A new research conducted by Macquarie University geoscientists in Sydney, Australia suggested that diamonds are formed from ancient seabeds that are now buried below the Earth’s crust. Their evidence for this are the traces of salt trapped within the gemstones.

In experiments recreating the extreme pressures and temperatures found 200 kilometres underground, Dr. Michael Förster, Professor Stephen Foley, Dr. Olivier Alard, and colleagues at Goethe Universität and Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Germany, have demonstrated that seawater in sediment from the bottom of the ocean reacts in the right way to produce the balance of salts found in diamond.

The study, published in Science Advances, settles a long-standing question about the formation of diamonds. "There was a theory that the salts trapped inside diamonds came from marine seawater, but couldn't be tested," says lead author Michael. "Our research showed that they came from marine sediment."

Diamonds are crystals of carbon that form beneath the Earth's crust in very old parts of the mantle. They are brought to the surface in volcanic eruptions of a special kind of magma called kimberlite.

While gem diamonds are usually made of pure carbon, so-called fibrous diamonds, which are cloudy and less appealing to jewellers, often include small traces of sodium, potassium and other minerals that reveal information about the environment where they formed.

These fibrous diamonds are commonly ground down and used in technical applications like drill bits.

This makes diamonds, more than being sentimentally or monetarily valuable, historically and scientifically valuable.

(Image Credit: gr8effect/ Pixabay)

Since it has the word “dog” in its name, a raccoon dog would behave just the same as a “man’s best friend” would, right? You might want to take a closer look at these creatures first or you might regret taking a tanuki (another name for raccoon dog) as a pet. They might seem like dogs, but they really aren’t. 

So what are their differences and similarities to dogs? Are raccoon dogs domestic or are they wild? What’s the right way to take care of them? Those are what Rachel Gutman of The Atlantic set to find out in her interview with Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden curator, Rebecca Snyder.

See the interview transcript over at the website.

(Image Credit: Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden)

It is vital for man to eat in order to survive, and I believe we all would agree to that statement. In fact, eating is so crucial that our brain employs different regions for food recognition. For fresh, raw foods one region, the occipital cortex, is involved. Another region, the temporal gyrus, is involved for the recognition of processed or cooked foods.

"Food is essential for life. It is therefore of paramount importance that its key characteristics (is it poisonous? is it tasty? is it nutritious?) are readily recognised. To come to our aid, in this case, is our semantic memory, which is a large personal store of information on everything that we know, including the sensorial or abstract properties of the objects. Semantic memory allows us to give a name and a meaning to what we have encountered during our existence" explain Miriam Vignando and Raffaella Rumiati, respectively lead author and research director: "Speaking of food, one of the key characteristics to identify is certainly the level of processing it has undergone".

Via EurekAlert!

(Image Credit: Rachel Park/ Unsplash)

The Grounds of Alexandria sure made a magnificent makeover of their place. Taking inspiration from the iconic city of Agrabah in the film Aladdin, the said café transformed itself into this spectacular place. Walking into the café is an immersive experience, and dining there a magical encounter.

The mood wouldn't be complete without a menu makeover, so while the experience is open, The Grounds is serving magical drinks like the color-changing "Magic Carpet Ride" cocktail and the "Friend Like Me" tea. The latter is a blend of hibiscus, apple, pomegranate and rosehip and is served in a magic lamp, naturally.

As for desserts, they have dishes like the "I Wish for More...Cake," a pistachio sponge cake layered with white chocolate and orange blossom mousse and raspberry confit. The outside is a purple, shimmery, sparkly situation with a chocolate magic lamp on top so uh, yeah, we want in. The Jafar Cake is equally impressive-looking—to eat it, you crack open what looks like a mandarin orange to find a white chocolate and orange mousse with citrus and almond cake inside.

Check out the amazing venue and the magical food over at the cafe's Instagram account.

(Image Credit: The Grounds/ Instagram)

As the International Space Station orbits the Earth every 93 minutes, its payload, the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), tracks cosmic sources of X-rays. As night falls upon the orbital outpost, the NICER team keeps the X-ray detectors active. As the payload turns from target to target, “bright arcs and loops are traced across this all-sky map made from 22 months of NICER data.”

