Most of us live in noisy places. All day long, we’re surrounded by noise wherever we are may it be in the office, the streets, or even our own homes. As I write these sentences, I can hear a car beeping, and I can hear my air condition vibrate. Have you ever been so irritated to the sounds surrounding you that you just want to cover your ears for everything to be quiet? Perhaps this is the place for you — the quietest chamber so quiet it is in negative decibels. A place so quiet where you can hear your own heart, lungs, and stomach. A word of warning, though: this place may drive you crazy.
Stuart Dahlquist never expected that he’d have crow friends who would follow him along as he takes his walks. He never thought he would be friends with the black birds.
“This particular family of crows has been hanging around our house I'd guess about four years,” Dahlquist told The Dodo. “They had nested in a large Douglas fir in the front yard and we could hear the babies when the adults fed them.”
Dahlquist loved to listen to the excited chirping of the baby crows. But, one day he went outside and immediately realized something was wrong. Both chicks had fallen from their nest, and their parents were unable to help them.
“[The chicks] were almost able to fly, but instead were just running around the yard — their parents squawking,” Dahlquist said. “I caught the two of them and got them into a tree. I put some food and water underneath them in case they fell again.”
What a thoughtful guy.
The crows would remember Dahlquist after what he did (crows can remember faces, by the way).
See more about Stuart’s friendship about the crows and the crows’ gift to him at The Dodo.
Marion Stokes has been recording bits of television shows ranging from sitcoms, news reports, and documentaries non-stop for over 30 years, from 1975 to her death at 2012. In 1975, she got a Betamax tape recorder, and that’s where it all began.
From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, “she hit record and she never stopped,” said her son Michael Metelits in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a newly released documentary about his mother and the archival project that became her life’s work.
As of today, the 71,000 VHS and Betamax cassettes sit in boxes of the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California pending for digitization.
The most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. In a nutshell, Alzheimer’s is a disease where you forget things, until it comes to a point where you even forget to breathe (loss of bodily functions). Oftentimes, this disease is interchanged with the general term dementia.
“Not everything that looks like Alzheimer’s disease is Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Julie Schneider, a neuropathologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. And among all the known dementias, this newly identified kind “is the most striking mimic of Alzheimer’s,” she added.
Find out more on this new type of A̶l̶z̶h̶e̶i̶m̶e̶r̶'̶s̶ I meant dementia, on AP News.
(Image Credit: Mark Cornelison/ University of Kentucky via AP)
Most of us, if not all of us, can’t rid ourselves of plastic use. Yearly, we humans produce over 300 million tons of plastic (such as plastic bottles, plastic bags, etc.). Approximately 50% of this (150 million tons) is single-use plastic, which are plastic products that are discarded after use. Also, over 8 million tons of plastic are thrown to our oceans yearly. This phenomenon severely affects the environment. (Also, plastic takes 1,000 years to decompose).
One of the solutions offered to us are biodegradable bags which usually take 3 to 6 months to decompose. However, this may not be the case.
...new research from the University of Plymouth found that after three years in the dirt or water, so-called “biodegradable” bags were still in relatively good shape. Many were still perfectly functional bags that had lost little of their material or tensile strength, still able to carry five pounds of groceries. And even “compostable” samples didn’t always disappear without a trace. While more research is needed, the scientists concluded that biodegradable bags may not disappear from the environment much, if any, faster than traditional plastic ones.
Living in the deep sea some 4500 meters deep would prove to be difficult for amphipods — tiny shrimplike crustaceans found in most aquatic ecosystems. We know that the deeper the water, the higher the pressure. Add to that low temperatures in the ocean deep, and high acidity of the waters. This would mean trouble for the tiny creatures, as these factors cause “the calcium carbonate in their exoskeletons to dissolve, making them vulnerable to pressure and predators”. However, this is not the case for the Hirondellea gigas. This one species found a way to survive in the harsh conditions of the deep sea. Their solution? Making aluminum suits of armor.
Researchers first analyzed H. gigas specimens found at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, more than 10,000 meters below the surface of the ocean. They found that this extreme amphipod constructs a personal suit of armor—a layer of aluminum hydroxide gel covering the surface of its exoskeleton. But aluminum isn’t abundant in ocean water, making it hard to source as a building material. It is, however, abundant in ocean sediment.
With the world that we have right now, I can agree that books are no longer needed by people. Today, kids now use tablets in schools to study their lessons, instead of books. Universities strive for a paperless education. Exams are now done in front of a computer or online at home. Want to read a book? Go download it in digital format on the Internet.
Buying a book is now considered a luxury — a fashionable accessory.
Last month, when supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid were each seen carrying novels, the New York Post deemed literature the “hot new accessory.” Carry a book. Complete your look. Although some resisted this formulation and took to social media to mock the characterization of the model off-duty literary style, noting that books are not an accessory and that they are definitely not new, the newspaper did have a point.
Increasingly, reading old-school printed texts isn’t necessary. You can download any book onto a Kindle and carry a whole library with you anywhere. But books offer a sensuous pleasure, lovely covers, the satisfying sensation of flipping pages, the ability to measure one’s progress, to underline and annotate and fold paper, making these objects entirely personal. And it’s precisely because there are more efficient modes of consuming literature that the dated way is gaining appreciation.
