Actually, he could speak as a child, although he couldn't speak on his own. Bruno Youn, when he was 3 years old, could only mimic what he heard and recite poetry, but he was not able to come up with his own words or communicated his thoughts. Upon recognizing this, his mother brought him in for testing and found out the bitter truth: Bruno had autism.

“I could not cope with the idea,” said Josette Thompson, a Seal Beach physician. “I couldn’t have a child with autism. Never talk. Never have a job. Never get married. You lose all those dreams for your child at once. I couldn’t go there.”

But if back then Josette had a peek into the future, she might not have worried too much about her son.

On Saturday, Youn, now 22 years old, will walk across the stage to receive his diploma at Claremont McKenna College. But before he does, he will stand before an audience of hundreds and do what his senior class elected him to do: deliver the student commencement remarks.

In four years at the small, highly selective liberal arts college in the Pomona Valley, Youn has grown from a freshman who avoided people, spending most of his time holed up in his dorm playing video games, into a campus leader.

He majored in philosophy, politics and economics, and will graduate with Phi Beta Kappa honors and a 3.8 GPA. He worked on policy research at Claremont McKenna’s Rose Institute of State and Local Government. He was selected for a prestigious post as one of two student fellows to host and moderate panel discussions with high-profile figures for the college’s Athenaeum speakers program.

He has worked with political campaigns. He has had a girlfriend and made lots of friends.

“I have left behind me a trail of broken stereotypes,” Youn plans to say in his commencement speech.

(Image Credit: Gina Ferazzi/ Los Angeles Times)

Named after the Chinese goddess of the moon, China’s lunar lander Chang’E 4 landed on the far side of the moon and was the first to do so. This historic event went a long way in probing the mystery of the far side of the moon, and might help clarify how the moon evolved.

A theory emerged in the 1970s that in the moon's infancy, an ocean made of magma covered its surface. As the molten ocean began to calm and cool, lighter minerals floated to the top, while heavier components sank. The top crusted over in a sheet of mare basalt, encasing a mantle of dense minerals, such as olivine and pyroxene.

As asteroids and space junk crashed into the surface of the moon, they cracked through the crust and kicked up pieces of the lunar mantel.

"Understanding the composition of the lunar mantel is critical for testing whether a magma ocean ever existed, as postulated," said corresponding author Li Chunlai, a professor of the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). "It also helps advance our understanding of the thermal and magmatic evolution of the moon."

The evolution of the moon may provide a window into the evolution of Earth and other terrestrial planets, according to Li, because its surface is relatively untouched compared to, say, the early planetary surface of Earth.

Li and his team landed CE-4 in the moon's South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, which stretches about 2,500 kilometers—about half the width of China. CE-4 collected spectral data samples from the flat stretches of the basin, as well as from other smaller but deeper impact craters within the basin.

Find out more on phys.org.

(Image Credit: NAOC/ CNSA)

Nova Scotia, Canada — Police, public works and a resident rescued five ducklings from a storm drain in the town of Truro, while the worried mother duck waited patiently, pacing back and forth on the scene. Constable Wendy Cormier said that the police got a call from a man who noticed a mother duck in the street about to be hit by a car. After investigating a little, the man stated that he heard some chirping coming from the drain. Upon heading on the drain, there the man saw the ducklings.

A public works staffer was on the scene within minutes to help remove the drain cover.

The constable did not hesitate to jump inside the storm drain upon heading to the scene.

"I couldn't get to the call fast enough actually to get them outta there," said Cormier. "I was the smallest one there, so I got picked to go down and fish them out."

When she got inside, she saw that the ducklings were walking in a pipe between drains.

The public works staffer got in the other drain and retrieved one duckling. Cormier rescued the other four while the mother duck stayed nearby.

"Once we got them out it was almost like she knew we had them and that they were safe," said Cormier, who put the ducklings in a box.

(Image Credit: Truro Police)

Celebrities, royals, and businessmen get the privilege to ride private jets. On their luxurious ride in the sky, these privileged people get their every need attended by flight attendants, who, I believe, are one of the most selfless people in the world. These stewards ensure the comfort of the passengers inside the plane.

Despite the perks of being able to travel across the globe, a private flight attendant’s job is very demanding and stressful.

