Communication on social media has changed so much that we now just use emojis to express what we want to say. It's no surprise since these emojis can capture a whole lot more emotion and meaning than black and white text can. However, we don't have yet an exhaustive list of emojis for all sorts of things, so Vice has put out a list of emojis that don't exist but should.
(Image credit: iabzd/Unsplash)
Taking the record from Dunedin, New Zealand, Ffordd Pen Llech from the Welsh town Harlech has become the new steepest street in the world. Their bid has just recently been approved by Guinness World Records and with this, they hope to attract more tourists to visit their town.
The Guinness World Records said Tuesday that Harlech's Ffordd Pen Llech has a gradient of 37.45 per cent, two percentage points steeper than Dunedin's Baldwin Street. "The local community in Harlech has shown sheer will-power in their quest to earn Ffordd Pen Llech the title," Craig Glenday, Guinness World Records editor-in-chief, said in a press release.
(Image credit: Gwyn Headley via CBC)
Companies always try to make their branding strategies customer-centric, showing that their products and services provide value to the customer. However, if we are going to be brutally honest, these slogans could more accurately describe certain aspects of these companies' products and services. Check out more of them on Sad and Useless.
(Image credit: Sad and Useless)
There are instances when after removing tumors and undergoing chemotherapy, patients experience relapse and cancer cells show up again. So what gives? Well, cancer researchers have long wondered that this may be caused by the surrounding environment wherein the tumor had been. And surprisingly, they have learned that normal cells are accomplices of cancer cells.
Cancer researchers have long noticed that doses of chemo drugs that reliably kill cancer cells in laboratory cultures tend to be strikingly less effective in actual patients. They surmised that something about the environment in which a tumor sits — the tumor microenvironment — must be helping to shield it from the drugs’ full lethal effect.
They’ve learned that noncancerous cells within and around the tumor can physically block delivery of chemo drugs to the cancer, or send chemical signals that encourage tumor cells to survive, or prevent the immune system from launching an effective attack.
Find out more on Knowable Mag.
(Image credit: Allie Smith/Unsplash)
As with all creatures, fish require energy to move around and live. And since they are wading through water, which is denser than air, they would need to expend more energy which is why fish need good breathing strategies to conserve their energy. The coffinfish for example holds its breath by inflating itself and filling its gill with water.
“This is a unique behavior for water-breathing fishes,” says Stacy Farina, a biologist at Howard University in Washington, DC, and the author of a new report documenting the discovery. “It’s the only case we’ve ever seen.”
Farina and Nicholas Long, an undergraduate student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, discovered the distinctive adaptation while watching videos of several species of coffinfish captured by a US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deep-sea submersible in the Gulf of Mexico and North Atlantic. They were surprised to see the fishes stop pumping their gills.
Based on their observations, they found that the coffinfish can hold its breath for four minutes at least. Though it's a pretty rare behavior for fish to stop breathing, the coffinfish can afford this energy conservation strategy because it doesn't require a lot of energy in the first place, living a low-key lifestyle on the seafloor.
Read more on Hakai Mag.
(Image credit: NOAA Photo Library/Flickr; Wikimedia Commons)
Getting the data for research is tedious, time-consuming and expensive. However, sometimes, the data that one might need is already available but it's under restrictions or legal protections.
This makes it difficult for researchers to make more timely and insightful studies because they would need to repeat processes which have already been done before unless they pay for the scientific literature.
So Carl Malamud, an American technologist and public domain advocate, in collaboration with bioinformatician Andrew Lynn from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, plans to mine a ton of scientific research papers to create a repository wherein researchers could crawl text and data to gather insights.
The unprecedented project is generating much excitement because it could, for the first time, open up vast swathes of the paywalled literature for easy computerized analysis.
Dozens of research groups already mine papers to build databases of genes and chemicals, map associations between proteins and diseases, and generate useful scientific hypotheses. But publishers control — and often limit — the speed and scope of such projects, which typically confine themselves to abstracts, not full text.
(Image credit: Smita Sharma/Nature)
If you look up at the sky right after sunrise, you might be able to see the moon in a clear morning. Such a phenomenon usually happens after the full moon and will persist until the new moon.
In the days after full moon, the moon is officially in a waning gibbous phase, rising after nightfall and setting in a westward direction shortly after sunrise. If you look for the moon at the same time every morning, you’ll see this week’s waning moon appearing higher and higher in the western sky each early morning, for several days.
Though I won't be seeing the daytime moon anytime soon, I have been able to see it before. I was curious why I saw the moon in the day. Now, I understand the reason behind it. For others, they might know this type of moon as the "children's moon" with varying explanations as to why it's called that way. We will see the daytime moon until August 1, when the moon becomes new again.
(Image credit: Robert Kixmiller/Wikimedia Commons)
Is it weird that I find #FaceApp so...comforting? pic.twitter.com/HxBrGu1qNE
— Hannah Hart (@harto) July 17, 2019
This trend just kicked off recently and caused a spike in downloads of FaceApp, a facial editing tool that allows one to edit how they look in photos by changing the features of their face. It has gained much attention on social media because of the "old face" filter which shows you how you might look like when you get older.
We don't know who kicked off the trend, but the app has earned a spike in downloads this week thanks to the popularity of its 'old face' filter which gives users an idea of what they might look like in their golden years.
(Image credit: Hannah Hart/Twitter)
Here are some other examples:
As we get older, our body functions and senses naturally deteriorate. We could develop conditions such as dementia or Alzheimer's in our later years. But a Protect study from the University of Exeter found that wearing hearing aids for age-related hearing problems could help in maintaining brain function and thus, possibly prevent memory loss and other degenerative conditions.
