As you know, Stan Lee passed away. To celebrate his life, let's watch this neat YouTube clip: Every Stan Lee Cameo Ever.

RIP Stan Lee 1922-2018

Ever wonder if there was some kind of switch in your brain that would cause you to feel sad or emotional? Well, researchers think that there may be a part of your brain greatly connected to having the blues.

Scientists may have caught a glimpse of what sadness looks like in the brain.

A study of 21 people found that for most, feeling down was associated with greater communication between brain areas involved in emotion and memory, a team from the University of California, San Francisco reported Thursday in the journal Cell.

"There was one network that over and over would tell us whether they were feeling happy or sad," says Vikaas Sohal, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCSF.

With this discovery, it may be possible for scientists to better understand mood disorders and hopefully, find a more direct treatment that could ease their condition.

Read more over at NPR | The original research paper over at Cell

Image: Andrew Mason/Flickr

How would you like to stay for a night or two in a Dutch prison? No, not as a criminal, but as a guest. Recently, the Netherlands has been converting some of their prisons into hotels and apartments because they are struggling to fill them.

It doesn't mean that their law enforcement authorities are not doing their job effectively. It's just that their approach to resolving crime focus more on rehabilitation than incarceration.

“The Dutch have a deeply ingrained pragmatism when it comes to regulating law and order,” René van Swaaningen, a professor of criminology at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam told The New York Times. “Prisons are very expensive. Unlike the United States, where people tend to focus on the moral arguments for imprisonment, the Netherlands is more focused on what works and what is effective.”

Read the rest over at Amusing Planet

Image: Het Arresthuis

Streaming has become the trend nowadays and Netflix takes a big chunk out of that market. Not only does it give you the best blockbusters on-demand, but it even creates its own content that would suit a variety of tastes and preferences in the market. And it only costs less than $20 a month!

But there's something that we need to worry about when it comes to this entertainment giant ...

Todd Van Luling wrote this intriguing article over at HuffPo Life:

Just because individual users don’t share so-called fake news or problematic content on Netflix as they do on other platforms, that doesn’t mean Netflix isn’t offering what can also be considered “fake news” and problematic content.

Look at the myriad documentaries and docuseries Netflix adds every month, many of which make dubious claims that wouldn’t withstand scrutiny from a fact-checker. (Often, Netflix will deem new documentaries and docuseries as Originals even if it didn’t have a major role in their creation, essentially putting its stamp of approval and ownership on these dubious pieces of journalism.)

Last year, The Ringer examined the various conspiracy documentaries Netflix and its competitors hosted, including multiple films that argued 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government. (Netflix has since removed the most troubling examples.) Earlier this year, Slate had a follow-up that examined the less overtly insidious conspiracies Netflix has peddled, such as those involving aliens and the pyramids or powerful cults that rule the world. Many of these documentaries can still be found on the service.

The Shining is probably one of the scariest horror films in history but its origins actually take inspiration from the 105-year-old Stanley Hotel in Colorado. The author, Stephen King and his wife, apparently stayed there for a night to see whether it was truly haunted.

According to the staff, the Kings arrived a day before the hotel was set to close for winter, and that night, they were its only guests. King wandered the maze-like hallways, drank at the bar and stayed in room 217 (Kubrick changed the room number to 237 for the film).

Now, 37 years after the publishing of that book, the Stanley fully embraces its "Shining" reputation.

The 160 guest rooms come equipped with an uncut version of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 big-screen adaptation of "The Shining" on continuous loop on channel 42.

Read the rest of the article by Darian Lusk over at CBS News

Photo: Miguel Vieira from Walnut Creek, CA, USA - Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0/Wikipedia

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The chances that you would fly in the same plane with a celebrity may seem to be quite slim seeing that most of them would probably fly on private planes or business class so you won't be able to have a personal encounter with them.

Moreover, these people would usually have guards around them to provide security so the chances get slimmer and slimmer that you would be able to get close.

But what if, you find yourself on the plane with royalty. Not just that, but they are actually serving as the co-pilot who is flying you to your destination.

Recently, the Dutch King Willem-Alexander revealed that he has been serving as co-pilot twice a month for the past 21 years, flying commercial passengers incognito. Though it is known that he had been a "guest pilot" before ascending the throne, what was unknown until now was that he often flew as king with KLM Captain Maarten Putman:

Willem-Alexander once said that if he had not been born in a palace, his dream would have been to fly a big passenger plane such as a Boeing 747, so it is no surprise that he intends to retrain for the updated plane.

He told De Telegraaf that he never used his name when addressing passengers and was rarely recognised in uniform and wearing his KLM cap. However, he admitted that some passengers had recognised his voice.

"The advantage is that I can always say that I warmly welcome passengers on behalf of the captain and crew," he said. "Then I don't have to give my name."

Read the full story over at the BBC.

(Photo: Natascha Libbert/@KLM)

But how ?!

