The popular coffee chain Starbucks releases an IG-worthy summer drink. Called the Tie-Dye Frappuccino, the drink reportedly tastes like banana candy. It would only be around for a limited amount of time.
The American Heart Association recommends that the average male human eat no more than nine teaspoons of added sugar (or 150 calories, or 36 grams) per day to stay healthy. Women should cap their daily amount at six teaspoons (or around 100 calories or 25 grams).
In contrast, a venti-sized Tie-Dye frappe has 75 grams of sugar, or three days’ worth, all in one pink-and-purple concoction. Sure, you could skip the glitter-covered whipped cream and cut that down to 71 grams of sugar, or order the relatively spartan tall-sized (read: small) version, but that still has 39 grams of sugar, which is still more than the average human should eat in a single day.
Comedian Emily Heller asked her audience on her podcast to draw a bicycle from memory (no references allowed!). It should be easy, right? I mean we can draw many things from memory like a pigeon, a chair, a couch, or a car. But perhaps it is a different case when drawing bicycles. For some reason, we know how a bicycle looks like, or how it should look like, but we don’t know how to draw it.
Can you draw a bike properly from memory?
Here is one of the drawings. Check the others out on Funny or Die and have a good laugh.
The Department of Evolutionary Psychology and Education of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology investigated the media consumption of 8-12-year-old children.
The research was conducted in various phases divided into two subcategories.
Firstly, the use that schoolchildren make of various devices, the Internet in particular, as well as the support and control strategies used by their parents, the positive and negative conceptions parents have about the use, difficulties and challenges they face when mediating in their use were identified...
Secondly, various tests were conducted to delve further into the interpretation and decoding that the schoolchildren carry out on the messages transmitted by the fictional content of the cartoons. These tests revealed that the type of narrative or non-narrative structure that characterises the cartoons affects the reception, processing, comprehension, memory and what the messages conjure up, in terms of narrative skills and perception of values/countervalues, of 8-12-year-old children…
Using the cartoons Doraemon for the narrative structure and Code Lyoko for the non-narrative, here is what the researchers found.
After displaying the cartoons, "we asked the schoolchildren to tell us what they remembered from what they had seen, and that way we analysed their narrative skills as well as the values and countervalues they had perceived," added Oregui, who was responsible for the research. The accounts by the schoolchildren who had watched the cartoons with a narrative structure were much longer and more detailed and the values and countervalues were perceived effortlessly. In the case of the non-narrative ones, however, the accounts were very short, they had been altered, and focus was placed almost exclusively on the sequences of the action; the children also experienced greater difficulty perceiving the values and countervalues of the subject matter".
Children can also grasp easier the values or countervalues that they see on narrative cartoons, compared to non-narrative ones.
Johnny was a very heavy man who always felt the need to feast on frankfurters every time he felt emotional. He believed that eating frankfurters was necessary for “coping up” with his feelings. Though he enjoyed feasting on this, he did not enjoy gaining weight, and neither did his doctors. And so, Johnny went to see Dr. Glenn Livingston. This is what the doctor said:
Initially, I gave Johnny exactly what he asked for. I showed him some breathing techniques to help deactivate the sympathetic nervous system, which plays a strong role in producing the feeling one must urgently act on the impulse to overeat. I also helped him more specifically label his emotions so he might gain more of a sense of control. But once I'd given Johnny what he asked for, I also explained he might be approaching the entire issue with the wrong mindset.
See, if you consider emotional upset to be a "fire", then Johnny's paradigm was "I must put it out!" But if you think about it, you can have a very intense fire in your living room and, as long as it's contained by an effective fireplace, that fire actually becomes the center of hearth and home. People gather around the fireplace with a roaring fire, share stories, and make memories. It's only when there's a hole in the fireplace which allows sparks and embers to escape that the fire becomes dangerous. Similarly, it's only when emotions are allowed to "jump" out of the fireplace and become actual behavior that damage to your health is done, and this only happens when some type of rational justification makes it "OK" to act against your previously best laid plans.
It turns out that when you make a very specific rule to accomplish an important health goal, there's almost always a voice of justification that occurs which rationalizes crossing the line you previously swore not to cross, even if you aren't conscious of this rationalization at the time. There has to be, because if that line weren't important to you, you wouldn't have made it in the first place. Your conscious brain won't let you cross it unless you've got what appears to be a good reason at the time.
So how do you fight against this “voice of justification”? Find out on Psychology Today.
We humans are still not stopping, and probably we would never stop, on trying to make our lives easier and more efficient. Perhaps one of the best examples of human progress is the inventions with regards to transportation that we have made across thousands of years. From the invention of the wheel which would then pave the way to chariots and stagecoaches, we now have cars which can roam smooth or rough lands. Truly, we have gone far from where we once were. But I believe we still have much to go.
