Christian Sasse, a photographer who documents the eagle population in Vancouver, British Columbia, is waist-deep in the water as he waits for the opportunity to capture the perfect picture of a bald eagle.
The eagle Sasse was observing had come to the beach in search of a snack. “During low tide [the eagles] can access the intertidal zone,” Sasse told The Dodo. “And we have a lot of fish called midshipman fish there that are high in protein for eagles.”
Sasse was not expecting anything amazing to come up with the photos as he snapped a few photos and left for a day. He thought wrong, however.
… when he reviewed the shots later that night, he started cracking up: “When I came home, I looked at the photos, and said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is just too funny.’”
In one of the shots, a mysterious stream of water seemed to be coming from the eagle. It looked to Sasse as if the bird was peeing, but he knew that was impossible.
See the explanation behind this photo over at The Dodo.
This is Emmanuelle Moureaux’s new installation titled “Universe of Words” which forms part of the Japanese soft drink Calpis — “Calpis 100th year anniversary, let’s meet at Tanabata” — exhibition.
… The work immerses visitors in colored pieces of paper suspended from the ceiling. As the latest in moureaux’s ‘100 colors’ series, the work uses the full spectrum to compose intimate and thoughtful spaces.
The installation was unveiled on July 4, with the day coinciding with the Japanese star festival.
In Japan, Tanabata Day marks a tradition when people write their hopes and dreams on colored pieces of paper and hang them from a bamboo branch in the hope that their wishes will come true. Moureaux‘s installation reinterprets this event by floating words throughout the gallery space, in an effort to evoke visitors’ curiosity and emotion.
Toronto-based artist Micah Adams loves to make tiny assemblages from tiny things that he was able to collect over the years. These tiny things would range from “toys, bottle caps, beach finds and even teeth”, which he would cast in metal.
“... They were like tiny bronzes or miniature monuments. That lead me to look for tiny things that were already metal that I could use. So I looked at coins and their designs for things I could cut-out.”
And cut out designs from coins he did by using a jeweler’s saw.
These are child-like figures created by 31-year old Tokyo-based artist Moe Nakamura. Each of these sculptures are carved out of a single block of wood. The figures are under Nakamura’s latest exhibition entitled “Remember You”, and is currently on display at Gallery Tsubaki in Tokyo until September 7, 2019.
Each of the sculptures seem to portray a child-like figure in a costume or mask that they wear as if they were born with them. Most are the size of a child: between 2.5 and 3 ft. They are either propped up on pedestals or, in some cases, low to the ground and you must kneel to get up close. One piece, “Hour to the dawn,” stands out in its towering scale. At over 6 ft tall the sculpture, which depicts the classic prank of children trying to appear taller by standing on each other’s shoulders behind a screen, eclipses the height of most gallery visitors.
Each sculpture emanates an enigmatic aura that leaves a person either perplexed or amazed.
What are your thoughts on this one? Are they adorable? Are they creepy?
The DC-Based film “Joker”, starring Joaquin Phoenix’s as the iconic archenemy of Batman, premiered on the Venice Film Festival last Saturday. The film was said to have the audience on their feet for — not one, not two, but — eight long minutes of standing ovation. Now THAT’s quite the film to look forward to!
The Todd Phillips-directed movie was also met with shouts of “Bravo!” as the credits rolled and Joaquin Phoenix’s name was flashed on the screen, Deadline reported.
The reaction at Venice only fuels early Oscar buzz, especially for Phoenix, who was present at the Saturday night screening.
The film will hit theaters on October 4. Are you looking forward to it?
This is the Orion Nebula, a massive stellar nursery located some 1,500 light years away. This image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope was built from data intended to monitor the brightness of the young stars of the said nebula, of which many are still surrounded by “dusty, planet-forming disks.” Orion’s young stars, which are only around a million years old, are younger than our own Sun, which is already 4.6 billion years old.
The region's hottest stars are found in the Trapezium Cluster, the brightest cluster near picture center. Launched into orbit around the Sun on August 25, 2003 Spitzer's liquid helium coolant ran out in May 2009. The infrared space telescope continues to operate though, its mission scheduled to end on January 30, 2020. Recorded in 2010, this false color view is from two channels that still remain sensitive to infrared light at Spitzer's warmer operating temperatures.
No matter how many times I look at space photos, I never cease to be amazed by the wonders of the cosmos above us.
A team of Argentinian scientists from the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) discovered the oldest parasite DNA when they studied the coprolite taken from a rock-shelter in Catamarca Province in northwest Argentina, a place where the remains of an extinct megafauna have been recovered in stratigraphic excavations.
Radiocarbon dating revealed that the coprolite and thus the parasitic roundworm eggs preserved inside dated back to between 16,570 and 17,000 years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age.
[...]
