Yes, there have been many machines that can solve a Rubik's cube - some in lightning speed - but this Rubik's cube invention by a Japanese guy who called himself Human Controller is different: it can actually solve itself!
Watch it in action:
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Got a smart dog? No, you don't ... according to science, that is!
Researchers from the University of Exeter and Canterbury Christ Church University found that dogs actually aren't all that intelligent:
The study examined more than 300 papers on the intelligence of dogs and other animals, and found several cases of "over interpretation" in favour of dogs' abilities.
"During our work it seemed to us that many studies in dog cognition research set out to 'prove' how clever dogs are," said Professor Stephen Lea, of the University of Exeter.
"They are often compared to chimpanzees and whenever dogs 'win', this gets added to their reputation as something exceptional.
"Yet in each and every case we found other valid comparison species that do at least as well as dogs do in those tasks."
Read the rest over at Phys.org
HORSE PLAY: Surveillance video captured the moment a runaway horse galloped into a French café after escaping her racing stable -- bucking, kicking and spooking several customers; no one, including the horse, was injured. https://t.co/b1xc3q32yi pic.twitter.com/MbvduwuRFk
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) October 1, 2018
This time it's not a joke: a horse did walk - or rather gallop and buck into a bar in Chantilly, France.
Credit: Stephanie Jasmin
The strength of the Earth's magnetic field is about 30 microtesla. The magnets in an MRI machine clock in at about 3 tesla, and the approximate magnetic field of a white dwarf star is about 100 tesla.
So just think about how powerful this 1,200-tesla magnet created by Shojiro Takeyama and his colleagues at the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo.
Rafi Letzter of Live Science writes:
To achieve that intensity, Takeyama and his team pump megajoules of energy into a small, precisely engineered electromagnetic coil, the inner lining of which then collapses on itself at Mach 15 — that's more than 3 miles per second (5 kilometers per second). As it collapses, the magnetic field inside gets squeezed into a tighter and tighter space, until its force peaks at a tesla reading unimaginable in conventional magnets. Fragments of a second later, the coil collapses entirely, destroying itself.
The last time Takeyama switched on his super-strong magnet, it blew out the heavy door of the lab that contained the machinery!
The YND239-20 cafe (named after its street address in Seoul, the capital of South Korea) looks like an optical illusion: everything in it - from the walls to the chairs and even the dishes - look like hand drawn black and white cartoon!
Lonely Planet has the scoop:
“We wanted to supply a place that looked like a cartoon to our customers,” the cafe’s marketing manager, JS Lee, told Lonely Planet. He also said they’re all happy to see that guests take pictures and make good memories in the cafe because that is “exactly what we wanted.”
Turns out that this little corner of black and white design and stellar Instagrammability gained its popularity exclusively through word-of-mouth. “Famous bloggers, Facebook stars, magazines and TV programs all talked about us,” JS Lee remembered. “Then we became famous very naturally.”
Actually that's Asteroid 2015 TB145 as spotted by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, when it zipped past Earth - missing it by just 300,000 miles - on Halloween three years ago.
It's making the rounds again on the Internet, but its likely won't come that close to Earth when it comes around again this year.
When Jeremy and Krista lost their wedding venue before the big day, they decided to have the wedding ceremony over at Jeremy's place of work: a fire station in St. Paul Park, Minnesota.
"We talked about it, 'What if there's a call?'" Krista told KARE11, and said "You can let the other guys go; you're not leaving our wedding."
But after the ceremony, there was an urgent "all call" request to fight a nearby fire ... and Jeremy had to go.
Read about what happened over at KARE11.
(Photo: December Orpen Photography)
She even responded in the form of a question. They truly are a match made in heaven!pic.twitter.com/se12NVG4m8
— Jeopardy! (@Jeopardy) September 27, 2018
Jeopardy contestant Michael Pascuzzi bet it all on national TV and asked his girlfriend Maria for her hand in marriage in this Jeopardy proposal. And best of all, she even answered in the form of a question.
"Home sweet home" is the literal truth in case of this chocolate house, made by artisan chocolatier Jean-Luc Decluzeau as a promo for the travel aggregator Booking.com.
Approximately 3,000 pounds of chocolate was used to create the 200-square foot home - and yes, everything is made out of chocolate!
When students at the University of Bristol learned that their beloved janitor Herman Gordon hadn't seen his family in Jamaica for more than a decade, they decided to do something about it.
Spearheaded by medical student Hadi Al-Zubaidi, the college students raised £1,500 so Gordon and his wife could visit his family in Jamaica as well as stay at a resort there for a vacation.
Now, isn't that a neat and kind thing to do?
Photo: Sandals UK
An army marches on its stomach, as Napoleon supposedly said ... and what better food to feed the troops than pizza?
Now, after two decades and hundreds of failed attempts, the Army's Combat Feeding Directorate has finally created the combat-ready Meal, Ready to Eat (M.R.E.) pizza.
Dave Philipps of The New York Times has the scoop:
Now being shipped to military bases around the world, the newest of 24 current M.R.E. options is a humble three-by-five-inch Sicilian-style slice, scattered with melt-proof shreds of mozzarella and pebbles of mild pepperoni, sealed in a dun-colored laminate pouch.
It isn't much to look at, even by free-pizza standards. But this is no ordinary slice. To quality for M.R.E. duty, a food item has to be able to survive years of storage in a dank ship's hold or a sun-baked shipping container, withstand Arctic freezes and tropical monsoons, stave off assaults by insects, and remain intact through a parachute airdrop or even a free fall from 100 feet.
Forget 30-minute dlievery - Army regulations say it has to stay fresh for 36 months. And after all that, the pizza still has to be tasty enough to eat.
Photo: Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
Hotels are touting free hot breakfast to drum up business, but they may have lured in more than just travelers.
A few hotels in Dalton, Georgia, have been targeted by a daring thief that came in to eat at the breakfast buffet. Locals have dubbed him the Breakfast Bandit:
“He’s definitely still on the loose and we think he’s still hungry,” a Dalton police spokesperson told Thrillist over the phone. “I don’t know what he ate, exactly, but he definitely ate a lot of it.”
The low-stakes criminal reportedly told a Holiday Inn Express employee that he was “just checking how easy it is to get into hotels and get free stuff.” He was spotted wandering into locations across Dalton, pocketing bottles, towels, and plastic silverware, before demolishing the most holy of all hotel accomodations: the breakfast buffet. We’re talking pancakes, bacon, Cocoa Puffs, the whole charade.
Eliza Dumais of the Thrillist has the story.
It doesn't look like much, but this low-tech mosquito trap called the Gravid Aedes Trap (GAT) may just be what's needed to help get rid of the Asian tiger mosquitoes.
Scott Ritchie of the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University explained in this All Things Considered feature by Joe Palca from NPR:
The trap doesn't look particularly impressive — it's basically three plastic buckets stacked together. The top and bottom buckets are black. The mosquitoes fly into the trap through a hole in the top bucket, but they seem to have a hard time flying back out through the hole. To make matters worse (for the mosquito) you can dangle a piece of sticky paper inside the top bucket to catch a wayward pest that happens to land there.
The bottom bucket contains water with some rotting grass floating in it. Aedes mosquitoes typically lay their eggs in stagnant water. The middle bucket has a net to trap any mosquitoes that hatch in the water.
Photo: Joe Palca
A seal came out of nowhere to say hello to this kayaker. In the face. With an octopus. Smack!
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