It is said that if you want to get your money’s worth for the video game that you bought, you have to, at the very least, finish the game. But for Kellen Beck, it’s okay to not finish a game. Beck from Mashable writes:

Even if you like it, even if you really want to finish it, it’s OK that you haven’t. It doesn’t make you a failure.

Video games are meant to be entertainment. If a game doesn’t suit your mood, drop it and try again another time. If a game is too difficult, give it a rest for a week, a month, or even a year. If a game bores you, drop it forever.

If you finish one, great! If you get halfway through, or even 90 percent of the way there and stop, also great! Chance are you paid for it, and it’s your choice to do whatever you want with it.

And to that sentiment, I agree. But how about you?

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There has been much debate whether instant ramen is healthy or not. But it doesn’t matter which side you are on in that debate when it comes to this ramen; you’ll still agree that this particular one is healthy. A bowl of this Kimchi Ramen by Meisei has 40 billion lactic acid bacteria, which is the equivalent amount of bacteria to 40 cups of yogurt, or a bottle of Yakult 400. One of the staff from SoraNews 24, P.K Sanjun, decided to try this ramen.

P.K. was intrigued at what such a bacteria-ridden ramen might taste like, so he happily paid the 230 yen (US$2.20) price of admission and started boiling some water. The contents were underwhelmingly similar to a regular instant noodle kit with dried noodles, toppings, and sauces. No pulsating packages of 40 billion bacteria, or anything to even suggest such.

Even while eating, there was nothing outstandingly different about this ramen. It was tasty, but well in the neighborhood of other instant ramens. P.K. had thought that for sure the lactic acid bacteria would have given it a milkier taste or texture, but nothing out of the ordinary could be detected.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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Lockdowns are still implemented in various places across the world. If you’re someone who lives in one of those places, then it probably means that you've had plenty of time indoors these past months, and this probably means that you’re not getting the same amount of Vitamin D that your body makes when you get sunlight.

Not only is this a problem because a Vitamin D deficiency can lead to bone deformities such as rickets in children, and bone pain caused by a condition called osteomalacia in adults, according to the NHS… 

With that in mind, should you begin to take vitamin D supplements? Public Health England (PHE) would say yes.

Public Health England (PHE) has issued guidance in which it encouraged the public to consider taking vitamin D supplements. It says: “It's important to take vitamin D as you may have been indoors more than usual this year. "

Learn more about Vitamin D and how essential it is to the body over at Independent.

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A rare whale skeleton was discovered earlier this month some 12 kilometers (about 7.46 miles) from the coast just to the west of Bangkok. The skeleton, which is 12 meters (about 39.4 feet) long, is believed to be about 3,000-5,000 years old. Surprisingly, the whale skeleton is almost perfectly preserved.

Experts hope the find might provide "a window into the past," especially for research on sea levels and biodiversity.

The partially fossilised bones are "a rare find," mammal researcher Marcus Chua of the National University of Singapore told the BBC.

"There are few whale subfossils in Asia," he said, and even fewer ones are "in such good condition".

Pictures shared by Thailand's environment minister Varawut Silpa-archa show the bones apparently almost entirely intact.

[...]

Mr Chua says the discovery will allow researchers to find out more about the particular species in the past, whether there were any differences compared to today's Bryde's whales.

Cool!

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Meet Shiloh. Of all the staff that work on the Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, Shiloh probably has the most tiresome job. As a “Justice Volunteer”, Shiloh’s job is to greet, as well as check up on everyone. In return for doing his wonderful job, Shiloh gets “free treats for life, room & board, meal plan, grooming, and unlimited cuddles and smiles from health workers” at the hospital.

“It’s SO good for mental health of patients & staff. It’s a wonder more hospitals don’t have them,” a user commented. “Whatever he’s being paid, it isn’t nearly enough. That is some seriously valuable work!” another user added. “12/10 would promote immediately,” another one commented.

Now that’s a really tough job.

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Cleveland — Brendan Ring did not expect that the man who just ordered a beer, which cost only $7.02, would give a tip of $3,000. Thinking that there was a mistake, Ring, the owner of the restaurant, ran after the man.

“I ran after him and he said no mistake we will see you when you reopen!”