The arcs tend to converge on prominent bright spots, pulsars in the X-ray sky that NICER regularly targets and monitors. The pulsars are spinning neutron stars that emit clock-like pulses of X-rays. Their timing is so precise it can be used for navigation, determining spacecraft speed and position.

Looks like something from a Doctor Strange movie.

(Image Credit: NASA/ NICER)

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We brought one of the most iconic living rooms to life using our products. Can you guess which family lives here?

If you’ve watched this TV series, you’ll know what this living room design is based on. That’s right. It’s based on The Simpsons, the longest-running American sitcom.

For their latest ad campaign, furniture company IKEA decided to recreate the iconic living rooms of TV shows The Simpsons, Friends, and Stranger Things, but with very little differences. This ad campaign titled the “Real Life Series” will be on display on some IKEA stores on the Middle East.

Check out their recreation of Joyce’s living room from Stranger Things and the living room featured on Friends over at People.com.

Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is a Star Wars theme park and is the biggest park expansion in Disney history. The Disneyland version in Anaheim, California opened this May 31, and the Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World Resort version in Orlando, Florida will open on August 29 of this year.

First announced in 2015, Galaxy’s Edge aims to transport guests directly into the Star Wars universe, not just with the merchandise and rides, but also interactive experiences like lightsaber building and roleplay-like elements.

Check out these stunning photographs of the park over at Polygon.

(Image Credit: James Bareham/ Polygon)

In the 1980s, the humble village of Soumousso in Burkina Faso, West Africa, helped battle malaria through an ingenious method: insecticide-treated bed nets. Unfortunately, the mosquitoes developed resistance to widely used insecticides, and the bed nets became less effective. Now, researchers have been testing a new countermeasure for mosquitoes — a genetically modified fungus that can kill these malaria-carrying insects. 

In tests in a 600-square-meter structure in Soumousso called the MosquitoSphere—built like greenhouse but with mosquito netting instead of glass—the fungus eliminated 99% of the mosquitoes within a month, scientists report in this issue of Science.

"To be able to clear insecticide-resistant mosquitoes to this level is amazing," says entomologist Marit Farenhorst of In2Care, a mosquito control company in Wageningen, the Netherlands. But Farenhorst, who was not involved in the study, emphasizes that the fungus is a long way from real-world use.

Still, this could be a potential weapon that can be used to fight against one of the world’s deadly diseases.

(Image Credit: Sarah Weiser)

In 2006, Coca-Cola released their Coca-Cola Blak, which was a coffee-flavored version of the well-known beverage. Unfortunately, people did not like the product, and after just two years, the company stopped the selling of the said beverage and Blak disappeared from the market.

Nancy Quan, Coca-Cola’s chief technical officer, stated that bad timing caused the failure.

"That was a trend before its time," Quan told CNN Business. "I don't think people were ready to have a coffee portfolio within the Coca-Cola brand."

Now, thanks to evolving trends and palates, the company thinks the public is ready. And Coca-Cola is bringing Blak back — sort of.

Over the past few years, Coke has been releasing a similar product called Coca-Cola Plus Coffee or Coca-Cola With Coffee in international markets. The new product contains more real coffee than Blak did. There's also an additional caffeine jolt: The product is more caffeinated than regular Coke.

Today, it's available in Australia, Italy, Spain, Thailand and Poland, among other countries. Coca-Cola is "pleased with the initial response," according to a spokesperson. It plans to make the drink available in 25 international markets by the end of the year.

The company hasn't committed to bringing the product to the United States. But it's "optimistic about the potential for the beverage" in the country, a spokesperson said.

"I believe that there's going to be a space for a Coca-Cola With Coffee" in the United States, Javier Meza, Coca-Cola's global chief marketing officer of sparkling beverages, told CNN Business. He said the product could reach the United States next year.

What are your thoughts? Would this be a pop or a flop?

(Image Credit: Coca-Cola Company)

It would seem that married people are happier than single people. But according to Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioral science, this is only true “when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: f—ing miserable”. In fact, the opposite is true. Single people, specifically, are happier. This only applies to women, by the way. Men get happier when married.

Paul Dolan summarizes this clearly: “If you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.”

