Recently, the Italian parliament have passed their 2019 budget which allows Venice to charge a tourist tax for all guests whether they spend the night in the city or not. This comes due to the fact that not even a third of tourists spend a night in one of its more than 1,500 hotels and B&Bs.

As part of Italy’s 2019 budget, which was passed with a parliamentary majority, Venice has now been given permission to charge tourists who do not spend the night as much as $12 a day for just setting foot in the canal city.

Last May, the Venice city council introduced turnstiles into the old city from the main square used by the hordes of cruise-ship passengers who are seen to be the most problematic tourists—and primary target of the new tax—to the city.

Cruise ships have been a problem for Venice for years. Not only do the massive ocean liners erode the canals when they pass by the Grand Canal near St. Mark’s Square, but the tourists themselves contribute nothing but chaos with little return, because they generally eat their meals and spend their nights back on their ships.

(Image credit: Jan Tielens/Unsplash)

If your child has sweet tooth, maybe it is time to curb their sugar intake before it would cause serious problems in the future.

The average 10-year-old has consumed as much sugar in their lifetime as the recommended limit for an 18-year-old, according to Public Health England (PHE), which is warning of serious implications for obesity and health.

Children are consuming the equivalent of eight excess sugar cubes a day, or 2,800 a year, says PHE, which has launched a new healthy eating campaign under its Change4Life scheme. National guidance recommends no more than five or six sugar cubes (20g-24g) a day for children aged four to 10.

One-third of children are overweight or obese at the age of 10 and 4.2% are severely obese in year six at school. Obese children often become obese adults, at risk of heart attacks, strokes and type 2 diabetes.

There are a lot of healthier alternatives with low amounts of sugar in them. It would be best if you could educate children about the long-term effects of their lifestyle choices - eating habits and exercise - so that they could develop and maintain these habits as they grow older.

(Image credit: Sharon McCutcheon/Unsplash)

I have heard about some of the craziest, most audacious things that people have done and this might be at the top as being one of the boldest things that anyone can do. It is actually quite admirable. Jacques-Andre Istel is known as "the father of American sport parachuting" and in the 1980s, he and his wife moved to California and where he bought a 2,600-acre land decades earlier.

With nothing much around apart from an RV park and some impressively tall sand dunes, the couple’s desert refuge was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. So it made sense, at least in Istel’s fervid imagination, to put it in the middle of somewhere. In 1985, the French-born parachuting pioneer cajoled California’s Imperial County Board of Supervisors into designating a spot on his property as The Official Centre of the World.

But he didn't end here. He decided to build a town around that landmark.

The following year, Istel created Felicity, which now boasts about 15 residents and its own freeway sign. Facing no opposition, Istel got himself elected mayor that same year – apparently for life.

He still wasn't satisfied. Istel wanted to erect a monument with inscriptions honoring people and places important in his life and he wanted it to last for a long time.

The triangular monument went up in 1991; it was 100ft long, about 4.5ft high, and faced with some 60 panels of polished, red granite. The durability came from what was inside: steel-reinforced concrete sunk into trenches 3ft deep.

Istel then decided he would build another monument, this one to honour US marines who fought and died in the Korean War. Then came a third monument, and a fourth, and a fifth. Today, 20 granite monuments, arranged at artful angles across the desert floor, collectively make up The Museum of History in Granite, a sort of open-air bank of knowledge for the ages.

(Image credit: Anne Burke/The BBC)

Watching crime thrillers or dramas, I know this might sound suspicious and I would think that somebody is lying when two eye witness accounts contradict each other. Only one of them could be right but does that mean one of them is guilty, lying, or trying to cover up what they saw? Did they experience being zapped by a neuralyzer which caused them to alter their memories about the event?

Not necessarily. It all actually starts with perception.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

A new discovery by researchers from the University of Portsmouth have found a flying reptile that once soared through the skies in the Jurassic period. It is a unique species of the pterosaur as they have fangs that would allow them to catch prey securely compared to other giant, flying dinosaurs which somewhat resemble birds' beak-like structure in that respect, except more elongated.

"Klobiodon has been known to us for centuries, archived in a museum drawer and seen by dozens or hundreds of scientists, but its significance has been overlooked because it's been confused with another species since the 1800s," paleontologist Michael O'Sullivan of the University of Portsmouth, said in a statement.

O'Sullivan and his colleagues discovered that the bones belonged to a new species while combing through more than 200 specimens from the English slate layer in order to fit them all into a family tree.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

If I were a pregnant woman, I probably wouldn't agree to an arrangement wherein I would have to fly up to space, deliver my baby, and go back down to Earth. It's a crazy idea but SpaceLife Origin believes that it may be the future for childbirth.

They describe the mission as follows:

SpaceLife Origin, based in the Netherlands, wants to send a pregnant woman, accompanied by a “trained, world-class medical team,” in a capsule to the space above Earth. The mission would last 24 to 36 hours.

Once the woman delivered the child, the capsule would return to the ground. “A carefully prepared and monitored process will reduce all possible risks, similar to Western standards as they exist on Earth for both mother and child,” SpaceLife Origin’s website states.

