Echo the Samoyed dog knows the importance of having balance between work and play, so when he saw that his human was still working, he gently took the pen away from her hand to remind her that it’s time to take a break and play with him.

What a thoughtful doggo.

Via Dogs Addict

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Llamas are known for very soft wool, but they can offer much more than that. They have amazing antibodies that, according to a 2018 study made by scientists from the United States, could be key towards making a universal flu vaccine. But that’s not all that their antibodies can offer.

Now, new research published in the journal Nature Methods has created a synthetic antibody inspired by llamas to stop the human body from destroying imperfect, but still functional proteins. The novel technology could be used to treat several conditions including cystic fibrosis, cancer and epilepsy.

Many genetic diseases result in mutated proteins being churned out by our cells, and while some of these are still able to carry out their function our bodies will ultimately destroy them. The imperfect proteins are marked by our cell’s quality control system with a peptide called ubiquitin. While this is a necessary cell function, preventing these proteins from being destroyed can sometimes be beneficial as while they are imperfect some are still capable of doing their job. Deubiquitinase enzymes (DUBs) can be employed to remove the “for destruction” tags but allowing them to remove tags from all imperfect proteins would be harmful and so such therapies need to be targeted.

Here is where our magical llama antibodies come into play, as study authors Henry Colecraft and his student, Scott Kanner, identified a means of targeting DUBs using nanobodies. Nanobodies are tiny antibodies which are produced by llamas, camels and alpacas, and they bind with their targets with uniquely reliable specificity. They are used in place of antibodies because antibodies’ function changes when acting inside cells, unlike nanobodies.

Learn more about this study over at IFL Science.

Cool! 

(Image Credit: Pezibear/ Pixabay)

The Ancestral Puebloans have lived for hundreds of years in what is now western New Mexico — a treacherous and arid landscape. For a time, this place experienced devastating droughts, and these droughts have affected them. But thanks to their creativity and ingenuity, the Ancestral Puebloans survived these droughts. How? By melting ancient ice found deep in the caves.

Exploring an ice-laden lava tube of the El Malpais National Monument and using precisely radiocarbon- dated charcoal found preserved deep in an ice deposit in a lava tube, USF geosciences Professor Bogdan Onac and his team discovered that Ancestral Puebloans survived devastating droughts by traveling deep into the caves to melt ancient ice as a water resource.

Dating back as far as AD 150 to 950, the water gatherers left behind charred material in the cave indicating they started small fires to melt the ice to collect as drinking water or perhaps for religious rituals. Working in collaboration with colleagues from the National Park Service, the University of Minnesota and a research institute from Romania, the team published its discovery in Scientific Reports.

The droughts are believed to have influenced settlement and subsistence strategies, agricultural intensification, demographic trends and migration of the complex Ancestral Puebloan societies that once inhabited the American Southwest. Researchers claim the discovery from ice deposits presents "unambiguous evidence" of five drought events that impacted Ancestral Puebloan society during those centuries.

Learn more about this over at ScienceDaily.

Now that’s persistence.

(Image Credit: Lorax/ Wikimedia Commons)

How did planets in the galaxies form? Researchers from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder are diving deep to the mystery of how planets like ours were formed by examining the dust that surrounds the Sun.

The pursuit comes by way of NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a pioneering mission that has taken scientists closer to Earth's home star than any spacecraft to date. Over two years, the probe has circled the sun six times, hitting maximum speeds of roughly 290,000 miles per hour.

In the process, the Parker team has learned a lot about the microscopic grains of dust that lie just beyond the sun's atmosphere, said David Malaspina, a space plasma physicist at LASP. In new research, for example, he and his colleagues discovered that the densities of these bits of rock and ice seem to vary wildly over the span of months--not something scientists were expecting.

[...]

"By learning how our star processes dust, we can extrapolate that to other solar systems to learn more about planet formation and how a cloud of dust becomes a solar system," he said.