Ring said the man wished him well and told him to share the tip with the four employees who were working brunch service.

Awesome.

(Image Credit: Brendan Ring/ Facebook)

When we go to a high altitude, have a tough workout, or hold our breath, we feel that we’re running out of oxygen. But what goes on inside our body when we experience this feeling? This recent study in the European Journal of Applied Psychology holds some answers to the question.

The study is very straightforward, taking measurements of heart rate and oxygen levels while volunteers hold their breath, and it offers a revealing picture of how the body copes with a shortage of oxygen—and what can go wrong.

The research was performed at Ghent University in Belgium, by Janne Bouten, Jan Bourgois, and Jan Boone… They asked 31 volunteers (17 men, 14, women) to hold their breath for as long as possible three times in a row, with two minutes break each time. Typically people get better and better in repeated breath holds, in part because their spleens are squeezing more oxygen-carrying red blood cells into circulation. During the third and final breath hold, they took continuous measurements of parameters including heart rate, oxygen levels in the brain, and oxygen levels in the leg muscles.

Humans, like other mammals, have a “diving response” that kicks in when you hold your breath, with the goal of making sure your brain always has enough oxygen. As the researchers point out, if your circulation stops abruptly, you’ll be unconscious within 30 seconds and suffer irreversible damage within two to ten minutes. The diving response is enhanced if your face is submerged in water, but it happens even on dry land. Your heart rate drops, and the blood vessels leading to non-essential parts of the body like your leg muscles constrict in order to redirect crucial blood (and oxygen) to the brain.

Learn more about this study over at Outside Online.

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With this superconducting camera developed by scientists and engineers from the United States and Japan, scientists will now be able to directly image exoplanets and discs around bright stars. This superconducting camera is said to have a pixel count of 20,440, which makes it the world’s largest superconducting camera by that standard.

It is the first permanently deployed superconducting camera that operates in the optical and near-infrared spectrum, and it runs at a brisk 90 millikelvin – a touch over absolute zero.

Now part of the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii the MKID Exoplanet Camera is so named because it uses Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors, which help overcome problems of scattered light associated with even the best adaptive optics systems.

MKIDs also can determine the energy of each photon that hits the detector – allowing scientists to determine a planet’s brightness – and they are fast, reading out data thousands of times per second.

There’s still work to be done, notably on the software and algorithms, but the developers, led by the University of California Santa Barbara, are confident of a bright future. The full story to date is told in a paper to be published in Publications of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific.

Cool!

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In 1784, just two years after the bald eagle became the symbol in the Great Seal of the United States, founding father Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter. In the letter, he complained about the decision, and said that the turkey would have been the better choice. He reasons that the eagle is a scavenger, and is too lazy to find food for itself. The turkey, on the other hand, is “a bird of courage,” according to Franklin. Surprisingly, his claims about the bald eagle and the turkey is backed up with science.

More about this over at Discover Magazine.

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It has been over three decades since the 1980s, ever since scientists agreed that most of the matter in the known universe is invisible, and that “dark matter” is the one responsible for gravitationally shaping the cosmos. It has also been over three decades since the search for this dark matter began.

They first set out in pursuit of a heavy, sluggish form of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP — the early favorite candidate for the cosmos’s missing matter because it could solve another, unrelated puzzle in particle physics. Over the decades, teams of physicists set up ever larger targets, in the form of huge crystals and multi-ton vats of exotic liquids, hoping to catch the rare jiggle of an atom when a WIMP banged into it.

But these detectors have stayed quiet, and physicists are increasingly contemplating a broader spectrum of possibilities. On the heavy end, they say the universe’s invisible matter could clump into black holes as heavy as stars. At the other extreme, dark matter could spread out in a fine mist of particles thousands of trillions of trillions of times lighter than electrons.

As the years passed by, new hypotheses were made, and with new hypotheses also came new methods. Quanta Magazine documents the many types of experiments and hypotheses that were made in search for the elusive dark matter. Read more about the story over at the site.

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When you hear the word “science genius”, the first names that could come into your mind are the most popular names, like Newton, Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein. Buried beneath these popular science geniuses, however, are the names of other geniuses that have been forgotten by most of us. Tom Siegfried lists ten names of unsung geniuses over at Nautilus. Why don’t you check them out? For now, here’s Brahmagupta, one of the unsung geniuses on the list.

