The Pudding presents to us a map of the United States, but in a different light. Names of famous people like Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, and Dwayne Johnson, are displayed along with the cities and towns they are associated with.
Check out the People Map of the United States and see the famous persons whom you share the town with. Note: Some are criminals.
In its International Classification of Diseases (ICD), an international standard diagnostic tool which is widely used as basis for diagnosis and health insurers, the World Health Organization finally recognized burnout as a medical condition.
The decision, reached during the World Health Assembly in Geneva, which wraps up on Tuesday (May 28), could help put to rest decades of debate among experts over how to define burnout, and whether it should be considered a medical condition.
In the latest update of its catalogue of diseases and injuries around the world, WHO defines burn-out as "a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed".
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
Mention the word "UFO" and chances are people will think that you're talking about alien spacecrafts, X-Files paranormal phenomena or tin foil hat-worthy conspiracies. But who'd have thought that the U.S. Navy would have records of this kind of stuff?
“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.
“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”
No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.
What could the flying objects be?
(Image Credit: Thor_Deichmann/ Pixabay)
No, they did not kill the butterflies. They merely swabbed the little creatures.
Thanks to the frosted elfin butterflies in the area, Gainesville’s First Magnitude Brewing now have the Frosted Elfin England-Style Session Pale Ale, brewed from the yeast they gathered from the butterflies.
The beer was a collaboration between the brewery and scientists at the Florida Museum of Natural History, who netted the butterflies and gently swabbed them for yeast before releasing them back into the forest. Those yeast samples were multiplied in petri dishes to produce what was needed for brewing.
That flowery-smelling yeast was part of what resulted in a tropical, fruity, hoppy and hazy pale ale that went on sale at First Magnitude’s tasting room on May 17 for $12.50 per four pack. The beer is also being sold in some stores around Gainesville, including Lucky’s Market. The brewery will hold another release event at the Brass Tap in Tallahassee on May 25.
Jaret Daniels, a professor at the University of Florida and director of the museum’s Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity told U.S. Fish & Wildlife he was looking for a way to engage a new demographic, specifically beer drinkers, in conservation.
A portion of the proceeds from every can is going directly to butterfly research. The researchers also hope the exposure raises awareness for the frosted elfin.
Both beer enthusiasts and the frosted elfins would benefit from this new beer, so I guess they hit two birds with one stone.
This isn’t the only beer made with the help of butterflies. Check out the others as well on the video.
(Video Credit: Florida Museum/ YouTube)
(Image Credit: First Magnitude/ Medium.com)
Art Department, an anonymous art collective, has beautifully transformed a decommissioned building located on the grounds of the Laguna Bell Substation in Commerce, California, into a “secret wish-processing facility”. The said art collective has welcomed visitors last weekend. Renée Reizman of Hyperallergic wrote her experience:
Visitors who wanted to make their wishes in person were handed a ticket and instructed to climb a flight of rusted stairs that led to a dilapidated administrative building. Inside, a grassy, dandelion-lined corridor pointed wishers to their first station: a cramped office where a brusk employee asked the visitor to describe their wish without spilling the specific details (the Department of Small Things That Float on the Wind, which oversees the wish-processing facility, firmly believes that sharing a secret wish automatically disqualifies it from coming true). The bureaucrat asked more general questions. Could the wish be categorized as altruistic or selfish? Did it pertain to romance or your career?
Then the wishers were ushered to the next station, where they took a more thorough survey on the WISH_TEK2000, an old, ’90s-era computer running on DOS. At the end of the survey — which asked you to rate your general luck on a scale of one to 100 — the computer spat out the likelihood of the wish being granted; for me, it was a long shot.
With the analysis wrapped, it was finally time to receive a dandelion and make the wish. A horticulturist gently snipped a dandelion growing in a vial and pointed to a pneumatic tube system where the seeds would be evaluated and eventually dumped into the seed sorting department, the archived collection of hundreds of thousands of dandelion seeds.
The whimsical journey, which was unique, beautiful, and expertly produced, may feel like it lacked depth conceptually, but was genuinely engaging. Even though it was visually impressive, it didn’t dissolve into Instagrammable gimmicks. Pulling visitors into the immersive script discouraged them from breaking the fourth wall by pulling out their phone, and the surveys put pressure on visitors to think more seriously about what they may wish for if they actually had the chance for it to come true.
What would you wish for?
(Image Credit: Michèle M Waite/ Art Department)
(Image Credit: Renée Reizman/ Hyperallergic)
Get an instant buff physique by wearing this undershirt. “Secret Macho T” is a unisex undershirt developed His Company Group (no connection with the travel-related H.I.S. Group).
