Great advertising is the key towards a great business. In order to be a great advertiser, you have to make ordinary things extraordinary, and make boring things interesting.
These photos of funny fast food signs, which were compiled by Sad and Useless, are great examples.
(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)
You were very excited at the release of Pokemon Go, which utilized augmented reality. You were thrilled when you wore VR goggles for the first time and felt like you were inside the game. But far more superior than augmented reality and virtual reality is actual reality. With its ultra-immersive gameplay, stunning 360° environments, and very responsive controls, one wouldn’t be able to stop playing the game that will utilize this technology.
(Image Credit: GreenTV/ YouTube)
I’ve seen people “go superman” on motorcycles before, but this is my first time seeing a guy stand up on one. Was this guy bored? Or was he just crazy? Maybe the answer was both. We can only guess.
One thing is sure, however. What I’m seeing now is amazing.
(Image Credit: gaa1997/ TikTok via Facebook)
Amanda and Thomas Evans thought long and hard about how to greet their new neighbors after moving to their new home at Cape Coral, Florida. Should they bring their neighbors some cookies or pie? Or should they invite them to dinner? These options are what we would choose under normal circumstances, but this wasn’t an ordinary circumstance. This was during a global health crisis, and the couple wasn’t sure how their neighbors were feeling. And so, they just decided to create a flyer.
“Hi, we’re new to the neighborhood and would like to meet our lovely neighbors. We will be in our driveway with drinks, ready to meet any neighbors who would like to stop by. We can’t wait to meet you.”
Her husband wasn’t sure anyone would show up. But once the “Free Beer” sign was placed outside, the neighbors started venturing over.
“It’s always funny to see a sign on the table that says free beer, just to get people to stop and turn their head and drive by and say what did that sign just say. We had a few people do a double take, free beer is a pretty easy way to get people to show up,” said Thomas Evans.
They say it’s a great ice-breaker for anyone who is new to a neighborhood.
Now I know what to do when I move into another place.
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
Back in the early days of oil drilling, a blowout was considered as a risky, but natural consequence of the process. This event occurs when oil shoots up from the ground uncontrollably, which results in what we call a “gusher”. The gusher, back then, was the image of the progress of oil exploration, and the “symbol of new-found wealth.” In reality, however, it was a symbol of death and destruction.
[Gushers] have killed workmen, destroyed equipment, and coated the landscape with millions of barrels of oil. The destruction to wildlife and to the environment is catastrophic.
One of the largest, and the worst, gushers to happen in history was the Lakeview Gusher in 1910. The oil spill lasted for 18 months, spilling 9 million barrels of oil in the process.
The Lakeview gusher remains the largest accidental oil spill in history, bigger than the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and only eclipsed by the oil spills during the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraqi forces deliberately dumped massive amounts of oil into the Persian Gulf to thwart the US Marines from landing on Kuwait's coast...
Learn more about this historic disaster over at Amusing Planet.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
This is the Storm, an armored multi-purpose vehicle designed by the Ukranian company Highland Systems. This vehicle, capable of being fully amphibious, was revealed at the IREX defense expo in Abu Dhabi. But what makes it so different from other amphibious military vehicles, such as Russia’s BT-3F and the USA’s AAV-7? Loz Blain from New Atlas, has this to say:
… the Storm is the first to take advantage of a hybrid-electric powertrain, giving it an impressive 18-36 hour range in hybrid mode with its diesel range extender running, or the ability to operate purely on battery power for 1.5-3.5 hours depending on your speed.
Weighing in at around 8,000 kg (17,600 lb), this versatile six-seater's 2,500-horsepower electric powertrain makes it a seriously quick performer for its category. Top speed on land is 140 km/h (87 mph), and it's capable of an impressive 30 km/h (18.6 mph) in the water, two to three times as fast as larger competitors. It'll currently handle waves up to 1.5 metres (60 inches).
These feats are already impressive, but the Storm still has more to offer, such as its ability to climb vertical step-ups, as well as its thick armor that can protect against ballistics and mines. Despite all these, Highland Systems still plans on going to the next level. The company plans on making a submersible version and a wheeled version of the vehicle.
Exciting!
(Image Credit: Highland Systems/ New Atlas)
Have you ever wondered how the human hand can split a block of wood or concrete without damaging itself? Physicists Michael Feld, Ronald McNair, and Stephen Wilk, also wondered about the same thing. But they were not just physicists; they were also karate enthusiasts. Feld was a brown belt, while McNair was a fifth-degree black belt. In 1979, the trio published a paper about this curiosity, and the answer that they found was, well, found in physics.
