Welcome to “The Google Store Chelsea”. It is the first-ever permanent retail store from the tech company, and it just opened on June 17. Here, you can buy stuff that you would normally order at the online Google Store, such as Pixel phones, Google TVs, and Stadia controllers. And if you think that it’s just an “offline version of Google Store”, then you are mistaken.

Google also notes that it will "have experts on hand to help visitors get the most out of their device, such as troubleshooting an issue, fixing a cracked Pixel screen, or helping with installations."

"Sandbox" areas for Pixel, Stadia, and Nest will pitch customers on the benefits of each product line. The Pixel area shows off the phone's camera technology with various lighting effects; the Stadia area is one of the only places the public can actually try the game streaming service; and the Nest section is a big living room full of smart home devices. A "workshop" space will host regular events and lessons. There's also a rotating exhibit called the "Google Imagination Space," a "17-foot-tall circular glass structure" that surrounds a visitor with several vertical screens. Right now, it's pitching Google Translate, and visitors can "experience real-time translation of your speech into 24 languages simultaneously and then learn how this all happens on the back end using several Google technologies."

The Google Store Chelsea is located at Google’s New York city campus.

Learn more over at Ars Technica.

This looks gorgeous!

(Image Credit: Google/ Ars Technica)

For most of us, hiccups are nothing but a minor inconvenience. When we’re suddenly having hiccups, we can always just drink upside down or eat a spoonful of sugar. (It should be noted, however, that these “cures” are unreliable, contrary to popular belief). But for some of us who suffer from hiccups regularly, hiccups are a nightmare. Now there is hope for those people in the form of this specialized straw called HiccAway, which was invented by a neurologist.

… in a newly published research letter in JAMA Network Open, survey results from 249 volunteers around the world indicate that 90 percent of the users think this thing works better than traditional remedies.

The straw has a mouthpiece at one end and a pressure valve at the other, which requires you to suck harder than you would through a normal straw. This pressure causes your diaphragm to contract, stopping the uncontrollable influxes of air which rhythmically slam your vocal cords shut and cause the classic sound of a hiccup. 

All that's required to stop these 'burps of the throat' is to submerge HiccAway in half a glass of water and begin sucking. Those who have used the device say it takes as few as one or two attempts for the hiccups to fade.

The Kickstarter product is currently patent-pending.

Learn more about this device over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: HiccAway)

Digital audio sampling and virtual instruments have improved so much over the years that we’re now at a point where we can’t tell if the sound of an instrument is virtual or real. The piano, the drums, and the bass are some of the instruments affected by the current reality in the music world. The question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it depends on the person.

In this video, Davie504 reveals to us iconic song basslines that, apparently, were not really played on bass.

(Image Credit: egonkling/ Pixabay)

It is already established that killer whales are intelligent beings, and they have attributes common to us human beings, such as traveling with family groups and taking care of grandchildren after menopause. They can even imitate human speech. But their intelligence does not end there. Marine biologists recently discovered that they are able to form strong and fast friendships with other killer whales. It seems that they also have the concept of a best friend.

[The] new study suggests the whales rival chimpanzees, macaques, and even humans when it comes to the kinds of “social touching” that indicates strong bonds.

The study marks “a very important contribution to the field” of social behavior in dolphins and whales, says José Zamorano-Abramson, a comparative psychologist at the Complutense University of Madrid who wasn’t involved in the work. “These new images show lots of touching of many different types, probably related to different kinds of emotions, much like the complex social dynamics we see in great apes.”

… the researchers recorded more than 800 instances of physical contact between individuals, they report this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Those included slippery hugs, back-to-back and nose-to-nose rubs, and “flipper slaps” between pairs of whales, all dispersed around bouts of leaping out of the water in perfect synchrony. Other whales playfully tossed calves into the air, letting them splash back into the water next to them.

Learn more about this study at Science Magazine.

Wholesome!

