How much exercise is too much? Apparently, in the case of two teenage girls from China, it's over 1,000 squats. It's quite surprising they lasted that long without passing out from the pain. But due to their competitive spirit, they went at it until they almost literally dropped dead, sort of.

"This is too embarrassing to say. I was chatting with [my friend] in Guandong over the Internet," Xiao told China Press from the hospital. At some point, the two girls got into a squat contest to determine who had the most stamina. "We both did not want to lose and so we kept trying to beat each other," she explained. Neither of them willing to back down and stop squatting first, they both ended up doing over 1,000 squats.

Though they didn't feel anything adverse right away, however, it wasn't long until they started feeling something wrong. When they went to the hospital, they found out that they both ended up with kidney damage.

(Image credit: Gesina Kunkel/Unsplash)

Las Vegas has been plagued with a dense swarm of grasshoppers for the past several days, to the point that they have been picked up by weather radar. Most of these grasshoppers are migrating north and will continue to swarm Las Vegas until much of them are eaten by birds and other animals.

The pallid-winged grasshopper (Trimerotropis pallidipennis) is a common desert species in southwestern parts of the United States. And after a rainy winter and spring that provided the insects with a feast of rich vegetation, multitudes of grasshoppers that originated in southern Nevada are on the move and migrating north.

Their path carries them right through Las Vegas and could extend into central Nevada, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) entomologist Jeff Knight told reporters on July 25. The creatures fly at night and can cover "a couple hundred miles, at least," Knight said, and during their migration northward, they fly at altitudes of up to 1,000 feet (305 meters).

Despite the huge numbers of grasshoppers, they don't necessarily pose a threat to humans although it might get annoying especially if they enter your home. The best thing to do is just to let it pass and wait for the swarm to leave which will be in a couple of weeks at most, according to Knight.

(Image credit: Valentin Petkov/Unsplash)

John took this video outside the flamingo just now. It’s not snowing. It’s grasshoppers. #lasvegas #GRASSHOPPERS pic.twitter.com/HvF6AZGfjQ

— Nancy Ryan (@NancyRyanComic) July 26, 2019

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One of the most incredible experiences of my and @vasfsf’s career bringing to life the conceptual drawings of the Teetertotter Wall from 2009 in an event filled with joy, excitement, and togetherness at the borderwall. The wall became a literal fulcrum for U.S. - Mexico relations and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side. Amazing thanks to everyone who made this event possible like Omar Rios @colectivo.chopeke for collaborating with us, the guys at Taller Herrería in #CiudadJuarez for their fine craftsmanship, @anateresafernandez for encouragement and support, and everyone who showed up on both sides including the beautiful families from Colonia Anapra, and @kerrydoyle2010, @kateggreen , @ersela_kripa , @stphn_mllr , @wakawaffles, @chris_inabox and many others (you know who you are). #raelsanfratello #borderwallasarchitecture

A post shared by Ronald Rael (@rrael) on Jul 28, 2019 at 11:22pm PDT

The Teetertotter Wall was a project that two architects, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, came up with ten years ago but it's just as relevant today, if not more so.

They installed three pink seesaws along the US-Mexico border and though the scene captures an innocent moment of playful glee as children on both sides play together, we are struck by the reality of the situation - that there is a big wall between them.

One of the architects, Ronald Rael writes on Instagram:

One of the most incredible experiences of my and @vasfsf’s career bringing to life the conceptual drawings of the Teetertotter Wall from 2009 in an event filled with joy, excitement, and togetherness at the borderwall.

The wall became a literal fulcrum for U.S. - Mexico relations and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side.

(Image credit: Ronald Rael/Instagram)

Though Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, and other fantasy stories and games are popular now, becoming a part of mainstream pop culture, they weren't considered that way before. They were either thought of as the domain of geeks or worse, as symbols of occultism and witchcraft. Which is probably why many heavy metal bands used elements from them as inspiration for their music, logos, and even band names.

Desert rock pioneers Kyuss took their name from a Dungeons & Dragons monster; one-man black metal band Isengard’s logo was swiped directly from the Middle-earth Role Playing game; and, decades before Stranger Things, there were a host of groups named after the ultimate D&D baddie, the Demogorgon.

Metal and table-top role-playing games have shared influences since their beginnings. To this day there remain a handful of bands who proudly proclaim their love of RPGs, and plenty more who have been inspired by them, one way or another.

-via Daily Grail

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

People have been trying to chart our world since ancient times and they have used various methods to do so. Up until it was proven that the Earth is indeed spherical in shape, most maps depicted the Earth as a flat surface and anyone who reached its edge would fall off. After the age of exploration and maritime navigation, we became more enlightened about the fact and we've been making more (accurate) maps ever since.