As it turns out, there’s no trick—the perfect karate strike is nothing more than a precise application of Newton’s laws.
Feld, McNair, and Wilk placed wood and concrete in a hydraulic press to determine the amount of stress (force) needed to crack the underside of the objects. A wood plank can bend by about one centimeter before it breaks, which requires a force of 500 newtons. Concrete blocks only need to be deflected one millimeter before breaking, but since the material is less bendable than wood, that displacement requires 2,500 to 3,000 newtons. And because some energy is lost upon collision, the fist needs to exert even more force than that in order to actually break the blocks.
Thankfully, the human hand is capable of generating a very high degree of force in a very short period of time. The impact from a typical strike lasts only about five milliseconds. Through a combination of theory and experiment, the team discovered that within this brief flash of time, “the hand of the karateka, or practitioner of karate, can…exert a force of more than 3,000 newtons, a wallop of 675 pounds.” The team’s model indicates that the hand must reach a speed of 6.1 meters per second to break wood and 10.6 meters per second to break concrete. “Such speeds agree with our observation that beginners can break wood but not concrete,” they write. “A hand velocity of 6.1 meters per second is within range of the beginner, but a velocity of 10.6 meters per second calls for training and practice.”
Good to know!
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
It’s only reasonable to think that all the components of NASA’s Perseverance rover are new. After all, it is the successor to the Curiosity rover, and it was only launched last year. And so it would be a surprise to find out that the Perseverance’s brain is a piece of technology from the late 90s. That’s right. A processor released by IBM and Motorola over two decades ago, in 1997, serves as the brain of the Perseverance rover. The question is, why?
The craft's developers were more interested in reliability than sheer power, and their solution was a G3 processor, or CPU, used in Apple's Power G3 Macintosh starting in 1998.
Apple veterans remember the G3 fondly. It was a futuristic, tower-style computer of translucent white and blue. Its side conveniently flipped open to facilitate expansion. It smoked older Macs with a processor operating speed that topped out at a screaming 266 megahertz (MHz).
Or so we thought at the time. Today's processors leave the G3 in the dust. The processor in an Apple iPhone 12 runs at 3 GigaHertz (GHz), while a Samsung Galaxy S21 runs at 2.9 GHz in the U.S. model.
[...]
The chip in Perseverance, the PowerPC 750, isn't even the fastest G3 chip — the single-core chip runs at 200 MHz, which is still 10 times the speed of the chips powering the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, according to NASA.
(Image Credit: NASA/ Big Think)
Well, whatever’s in that part of the ceiling should be investigated. This is not normal.
Just kidding. This is a normal photo of two cats named Koda (the one with the seemingly severed head), and Lilly (the one with the seemingly headless body).
Just as magicians use two people to show an illusion of a body seemingly cut in half, the same technique was used in this photo. In this case, it just so happened that the Lilly's head cannot be seen from the angle at which the photo was taken, and the photographer, Reddit user i_spin_bubbles, took the photo at the right time.
The Reddit user said that he didn’t realize that he’d captured an Illusion until he saw the photo: “I just took pictures of both of them playing. When I saw the captured picture, I saw the illusion. I didn’t expect for the picture to become a meme and thus so widely known. I was just hoping for people on /r/aww to like it.”
There were lots of memes created from this picture. The owner said that he really enjoys them: “I really liked the beheading history meme. Fun fact: The cats were born near the French border.”
Along with Koda and Lilly, i_spin_bubbles also lives with another cat named Miez. Learn more about them over at Bored Panda.
Now this is cool.
(Image Credit: i_spin_bubbles/ Bored Panda)
Günther Beinert still remembers how he broke down a wall at his parents’ old house, and how he made his first small castle by reassembling the materials with a mixture of ash and sand. He was a boy in his teens at that time.
Over the years, Beinert would become a bricklayer, and through this profession he would get “more involved in [his craft].” Beinert is 87 years old now, but his passion for building miniature castles is still very much alive.
Today, the small town of Gerbstedt is adorned by Beinert’s miniature castles, and one can immediately see them upon arrival.
Learn more about Beinert’s life and his love for his craft over at Atlas Obscura.
