On June 21, 1965, the debut album from The Byrds, called Mr. Tambourine Man was released. This particular album is said to have marked the beginning of the folk-rock revolution. The two-sided album had six tracks on each side, and contained band originals and song covers, one of which was "Mr. Tambourine Man," originally by Bob Dylan. The album was a great success, and...

In just a few months, the Byrds had become a household name, with a #1 single and a smash-hit album that married the ringing guitars and backbeat of the British Invasion with the harmonies and lyrical depth of folk to create an entirely new sound.

You can hear the band’s 1966 performance of the song over here.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Meet the bristle worm. It is said that their kind has already been around on Earth for about 500 million years, surviving five mass extinctions over that time. Today, there are some 10,000 species of the bristle worm.

Of these many species, scientists have been amazed by one particular bristle worm, Platynereis dumerilii, due to its virtually unbreakable jaw, which apparently, scientists found out, is made of metal atoms. That’s right. This bad boy has a metal jaw.

This is pretty unusual. The study's senior author Christian Hellmich explains: "The materials that vertebrates are made of are well researched. Bones, for example, are very hierarchically structured: There are organic and mineral parts, tiny structures are combined to form larger structures, which in turn form even larger structures."

The bristle worm jaw, by contrast, replaces the minerals from which other creatures' bones are built with atoms of magnesium and zinc arranged in a super-strong structure. It's this structure that is key. "On its own," he says, "the fact that there are metal atoms in the bristle worm jaw does not explain its excellent material properties."

But even if its jaws are made of metal, it is deformable enough, which makes it even more amazing.

Learn more about this bristle worm over at Big Think.

Ah, the wonders of nature really are fascinating.

(Image Credit: Martin Gühmann/ Wikimedia Commons)

It is often understood that the immune system works the same regardless of the time of day when an infection hits the body, but apparently, this was a misconception. Scientists have found out that the immune system works differently depending on the time of day, thanks to the body’s circadian rhythm.

Our body clock has evolved over millions of years to help us survive. Every cell in the body has a collection of proteins that indicate the time depending on their levels. Knowing whether it’s day or night means our body can adjust its functions and behaviours (such as when we want to eat) to the correct time.

Our body clock does this by generating 24 hour rhythms (also termed circadian rhythms) in how cells function. For example, our body clock ensures that we only produce melatonin as night falls, as this chemical makes us tired – signalling it’s time for sleep.

Our immune system is composed of many different types of immune cells that are continually patrolling the body looking for evidence of infection or damage. But it is our body clock that determines where those cells are located at particular times of the day.

This means that the effect of viruses, medicines, and even vaccines, may be stronger or weaker depending on the time of day.

More about this over at The Conversation.

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Have you experienced driving on a snowy evening? Or did you ever get lost so you had to turn down the music volume so that you can “see better”? Or how about the sudden existential crisis that dawns on you in the middle of driving? Chances are you experienced all of these already, and you would probably be able to relate to most, if not all, of these car memes.

Have a look at them over at Bored Panda.

Which one is your favorite?

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

A year ago, Kane Powell, a musician from Maryland, was at an Applebee’s with his friends, talking about the multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos. At some point in their conversation, Powell suggested that Bezos buy the Mona Lisa painting, and then eat it. It seems that he didn’t leave that idea where he was at the time, as he made a petition on Change.org about it.

“Nobody has eaten the mona lisa and we feel jeff bezos needs to take a stand and make this happen,” he wrote.

Now, a year later, the petition has gained thousands of signatures, meaning thousands of people are interested in seeing this happen. This might be one of the weirdest things that I have encountered. But apparently, in the art world, eating a painting is not that weird.

Amy Adler, an art law expert and professor at the New York University School of Law, told the New York Times that the hypothetical idea of Bezos buying and eating the painting would fall “within the tradition of destruction of art as a way of creating art.” Other artists have carried out this practice in recent decades, Adler noted, such as Robert Rauschenberg, who spent a month erasing a drawing by Willem de Kooning in 1953.

The Louvre Museum has already seen the petition, but the institution said that they will not comment on said petition.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Howard Farley Sr. always looked forward to seeing the four ghostly structures that make up Nomehenge when he returns after fishing for king crab. He says that he doesn’t feel like he’s really back until he sees them.

“They were always there, part of Nome.”