Now that we have become busy people, we know how much time is worth, and some of us would gladly spend more money if it would mean less of their time would be spent. And that is why the Hyperloop is one of the most attractive concepts up to this day.
"If you're able to go from one city to another, going at a max speed of 670 miles per hour or 1,080 kilometers per hour, and you're able to do that, instead of in three to five hours depending on traffic, in under 30 minutes -- that creates huge socio-economic benefits that are equivalent or exponential to the creation of the plane or the train, as an example," says Ryan Kelly, head of marketing and communications for Virgin Hyperloop One.
Sure, traveling by airplane is generally swift, but, says Sebastien Gendron, co-founder and CEO of TransPod, Hyperloop will combine "the frequency of the subway with the speed of the aircraft."
It was a normal day for the TV presenters at their table stating their reports for the public to hear. Suddenly, one of the reporters get interrupted as the TV studio began to shake. There they all stopped speaking, while exchanging worried glances. The shaking then becomes more violent, and all the reporters were forced to evacuate the set.
As the South Korean live TV team hastily discarded body microphones and abandoned their set, the seismic ripples of a 5.5 magnitude earthquake continued to shudder across Pohang. It was a powerful jolting. Other footage shows people running from buildings as walls collapse behind them. An entire city of half a million residents was left in shock. But this quake wasn’t a freak natural event. It was started by people.
That’s the conclusion of a report published in March by a team of experts who tried to find out what caused the event in Pohang on 15 November 2017. It left 135 people injured and 1,700 had to be temporarily relocated to emergency housing. Thousands of buildings were damaged, costing $75m ($60m). Because a geothermal drilling project had been operational nearby at the time, a big question needed to be answered: Whodunit? Humans or nature? To find out if industrial activity had set off the quake, the South Koreans called on a new breed of seismologist: the earthquake detectives.
If the earthquakes were started by people, how are we starting earthquakes ourselves?
With more drilling and fracking occurring around the world, human-induced or anthropogenic earthquakes have become an increasingly common concern. About 100,000 oil wells are now drilled every year and the use of geothermal energy, which sometimes involves injecting fluid into hot rock in order to create steam, could increase six-fold by 2050. By removing large quantities of fossil fuel or by flooding fractured rock with liquid, it’s possible to upset the balance of stresses below and set an earthquake in motion.
The title would not make sense at first. But trust me, it would if you read the whole story.
July 28, 2018. Employees of the Santa Ana Zoo showed up early on to work to prepare for the public to arrive. However, on this day, something was clearly wrong at the zoo. The lemurs and capuchin monkeys were wandering loose at the grounds. Apparently, somebody had cut holes in the primates’ fences, allowing them to escape.
The zookeepers then proceeded to round up all the animals for a head count, and an animal was found missing.
A 32-year-old endangered lemur named Isaac. An inquisitive and easygoing senior, he is believed to be the oldest ring-tailed lemur living in captivity in North America.
The plot would still thicken after this incident.
Almost as soon as zoo officials notified authorities and began planning a search party, things took an even stranger turn. A call came in from the police department in Newport Beach, some 10 miles from Santa Ana. Just after 2 a.m. that morning, police said, employees at a Marriott hotel had discovered a strange parcel near the front door.
"This belongs to the Santa Ana Zoo," read a hand-scrawled note attached to the plastic container. "It was taken last night please bring it to police."
Another note detailed the package's contents: "Lemur (with tracker)."
Fisher still isn't sure exactly how the culprit figured out that Isaac had an implanted microchip that would allow veterinarians to identify him, but he and the rest of the staff were just happy to get the aging lemur back unharmed. The question of who had been behind the late-night zoo heist - and why - remained a mystery.
The lemur-stealing culprit would still remain a mystery, until the police discovered a diamond ring. They would later link this diamond ring to a 19-year-old man named Aquinas "Quinn" Kasbar, which the police would later identify as the culprit behind the zoo incident.
Before you heard about them ih science, you might have heard of them before in the Old Testament. They are, according to the Bible, the most villainous enemies of the Israelites.
They sent Delilah to cut the hair of the Israelite leader Samson and thus stripped him of his power. Goliath, the giant slain by David, was a Philistine. The Philistines’ reputation as a hostile, war-mongering, hedonistic tribe became so pervasive that “philistine” is still sometimes lobbed as an insult for an uncultured or crass person.
But who are the Philistines, really? Ancient DNA sheds light on their identity.
The Aeryon Skyranger drone which can carry night vision cameras as well as zoom lenses was developed for tactical surveillance by the military, has been deployed in war zones across the middle east and is now used by 20 armed forces around the world.
Motoring organisations said the deployment of military-grade technology against drivers would “raise eyebrows” but could be cost effective as a deterrent.
