For the untrained eye, the sea only looks like a featureless expanse of water. But for master navigators of Oceania, the sea is full of signs and clues that could help them reach their destination — from driftwood, birds, and even the direction of the waves.

Navigators from the Marshall Islands use wave charts to travel through the small islands and atolls in the region. These charts, which capture the distinctive patterns of ocean swells, are a result of constant observation of the sea from land. But as these are not maps, they are not brought to sea. Instead, the sailors memorize these stick charts.

Wave charts have three types: the rebbelib, which show whole island chains; meddo, which represent ocean swell patterns in small areas; and mattang, which teach basic interactions between land and sea.

The wave charts have been a crucial element in making the Pacific Ocean trade routes possible. These routes stretched "at some points all the way from New Zealand to South America." Now that's bonkers!

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity revolutionized how we think about light, gravity, and heavenly bodies today. Through this theory, Einstein was able to calculate how the Sun's mass bends the space around it. But Einstein didn't stop there; In 1917, just two years after his general theory of relativity, Einstein went on to the quest of modeling the shape of the Universe. If his theory modeled how mass is distributed throughout the Universe, Einstein thought he could calculate the Universe's shape. It was a bold move, and he thought he might be sent to a madhouse with his controversial ideas about the cosmos.

But without any data to work with, how could Einstein model the shape of the Universe? The answer was with simplifications, assumptions, and estimations. Less data available meant more freedom to speculate. And speculate Einstein did, and he drew from his worldview. Back at that time, most people believed that the Universe was static, and Einstein belonged to this group. He did not like the idea of an expanding Universe.

In 1929, however, astronomer Edwin Hubble proved that the Universe was expanding. Two years later, in 1931, Einstein discarded his idea of a static universe when he met the astronomer in California.

(Image Credit: ParentRap/ Pixabay)

When you get the chance to travel to a rainforest in Southeast Asia, do keep a keen eye for dead leaves. That's because some of them might be special. These special dead leaves can spring back up to life, you see. The reason? They're not really dead in the first place. They're not leaves, either. They're a species of butterflies called the Kallima inachus. But they are called "dead leaves" or "oak leaves."

Kallima inachus butterflies are usually found flying through the undergrowth and along streams, feeding on tree sap, puddles, and ripe fruits. Once they sense danger, these butterflies suddenly drop into the foliage, close their eyes, and stop moving to avoid detection. Their strategy is, unsurprisingly, effective against the birds that seek to eat them. Thanks to the veins in the underside of their wings that resemble the veins of a leaf, and with the white and black spots on their wings that look like mold and lichen, a Kallima inachus can pull off the most convincing disguise.

These butterflies are found in various countries in South Asia (India, Bhutan, Bangladesh), East Asia (China, Japan, Taiwan), and Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.)

(Image Credit: Hsu Hong Lin/ Wikimedia Commons)

In March 1975, a 50-year-old man sat down on his chair to watch one of his favorite shows. It was a British comedy series called The Goodies, and the man in question, Alex Mitchell, found the show very funny. On that fateful day, the bricklayer laughed really hard as he watched a funny bit of the show. And by really hard, I mean really hard. Mitchell laughed for over twenty minutes. All of a sudden, he slumped into his chair, lifeless. He died then and there.

According to a doctor (probably the one who examined him), Mitchell died from too much laughter. He laughed so hard that "the left side of his heart failed."

But could it really be true? Could a person really die from laughing too much?

Fortunately, the answer is no. However, laughing too hard may trigger something bad in your body, especially if you have a preexisting condition. This is the deadly part.

If you have a cardiovascular condition, like an aortic aneurysm, for example, laughing could increase the pressure inside your thorax, and that might trigger a heart attack.

Laughing too hard has some other undesirable effects on the body, such as blocking the flow of oxygen.

Alex Mitchell's death in 1975 made headlines worldwide. Doctors back then cited "heart failure" as the cause of his death, but doctors in 2012 believe he was suffering from a conduction disorder called the Long QT syndrome, as his granddaughter was diagnosed with the same condition.

