Samuel Ruben and Martin Kamen were doing pure research on the basics of life. How did plants photosynthesize sunlight and turn it into oxygen? Could the answer be carbon? They did experiments using a particle accelerator called a cyclotron. Their experiments ran through the dead of night, because the cyclotron was used for more important things during the day- namely a cure for cancer.

In the early morning hours of February 27, 1940, chemist Martin Kamen sat in a cold, dark police station. Police officers apprehended the disheveled scientist, too tired to protest, outside of his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and hauled him to the station for questioning. They accused him of committing a string of murders that took place the previous evening.

But the police couldn’t pin the crimes on Kamen because the scientist had been locked away in his lab for the past three days, lobbing deuteron particles at a tiny sample of graphite with his colleague, the chemist Samuel Ruben. After he was released, Kamen went home for a brief nap, returned to the lab, and then made one of the most important discoveries of the 20th Century: the carbon-14 isotope.

It wasn't the last time Kamen would be accused of a crime, but those stories faded in importance to the discovery of carbon-14, which is used to determine parts of our history, measure the effects of climate change, and even authenticate Scotch whisky. Read that chapter of science history at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg

(Image credit: Department of Energy)

Disney has always known that six years is just enough time for a new generation of kids to be born that would enjoy their movies. Expectations were pretty high for Frozen 2, six years after the first Frozen was a global phenomenon. But the reason Frozen was such a hit was its unique characters and unique magic. The sequel, by definition, is not unique, and the plot appears to be stolen from a Marvel movie. So of course it made a ton of money ($1.4 billion so far) for Disney. This Honest Trailer explains Frozen 2.

Ah, the 70s! It was a crazy time to be alive. The decor in particular was wild, as exemplified by this groovy pad at 23645 Country Villa Road in Ramona, California.

This unit was set aside for the developer's own use. He sold it as a vacation home to a retired couple who rarely used it. The gem has, as a result, been almost perfectly preserved, right down to the original furnishings and appliances.

The best news of all: it's for sale!

What happens when you run a script of an untranslated game through multiple rounds of Google Translate? This video, apparently. Watch the product of a Google-translated Fire Emblem Sacred Stones, and see for yourself if Google Translate is a reliable translator. Don’t worry, the battle maps aren’t included, only the conversations in the game. 

Being so excited to finally meet the person? Wearing light wash jeans? Not able to make a simple decision about what to drink and then asking the woman what she prefers?

The qualities mentioned above are red flags, at least according to these two girls in this video about red flags on a first date. So if we spot these red flags on our first date, I guess we’ll know what to do.

Well, what do you think?

(Video Credit: Funny or Die/ YouTube)

TEXAS — Last week, the Odessa Police Department received an unexpected visitor in their counter. The visitor, named Chico, put up his paws on the counter and proceeded to report about a case of a missing dog. As it turns out, he was the missing dog.

Sergeant Rusty Martin was among the officers there to receive him, noting that the pup appeared none too distressed by his "lost dog" status. Mostly, he just seemed out for a good time — and he got one.

"We were all excited to have him in the building," Martin told The Dodo. "We had a tennis ball and threw it in the lobby for a bit. Everyone loved on him."

Despite having fun with the dog’s company, the people on duty did not forget that the dog was missing, and so they tried their best in solving the case. They had a problem while solving it, however.

The dog was wearing a collar, but the ID tag had apparently fallen off, so animal control was dispatched to come check for a microchip.

But before the animal control could arrive, Chico decided that he was missing long enough, and he “headed back to his family, all on his own.”

"He ran out just as quick as he came in," Martin said, having posted about the incident on Facebook. "The owner responded the next day [to say that] it was his dog and he had returned home. He lives about a mile from the station."

Crazy!

(Image Credit: Facebook/ The Dodo)

Activities such as “connect the dots” can be usually seen in art workbooks in the elementary level. However, despite me being an adult now, I am still fascinated by this fun art activity, and I know that many of us feel the same.

Check out these pair of flipbooks, titled Dots & Lines, created by animation studio Zumbakamera, and released by Flipboku.