They may serve their passengers every need, but the skills required by flight attendants are much more than that of a waitress -- they're cocktail mixologists, cleaners, personal assistants, caterers and even dog sitters.

Kimberly Benton, who has been working in the industry for nine years, shares her story of what it is like to be a flight attendant.

For her, being a VIP flight attendant is more than just delivering the best possible service to her clients, but about "creating an experience."

"They're expecting you to be a lot more personal," the 32-year-old told CNN Travel. "They expect you to know exactly what they want, when they want it and it could be something as little as as soon as they get on the plane they want a shot of a Nespresso, the foot rest up and their Sunday Times [newspaper] waiting for them."

She's held birthday parties in the sky, after-parties for pop stars who she's flown with for their concert tours, and even put on full banquets for her guests. It's a job that requires her to be constantly adaptable to whatever situation she's in.

Mary Kalymnou, who has been a flight attendant for 13 years, also shares her experience.

On board she's had guests bring exotic parrots, jewels, more than 20 bags of shopping and even guns. She says she's also had dead bodies.

"Three times in my career I had a deceased person on board -- a coffin in the cargo, made out of gold and expensive wood," she recalls.

"They were three very well-known men, [who] obviously traveled in luxury for the last time in their lives."

She says the job of a VIP flight attendant is demanding and one that "requires a lot of sacrifices."

"It requires a lot of patience, flexibility, and for sure -- high levels of self-esteem," Kalymnou explains. "The clients expect the best, the operators demand the highest so you must be willing and of course be able to offer the best of yourself."

Otherwise, she says, you could be easily replaced.

"Every girl could learn this job ... but only a few will eventually stand out. Being professional is not enough -- you must be unique," she says.

Would you consider being a flight attendant?

(Image Credit: Mary Kalymnou)

For dogs, bees are adorable little creatures that you can eat. And of course, after hours of having fun chasing around these buzzing insects, they eat them, and their faces get swollen after. Lesson learned: don’t eat bees. It’s painful.

Here are some funny pictures of dogs having swollen faces.

Poor dogs.

(Image Credit: The Sun)

“There are no miracles. There is only discipline,” a sign in Danielle Steel’s office reads, and she does just that. With the number of books under her belt, you may think that what happened to her is a miracle. 

Danielle Steel wrote 179 books in a span of 5 decades. Now THAT’s hard work. How does she do it? Where does she get her inspiration?

Let's look at the numbers, shall we? The author has written 179 books, which have been translated into 43 languages. Twenty-two of them have been adapted for television, and two of those adaptations have received Golden Globe nominations. Steel releases seven new novels a year—her latest, Blessing in Disguise, is out this week—and she's at work on five to six new titles at all times. In 1989 Steel was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times best-seller list for the most consecutive weeks of any author—381, to be exact. To pull it off, she works 20 to 22 hours a day. (A couple times a month, when she feels the crunch, she spends a full 24 hours at her desk.)

Steel writes in her home office. Most of the time, that's in Paris, but sometimes she's at her home in San Francisco, where she writes on her 1946 Olympia standard typewriter, which she's nicknamed Olly. "Olly's a big, heavy machine and it's older than I am," Steel tells Glamour. "It has a very smooth flow to it . I have anywhere between 12 to 15 of them that I've bought over the years, but they're not good enough to work on. I keep them for parts in case there's ever a problem, because this is a very endangered species!"

Steel is a creature of habit. She gets to her office—by 8:30 A.M., where she can often be found in her cashmere nightgown. In the morning she'll have one piece of toast and an iced decaf coffee (she gave up full-throated caffeine 25 years ago). After lunch and as the day wears on, she'll nibble on miniature bittersweet chocolate bars. "Dead or alive, rain or shine, I get to my desk and I do my work. Sometimes I'll finish a book in the morning, and by the end of the day, I've started another project," Steel says.

She credits her boundless energy for her productivity and also her drive to push through moments when she's stuck. "I keep working. The more you shy away from the material, the worse it gets. You're better off pushing through and ending up with 30 dead pages you can correct later than just sitting there with nothing," she advises. Her output is also the result of a near superhuman ability to run on little sleep. "I don't get to bed until I'm so tired I could sleep on the floor. If I have four hours, it's really a good night for me," Steel says.

Talk about dedication and passion.

More about Danielle’s story at Glamour.