Colloquially, they’re known as “Nomehenge” or simply “the billboards,” though, given their concave shape, one could easily mistake them for unfinished skate ramps. Sitting on the summit of the otherwise-bald 1,200-foot mountain that looms behind the town, they’re useful wayfinding aids for aircraft pilots, boat captains, hikers, and snowmobilers—particularly in the winter, when it’s dark much of the day and the snow is deep enough to obscure most other landmarks.

But what really is Nomehenge, and what purpose did it serve? The answer goes back to the Cold War.

Learn more about this helpful structure over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Casey Anderson/ Atlas Obscura)

Immortalize your pet with the help of Petsies, a company that creates custom stuffed animals. With their superb skills, they are able to create a stuffed animal that looks just like your own pet, down to the smallest details. Of course, this kind of service costs a bit, priced at $249. The manufacturing process takes a bit of time, too, lasting for six weeks. But if you have the extra cash and the patience to wait, then maybe you can go for it, because why not?

Staff at The Dodo tried to avail of this service by picking one of their office pups to be the model, and they were not disappointed. Have a look at what they wrote about their experience over at the site.

(Image Credit: Matt P./ The Dodo)

Say hello to Playdate, a handheld device where you can play 8-bit games. But don’t be fooled; while this might pay homage to the Game & Watch and the Game Boy, this is not old school. The device has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and has a USB-C port.

“Panic saw an opportunity for something truly different in the world of video games,” comments the official release. “Something small-scale that could deliver a dose of fun and delight to video game players who have otherwise seen it all. Something that could fit nicely in-between regular gaming sessions. Something unexpected and beautiful, with a secret, surprise set of exclusive games written by amazing developers. Put simply: something that adds a little brightness to your life.”

The Playdate features the usual buttons that you’ll see in a retro handheld device, such as the D-Pad and the A and B buttons, but what makes it unique is the crank that you can also use to control certain games.

Unfortunately, the Playdate does not have a backlight, but you can play it by the reading lamp thanks to its very reflective screen, and the crisp image that it produces.

What we found most interesting about this device is what they call The Season, or a collection of secret games that are released to players over time — currently planned to be one game per week. It gets even better as the company says that once the season is over, the games you downloaded to your device will stay there, allowing users to play them any time.

The Playdate was created together with Swedish consumer electronic company Teenage Engineering who created the crank because they “want to break people off their touch psychosis.”

This is awesome.

(Image Credit: DesignBoom)

A herd of elephants can be seen passing between Piccadilly and Buckingham Palace in London’s Green Park. They seem to have come from somewhere, and are migrating towards another place. Unfortunately, they seem to be traveling at a very slow pace. In fact, they’re not moving at all, as they are just life-sized models.

The lumbering creatures are part of an ongoing collaboration between two nonprofits, CoExistence and Elephant Family, that explores how humans can better live alongside animals and the larger ecosystem through imaginative public art projects.

As its name suggests, CoExistence’s aim is to identify mutually beneficial modes of living considering that within the last century, the balance between world population and wilderness has shifted considerably: in 1937, 66 percent of global environments were intact with 2.3 billion people on Earth. Today, those numbers have undergone a dramatic change, with a world population of 7.8 billion and only 35 percent of wilderness remaining.

The herd in Green Park is only one out of the nine herds set up in London, the others being at other remarkable places in the city, like St. James’s Park, and Berkeley Square.

Thirty-seven endangered and extinct birds will join the herd in Green Park on July 6. Using steel, clay, and bronze, seven artists created the flock, which includes a three-meter-tall curlew by Simon Gudgeon that’s as large as some of the elephants. The avian additions are the product of a collaboration with WildEast, a group focused on restoring biodiversity in the U.K. and finding new methods of sustainable farming, and will be sold to raise money for conservation efforts.

Beautiful!

(Image Credit: CoExistence/ Colossal)

Wooden carvings that are slightly elevated from the floor can be found at the Contemporary Art Foundation in Tokyo. The dumbbell-like carvings are part of Aki Inomata’s exhibition titled “How To Carve a Sculpture.” On the corner of the exhibition, however, was a similar carving, but this was placed sideways and is surrounded by wood chips. This gives us a clue as to how the carvings were made. These were not made by human hands. These were made by beavers.

“Beavers, like humans, are one of the few animals that actively modify their environment, reforming it to suit their own requirements,” says Aki Inomata, who previously created 3D-printed architectural shells for hermit crabs. A continuous theme throughout the artist’s practice is how the act of “making” is not exclusive to mankind, which leads her to collaborate with living creatures. Beavers chew on trees, sharpening their constantly-growing teeth, and then use the felled wood as building materials for dams or to create lodging.

