Click on the image above to start the video. The first rule of building a complicated ball run, domino fall, or Rube Goldberg contraption is that you must first put the cats away somewhere. However, when you spend ten hours getting it right, keeping the cats locked up begins to border on animal abuse. In this case, people who watch this -and you have to watch it at least a couple of times- tend to agree that the cat made it all worthwhile. You can watch this in a somewhat larger format at reddit.
We know from Western movies that a cowboy always rode high in the saddle, his six-shooter by his side in case of outlaws or Indian attack. But cowboy life in the Old West wasn't like that, outside of Hollywood. Herding cows was hard work that fell to youngsters and minorities, those with few opportunities for a better job. While ranch work was poorly paid drudgery, it was nirvana compared to the work involved in a cattle drive.
Driving two or three thousand cattle over 1,000 miles required a dozen or so cowboys, each with four or more horses, working for three to six months. The trail boss, who might be the ranch owner but was more likely an experienced ranch hand, rode ahead of the herd to control the pace and direction of travel and tolerated neither unruly cattle nor rebellious laborers. Cowboys took orders and worked for wages typically lower than skilled factory pay.
Each herder had a regular position in the herd, from lead to flank to swing to drag, with status and sometimes pay according to position. According to Montana cowboy Edward Charles “Teddy Blue” Abbott, drag riders had it the worst. Responsible for bringing along the poor, weak, or wounded animals, drag riders would end the day “with dust half an inch deep on their hats and thick as fur on their eyebrows,” Abbott said. Even worse was the dust in their lungs, which had them coughing up brown phlegm for months after the drive.
There were small and memorable parts of a cowboy's world that fed into what became the cowboy myth in dime novels, Wild West shows, and eventually Hollywood movies. Read about the real life of a cowboy at the Saturday Evening Post. -via Damn Interesting
Sugar is one of the essential ingredients in our food. From confectionaries to actual main course dishes, our sugar intake might be more than what we can imagine. In a time where many would worry of excessive consumption of sugar, it’s better to know more about sugar. Katie Couric consults Dr. Mark Hyman, a family physician, on what sugar does to our bodies:
Our hormones, taste buds, and brain chemistry are all hijacked by sugar. Not metaphorically, but biologically. Simply put, you get addicted, like you would be to some of the deadliest drugs on the planet, to sugar and anything that turns to sugar in your body, like white flour.
This is because food contains not just calories or energy to fuel our cells; food contains information. When we eat sugar, it increases our blood glucose and it tells our body to increase insulin, in order to shuttle that glucose into cells. But when we constantly eat sugar and have chronically high blood glucose, we develop insulin resistance, which is the predicator to developing type 2 diabetes. Insulin resistance usually comes with increased fat storage, high blood pressure, and a poor cholesterol profile. Elevated blood sugar and insulin promote inflammation and cause a hormonal cascade that makes it hard to think clearly, maintain a healthy weight, stay in a good mood, have a healthy sex drive, and so much more.
A new type of T-cell has been accidentally discovered by researchers at Cardiff University. The researchers were analysing blood from a bank in Wales when they found the new type of immune cell. The cell carries a receptor that has never been seen before, allowing the newly-discovered immune cell to latch on to most human cancers, ignoring the healthy cells. Yahoo News has more details:
Professor Andrew Sewell, lead author on the study and an expert in T-cells from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, said it was “highly unusual” to find a cell that had broad cancer-fighting therapies, and raised the prospect of a universal therapy.
“This was a serendipitous finding, nobody knew this cell existed,” Prof Sewell told The Telegraph.
“Our finding raises the prospect of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ cancer treatment, a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population. Previously nobody believed this could be possible.”
Asked if it meant that someone in Wales was walking around completely immune to cancer, Prof Sewell said: “Possibly. This immune cell could be quite rare, or it could be that lots of people have this receptor but for some reason it is not activated. We just don't know yet.”