The study included 25,000 people aged 50 or over who undertook annual cognitive tests over two years. The participants were split into two groups – one group wore hearing aids and the other did not. After two years, people in the group who wore hearing aids performed better in measures assessing working memory and aspects of attention than those who did not wear them.
On one measure, people who wore hearing aids showed faster reaction times - in everyday terms, this is a reflection of concentration, for example, “straining to hear a sound”, “peering closely at an object of great interest”, or “listening intently to someone speaking”.
(Image credit: JD Mason/Unsplash)
We're millennia away from building a floating civilization similar to the spaceship societies depicted in several science fiction works but we can try and imagine how humanity will function once that idea has become reality. Several sci-fi novels and shows have already done so with various outcomes. Here are some of them.
Starship UK — Doctor Who
The fifth season episode “The Beast Below”, saw the Doctor and Amy on their first proper adventure, forward into the future to a ship known as Starship UK. In the 29th century the Earth was threatened by solar flares, but the entirety of the United Kingdom (minus Scotland, who wanted their own ship) could not manage to make an escape to space. A star whale appeared, and the humans captured it and built their ship around the whale.
However, the humans never realized that the whale was offering its assistance freely and so they elected to keep torturing the whale and use it as their means of transport. When Amy and the Doctor figure out that this was the case, they decided to do something about it. The Doctor wanted to lobotomize the whale but Amy instead found a better solution by releasing the whale through an "abdicate" button.
In some of the scenarios depicted in these works, it follows the same issues humans have faced on Earth. Living in outer space is no different because the conditions of scarce resources still apply. How humans work out that situation will determine whether spaceship societies can thrive, let alone survive in space.
(Image credit: Kellepics/Pixabay)
Popular animated television show Spongebob Squarepants is an internet icon. It has continued to inspire memes and jokes online, and there's no sign of stopping the nautical nonsense from jumping out of the sea and into our screens. In the video, Tom Kenny, the voice actor of Spongebob, explains some Spongebob memes circulating on the internet. And in another, he answers the question of why Spongebob still influences internet humor.
Apart from the astronauts who were center stage in the success of Apollo 11, there were several other people who worked to make the whole thing happen. Here are some of the behind-the-scenes people who didn't become famous but were very instrumental to the Apollo mission.
As in any great drama, there were big parts and small ones. Some—the astronauts certainly, and top managers like Wernher von Braun—achieved lasting fame. Most played roles so small or brief that few recall their names today. But without Ellie Foraker to sew their spacesuits, or Emil Schiesser to chart their course, or Lynn Radcliffe to test their spacecraft engines, the astronauts might never have reached the moon.
-via Smithsonian
(Image credit: NASA/Wikimedia Commons)
With talks, summits, and other initiatives, North Korea is slowly opening itself up to the world. It's now promoting certain tourist spots hoping to attract foreign visitors to come to the country. And one of their most touted sites is Mount Kumgang.
Known for such sites as Manmulsang cliffs, Kuryong Falls and floating Hotel Haegumgang, Mount Kumgang is located just miles from the heavily-fortified border separating the two Koreas and was once a destination for South Korean tourists as well.
The country has been investing in its tourism sector since the 1990s and the youngest Kim, who succeeded his late father at the end of 2011, has sought to further shed his country's international reputation as a human rights abuser and police state in order to promote the flow of foreign capital.
(Image credit: Allen R. Francis/Wikimedia Commons)
When London had a cholera outbreak in 1854, John Snow and his contemporaries suggested that it was due to a contaminated water pump on Broad Street. But waterborne diseases weren't something people believed as much at the time because the general consensus was that outbreaks spread through miasma or bad air.
Along with results from investigations that had been made, John Snow and others convinced that it wasn't the case and had the pump fixed. After the whole incident, John Snow created the map that would revolutionize data visualization as regards epidemics and outbreaks for more efficient disease prevention.
The simple, yet sophisticated data visualization would lead to radical new ways of conceptualizing disease outbreaks, helping to stop or prevent who knows how many epidemics before they killed hundreds or thousands. Snow’s map also deserves credit for giving “data journalists a model of how to work today.”
(Image credit: John Snow/Wikimedia Commons)
With nature safaris, wildlife tours, or just a trip at a national park near you, there will be times when you would come face-to-face with animals. And though some animals might seem docile or non-threatening, it is still best to exercise a lot of caution. For example, the bison may be a herbivore but they don't take invasion of their privacy lightly.
Bison, often colloquially referred to as buffalo, are scattered across much of the U.S. The largest population can be found in western states such as Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, but protected herds may roam as far east as Kentucky. The biggest single herd of wild bison, meanwhile (about 4,500 members), is in Yellowstone National Park, the only place in the States where bison have lived continually since prehistoric times.
Bison may look like big, cuddly, slow-moving animals; they are anything but. The herbivorous ruminants can weigh as much as 2,000 pounds, but will run at speeds up to 35 mph (three times faster than humans), and jump over objects up to 5 feet tall. They’re agile, good swimmers, too, and have exceptional vision, hearing, and sense of smell. They’re most aggressive during their mating season in late July and August, and calving season in April and May.
The best thing to do when you encounter a bison is simply to back off slowly and hope that they didn't feel threatened when you came close to or stumbled upon them. Otherwise, there's nothing that would stop an angry bison from ramming toward you. You can still take a look at them from a good distance however with binoculars if you really want to see.
(Image credit: Daniel Mayer/Wikimedia Commons)
