Surely you knew that braille is the alphabet and writing system used by blind and visually impaired people, but did you know that it was invented by a fifteen-year old boy who was accidentally blinded at a young age?

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings wrote a fantastic review of Six Dots: A Story of Young Louis Braille by Jen Bryant. With lovely illustrations by Boris Kulikov, it is a children's book about how Louis Braille went blind at the age of three due to eye infection after an accident at his father's workshop, and how he went on to invent the writing system that is still in use today.

... the turning point in [Braille's] life came when he was three. His father was a leatherer specializing in horse tack in a small town near Paris. One day, while playing at the leather workshop, little Louis disregarded his father’s admonition not to toy with the sharp tools. ... Trying to imitate his father, he set out to puncture a piece of leather. But the awl slipped from his tiny hand and stabbed him in the eye.

Images: Takhini Hot Pools

This sure puts "chill" in "just chilling."

Every year since 2011, the Takhini Hot Pools, a hot springs resort in Yukon, Canada, has held The International Hair Freezing Contest (Previously on Neatorama). Contestants would soak in the hot springs, dip their heads in the hot springs and wet their hair, then mold their hair into the most creative 'dos and let the cold winter air freeze it.

Take a look at the photos of some of this year's participants:

Just how cold was it there? Take a look at the temperature shown on the thermometer below:

Images: Sohu

If you think that the traffic on the street outside your apartment window is noisy, stop complaining now. You've got nothing on the residents of this Chongqing apartment building: they have to deal with a train running straight through the structure!

"Our city is very heavily built upon and that can make finding room for roads and railway lines a real challenge," a Chongqing Rail Transit Group spokesperson said in 2014 as reported by Oddity Central, "Sometimes there just isn’t room on the ground so we have to think about going under, or over, or – in this case – straight through. In a city as fast paced as this it was clear people wanted to get around quickly. Extending the railway line this way was a gamble, but it was one that paid off."

Interestingly, having a train traveling straight through the building several times a day did not reduce property values. In fact, it actually made the apartments more expensive as it made access to public transportation much more convenient for the dwellers.

See the clip of the train in action:

Image @JeffBezos

After crushing brick-and-mortar and online competitors with his Amazon store and working to conquer space travel with his rocket company, what is there left to do for a billionaire? How about channeling your inner Tony Stark and turning yourself into mecha-billionaire?

That's what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos did at the private Machine Learning, Home Automation, Robotics and Space Exploration (MARS) conference. As reported by The Verge, he stepped into a 13-foot-tall bot developed by Hankook Mirae Technology of South Korea and lived out our childhood fantasy of controlling a giant robot.

Conference attendee Caleb Harper shot this video clip of Bezos waving the mecha's arms:

Late for school? Don't ask mom for a ride in her minivan ... ask dad to drop you off with his helicopter! (See, choppers aren't only good for running away from alien monster ... )

Passersby spotted a chopper land in front of a school in the elite Lipky district of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Moments later, a schoolboy jumped out and ran inside. The boy is reportedly the son of former Deputy Minister of Sports Andrey Palchevskii.

The incident sparked a debate on social media: is it an extravagant gesture of the elite, or is it just a boy desperate not to be late for school?

This puts a whole new spin on "Helicopter Parenting." View the story and video clip on Metro.

Seventies disco song "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees could very well save your life one day. Turns out, the song has just the right tempo for administering CPR.

The NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and advertising agency Seiden have released a Spotify playlist of songs with around 100 beats per minute (bpm) tempo, which is considered the ideal rate for administering chest compressions during CPR.

In the playlist are apt life saving musical hits like "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees as mentioned above, "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor, and "Rock Your Body" by Justin Timberlake. More perplexing, however, is the inclusion of "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen ... Someone's got a morbid sense of humor!

Check it out over at The NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital - via Quartz

Think your apartment is bad? Take heart, at least you're not living in the bathroom.

The SFist spotted a rental listing for a small studio apartment in the Presidio Heights area of San Francisco. The landlord is asking for $2,000 a month, which is steep, but hey, that's the going rate for the most expensive rental market in the United States.

Here's the ad, which touts the studio as "quiet" and with "easy parking."

Looks like it's wide enough for a couch and not much else ...

And there's a nice built-in counter with stools, which is good because you can't fit a table or desk in the space. And the microwave is just an arm's reach from the shower - in case you need to heat something up while you take a shower in the morning.

All this for $2,000 a month, folks!

But hey, look at the bright side: the bathroom is really conveniently located!

Something must be lost in translation here. Redditor GrapefruitTechnique posted a girl wearing a shirt with a familiar character but something's not quite right ...

Images: BoysPlayNice/H3T - via Apartment Therapy

See, living under bridges isn't just for trolls anymore. Now, the avant garde class (or horror lovers) can join in on the fun!

