This is the remora fish, also known as the suckerfish, or the sharksucker, due to its powerful suction disc on its head which makes it capable of sticking and staying stuck even on fast-moving sharks and leaping dolphins. Its ability has made it a wonderful inspiration for scientific inventions.

Chinese scientists have now discovered how it works and, with colleagues in the US, have started adapting the same approach for use in robots.

[...]

Inspired, they engineered a biomimetic disc infused with vertical nylon fibres with electrostatic flocking, a technique that utilises an electric charge to align fibres.

Compared to pure silicon discs, these discs demonstrate an adhesion enhancement of 62.5% and show 3.4 times increment in attachment time, the researchers report in a paper in the journal Matter.

Unfortunately, as of the moment, the scientists could not yet copy the natural suction disc. Nevertheless, this new device could pave a way to new underwater robots which could travel the world attached to both whales and sharks.

Amazing!

(Image Credit: Klaus M. Stiefel/ Cosmos)

As a parent, keeping your child’s finger from his nostrils can be difficult. In order to solve this problem, you decide to make up a nonsense consequence of nose-picking, such as “your fingers will be stuck”, or “you will receive a visit from an enraged snot monster.”

Nose-picking has been seen as bad manners in today’s society, but did you know that it was considered bad manners in the 15th century as well? In a 15-century book titled “Lytille Childrenes Lytil Boke”, which was recently digitized by the British Library, there’s a warning for children to “Pyke notte thyne errys nothyr thy nostrellys”, which translates to, “don’t pick your ears or nostrils”.

One of many so-called courtesy books—a genre popular in Europe between the 13th and 18th centuries—the manuscript proffers advice on table manners and etiquette, ironically offering modern readers a glimpse into the mischief of medieval children, reports Stephanie Pappas for Live Science.

This is only but one of the many warnings in the Little Book. See more of them over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: The British Library)

When an Icelandic fisherman fell into the close-to-freezing sea, three miles from the shore, he swam for six hours to safety. https://t.co/vr70DqEqUw

— BBC Future (@BBC_Future) February 27, 2020

There are many ways to die from very cold weather. Inadequate clothing can be a killer. Wet clothing can suck your body heat out, and when it dries, the evaporation also sucks heat out. Shock can disorient you and cause you to make mistakes. At high altitudes, the inability to exercise causes a lack of heat generation. And it's easy to get dehydrated, too. The BBC explains all those ways to die of cold and more, and then tells us about Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, who managed to survive everything nature threw at him when his fishing boat capsized off the coast of Heimaey, an island south of Iceland. He swam for six hours to get to shore.

It was here, in the early hours of March 12 1984, that 23-year-old Guðlaugur Friðþórsson stumbled towards salvation. His bare feet were bleeding from deep cuts caused by the volcanic rock hidden beneath the snow, his clothes soaked in seawater and frozen to his body. He should have already died several times over, but something deep inside Friðþórsson propelled him forwards.

The night was clear and cold. The air temperature was -2C (28F) but with strong winds it would have felt much colder. Despite the freezing temperatures, he paused at a bathtub filled with water left out for sheep for a brief respite. Punching through the centimetre-thick ice he began to gulp down water from the trough.

Friðþórsson's survival was a unique case, even at the time, as the four other fishermen on the boat didn't make it. Your mileage may vary. Read his story, and the dangers of hypothermia at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

Back in 2017, Shimon the robot was more focused on playing the marimba. Now, it seems that he has learned new things along the way. He can now sing, dance, write lyrics, and compose his own melodies, and he’s about to show the world what he can do as “he’s about to go on tour to promote his first album.”

Shimon learns his craft the same way other creative robots do – by being fed huge amounts of data from existing human examples. In this case, that meant 50,000 lyrics from jazz, prog rock and hip-hop music.

With that foundation laid, Shimon can then begin assembling his own lyrics from the rules he’s learned. But there’s more to it than just repeating “yeah baby tonight” – the team made sure that Shimon understood some of the other ingredients that make music so appealing.

Take a listen to Shimon’s first single, "Into Your Mind," and learn more about Shimon’s recent changes, over at New Atlas.

Well, what do you think?

(Video Credit: Georgia Tech Center For Music Technology/ YouTube)

Box of Gold

(This adorable leprekitten design is available on a variety of garments and bags)

March is but a few days away. You know what that means. Spring is in the air and it's time to get your green on! 

St. Patrick's Day is Tuesday, March 17th. In honor of this luckiest of holidays we present our failed attempt to make a limerick. The piece is titled:

The NeatoShop

There is a great shop in the Pacific Northwest. 

That sells cool stuff to make your life the best. 

Make no mistake, their printed stuff is especially great.

Take a whirl around the store, don't wait!

The fact that you stumbled upon this website is probably fate. 

Spruce up your spring wardrobe with some funky fresh designs from the NeatoShop. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months all the way to 10 XL shirts. We know that fun and fabulous people come in every size. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great stuff. New and crazy items arriving all the time. 

Ever since its inception in 1986, the Konami Code (which is up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A) may have perhaps helped thousands of gamers. I was able to finish the game Contra because of this code. The Code was created by a man named Kazuhisa Hashimoto during the development of the side-scrolling shooter Gradius, when he discovered it to be too difficult to play during testing.

However, he forgot to remove this bypass and soon, gamers discovered that if you paused Gradius and entered the code, every power-up became theirs. While it was initially considered for removal from the title, developers worried that it could effectively break the game, so it stayed in.

The Konami Code has since then been used in dozens of games, such as Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, and Dance Dance Revolution.