Nowadays, we rely on satellite technology and GPS to get a view of our world with even more precision. But several centuries ago, people simply used whatever materials and data they had to create maps. Some maps were carved in wood, stone, or metal. Others were illustrated in parchment. But other maps (and globes) were more creative than others. One such example is the eggshell globe, made from two lower halves of ostrich eggs.

The pictured example was found at a London map fair in 2012, and eventually found its way into the hands of a Belgian map collector named Stefaan Missinne. According to a paper submitted to the journal The Portolan (of the Washington Map Society) by Missinne, the ostrich egg globe is a near perfect duplicate of the now famous Hunt-Lenox Globe, a copper terrestrial globe that has held that title since about 1870.

The ostrich egg globe, which as yet does not have a name, has been dated to 1502-1508, and this leads some to believe that the egg was used as the design model for the Hunt-Lenox Globe. Both globes show the Americas (both north and south) as small islands in the far west Atlantic Ocean, but even with this glaring inaccuracy, it’s held that they are the first representations of the New World on a globe of any kind.

The ostrich egg globe however has one striking difference from the Hunt-Lenox in that "it is the very first map of any kind to show Newfoundland". Missinne also suggests that the globe was actually made by Leonardo da Vinci but scholars are skeptical that da Vinci had anything to do with it.

(Image credit: Davidguam/Wikimedia Commons)

Some animals are endemic to certain countries and in Southeast Asia, a region brimming with biodiversity, some animals have become symbols, showing that they are also part of a nation's identity and culture. Here are five national animals from different Southeast Asian countries.

(Image credit: Ethan Hoover/Unsplash)

Inspired by Luke Skywalker, a collaboration effort between Mobius and the University of Utah has made efforts to build a robotic prosthetic arm which could aid amputees to get their sense of touch back, something that has been quite difficult considering the monumental task.

Giving someone who has lost a limb the ability to feel the same way they did as when they still had their body parts, but with replacing them with artificial ones seems a bit too ambitious. But the team wants to go beyond what only seems impossible.

In an experimental study, Mobius and the University of Utah teamed up to develop the LUKE Arm prototype—short for Life Under Kinetic Evolution, inspired by Luke Skywalker, who famously lost his right hand in a battle with Darth Vader. The prosthesis returns function and feeling to its users by signaling the nervous system via peripheral nerve stimulation, a process that utilizes an aspirin-sized implant to deliver sensory information and feedback to LUKE.

Here's how it works: The nerves near the user's amputated area are connected to electrodes, which feed into his or her arm. As the user thinks about moving LUKE, his or her brain sends electrical signals via the electrodes to LUKE, telling it to move. It's similar to the way non-amputees move their arms and fingers, except amputees using LUKE have to consciously think about moving the prosthetic. Non-amputated parts of the body don't require nearly as much thought to move.

(Image credit: Dan Hixson/University of Utah College of Engineering)

It's not a rare occurrence for galaxies or even stars to consume its neighbors or merge with them. As astronomical bodies orbit around or drift in space, they come in contact with other bodies and sometimes, the one with a larger mass and gravitational pull will simply absorb the other. In fact, our own galaxy has had a history of doing that.

Ten billion years ago, the Milky Way encountered another galaxy in the vast emptiness of space, and consumed it. Dubbed Gaia-Enceladus by astronomers, this stranger was roughly one-quarter the Milky Way’s size, and it forever changed the makeup and shape of our home galaxy.

(Image credit: Koppelman, Villalobos and Helmi/NASA/ESA/Hubble)

A team of paleontologists from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris have recently unearthed what is considered a major discovery in the form of a sauropod's femur fossil found in the dig site of Angeac-Charente, France. It is six and a half feet in length and weighs about 1,100 pounds.

The expert team's awesome French specimen was particularly well-preserved for a fossil of its size and long ago helped support the 50-60 ton weight of this gentle giant.

“We can see the insertions of muscles and tendons, and scars,” Ronan Allain, paleontologist at the National History Museum of Paris, told Le Parisien newspaper. “This is rare for big pieces which tend to collapse in on themselves and fragment.”

(Image credit: Tadek Kurpaski/Flickr, Wikimedia Commons)

It feels good to be able to give back to the community and it's even better to do that in lieu of paying for your parking fines. Cities like Muncie in Indiana and Anchorage in Alaska have launched initiatives allowing violators to donate instead of simply paying their outstanding fines.

In Indiana, the Muncie Police Department are collaborating with the Muncie Animal Care & Services that offers people an alternative way of paying their fines by donating to the animal shelter. While in Anchorage, the organization managing parking services accepts school supply donations in exchange for paying off outstanding fines.

Read more about these initiatives on My Modern Met.

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So far, the fastest internet speeds rely on fiber optics to send and receive data. But with an ever-growing amount of data and a scope that goes far beyond what we have ever dealt with before, future computers would need more powerful infrastructure that would enable them to process all that information. That's where the quantum internet comes in.