Czech architecture firm H3T Architeckti's "Black Flying House" is a small four square meter (about 43 square feet) house suspended under an old railway bridge with thin steel cables. From a distance, it looks like the dwelling is floating in the air.

The house is accessible using a small ladder and features a small window and stark interior with matte black finishes. Perfect for a horror fan!

Image: Michael Gurven

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States accounting for roughly 1 in 4 deaths every year. But there's a part of the world where heart disease is so rare that it's practically unheard of.

Research has shown that the Tsimane people of Bolivia have "the lowest reported level of coronary artery disease of any population recorded to date." Using calcium plaque as a measure of heart disease, their hearts are much healthier than those of people who live in the United States, Europe, as well as Asian countries with advanced economies and health care system like Korea and Japan.

"If you think of the calcium plaque as a reasonable measure of arterial age, their arteries are 28 to 30 years younger than ours," cardiologist Randall Thompson and one of the authors of the study said to The Washington Post. "Obviously the Tsimane are achieving something that we are not."

So, what's their secret? Well, let's just hope it's not their diet. You see, the Tsimane people eat monkeys, wild pig, and piranhas for dinner.

Read the full story by Peter Whoriskey over at The Washington Post's Wonkblog.

This is why we can't have nice things. Locals have stealing toilet paper from the public bathrooms at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, causing the park to use over 30 rolls of toilet paper a day. A local news investigation caught nearby park residents visiting the public restroom multiple times a day to stuff their bags with as much free toilet paper as they can snatch.

Tired of having to spend so much money on toilet paper, the local authorities decided to employ a high tech solution: they've installed facial recognition scanners to the toilet paper dispensers.

The Shanghaiist reports:

In order to get toilet paper, visitors must remove their glasses and hat, and have their faces scanned by a high definition camera. Afterward, they are issued a 60-cm [about 24 inch - ed] long piece of toilet paper by the wall-mounted machine ... Authorities say that the system can remember faces, and that each individual will only be allocated paper once every nine minutes.

Voice-controlled home automation is all the rage these days, but yelping at Amazon's Alexa or Google Home just doesn't do it for this diehard Zelda fan.

Allen Pan of Sufficiently Advanced decided that the best way to voice-control his home is by using ... the Zelda ocarina. Pan built a Raspberry Pi-based sytem to recognize various Zelda tunes and perform tasks like unlocking the front door, turn on the lights, adjust the thermostat, control the humidifier, water the plants, tell the time, find his cell phone and unlock his car.

Check it out:

(YouTube Link - via Sploid)

Now, we've got to figure out his home address and go there with an ocarina!

Under a size cutoff of 10,000 kilometers, there are two planets, 18 or 19 moons, 1 or 2 asteroids, and 87 trans-Neptunian objects, most of which do not yet have names. All are shown to scale, keeping in mind that for most of the trans-Neptunian objects, their sizes are only approximately known. Montage by Emily Lakdawalla. Data from NASA / JPL, JHUAPL/SwRI, SSI, and UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA, processed by Gordan Ugarkovic, Ted Stryk, Bjorn Jonsson, Roman Tkachenko, and Emily Lakdawalla.

Remember Pluto?

Ever since it was kicked out of the family of planets of our solar system, it's been trying to get back in. This time, in an effort spearheaded by Kirby Runyon of Johns Hopkins University, Pluto wants itself and its 100 closest pals to be called planets.

Runyon proposed that a planet is redefined to focus on its own geophysics: "A planet is a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has enough gravitation to be round due to hydrostatic equilibrium regardless of its orbital parameters."

In a scientific poster submitted to the upcoming Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Runyon pointed out that this new definition of planet would emphasize its intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic properties. For school children and lay people, the definition of planets is easy: "Round objects in space that are smaller than stars."

But what about memorizing the names of all those new planets? No need to do that, Runyon said, instead schools should focus on teaching Solar System's zones and why different types of planets formed at their respective distances from the Sun.

Read more about the new effort to reclassify Pluto as a Planet over at Universe Today.

Like Master Splinter once said, "The path that leads to what we truly desire is long and difficult, but only by following that path do we achieve our goal." And by goal, I think he meant pizza and by path he meant trash cans.

We all know that nanotechnology and nanoscience deal with really, really, really small things, but how small is small, exactly? Let the Molecular Foundry, part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, show you using a common penny.

In this YouTube video clip, the lab used beams of electrons to sketch letters that spell "Molecular Foundry" with the smallest feature roughly being 20 nanometers (about 100 atoms). As the video zooms out, you'll see the Berkeley Lab logo written using a beam of charged gallium atoms. Then, as the video continues to zoom out, you'll see an 18-hour timelapse of the face of Abe Lincoln, drawn with gallium atoms.

Check it out:

I only wish we could reverse the video clip, and yell out "Enhance" like in CSI.