It’s been some days since we’ve been able to go outside our homes and travel places in the world. Thanks to the coronavirus, we’ve been temporarily prohibited to leave our respective homes. And we know that staying at home is the best thing we can do right now, as we don’t want to put ourselves and others in danger of being infected with the disease.
Thankfully, there are many ways to keep ourselves from boredom, such as playing video games. But if you really miss traveling, don’t worry. You can travel virtually using the internet. See how and where to travel virtually over at Forbes.
Many businesses have been greatly affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Because of the lockdown imposed, people are discouraged from going outside to avoid the risk of contracting the dreaded disease. This, however, results in many restaurants closing down, as no customers will come into their establishments.
“The economic impact is huge,” said Johnson-Roberson, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Michigan. “I’m really worried that these restaurants aren’t going to come back.”
This doesn’t have to be the case however. If people can’t go into restaurants to eat, then maybe these restaurants could bring good food to the people through the use of food delivery robots.
Now, in a time of social distancing and Instacart delays, the food delivery robot could finally have a moment.
1990. An army of marbled crayfish clones invaded the land of Germany. Within just a decade, these lobster-like creatures would be found invading other countries like Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, France, Sweden, and Japan. How were these crayfish able to clone themselves? The answer, according to scientists, might dat back to 1995.
Scientists suspect that sometime around 1995, a genetic mutation allowed a pet crayfish to reproduce asexually, giving rise to a new, all-female species that could make clones of itself from its unfertilized eggs. Deliberately or accidentally, some of these mutants were released from aquariums into the wild, where they rapidly multiplied into the millions, threatening native waterways species and ecosystems.
But their success is strange. “All marbled crayfish which exist today derive from a single animal,” said Günter Vogt, a biologist at Heidelberg University. “They are all genetically identical.” Ordinarily, the absence of genetic diversity makes a population exceedingly vulnerable to the vagaries of its environment. Yet the marbled crayfish have managed to thrive around the globe.
A closer look reveals that the crayfishes’ uniformity is only genome-deep. According to studies conducted by Vogt and others in the mid-2000s, these aquatic clones actually vary quite a bit in their color, size, behavior and longevity. Which means that something other than their genes is inspiring that diversity.
So what contributes to the diversity of these crayfish clones? If it is not nature, then the usual response would be nurture. At least that’s what our common sense would deduce. But new research on crayfish and other organisms reveal something else other than nature and nurture, and that is “random, intrinsic noise”.
Dreams can come in a lot of variations. They can be pleasing, sad, or just outright weird. Some say that dreaming is just our brain trying to process things, but what do they really mean? Sometimes we’d like to decipher the message or meaning behind these dreams, but even scientists can’t say what our dreams mean. It’s up to the dreamer to determine what their sleep-induced movies mean, as MSN detailed:
Dr. Kryger says that dreams are "mostly speculation in terms of specific meanings." Among the scientific community, he continues, there are two main trains of thought: One is that every part of a dream has a specific meaning, and the other is that dreams are entirely spontaneous and mean nothing.
The first train of thought can be attributed to Sigmund Freud, who is recognized as the first person to assign definitive meanings to dreams -- like that dreaming about a king and a queen actually means you're dreaming about your mother and father, Dr. Kryger says.
Although dream psychoanalysis may have only begun in the last century or two, people have studied dreams for far longer: Aristotle wrote about dreams as early as 325 B.C., according to Dr. Kryger.
Lauri Quinn Loewenberg, a professional dream analyst, says the problem with arriving at proof across the board "is that dreams and their meanings are so very personal because they are based on the person's individual life experiences."
Additionally, neuroscience tends to focus on the function of dreaming (like memory retention) rather than the "comparative analysis between the imagery in dreams and the content of the previous day, which is how I approach dream analysis," Loewenberg says.
A video of the Etobicoke Creek in Ontario, Canada, turning completely red has creeped out the Internet. The video was shared online by Twitter user adamcarson0205. The creek turning red was like a scene from a horror film! Some people are believing that the end is near, with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the creek turning red.
King Henry VIII is best known for his cruelty towards his wives. He executed two of his wives as King of England. There’s even a mnemonic to remember the fate of all six of King Henry VIII’s wives! The Infographics Show looks into the reason behind the fate of all the king’s wives. Watch and find out the reason why King Henry VIII beheaded two of his wives!
Jose Manuel Ballester recreates classic paintings such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The Spanish artist recreates these paintings with a twist: he removes all human figures from his recreations. His reimagined paintings seem to ask the question, ‘What would happen if humans left the scene of these paintings?’ His work give a new look and life to the classic paintings, as The Colossal detailed:
In an interview with Bored Panda, Ballester said that while his Concealed Spaces series often is regarded as humorous, it has multiple meanings. “After a deeper look it’s not difficult to find transcendence and the multiple possible interpretations, both as new images and as related to their original counterparts,” he said.
One of the clearest aspects in this series is the way we can understand art from the point of view of each period, which has a unique way of looking and understanding reality shared by artists, who develop their creativity inside those period’s values and connect with ideas and universal precepts extended in time.
Antonio Muñoz wanted a bag of Cheetos to eat. There’s a problem, however — he doesn’t have one at home, and he can’t go outside to the department store across the street to buy one due to the quarantine. He would be exposing himself to greater risk of contracting the disease if he did go. But he really wanted Cheetos. He didn’t just let his cravings go. And so he thought of a way he could have his Cheetos without having to step a foot outside his house. If he can’t go, then maybe someone can go for him. Maybe his chihuahua can go for him. And so he set his chihuahua on a mission.