A prominent astronomer, Brahmagupta wrote an extensive treatise covering such topics as the motions of the planets, eclipses, and the phases of the moon. But his genius emerged most prominently in mathematics. He introduced the idea of zero as a number like any other and discussed how to calculate with it. He was also the first to explain negative numbers, a concept thought by the Greeks to be “absurd.” Brahmagupta pointed out that multiplying two negative numbers (he called them “debts”) produced a positive number (in his terminology, a “fortune”).

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Carla Rhodes knew something was up when she saw the patch of dust forming in her backyard. Curious to see what was going on, the wildlife photographer decided to set up a trail camera, and, lo and behold, her camera captured a wild female turkey which stopped by her backyard every afternoon to treat itself with a nice dust bath.

Soon after, Rhodes set up a camouflaged hunting blind in her driveway. Armed with her camera and hoping to snap a photograph of the wild turkey in action, Rhodes sat for hours in silence. “One day, I was in there for four hours, and I wouldn't leave because I would think, when I leave, she's going to show up,” says Rhodes.

“My husband would come outside while I was in the blind,” says Rhodes, “and I would call him from my cell phone and be like, “Get back inside—she might show up, you might scare her!”

Finally, the turkey arrived at the patch of dust, and began her ritual of wriggling and frantically flapping in the dirt, tossing clouds of dust into the air around her. Rhodes was thrilled—she’d finally captured the turkey dust bathing, but she moved too quickly and spooked the bird. The next time the turkey showed up, Rhodes was more cautious and snapped more shots.

For a few weeks, with an enthusiastic spirit, Rhodes observed and documented the female turkey.

Read about her experience, and see some of the photos she took, over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: Carla Rhodes/ Smithsonian Magazine)

Found in the village of Rushton in Northhamptonshire, England, is the Rushton Triangular Lodge. This building was constructed between 1593 and 1597, and was designed by Sir Thomas Tresham, as a way of expressing his faith.

The number three, symbolizing the Holy Trinity, is apparent everywhere, from the triangular shape to the use of the trefoil window designs, to the number of floors, the various dimensions and symbolic letters, dates, and numbers which are all multiples of three.

Thomas Tresham, grand prior of the order of St. John in England, was the eldest son of John Tresham of Rushton. The family owned large estates in Rushton and Lyveden which he inherited from his grandfather at the age of fifteen, establishing him as a member of the Catholic elite. He served as sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1573 and was knighted at the Queen's Royal Progress at Kenilworth in 1575. Tresham’s connection with Jesuits and his recusancy made [him] a threat to Protestants and he was frequently imprisoned and fined for his religious affiliation. It was during his prolonged captivity that Sir Thomas formulated the idea of making a covert declaration of his faith.

On his release in 1593, Tresham began designing the triangular lodge as something of a shrine dedicated to his long suffering. 

Learn more about the building over at Amusing Planet.

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If you ever want to go dinosaur hunting, the last place you would want to go to is Ireland. Due to its weird geology, the rock layers are only made up of material that dates either before or after dinosaurs existed. This means that finding dinosaur fossils or remains in this place is extremely rare. But it doesn’t mean that you can't find one.

Just recently, a research team led by Dr. Mike Simms have confirmed two bone fragments, which were discovered by a schoolteacher named Roger Byrne, to belong to two different dinosaurs. These are the only dinosaur remains to be found in Ireland.

… the two bone fragments were found to belong to two different individuals.

"This is a hugely significant discovery," says Simms. "The great rarity of such fossils here is because most of Ireland's rocks are the wrong age for dinosaurs, either too old or too young, making it nearly impossible to confirm dinosaurs existed on these shores. The two dinosaur fossils that Roger Byrne found were perhaps swept out to sea, alive or dead, sinking to the Jurassic seabed where they were buried and fossilized."

More details about this story over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: University of Portsmouth/ New Atlas)

One of the main rules in naming a shop or a company is that the name should be easy to remember, and one way to do just that is by settling with puns. That is a tried-and-tested method. The result are shop names that would give you a chuckle.

Check out some of these punny shop names over at Bored Panda.

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