The thousand years or raindrops summoned by my song are my tears. NeatoShop artist Retro Review explains how to play the song and save the princess, so save your rupees to get the T-shirt, wontcha?
Visit Retro Review's website and official Facebook page (tons of neat gaming-related posts there), then check out his NeatoShop for more gaming-inspired T-shirt designs. Your purchase helps support indie artists as well as this blog, so buy something, mmkay?
The Ancient One returns! In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming about his own animated TV series and NeatoShop artist adho1982 heeded the call and made the art for it.
Isn't this a plot in many an apocalypse Hollywood movie?
Scientists have succeeded in reconstructing the genetic code of a deadly strain of bacteria that killed nearly a quarter of the human population during the Justinian Plague, back in the days of the Roman Empire. The plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, made another appearance in Europe several centuries later - and that time, it got a moniker you're probably familiar with: the Black Death, which killed nearly half of the entire human population.
So, what could go wrong?
Anyways, back to the story: When housing developers were digging up a farmland outside Munich, Germany, they found skeletons in a mass grave of people who died from the plague, including a tooth which dental pulp still contained traces of blood. And in that blood was DNA of the plague bacteria.
They think the strain of bacteria that caused the Justinian plague jumped from rodents into humans and then died out, the team wrote Tuesday in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The later emergence of the Black Death seems to have been caused by a separate event.
The DNA also suggests that, like the Black Death, the original source of the plague was in China, says microbiologist Paul Keim, another member of the research team at Northern Arizona University. "So the ecological reservoir for plague, the historical reservoir, is in China," Keim says. "And it's this emergence, this pattern over and over again, with people moving commodities, rats and fleas around the world that we're able to document."
Overall, this ancient strain is not that different from modern ones that still circulate in places like Arizona, says Keim.
So, could Black Death strike again? Well, consider this: currently, every year, about a dozen people in the United States catch the disease. They're treated with antibiotics, but there's a concern that the plague bacterium could develop drug-resistance through the overuse of antibiotics and become a major threat once again.
Yeah, we meant you. (Though to be honest, I've long suspected that some people are actually fully Neanderthals from the way they act.)
DNA analysis studies published in Nature and Science showed that humans are part Neanderthals.
When modern humans move out of Africa into Eurasia about 100,000 years ago, they found Neanderthals already living there. They've probably made war with each other, but it's now certain that they made love: their offspring, the people of Europe and Asia, have 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.
Despite using different methodologies, both two studies pointed to part of the human genome that affect skin and hair as being part Neanderthal. "The idea is that maybe Neanderthals carried versions of alleles [genetic variants] for these genes that were well-adapted to their environment," Harvard Medical School's Sriram Sankararaman, told NBC News.
Geneticist Joshua Akey of University of Washington added, "It's a pretty fascinating way of adapting to an environment. Instead of resting on your laurels, waiting for an adaptation to appear, you just pick one up from the local population."
But not all of the Neanderthal DNA is actually good for humans: National Geographic reported that Neanderthal genetic variants have been linked to various diseases including lupus, biliary cirrhosis, Crohn's disease and type 2 diabetes. Indeed, both teams found that there are long stretches of human DNA that's completely devoid of Neanderthal sequences, suggesting that some Neanderthal genes were actually bad and therefore got purged out of the human genome over hundreds of generations.
Nothing can stop the giant from getting his cookies! Sure, go ahead and laugh but watch out when the wall falls. NeatoShop artist Olipop illustrates what happens next.
Visit Olipop at his official Facebook page (give 'im a like, wontcha?) then check out his NeatoShop for more funny and geeky T-shirts. Your purchase helps support indie artists and this blog, so buy something, mmkay?
I think this is how M.C. Escher played tennis! Imgur user cynicalnihilisticromantist submitted this photo of an optical illusion tennis match - or is it just a regular tennis match being played down under in Australia?
Ask a dozen married couples the secret to their marriage and you'll likely get a dozen different answers. Speak your mind. Let it go. Accept your partner for who he or she is. Encourage them to change for the better. Don't be a doormat. Compromise.
Stephanie Theodore (@TheodoreArt) snapped a pic of a kid playing on a $10 million sculpture by Donald Judd at London's Tate Modern museum. When she confronted the parents, the mom told her that she obviously didn't know anything about kids.
