With his sandy masterpiece entitled “Liberty Crumbling”, Damon Langlois bags the first prize of the 2019 Texas Sandfest, the largest native-sand sculpture competition in the U.S.
See all of the winners from the 23rd Annual Texas Sandfest here.
(Image Credit: Kastle Kelley)
Thank Samsung for that.
Moscow, Russia — Researchers at the Samsung AI Center developed a way to create moving portraits using only a small dataset. The dataset can be so small that even one photograph is enough to make a moving portrait — a “living portrait.”
Because they only need one source image, the researchers were able to animate paintings and famous portraits, with eerie results. Fyodor Dostoevsky—who died well before motion picture cameras became commercially available—moves and talks in black and white. The Mona Lisa silently moves her mouth and eyes, a slight smile on her face. Salvador Dali rants on, mustache twitching.
This technology far more exceeds than that of deepfakes, which only pastes faces over another face.
Do you think technology has gone too far on this one?
Via Vice
(Video Credit: Egor Zakharov/ YouTube)
This is Cape Vyatlina, located in the Russian Far East. This place has been dubbed as the Russian Stonehenge because of its peculiar feature: man-made stone towers. Hundreds of stone towers line up at the beach and everyday, new stone towers are erected.
The tradition of building towers at Cape Vyatlina by stacking stones of various sizes on top of each other started in 2015, when a group of activists from Vladivostok built 155 such monuments in celebration of the city’s 155th anniversary. Many of these original towers, some up to 3.5-meters-tall, were destroyed by the collapse of a nearby grotto, but other locals and tourists took it upon themselves to restore them and even add to their number. Today, there are several hundreds of these hand-stacked stone towers covering the beach at Cape Vyatlina and building them has become somewhat of a superstition.
It’s said that building a stone tower at Cape Vyatlina can make your greatest wish come true, so it’s no surprise that stacking stones has become a tradition among visitors to this remote place. For others, the practice is almost meditative in nature, as erecting these structures requires lots of patience and concentration. Whatever the motivation behind each builder’s actions, there’s no denying that the towers make quite a sight.
Would you build a stone tower in this place in order to make your greatest wish come true? I certainly will if given the chance to go there. Sounds like fun.
(Image Credit: Kisenia Anatolievna/ Instagram)
Commuters in Mexico have a very big problem: armed robberies. These robberies happen all the time and have since become common in the Mexican streets. We know what happens typically in a robbery: armed men get in the bus, and demand the passengers and the driver to hand over their phones and their money, or else they will get harmed. Of course, the commuters know that they can’t let their phones be handed over, and so they made an ingenious solution: they bought fake cellphones to hand over to the robbers.
Costing 300 to 500 pesos apiece — the equivalent of $15 to $25 — the “dummies” are sophisticated fakes: They have a startup screen and bodies that are dead ringers for the originals, and inside there is a piece of metal to give the phone the heft of the real article.
That comes in handy when trying to fool trigger-happy bandits who regularly attack the buses, big and small, that ferry people from the poorer outlying suburbs to jobs in the city center.
What are your thoughts on this one?
(Image Credit: AP Photo/ Eduardo Verdugo)
Leonardo da Vinci is known for his paintings such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. But did you know that Leonardo also had interests in sciences and in engineering? Check out his blueprints of various weapons like cannons and ballistae in his Codex Atlanticus, which can now be read online. The codex is a 1119-page collection of papers.
You can read the digital scan of the Codex Atlanticus online at this link.
Via Kottke.org
(Image Credit: Kottke.org)
This fungus is twice as old as any other identified fungi specimens - it is roughly a billion years old. The new species of fungus was found in the Grassy Bay Formation in the Canadian Arctic, and was named Ourasphaira giraldae. The new species was found by researchers led by a PhD student at Université de Liège, Corentin Loron.