Watch how young magician Eric Chien performs his magic trick "Ribbon," which won him the 2018 World Championships of Magic, as organized by FISM or the International Federation of Magic Societies.

via Twisted Sifter

Technically, anything you can buy in any store in the world fits that description, right?

Spotted by u/shroderrr

As part of this year's Amsterdam Light Festival (previously on Neatorama), French artist collective Groupe LAPS created a light illusion of a giant spider on a bridge.

The giant spider is actually made from 80 individual spiders, and light effects give the illusion that the spiders are crawling over each other.

More pics below:

You might consider yourself an expert Pokemon Go player, but you're nothing compared to Chen San-yuan.

Chen, a 70-year-old grandfather from Taiwan, became famous when people began noticing him around town with a special rig on his bicycle that let him play Pokemon Go with multiple phones.

Now, a new photo has emerged showing Chen with 11 phones attached to a body rig, instead of a bicycle. He even carries a portable charging station in a small bag so he won't run out of juice while chasing rare Pokemons!

via Motherboard and The Verge

More pics below:

『もののけ姫』の冒頭シーンに出て来るタタリ神はCGじゃなくて手描きの作画なんだけど、グニョグニョ動くヘビの動きが複雑すぎて、わずか数分のカットなのに制作期間は1年7か月！動画枚数は5300枚もかかったらしい。原画マン曰く「段々わけがわからなくなって泥沼にはまってしまった」とのこと。 pic.twitter.com/krPT7KxKZQ

— タイプ・あ～る (@hitasuraeiga) October 26, 2018

Fans of Japanese anime classic Princess Mononoke would recognize the scene at the beginning of the movie, where a monster called Tatarigami appeared.

The animation is remarkably fluid - so much so that most people would assume it's CG (or computer generated). But @hitasuraeiga explained:

“The leading scene in Princess Mononoke where Tatarigami appears isn’t CG; it’s drawn by hand. The part where the snakes move sluggishly was so difficult that–even though the scene is only a couple of minutes long–it took one year and seven months to finish! It apparently took a total of 5,300 drawings. One of the artists explained, ‘It gradually got so confusing to draw that it ended up bogging us down.'”

via SoraNews24

Answer: with a jetpack, of course!

Little is known about the reproductive health of whale sharks, said Dr. Simon Pierce of the Marine Megafauna Foundation, "Whale shark breeding is a mystery. Only one pregnant shark has been physically examined so far, back in 1995 in Taiwan."

So when divers spotted a huge female whale shark in the waters north of Galapagos, a team of researchers hurried on over there to see if they could take an ultrasound image of its organs.

But how do you perform an ultrasound scan underwater?

The team conducted scans using a 17 kg ultrasound system in a waterproofed case. Whale sharks have tough protective skin, more than 20 cm thick on some individuals, so the 30 cm penetration of the ultrasound waves proved a challenge – not to mention the difficulty of carefully checking the whole belly area of a gigantic shark while it is swimming. Dr Matsumoto had to use a propellor system mounted on his air-tank to keep up with the sharks.

“We use some interesting technology anyway, but working with the Okinawa team was something else”, commented Dr Pierce. “I felt cool by association. We saw dive groups a couple of times at the site, and I can only imagine what they thought – why is that guy diving with a briefcase? And a jetpack?”

Read the rest over at Marine Megafauna Foundation

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I Love Stem by happinessinatee

Today, November 8, is the National STEM Day.

To help you celebrate all things STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), take a look at 15 of NeatoShop's neatest STEM inspired T-shirts. Click on the images to view them.

See More: Science T-Shirts | Math T-Shirts

The Good Thing About Science by kgullholmen

Learn About Gravity by Steven Rhodes

Quick: think of a place you'd associate with self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.

Chances are, you'd think of Silicon Valley and not Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya (actually, the largest slum in all of Africa).

But the poor Kenyans from Kibera actually play an important role in teaching self-driving cars how to drive by providing "training data" that computers can understand.

Dave Lee of the BBC reports:

Each day, Brenda leaves her home here to catch a bus to the east side of Nairobi where she, along with more than 1,000 colleagues in the same building, work hard on a side of artificial intelligence we hear little about - and see even less.

In her eight-hour shift, she creates training data. Information - images, most often - prepared in a way that computers can understand.

Brenda loads up an image, and then uses the mouse to trace around just about everything. People, cars, road signs, lane markings - even the sky, specifying whether it's cloudy or bright. Ingesting millions of these images into an artificial intelligence system means a self-driving car, to use one example, can begin to "recognise" those objects in the real world. The more data, the supposedly smarter the machine.

Artist Liza Lou spent five years covering a life-size replica of a kitchen with millions of tiny glass beads.

Every surface, from the overflowing sink to the bag of potato chip and cereal boxes, are covered with the colorful glass beads.

More pics below: