For people interested in home decor with a specific theme or just something with an artisanal feel, sculptor Art Donovan has recently released his newest handmade lamp inspired by the Event Horizon sighting of an actual black hole.
Two weeks ago, I had finished this design called, "Event Horizon" to find that the subject of Black Holes and that incredible, historic image was all over the news last week. My own "E.V." was inspired by both my NASA experience and also the 2014 Christopher Nolan film, "Interstellar".
You may check out his other art on his website. -via Boing Boing
Rising waters continue to threaten many communities near coasts as well as those islands in the Pacific. Floating cities was an idea tossed around several years back wherein rich people could find a safe haven.
It was scrapped of course but now, the idea has re-emerged, this time as a place of refuge for those who are in danger of the creeping tides.
Dreamed up by Marc Collins Chen, an entrepreneur who was involved with efforts to bring Thiel’s vision to French Polynesia, the plan was rolled out at a United Nations roundtable last week — complete with luxe architectural renderings from the Brooklyn- and Copenhagen-based Bjarke Ingels Group.
Designed to house 10,000 people, Oceanix City, as it’s called, is a self-sustaining cluster of islands fit for an Instagram honeymoon. There are vertical farms, underwater seafood-harvesting cages, and aquaponics systems fertilized by fish poop (every newlywed’s dream!). It’s got the power to extract potable water from the air, and its island components can be rearranged for optimal heating and cooling across seasons. Garbage is whisked away in pneumonic trash-tubes. There’s nary a car in sight.
It's a paradise basically that is also functional. Trying to build this would take a lot of effort, the planning and the construction as well as the political will needed to make it happen. But if it turns out how it is expected, then it could be viable, albeit temporary, solution in the face of climate change. -via Digg
That's called the "Zoo Hypothesis" which basically states that the aliens wherever they are in space can see us but we can't see them. They don't want to mingle with us because they don't want to tamper with the natural order of things.
They’ve kept their distance not because we’re imperfect, but because of our right to pursue our own destiny. Diversity is something that everyone in the cosmos is assumed to value, so life-bearing worlds should be left to their own evolutionary development.
It's certainly an interesting hypothesis especially with all the fiction illustrating abductions and experimentation by these aliens or world domination in some respects. So it is plausible that aliens are keeping their hands off in order to let nature have its course.
But you would think then that we are imputing arbitrarily characteristics to these entities. Who's to say that they are an advanced and benevolent extraterrestrial civilization who would rather treat us animals in a zoo, needing protection from the rest of the universe?
It still stands that if there are aliens, they just might think it equally reasonable to invade our planet considering we haven't found anything remotely close to Earth's environment in outer space. It's a question for those who study the stars.
Stop-motion animation, much like any animated film production takes an absurd amount of time to create since the characters that you are portraying in the story are either drawn or handcrafted sometimes with the assistance of CGI, like Laika's new film "Missing Link".
The video featured in the article takes us inside the artists' studio or workshop and it gives us an idea of how difficult the animated medium really is.
“What we do at Laika is to take this style of filmmaking, which is craft-based, it’s about artists using their hands to bring something to life, and blend that with technologies,” says Knight. He believes the appeal of the stop-motion technique is primal. “It feels like a child’s plaything being brought to life. It’s like we’re playing with our dolls, playing with our toys, telling stories that mean something to us.”
Animation as a medium of entertainment is generally looked down upon by filmmakers because of its perceived target audience but the stories being told through the medium are not just for mere children as they are for adults as well.
Scientists have recently named a new species whose fossils they just discovered which they say are related to living cucumbers. They named it Sollasina cthulhu after H.P. Lovecraft's fictional sea monster.
The new cthulhu, Sollasina, had 45 tentacle-like tube feet, which it used to crawl along the ocean floor and capture food. The creature was small, about the size of a large spider. It was found in the Herefordshire Lagerstätte in the United Kingdom, a site that has proven to be a trove of fossilized ancient sea animals.
(Image credit: Elissa Martin/Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History)
Though cats may sometimes look very haughty and snarly, they can also do some of the cutest things you'll ever see. In this collection of 60 photos, you will see cats doing various dance poses that would put a smile on your face. Above, you will see a cat doing a sort of ballroom pose but they're not limited to one type of dance as you will see from the breakdancing cat below. Many other
Before there were memes and funny video clips on the internet, webcomics dominated. Even now though, artists still share their funny strips online although with much more competition online, their reach is more limited in terms of capturing people's attention. Still, their influence on online communities is big.
The Verge asks several artists to share their thoughts on the early days of webcomics and how their experience was in creating this internet culture.
Called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the first defense mission will be an interesting one seeing that there are so many possible threats on our planet, not just from within it but from without as well.
In order to preempt any asteroid from hitting earth, NASA has now embarked on creating measures to counter any cataclysmic event like that from happening with this new mission.
The mission, led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, will be the first to demonstrate the kinetic impactor technique, which involves slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid at high speed to shift it off course.
Let the children run free and explore things that interest them independently with supervision. That's the philosophy that a lot of these new outside preschools, or forest schools as they are now being called, uphold. But people in the community of North Park Village are getting annoyed by some of the things purportedly being done in these schools.
One concerned citizen, Janita Tucker, who lives opposite Walking Stick Woods where these schools operate, read out a letter in a community meeting regarding the forest schools.