(Image Credit: Gerbstedt City Council/ Atlas Obscura)
Babies need a lot of sleep for their development. Kittens are similar to babies, so don’t be surprised and worried if you find them sleeping most of the time. But how long do kittens sleep? The Dodo has interviewed Dr. Julian Rivera, a veterinarian, in order to find answers.
More often than not, it’s totally normal.
“Depending on their age, kittens can spend between 70 to 90 percent of their time sleeping,” Dr. Rivera told The Dodo. “Cats are prodigious sleepers, and even as adults sleep about 50 percent of the time.”
So when should you worry about your kitten? This is what the veterinarian has to say.
According to Dr. Rivera, you should hit your vet up if your kitten:
(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)
Different types of sushi are beautifully lined up on the table. At first glance, they look appetizing, but on a closer look, you’ll notice that something’s not right with them. That’s because they’re not real food. These are made of stone.
The artist, who goes by the name Hama, is a graduating senior from art school who created this series of hand-polished sushi stones during the pandemic-induced lockdown and subsequent remote learning. It may be heard to believe, but all the rich colors you see are from natural stones – no paints or artificial coloring of any kind was used.
Close observers will notice that among the sushi are body parts like ears, lips, nose and a finger. The artist says that the series – both the fish but also the body parts – were inspired by his part-time work in the seafood industry where he saw so much life being ended and then thrown out without even being eaten. Creating body parts as pieces of sushi was the artist’s way of reminding us that much of the food we eat was once alive, and that we all need to do our part to combat food waste.
Hama’s work is part of the Joint Graduation Exhibition of 5 Art Universities in Tokyo.
Cool!
(Image Credit: Hama/ Spoon & Tamago)
After seeing that Caesar’s paws often get burnt, inflamed, or cut, the designers from RIFRUF immediately realized that their dog needed shoes. However, as they searched for dog shoes available at the market, they did not find any that met their expectations, and so they decided to make shoes on their own. With this, the RIFRUF brand was born.
“Dogs and humans have been companions for over 16,000 years, yet to this day not a single person thought of creating a quality set of dog shoes that function and actually look good – we are here to change that,” the RIFRUF team shares. The shoes are made from custom knitted ‘rufknit’ mesh upper and natural rubber outsoles – the same materials one finds in their favorite human sneakers. Secured with Velcro straps at the heel, the design allows for a custom fit that accommodates most paws while locking the shoe in place.
Being avid dog lovers, the RIFRUF team seeks to represent more than just dog fashion, introducing contemporary design, adaptability, and safety into one sneaker model. “From the dirty streets to the fashion runway, on those hot summer days and cold snowy nights, in the pouring rain and across rough terrain, and from the moment they are born to when their health matters the most, RIFRUF is with your dogs every step of the way,” the company says.
Now Caesar’s paws will always be safe. And the same goes for the dogs that will wear these.
(Image Credit: rifrufqueens/ Instagram)
Back in 2019, Russian photographer Daniel Kordan had the chance to go to Kyushu, Japan, during the beetle mating season. Kordan did not miss the opportunity to photograph the thousands of fireflies that lit up the thick vegetation in the island, and the results are these dazzling photos of trails of light emitted by the tiny beetles (yes, fireflies belong to the beetle order).
Check out Kordan’s stunning photographs over at Colossal.
(Image Credit: Daniel Kordan/ Colossal)
If there was a word that could completely describe the human gut, that word would be diverse. This region in the human body is home to thousands of viruses called bacteriophages, as well as trillions of bacteria. A recent research published about two weeks ago in the journal Cell identified more than 140,000 viral species living in the human gut, most of them never seen before. The research analyzed over 28,000 gut microbiome samples acquired in various places in the world, mainly from healthy individuals.
The number and diversity of the viruses the researchers found was surprisingly high, and the data opens up new research avenues for understanding how viruses living in the gut affect human health.
Dr Alexandre Almeida, Postdoctoral Fellow at EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "It's important to remember that not all viruses are harmful, but represent an integral component of the gut ecosystem. For one thing, most of the viruses we found have DNA as their genetic material, which is different from the pathogens most people know, such as SARS-CoV-2 or Zika, which are RNA viruses. Secondly, these samples came mainly from healthy individuals who didn't share any specific diseases. It's fascinating to see how many unknown species live in our gut, and to try and unravel the link between them and human health."
Learn more about this research over at Science Daily.
Cool!
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
