Last week, Tyler King was at work in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, when he saw that his left bicep was starting to swell. King then tried taking Benadryl (he might have assumed that it was just an allergy). Unfortunately, a few hours later, his left bicep became thrice its normal size. Alarmed, he rushed to the emergency room.

King had contracted vibrio, a bacteria commonly found in warm, brackish water – a mix of salt and fresh water. When exposed to an open wound, vibrio can cause a skin infection. If left untreated, the bacteria can be deadly.

But King stated something strange.

King, who owns a water sports business, says he did not directly touch water the day he was infected. He still doesn't know how it happened but he considers himself lucky.

[...]

"Waters are getting warmer and the bacteria love warmer water, so we're all at higher risk," explained CBS News medical contributor Dr. David Agus.

Thankfully, Dr. Agus gives us tips on how to prevent these kinds of bacteria from doing more harm.

Check out the rest of the news over at CBS.

(Image Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/ Wikimedia Commons)

1702. The Spanish still ruled on Florida. A fleet from the English colonial forces of Carolina Governor James Moore approached the Castillo de San Marcos, the Spanish stronghold on the Atlantic shore.

The fort was an essential piece of territory for the Spanish, as it guarded the empire’s trade routes as well as the city of St. Augustine, the capital city of Spanish Florida at that time. For the English, this fort would serve as an important political and economical outpost. And thus the forces led by Moore dropped their anchors and the siege began.

But even after nearly two months of being shelled with cannonballs and gunfire, the fort’s walls wouldn’t give. In fact, they appeared to be “swallowing” the British cannonballs, which then became embedded within the stone. Precisely how the walls did this remained a mystery for the next three centuries.

What were the walls made of?

Find out on Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: National Park Service/ Wikimedia Commons)

This house, at first glance, looks like it is made from wood. However, this house is really made from 600,000 recycled plastic bottles. These bottles were shredded, melted, and then made to be a wall six inches thick. The house also has hidden advantages over a typical house.

“This is a way to get rid of plastic waste and at the same time develop structures that are sustainable,” says David Saulnier, cofounder of JD Composites, the startup that built the prototype house. The recycled-plastic panels provide more insulation than typical walls, so homeowners can save energy in heating and cooling.

Using this type of panel to build a house isn’t new, but the company chose to use a fully recycled material to try to tackle the problem of plastic pollution. Each minute, by one estimate, consumers buy at least one million single-use plastic bottles; the majority end up in landfills or in waterways, not at recycling plants. The startup partnered with Armacell, a Belgian company that uses bottles rejected by the recycling industry to build a foam core from 100% recycled plastic. JD Composites trims that material and laminates it to create each panel.

The walls are also not something to be underestimated.

Though the walls are lightweight, they’re engineered to be strong. In testing at a certification facility, an eight-foot chunk of the wall withstood 326-mile-an-hour wind speeds, twice as strong as a Category 5 hurricane. “They basically couldn’t destroy the panel in the test chamber,” Saulnier says. “They had never loaded a panel by hand in the test chamber that they couldn’t break, ever. Ours was the first.”

This house can also be assembled faster than a typical construction home.

Check out more information about this over at Fast Company.

(Image Credit: Fast Company)

Jo Nakashima, a Brazil-based origami artist, created this kinetic origami from modular cubes. Each cube is folded individually and is interconnected to one another. The result is then a movable structure that the user can change in form whenever he wants to.

Check out Jo’s other origami via YouTube or Instagram.

(Video Credit: Jo Nakashima/ YouTube)

According to Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the answer is yes. The institution stated that “bowel, kidney, ovarian and liver cancers are more likely to have been caused by being overweight than by smoking tobacco.” (The statement only applies true for these four types of cancer). It was also stated that there are millions at risk of cancer due to them being overweight. Obese people also outnumber smokers two to one.

Smoking remains the UK's leading preventable cause of cancer overall. Obesity ranks second, says CRUK.

But while smoking rates are decreasing, obesity is increasing, which health experts agree is concerning.

More details of the study on BBC.

(Image Credit: cocoparisienne/ Pixabay)

All of us may have already watched several films on our lifetime. On these several films that we have watched, I am quite sure that at least one person here has his or her own favorite film.

Box Office Mojo has listed the Top 300 highest-grossing movies of all time. However, this is not your typical list.

