Music is a medium in which we can express ourselves. Through music, we can vent out our sadness, happiness, and anger, which thereby makes us feel better. We can also use music to calm our mind (when we feel troubled and anxious) and help us synthesize our thoughts, as well as evaluate ourselves when we meditate.
Since the beginning of history, humans have used music as an aid to meditation, prayer and yoga: from Gregorian chants written 500 years ago to Arvo Pärt's haunting minimalist music written just a few years ago.
Classic FM shares to us what they believe are the best music for mindfulness. Check it out over at the site.
Butterflies are very delicate creatures. Because of their very thin wings, they are greatly affected over minimal changes in temperature.
… muscles in the thorax must be warm so that the insect can flap its wings fast enough for takeoff. But because the wings are so thin, they heat up faster than the thorax and can rapidly overheat.
Fortunately, they just have the right tool to prevent their wings from overheating — a state-of-the-art heating system built-in in their bodies.
New thermal images of butterflies show that living parts of the wing — including veins transporting insect blood, or hemolymph, and scent patches or pads that males use to release pheromones — release more heat than surrounding dead scales, keeping the living areas cooler.
Check out how butterflies maintain their wing temperatures over at ScienceNews.
At first glance, this might look like just the ordinary toilet paper that you have at home. But don’t make the mistake of putting this on the toilet paper holder, as this is not really toilet paper. It’s a tasty cake made to look like toilet paper!
… and he paid ¥390 ($3.59) for it. While the smile was entirely free, the delivery charges clearly weren’t, and so the man, Yusuke Yamano, had to still pay the service. But how was we able to order a free smile in the first place?
… many users in Japan might not be aware that way at the bottom of the McDonald’s menu screen lies the notorious “free smile” often seen on their in-house menu.
It serves its purpose of creating awkward situations between customers and staff in restaurants quite well…
… using the McDonald’s delivery app, users are given the option of an additional free small at the checkout. If selected, a happy face and message will be drawn on the bag.
However, Uber Eats is different in that the smile is positioned as a regular menu item, meaning you don’t need to order anything else in order to order it.
Twitter user @Dope_chakra writes that "sometimes my cat walks around with my slipper like he’s wearing it." His name is Meeko and, like many cats, he is an Instagram influencer. Soon, everyone will be walking around with one shoe on the front left paw.
with everything under quarantine, the nerd-folk duo doubleclicks compiled a list of upcoming live shows streamed directly to your computer screen: See them here.
Little acts of kindness are everywhere. When the mayor of Portland, Oregon called upon residents to thank health care workers they answered.
Residents in Portland responded and came out of their homes -- keeping a safe distance of course -- to recognize health care workers.
They clapped and banged metal lids together to sound their support.
Towns outside the city limits also participated. The mayor hopes that this little act of gratitude continues to expand and actually becomes a nightly event.
Thank you health care providers! We appreciate you!
The eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii grew to such a huge scale that even astronauts from space could see it. Astronauts A.J. Feutsel and Ricky Arnold shared their photos of the volcano from outer space. From the International Space Station, the two astronauts were able to take photos of the massive eruption of the volcano.
Slap Wraps, or Slap Bracelets, were 9-inch pieces of stainless steel covered in decorative fabric. The item can envelope someone’s wrist in one quick motion. In addition, the motion of slapping the bracelet to your wrist was entertaining, especially for children. However, some schools banned the use of the part toy and part accessory because of the item being and a distraction and some knock-offs of the bracelet can cause harm to students. Mental Floss details the history of the 1990s phenomenon:
Slap Wraps were the invention of Stuart Anders, a Fort Prairie, Wisconsin, native who graduated from college with a degree in education in 1983. Teaching jobs were hard to come by at the time, so Anders took on substitute positions and coached sports.
Anders pulled out a self-rolling tape measure, which curled up with the flick of his wrist, and began fidgeting with it. He thought it would make a cool bracelet, provided someone covered the steel in fabric.
He called the company who made the tape measure, but they were no longer manufacturing it. Anders didn’t know what else to do. While he thought the idea of a snap bracelet could be successful, he didn’t have the money or other resources to commit to producing them himself. But he kept the prototype on his steering wheel.
Bart found a receptive audience in Eugene Murtha, who had just opened Main Street Toy Company in Simsbury, Connecticut, in 1988. Murtha, a former vice president of Coleco during that company’s Cabbage Patch Kid craze, immediately saw the potential in Anders's invention. He agreed to distribute Slap Wraps, paying Bart and Anders royalties.
The Dineobellator was a coyote-size carnivorous feathered dinosaur. The remains of the said carnivore were found in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin. The newly-discovered dinosaur remains suggested that its unusual tail and claws helped it to hunt and kill during its time. Paleontologist Steven Jasinki said that Deinobellator is a new species from the Late Cretaceous (70-68 million years ago) period, as the Smithsonian magazine detailed:
Steven Jasinski, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania and lead author of the study in Scientific Reports, says Dineobellator is a new species from the Late Cretaceous (70-68 million years ago) that belongs to dromaeosaurid, a group of clawed predators closely related to birds. These rare fossils have features that suggest raptors were still trying out new ways to compete even during the dinosaurs’ last stand—the era just before the extinction event that wiped them out 66 million years ago. “This group was still evolving, testing out new evolutionary pathways, right at the very end before we lost them,” Jasinski notes.
The name Dineobellator pays homage to the dino’s tenacity and that of the local Native American people. Diné means ‘the Navajo people,’ while bellator is the Latin word for warrior.
