Bangkok, Thailand — A new addition to Bangkok’s buffet craze arrived in the form of unlimited durian last September 5. The buffet however, is expensive, costing 559 baht a head for an hour, which is about half-a-day’s earnings on minimum wage. Despite that being the case, it didn’t keep the customers away from the grand fruit event. After all, it happens only twice a year.

Eating durian, however, can be dangerous when eaten together with alcohol or soft drinks.

… a durian buffet is dead serious business, as a gentle warning sign in Thai, English and Chinese reminds guests: “Tips about durian. Eating durian together with alcohol can be lethal as it will rapidly increase sugar levels in the body and create an aggressive warming effect in the body.”

Non-alcoholic drinkers are warned as well: “Durian and soft drink can be a deadly combination. The fruit is high in sugar; combining with caffeine content in soft drink will cause a surge in blood pressure that [could] lead to sudden death.”

Those with diabetes, heart disease, or high blood pressure “should be careful of overindulgence in durian.”

More details over at Khaosod English.

(Image Credit: Khaosod English)

Australian cricket journalist Peter Lalor stopped at a bar in Manchester, northwest England, in order to, of course, drink. Little did he know that he was about to drink what he called to be “the most expensive beer in history”. Lalor was charged about A$100,000 ($68,120) for the said drink.

Relaying the tale on his Twitter account, Lalor said he was not wearing his glasses, so he did not check the bill for the bottle of Deuchars IPA he ordered before handing over his bank card.

The rude shock came a few hours later when Lalor’s wife, at home in Australia, alerted him to the fact that A$99,983.64 had been stripped from their joint account. Adding to the pain, he’d been slugged another A$2,500 as a transaction fee.

Some sleuthing revealed that instead of entering 5.50 pounds ($6.78), bar staff charged him 55,000 pounds for a single beer.

Thankfully, the transaction fee has already been refunded to Lalor, though he will have to face a “massive hole” in his finances, as the larger amount will take nine working days to be returned.

As for the quality of the ale itself, which has won a number of awards, Lalor was ambivalent: “It was good, but not that good.”

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)

A few months ago, Mr. Sato of SoraNews24 experimented with tapioca bubble tea and rice and found out that the combination tasted great. Now, he experimented with rice once again, this time fusing it with eggs. Will it be as good as the previous one?

Find out the answer over at the site.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: SoraNews24)

Someone said that iPhone 11 resembles coconut #iPhone11 pic.twitter.com/hOinrDhmXT

— OGA JOHN BOSCO (@johnboscokomedy) September 10, 2019

Fans on social are making fun of Apple’s new entry to the iPhone series, the iPhone 11. They have described the iPhone 11’s new camera feature, that being three rear cameras, as bearing resemblance to a coconut, to which I agree. The design does seem to be inspired by a coconut. Some liken the new design to that of a bowling ball.

Apple unveiled three versions of the device at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino on Tuesday, showing off a handset with a 6.1-inch display that will come in six colours: purple, white, yellow, green, black, and Product Red.

However, the feature that caught the eye of most fans were the three cameras clustered at the back of the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max versions of the product.

What are your thoughts?

(Image Credit: Oga John Bosco/ Twitter)

This guy stood up the whole 6 hours so his wife could sleep. Now THAT is love. pic.twitter.com/Vk9clS9cCj

— Courtney Lee Johnson (@courtneylj_) September 6, 2019

An entrepreneur named Courtney Lee Johnson shared on Twitter this photo of a man standing up on a plane with a woman lying down across a row of 3 seats. According to the caption, the guy apparently “stood up the whole six hours so his wife could sleep. Now that is love.”

As of this writing, the photo has already garnered almost 16,000 likes and almost 3,500 retweets. However, not everyone agrees with Johnson that this is a gesture of love.

Some thought it was romantic, with one Twitter user writing: “I’ve never been THAT in love...can’t wait to be so in love that I even consider that an option lol.”

However, many considered the woman’s actions “selfish”.

“If that is love then I’d rather be lonely,” commented one person, while another said: “Not love but exploitation. She could have just rested her head on his lap. Very inconsiderate.”

How about you? What do you think about this?

(Image Credit: Courtney Lee Johnson/ Twitter)

This is the $400 million Army museum, which is set to open next year in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

Going inside this new National Museum of the U.S. Army, you’ll be transported to the fall of 1918, where experts will skillfully recreate the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the historic 47-day battle that happened in France, which helped put an end to World War I, leaving Germany defeated and the U.S and the allied forces victorious.

“Wow,” Paul Morando, chief of exhibits, says as the work takes place. “We are actually starting to look like a museum.”