I don't know what's more shocking: that those parents let their kid crawl all over a multi-million sculpture, or that the artwork, Judd's minimalist Stacks made from metal and plexiglass - is valued at $10 million. What do you think?
If you've got a suspicious charge of $9.84 on your credit card, be wary: it's probably a scam.
In this consumer forum post, dozens of Amazon customers are reporting fraudulent charges of $9.84 from a EETsac.com, which has been linked to various online education websites. The incident, however, doesn't seem to be limited to Amazon as there's a report from another source describing the same charges being made elsewhere.
The Better Business Bureau reported that scammers are charging small amounts of money on stolen credit cards, believing that many cardholders probably won't scrutinize their bill and notice such a small charge:
The source listed on your bill is an unfamiliar website. You check out the web address, and it's not the business website. It's a generic landing page that claims to offer "Customer Support." The text promises to "refund 100% of your last payment" and provides a phone number and email address.
Victims that called the number reported that they received verbal confirmation that their credit card charges would be reversed. But affected cardholders are advised to report the charges to their banks and cancel the card. "It's likely the scammers will be back for more," the BBB warned (and it's likely that they'll change the charge from $9.84 to some other small amount).
In his blog Krebs on Security, Brian Krebs tracked down the companies associated with the $9.84 credit card scam to various entities registered in the United Kingdom, India, and Cyprus.
The scam doesn't appear to be related to the recent hacking incident that hit retail giant Target. Krebs wrote:
If I had to hazard a charitable guess about what is going on here, I would say some ambitious “affiliates” associated with these moneymaking schemes were abusing the system and pushing through charges on stolen credit cards. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this is little more than an elaborate (and probably successful) scam set up to steal little bits of money from lots and lots of people.
By the way, this is not a new type of fraud, nor is this particular fraud a recent occurrence — although the bogus $9.84 charges do appear to have spiked around the holidays. Most of the domains involved in this scheme were registered a year ago or more, and a quick search on the amount $9.84 shows that the fraudsters responsible for this scheme have been at it since at least the first half of 2013.
Moral of the story: read your credit card statement carefully.
New year, new T-Shirts! This January, we've listed more than 500 geeky and
funny artist-designed T-shirts on the NeatoShop. Here are some of our
favorites New T-Shirts:
We all know that what's inside the book can often be very illuminating, but little did we know that the physical book itself can brighten up our life until we see these wonderful book lamps by ReTech.
Asher of ReTech specializes in creating lamps out of hollowed out books, as well as various machine parts found in a local salvage yard. Take a look at his work over at Homes and Hues: ReTech Steampunk Lamps
Artist Madiha Siraj probably had the same problem as me when it comes to deciding what color to paint the walls: there's just too many darned choices! But instead of giving up all hope, she decided to turn lemon into lemon vodka by using paint swatches from a local paint store into an art installation.
In her 2011 Oyster EB-124 installation at the California College of the Arts, Siraj covered the walls and floors of her space with thousands of paint swatches. The result is an explosion of color that's as fun to look at as probably to create.
Is it time to sever a long-term relationship with that product you used to love, but now love to hate?
Design consultancy company Altitude asked its team members to write a break up letter directed at once-cherished products that have since lost their charm. The results are quite interesting - and useful to the product designers in order to fix/improve the product or service.
The exercise wasn’t just catharsis. It was intended to help us better empathize with consumers. The aspect of human nature embodied by the adage that people say one thing and do another can make it difficult for designers to truly capture consumers’ intentions, motivations, and values. So designers borrow cognitive psychology techniques that encourage people to create something as a means of explaining their tacit knowledge, latent needs, emotions, dreams, and motivations.
One of those techniques, the Breakup Letter, was developed by our fellow colleagues at Smart Design. Reframing one's relationship to a product as something romantic gives the user permission to exaggerate his or her biggest frustrations and wishes. That, in turn, can help designers understand the emotional connection between people and their products, services, and experiences.
This one below, written to a stud finder, captures the essence of my fear and loathing of working with such a device:
And I've broken up with many a printer in my life:
What product(s) in your life do you want to break up with and why?