Learn more about this over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: NASA/SDO (AIA) / Wikimedia Commons)

Man-made stuff is now likely to be officially heavier than the mass of the natural world. A new research published in Nature, which has detailed the “crossover point” between man-made mass and living biomass, seems to suggest this. Considering the fact that we today are largely dependent on manufactured materials, we know that it is inevitable that we would soon outweigh nature. Still, it is still surprising at how it happened so soon.

The weight of roads, buildings and other constructed or manufactured materials is doubling roughly every 20 years, and authors of the research said it currently weighed 1.1 teratonnes (1.1 trillion tonnes).

As mankind has ramped up its insatiable consumption of natural resources, the weight of living biomass—trees, plants and animals—has halved since the agricultural revolution to stand at just 1 teratonne currently, the study found.

Estimating changes in global biomass and manmade mass since 1990, the research showed that the mass of human-produced objects stood at just three percent of the weight of biomass at the start of the 20th century.

But since the post-World War II global production boom, manufacturing has surged to the extent that humans now produce the equivalent of the weight of every person on Earth every week on average.

Learn more about this over at PHYS.org.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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With the millions of songs that are published in the world, it has become difficult for composers to create something new, with a unique melody, chord progression, and melody.

(Image Credit: Daniel Thrasher/ YouTube)

“How rare is it?” you ask? It’s a 1 in 500,000 chance. Or if you want it in percentage, it’s 0.00002% chance of getting, and that’s why it’s understandable that Twitch streamer AjentVee freaked out when she found the Pokemon she’s been tracking down for the past month. The Pokemon gods have blessed her.

AjentVee has spent the last month or so tracking down a “shiny” Sinistea in Pokémon Sword and Shield as part of her overall goal to catch an entire Pokédex’s worth of these elusive, alternatively colored pocket monsters. But that’s not all: She also wanted her Sinistea to be “authentic,” which means that it’s one of the select few members of its species with a rare mark on the bottom of its teacup.

This means that every time AjentVee encountered a Sinistea, there was a one in 500,000 chance it would be both “shiny” and “authentic.” By her own estimation, it only took 4,000 attempts, so I’d say she got off lucky! Not only that, but the Sinistea that ended up being authentic was the first shiny she encountered that day, and at just 11 minutes into her stream at that.

Epic!

(Image Credit: AjentVee/ Kotaku)

When donkeys and horses mate, they produce beings called mules — strong four-legged creatures that ate little. Seeing that these mules would be a great asset for young America’s farms, George Washington longed to have donkeys and have them mate with the horses.

But Washington's desire to breed mules hit a stumbling block. America didn't have any good male donkeys (or "jacks," as he called them). The best jacks were in Spain, who wouldn't export them. Washington spent years negotiating with diplomats to change this, and finally, the king agreed [to] ship a couple to him.

This is just one of the anecdotes that Cracked.com has documented at their site. Check out the other anecdotes, which star Henry VIII, Abraham Lincoln, Peter the Great, and Teddy Roosevelt, over at the site.

(Image Credit: Marzena7/ Pixabay)

How is the brain able to recall events in a chronological order? Two studies from UT Southwestern shed light on this question. The findings from these studies could potentially provide a basis for new treatments against memory loss.

Almost ten years ago, a certain group of neurons were discovered in rats. Aptly called “time cells”, these neurons help in recording the time of events, allowing the brain to correctly arrange the events in an episodic memory.

Located in the brain's hippocampus, these cells show a characteristic activity pattern while the animals are encoding and recalling events, explains Bradley Lega, M.D., associate professor of neurological surgery at UTSW and senior author of the PNAS study. By firing in a reproducible sequence, they allow the brain to organize when events happen, Lega says. The timing of their firing is controlled by 5 Hz brain waves, called theta oscillations, in a process known as precession.

Lega investigated whether humans also have time cells by using a memory task that makes strong demands on time-related information.

Learn more about these studies over at MedicalXpress.

(Image Credit: Melissa Logies/ MedicalXpress)

It seems that the robot vacuum cleaners that you have at your home not only can pick up the dust and dirt in your home. It can also pick up your private conversations. Computer scientists from NUS have demonstrated this capability through their work which was presented last month at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2020).

