In 2006, an elephant only 5 months old was found all alone by Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (SWT) in Kenya. The organization decided to hand-raise this elephant, which they named Loijuk, until she was old enough to be released back to the wild.

Despite the many years that have passed, Loijuk still has a close bond with her rescuers. Every month, she returns to the sanctuary to visit. This month, however, is different: she surprised her human family with a newborn calf in tow.

It was clear the proud elephant mom couldn’t wait to show off her baby. The calf, who has since been named Lili, was only hours old — likely born only the night before.

Loijuk has never forgotten the kindness of those who helped her. She even invited Benjamin Kyalo, the head keeper, to have a special moment with her newborn calf.

“Benjamin was able to get close to Lili (who nestled into his legs), stroke her delicate newborn skin and breathe into her trunk, thereby letting her know who he was via his scent,” Rob Brandford, executive director of SWT, told The Dodo. “Elephants have an incredible memory and sense of smell and our keepers will often breathe into the orphans’ trunks so they can recognize who they are.”

Check out the video over at The Dodo.

(Image Credit: Sheldrick Wildlife Trust)

This Lady is helping @TrooperPesola slow drivers down on Finley Point. She’s running radar with her #SoloCup #FinleyPoint #SlowDown pic.twitter.com/zicvdRpCyc

— Timmy B (@timmyb48) August 18, 2019

Speeding down residential areas is a dangerous thing to do. You might end up crashing, or end up running over someone. This woman helps in preventing it by posting up on the narrow side of a road with her radar gun (which is, in actuality, is just a hair dryer).

Clever woman.

(Image Credit: Timmy B/ Twitter)

For the first time in 30 years, the LEGO group launches its very first brand campaign. The brand campaign, titled “Rebuild The World”, the toy company hopes to use their latest initiative to “help nurture the creative skills of the next generation”.

The global campaign was created by french agency BETC and features a live action-adventure film directed by multi-award winning collective traktor. It follows a rabbit being chased by a hunter with a bow and arrow, using LEGO creations to overcome a series of challenges.

The film is complete with surreal touches and a plethora of jokes only fans of the LEGO universe will understand. 2D-printed clothing, cars and trees look straight out of the box, and even the people bend their backs and rotate their heads right around, just like LEGO. Every character, animal and vehicle is based on an existing or past toy, so heads spin 360 degrees, everyday objects are outsized, and a boat can suddenly fly with a little help from a palm tree.

More details on DesignBoom.

(Video Credit: LEGO/ YouTube)

View this post on Instagram

Playing the organ! With one balloon you can play up to 45 seconds 😘👍🎶🎹🎵 #papierorgel #paperorgan #musicinstrument #workingorgan #organbuilding #orgelbau #orgelbausatz #diykit #organkit #invention #inventions #musicinvention #erfindung

A post shared by PAPERorgan (@paperorgan) on Aug 29, 2019 at 2:05am PDT

This is the PAPERorgan, the latest project of Wolfram Kampffmeyer, a German artist who loves to use paper to create cool products. This product is a fully functioning modular organ powered by an inflated balloon.

The instrument can run for approximately 40 seconds on one balloon’s-worth of air, and plays a range of notes depending on how each user chooses to tune and expand their organ. For paper organ aficionados, Kampffmeyer clarifies that he has spoken with fellow instrument designer Aliaksei Zholner (previously) to ensure that his design and commercial product are not derivative or competitive.

Kampffmeyer is currently building awareness for the product and will be funding production on Kickstarter. Follow along with the journey on Instagram and Facebook, and sign up for email updates on PAPERorgan’s website.

Cool!

(Video Credit: PAPERorgan/ Instagram)

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “art installation”, the gold toilet “America” has been stolen from its wood-panelled room over the weekend. A report of the burglary at the Oxfordshire country house was received by the Thames Valley Police just before 5 A.M on Saturday, September 14.

“The piece of art that has been stolen is a high-value toilet made out of gold that was on display at the palace,” Detective Inspector Jess Milne said (in a statement she probably never expected to utter).

“Due to the toilet being plumbed in to the building, this has caused significant damage and flooding,” Milne added.

[...]

The toilet is reportedly worth £4.8 million (nearly $6 million).

More details on Geek.com.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Blenheim Palace/ Geek.com)

Albert Einstein, in his theory of general relativity, hypothesized that a black hole, formed from two cosmically quaking collisions of two massive black holes, would ring in the aftermath. This ring would produce gravitational waves that, like a struck bell, would reverberate sound waves. Einstein predicted that this particular pitch and decay of these gravitational waves would indicate the mass and the spin of the newly formed black hole.