“Day three of quarantine. I really wanted my ‘Cheetos’,” he said.
Muñoz sent his dog out to the department store across the street with a note that said, “Hello Mr. Shopkeeper. Please sell my dog some Cheetos, the orange kind, not the red ones, they’re too hot. She has $20 attached to her collar. WARNING: She will bite if not treated right. Your front neighbor.”
Surprisingly, the chihuahua returned to him holding a bag of Cheetos in his mouth.
More details about this story over at Bored Panda.
Kirk, a border collie named for Star Trek's Captain Kirk, won in the small dog agility category of the 2017 Purina Incredible Dog Challenge. Her human, Channan Fosty, played a recording of Kirk's performance, which delighted the pup. She knows who's on the screen!
The N95 Mask is now one of the most significant and sought-after health devices of the 21st century. The small polymer cup has been widely used as protective equipment, and has saved a lot of lives. The origin of the N95 can be traced way back to the Renaissance era, where people would cover their noses with cloth to avoid the plague. Fast Company has more details:
e The N95 mask is a descendant of Wu’s design. Through World War I and World War II, scientists invented air-filtering gas masks that wrapped around your entire head to clean the air supply. Similar masks, loaded with fiberglass filters, began to be used in the mining industry to prevent black lung.
“All the respirators were these giant, gas mask-looking things,” says Nikki McCullough, an occupational health and safety leader at 3M, which manufactures N95 respirators. “You’d wash them out at night and you could wear them again.”
his equipment saved lives, but it was burdensome, and a large reason why were the filters. The fiberglass required a lot of effort to breathe, and the full head enclosures were hot to wear. By the 1950s, scientists began to understand the dangers of inhaling asbestos, but people working with asbestos preferred not to wear bulky respirator masks. Imagine working in construction in 85-degree heat and having your head wrapped in rubber to protect yourself from an invisible threat.
So in the 1970s, the Bureau of Mines and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health teamed up on creating the first criteria for what they called “single use respirators.” The first single-use N95 “dust” respirator as we know it was developed by 3M, according to the company, and approved on May 25, 1972. Instead of fiberglass, the company repurposed a technology it had developed for making stiffer gift ribbons into a filter, by taking a melted polymer and air-blasted it into layers of tiny fibers. “They look like somebody dropped a bunch of sticks—and they have huge spaces between them,” says McCullough.
Software engineer Andrew Eckel is one of the many people who now are expected to work from home, and who have to network with co-workers. That's what he's doing in the top picture. We've seen a lot of these lately, even on TV. You just have to look at the background and judge the home environment, don't you? His is pretty nice. But it's not real.
I work as a software engineer in cancer research and have an active but money-losing side gig as a musician*. The luxury apartment is improbable for my lifestyle, but anything's possible, right?
After I zoomed out and showed my co-workers the paper backdrop, they said they'd been quietly wondering how I could afford such a stylish place. Or just why I had two office chairs.
Eckel said he was inspired by the Picture Phone from the TV show Pee-wee's Playhouse. Pee-wee Herman stood in front of a different fake backdrop every time he took a video call -on a tin can. Okay, Pee-wee was tickled to learn that Eckel got the idea from him. Then Pee-wee wrote a blog post explaining where he himself got the inspiration for the Picture Phone on his show that ran from 1986 to '90. That inspiration dates back to 1957, when video calls were a futuristic concept. But you won't be surprised to find out what it was. -via Boing Boing
Many of us have taken guided tours of museums, but how many of us have discovered hidden treasures on those tours? Back in 2017, Italian archaeology student and PhD candidate, Vottoria Dall'Armellina was on a guided tour of Saint Lazarus Monastery. She came across something really unusual in a case. A metal sword that looked like piece of weaponry she had seen in her studies.
"I noticed it immediately," she told CNN. The sword was labeled as a medieval artifact, but Dall'Armellina had a hunch that the object was much older than that.
Other researchers were skeptical at first, but after spending two years studying the sword she discovered she was right. The weapon is one of the oldest swords ever found and is estimated to have been created over 5000 years ago.
Photo: Ca'Foscari University of Venice / Andrea Avezzu
Due to the spread of COVID-19, Reddito Ashmush and her fiance’s wedding had to be called off. However, this doesn’t mean they can’t have a wedding at all! Ashmush’s fiance decided to surprise her with a special wedding in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Her fiance invited their friends, and prepared a virtual wedding in the game. Now that’s sweet!
It’s a really good thing that we have the Internet. We get to know things we don’t know before, such as this one. Apparently, horses can grow a mustache, and it doesn’t matter if the horse is male or female; he or she gets the chance to grow a mustache provided that he or she has the right gene.
Check out the pictures compiled by Sad and Useless and have a good laugh.
An illustrator from Belgium is in a soft lockdown with his wife, kids, and cats. This meant that he had to explain the Corona Virus and social distancing to his kids, and he did so using the Corona-Monkey as a guide!
The monkey has helped my children understand the many changes we’ve had to make in our daily lives. Maybe he’ll be able to help out some more parents. The metaphor isn’t perfect, but with a bit of creativity, it helps you explain many aspects of what we have to deal with.
But be sure to wash your hands afterward, he’s been known to leave some gifts behind!