The company has set the year 2024 as the target date for the trip.

If this experiment would become successful, what will be the implications? And if a baby were to be born in space, will that make them space citizens? There are so many legal ramifications that need to be considered before this takes place five years from now. But read on to find out why the company wants to do this.

(Image credit: Luma Pimentel/Unsplash)

A rare moment was captured on video showing a group of cane toads hopping on the back of a python as a means of getting away from the incoming storm in Australia. Paul Mock saw the giant 3.5m python in the middle of his lawn as it slithered to find a safe place and on it, shockingly, were around ten toads. His brother, Andrew, had posted a video of the scene which garnered varied reaction from people on Twitter. via The Guardian

Earth hasn't been the only planet with recorded weather patterns. Mars, Jupiter, and even Saturn have clouds and can experience storms. Though they may seem like barren wastelands, they are not devoid from natural forces. There have been records of lightning or something like lightning being detected on Mars. What would this mean for future probes and missions there?

(Image credit: NASA via Astroquizzical)

For the past year, despite all the tragically terrifying news that we have heard on the news, Future Crunch has been scouring all over to find the stories that could make you feel some good vibes for a change. This is their collection of good news for 2018. via Quartz

(Image credit: Albert Gea/Reuters)

We have all been through that morning after a hangover. The familiar banging sensation that won't stop racking our heads. But is it actually possible to get through the pain of the hangover by eating? Will it give us any relief? There have been different remedies for a hangover suggested throughout history.

Several years ago a freshly deciphered Egyptian papyrus revealed that even 1,900 years ago, cures for the after-effects of consuming too much alcohol were on people’s minds – the recommended option in this case being a necklace made out of the leatherleaf plant.

Various other treatments suggested by folklore include a breakfast of pickled herrings, a fried canary (thanks, Romans), salty plums, and the Prairie Oyster, an American concoction consisting of raw eggs, tomato juice, hot sauce, and other fixings. Anything that might cure the pounding headache, nausea, fatigue, and disorientation that characterize the hangover has been tried.

But it seems like we can't eat the pain away.

However, very little, other than the tincture of time, seems to work. One difficulty in designing a hangover treatment is that exactly what a hangover is, when it comes down molecular biology, is still not clearly known. Intriguingly, hangover symptoms don’t occur until the alcohol has already left our blood.

Read more on The BBC.

(Image credit: Jakub Kapusnak/Unsplash)

Though funerals are a time of grief and mourning, Alan Davidson, a British food writer, discovered an interesting Thai custom in which the relatives of the deceased would give away cookbooks to the mourners as a way of easing their pain and spreading them joy instead. Look into other traditions from all around the world, written by Mayukh Sen for Topic Mag.

(Image credit: Sharon Core/Topic)

If you have come across a laboratory where they culture cells, you may find it curious why they store them in red bottles and what kind of stuff those red liquids contain. They might even look like mouthwash if you take just one glance at it. But these are the growth media or culture media that scientists use to study cells. It originated in 1959 with a man named Harry Eagle.

In 1959, an American physician named Harry Eagle mixed up one of the most pivotal cocktails in medical history—a red blend of sugar, salts, vitamins, and amino acids that allowed scientists to efficiently grow the cells of humans and other animals in laboratory beakers. This red elixir, known as Eagle’s minimal essential medium (EMEM), became a bedrock of biological research.

And in recent years, scientists have started realizing that such pared-down concoctions might be skewing their results, by warping the ways in which cells process nutrients. It’s as if they had spent decades studying the health of people who had only ever been given rations to eat.

Read more on the Atlantic.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Ever wonder why the periodic table of elements looks the way it does now? Well, it didn't really start that way and through the years there have been changes in its design. We credit Dmitri Medeleev as the one to present the known elements in his time on a table with rows and columns.

But the periodic table didn’t actually start with Mendeleev. Many had tinkered with arranging the elements. Decades before, chemist John Dalton tried to create a table as well as some rather interesting symbols for the elements (they didn’t catch on). And just a few years before Mendeleev sat down with his deck of homemade cards, John Newlands also created a table sorting the elements by their properties.

Read more on Quartz.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

And that's the reason why the music from 1968 was so enduring. In fact, you may know that this was the era when some of the greats were at their peak: The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Aretha Franklin.

One of the most tumultuous years of the 20th century also produced some of its greatest popular music. And it's not just baby boomers who are nostalgic for the sounds of their youth: Even to people born decades later, the music of 1968 stands out.

"There's this kind of blossoming in what was possible," says Meg Baird, a singer and musician who performs under her own name and in the band Heron Oblivion.

There was probably just something so raw and emotional, and at the same time an overflow of artistic expression that came out of 1968 that makes the music produced in that year stick in the minds and hearts of people.

NPR has more about it.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

To think that single-celled organisms actually have a greater capacity at computations than the best computers that we have right now. But why? Why does an amoeba that seemingly shouldn't have the capacity for high-level math find a solution to the biggest problem in computer science?

Find out more on Popular Mechanics.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)