If you gloss over the current domestic box office winners, you'll get a mixed bag of mostly sequels, superhero movies and a lot of Disney-produced films. Not to mention, nearly every title will be from the last 10 years.

So what makes this list different? This list accounts for inflation.

Take for example the list’s tenth placer, which is Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The film had made $184.9 million before inflation, which when adjusted for ticket price inflation, would be equal to over $982 million.

See the full list of films on Box Office Mojo.

What is your favorite film? And is it here on the list?

Via CNN

(Image Credit: Derks24/ Pixabay)

Last April 2019, Mark Gurman got his hands on a review unit of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, Samsung’s newest foldable phone at that time. Unfortunately, after only two days, the phone became completely broken and unusable. In other words, the phone began breaking before it was even released.

Fast forward to this day. Samsung has reportedly done redesigning the phone.

The world’s largest smartphone maker is now in the final stages of producing a commercial version but can’t yet pin down a date to begin sales, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified describing an internal effort. Samsung pulled the device after several publications including Bloomberg News reported problems with test versions, such as screen malfunctions that emerged after a film on the display was peeled off.

Korea’s biggest company is trying to move past yet another product faux pas. It has now stretched the protective film to wrap around the entire screen and flow into the outer bezels so it would be impossible to peel off by hand, said the people, who have seen the latest versions. It re-engineered the hinge, pushing it slightly upward from the screen (it’s now flush with the display) to help stretch the film further when the phone opens.

That tension makes the film feel harder and more a natural part of the device rather than a detachable accessory, they added. The consequent protrusion, almost imperceptible to the naked eye, may help reduce the chance of a crease developing in the middle of the screen over time, one of the people said.

Will Samsung be successful this time around?

(Image Credit: Jeenah Moon/ Bloomberg)

This is EPIC 249706694, a binary star located at around 350 light-years away. Astronomers have found 28 dips in its brightness. The drops in light mostly are the same. However, these drops occur randomly, leaving astronomers baffled.

Astronomers led by MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research have tested every scenario that could be plausible, and have come up blank so far.

EPIC 249706694 was studied in the second run of the Kepler planet-hunting telescope's data collection mission. If you've been following along, you know how Kepler's "transit method" works.

The telescope stares at a patch of the sky, recording the brightness levels of stars in its field of view. If any of the stars dip in said brightness, that's a hint an exoplanet could be passing between us and the star.

But just a dip isn't enough. It also has to have something called periodicity - that is, several dips, all of the same brightness, and all occurring at equal time intervals. This periodicity would indicate that the potential planet is travelling on a regular orbit.

Unfortunately, the said star does not have a periodicity in its dips in brightness, and, according to the researchers, “their arrival times could just as well have been produced by a random number generator.”

Find out more about this mysterious star on Science Alert.

(Image Credit: ESA/Hubble/ Wikimedia Commons)

Inspired by a magic trick from the 19th century, researchers have developed 3D holograms that let people watch how massive stars form before their eyes. The holograms will be demonstrated by Dr. Anne Buckner at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Lancaster on July 1-4.

"Our research focusses on how massive stars form" she explains, "it's inherently an abstract and complex topic to non-experts, so we developed the 3D holograms to help explain it in an easy to understand and visually engaging way".

[...]

"We wanted to excite school kids about astrophysics" says Buckner. Virtual reality headsets were an obvious choice, but they were too expensive, and would be impractical for large audiences, so Buckner took inspiration from an unlikely source: 19th century magic shows.

"As a fan of magic I was aware of an illusion called 'Pepper's Ghost' which has been around since the 1800s" she says. "We wondered if we could adapt something similar to this to work for astronomy, and as a result we have the ability to project 3D holograms bringing millions of years of stellar evolution to life".

(Image Credit: Dr. Anne Buckner)

Perhaps the hardest thing in taking care of a baby is trying to guess what he needs (although you’ll know what his needs are through your own instinct after a time.) Whenever the baby cries, you will be unsure of what he needs. Did he wet himself? Is he hungry? Did he just poop? Does he need a hug or a cuddle? It is really a stressful job.

A team of researchers, directed by Lichuan Liu, have claimed that they were able to develop a baby cry translator.