Check out their promotional video.
Would you buy one?
Via Grapee
(Video Credit: His Company Group)
The Siege of Ostend, Belgium, year 1601. After the bloody battle that happened, Dutch surgeons traversed the battlefield and came out of the place with “bags full of human fat.” It was presumed that they used it to treat the wounds of their own soldiers.
Let’s go back to 1543. Andreas Vesalius, a 16th century physician, ordered anatomists that boil skeletons to collect the layer of fat “for the benefit of the masses, who ascribe to it a considerable efficacy in obliterating scars and fostering the growth of nerves and tendons.”
Vesalius knew what he was talking about. At the time, human fat was widely considered—and not just by “the masses”—to be efficacious in healing wounds, and was typically harvested from the recently deceased.
The claim that human fat can heal wounds is not that far-fetched — it has some scientific basis, after all. The pre-modern people just did not see that scientific reason, and went for a superficial one.
What was it about human fat that made it so sought-after? And what was so special about the fat of slain criminals in particular? The practice no doubt echoes the Catholic cult of holy relics, whereby saints were considered to be fully present in their bodies after death, as well as in the objects they touched. Yet this mystical appreciation explains only so much, and most executed criminals were no saints. Rather, the use of fat for medical purposes was perceived as a natural practice rather than a magical one, and thus was based on assumptions about the physical properties of the substance itself. Despite the apparent obsolescence of many of these beliefs, the claim that fat could heal wounds was not entirely misguided. Physicians today know that adipose tissue is highly “angiogenic,” meaning that it promotes the growth of new blood vessels from preexisting ones.
The use of human fat would then be a common medical practice for quite some time, and there would also be a thriving trade for it.
More details about the history of this medicine at The Atlantic.
(Image Credit: Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Library/ Wikimedia Commons)
Having analyzed data from 7,000 American adults between the ages of 51 and 61, a research report published on Friday suggested that having a purpose in life may decrease the risk of dying early.
What they found shocked them, according to Celeste Leigh Pearce, one of the authors of the study published in JAMA Current Open.
People who didn't have a strong life purpose — which was defined as "a self-organizing life aim that stimulates goals" — were more likely to die than those who did, and specifically more likely to die of cardiovascular diseases.
"I approached this with a very skeptical eye," says Pearce, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan. "I just find it so convincing that I'm developing a whole research program around it."
People without a strong life purpose were more than twice as likely to die between the study years of 2006 and 2010, compared with those who had one.
This association between a low level of purpose in life and death remained true despite how rich or poor participants were, and regardless of gender, race, or education level. The researchers also found the association to be so powerful that having a life purpose appeared to be more important for decreasing risk of death than drinking, smoking or exercising regularly.
"Just like people have basic physical needs, like to sleep and eat and drink, they have basic psychological needs," says Alan Rozanski, a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who was not involved in this research but has studied the relationship between life purpose and physical health.
"The need for meaning and purpose is No. 1," Rozanski adds. "It's the deepest driver of well-being there is."
Have you found your purpose in life? If yes, then what is it?
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
With no electricity in his humble home in Moche, Peru, 11 year-old boy Víctor Martín Angulo Córdoba does his homework and reads his books under a streetlight. The photo of this boy became viral and came to the attention of Yaqoob Yusuf Ahmed Mubarak, a 31-year old millionaire from Bahrain.
Upon hearing Víctor's story, Yaqoob traveled from Bahrain to Peru to help.
He had Víctor's humble home rebuilt, making it into two storeys high, Tubarco reports.
Yaqoob, who said he had a similar childhood to the little boy, also set up a business for Víctor's mum to help her out.
This way, she'll be able to help her son's future who now has a better quality of life and study conditions.
Taking his kindness even further, he promised to help repair the boy's school.
(Image Credit: Mirror)
Four years ago, Joshua Smith flew over the Simpson Desert for the first time. As he passed by the desert, he was not able to stop snapping.
"There were shapes and colors and details that I just did not think were possible," he says.
The resulting images were so stunning that Joshua got a crazy idea in his mind; why not take a picture of all the deserts of Australia?