(Image Credit: Brigette Lacombe)

Hershey’s design of chocolate bars with its logo embossed on the middle has remained unchanged for a century and a quarter. Now, after 125 long years, the chocolate company redesigned the iconic bar, and the design is dedicated to the texting generation of today. The new design removes the logo, and instead replaces it with emojis.

The new emoji chocolate bars, which will be available for a limited time starting this summer, will feature 25 of “the most popular emojis” engraved in the bar’s squares. “In today’s text savvy world, many conversations start (and end) with an emoji,” Hershey’s senior brand manager Kriston Ohm told People. “By adding an emoji design to each pip of chocolate, we hope that parents and kids are inspired to share a chocolate emoji and make a connection with someone new.”

What are your thoughts on this new design?

(Image Credit: Hershey’s)

An unknown heavenly body has been blasting holes in our galaxy. However, this “dark impactor” is unseen. It can be speculated that this is not made of normal matter. Not even our telescopes can detect this unknown entity, but it sure is out there.

"It's a dense bullet of something," said Ana Bonaca, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who discovered evidence for the impactor.

Bonaca's evidence for the dark impactor, which she presented April 15 at the conference of the American Physical Society in Denver, is a series of holes in our galaxy's longest stellar stream, GD-1. Stellar streams are lines of stars moving together across galaxies, often originating in smaller blobs of stars that collided with the galaxy in question. The stars in GD-1, remnants of a "globular cluster" that plunged into the Milky Way a long time ago, are stretched out in a long line across our sky.

Under normal conditions, the stream should be more or less a single line, stretched out by our galaxy's gravity, she said in her presentation. Astronomers would expect a single gap in the stream, at the point where the original globular cluster was before its stars drifted away in two directions. But Bonaca showed that GD-1 has a second gap. And that gap has a ragged edge — a region Bonaca called GD-1's "spur" — as if something huge plunged through the stream not long ago, dragging stars in its wake with its enormous gravity. GD-1, it seems, was hit with that unseen bullet.

"We can't map [the impactor] to any luminous object that we have observed," Bonaca told Live Science. "It's much more massive than a star… Something like a million times the mass of the sun. So there are just no stars of that mass. We can rule that out. And if it were a black hole, it would be a supermassive black hole of the kind we find at the center of our own galaxy."

It's not impossible that there's a second supermassive black hole in our galaxy, Bonaca said. But we'd expect to see some sign of it, like flares or radiation from its accretion disk. And most large galaxies seem to have just a single supermassive black hole at their center.

What do you think is this invisible culprit?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain have successfully rewritten a bacteria’s DNA. Amazingly, the bacteria, Escherichia coli, survived the process, much to the relief of the researchers.

The bacteria are alive, though unusually shaped and reproducing slowly. But their cells operate according to a new set of biological rules, producing familiar proteins with a reconstructed genetic code.

The achievement one day may lead to organisms that produce novel medicines or other valuable molecules, as living factories. These synthetic bacteria also may offer clues as to how the genetic code arose in the early history of life.

“It’s a landmark,” said Tom Ellis, director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the new study. “No one’s done anything like it in terms of size or in terms of number of changes before.”

This new breakthrough might be a way for us to understand how life works.

More details at the New York Times.

(Image Credit: Nano Creative/ Science Source)

2012. Immunologist Jacob Glanville left his prestigious job at Pfizer to start his own company, Distributed Bio, while also being Stanford Academy’s first Ph.D in computational immunology. Five years later, in 2017, Glanville has developed a method of catalyzing the creation of new drugs, and that is by “extracting patients’ antibodies, the blood proteins vertebrates use to counteract the threat of viruses, bacteria, and toxins.” Glanville thinks he might be able to use this technique in cancer research someday.

Meanwhile, unknown to Glanville, a man has been working to be immune to snakes since 2000 — Tim Friede. His way of immunizing is giving himself small dosages of snake venom, and letting his snakes bite him. Fate would later bring the two men to each other.

Back to Glanville in March 2017.

...one day, while sitting with a meditative view at San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden, he took to Google in search of a melanoma survivor. Chasing a thought, he typed in “repeat venom survivor” instead and found Friede.