They say that laughter is the best medicine. It seems that, like with anything, it is best taken in moderation.

(Image Credit: Pexels)

Located on the west shore of Hudson Bay, about 140 km (87 mi) away from the Manitoba-Nunavut border, the town of Churchill, Canada. It is a small town home to only about 850 people. Interestingly, the place also has more or less the same number of polar bears. That's a 1:1 ratio if you ask me. While the bears live on the frozen bay to hunt seals during winter, they move inland once the ice melts in July. And then they'd return to the shore by the end of November to wait for the bay to freeze once more. Because Churchill is in the middle of the so-called "polar bear highway," the town has earned the nickname the "Polar Bear Capital of the World." The town even has a company that offers polar bear tours.

But how do the people manage to live peacefully with the polar bears? The answer is through the polar bear holding facility, or as it is colloquially known, the "polar bear jail." Like a real jail, the place is used to "imprison" bears reported to approach humans. They're still dangerous animals, after all.

As they "serve time" in the holding facility, the animals are only given water, so they won't associate humans with food. Their "sentence" doesn't take long, however. Most bears only stay in the facility for 30 days or until the bay freezes. Immediately, they are released and free to hunt seals again.

Atlas Obscura tells more of this bear-y interesting story over at their website.

(Image Credit: Marko Dimitrijevic/ Flickr via Atlas Obscura)

Over a hundred years ago, an amusement park was constructed on Coney Island in New York City. The park was named Luna Park, and it opened in 1903. As the place became popular, other builders borrowed the name. Today, there are multiple Luna Parks around the world. Some of them are defunct, while some of them still operate.

The first Luna Park ceased operations in 1944. However, another one was opened in Coney Island in 2010, just across the street from the original site.

One of the most notable Luna Parks out there is the one in Melbourne, Australia. The said park opened way back in 1912, but it still operates to this day, making it the oldest operational Luna Park. It is also home to one of the oldest wooden rollercoasters in the world.

Artist Daniel Agdag references the wooden rollercoaster in Melbourne Luna Park in this piece called "Lattice." It is a massive ten-foot work made from vellum trace paper and cardboard. And yes, it is structurally sound. The project, a commission from the New York City Department of Education and NYC School Construction Authority Public Art for Public Schools, took two years to make. The truss section alone, which consists of some "897,560 individual hand-cut cardboard members," took him 8 months. Just thinking about how he made this intricate work makes my head hurt.

Agdag documented his process of the work through a series of pictures, which he shared on Instagram.

(Image Credit: Etienne Frossard/ Daniel Agdag via Colossal)

The newer generation would probably not recognize this piece of technology. Or maybe they would recognize it as "the save icon."

Despite its antiquity, the floppy disk is still essential to some. These are people with small businesses that found upgrading their equipment too expensive.

Mark Necaise from Mississippi is one such case. He creates custom embroidery on jackets and vests using a second-hand Japanese machine. Sadly, he has to get his hands on floppy disks as it is the only way to transfer designs from his computer to the machine. When he went down to his last four floppy disks, Necaise began to worry. Thankfully, he decided to buy a floppy-to-USB emulator. Never again would he worry about floppy disk shortage.

Small embroidery businesses are not the only ones using floppy disks. Cargo airlines, such as one in Tbilisi, Georgia, still use floppy disks to update systems of old airplanes.

It would seem that, even after floppy disk production was discontinued, this "antique" technology still remains relevant today. Lori Emerson, the founder of Media Archaeology Lab and a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, believes that the floppy disk will never die when "there are people in the world who are still busy finding and fixing up and maintaining phonograph players from 1910."

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

The lockdowns of 2020 have taken away face-to-face interactions in our lives. (Thankfully, it's no longer the case.) At that time, we had many ways to cope with it. Some of us picked up an old hobby, while others tried learning something new. And there were people, like artist Aki Inomata, who decided to take a breath, sit down or lie down and appreciate the simple things in life, like the lovely view of the blue sky.