The discovery, announced on Wednesday in Nature, not only pushes the fossil record of fungi back by about 600 million years, it also suggests that other eukaryotic organisms—a group that includes complex multicellular life-forms like animals—may have originated around the same time as O. giraldae, in the mid-Proterozoic age.
“Fungi are, in the ‘tree of life,’ the closest relative to animals,” Loron told Motherboard in an email. “This is reshaping our vision of the world because those two groups, as well as other eukaryotic groups like algae, are still present today.”
“Therefore, this distant past, although very different from today, may have been much more ‘modern’ than we thought,” he said.
Prior to this discovery, the oldest known fungi fossils came from the Rhynie chert, a Scottish site that dates back roughly 400 million years. Scientists have also presented possible fungi fossils predating the Cambrian explosion, a sudden proliferation of complex life that occurred 541 million years ago, but those specimens are not considered to be definitive proof of Precambrian fungi.
Are we getting closer to knowing the origin of terrestrial life on Earth?
(Image Credit: Corentin Loron et al)
Researchers from Rome University modified E. Coli cells in order to recreate faces of well-known scientists and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. These E. Coli cells have been modified to respond to light patterns.
The team genetically-modified E. coli cells so that they would contain a protein called proteorhodopsin, which is found in ocean-dwelling bacteria, causing them to respond to light.
By doing so, the scientists hoped, the E. coli bacteria that then received more light would swim faster than others, eventually creating the patterns needed [to] form the portraits.
Giacomo Frangipane, the lead author, said in a statement: “Much like pedestrians who slow down their walking speed when they encounter a crowd, or cars that are stuck in traffic, swimming bacteria will spend more time in slower regions than in faster ones.”
Via Story Trender
(Video Credit: Caters Clips/ YouTube)
(Image Credit: Frangipane et al / CATERS)
The creativity of the Japanese people never ceases to amaze me. Check this guy’s creation as he “deconstructed the packaging of a box of Chivas Regal Scotch whisky and put it together to assemble this badass sword and shield-totting knight”.
(Image Credit: @02ESyRaez4VhR2l/ Twitter)
British respondents get drunk more times per year than anyone in the world, The results of the 2019 Global Drug Survey, published on Thursday, revealed. What could be the explanation for this?
Adam Winstock, an addiction psychiatrist and founder of the Global Drug Survey, said British respondents are drinking too much, too often, regarding getting drunk as the point of a night out as opposed to enhancing the evening.
"We have never grasped moderation. It's not part of our culture or conversation," he said. "We need to learn that more fun with better health and fatter wallets can follow from a bit less, a bit less often."
And drinkers around the world should consider cutting down to benefit their health, Winstock said.
"Deaths due to alcoholic liver disease and cancer due to excessive alcohol consumption are on the rise, along with obesity and poorer mental health," he said. "Drinking too much makes all these worse; drinking less make them better."
Researchers spoke to 123,814 people from more than 30 countries in preparing the report, and they found that people on average got drunk 33 times in the previous 12 months.
(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)
A study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology examined how goal-setting corresponds with performance among people with varying intellectual abilities. The said study says that people with high IQ tend to choke when under pressure. Interestingly, when goals are framed strategically, this disadvantage seem to vanish.
It suggests an ironic reason for why people with high general mental ability (GMA) often become mentally overwhelmed in complex, dynamic working environments: Their strong mental capacity leaves them vulnerable to performance anxieties and intrusive thoughts.
More details of the study at Big Think.
(Image Credit: JESHOOTS-com/ Pixabay)
Fifteen new sites in Laos that contained over a hundred 1000-year old stone jars have been found by archaeologists from Australian National University (ANU). These mysterious stone jars are presumed to have been used for the dead.
The jars of Laos are one of archaeology’s enduring mysteries. Experts believe they were related to disposal of the dead, but nothing is known about the jars’ original purpose and the people who brought them there.
The new finds show the distribution of the jars was more widespread than previously thought and could unlock the secrets surrounding their origin.