“You see the walls going up … and the construction of it, but then when you start seeing the artifacts go in and the cast figures, reality is setting in that it is going to be … a world-class museum,” he says.

See more details of this one over at The Washington Post.

(Image Credit: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

A new research, based on data collected from some 3,500 people living in Switzerland, was published Monday in the journal Heart. The research found new evidence that daytime naps may be related towards a lower risk of heart attack or stroke. There’s a catch, however: the naps should only be limited to a few times a week.

Research lead author Nadine Häusler, an internist at the University Hospital of Lausanne, stated that they looked into the lives of healthy adults. They found out that “people who take occasional naps — once or twice a week — had a lower risk for cardiovascular disease compared to people who were not napping at all.”

Häusler and her colleagues tracked the participants for five years. All were between 35 and 75, basically healthy without any evidence of heart disease, and none were overly sleep-deprived.

[...]

About one in five participants hit what the researchers found to be the napping sweet spot: one to two times per week.

It was that occasional nap frequency that was linked to a 48 percent lowered risk for heart attack, stroke or heart failure.

Nap length did not appear to influence the findings, and included anything from a quick, five-minute catnap to an hour-plus snooze. Because the study was observational, it cannot prove cause and effect.

Head over at Today to know more about this study. 

Take a nap today!

(Image Credit: Hans/ Pixabay)

Livers on ice, which are destined for transplant, usually last for nine hours, and, if lucky, 12 hours. During this time, a lot of things should happen. First, the liver must be delivered from one hospital to another, while a surgical team is assembled. The operating room should also be prepped as a recipient is rushed into surgery, and the diseased liver should be removed with haste. It is a race against time as the liver deteriorates each hour on ice, and, if left on ice for too long, it won’t function in a human body again.

For this reason—along with the sobering statistic that 20 people die every day waiting for a transplant—doctors and scientists have long sought ways to preserve organs. Biologists now report a new strategy tested on five human livers: supercooling the organ to 4 degrees Celsius below zero, or just under 25 degrees Fahrenheit. This is below the freezing point of water, but the liver, perfused with a special solution, is never actually frozen. “When you touch it, it’s soft and there’s no ice,” says Shannon Tessier, a bioengineer now at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the new study.

Preserved this way, the human livers appear viable, based on lab tests, for at least 27 hours. “That is impressive,” Ina Jochmans, a researcher and transplant surgeon at KU Leuven who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.

More of this on The Atlantic.

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Now this is something that will make your heart go “awww.”

This pair of toddler “besties” immediately rushed to hug each other when they spotted each on the streets of New York City. Their cute little moment was captured on video by the father of one of the kids.

The 2-year-old boys, named Maxwell and Finnegan, can be seen running on a tree lined block, their arms flailing, and embracing, in the now-viral footage posted on Facebook Sunday by dad Michael Cisneros.

Cisneros, who is Maxwell’s father, told ABC News the boys have known each other for about a year and are inseparable.

“When they are away from each other, they are always asking about one another,” he said. “They go to music class together, Dana Banana (a weekly music event) and they love to dance — both are excellent dancers.”

Adorable!

(Image Credit: Michael D Cisneros/ Facebook)

A few years ago, Bobby Seagull sat down and tried to work out why he had been so unlucky in life. “I was 32 or 33, I was single, I loved maths and science – I thought: ‘Can I use maths and science to help me?’ It was a genuine, earnest attempt.” And attempt he did. He used mathematics to try to solve his predicament.

Inspired by Peter Backus – a Manchester University economics lecturer who in 2010 wrote a paper titled Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend – Seagull used the Drake equation, developed to estimate how many intelligent alien civilisations there might be in the galaxy, to determine his number of potential partners. “You start by assuming there’s infinitely many, then you keep on making the pool smaller and smaller.”

From the total female populations of London and Cambridge – the cities between which he split his time – Seagull selected those roughly his age and up to 10 years younger. Then he reduced that group to the proportion that were likely to be university educated, to reflect the reality of his networks, as a school maths teacher and doctorate student.

What happened next? Find out over at The Guardian.

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Researchers from Oxford University found out that vegetarians have a lower risk of coronary heart disease compared to meat-eaters. However, they may have a greater risk of getting a stroke. However, the study “could not prove whether the results were down to diet or some other aspect of the participant’s lifestyle.”

The World Health Organization and other major scientific bodies have encouraged people to adopt a plant-based diet, or at least cut out meat due to its benefits to both personal health and the environment.

An increase in alternative meat and dairy foods made without animals is one of the defining food trends in recent years. However, as meatless diets take off, researchers say further scrutiny is important.