Now, physicists from MIT and elsewhere have "heard" the ringing of an infant black hole for the first time, and found that the pattern of this ringing does, in fact, predict the black hole's mass and spin -- more evidence that Einstein was right all along.

The findings, published today in Physical Review Letters, also favor the idea that black holes lack any sort of "hair" -- a metaphor referring to the idea that black holes, according to Einstein's theory, should exhibit just three observable properties: mass, spin, and electric charge. All other characteristics, which the physicist John Wheeler termed "hair," should be swallowed up by the black hole itself, and would therefore be unobservable.

More details of this news on Science Daily.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

This is the Great White Spot of Saturn (see top left of the image), which began as a “fluffy white storm cloud” in the northern hemisphere of Saturn back in 2010. Now, it has spread across the entire planet, which, if scaled to a storm system on the Earth, would be comparable to “a storm system that covers all of North America but wraps around the entire planet.”

Pictured here in false colored infrared in February, orange colors indicate clouds deep in the atmosphere, while light colors highlight clouds higher up. The rings of Saturn are seen nearly edge-on as the thin blue horizontal line. The warped dark bands are the shadows of the rings cast onto the cloud tops by the Sun to the upper left. A source of radio noise from lightning, the intense storm was thought to relate to seasonal changes when spring emerges in the north of Saturn. After raging for over six months, the iconic storm circled the entire planet and then tried to absorb its own tail -- which surprisingly caused it to fade away.

(Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA)

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a disease that starts to alter and damage the brain years or even decades before symptoms in a person appear. Being able to identify early if a person is at risk of having this disease would be of great help for the person, as he or she can prepare for the disease, and probably prevent it.

Scientists at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in a new study recently published online in the Neurobiology of Aging, state that, with further developments, measuring how fast an individual’s eyes dilate while he or she takes a cognitive test might be a “low-cost, low-invasive method” that can help in screening individuals at increased genetic risk for Alzheimer’s Disease, even before the cognitive decline begins.

In recent years, researchers investigating the pathology of AD have primarily directed their attention at two causative or contributory factors: the accumulation of protein plaques in the brain called amyloid-beta and tangles of a protein called tau. Both have been linked to damaging and killing neurons, resulting in progressive cognitive dysfunction.

The new study focuses on pupillary responses which are driven by the locus coeruleus (LC), a cluster of neurons in the brainstem involved in regulating arousal and also modulating cognitive function. Tau is the earliest occurring known biomarker for AD; it first appears in the LC; and it is more strongly associated with cognition than amyloid-beta…

The LC drives pupillary response — the changing diameter of the eyes’ pupils — during cognitive tasks. (Pupils get bigger the more difficult the brain task.) In previously published work, the researchers had reported that adults with mild cognitive impairment, often a precursor to AD, displayed greater pupil dilation and cognitive effort than cognitively normal individuals, even if both groups produced equivalent results. Critically, in the latest paper, the scientists link pupillary dilation responses with identified AD risk genes.

(Image Credit: Skitterphoto/ Pixabay)

If you can’t see a trash can along the road, do you just throw away the peel of the banana you just ate on the ground? If you think to yourself that it’s fine and “it will just decompose anyway,” think again. While it does decompose, you might be wrong in assuming that it decomposes quickly. 

For this matter, Popular Mechanics interviewed Rhonda Sherman, an extension solid waste specialist at North Carolina State University’s Department of Horticultural Science. She also authored a book entitled “Backyard Composting of Yard, Garden, and Food Discards.”

Before we go any further, let’s take a look at the decomposition process. The first thing that happens after you toss your peel is that microorganisms start breaking it down by secreting enzymes that cause the decomposition, Sherman says. But because microorganisms don’t have mouths or teeth, this doesn’t happen quickly.

… while weather does play a role—things decompose more quickly in tropics than, say, a desert—when all is said and done, food waste can take years to decompose, not just a few weeks like many people may think.

If your banana peel is just laying on the ground for two years, it’s not good for the environment. Plain and simple.

So where do we throw our banana peels, or any kind of food waste? We throw it in the trash bin. Or even better, we can compost it.

Find out more about this topic over at the site.

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)

A new study has found out that a mysterious population of previously unknown cells lurks in the human body. Called “Immune Cell X”, this baffling cell type is a changeling that can act as two different cell types, and may also trigger type 1 diabetes.

Scientists have long believed that hybrid cells like these could not exist. The population of these cells is likely tiny; perhaps less than 7 out of every 10,000 white blood cells, said study co-author Abdel-Rahim A. Hamad, associate professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. 