The novel method, called LidarPhone, repurposes the Lidar sensor that a robot vacuum cleaner normally uses for navigating around a home into a laser-based microphone to eavesdrop on private conversations.

[...]

The core of the LidarPhone attack method is the Lidar sensor, a device which fires out an invisible scanning laser, and creates a map of its surroundings. By reflecting lasers off common objects such as a dustbin or a takeaway bag located near a person's computer speaker or television soundbar, the attacker could obtain information about the original sound that made the objects' surfaces vibrate. Using applied signal processing and deep learning algorithms, speech could be recovered from the audio data, and sensitive information could potentially be obtained.

Learn more about this over at TechXplore.

Scary.

(Image Credit: National University of Singapore/ TechXplore)

Picture-taking will always be a part of any event in any season, so it would be great if you know some tricks that will help you take better photos. And if you’re someone who plans on improving your photography skills this holiday season, then you might consider attending the Nikon School Online classes. Until December 31, Nikon is offering their classes at the best price: free!

… you can stream all 11 of their photography courses just by signing up with your email.

They’ve added a class on how to take better holiday photos to their original lineup of 10—which also features courses on the fundamentals of photography as well as others focused on creating video content, landscape photography, portraiture, macro photography, and even how to photograph children and pets. Each one is taught by industry professionals and offers practical tips, tools, and lessons that will have you taking better shots in no time.

“The holidays are for making memories, and Nikon is meant for capturing them,” says the company. “Come by for ideas, insider tips, and the technical advice to help you get your best holiday shots ever—the more the merrier!”

You can stream all Nikon School Online classes on the company's website.

Nice!

(Image Credit: PIRO4D/ Pixabay)

This is the vegan dog leash made by Project Blu, a pet accessory business based in Wales. This leash, unlike other leash, is made from apple skins with an organic polymer. But don’t think that this dog leash is extremely weak just because it’s made of fruit, as this leash is stronger than the ones made of leather. Project Blu has other environment-friendly products aside from the leash, such as collars, harnesses, and even poop-bag handlers.

Through their Kickstarter campaign, they are offering, for a limited time, special early-bird prices available now…

[...]

And, with every sale made, the company plants a tree in partnership with Eden Reforestation Projects to help combat deforestation.

On a mission to remove pollution from the pet industry, Project Blu wants to revolutionize the pet product market offering products that are sustainable, affordable, and built to last.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Project Blu/ Good News Network)

Computerized axial tomography scan, better known as CAT scan, is an imaging technique which combines data from several X-ray scans taken from different angles in order to produce a detailed image of structures inside the body. And then there’s the cat scan, where you put a cat on a scanner and, well, scan it. We do the former for medical purposes, and the latter to alleviate boredom, and possibly for research purposes.

If you have a scanner and a cat at home, and if you have nothing worthwhile to do, then try scanning your cat, just like these people did. Check out the pictures of these cat scans over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

Because why not? Ugly sweaters are still sweaters that will keep you warm this winter season. And if I have to choose between a generic sweater and an ugly sweater, I’ll choose the latter for the sake of nostalgia. And I know I’m not alone when I’m saying this; I know you want an ugly sweater by Microsoft, too.

Available in MS Paint, Windows 95, and Windows XP varieties, the sweaters are pre-orderable in sizes small – XXXL for $70, with a portion of each sale being donated to Girls Who Code, a non-profit dedicated to closing the gender gap in tech. Unfortunately, the sweaters won’t ship until January 29th, 2021...

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Technabob)

Professional people cooking food is really a fun thing to watch, and I know that I’m not the only one who enjoys watching these stuff.

Watch this professional chef from Shunraku Kaiten Sushi Restaurant in Hokkaido, Japan break the eggs, mix the ingredients, and then put the oil in the pan (and then drain it), as he cooks a Dashimaki Tamago (rolled omelette). You might be able to pick up a skill or two as you watch it.

Via Laughing Squid

(Image Credit: KaitenSushiTV/ YouTube)