Marketing people should be paying attention or else their ads on vehicles will fail miserably like these. Check out these epic fails over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad And Useless)

All of us have impressions of people we meet for the first time. First impressions, which happen immediately, are largely based on non-verbal cues that we see — their appearance, body language, and gestures. Using these cues, we then form an emotional response that informs the way we view the person. All of these happen in only a tenth of a second.

In some contexts, first impressions are of the utmost importance, as when chatting with a prospective date—who might, eventually, become your life partner (or not, as the case may be). As for the dreaded job interview, sage advice invariably counsels that we come across well from the outset, that hiring decisions are often decided within the first few minutes.

Non-verbal cues not only contributes in the formation of first impressions. In fact, up to 70% of our daily interactions may derive from them.

Know more about this over at Psychology Today.

(Image Credit: jarmoluk/ Pixabay)

The Royal College of Psychiatrists, which represents psychiatrists working in the UK, urge the UK government to force social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to hand over their data on the type of materials users view, as well as the amount of time they spend on the platform, over to academics. The data will be part of research which aims to reduce rates of suicides and self-harm among young people.

Although most children and young people will be able to benefit from technology without negative effects, some may be vulnerable to compulsive use and potential harms, the report says. The college said any data shared would be anonymized (although this is trickier to guarantee than it sounds).

While this might be a good idea, the tech companies are unlikely to share this data. After all, they will only get a tiny incentive in doing this, and this could expose them to risk.

...individual users could potentially be reidentified from the data, for example, or people might choose to take legal action as a result of the findings.

Almost two years ago, a pair of Apple investors wrote an open letter to the company calling for it to do more to protect children from the supposedly damaging effects of digital technology. Not much changed as a result.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

A security flaw in Internet Explorer is currently being used by hackers, according to Microsoft. The tech company told TechCrunch that it was “working on a fix”. However, it was unlikely to release a patch until the next round of monthly security fixes, which is scheduled for February 11.

The aforementioned security flaw is believed to be similar to the one disclosed by Mozilla earlier this week.

More details over at the site.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Modder Mastaklo from kakarotmods.com has created a hilarious mod for Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, a game on the PS4, Xbox, and PC. The mod injects the goose from the well-known Nintendo Switch game, The Untitled Goose Game into the action. Watch the three-minute gameplay from IGN as the goose hits a good combo attack against Piccolo. The goose is truly powerful! 

In the mid-20th century, rural France had a glut of vintners and a lack of agricultural diversity. Authorities hatched a plan to build a reservoir in the Salagou Valley in southern France, in order to refresh the soil and encourage new crops. The original plan called for the reservoir to inundate the small village of Celles, home to 63 residents whose families had lived there for generations.

Between 1959 and 1968, the inhabitants of Celles were pushed to sell their homes to make way for the reservoir. Those who didn’t were expropriated, their houses left empty.

In 1968, the dam on the Salagou River was finally finished. The water crept up slowly, covering the red clay landscape. But just short of the village, it stopped. In the original plans the water was supposed to rise to the 150-meter altitude mark. But in the end it stopped permanently at 139 meters, 4 meters lower than the village.

By then there were no inhabitants left, and the buildings began to fall into ruin. But some former residents, particularly one family, never gave up on Celles. Fifty years later, read about the effort to rebirth a town killed by good intentions at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Sam Harrison)

The unprecedented snowfall in St. John's buried countless cars overnight, including this one. #NLStorm2020 pic.twitter.com/oYDY3ujbJG

— CBC Newfoundland and Labrador (@CBCNL) January 19, 2020

Snow fell across Canada this past weekend, but Newfoundland got more than their share.

The capital of Newfoundland, St. John’s, was hit with 30 inches of snow in 24 hours, shattering a previous record, the Weather Channel reported. Officials also recorded snowdrifts as high as 15 feet on some highways, more than a few of which required help from Canadian armed forces to clear.

Plowing the streets is all well and good, but you can't go anywhere when you open the front door to a wall of snow, or your car has completely disappeared underneath it. Now that the plows and snowblowers have been at work, we have plenty of evidence of the unusually massive snowfall.  

Results of a record-breaking blizzard in Newfoundland... 😱 pic.twitter.com/oTgLqZ3vwV

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) January 19, 2020

See more Tweets about the snow at Earther. Continue reading to see more impressive images and videos of what the storm left behind.

They may be called century eggs or even 1,000 year eggs, but it only takes between ten and 30 days to preserve them. Great Big Story explains how century eggs are made in the traditional way. The comments at YouTube confirmed that they are delicious, with a salty flavor in the jellied "white" and a creamy yolk. After watching this video, I had a couple of questions, which Wikipedia answered.

Do you need to cook these eggs? No, they can be eaten as is, but many folks cut them up and add them to congee.