Friede, who has spent 19 years promoting his quest to help researchers create a universal antivenom, takes up an inordinate amount of space on the internet. Glanville soon stumbled upon a newspaper story that described a YouTube video of Friede’s favorite stunt, the one he says proves his immunity to two of the deadliest snakes in existence. In the video, Friede holds the head of a Papua New Guinea taipan, one of the world’s most potently venomous snakes, against his forearm. Blood is already dripping from fang marks on his right arm, left there moments earlier by a ten-foot-long black mamba. Now the taipan bites. An attack from either snake can stop a person’s heart in a couple of hours. Other symptoms, including drooping eyelids and paralysis of the tongue, develop in seconds. But Friede calmly puts the snake back in its cage and says to the camera, “I love it. I love it. I love it.”

Glanville watched this with the appropriate mix of discomfort and grim fascination. “Jesus f***, this is my guy,” he said. Friede’s immune system, it seemed, was able to neutralize dozens of different toxins. Glanville wondered whether he could use his new antibody-­extraction method on Friede to create a universal antivenom.

Hear more about Glanville and Friede in this amazing narrative at Outside.

(Image Credit: Boris Smokrovic/ Unsplash)

Between 1975 and 2016, the prevalence of worldwide obesity nearly tripled up in number. According to the World Health Organization, in 2016, over 1.9 billion adults (aged 18 and above), were overweight, while more than 650 million of them were obese. 

This begs for a question: what makes us gain weight? We might answer that fatty or sweet or salty foods make us gain weight, but that might not be the case. Researchers from the National Institute of Health conducted a study that suggested that it’s not just salt or sugar or fat that makes us gain weight — it is the quality of food we are eating, if they are processed or not.

The study, conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, is the first randomized, controlled trial to show that eating a diet made up of ultra-processed foods actually drives people to overeat and gain weight compared with a diet made up of whole or minimally processed foods. Study participants on the ultra-processed diet ate an average of 508 calories more per day and ended up gaining an average of 2 pounds over a two-week period. People on the unprocessed diet, meanwhile, ended up losing about 2 pounds on average over a two-week period.

"The difference in weight gain for one [group] and weight loss for the other during these two periods is phenomenal. We haven't seen anything like this," says Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina who has studied the role of ultra-processed foods in the American diet but was not involved in the current research.

Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, agrees that the findings are striking. He says what was so impressive was that the NIH researchers documented this weight gain even though each meal offered on the two different diets contained the same total amount of calories, fats, protein, sugar, salt, carbohydrates and fiber. Study participants were allowed to eat as much or as little as they wanted but ended up eating way more of the ultra-processed meals, even though they didn't rate those meals as being tastier than the unprocessed meals.

"These are landmark findings that the processing of the foods makes a huge difference in how much a person eats," says Mozaffarian. That's important, because the majority of foods now sold in the U.S. — and increasingly, around the globe — are ultra-processed.

And ultra-processed foods include more than just the obvious suspects, like chips, candy, packaged desserts and ready-to-eat meals. The category also includes foods that some consumers might find surprising, including Honey Nut Cheerios and other breakfast cereals, packaged white bread, jarred sauces, yogurt with added fruit, and frozen sausages and other reconstituted meat products. Popkin says ultra-processed foods usually contain a long list of ingredients, many of them made in labs. So, for example, instead of seeing "apples" listed on a food label, you might get additives that re-create the scent of that fruit. These are foods designed to be convenient and low cost and require little preparation.

(Image Credit: Christopher Flowers/ Unsplash)

Shenzhen, China — The 2019 OCT Phoenix Flower Carnival found its venue to be full of air, literally. 

The ‘Air-Mountain’ is a multi-purpose pavilion designed by Aether architects with two concepts in mind: “Micro-ecological geometry” and “multidimensional relationship, multidimensional phenomenon.”

The idea of ‘micro-ecological geometry’ centers on creating a final architectural form based on the environmental demands and requirements of the event. The bubble-like geometry of the pavilion is constructed using air and layers of plastic to create the domed structures, allowing users to bounce on the inflatable surface. At the top of the larger domes, a hole has also been implemented to allow the flow of air.

The concept of a ‘multidimensional relationship’ relates to the idea of architecture having not just one single function. For Air-Mountain, the architect envisions the form not as an independent physical entity, but a fusion of architecture and surroundings, the fusion of different activities, the fusion of different states and behaviours, and the co-relationship between something man-made and nature.

