There are people who bake pies. Then there are professional bakers that bake pies. Then there is Lauren Ko of Lokokitchen.

Check out Ko's beautiful geometric pie designs over at her Instagram. They're amazing!

Why stick to one flavor combination when you can have nine?

This clever peanut butter and jelly sandwich hack involves three rows of jam, honey, and fluff or marshmallow creme and three columns of crunchy peanut butter, nutella, and creamy peanut butter.

Genius!

via Bits & Pieces

You may not notice, but there's something very disturbing going on quietly in the wild: insects are disappearing at an alarming rate.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that arthropod biomass (including insects, centipedes, and spiders) have declined 10- to 60-fold in the past 30 years.

Ben Guarino of The Washington Post wrote:

The researchers trapped arthropods on the ground in plates covered in a sticky glue, and raised several more plates about three feet into the canopy. The researchers also swept nets over the brush hundreds of times, collecting the critters that crawled through the vegetation.

Each technique revealed the biomass (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) had significantly decreased from 1976 to the present day ... Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold.

“Everything is dropping,” Lister said. The most common invertebrates in the rain forest — the moths, the butterflies, the grasshoppers, the spiders and others — are all far less abundant.

“Holy crap,” Wagner said of the 60-fold loss.

So what, you think? You should be concerned: insects are at the bottom of the food pyramid of the forests in the world, and their crashing population will adversely affect all the animals that depend on them for food - and ultimately, the health of the forests themselves. Not only that, insects are our main pollinators for crops, so we depend on them for our food supply.

The study linked climate change as the driving force behind the collapse of the forest food web.

(Photo: Chris Huh/Wikipedia)

Imagine yourself as a deer in the woods ... with a predator wolf nearby. Can you spot it before you're its lunch?

See the larger image over at reddit and let us know if you've found the big bad wolf.

Image via r/pics

Got dirt?

Well, an underground mine definitely has a lot of dirt. And by a lot, we mean 5 miles of dirt trails, ramps and obstacles in a 320,000 square feet of space. Oh, and did we mention it's 100 feet underground?

Check out this abandoned limestone mine in Louisville, Kentucky, that got converted into the world's only underground mountain bike park: the Mega-Cavern Bike Park.

WebUrbanist has the story.

Video clip below.

Enhance!

I betcha you'll yell that too as you zoom into all of the insects in British photographer Levon Biss' site Microsculpture.

Biss collaborated with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to capture various insects at high magnification. He explained:

Each image from the Microsculpture project is created from around 8000 individual photographs. The pinned insect is placed on an adapted microscope stage that enables me to have complete control over the positioning of the specimen in front of the lens. I shoot with a 36-megapixel camera that has a 10x microscope objective attached to it via a 200mm prime lens.

I photograph the insect in approximately 30 different sections, depending the size of the specimen. Each section is lit differently with strobe lights to bring out the micro sculptural beauty of that particular section of the body. For example, I will light and shoot just one antennae, then after I have completed this area I will move onto the eye and the lighting set up will change entirely to suit the texture and contours of that specific part area of the body. I continue this process until I have covered the whole surface area of the insect.

The result is simply stunning. Check out more over at Levon Biss' Microsculpture - hit the hamburger icon at the upper left-hand corner.

Don't miss the behind-the-scenes video:

Think your freeway interchange is complicated? It's probably nothing compared to this freeway interchange in Guizhou, China.

From Oddity Central:

Construction on the Qianchun Interchange began in 2009, but the massive road knot was only completed last year . It consists of 18 different ramps, in 8 directions, on five different layers, with the highest one standing 37 meters above ground.

Snake and ladders used to be such a fun game. But that was before researchers from Kyoto University decided to make a snake robot that can climb ladders!

Watch it go:

In 2017, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation performed sci-fi themed orchestral concerts featuring music from various popular movies.

This one, titled the Blade Runner Suite is based on the Blade Runner soundtrack by the Greek electronic music composer Vangelis.

If you like this, don't miss the Aliens, The Fifth Element, and the Interstellar Suite.

Neuroscientists from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University have figured out a way to connect three human brains to each other in a "BrainNet" interface ... and make them play Tetris!

The team used "electroencephalograms" (EEGs) to record electric impulses from two human brains and "transcranial magnetic stimulation" (TMS) to deliver information to a third brain. The end result: an interface that allowed three human subjects to collaborate and solve Tetris problems using brain-to-brain communication.

In the test, two "senders" were connected to EEG sensors and communicated to a third person, the "receiver" via a TMS helmet with the ability to send flashes directly to the brain.

The two "senders" could see the game of Tetris being played, the "receiver" could not. The goal: send a message telling the receiver to either rotate or not rotate the Tetris piece, depending on how the game was going.

Read the rest over at CNET

From inflatable art experts Filthy Luker and Pedro Estrellas, here's something that'll spruce up a tree in your neck of the woods: a pair of googly eyes!

Photo: Filthy Luker

In the early 1970s, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a computer program to predict what will happen to planet Earth (and the humans who live on it).

The computer model, called World1, used data including pollution levels, population growth, the availability of natural resources and the overall quality of life. Here's what it found:

"At around 2020, the condition of the planet becomes highly critical. If we do nothing about it, the quality of life goes down to zero. Pollution becomes so seriously it will start to kill people, which in turn will cause the population to diminish, lower than it was in the 1900. At this stage, around 2040 to 2050, civilized life as we know it on this planet will cease to exist."

The bad news: according to the computer model, we're right on track to make that prediction come true.

Add this to the long list of things that are being killed by millennials: American Cheese.

But don't count Big Cheese out yet! Kraft is fighting back. From Bloomberg (warning: self-starting video):

Kraft has a 30-person research-and-development team working on ways to get American cheese into more homes, he said, offering qualities that healthier, more natural cheeses can’t. For instance, “the melt.”

“Honestly, you can’t get that in a natural cheese,” Cotter said. “It’s a very unique product. The creamy smooth texture and melt of the cheese. The natural cheeses, they just don’t melt that way.”

If you want a really cool house for trick or treating this Halloween, you probably can't beat this one: the 1638 house of John Proctor, who was falsely accused and subsequently hanged during the Salem witch trials for witchcraft.

Listed at $600,000, this six-bedroom, two-bathroom house in present-day Peabody, Mass., has many historic features intact, according to real estate agent Joseph Cipoletta of J Barrett & Company.

Strong winds of up to 40 knots due to Storm Callum caused this TUI Airways Boeing 757-200 aircraft to come in for a sideways landing at Bristol Airport, England.

From Mraviationguy, who filmed the plane's landing maneuvers:

Strong winds blowing directly across the runway at Bristol Airport on the 12th October 2018 due to Storm Callum caused this TUI Airways Boeing 757-200 aircraft to come in nearly sideways. Aircraft need to compensate for the crosswind otherwise they will be blown off course, they do this by pointing their nose into the direction the wind is coming from, demonstrated perfectly by this crew. It is always fascinating to watch planes landing in strong crosswinds; the power of mother nature vs the skill and professionalism of the brilliant airline pilots.