Ancient mitochondrial DNA analysis was used to confirm the coprolite came from a Puma (Puma concolor) and that the eggs belonged to Toxascaris leonina, a species of roundworm still commonly found in the digestive systems of modern day cats, dogs and foxes.
[...]
The discovery marks a number of firsts: it represents the oldest record of an ancient DNA sequence for a gastrointestinal nematode parasite of wild mammals, the oldest molecular parasite record worldwide, and also a new maximum age for the recovery of old DNA of this origin.
For Dr Petrigh, the findings also cast light on both the past and the present. She said: "This work confirms the presence of T. leonina in prehistoric times, presumably even before that of humans in the region, and it represents the oldest record in the world. The common interpretation is that the presence of T. leonina in American wild carnivores today is a consequence of their contact with domestic dogs or cats, but that should no longer be assumed as the only possible explanation.
New research from the University of Stirling suggest that health warnings printed on individual cigarettes could play an important role in reducing smoking. The researchers from the Stirling’s Institute of Social Marketing studied smokers’ perception of the warning “smoking kills” on individual cigarette sticks as opposed on the warning only appearing on cigarette packs.
The team, led by Dr. Crawford Moodie, found that smokers felt the innovative approach has the potential to discourage smoking among young people, those starting to smoke, and non-smokers.
Participants felt that a warning on each cigarette would prolong the health message, as it would be visible when taken from a pack, lit, left in an ashtray, and with each draw, thus making avoidant behavior more difficult.
It might seem like a new technological advancement, but it’s not. It is a technology that has been around for nearly 130 years, which makes it even older than the Ford Model T. It is a wonder why it is only appearing now, considering that it has been around for over a century.
So how did it start, and how does it work?
The story begins in 1831 when English physicist Michael Faraday discovered the underlying magnetic and induction principles which led to induction charging, which can transfer energy wirelessly between two receivers.
He described his experiment, which produced a "current of electricity by ordinary magnets," in an 1831 series of lectures at the Royal Society in London. Faraday had used a liquid battery to send an electric current through a small coil. Then when it moved in our out of a larger coil, the magnetic field changed—it created a momentary voltage in the smaller coil.
There was also Nikola Tesla who was determined to transmit electricity without the use of wires. By using Faraday’s principles, he was able to demonstrate the ability to transmit energy through the air.
He created a magnetic field between two circuits, a transmitter and a receiver, in the late 19th century.
And if you're picturing something straight out of The Prestige, you're not far off.
If you head over to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, you can see this history in action. Tesla's coil prototype has been on display there since 1937. In the demo, it powers a neon sign without any wires—and that's what's going on inside your smartphone when you place it on a wireless charger.
While scientists discovered wireless charging—it didn't have many practical uses, at least not at first. Prior to smartphones, smartwatches and electric vehicles, most applications for wireless charging came down to...electric toothbrushes.
Since the 90s, electric toothbrushes with plastic bottoms have used inductive charging built into the stand.
The universe is truly a vast place, but have you ever asked how big is it? This is one of the fundamental questions to astrophysics, and a question impossible to answer. Still, scientists still try their best in trying to find the answer.
"That may be something that we actually never know," Sarah Gallagher, an astrophysicist at Western University in Ontario, Canada, told Live Science.
But how do scientists solve for the answer to one of the biggest (literally) questions man can ask? They have a few tricks up their sleeve. Unfortunately, even with these tricks, they still can’t answer the question.
Some say that the universe is infinite, while others say that it is finite. Both of them, however, agree on this one: the universe is “really freaking huge.”
Garlic is a lovable cat with a pink nose and tiny gray ears. He looks identical to his original.
“My cat died of urinary tract disease,” Garlic’s owner Huang Yu told the Global Times. “I decided to clone him because he was so special and unforgettable.”
Garlic may be biologically identical to his original, but he’s not the same cat. He has his own personality and he has his own memories.
While they have successfully cloned the cat (which is the first cloned cat in their country, by the way), China’s Sinogene Biotechnology Company is not content with just cloning the body. They state that the next level would be using artificial intelligence to transfer the original’s memories over to the clone.
Sinogene’s general manager told attendees at a press conference on Monday that “to make the cloned animal share the same memories with the original, the company is considering the use of artificial intelligence or man-machine interface technology to store them or even pass the memories to cloned animals,” wrote the Global Times, a paper run by the Chinese communist party.
Cloning pets is already controversial — scientists have claimed that cloned animals aren’t as healthy, with shorter lifespans than naturally born animals, while some animal activists have argued that cloning pets is unethical given the number of shelter animals in need of homes.
Sigal Samuel expected that she would suffer from writer’s block (the inability to think of what to write) day by day for the rest of her life as a journalist and a novelist. After all, the writer’s block is a part of her profession. But Sigal now thinks that she would suffer less thanks to her new writing buddy, GPT-2.