During the event, the interior of the pavilion served as the venue, while the external served as a public leisure space for the visitors.

(Image Credit: Zhang Chao/ Design Boom)

In 1973, Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize for discovering the meaning of the “waggle dance”. The waggle dance is a bee’s way of communicating to other bees that it has found a new nectar source near them. The bee dances to the designated “dance floor”.

Honey bees aren't waggling willy-nilly, though. Certain aspects of the dance communicate details about the nectar source. How long the dance lasts corresponds with the distance to the source, for instance, and the angle of the bee's dancing body relative to the sun indicates the direction of the source.

However, there’s just one problem. Each bee tells of the same nectar source but dances differently. That is what Margaret Couvillon and Roger Schürch, both researchers at Virginia Tech, noticed.

The husband-and-wife duo decided to develop their own "distance-duration calibration system" that factored in "noise," or variation between bees who visit the same source. They discovered that that bee-to-bee variation is so high, it renders the location and sub-species of the bee biologically irrelevant. That made it possible for them to create a universal calibration for decoding waggle dances.

Why would humans want to understand bees, anyway? To start, the universal calibration makes it possible for researchers worldwide to understand where bees are collecting food. This knowledge can inform bee-friendly planting practices.

Understanding waggle dances also makes it possible to use bees as a way to monitor the environment, Couvillon said in a press release.

"The bees can tell us in high spatial and temporal resolution where forage is available and at what times of the year," she said. "So, if you want to build a mall for example, we would know if prime pollinator habitat would be destroyed. And, where bees forage, other species forage as well. Conservation efforts can follow."

More at Curiosity.

(Image Credit: PollyDot/ Pixabay)

Armed with her $5, the girl decides to bribe New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern into launching a study about dragons and some physics. According to Reddit user honeybee6992, his littlest sister, 11-year old girl Victoria, wanted the government of New Zealand to make her telekinetic, and share their knowledge of dragons to her. She also wanted to know if the government have found any dragons, so that she could train them.

“She does love how to train your dragon. She also loves stranger things, that’s where the request for telepathy and telekinesis comes from.

She can’t remember exactly what she said, but from what she told me it was rather strongly implied.” - honeybee6992

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister was not swayed by the bribe, and kindly rejected the offer, saying in a letter “that they are not currently doing any work in either of these areas” and therefore is returning Victoria’s bribe money.

(Image Credit: Reddit/ NPR)

To be able to move with precision, one must have a good sense of his surroundings and keep an eye for the ceiling, the walls, and other barriers present. Thankfully, most of us have good depth perception and spatial awareness. But did you ever wonder which part of our brains process this type of information to keep us from bumping into things? Researchers from Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and Aalto University in Finland, set to find out.

"Vision gives us an almost instant sense where we are in space, and in particular of the geometry of the surfaces -- the ground, the walls -- which constrain our movement. It feels effortless, but it requires the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions," said Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute and the paper's senior author. "How neurons work together to give us this sense of our surroundings has remained mysterious. With this study, we are a step closer to solving that puzzle."

To figure out how the brain perceives the geometry of its surroundings, the research team asked volunteers to look at images of different three-dimensional scenes. An image might depict a typical room, with three walls, a ceiling and a floor. The researchers then systematically changed the scene: by removing the wall, for instance, or the ceiling. Simultaneously, they monitored participants' brain activity through a combination of two cutting-edge brain-imaging technologies at Aalto's neuroimaging facilities in Finland.

"By doing this repeatedly for each participant as we methodically altered the images, we could piece together how their brains encoded each scene," Linda Henriksson, PhD, the paper's first author and a lecturer in neuroscience and biomedical engineering at Aalto University.

Our visual system is organized into a hierarchy of stages. The first stage actually lies outside brain, in the retina, which can detect simple visual features. Subsequent stages in the brain have the power to detect more complex shapes. By processing visual signals through multiple stages -- and by repeated communications between the stages -- the brain forms a complete picture of the world, with all its colors, shapes and textures.

In the cortex, visual signals are first analyzed in an area called the primary visual cortex. They are then passed to several higher-level cortical areas for further analyses. The occipital place area (OPA), an intermediate-level stage of cortical processing, proved particularly interesting in the brain scans of the participants.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)