“Due to their small size and delicate bones, skeletons of raptors like Dineobellator are extremely rare in North America, particularly in the last 5 million years of the Age of Dinosaurs,” says David Evans, a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Even though it is fragmentary, the skeleton of Dineobellator is one of the best specimens known from North America for its time, which makes it scientifically important and exciting.”
Urban planning decisions, like most nationwide or citywide decisions, have almost always been made and directed by men in power. There are features and details in the current planning of various cities that cater specifically to men. An equal urban plan needs data from everyone to be able to create an efficient and effective city system for everybody. Income, gender, race, or sexuality shouldn’t matter in a properly and equally planned city, as treehugger details:
But when cities were planned, most of us were left out of the meeting room. By "us," I mean anyone who wasn't a privileged man with access to education and power. In a profile for dezeen, British writer Caroline Criado Perez describes how cities have never been designed for 50 percent of the population: "Things like zoning are really very biased against women."
So biased, in fact, that she wrote an entire book about it, called "Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men." This kind of gendered data gap has led to city planning and public spaces that just don't function for everyone equally.
"The vast majority of information that we have collected globally, and continue to collect — everything from economic data to urban planning data to medical data — has been collected on men, male bodies, and typical male lifestyle patterns," Perez states.
It is an imbalance we still struggle with today. Writing for MobyCon, a private consultant group that worked with the Dutch government to develop a modern, groundbreaking approach to mobility for all, Melissa Bruntlett says:
Our personal lived experiences influence how we see the world, and how, as planners and designer, we find solutions to mobility challenges. The fact is that despite gains in many countries to balance gender roles in daily life, men and women experience the world differently. Our differences in height, body types and even values have an impact. By aiming to have more gender parity of voices in the room, you have a much greater chance of hearing more balanced approaches and ideas.
Nick Haber, Catalin Voss, and Dennis Wall have upgraded Google Glass for children with autism. The final product, called Superpower Glass, provides behavioral therapy to children with autism in their homes. The six-year project has three main elements: face detection, emotion recognition, and in-app review. These main elements help autistic children learn as they interact with their environment, as the three proponents wrote on IEEE Spectrum:
Our system provides behavioral therapy to the children in their homes, where social skills are first learned. It uses the glasses’ outward-facing camera to record the children’s interactions with family members; then our software detects the faces in those videos and interprets their expressions of emotion. Through an app, caregivers can review auto-curated videos of social interactions.
Over the years we’ve refined our prototype and run clinical trials to prove its beneficial effects: We’ve found that its use increases kids’ eye contact and social engagement and also improves their recognition of emotions. Our team at Stanford University has worked with coauthor Dennis Wall’s spinoff company, Cognoa, to earn a “breakthrough therapy” designation for Superpower Glass, which puts the technology on a fast track toward approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We aim to get health insurance plans to cover the costs of the technology as an augmented-reality therapy.
The kids are motivated to seek out social interactions, they learn that faces are interesting, and they realize they can gather valuable information from the expressions on those faces. But the glasses are not meant to be a permanent prosthesis. The kids do 20-minute sessions a few times a week in their own homes, and the entire intervention currently lasts for six weeks. Children are expected to quickly learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.
Our system is intended to ameliorate a serious problem: limited access to intensive behavioral therapy.
As 1943 dawned, the people of Germany were well aware of setbacks in the war and their military's recent losses. They needed some inspiration, so the Nazis staged a holiday for the tenth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power on January 30. Hermann Göring was to deliver a speech in Berlin, followed by a parade and more speeches. But the celebration didn't go off as planned, as Britain dispatched two squadrons of Mosquito combat aircraft.
The 400-mph Mosquitos were undertaking the RAF’s first daylight bombing attack on Germany’s largest city. Their target was not the parade route or even the Reichsmarschall himself, but something bigger. It didn’t take a top-level English spy to figure out that Göring’s remarks would be transmitted to the far corners of the Third Reich. The bombers banked and streaked towards Berlin’s Haus des Rundfunks—the headquarters building of the German State broadcasting company.
Göring and the radio building were slightly more than four miles apart—a distance that the Mosquitos could cover, going all-out, in roughly 40 seconds. And the cacophony they brought with them traveled even faster. As the mics went live and Göring began to speak, the roar of impending catastrophe became audible over the radio.
The broadcast engineers faced a terrible choice: They could relay the horrible echoes of the air raid, unfolding live, or they could shut down the transmission. In the Reichsmarschall’s moment of glory, they cut the feed and dove for cover.
The attack was no coincidence. To make sure the Germans knew that, the RAF sent a second attack during Joseph Goebbels' speech later in the day! Read the story of the propaganda attack at Air & Space magazine. -via Damn Interesting
You've been playing Monopoly or Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit all your life, and they may seem boring by now. Instead of buying a new game that you may or may not like, how about combining the games you have into something new? Intriguing idea, but actually coming up with the rules for a board game mashup is a lot of work. Lucky for us, it's already been done. Check out the Board Game Remix Kit.
There are 26 different suggestions for ways to play, plus another four in the Valentine's Day Expansion. The simplest ideas are just tweaks to the original games, to make them differently fun: a more intensely strategic Scrabble, a faster Trivial Pursuit.
Then there are the new games: use lead piping to defend yourself from zombies in the Cluedo mansion; listen to the answer from a Trivial Pursuit card, and compete to come up with the most plausible question.
Finally there are mash-ups, combining pieces from more than one game: auction off individual Scrabble tiles with your Monopoly money; solve a murder mystery with Scrabble tile anagrams.
The ability to easily produce fire was a wildly successful development for mankind. But for a large part of the 19th century, working in a match factory could lead to illness, bone loss, and even death. Occupational safety has come a long way since then. Eventually a less toxic form of match was developed, and in this video, you'll also find why "safety matches" are called that.