Quantum computers have the potential to vastly outperform current systems because they work in a fundamentally different way. Instead of processing discrete ones and zeros, quantum information, whether stored in electron spins or transmitted by laser photons, can be in a superposition of multiple states simultaneously.

Moreover, the states of two or more objects can become entangled, so that the status of one cannot be completely described without this other. Handling entangled states allow quantum computers to evaluate many possibilities simultaneously, as well as transmit information from place to place immune from eavesdropping.

But the process of getting there is an uphill battle. Obviously this would require more research and a ton of funding in order to push through. So for now, we just have to make do with our meager internet speeds.

(Image credit: Zoltan Tasi/Unsplash)

Several days ago, researchers were able to map influenza A virus's genome. And a few days later, another team of researchers from the Institute of Virology at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna have successfully decoded the RNP structure of the rabies virus.

Although the individual components of the RNP had already been known, the exact structure of an intact RABV-RNP complex had not yet been identified. Using cryoelectron tomography, an imaging procedure allowing for the three-dimensional representation of the smallest biological structures, and a subsequent computer-assisted analysis by subtomogram averaging, a research team of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna around Christiane Riedel, the study's first author, and Till Rümenapf, the study's last author, has now succeeded in doing exactly that.

-via Phys

(Image credit: CDC/Dr. Daniel P. Perl, Wikimedia Commons)

Yes, please. Trying to cool yourself off on a very hot and humid day is agonizing. It really feels like your melting. And it's even more difficult when you have to get out of the house to go to work or school. But you would have to suffer all day from the heat. No more! Sony will be bringing to us this new invention: a wearable air-conditioner.

Sony calls its personal air conditioner the Reon Pocket, and it’s worn just below a person’s neck in the pocket of a special undershirt. Once the device is in place, the person can control it using a smartphone app. 

According to Sony, the Reon Pocket can decrease a person’s body surface temperature by 13 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit). It can also raise it by 8 degrees Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit) if you wanted to use the device in the winter months to stay warm.

Currently, Sony is crowdfunding the project by taking orders on First Flight. Once the goal has been met, investors can expect their device around March of next year. However, for now, it's only available in Japan.

(Image credit: Dan LeFebvre/Unsplash)

We need the trees. They need us. But we're quickly losing them. And though we might be able to salvage some of our forests if we double or even triple the efforts to repopulate them, it might already be too late. Or is it? Maybe, there's a better way of building forests. Like the Miyawaki Method perhaps. The method was named after Akira Miyawaki.

The Blue Planet Award-winning botanist from Japan is celebrated for his very particular approach to afforestation—a soil-, air-, water-, and climate-remediating process by which trees are planted where no trees existed before.

Shubhendu Sharma, a former industrial engineer who worked with Toyota, was so enamored by Miyawaki's presentation of "afforestation" that once he tried it out and proved it works, he quit his job and set up his own forest-production company called Afforestt.

Sharma volunteered to help place over 32,000 native trees and plants like neem, mango, and teak into the otherwise industrial landscape. And from that day on, his fate was sealed. In 2011, after proving that Miyawaki’s method could work for his own experimental backyard forest, he quit his job at Toyota and opened a forest-production company named Afforestt, which practices what Miyawaki preaches: the introduction to a depleted landscape of “potential natural vegetation,” which is what would naturally occur in that particular place without human intervention.

So how is afforestation done and how does it work?

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Memories and stories are the lifeblood of history. The things we experience, the things we see, and the things we do all contribute to the grand scheme of things, or so I think. But still, they are important. To be able to remember or to recount the things that have happened in our lives, no matter how insignificant they may seem, touches something so inexplicably human. Memories create the links to our past and forge the way for a better future.

It's no surprise then that in Italy, the small Tuscan town of Pieve Santo Stefano values their people's diaries so much. Situated just outside Caprese Michelangelo in the province of Arezzo, Pieve Santo Stefano is dubbed Italy's "Citta' del Diario" or "City of Diaries" because of their vast collection of diaries.

More than 8,000 diaries reside here—nearly three per capita—in the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (ADN), or National Diary Archive. Many deal with war. Others with love, madness, adventure. Together, these journals—written by Italians from every province and profession—comprise one of the richest testaments to the Italian experience available anywhere in the world. And some 200 more arrive each year.

Yet the town’s peculiar claim to fame is rooted in tragedy. Seventy-five years ago—on August 5, 1944, roughly a year after the Mussolini regime had collapsed and the Nazis had occupied Italy—the townspeople of Pieve Santo Stefano were ripped from their beds under threat of death and marched north with whatever meager possessions they could carry. The town was promptly leveled.

One can imagine the kind of pain that it must have caused the people of this humble town. And it is possibly the reason why the people of the town have devoted themselves to remembering such events, whether big or small by writing them on diaries as well as gathering as many diaries as they could from all over the country. The other reason: Saverio Tutino.

(Image credit: Julia Joppien/Unsplash)