It’s time to address the elephant in the room, er, hotel. An elephant in Sri Lanka wandered into a hotel, and surprisingly enough, is on its best behaviour. Twitter user upidaisy shared a video of the wild elephant, gently wandering around and poking stuff with his trunk. Maybe the elephant is aware that it might cause further disturbance if it thrashes around the hotel!
Amp up the romance this coming Valentine’s Day by taking your lover to a vacation in Juliet’s historic home in Verona, Italy. Yes, you heard that right, Juliet’s home (from the Shakespearean classic Romeo and Juliet) is available for reservation. Airbnb will grant one lucky couple a stay at Casa di Giulietta, letting them use the actual bed used in the 1968 movie adaptation of the play. It’s all romance and fate, no poison included, as CBS News details:
"Juliet's House is the most important museum in the City of Verona, attracting millions of visitors every year. Partnering with Airbnb brings the widely-known Shakespearian myth of Romeo and Juliet to life in a way never before offered," said Mayor of Verona Municipality Federico Sboarina. "We are excited to promote our cultural heritage, share traditions that were previously safeguarded, and bring international visibility to the City of Verona."
The trip also includes a personal butler, a candlelight dinner and cooking demonstration by two Michelin starred Italian chef Giancarlo Perbellini, an opportunity to read and answer some of the 50,000 letters addressed to Juliet every year, a private tour of the home and a tour of Verona, the city of love, through the eyes of Shakespeare himself.
"This stay will give one couple the unique chance to celebrate their love in what is possibly the most romantic home in the history of literature," said Giacomo Trovato, Airbnb's general manager for Italy.
In this work called “REGULAR RAIN”, Russian artist and photographer Slava Semeniuta (also known as VISUAL SCIENTIST) retouches digital photographs of puddles on wet streets to make rain look more colorful, and it does look more colorful.
Semeniuta tells Colossal that he was inspired to create the photo series a couple of weeks ago in Sochi. The way the light shimmered on the wet plants, tiles, and asphalt compelled him to return home for his camera to shoot “everything that seemed to me impressive, something that touched me. I especially liked the look of the reflection of neon light in the water,”...
Marijuana is currently legal in 33 states, as well as in Washington, D.C. in the United States. Millions of people in the world have used this drug to treat various health conditions, like post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, cancer, and others.
As it gets increasingly legalized in the country, many people are curious about how cannabis can be used in treatments for insomnia and pain management. However, new research casts doubt on the aforementioned drug’s effectiveness towards these two.
Two new studies aiming to shed more light on the health effects of cannabis were published in the journal BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care on Monday, in response to the World Health Organization’s recent request for more data on the use of cannabinoids in pain management. Together, they suggest that weed might not alleviate people’s pain and sleep issues as conclusively as previous research has indicated.
The first study is among the first research to primarily look at how medical cannabis affects sleep. Chronic pain makes it hard for people to sleep through the night—simply shifting sleep positions can trigger a pain flare-up and cause them to wake. The study found that weed may be able to help some people sleep more soundly, but negatively affect the sleep of people who use cannabis heavily.
Mindar is a new priest serving at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple located in Kyoto, Japan. Like other priests, Mindar can deliver sermons and move around to interact with worshippers. Mindar, however, has some peculiar features: he has a body made of aluminum and silicone, as he is a robot.
Designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, the $1 million machine is an attempt to reignite people’s passion for their faith in a country where religious affiliation is on the decline.
For now, Mindar is not AI-powered. It just recites the same preprogrammed sermon about the Heart Sutra over and over. But the robot’s creators say they plan to give it machine-learning capabilities that’ll enable it to tailor feedback to worshippers’ specific spiritual and ethical problems.
Mindar is not the only robot in the religious circle.
In 2017, Indians rolled out a robot that performs the Hindu aarti ritual, which involves moving a light round and round in front of a deity. That same year, in honor of the Protestant Reformation’s 500th anniversary, Germany’s Protestant Church created a robot called BlessU-2. It gave preprogrammed blessings to over 10,000 people.