Dots features animations, while Lines unveils optical illusions—that utilize the technique of the classic game to create six different sequences that span the entirety of the book, depending on thumb placement. Flipping the book and positioning a thumb at the top, middle, or bottom of the books’ edges determines which animation the viewers see.

(Image Credit: Colossal)

While this hyper-realistic head might look spooky at first glance, it actually is spookier when you find out that it moves. This robot, named “Afetto”, developed by scientists from Osaka University, can respond to your touch by smiling, grimacing, or frowning. What’s more, it can “feel pain” when an electric charge is applied to its skin. This was made…

… in hopes to teach empathy to artificial intelligence.

[...]

To create Affetto, researchers identified 116 different facial points, and analysed the mechanisms needed to create distinctive expressions. Now they want to enable it to process pain. Lead researcher professor Minoru Asada, who is also president of the Robotics Society of Japan, hopes that as a result, machines might have the ability to feel empathy and morality.

This gives me the creeps.

(Image Credit: Hisashi Ishihara/ YouTube)

Some animators were overjoyed to switch to computer generated cartoons, because drawing the same scene over and over was a lot of work. The big animation studios had already outsourced a lot of those "in-between" drawings to lesser-paid workers. However, experimental animators keep looking for ways to make the work harder, as in stop-motion animation, because that's just cool. A film crew at Wriggles & Robins went a step further- they cooked more than 6,000 pancakes to bring you this simple animated story. It's only appropriate that they unveiled it on Mardi Gras, also known as Pancake Day. -via Digg

Establishments such as retailers and restaurant chains use software that determines their employees’ work schedule. The software uses a variety of data to fine-tune and automate their employee’s schedules, and is designed to track employees’ time and activity to cut labor costs and maximize profit. While these systems do help ease the management costs, it may put the companies’ employees at risk, as Vice details: 

Many large retailers and restaurant chains in the U.S. and abroad have deployed software that uses a variety of data to fine-tune and automate their employee’s schedules, according to press releases, public statements, and employees interviewed by Motherboard. These systems are designed to track employees’ time and activity to cut labor costs and maximize profitability for shareholders.

"Because there isn't a way to guarantee week-to-week that I [could have] certain days off depending on what the system dictates, it makes it really hard to plan anything outside of work,” Kyle, a former full-time worker at Target, told Motherboard. Motherboard granted Kyle and other sources in this story anonymity because they feared retaliation from their employers. “As far as a social life is concerned, all of my activities became spontaneous. Planning anything for me became months and months in advance.”

“I felt like my life source was being tapped out of my body. I felt like I should just suck it up and be better,” Callen, a student and Starbucks worker, told Motherboard.

They said that management used Starbucks’ scheduling software to prevent shorter shifts during the week in favor of longer weekend shifts.

“I live three hours away from [my family] and I can only return home on weekends. Last semester, I only saw them three times,” Callen said.

This illustrates how these systems rely on forcing workers to have a 7-day “open availability,” a common aspect of at-will employment contracts used in the service industry.

image via wikimedia commons

Giant heads, grass sculptures, jungle gardens, and giant rhododendrons cultivated — these are the many sceneries that the Lost Gardens of Heligan has to offer.

Since the late 1500s, The Lost Gardens of Heligan belonged to the Tremayne estate evolving and becoming more extravagant with each passing generation.

The garden was owned by the Tremayne family, and each head of the family was responsible for its evolution.

Throughout the 19th century, the gardens thrived, growing larger and requiring greater staff to manage them. Before the outbreak of World War I, the Tremayne estate employed 22 gardeners. Many of those loyal gardeners went to fight, and after the war, their numbers had diminished so that the gardens fell into severe disrepair. As the rest of the estate was rented out, the gardens became an afterthought and were not rediscovered until the 1990s.

After 75 years of being neglected, the Lost Gardens of Heligan is now back to its former beauty and glory.