The sites, deep in remote and mountainous forest and containing 137 jars, were identified by ANU PhD student Nicholas Skopal with officials from the Lao government.
“These new sites have really only been visited by the occasional tiger hunter. Now we’ve rediscovered them, we’re hoping to build a clear picture about this culture and how it disposed of its dead,” said Mr Skopal.
ANU archaeologist Dr Dougald O’Reilly co-led the team that made the discovery. He said the new sites show the ancient burial practices involving the jars were “more widespread than previously thought”.
“It’s apparent the jars, some weighing several tonnes, were carved in quarries, and somehow transported, often several kilometres, to their present locations,” Dr O’Reilly said.
(Image Credit: ANU)
Thanks to the efforts of hotelier MCR Development, the Trans-World Airlines airport terminal is seemingly brought back to life. The said airport terminal was designed by Eero Saarinen in 1962.
The TWA Hotel at JFK opened its doors on May 15 following a two-year $265-million restoration and renovation project orchestrated by architects Beyer Blinder Belle and Lubrano Ciavarra. Travelers will be able to stay in one of 483 rooms and 22 suites distributed throughout the building’s two iconic, six-story wings, some of them looking to the runways through giant 4.5-inch-thick glass panels that are claimed to fully isolate guests from the airport noise.
The hotel rooms–each with an obligatory Womb Chair and Tulip table designed by Saarinen, plus a classic 1950s rotary phone that most millennials won’t know how to use anymore–were designed by New York-based architecture firm Stonehill Taylor, which also created the public interior spaces and the Connie airplane bar. The latter includes a fully restored Lockheed Constellation airplane. Each room starts at $249 per night, with a shorter 4-hour stay rate of $140 in case you want to take a short rest before your plane leaves.
It’s a blast from the past!
(Image Credit: TWA Hotel/ David Mitchell)
Designed by Shanghai-based architecture X+Living, Zhonshuge bookstores “feature incredible rooms coveted by book and illusion lovers alike.” Each location of the bookstore has a different design, meaning it is always a new experience upon going to a new branch.
Check out the amazing photos at Colossal.
(Video Credit: Great Big Story/ YouTube)
(Image Credit: DesignYouTrust/ Colossal)
Most, if not all of us, have encountered a picture of the giant stone heads in Easter Island at least once in our life. But to those who have seen those pictures, did you know that these heads have torsos as well? It was just buried the whole time (well, until the archaeologists excavated them).
The large stone statues, or moai, for which Easter Island is famous, were carved during the period A.D. 1100–1680 (rectified radio-carbon dates). A total of 887 monolithic stone statues have been inventoried on the island and in museum collections.
Although often identified as “Easter Island heads,” the statues have torsos, most of them ending at the top of the thighs, although a small number are complete figures that kneel on bent knees with their hands over their stomachs.Some upright moai have become buried up to their necks by shifting soils.
(Image Credit: Outdoor Revival)
The answer may be yes according to a study. Conventional wisdom also says yes. However, there is no causal data — no definitive proof. In other words, the studies are inconclusive.
The studies we have so far on the relationship between digital technology use and mental health — for both teens and adults — are more than inconclusive. “The literature is a wreck,” said Anthony Wagner, chair of the psychology department at Stanford University. “Is there anything that tells us there’s a causal link? That our media use behavior is actually altering our cognition and underlying neurological function or neurobiological processes? The answer is we have no idea. There’s no data.”
Several researchers I spoke to — even those who believe the links between digital technology use and mental health problems are overhyped — all think this is an important question worth studying, and gathering conclusive evidence on.
If technology plays any small part in the rise in teen anxiety, depression, and suicide, we ought to know for sure. And if the ubiquity of digital devices is somehow remolding human psychology — in the ways our brains develop, deal with stress, remember, pay attention, and make decisions — we ought to know that too.
This begs the question: How do we find more conclusive answers? The answer is, in simple terms, by asking better, more specific questions.
(Image Credit: Tero Vesalainen/ Pixabay)