The fire that broke out of Notre Dame, which had an explicit fire-safety procedure, and the crash of two Boeing 737 aircrafts, which is the most modern aircraft of all… Why did these accidents happen? Is it possible that by making things better, we only make them worse? This is what some experts suggest. The more we modernize the systems, the more we complicate things. Thus, accidents are more likely to happen. Kind of like entropy. The more variables, the more unpredictable.
...Now something of a cult classic, Normal Accidents made a case for the obvious: Accidents happen. What he meant is that they must happen. Worse, according to Perrow, a humbling cautionary tale lurks in complicated systems: Our very attempts to stave off disaster by introducing safety systems ultimately increase the overall complexity of the systems, ensuring that some unpredictable outcome will rear its ugly head no matter what. Complicated human-machine systems might surprise us with outcomes more favorable than we have any reason to expect. They also might shock us with catastrophe.
Obesity and Type 2 diabetes cases have been growing in number worldwide within the past 3 decades. This is largely caused by overindulging in high-calorie foods such as eggs, pasta, chocolate, and cheese. Overeating impairs blood sugar control and insular levels. With these things in mind, it can be said that overeating is bad. However, overeating is not bad in itself. It is bad when overeating is done for long periods of time, as this research paper suggests.
Although the amount of visceral fat that surrounds internal organs increased substantially, short-term overeating did not have a significant effect on the men's weight or fat mass. In addition, fasting levels of blood sugar and C-peptide--an amino acid the body releases in response to increased production of insulin--did not change. This finding was surprising because fasting levels of endogenous glucose--new glucose the body produces in addition to what it has already stored for future use--increased during the short-term trial.
Want to make an icosahedron pie (plane figure with 20 equilateral triangle faces)? It’s a pie made up of 20 pies stuck together. Talk about pie-ception. This person named turkey tek from Instructable gave us instructions on how to make one. However, you must be precise in the measurements and angles, and it would take a lot of time, so you must be patient. Aside from the pie itself, you’ll be needing metal sheets and magnets.
Most of us work from Monday to Friday. At weekends, we get much rest that our bodies deserve in order to make up for the rest we did not get on the weekdays when we still work. And then comes Monday again — the day that most of us dread. And then we go back to this tiresome cycle, working again from Monday to Friday, and then getting rest or having fun on the weekends.
Oftentimes, when we work, we get tired at the middle of the week, and we get less productive and we perform not-so-well. We also neglect other duties aside from our job duties as we work on weekdays. An Australian company, tries to solve this problem, by dividing the whole week into two mini-weeks. Would you work in a company that gives you a 5-day pay for 4 days work? I will absolutely say yes to that.
A mid-week break lets staff go to the gym, get on top of house work, look after young children, schedule appointments, work on their start-up or just watch Netflix. Sometimes, they’ll catch up on work. Sick days are down, staff satisfaction is up... “You get that Monday feeling a couple of times a week.”
You might ask, “Why Wednesday?”
Professor Jarrod Haar isn’t surprised that dropping Wednesday has proven so successful for Versa. As professor of human resource management at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, as part of his own research Haar has interviewed employees on rotating four-day weeks, and found they most enjoyed the Wednesdays off.
For employers, shutting down mid-week gives “more bang for your buck”. he says. “The Wednesday break means you return to Thursday fresh, and this is when people feel most productive.”
Takumi, a Japanese illustrator who previously created the Ghibli Theme Park conceptual art, now gives us some stunning artworks — the Avengers characters rendered in Ukiyo-e, a genre of Japanese art which became popular from the 17th century to the 19th century.
Featured in his artwork are Captain Marvel, Captain America, Thanos, Thor, Ant-Man, and many more.
Envisioning an ideal utopia of not just a flourishing Earth and its people, but also a prosperous “God-free Great Beyond”, the artists of the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s drew these inspiring posters.
The Salt Cathedral of Colombia is one amazing spectacle. It is located about 600 feet underground in what was once a salt mine in Zipaquirá, just outside Bogotá, the capital of Colombia.
At the bottom, the temple opens up to reveal three naves representing the birth, life and death of Christ. There is a basilica dome, chandeliers and an enormous, floor-to-ceiling cross illuminated with purple lights. The pews are jammed with the faithful and when a choir breaks into song ahead of Mass, the sound envelops the chamber.
Despite not being part of the 7 Wonders of the World, the people of Colombia still love their own masterpiece, with the Congress calling the Salt Cathedral “The First Wonder of Colombia.”
Over half of the respondents from the U.S — approximately 55% — have reported feelings of high stress the day before the Gallup’s annual survey was conducted. According to Gallup’s press release, 45 percent of the respondents worry much of the day, while 22 percent get angry multiple times a day.
Americans’ stress levels were significantly higher than the global average of 35 percent, leaving the U.S. tied for fourth (alongside Albania, Iran and Sri Lanka) in Gallup’s ranking of the world’s most stressed populations. Greece topped the list at 59 percent, while the Philippines and Tanzania finished in second and third with 58 and 57 percent, respectively.
In terms of worry, the U.S.’ 45 percent was ahead of the global average of 39 percent. Comparatively, 63 percent of the world’s most worried population, Mozambique, reported strong feelings of worry the day prior.
Despite these reports of high levels of negative emotion, Americans stated as well that they experience positive experiences more than the global average.