Then there’s SanTO — short for Sanctified Theomorphic Operator — a 17-inch-tall robot reminiscent of figurines of Catholic saints. If you tell it you’re worried, it’ll respond by saying something like, “From the Gospel according to Matthew, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Sharks have been around here on Earth for a very long time; they emerged over 400 million years ago. But did you know that some of them can walk? New research shows that nine million years ago, these walking sharks appeared. This makes them the most recently evolved shark on the planet.
New research published in Marine and Freshwater Research describes nine species of walking shark, all of whom live in the waters off northern Australia, eastern Indonesia, and near the island of New Guinea. Walking sharks have been documented before, but the new research—a collaboration between the University of Queensland, Conservation International, and several other institutions—describes them [in] an evolutionary context, including how they came to be a distinct genus.
But don’t worry! Even if they can walk on land, they are harmless to humans.
Toxic chemicals might be lurking on your home. But where are they? You might think that this is not that dangerous, but the ink printed on mailing labels and cardboard boxes might be deadlier than you think.
Ink typically makes up only about 1% of the total weight of packaging, according to Lumi, a company that creates packaging and manages supply chain logistics for brands. (Lumi sometimes receives questions about possible toxins in ink, and recently published a comprehensive, well-researched blog post written by staffer Ian Montgomery about the subject.) But even though inks are tiny in terms of volume, they often contains high concentrations of heavy metals and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are bad for both the environment and human health.
While the risk to customers, who shop online and interact with these packages directly, is relatively low, people who work at warehouses and post offices who come in contact with larger volumes of ink daily are in a more dangerous position.
The current transportation system is not at its best, with longer commute times, the extreme traffic, and the hassle of finding a public transport you can hop in for the day. It seems by 2030, things might get better. Transportation options such as hover cars are projected to be available by 2030. This is because of improvements in technology, as USA Today details:
"Transportation planning has always been around how to get a vehicle from place to place using roads and traffic lights. But that's changing," said Thom Rickert, a risk and insurance specialist at Trident Public Risk Solutions.
The mobility industry's next objective is to focus on moving a person through multiple modes of connected travel.
That's where air taxis, e-scooters, connected trains and semiautonomous cars come into play, powered by widespread 5G connectivity, Rickert said.
When Sandy Doucette was driving near his home on a snowy winter road in Canada the other day, he noticed something odd on the road.
"A group of birds were on the road and they flew away as I drove by them, except one," Doucette told The Dodo. "I thought that was very odd."
And so Doucette stopped his car and took a closer look on the bird that was left. The bird didn’t budge as he walked closer to it, and there Doucette discovered why.
"I saw its feet completely encased in at least an inch of frozen ice and snow," he said.
Using his bare hands to brush away and melt the ice, Doucette helped the bird go free.
“There you go! Gotcha! Good deed of the day,” he said as the bird flew away.
Welcome to YM Nursery, a nursery school located in Tottori prefecture. Designed by the team of Taku Hibino, the lead architect of the architectural firm Hibino Sekkei, the school is made to teach students to respect nature, as well as help them develop a deep sense of community. The said architectural firm specializes in the design and construction of learning facilities for early education.
Hibino took some bold steps to overhaul the previous nursery, which was conservative and traditional in its design. Despite being in a location that had both the sea and forests, children were closed off to all of it. In addition, Hibino is a proponent of fostering learning from our 5 senses. Children, probably more than any other time in their lives, absorb information not only from sight but from touch, smell and hearing. This belief goes on to inform each and every one of Hibino’s design decision.
Check out more details about the nursery school over at Spoon & Tamago.
Ze Frank observed the mating dance of the puffin, and instead of just snarking about the more unsavory aspects of the species, as we would expect, he was inspired to write a song. And sing it! Therefore, in this short video, we get anthropomorphized animals who aren't too bright plus double entendres galore, as we do expect from Ze Frank. Plus music!