(Image Credit: JillWellington/ Pixabay)

In 2016, Nobuaki Mizumoto, a biologist from Arizona State University, happened to encounter this bizarre fossil dated approximately 50 million years ago. This fossil seemed to show a group of fish heading to the same direction, possibly migrating. Does this suggest that fish have been traveling in groups far longer than scientists realized? The answer is most likely yes.

As Lucas Joel reports for The New York Times, the 259 juvenile fish found in the fossil likely belong to the extinct species Erismatopterus levatus. All of the specimens are facing the same direction, and each measures under an inch long. Much like modern schools of fish, the prehistoric one seems to adhere to the laws of attraction and repulsion, with members maintaining enough distance between neighbors without straying too far from the group.

To better gauge the school’s movements in life, the team measured the exact position and direction of each individual fish. Next, Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky writes, the scientists ran 1,000 computer simulations designed to predict the group’s most plausible next position, as determined by factors including water currents and spatial distribution. Overall, the models appear to align with behaviors exhibited by modern fish schools, or shoals, suggesting that the fish in question were, as NOVA Next’s Katherine J. Wu writes, “undulating along in a coordinated fashion,” when they met their demise.

(Image Credit: Mizumoto et al.)

Costing £700,000, this robot, developed in partnership with one of Britain’s main berry growers named Hall Hunter, is said to be able to pick over 25,000 raspberries in one day. This robot outpaces human workers who can only pick around 15,000 an eight-hour shift. How does it do the harvesting?

Guided by sensors and 3D cameras, its gripper zooms in on ripe fruit using machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence. When operating at full tilt, its developers say the robot’s gripper picks a raspberry in 10 seconds or less and drops it in a tray where the fruit gets sorted by maturity, before being moved into punnets, ready to be transported to supermarkets.

The final robot version, expected to go into production next year, will have four grippers, all picking simultaneously.

Separate field trials in China have shown the robot can pick tomatoes, and it has also been let loose on cauliflower.

As robots don’t get tired, they can pick for 20 hours a day, but the biggest challenge has been getting them to adapt to different light conditions, says Rui Andres, portfolio manager at Frontier IP, one of the main backers of Fieldwork.

Andres says UK farmers typically pay £1 to £2 for a kilogram of raspberries picked by human workers. Fieldwork intends to lease its robots to farmers for less.

(Video Credit: Guardian News/ YouTube)

Milbury, Massachusetts — May 26, 4:43 AM. Firefighters responded to a call to an unlucky tree struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. Upon their arrival, an eerie sight welcomed them.

When the firefighters from Millbury Fire Department arrived in the early morning hours of Sunday they found that the fire had consumed the interior of the tree but had left the exterior intact, making the tree appear as if it’s burning from the inside out.

The firefighters eventually put the fire out.

One commented that the tree was the gate to hell and was thankful that it was closed as “we have enough demons already.”

Via Geek.com

(Image Credit: Millbury Fire Dept. / Facebook)

Looks like roasted chicken, tastes like pancake. Taiwanese food stall YesMade offers this deceptive, yet, delicious roasted chicken-shaped pancake pops. How do they achieve this kind of look in their pancake pops?

YesMade achieves this illusion thanks to their custom-made pancake iron, which features small chicken-shaped molds. As you can imagine, the unique shape of their delicious creations has made YesMade a huge hit on Instagram.

YesMade currently has three food stalls in Taiwan, one at Feng Chia Night Market in Taichung, and the other two in in the Hsinchu and Zhongli district of Taoyuan. They only sell their chicken-shaped pancake pops in packs of 5, priced between 40TWD ($1.30) and 50TWD ($1.60), depending on the flavor.

These treats come in five staple flavors – original, cocoa, matcha, cheese & peanut cocoa – plus a secret flavor that changes periodically. Past secret flavorings include bubble tea, vanilla Oreo, yam and lava egg yolk.

Yum!

(Image Credit: YesMade/ Facebook)

Yup. You’ve read it correctly. Your iPhone is secretly talking to things. And it’s something way scarier than the paranormal. Through his sleuthing, Geoffrey A. Fowler of the Washington Post found out that in just a week, his iPhone has reported and given data to about 5,400 hidden app trackers. If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what would.

On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.

And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -— once every five minutes.

Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we’ve got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.

You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise.

IPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.

This isn’t just an issue on iPhones, but on Android smartphones as well.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)