From her observation, Inomata realized that no two days were alike. The patterns in the sky are never the same. This realization brought the idea of recording the sky from the previous day and rendering them in a glass of water through 3D printing. Clouds on the glass, meanwhile, are made from milk, so it is safe to drink.

As 3D-printing a liquid into a liquid is quite the endeavor, Inomata asked for help from technologists from the Digital Hollywood University Graduate School of Japan, and they experimented for 2 years.

"Thinking of Yesterday's Sky" is still an ongoing project. See more images at Spoon & Tamago.

(Image Credit: Aki Inomata via Spoon & Tamago)

You go to YouTube, and you'll see people talking about ChatGPT. You go to Facebook, and you'll see posts about the very same chatbot. From memes to YouTubers creating content about it, ChatGPT has, indeed, become viral on the internet. ChatGPT even has a subreddit with 476k members.

However, the people at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, are scratching their heads about the virality of their recent product.

John Schulman, the company cofounder, expected that ChatGPT would gain a following. He wasn't expecting it would "reach this level of mainstream popularity."

Company CEO Sam Altman even described the software as a "terrible product."

OpenAI's policy researcher, however, may be correct in his observation. "We work on these models so much, we forget how surprising they can be for the outside world sometimes," he said. My guess is since they were the ones who developed the chatbot, they are no longer amazed by its capabilities. Meanwhile, we, who are not always exposed to advanced AI like this, find ChatGPT awesome.

Despite ChatGPT's popularity, OpenAI keeps an eye on how people use the program to prevent unpleasant safety issues.

(Image Credit: ChatGPT)

Scientists in this new study may have finally found how lemon juice prevents the formation of kidney stones, and it challenges the conventional wisdom about how the juice works against the disease.

People have already known for a long time that lemon juice can prevent kidney stones from forming. They thought it was because of the citric acid present. However, drinking pure lemon juice has its own consequences, too. For one, patients will have a hard time drinking a cup of that sour juice. That and lemon juice can also eat away teeth.

And so, scientists looked for alternatives that could prevent kidney stones, and they found the alternatives to be medicinal plants like ginseng and dandelion.

The medicinal plants stated above apparently have nanoparticles that slow down the formation of calcium oxalate crystals.

When the team found out that these same nanoparticles were also present in lemon juice, they fed lemon juice nanoparticles to rats (which also ingested a substance that could cause kidney stone growth). The team found that these particles softened the stones and made them less sticky.

The team hopes that their study about these lemon nanoparticles could be used in treating people with kidney stones in the near future.

(Image Credit: L. Zhang et al./ Nano Letters 2023 via ScienceNews)

Deep in the Norwegian forest, a hungry four-legged animal weighing 400-550 kg explores the area. As it finds its food, the animal happily eats. And then, it eats more. Little does it know that by doing so, it is changing everything in its surroundings.

We know that we humans are the main contributors to global warming and climate change. However, human activity is not the only reason for global warming. Animal activity can be, too.

Ecologists currently think that moose may be responsible for additional carbon emissions, and they have good reasons for thinking so. Gunnar Austrheim, an ecologist at NTNU University Museum, states that a "grown moose can eat 50 kg of biomass each during summer." These animals like to eat young deciduous saplings, which could be a possible source of carbon storage if they fully matured.

Ecologists acknowledge that by eating deciduous plants, moose do the forest industry a favor. In doing so, competition and biodiversity in the land are reduced, and only coniferous trees like pine and spruce remain. Coincidentally, the forest industry prefers these coniferous trees. However, ecologists say this might not be good for the environment.

Thankfully, moose in Norway are heavily managed, so their carbon emissions are maintained. In fact, there is a "stronger management for moose than for most livestock in the country."

(Image Credit: Endre Grüner Ofstad via EurekAlert)

There is a ceiling in computing and artificial intelligence. For professor Thomas Hartung, we are getting closer to approaching that ceiling. But this doesn't mean we will stop trying to improve the efficiency of our computers. The better course of action is to try to overcome the limit, or in this case, shoot past the said ceiling. Hartung hypothesizes that the key to overcoming the current technological limits is biocomputing — computers with biological components.