Hashimoto passed away on February 26, at the age of 79.

Rest in peace, sir. You will always be remembered.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

A cat named Winston steps in amazement as he moves around an undressed memory foam mattress. At some points in the video, he slowly moves away his paw from the foam and looks at it, as if to say “did my paws just make that mark?” He is even more surprised when he sees his footprints disappear.

Adorable.

Via Laughing Squid

(Video Credit: mikebowers123/ YouTube)

We might be pronouncing the word “Nevada” wrong all along, at least for Nevadans.

For the locals of the state, the case of Ne-VAD-uh vs. Ne-VAH-duh is taken seriously.

The subject is so sensitive to Nevadans that Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval sent a text to former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination John Kasich instructing him how to say the word.

So what’s the correct pronunciation of the word? The answer is, it’s up to the speaker how he pronounces it. But for the locals, the right way is Ne-VAD-uh, and pronouncing the word as Ne-VAH-duh would immediately expose a person as a foreigner to the state.

The reason for the confusion may be that Nevada is a Spanish word. Meaning “snow-capped,” Ne-VAH-duh would be the correct pronunciation if you were to say the name in its original tongue. But following a flood of Northern and Midwestern settlers to the state in the 1860s, the hard a prevailed.

Still...

Not everyone in Nevada agrees there's one true pronunciation.

But you’ll still get funny looks from the locals if you pronounced it the Spanish way, “especially if you’re a politician.”

(Image Credit: skeeze/ Pixabay)

How do birds navigate when they migrate to one place and go back to where they came from again? This has been one of the many long-standing mysteries in science.

For forty years, scientists have known that birds can somehow sense the magnetic field and navigate by it. But they’ve been unable to figure out how, until now. Two teams have recently identified that birds can actually visualize the magnetosphere.

The prevailing theory when it came to bird navigation was that the cells in a bird’s beak, which are rich in iron, were what helps it in navigation. In the late 1960s, however, a new theory from Klaus Schulten from the University of Illinois emerged. According to Schulten, “migratory animals, including birds, must contain a certain molecule in their eyes or brains that responds to the magnetic field.”

Ever since then, there has been a great amount of evidence that supports Schulten’s theory. And now, two teams — one from the University of Oldenburg, in Germany, and the other from Lund University — may have made Schulten’s theory the prevailing one.

The Swedish study was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, while the German one was published in Current Biology. Both studies focus on a class of proteins known as cryptochromes.

More information about these studies over at Big Think.

(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)

A video from someone’s Pokemon Camp has gone viral. In the video, two Drifblims are kissing while a Gengar laughs in the background. The video attracted over 174,000 likes and 55,000 retweets. It’s a cute and wholesome video to be honest, although it might make you want to have someone to cutely kiss at a Pokemon Camp as well. 

(via NintendoSoup)

image via NintendoSoup

Youtuber Crystal ASMR performs an elaborate makeover on this popular root vegetable. Talk about a hot potato!

Takotna, Alaska, has a population of 52 people. You can only get to the town by plane, snowmobile, dogsled, or ATV, since there are no roads there. But the people of Takotna have their own claim to fame, and once a year they proudly show off their pies to the participants of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Despite its remote location and diminutive size, Takotna is known by mushers for its outsized generosity. Since the race started in 1973, locals have dished out turkey dinners, made-to-order breakfasts, and other free meals to the mushers. But Takotna is best known for the staggering number of pies available. This year, the village plans to make more than 100 pies (roughly two for each of the 57 racers). For the mushers, who mainly consume bland, lightweight trail meals, while traversing a landscape of muted white and brown, stepping into the community center in Takotna is akin to Dorothy appearing in Oz: The colors come on. But instead of plucky munchkins with oversize lollipops, it’s gregarious locals with tables of riotously colorful pies spanning the fruit and cream spectrum.

By the time race participants get to Takotna, they are really ready for some moose stew and pie. Read how Takotna's pie tradition began, and how the entire village pulls together for the tired mushers of the Iditarod, at Atlas Obscura. 

Ze Frank asks many questions about your creativity, or lack thereof. The answers are yes, yes, yes, yes, and oh yes! Somewhere in this video, you start to wonder if Ze Frank has undergone a crisis, but no. We all have these thoughts, conundrums, and setbacks. We're only human.

New York City has eight million residents, but the big city can also be seen as a collection of small towns jammed together, neighborhoods that each have their own flavor, culture, and name. Redditor bigchunguslolfunny constructed an interactive map labeling those neighborhoods. You can zoom in and out, and click on a colored unit to find out the name of the neighborhood.  

Of course, defining a neighborhood is difficult, as they came into their current form unofficially over time. Quite a few of them are small neighborhoods within larger neighborhoods. Their borders are fluid, and even next door neighbors may disagree on what to call their corner of the city. You can read some of the clarifications in the discussion at reddit.

Five years ago, Loz Blain was in the habit of recording the sound of his farts to send to his brother, Shonky. One of them was so unique that he turned it into a song that went viral called the Fart Symphony. It was the biggest video on YouTube for one day, and then just petered out  ...or did it? The song found an extended afterlife in music education.

The Fart Symphony was used in music composition classes at Berkeley College of Music in the US, largest independent college of contemporary music in the world.

Loz says he's pleased to see that his fart has resonated with other musicians and students around the world.

It also became a talking point for students at Auckland's Royal Oak Intermediate who had been studying body percussion and how different parts of the body, such as one's voice, can be used to make sound.

Kids love it, and the composition adds spice to what could be a boring music class. -via Metafiter