(Image Credit: NOAA/ Wikimedia Commons)

Meet Marty and Doc, the main characters of the Back to the Future franchise, reimagined as rubber duckie figures by Numskull Designs. The TUBBZ duck collectibles have four figures: Marty with a video camera and the other in his radiation suit. The other two are Doc figures, one with his brain wave analyzer, and the other with the remote control.

Fingers crossed they continue the series with Back to the Future II characters as well.

Cute!

(Image Credit: UCS LLC/ Numskull/ Technabob)

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have created a material that could be an alternative to single-use plastics that are used in today’s households. The material, a polymer film, mimics the properties of spider silk, one of the strongest materials in nature.

The material was created using a new approach for assembling plant proteins into materials which mimic silk on a molecular level. The energy-efficient method, which uses sustainable ingredients, results in a plastic-like free-standing film, which can be made at industrial scale. Non-fading 'structural' colour can be added to the polymer, and it can also be used to make water-resistant coatings.

The material is home compostable, whereas other types of bioplastics require industrial composting facilities to degrade. In addition, the Cambridge-developed material requires no chemical modifications to its natural building blocks, so that it can safely degrade in most natural environments.

The new product will be commercialised by Xampla, a University of Cambridge spin-out company developing replacements for single-use plastic and microplastics. The company will introduce a range of single-use sachets and capsules later this year, which can replace the plastic used in everyday products like dishwasher tablets and laundry detergent capsules. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

This is a great scientific achievement, but I hope that its price will be reasonable when it is finally released in the market.

More details about the research over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Xampla/ EurekAlert)

This is a brain tissue sample from a 45-year-old woman undergoing surgery for epilepsy. The sample, which was smaller than a sesame seed, is about a millionth of an entire brain’s volume. The sample was preserved, and then stained with heavy metals, which revealed the cellular structures.

Computational programs stitched the resulting images back together and artificial intelligence programs helped scientists analyze them. A short description of the resulting view was published as a preprint May 30 to bioRxiv.org. The full dataset is freely available online.

Charting the varied shapes of some 50,000 cells and the 130 million connections between them, neuroscientist Clay Reid describes the image as “absolutely beautiful.”

“In the best possible way, it’s the beginning of something very exciting.”

More about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Lichtman Lab/ Harvard University/ Connectomics Team/ Google)

For the third anniversary of their song "Youngblood," Michael Clifford, the lead guitarist of the band 5 Seconds of Summer, contacted Seth Everman and asked him if he wanted to do something with them. Together with the whole band, Seth recreated the chorus of the song, but with stuff that you can’t even imagine being used as percussion instruments.

(Image Credit: SethEverman/ YouTube)

Parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction in which an egg can grow and develop into an embryo without being fertilized by sperm. This kind of reproduction keeps the gene pool undiluted, and it doesn’t waste both energy and time on mating. There are also disadvantages in parthenogenesis. The first is the loss of genetic diversity, which helps in the survival of a species, especially in changing environments. The second disadvantage is recombination of genetic materials, which can result in birth defects or non-productive eggs.

Researchers have found workers of a species of honeybee in South Africa that produce asexually via parthenogenesis. Even more amazing is the fact that these honeybees seem to have found a way to avoid recombinations, which make their offspring nearly identical to themselves.

More testing showed that one line of worker bees in the hive had been cloning themselves for approximately 30 years—a clear sign that workers in the hive were not suffering from birth defects or an inability to produce viable offspring.

Cool!

(Image Credit: PollyDot/ Pixabay)

Some corvids, like the Eurasian jay, are natural magicians. They are capable of deceiving other birds, like a magician deceives his audience through sleight-of-hand. An example of this is how these jays pretend to store their food in one spot, and then secretly hide them in another place. And because they think like magicians, it also seems that jays can see through the deception of a human magician.

Garcia-Pelegrin is a professional magician as well as a cognitive scientist. As the video below shows, he used three standard tricks - known as palm transfer, French drop, and fast pass - to test six Eurasian jays’ capacity to determine which hand held a worm. The birds got to eat the worm if their first guess was right. Garcia-Pelegrin also performed various other hand movements for comparison.