“Vegetarian and vegan diets have increased hugely in popularity over the past years … but we actually know very little about the potential health benefits or hazards of these diets,” said Dr Tammy Tong, lead author of the study.

The study, published in medical journal The BMJ, followed 48,000 people with no previous history of heart disease, angina and stroke between 1993 and 2001 before a follow-up survey in 2010.

Head over at the South China Morning Post to know more details about the study.

(Image Credit: Sponchia/ Pixabay)

This Louisiana man spent 17 years in jail simply because “he looked like he was a serial robber.”

“Oh, this is such a scary story,” the reporter said. “Those who have been exonerated by DNA evidence, nearly three-quarters of them were convicted in the first place because of faulty eyewitness testimony. What happened to Royal Clark Jr., you will understand why.”

Royal Clark Jr. was 24 years old back then when he was charged and later convicted of armed robbery on a Burger King restaurant in Terrytown, Louisiana, in November 2001.

“Man, I didn’t know where Burger King was,” Clark said in his interview with CBS News.

The assailant had used a cup in the store and left fingerprints on it, but the prints were determined “unusable for identification purposes.”

Three employees chose Clark from a photo lineup. However, at the trial, only one person, a 19-year-old, was certain that he was the guy.

“What does that feel like when you know you weren’t there, and this witness is saying, ‘it looks like him?’” the interviewer asked Clark.

“Like everything shut down at that moment,” Clark replied.

Fortunately, the prints on the cup were re-analyzed and it was proven that the armed robber was not Clark, and Clark was freed.

More details of this over at the site.

If you haven’t watched the chaotic trailer of Jojo Rabbit, watch it now.

Jojo Rabbit tells a story of Jojo “Rabbit” Betzler, a lonely German boy who has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend (a character which Waititi included in the film, but is not in the original novel the film was based on). Jojo’s world turns upside down when he discovers that his mother is hiding a young Jewish girl.

Why did Taika Waititi takes aim at Nazis and Hitler? This is his reply:

“There had definitely been a lot of fantastic and amazing films that had approached this subject from a really dramatic, very serious and earnest way,” he said, joined by Rockwell at the L.A. Times studio at TIFF. “And in this day and age right now, we can’t forget what happened. And I think people kind of are.”

The New Zealander is himself of Polynesian and Jewish descent and hopes the Fox Searchlight title, which Disney will release Oct. 18, offers a new way to remember the lessons of the past. “My fear is that people are going to start getting numb to the story of what happened in World War II, and I think you’ve got to find new and inventive ways of telling that story again and again.”

Are you looking forward to the film?

(Video Credit: Los Angeles Times/ YouTube)

Over 500 million years ago, there was a worm that resembled an ear of wheat. It moved along an area of sediment underwater. It then paused, then left a detailed imprint in the wet earth, moved a little more, and then eventually died.

Its body, seven inches long and segmented, became a fossil. So did its near-final resting place, creating a mortichnia: a body preserved with its final “death march.”

This happened at least 10 million years before the Cambrian Explosion — the era “during which many of the animal groups that exist today appeared” — began.

The creature, Yilingia spiciformis — named after the Yiling district in which it was discovered — was a complicated one by the standards of the Ediacaran Period: mobile, segmented, trilobate (each body segment composed of three lobes) and bilaterally symmetrical.

[...]

Yilingia and its death march are the subject of a study published on Wednesday in Nature. The worm is remarkable itself, as is the record of its death. A mortichnia is very rare — the imprint-maker tends to wander off. “It’s like in forensics,” said Shuhai Xiao, a geobiologist at Virginia Tech and one of the authors of the study. “You find a footprint and can probably tell something about the suspect, but you’d rather catch the suspect on camera.”

Head over to The New York Times to know more about this worm.

(Image Credit: Zhe Chen, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology and Shuhai Xiao, Virginia Tech)

“If you ever want an ice cream, there you have an ice cream parlor,” the 89-year-old man said as he points to a part of the rubble with his walking stick. Pointing his walking stick towards another part of the rubble, he continued, “Do you want a special dessert? There’s a shop just around the corner. Well, there was. Today, there is nothing left.”

This man is Pablo Novak. He was born here in Villa Epecuén, a small town in the Buenos Aires province. He has witnessed the town’s birth and death.

The whole town was flooded due to violent rains in the year 1985, and the waters would only subside 25 years later.

“When the city flooded, I didn’t leave. Both because I wanted it and also because I felt an obligation towards this place.”

See the full story over at BBC.

(Image Credit: BBC)