If there are so few producers using the traditional process, how are century eggs so widely available? Modern manufacturers get the same effect by soaking the eggs in the "active ingredients" of the traditional preservation method, skipping the clay and reproducing the same chemical reactions.

-via Digg

The world’s last stand of Wollemi Pines, a prehistoric species known as “dinosaur trees”, can only be found in Australia.

Fewer than 200 of the trees exist in the wild, hidden in a gorge in the World Heritage Blue Mountains, northwest of Sydney, an area hit by one of the biggest bushfires that have ravaged much of Australia for months.

Due to the bushfires, the Wollemi Pines were in danger of extinction. To prevent this from happening, specialist firefighters were deployed for a secret operation which aimed to save these trees.

With flames approaching the area late last year, air tankers dropped fire retardant in a protective ring around the trees while specialist firefighters were winched into the gorge to set up an irrigation system to provide moisture for the grove, officials said.

Matt Kean, environment minister for New South Wales state where the Blue Mountains lie, described the operation as "an unprecedented environmental protection mission".

[...]

"It's just been a phenomenal success story," he added.

More details about this story over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: HO/ AFP/ ScienceAlert)

The Nintendo Switch is a great game console. It has lots of amazing games, and it has the ability to switch from a home console to a portable one. The standard Joy-Cons, however, are a problem for those who have big hands. Someone just solved this problem by using a Nintendo GameCube controller.

Shank Mods really wanted to play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with a proper GameCube controller, so he set about the complicated and time-consuming task of chopping up a real GameCube Wavebird wireless controller to convert it into a Joy-Con. He sliced the controller in twain, then ripped out the guts and replaced them with the electronics from the Switch Joy-Cons.

The project took months, but the final result was worth the time.

(Image Credit: Shank Mods/ YouTube)

Dogs who can play fetch with their owners are great. Why? Because playing fetch is not something simple. A dog must be able to perceive that the person wants the ball back. The canine also has to be social enough to want to play with the person in the first place. It is a skill so advanced that scientists think that it could have been around over thousands of years of domestication.

A new study, however, reveals that some gray wolves, the ancestors of dogs, can also play fetch.

The work supports the idea that the roots of many of the traits and behaviors we see in domesticated animals, from cats to chickens, may be present in their wild relatives.

More details about the study over at Science Magazine.

(Video Credit: Science Magazine/ YouTube)

Now that Disney owns both Star Wars and The Simpsons (and almost every other entertainment media in existence), they are proud to compile some Star Wars references from the past 30 years of The Simpsons ...although a few really dedicated geeks are lamenting the omission of their personal favorites. If you prefer Marvel superheroes to Star Wars, well, Disney owns them, too, so here's a supercut of Marvel references in The Simpsons.



But the most appropriate supercut may be the list of the times that The Simpsons made fun of Disney. This particular supercut was NOT released by Disney.

Ibride is a French furniture and furnishings design firm. Its artists have a flair for the surreal, especially mixing animal forms into humans and practical objects. Among their newer projects are shelves and tables that look like animals.

In 1961, Leonid Rogozov was the only medical doctor at the Soviet Antarctic Station. He was well qualified to take care of everyone else, but it was Rogozov himself who came down with appendicitis. He recognized the symptoms, but was weakening from his condition, and concerned about the decision he would have to make. The pain became so bad that on April 30, he set up the operating room, briefed his terrified assistants, applied local anesthetic, and removed his own appendix. In his own words:

“My poor assistants! At the last minute I looked over at them. They stood there in their surgical whites, whiter than white themselves. I was scared too. But when I picked up the needle with the novocaine and gave myself the first injection, somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn’t notice anything else.

“The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time… Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up… I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every four to five minutes I rest for 20 – 25 seconds.

“Finally here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst… My heart seized up and noticeably slowed, my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it’s going to end badly and all that was left was removing the appendix.”

Rogozov recovered from the self-surgery and lived until 2000. Read excerpts from his diary and the report he later wrote on the surgery at Flashbak. -via Digg

Wood is now seen as the material to replace steel and concrete, as it is said to reduce waste and create a more aesthetically-pleasing environment. The hype around replacing commonly-used building materials with wood is all thanks to structural timber (also known as massive timber). It involves sticking pieces of soft wood together like putting lego blocks together, as Vox detailed: 

Mass timber is a generic term that encompasses products of various sizes and functions, like glue-laminated (glulam) beams, laminated veneer lumber (LVL), nail-laminated timber (NLT), and dowel-laminated timber (DLT). But the most common and most familiar form of mass timber, the one that has opened up the most new architectural possibilities, is cross-laminated timber (CLT).

Slabs of wood this large can match or exceed the performance of concrete and steel. CLT can be used to make floors, walls, ceilings — entire buildings. The world’s tallest mass timber structure, at 18 stories and over 280 feet, was recently built in Norway; there’s an 80-story wooden tower proposed for Chicago.

image via Vox