“My art is the only kind that does not need to be beautiful,” forensic artist Lois Gibson said to Colors Magazine. “It’s ugly and sloppy and sketchy – but if it saves lives, it becomes beautiful and perfect.”
If there's an artist whose art has tremendous impact in real life, then Lois Gibson would be it: in her 30-year stint as a forensic artist, her artwork has helped the police identify more than 500 criminals.
Read more about it over at Colors (Photo: Scott Dalton)
To celebrate its tenth year anniversary, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope released a new constellation map with 21 gamma-ray constellations, named after famous landmarks and characters from pop culture, including Godzilla, Hulk, the Little Prince.
Best of all, you can explore the gamma-ray constellations in this interactive website over at NASA.
This. Is. Insanely. Cool!
Check out this intricately engraved coin by Roman Booteen, which in addition to the amazing surface art, also has a neat little mechanical surprise.
Don't forget to check out Booteen's Instagram for many more neat coin and lighter carvings.
After realizing that their Ariake warehouse was plagued with problems and inefficiencies, Japanese clothing retail giant UNIQLO worked to overhaul the warehouse.
Their solution? Get rid of 90% of the human workforce and replace them with robots.
From Japan News:
The robotic system is designed to transfer products delivered to the warehouse by truck, read electronic tags attached to the products and confirm their stock numbers and other information.
When shipping, the system wraps products placed on a conveyor belt in cardboard and attaches labels to them. Only a small portion of work at the warehouse needs to be done by employees, the company said.
The automation (watch the video clip above) is both eerie and intriguing at the same time.
Why drink in a bar alongside prickly bar patrons when you can drink accompanied by actually prickly hedgehogs?
The Chikuchiku Cafe in Japan is opening a hedgehog bar, where you can sit and enjoy your beer alongside the cute critters.
via Design Taxi
You're looking at "Hyperion," the largest and most massive cosmic structure found early in the formation of the universe - just 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
The galaxy proto-supercluster has a calculated mass of 1 million billion times that of the Sun.
“Understanding Hyperion and how it compares to similar recent structures can give insights into how the universe developed in the past and will evolve into the future, and allows us the opportunity to challenge some models of supercluster formation,” physicist Olga Cucciati said. “Unearthing this cosmic titan helps uncover the history of these large-scale structures.”
Photo: ESO/Luis Calcada and Olga Cucciati
In the 1950s, people in the United States were enthralled by the power and potential of nuclear energy. Nuclear optimism and the atom bomb fever was in full swing, and President Harry S. Truman authorized a nuclear test site just 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Indeed, mushroom clouds from the 100 nuclear blast tests were visible from the hotels in downtown Las Vegas and those tests themselves became tourist attractions.
So naturally, Las Vegas decided to combine that with another one of its major attractions - showgirls - and the Miss Atomic Bomb was born.
There were four Miss Atomic Bombs ever crowned. This one above was in 1955, where multiple delays of Operation Cue due to high winds got Linda Lawson crowned with as "Miss Cue." Her tiara was in the shape of a mushroom cloud!
Photo: University of Nevada/Las Vegas Libraries
When Timothy LaBranche found himself flying in an empty airplane cabin, he decided to have a little fun: he snapped a selfie of himself sitting in every single seat, and then stitched them together into "100 Tims on a Plane" - via PetaPixel
Here's a strange intersection between pop culture and ancient tradition. The Waghi people of Papua New Guinea heard of Lee Falk's comic hero the Phantom and decided that the immortal hero is the perfect adornment of their war shields!
Photos: (L & R) Christopher Johnstone (M) Artwhatson - via oobject
When the Charleston Water System noticed that their pumps at the Plum Island Wastewater Treatment Center in South Carolina had clogged, they couldn't just call in any plumber ...
They had to call in a crack team of divers (SEAL Team no. 2, anyone?) to dive into up to 90 feet of raw sewage - in complete darkness - to find and remove the clog by hand. Here's what they found:
"As we expected, they came up with these large masses of wipes in their first two loads, with more to come. They also found a baseball and a big piece of metal."
The Charleston Water System tweeted some pics, and said, "Don't flush stuff like this. Joking of course, but you should only flush #1, #2, and toilet paper."
More pics below for those of you who aren't yet thoroughly grossed out by now.
Archaeologists working at an ancient Roman site in Italy discovered the remains of a young child with a rock intentionally inserted into its mouth. They surmised that it's placed there as a ["vampire burial" rites to prevent the child - possibly infected with malaria - from rising from the dead and spreading the disease.
"Locally, they're calling it the 'Vampire of Lugnano'," University of Arizona archaeologist David Soren told Science Daily:
The 10-year old was the first at the cemetery to be found with a stone in its mouth. Similar burials have been documented in other locations, including in Venice, where an elderly 16th-century woman dubbed the "Vampire of Venice" was found with a brick in her mouth in 2009. In Northamptonshire, England, in 2017, an adult male from the third or fourth century was found buried facedown with his tongue removed and replaced with a stone.
These types of burials are often referred to as vampire burials, since they are associated with a belief that the dead could rise again. Other examples of vampire burials throughout history include bodies being staked to the ground through the heart or dismembered prior to interment.
Photo: David Pickel/Stanford University
It worked on horses so why not humans?
Panasonic has created Wear Space, a high-tech version of horse blinders (or blinkers) that block out your peripheral vision and minimize distraction from your co-workers. It's a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a U-shaped fabric wrap that goes around your head.
Kang Hwayoung, a member of the Panasonic team that developed the device told Japan Times:
An increasing number of companies have started to extend use of hot-desking in their offices, with workers freely choosing space to work, while startups often use co-working offices.
More diverse working styles have become a trend. “On the other hand, everyone sometimes wants to be alone and concentrate,” said Kang Hwayoung, a member of the team that developed the device.
Thus, the 330-gram Wear Space’s ability to create a semi-personal space will come in handy, she said, adding that the concept is (literally) to “wear space.”
Covering your head with the fabric partition can also stop people from trying to make small talk.
(Photo: Panasonic)
There's a video clip of it in action, too:
When loggers were loading a log of a chestnut oak tree onto a truck, they noticed something odd wedged inside: a mummified remain of a dog!
The year was approximately 1960 when the dog ran into a hole at the bottom of a tree and shimmied 28 feet up. “He’s a hunting dog, so we assumed that he was chasing something in the tree,” Bertha Sue Dixon, who runs a museum called Southern Forest World, told Newsweek. (Southern Forest World is where the dog now resides.)
But as the tree narrowed, the dog became stuck. He never caught his prey and no one pulled him out. Unable to escape, he remained in the accidental trap and perished.
Twenty years later, loggers found the immobile canine. Instead of pulping the log, they donated it whole to Southern Forest World.
Naturally, they named the dog "Stuckie."
(Photo: Scott Beahan/Shutterly Perfect Portraiture) - via ATI
Ancient Egyptians built their pyramids using large stone blocks, but mathematicians only need numbers - specifically, palindromic prime numbers - to build these interesting mathematical pyramids.
G.L. Honaker, Jr. of Bristol Virginia Public Schools and Chris K. Caldwell of University of Tennessee at Martin start with the simple pyramids above, centered on the prime number of 2 ...
Then they got serious:
See how they did it: Palindromic Prime Pyramids [PDF] - via Cliff Pickover
David Zach of the band Remedy Drive was trying to get a selfie with baby elephant in Thailand, but the baby elephant had a different idea ...