A $600-million supercomputer in Kentucky has recently been able to exceed the computational capacity of a single human brain for the first time. However, as Hartung states, it did so "using a million times more energy."

In Hartung's laboratory at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering, Hartung and his team are busy studying the brain cells (which Hartung himself grew and assembled using reprogrammed cells from human skin samples).

As supercomputers are gradually becoming unsustainable, computers powered by lab-grown brain organoids could be a favorable replacement, as they are energy-efficient. Hartung, however, thinks that creating organoid intelligence capable of powering systems that are at least as smart as a mouse could take decades.

But organoid intelligence is not only limited to the field of computers, states Johns Hopkins assistant professor Lena Smirnova; it could also be of use for neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegeneration research.

(Image Credit: Jesse Plotkin/ Johns Hopkins University)

At a glance, this teeny tiny cuboid looks like some sort of fragment chipped off from an electronic device. It would be understandable to think of that when seeing this.

But don't be fooled. This is not a fragment. This is a camera. The world's smallest camera.

That's right. This cuboid the size of a grain of sand is a camera, and it's the world's smallest one, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Called the Omnivision OV6948, the camera boasts a size of 0.65 x 0.65 x 1.158 mm. It can capture 200x200 resolution images at 30 frames per second. The raw images taken from the camera are blurry at first. But with some clean-up help from a custom algorithm to process the images, the pictures become recognizable.

Of course, we'd be asking, "what could we do with a tiny camera?" Well, for one, it could be used in the medical field. As the camera is designed to fit inside human veins, this camera becomes a helplful tool for doctors when they diagnose or perform surgeries.

The OmniVision OV6948 is developed by scientists at the University of Washington and manufactured by the semiconductor manufacturing company OmniVision Technologies.

(Images: OmniVision OV6948 Worlds Smallest Camera via Laptop-Spec)

Biodegradable plastics, or bioplastics for short, are marketed as a better alternative than the old traditional ones. Unsurprisingly, people have embraced this new type of plastic simply because it is environmentally-friendly. Already, stores are filled with products with labels such as "sustainable" or "compostable plastic." Big companies also support the idea of using bioplastics for their products. The Wrigley Company, for example, plans to roll out Skittles in biodegradable packaging sometime next year. 

But is it true? Does the use of biodegradable plastic products help in preserving our planet? In theory, it is. In reality, it isn't. In fact, promoting the use of bioplastic could "encourage more wasteful consumption," which leads to more harm to the environment.

While bioplastics do break down faster than traditional plastics, they require something else: proper disposal. We either put them in an industrial compost facility or dispose of them via home composting. Unfortunately, many of us only dispose of trash via the garbage bin, which is taken by the garbage truck. This means that bioplastics "generally end up in... landfills."

As bioplastics are promoted as less polluting, Zero Waste France advocacy manager Moira Tourneur thinks that consumers might overconsume bioplastic products.

The question is: if biodegradable plastics could still do damage, then what is the best way to preserve the environment? The answer is less plastic usage. Of course, plastic products will always be in use, especially in healthcare and transport systems. And so, experts agree that governments need to create better disposal infrastructures for bioplastics.

(Image Credit: LillyCantabile/ Pixabay)

Before, archaeologists probably relied on artists to create reconstructions of the remains they found on sites of interest. Or maybe they did the sketches and recreations themselves.

But thanks to numerous advances in modern science and technology, researchers are now able to reconstruct the visages of people who lived in the past with great accuracy and extreme attention to detail.

Live Science compiles 30 facial reconstructions of people from varying periods, from the Stone Age to the early modern period. Check out the many pictures at the site, and see what these people might have looked like as they lived on Earth.

(Image Credit: archiv MZM/ Live Science)

(Image Credit: Chris Rynn/ Live Science)