Yes, yes, we all know that Americans eat a lot of fast food, but do you know exactly how much is a lot?

A new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed the eye-popping number:

- More than 1 in 3 US adults eat fast food on any given day. That's 85 million people.

- Young adults eat more fast food. On any given day, almost 45% of adults aged 20 to 39 ate fast food, as compared to 38% of adults aged 40 to 59 and 24% of those aged 60 or older.

Imagine that: almost HALF of adults aged 20 to 39 eat fast food on any given day.

- Higher family income means more consumption of fast food.

Now - you probably associate eating fast food with low income, but the truth is: the more you earn, the likelier you are to eat fast food.

Image: Love French Fries Food Humor by happinessinatee

I was looking for something along "you get what you pay for" and "fast, good, cheap - pick two out of three" - don't ask - and came across this gem:

"The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten"

which turns out to be a quote by Benjamin Franklin.

Image via imgur

Surely you've dented or crumpled an empty aluminum soda can before, but not the way Noah Deledda does it: he elevates can crushing into an artform. Literally.

Take a look at Deledda's dented aluminum can sculptures, that he made from otherwise ordinary energy drink cans by hand (well, mostly his thumbs) - without any special tools, over at his Instagram.

via Crooked Brains

Miyu Kojima cleans rooms, but she's unlike any cleaner that you know.

You see, Kojima works for a company that specializes in cleaning up after kodushi or lonely deaths. In this increasingly common Japanese phenomenon, due to increased isolation and an aging population, someone had died alone - and often remaining undiscovered for a long period of time.

From Aljazeera:

At first, Miyu found the work tough. The scenes could be grotesque. Even after the body has been removed, hair and seepage from the corpse sometimes remain. The work can be physically demanding. But "what I find most difficult," she explains, "is to talk to the family. I don't know how much I can really ask or talk."

When someone dies of kodokushi, she says there's a sense of daily life that lingers. It's harder cleaning a house "where someone has been murdered or someone killed themselves", she adds, explaining that the air feels heavier in such places.

Partly to help her cope and partly as a public service to help spotlight the plight of isolated people, Kojima had turned to art. Now, she creates miniature dioramas of the rooms that she had cleaned.

From Spoon & Tamago:

To preserve and document the scene, the company always takes photographs of the rooms in case relatives want to see them. However, Kojima noticed that the photographs really don’t capture the sadness of the incident. And while she had no formal art training, she decided to go to her local craft store and buy supplies, which she used to create her replicas. She sometimes uses color-copies of the photographs, which she then sculpts into miniature objects.Kojima says that she spends about 1 month on each replica.

(Photo: Naoko Kawamura/Asahi News)

This is wonderful.

Sculptor Heath Satow was inspired by sunflower patterns to create Inflorescence, a sculpture for the University of Alaska's science building.

Satow wrote:

The mirror-polished stainless steel facets of each "seed", "atom" or "cell" create little individual paintings of the world, each one interpreting the same world around it, but each one unique in what it shows us.

Don't miss the interactive lighting feature of the sculpture as shown in the Vimeo clip below.

Surely you've heard about how all those carbon dioxide emissions into the Earth's atmosphere are contributing to global warming but have you ever wondered if you could just suck that gas out of the air?

Better yet, capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and convert it into fuel that you can use.

That's what Carbon Engineering, a company based out of Squamish, British Columbia, Canada, aims to do.

James Temple of MIT Technology Review explains why the idea behind air capture is actually quite feasible:

... a detailed new analysis published today in the journal Joule finds that direct air capture may be practical after all. The study concludes it would cost between $94 and $232 per ton of captured carbon dioxide, if existing technologies were implemented on a commercial scale.

Photo: Carbon Engineering

Sophie Oliveira Barata worked on special effect prosthetics for the television and movie industries in college, but wondered if she could use her skills to create stylish prosthetics for people who've lost limbs.

Thus The Alternative Limb Project was born.

Check out many more amazing alternative limbs that Sophie had created over at her website and Instagram - via Kottke

Photo: Omkaar Kotedia, model Kelly Knox

Photo: Ryan Seary wearing a detachable leg cover which fits over his C-leg (Photo by Omkaar Kotedia)

This recently published scientific paper (about the goby fish) is kind of unique. Can you spot something unusual about it?

Give up?

Check out the authors: the first author only has one name, Akihito. But you can call him Emperor Akihito.

Yup - that Emperor Akihito.

The second author is also special.

via GeekPress

Even in today's supposedly cashless society where everyone pays with credit cards or mobile payments, cash is still king. In fact, it's more popular than ever.