Let me back up a bit: Six months ago, the research lab OpenAI created an AI system that generates text — from fake news to poetry — that in some cases actually sounds like it’s written by a human being. The OpenAI team has been rolling it out in stages, each time giving us a more powerful version of the language model they dubbed GPT-2, and carefully watching to see how we use it.
They’ve just put out the most powerful version yet. It boasts 50 percent of the power of the full version, which has yet to be released. As you can tell by trying it out for yourself, this model is already plenty powerful.
I was excited to find out what this AI system could do for me as a fiction writer. Over the past couple of years, AI has been creating some pretty striking music and paintings and even Renaissance-style selfies. While some artists worry that AI will put them out of a job — just as it’s expected to do for, say, truck drivers and factory workers — I’ve been more inclined to see it as a collaborator than a competitor. I don’t think AI will be good enough to write a superb novel on its own, but I do think it can be very helpful in a novelist’s creative process.
The world we live in is an abundance of information. We learn from interacting personally with the world, and the information we receive from the world are integrated in our brains and are formed into memories. Experience and memory is believed to be inexorably linked, at least that’s what they seemed to be until this report on the formation of artificial memories happened.
Memories are essential to the sense of identity that emerges from the narrative of personal experience. This study is remarkable because it demonstrates that by manipulating specific circuits in the brain, memories can be separated from that narrative and formed in the complete absence of real experience. The work shows that brain circuits that normally respond to specific experiences can be artificially stimulated and linked together in an artificial memory. That memory can be elicited by the appropriate sensory cues in the real environment. The research provides some fundamental understanding of how memories are formed in the brain and is part of a burgeoning science of memory manipulation that includes the transfer, prosthetic enhancement and erasure of memory. These efforts could have a tremendous impact on a wide range of individuals, from those struggling with memory impairments to those enduring traumatic memories, and they also have broad social and ethical implications.
This operating system is Unix, an OS born half a century ago from a failure of an ambitious project which involved the giants in the tech industry, such as Bell Labs, General Electric (GE), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Unix is the brainchild of a few programmers in Bell Labs, and its story starts from a meeting on the top floor of a not-so-interesting annex of the Bell Labs complex in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
It was a bright, cold Monday, the last day of March 1969, and the computer sciences department was hosting distinguished guests: Bill Baker, a Bell Labs vice president, and Ed David, the director of research. Baker was about to pull the plug on Multics (a condensed form of MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service), a software project that the computer sciences department had been working on for four years. Multics was two years overdue, way over budget, and functional only in the loosest possible understanding of the term.
Trying to put the best spin possible on what was clearly an abject failure, Baker gave a speech in which he claimed that Bell Labs had accomplished everything it was trying to accomplish in Multics and that they no longer needed to work on the project. As Berk Tague, a staffer present at the meeting, later told Princeton University, “Like Vietnam, he declared victory and got out of Multics.”
Within the department, this announcement was hardly unexpected. The programmers were acutely aware of the various issues with both the scope of the project and the computer they had been asked to build it for.
Still, it was something to work on, and as long as Bell Labs was working on Multics, they would also have a $7 million mainframe computer to play around with in their spare time. Dennis Ritchie, one of the programmers working on Multics, later said they all felt some stake in the success of the project, even though they knew the odds of that success were exceedingly remote.
The cancellation of Multics, however, meant two things for the programmers at the computer science department. It meant that the only project they were working on will end, and the only computer in the department will also be pulled out. And just like that, and poof! What’s left for the department were a few office supplies and a few terminals.
However, out of this massive software project failure came one of the most influential operating systems all over the world. Those who did not give up did not have much of their own resources. What they have inside them, however, is more than enough to compensate: passion, perseverance, and creativity.
What do you do when you see someone being bullied? Will you stand up and defend the victim? Will you remain passive? Or will you reinforce the bully?
The three choices mentioned above are the usual responses to seeing someone being bullied, according to a study from social psychologists in Finland and California. While standing up and defending the victim may be the ideal response, and remaining passive because of fear a common response, the third choice maybe something unnoticed but is also a common response. So why do people join a bully?
A group of researchers suggests it might be something they call social contagion. According to Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who write about the links between our behaviors and our social networks in their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, many human behaviors spread through social contact, including some that are often assumed to be biological or acquired independently, such as obesity and fertility.
Research published in 2015 in the journal Sociological Science has shown that generous and helpful behavior is “contagious”—that is, if you do something nice for someone, you increase the likelihood that they’ll do something nice for someone else.
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Unfortunately, the same is true in the other direction. For example, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that observing someone engaging in “socially irresponsible behaviors” such as littering can lead to the same behaviors in the person who is observing them. Other studies have confirmed this kind of “contagion” of such behaviors.
F. Diane Barth also has another explanation for why people support bullies. Check it out on Psychology Today.