[...]

The jays usually saw through the French drop or the palm transfer, choosing the correct hand 70 and 60 percent of the time respectively. The fast pass was a different matter, with the jays getting just 26 percent of trials right.

[...]

The similarities between the way jays hide food from those who would steal it and the way magicians deceive the public are striking. Not only do jays and their fellow corvids; “Cache food items discretely in among multiple bluff caching events,” the paper notes, they also; “Conceal items in their throat pouch, akin to a magician’s use of false pockets, and will manipulate food items within their beak similar to sleight-of-hand techniques performed by magicians.”

Clever birds!

More details about this over at IFL Science.

(Image Credit: Elias Garcia-Pelegrin/ IFL Science)

If I received a badge for every minor thing I did in life like in video games in which they will give you a game achievement for doing a certain action, I probably would be approaching life like some kind of video game, where I will do all sorts of minor things just to get all the badges.

Among these badges made by Winks For Days, which badge would you most likely receive everyday? Mine would be the “Made Coffee” badge.

See the badges over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Winks For Days/ Sad and Useless)

If you’ve ever wanted to download Microsoft Flight Simulator, but found out that the game takes 170GB on your hard drive, then I have good news for you. The developers of the game have managed to reduce the game’s size to only 83 GB, about half of the size before. As to what they did to reduce the size, however, is unclear. But one thing’s for sure — it’s now more accessible to people who are interested in the game.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Asobo Studios/ Xbox/ Wikipedia)

Weaving is a skill best pursued by the brave, the patient, and the cunning. It is not something that can be learned easily. Not to mention that your creations take a few days before you can see them in their full glory. Yet, of all the activities he could have taken up as a hobby, 86-year-old Mongijal took basket weaving as his hobby to spend the days with during the first implementation of Malaysia's Movement Control Order (MCO) early in 2020.

But as time passed by, his casual pastime turned into a collection of well-over 30 baskets. And so, he turned it into a small business.

So, on May 22, Mongijal’s daughter Nancy promoted his baskets at Facebook. On the first day of Mongijal’s business, he was able to sell two baskets. Nancy was happy that her post reached some customers, but it seems she got more than that, as the post became viral, and there became a high demand on the baskets. However…

Nancy advised customers to show up to the hut in-person if they want to purchase a basket.

"We can't deliver at the moment. If you want it, just come to the stall and you'll get it. The stall will only open if there is stock," Nancy wrote, adding that she wanted to save her father the physical effort of delivering the baskets himself.

Needless to say, producing a multipurpose carry-all basket alone is not an easy task because it takes two to three days to complete. Bamboos known as 'Poring' or 'Tivung' in Rungus, have to be sourced from a nearby forest, while the rest depends entirely on talented hands and patience.

When Nancy first posted the photos, nearby villagers wound up visiting Mongijal's hut and purchased a lot of his baskets. Others even placed advanced orders, too.

On the next day, on May 23, it is said that Mongjial woke up in early in the morning and excitedly waited for his customers.

Very wholesome.

(Image Credit: Nancy Fuh/ Mashable)

Blender is a free open-source computer graphics software used to create 2D and 3D animated films, 3D character models, and video games. And, in case you missed the fourth word of the previous sentence, this software is free. With just a little patience and practice, you’ll be able to create magnificent stuff that you never knew you could do, just like this kid here named William Landgren.

(Image Credit: William Landgren/ YouTube)

One of the things that you have to make sure of when you’re playing chess is not losing focus at any moment in the game. After all, chess is a game of wits. It is an intense mental battle between two players. And, to be honest, it is really difficult to focus on the game when there are so many things going around you — when people are watching you, and when there are other people playing chess as well.

What happens when you focus on the wrong things while playing chess? You get distracted. And that’s what happens with Ozzy Man. Thankfully, he’s not the one playing the game; he’s just commentating on the match.

(Image Credit: Ozzy Man Reviews/ YouTube)