However, Inomata’s exhibition leaves more questions than answers. Can this be considered art? And if that is the case, then who will take credit for these pieces? Will it be Inomata, or will it be the beavers?

And how, indeed, do we carve a sculpture? Inomata does not say.

(Image Credit: Takumi Gunji/ Spoon & Tamago)

Scientists have found previously that there is a relationship between the gut and the brain. This new research further strengthens this finding. The new research, which was published recently in the journal Nature Communications, reports that infants who have uneven gut microbiome have a strong fear response (how someone reacts to a scary situation), while those who have even gut microbiome have a milder reaction.

Uneven microbiomes are dominated by a small set of bacteria, whereas even microbiomes are more balanced.

The researchers also discovered that the content of the microbial community at 1 year of age related to fear responses. Compared with less fearful children, infants with heightened responses had more of some types of bacteria and less of others.

The team, however, did not observe a connection between the children's gut microbiome and how the children reacted to strangers who weren't wearing masks. Knickmeyer said this is likely due to the different parts of the brain involved with processing potentially frightening situations.

More about this over at Science Daily.

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Belmar, New Jersey — The horns of the Devil seemed to have appeared on the horizon on the 10th of June. The reason for this stunning phenomenon was the Moon’s partial silhouette, which gave the Sun a crescent shape. Atmospheric refraction, which flattened and distorted the solar disk, also had a hand in this event.

But at its full annular phase this eclipsed Sun looked like a ring of fire in the heavens.

Magnificent.

(Image Credit: Madhup Rathi/ APOD NASA)

When it comes to making decisions under high uncertainty, reliance on data analysis seems to be counterproductive, and this consumes more time but does not ensure accuracy. In situations like this, it is better to trust your gut. This is what a report, authored by researchers from various business schools, found out after examining 122 different companies.

This may explain why 12 different publishers initially rejected the opportunity to publish “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ – because it had no data to inform its potential.

[...]

“Under extreme uncertainty, managers, particularly those with more experience, should trust the expertise and instincts that have propelled them to such a position. The nous developed over years as a leader can be a more effective than an analytical tool which, in situations of extreme uncertainty, could act as a hindrance rather than a driver of success.”

More details about this over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Around 1,400 years ago, from the 6th to the 7th century, people that lived across Europe had a strange habit of reopening graves and taking stuff out from these for reasons unknown to the archaeologists of today. Of course, this practice could be easily dismissed as grave robbing, but researchers found that this is not true.

In their study, the researchers reanalyzed previously excavated cemeteries from five regions of Europe. They found that between roughly the sixth and eight centuries A.D., people frequently opened graves and took out objects for reasons that don't seem linked to grave robbery. 

"They made a careful selection of possessions to remove, especially taking brooches from women and swords from men, but they left behind lots of valuables, even precious metal objects, including necklace pendants of gold or silver," lead study author Alison Klevnäs, a researcher at Stockholm University, said in a statement.

What could be the reason behind this act that spread over western Europe? Researchers think that it has something to do with symbolic motivation.

"Swords and brooches are some of the most symbolically laden objects in the graves," Klevnäs told Live Science in an email. "These were given as gifts and passed on as heirlooms; they're objects used to link people, including across generations. They bring stories and memories. So it's likely that they are retrieved for these reasons."

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: artbejo/ Pixabay)

In the ancient industrial zone of Yavneh, Israel, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) stumbled across an extremely rare object: a 1,000-year-old chicken egg, which lay on the cesspit of the ancient city’s industrial zone, untouched and undisturbed.

“We were astonished to find it,” IAA archaeologist Alla Nagorsky told the [Haaretz] newspaper. “From time to time we find fragments of eggshells, but a whole egg is extraordinary.”

Even more surprising, the egg did not decay or rot, as it was encased in soft waste.

Unfortunately, the said archaeologists accidentally broke the egg in the lab. Nagorsky, however, comforted the world, saying that the egg had to be broken at some point anyway. Fortunately, some yolk remained in the shell and that yolk “is now being tested for DNA.”

Despite the accidental lab omelet, the archeologists are excited by the astonishing find.

(Image Credit: Yoli Schwartz/ Israel Antiquities Authority/ Haaretz)