It’s like hitting two birds with one stone, but it’s viruses and one vaccine. Researchers from Yale University said that the proposed strategy to vaccinate against the Zika virus could also prove to be effective in the West Nile disease, another mosquito-borne virus that could cause potentially serious infection.
Common in North America, West Nile Virus belongs to the same family of flaviviruses as Zika. In a prior study, the team led by Section Chief for Infectious Diseases Erol Fikrig demonstrated that blocking a protein (AgBR1) found in the saliva of mosquitoes and transmitted to hosts could reduce Zika infection. For the latest study, they tested the same theory in mice exposed to West Nile by the same mosquito, Aedes aegypti.
What’s with juveniles and wanted men filming themselves these days? Is social media that addicting?
Twenty-six-year old Uthai Noisakul was arrested by police this Wednesday. Uthai has avoided an arrest warrant for exactly a year when he joined a local fair on the day of his arrest, according to police.
Not content with enjoying a carabao rendition on his own, Uthai reportedly asked a friend to film him dancing in front of the stage on Facebook Live.
Unfortunately for him, police officers also saw his 2.30-minute live broadcast and rushed to the scene, where Uthai was arrested.
Investigators said Uthai was wanted on a charge of selling drugs under an arrest warrant issued on July 3, 2018 – precisely a year prior to his arrest last [Wednesday].
The Wyoming State Capitol Building in Cheyenne is equipped with six heavy-duty vault doors. These vault doors were manufactured by the Mosler Safe & Lock Company of Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1880-1890s (these were the same outfit that built the stronghold at Fort Knox!).
But unknown to people of today, these vault doors have a treasure hidden in themselves.
A quick glance is enough to confirm a hefty lock and handle, but modern passersby would never notice that the imposing doors were also decorated with dreamy landscapes and intricate stenciling. It was all hidden under several coats of paint.
The masterpieces on the vault doors were restored last May.
How were the paintings restored? Find out on Atlas Obscura.
We have heard recently that our phones talk secretly and feed our information to thousands of data trackers all day long. While there are ways to keep your phone from talking, it is worth noting that we should never grow complacent when using the Internet.
Even if we secure our data so we are not tracked online, the ad tech industry will find ways to monitor our digital activities.
Advertisers are now getting more and more devious with this new method called fingerprinting, “which security researchers are calling a next-generation tracking technology.”
What is it exactly? Fingerprinting involves looking at the many characteristics of your mobile device or computer, like the screen resolution, operating system and model, and triangulating this information to pinpoint and follow you as you browse the web and use apps. Once enough device characteristics are known, the theory goes, the data can be assembled into a profile that helps identify you the way a fingerprint would.
“Get enough of those attributes together and it creates essentially a bar code,” said Peter Dolanjski, a product lead for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, who is studying fingerprinting. “That bar code is absolutely uniquely identifiable.”
And here’s the bad news: The technique happens invisibly in the background in apps and websites. That makes it tougher to detect and combat than its predecessor, the web cookie, which was a tracker stored on our devices. The solutions to blocking fingerprinting are also limited.
The Internet has never been this dangerous.
Thankfully, there are some things that you can do to protect yourself from prowling predators of the Web.
Southern California was shaken by yet another powerful earthquake that hit them on late Friday evening. The magnitude 7.1 quake caused injuries, sparked fires and closed roadways. Fortunately, no deaths were reported.
The latest earthquake happened just after 8 p.m. local time and was centered in the Mojave Desert near the town of Ridgecrest, which is still recovering from a 6.4 quake on the Fourth of July.
Social media posts showed restaurant lights swaying, items crashing from store shelves and vehicles shaking violently more than 100 miles from the center of the quake.
A seismologist in California says scientists believe the sequence of earthquakes striking the Mojave Desert will produce more than 30,000 quakes of magnitude 1 or greater over six months. Dr. Egill Hauksson also said Saturday at Caltech that the probability of a magnitude 7 over the next week has declined to 3 percent.
He says the probability for a magnitude 6 is 27 percent so he would expect one or two of those in the next week.
Somewhere in Hong Kong lies the Best Music Academy ran by a music teacher named Charliah Best. Inside this music school, shy kids are transformed into active kids just a few minutes after they enter the building, and it’s all thanks to music.
“Music encourages children to interact with each other,” she says. “Instead of constantly interacting with adults, it allows children to naturally interact and discover new things in a comfortable environment – that’s what this programme is for.”
[...]
“In Hong Kong, parents are looking for discipline, especially for their younger ones,” she says. “But they’re also looking for something more than just a playgroup, and music lessons are a great option.
“I’m not a music therapist, but I know there’s enough evidence-based research about music’s positive impact on the emotional, social and physical being – you can see it on the kids’ faces.”
[...]
The medical world is also listening. Evidence-based clinical research is increasingly showing a positive impact on a range of conditions, from chronic pain and dementia to memory loss, ADHD and autism.