It's a gargantuan, if not foolhardy, quest: Australia has 10 deserts occupying more than 500,000 miles (or nearly 20 percent) of its mainland—more land than is contained in all Peru. Yet they host just .15 people per square mile, meaning you're often more likely to meet a reptile than another human. It's easy to see why. Temperatures hit triple digits between December and February, and rainfall—below 10 inches—sometimes evaporates before hitting ground. If that weren't enough, global warming could aggravate these conditions, possibly adding 100 miles or more to the deserts' southern boundary by the end of this century. But Smith is dogged. Since that first flight over the Simpson Desert, he's documented five other deserts—the Great Victoria, Strzelecki, Sturt Stony, Tirari, and Pedirka—and plans to tackle the rest next month.
What tenacity and dedication!
Here are some of the stunning photos taken by Joshua. See more on Wired.
(Images Credit: Joshua Smith)
Bristol, England — the owner of a bar named Bristol Spirit is condemning people who choose to order free tap water instead of drinking beer or juice, saying that they are ruining her business. The co-founder of the bar shares her sentiment.
The co-founder of Bristol Spirit, Sam Espensen, has said that although the bar serves food, customers should all order drinks with their meal.
She tweeted that at least 14 people only drank water at the bar last week, and wrote: “If you come to Bristol Spirit and only drink free tap water - we will not make enough money from your table to break even, let alone turn a profit.
The bar owner told Bristol Live: "This is happening across the industry. This is partly down to people wanting to drink healthier or non alcoholic drinks (which is great), but as we offer around 50 different options for those not wanting to drink alcohol it certainly can't account for all of them.
"So I wanted to highlight to those people that them drinking tap water means we are unlikely to meet the average spend from their visit required to break even or turn a profit."
She added that offering tap water costs the business money, explaining: "Lastly we are also paying for the dishwasher, the glass, the tea towels to dry it, the bartender, the front of house person, and everything else associated with that glass of water."
Bar patrons, however, disagree with Bristol Spirit’s sentiment, and says that the bar is being unfair.
What are your thoughts? Should this certain bar start charging those who would order a glass of water?
(Image Credit: Abbie Trayler-Smith)
The cherry blossom has been an important symbol in Japan. Because of this, the Japanese hold the cherry blossom trees in high regard, and they don’t want you breaking off branches of the said trees. Unfortunately, tourists still do this up to this day, and this action angers the locals. Thankfully, there is a way for you to enjoy and immortalise the cherry blossom season without angering anyone.
If you don’t want to anger locals with questionable actions such as this, a place you’re guaranteed to get a winning pic is the Sakura Chill Bar, located in the stylish Minami-Aoyama, an upmarket district in Tokyo.
The bar contains a pool filled with 1.2 million imitation cherry blossom petals as a photo spot. The aesthetic is further compounded by a large tree with artfully draping branches over the pool. You can get in with your companions and take pictures fully immersed in the spirit of spring.
I’d definitely go in there. How about you?
(Image Credit: PR Times)
May 15. Nate Roman, 44, came back home from work when he noticed that something was off — somebody broke into his house. (They didn’t “break in” literally, though. Roman accidentally left his back door unlocked, and so nothing was broken). The unknown person did not take anything from the house. He or she only cleaned the house in a thorough manner.
Roman looked around and saw that they neatly made the beds, vacuumed the rugs, and scrubbed the toilets. They even crafted ornate origami roses on the toilet paper rolls in his bathrooms, he said. Every room in his house was cleaned, except for the kitchen.
He thought the whole thing was “weird and creepy,” and reported the incident to police.
(Image Credit: Nate Roman)
By extracting six strains of the yeast from old pottery discovered in the Holy Land, researchers from the Antiquities Authority and three Israeli universities have been able to recreate beer “believed to be similar to beverages enjoyed by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt.”
The team said it hoped to make the drink available in shops one day.
"I remember that when we first brought out the beer we sat around the table and drank... and I said either we'll be good or we'll all be dead in five minutes," said Aren Maeir, an archaeologist with Bar-Ilan University. "We lived to tell the story".
(Image Credit: EPA)
Despite being many in numbers, ants still value the life of each of their brethren. When one of them gets trapped in a spider web, its comrades immediately go and rescue the unlucky ant.
Veromessor pergandei harvester ants, which thrive in colonies tens of thousands strong in the southwestern United States, usually walk a single route each day to collect seeds. Christina Kwapich and Bert Hölldobler at Arizona State University in Tempe monitored the ants’ response when one of their own became ensnared in a spider web.
If the entangled ant released a chemical alarm signal, its companions rescued it, carried it back to the nest and cleaned the silk from its body. Ants also tugged on the web itself until they had destroyed it. In laboratory tests, ants needed between 30 minutes and 2 hours to demolish a single web.
(Image Credit: C. L. Kwapich)