(Image Credit: Rob Young/ Wikimedia Commons)

(Image Credit: Flickr)

A new mix-it-yourself hand soap has been launched by FORGO, a brand that avoids plastic and minimises carbon emissions. True to its aim, the hand soap comes only in concentrated powder, along with a refillable glass bottle. The powder contains the essential ingredients needed to turn regular tap water into a full bottle of foaming hand wash. Designboom has the details: 

form us with love worked with a lab specialized in natural cosmetics to develop the powder, which includes six core ingredients that have been around since the eighties. the FORGO handwash comes in three scents — neutral, citrus and wood — all packaged in the studio’s signature minimal aesthetic.

we have defined our mission as design real change, our guide to influence everything we do here at form us with love. this ambition is very time-consuming,’ says jonas pettersson, CEO at form us with love. ‘it means we have to dig deep to influence entire industries, and make better products in terms of innovation, sustainability, quality production to make things long-lasting solutions.’

image via Designboom

The Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo) has employed professional mapmakers for 175 years now. They plot out the topography of the country and record changes over time, such as growing cities and more accurate measurements. But every once in a while, an anomaly is found that show a cartographer's sly and subversive sense of humor.   

Watching a single place evolve over time reveals small histories and granular inconsistencies. Train stations and airports are built, a gunpowder factory disappears for the length of the Cold War. But on certain maps, in Switzerland’s more remote regions, there is also, curiously, a spider, a man’s face, a naked woman, a hiker, a fish, and a marmot. These barely-perceptible apparitions aren’t mistakes, but rather illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.” Maps published by Swisstopo undergo a rigorous proofreading process, so to find an illicit drawing means that the cartographer has outsmarted his colleagues.

Some of the illustrations were only discovered decades after they were embedded in the maps. Why would they do this? And how did the hijinks begin? For all we know, it's still going on. Read about the hidden pictures in Swiss maps at Eye on Design. -via Amusing Planet

Edward Bullard invented the ‘Hard Boiled Hat’ after coming back from World War 1. The hard hat was inspired from the helmet used by soldiers during the war. Bullard saw the effectiveness of the helmet as it protected soldiers from harm, so he created a version that would be used outside the war. Bullard’s Hard Boiled Hat revolutionized the safety-product industry, as Smithsonian Magazine detailed: 

“Bullard’s invention came at an important time,” says Peter Liebhold, curator in the Division of Work & Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which has three examples of the Bullard hard hat in its Mining Lights and Hats collection. “Mines were one of the first regulated work places in America. His hard hat protected employees and limited the liability against employers.”

Started in 1898, the E.D. Bullard Co. was founded by the inventor’s father Edward D. Bullard. The manufacturer produced carbide lamps and other equipment for miners in California, Nevada and Arizona. After returning from the war, the son began developing ideas for affordable safety headgear that would protect miners.

“He realized miners wouldn’t be able to afford a metal helmet,” says Wells Bullard, the inventor’s great-granddaughter, who now runs the family business. “He came up with the idea of a canvas hat, which was shellacked to give it durability and strength. He also invented an inner suspension system that distributed the force of an impact.”

Edward W. Bullard actually began working on a concept for protective headgear in 1915. But it wasn’t until after his experiences in World War I that his design finally took shape. He opted to use a heavy duck canvas, which was then formed to fit the human head with steam, hence the name Hard Boiled Hat. He attached leather brims to it, painted it black and then coated it with shellac so it would hold up to everyday wear in dirty, dangerous mines. In 1919, Bullard also developed a protective cap for the U.S. Navy, which wanted to keep shipyard workers safe.

image via wikimedia commons

Japanese mobile company Tone Mobile has released a phone that keeps its users from taking inappropriate photos. The Tone e20 has an AI-powered feature that prevents its users from taking or saving nude photos. This feature is aimed at parents who would want to keep their kids away from porn, or prevent them from posting (or taking) nude photos of themselves. Petapixel has the details: 

The system is powered by what Tone Mobile calls “TONE Security AI,” which is implemented into the phone’s TONE Camera to “prevent self-portrait damage caused by children under the age of 18 being deceived or threatened to photograph their own nudity.” If the AI recognizes that the subject of a photo is “inappropriate,” the camera will lock up; and if you somehow manage to snap a photo before the AI kicks in, the phone won’t let you save or share it.

Additionally, a feature called “TONE Family” can be set to send an alert to parents whenever an inappropriate image is detected.

image via Petapixel