But they may play an outsize role in the development of autoimmunity.

"They are very rare, but we think they are very powerful," Hamad told Live Science.

More details about this enigmatic cell over at the site.

(Image Credit: PublicDomainPictures/ Pixabay)

Remember Tobey Maguire’s “Emo Spider-Man” in the film Spider-Man 3? Somebody just recreated it, but this time it’s Tom Holland.

YouTuber Aldo Jones decided to create a deepfake of this scene, replacing Maguire’s face with that of Holland’s, and the result is this.

I don’t know about you, but this is pretty awesome to me. What do you think?

Via Futurism

(Video Credit: Aldo Jones/ YouTube)

Major corporations such as Facebook always get caught behaving badly. But for some reason, the best solution that we’ve come up with is to fine these corporations. But does it really fix the problem? Is it really the best punishments to hold them accountable?

...the Federal Trade Commission hit Facebook with a $5 billion fine this summer, an amount that, while large, will barely make a ding in its business. The $170 million fine the FTC and New York state recently hit Google’s YouTube with is almost laughable considering Google’s overall worth.

Even the $425 million Equifax settlement, which came out of the company’s exposure of some 147 million people’s personal information, promised victims the ability to claim a $125 check. Except too many people signed up, and the pot of money for those checks was just $31 million, coming out to about 21 cents per person.

Just one big bank executive went to jail after the 2008 financial crisis; financial institutions paid more than $300 billion in crisis-related fines, but collectively they made much more than that.

We can’t put companies in jail, as they are not people. While we can put the company’s executives behind bars, this happens only rarely. Thus, the main options nowadays are fines, but how well fines work is debatable.

But it’s not hopeless. Experts say there are ways to make firms do better, including stomping out the cultural and structural issues that cause problems in the first place, implementing close monitoring after something does go wrong, and making sure accountability mechanisms are in place where they can be for the people responsible.

Check out more of this topic at Vox.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Is the woman surprised or shocked? You may have answered yes to this question, but you may be wrong. A facial expression of emotion does not only depend on the face itself; it also depends on the context of the expression. Without the context, facial expressions can be very misleading.

We all remember “the dress.” An illusion like this shows that even a phenomenon as basic as color perception can be ambiguous. Emotions are much more complex entities than colors and thus can lead to even more confusion. Our perception of emotional expressions is related not only to the physical properties of a face, but also to a bunch of other factors affecting both the percipient (for example, a person's past experience, cultural background, or individual expectations) and the situation itself (the context).

To test that idea, researchers at Neurodata Lab created a short test and asked more than 1,400 people from 29 countries to have a look at four pairs of photographs, or eight in total. The first image in each pair showed a woman with a certain facial expression. The second was identical to the first, except that it had an object added to it: a mascara brush, a book and glasses, a toothpick or a guitar. These objects added context. People then had to look at every image and indicate if the facial expressions looked emotional to them.

Head over to the Scientific American to know more details about the study.

(Image Credit: Neurodata Lab, LLC)

Elon Musk’s company SpaceX states that it plans to change its satellite strategy in order to speed up the deployment of its Starlink broadband service. SpaceX has also set a new goal to provide broadband in the Southern US late next year. Not only will this change accelerate their plans of deploying broadband service, but they would also be covering a wider service area, which makes it even better.

"This adjustment will accelerate coverage to southern states and US territories, potentially expediting coverage to the southern continental United States by the end of the next hurricane season and reaching other US territories by the following hurricane season," SpaceX told the FCC. The Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons each begin in the spring and run to November 30 each year.

Check out Ars Technica for more details.

(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)

Grief and loss still remain as one of our society’s greatest taboos. We even hesitate to use the word “death” and instead use euphemism like “passing away.'' After all, it is a difficult and painful subject to discuss. Reluctance to discuss this subject, however, can provide space for myths to spread, which makes grieving all the more difficult. Psychology Today presents to us five myths about grief that we might be believing. Here is one of them:

Myth #1: Grief is an emotion.

One of the most common misconceptions about grief is that it’s a feeling. Given that grief occurs in some of the most painful situations anyone can imagine, we generally associate it with depression. But grief is actually a process composed of many emotions, including expected ones like sadness, as well as more surprising ones like anger, frustration, guilt, or even shock.

It’s common during grief to experience positive feelings, as well, such as relief that our loved one is out of pain. At times, people also can feel numb, almost like the death hadn’t happened. What’s important to know is that all of these emotions—at least in measured amounts—are normal.

Check out the others over at the site.

(Image Credit: PublicDomainPictures/ Pixabay)