The New York Magazine has some recommendations if you’re interested: 

My big, dumb game of choice for the pandemic is called Borderlands 3. I was sent a free copy when it came out last fall. I installed it and for six months stared at it in my Xbox menu, telling myself, “One day …” It’s an open-world, first-person shooter with some of the worst writing I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing in a video game. It’s perfect. I don’t know what is actually happening in the game anymore, but I get to shoot bad guys and drive a car, and it’s colorful and it should take me at least a couple of dozen hours to see through. There are long, overwritten stretches during which I have a window to check my phone and respond to texts. The game also causes my Xbox to crash completely (the hardware fully shuts down) if I even try to play online with others, which feels like a sign: My big, dumb game is protecting me. (I feel obligated to add that the company that developed this particular game, along with its CEO, has been the subject of various unflattering reports over the past year.)

image via The New York Magazine