“Experienced nurses or pediatricians can identify why a baby is crying because they have experience,” says Lichuan Liu, a professor of electrical engineering at Northern Illinois University, who conducted the research at the Digital Signal Processing Laboratory where she is director. “We talked to them, and they mentioned that based on the cry’s sound there are some clues.”

So Liu set out to identify the features of cries that can help mark them as expressions of pain or discomfort. These features include differences in pitch and frequency. The team then developed an algorithm based on automatic speech recognition to detect and identify these features. This “cry language recognition algorithm” was trained on recordings of baby cries taken from a hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. It uses compressed sensing, a process that reconstructs a signal based on incomplete data, which is necessary for identifying sounds taking place in noisy environments. It can identify a baby cry against a background of, say, adult speech or loud television sounds or babbling toddlers—that is to say, the actual environments where babies live. By classifying different cry features, like pitch, the algorithm can suggest whether the cry is due to sickness or pain, and identify the degree of urgency.

Know more about this story on Smithsonian.com.

(Image Credit: Ben_Kerckx/ Pixabay)

My 8 week old kitten started doing this thing to where she will know i’m about to come in the room and she will hide by the bathroom door and jump out to scare me when i’m walking up. 🤣 just thought I’d share this cuteness 🥰 pic.twitter.com/SOz1ckGGpr

— BAE 💕 (@_TakivaBreanna) June 30, 2019

Like a tiger, this little kitten targets her prey, which happens to be her hooman. Upon seeing her target, she hides in the corner, waiting for the right time to strike. As the hooman steps in the room, the kitten raises its tiny paws and jumps. Unfortunately, she does not jump directly towards her prey. Instead, she jumps sideways. Perhaps she hesitated and chickened out?

Nevertheless, she is still cute, and I commend her bravery for picking a prey several times bigger than her.

(Image Credit: @_TakivaBreanna/ Twitter)

On the 6 train tonight, a couple takes a table out and starts a ping pong game....#I❤️NYC pic.twitter.com/WqztzK9xSx

— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) June 29, 2019

Looks like the two still had a score to settle before going home, as they took their ping pong match on a train in NYC.

This did not seem to bother in the slightest the passengers aboard the train as the two sent the ball on each other’s court. Perhaps this is not that weird after all, at least in the eyes of New Yorkers.

Probably 75% of the time New York is trending or in the news it’s because an entire train car burst into song or an amateur circus troupe was tumbling from handrail to handrail.

I wonder who won the match?

(Image Credit: @marykarrlit/ Twitter)

It’s summer time once again, and Instagram photos are much hotter in this season, literally. And because it’s summer, the swan floats have become relevant and have been a trend once more. And sometimes, to be honest, it gets annoying. So how do you end this swan float trend? You decapitate the trend!

Lukas Bentel and MSCHF have created ‘decapitated floats’ to poke fun at the influx of the notorious social media ‘influencer’. The swan is a fully decapitated pool inflatable. The head can rest nicely on the body or float idly nearby. Large enough for one, two, or even three people, the head and body come together in the same package. conceived as a social commentary on the influencer role, the design team figured: ‘What better way to kill the trend than to literally decapitate it?’

The question is: what if this decapitated swan float would be the new trend? What are your thoughts?

(Image Credit: Lukas Bentel)

In the corporate world, first impressions count. These first impressions can be a crucial thing to whether or not you will be accepted for the job. And that is why we put our best foot forward when we go to an interview. We research the company, familiarize ourselves with common interview questions, and put our best suit in an interview.

A clean-shaven face and a good haircut can also make or break your application in the company. After all, who would want to hire a dirty-looking lad?

Jotaro Takigawa, the only university student on the SoraNews24, tried out a haircut from “Japan’s Leading Barber”. How did he look like after?

Find out on the site.

(Image Credit: SoraNews24)

The Mexican city of Guadalajara is covered with ice one and a half meter thick after it was hit by a heavy hailstorm. The ice half-buried the vehicles across the city streets. The city has been hit by several hailstorms in the past, but hailstorms this heavy rarely hit the city.

The authorities say 200 homes have been damaged and dozens of vehicles swept away in the city and surrounding districts.

State governor Enrique Alfaro described it as incredible, according to AFP news agency.

"Then we ask ourselves if climate change is real. These are never-before-seen natural phenomena," he said.

(Image Credit: AFP)