Tucker began to read a letter from “Residents Living Adjacent to NPV,” listing complaints about the open fire, an accumulation of junk, and a lack of appropriate licenses.
Forest schools were developed and became a trend in early childhood education because people thought that it would be better for children to have a more carefree development compared to the more restrictive environments that try to foster learning with rigid curricula.
Inspired by traditional European outdoor preschools, these programs are, in large part, a backlash to helicopter parenting and overly structured, tech-oriented teaching environments.
So far, all of the complaints against the forest schools have been answered and there will be no further meetings regarding them. Whether these programs will help children's development and learning, separate studies need to be made as to their effectiveness.
Several complications and diseases can come from diabetes one of which is blindness. My aunt has been afflicted by this and it's great news to know that there are possible treatments that we can derive from certain plant compounds.
The research was conducted by the University of Surrey in partnership with Indiana University in America and Kingston University. The cause for these degenerative eye diseases is an abnormal growth of new blood vessels in the eye. So in order to prevent and hopefully treat these conditions, the researchers looked into compounds found in plants.
In a paper published by the American Chemical Society, the University of Surrey, together with experts from Indiana University in America and Kingston University, detailed their testing of naturally occurring homoisoflavonoids found in the Hyacinthaceae plant family and their synthetic derivatives.
The team tested how well these compounds were able to stop the growth of new blood vessels and isolated several active compounds. One synthetic derivative in particular could be used to develop future treatments. Further work is continuing to synthesize more related compounds.
Nothing inspires me more than to read stories of people's adventures, whether it be in far-flung, remote areas or within the confines of the urban realm. But within these singular pieces of people's lives strewn together, we can find the resolve within ourselves to go and venture out ourselves.
This is the story of Andrew A. Schafer who spent two years in Sichuan, a southwestern province in China, to teach English in university, his struggles with Mandarin and getting around in a culture completely unfamiliar to him.
He recounts how he worked his way toward developing relationships, speaking the language, and learning from the people and students he worked with as much as he taught them about his own culture and language.
From there, he went back home to the US and he talks about the adjustment phase of reintegrating yourself into a society where not too long ago you had been a part of but after being away only for two years seems somewhat a bit unfamiliar. And he moved on from one deep end to another.
As a philosophy and English teacher, he tried looking for jobs that might sound interesting. After much searching, he landed on a tech job in one of the rising companies in Silicon Valley. Another set of learning opportunities and hard work lay before him.
The experiences he had in China worked to his advantage. Though he had no clue about tech culture, he applied the same principles he used in China to learn the ways of tech. The more he immersed himself, the better his understanding of tech became. And down the rabbit hole he went, finally emerging fluent in the ways of tech.
In all that, he tells us what he learned throughout those years and how he came out from them all the wiser and more well-versed in the environments he delved into. His is a fascinating story of continuous learning and development, something of which I feel deeply inspired.
The whole world erupted with excitement in anticipation of the first few images of an actual black hole and people took their reactions to the internet.
The guys at Interesting Engineering compiled a list of some of the interesting tweets from scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. Read them here.
The wildfire that devastated Paradise is still fresh in everyone's memory but it has only begun as an analysis showed that several other towns and communities in California are at risk of having the same fate as Paradise.
Impoverished towns in the shadow of Mount Shasta. Rustic Gold Rush cities in the Sierra Nevada foothills. High-dollar resort communities on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Ritzy Los Angeles County suburbs. They all could be the next Paradise.
A McClatchy analysis reveals more than 350,000 Californians live in towns and cities that exist almost entirely within “very high fire hazard severity zones” — Cal Fire’s designation for places highly vulnerable to devastating wildfires.
There is still so much we don't know about how our brain works, especially with regard to how memories are formed, how we are able to learn something new, and how our cognitive processes affect our emotions.
Recently, scientists have discovered the structure of a critical part in the brain, something they referred to as the "electrical switch" in the brain. These are the AMPA receptors.
"These are the fundamental electrical switches of the brain," said senior author Eric Gouaux, Ph.D., senior scientist and Jennifer and Bernard LaCroute Term Chair of neuroscience in the OHSU Vollum Institute and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "If these switches don't work right, then the brain doesn't function. It can lead to seizures, memory loss, and neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's disease."
These AMPA receptors play a critical role in keeping our brain functioning properly and when they start to decline, they may be linked to neurodegenerative diseases. So scientists want to compare the differences between healthy ones and damaged or compromised ones.
The new discovery comes by way of a technique that's revolutionizing the field of structural biology.
The ability to use cryo-EM vastly improves the scientists' ability to discern individual receptors in their true natural, or native, state. Cryo-EM enables scientists to see molecules in near-atomic detail.
After Makoto Shinkai's massive blockbuster hit "Your Name" in 2016, he comes up with a new film that is very characteristic of what I would say his surrealist take on storytelling.
Not that I didn't think "Your Name" was a good movie, it was, but something had always nagged at me, something that didn't seem to draw me into the movie as much, an indescribable feeling of reverse catharsis. And it seems that this new film, "Weathering With You", would follow in the same vein as his last one.
But as always, the animation is a visual spectacle and makes me reminisce about the first few anime films I've watched, which were from Ghibli. With the success of "Your Name", much is expected from the new film though with the trailer alone, it definitely has good prospects.