Dan Kopf of Quartz explains why it's (still) all about the Benjamins:

In 2017, for the first time ever, the one hundred dollar bill became the most popular US bill in circulation, beating out the one dollar bill. It is quite the turn of events for Benjamin Franklin-faced banknote. Just 10 years ago, it was less common than both the $20 and the $1.

Why are hundreds so much more common these days? It’s not because more people are using them for day-to-day spending. The vast majority of cash transactions are still made in small bills.

According to a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the $100 bill is on the rise as a form of savings ...

The Fed researchers suggest that people across the world are stashing hundreds under their beds as an alternative in case their local currency takes a dive.

Image: Atlas, with data from the Federal Reserve Board

Conference badges are usually ho-hum affairs ... but not at Def Con! At the world's largest hacking conference, there's an underground culture based on creating intricate badges out of circuit boards.

From Daniel Oberhaus of Motherboard:

At Def Con, attendee badges are never just a token of admission to the conference. Each year’s conference badge is a printed circuit board (PCB), the same type of mini computers you’ll find embedded in most modern electronics. For more than a decade, these circuit boards have served as a ticket to an underground social club whose members are all obsessed with solving the puzzles baked into the badge’s hardware. The stakes of the game are high—the first attendee to crack the puzzle wins an “uber badge” that will grant them free access to Def Con for life. But according to most of the attendees I spoke to, it’s the social aspect of the badges, not the prize, that drives their obsession.

(Photo: 2018 Mr. Robot Badge - Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard)

This is one tough cop.

Police Commissioner Krisna Murti posted a video on his Instagram about an unidentified riot police officer who calmly walked away from a riot with an arrow sticking out of his eye socket!

Pakistani ice cream vendor Abdul Qadir had two recent surprises in his life.

First, he was visited by agents from Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency in his home in the slum of Karachi. Second, he realized that the purpose of the visit was because they thought he had $18 million (2.3 billion rupees) in the bank.

From The Guardian:

“I am the most unlucky man in the world,” the 52-year-old said in a television interview. “When I came to know about [the huge sum], it was no longer there.”

Brought in for a second interview on 19 September, the distraught vendor invited sceptical officials to inspect the condition of his home. “Why would I be spending this miserable life if I have billions in my account?” he said.

The affair has only further impoverished Qadir. While he used to make £3 per day selling ice-cream, the father of two has been unable to return to work since his story spread through the neighbourhood.

“People started taunting me by saying, ‘Look a billionaire is selling falooda [an ice-cream topped desert].’

The authorities believed that Qadir didn't own that money in his account for one simple reason: he is illiterate.

(Photo: Pakistan Today)

Can't remember something? Write it down!

Still can't remember? Use this font to write it down.

The Sans Forgetica typeface, which was designed by a team of designers and scientists from RMIT University using the principles of cognitive psychology to help you remember.

From DW:

RMIT Behavioral Business Lab's Dr Janneke Blijlevens said normal fonts were very familiar.

"Readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created," Blijlevens said in a statement, but warned that if a font is too outlandish the brain struggles to process the text and the information is not retained.

"Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention."

The modifications force readers to spend longer on each word, allowing the brain to engage in deeper cognitive processing.

How bad is the state of healthcare in the United States right now? How about this: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman had to sell his Nobel Prize gold medal to help pay for medical expenses.

Washington Post has the obituary, which is worth a read for Lederman's many accomplishments:

Sometimes called the “Mel Brooks of physics,” Dr. Lederman was known for his humor and engaging lecture style. (“I’m so old,” he said when he won the Nobel, “I can remember when the Dead Sea was only sick.”) He brought an innovative spark to science beginning in World War II, when as a soldier he helped develop the Doppler radar.

“It was a cruel blow when I got caught speeding years later with a Doppler radar gun,” Dr. Lederman told Smithsonian magazine in 1993, “and the judge didn’t care when I explained that I’d helped create the thing.”

Photo: FNAL/Wikipedia

When you think about nuclear fission reactor, you probably thought of man-made nuclear energy power plants (the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant from The Simpsons, perhaps).

But did you know that Mother Nature actually had set off nukes on Earth about 1.7 billion years ago?

Ethan Siegel of Stars with a Bang wrote about Earth's First Nuclear Reactor:

The Oklo fission reactors are the only known examples of a natural nuclear reactor here on Earth ... For approximately 30 minutes, the reactor would go critical, with fission proceeding until the water boils away. Over the next ~150 minutes, there would be a cooldown period, after which water would flood the mineral ore again and fission would restart.

This three hour cycle would repeat itself for hundreds of thousands of years, until the ever-decreasing amount of U-235 reached a low-enough level, below that ~3% amount, that a chain reaction could no longer be sustained.

Read more about the Oklo Mine natural nuclear fission reactor over at Wikipedia

Photo: US Department of Energy