Whatever it is that’s inside this thing, I’m sure that it is something that we are not yet ready to see. But for now, we can only guess.

What do you think is in there?

Image via Engrish.com

About 3 years ago, Arnie Lloyd of Elmsdale bought a 1948 Ford F1 car from a family. Aside from the car, he also bought some boxes of truck parts from the same family.

Recently, as he was going through one of the boxes, Lloyd found a hand-written letter by a Canadian soldier named Arnold Weisner. The letter, which was dated Nov. 4, 1944, was addressed to one Clark Armstrong of Beechville.

Lloyd said he found numerous other items bearing Armstrong's name in the box, including love letters, old pay stubs and a driver's license from the early 1900s.

Lloyd currently plans on reuniting the items with Weisner’s family.

"If a grandson or granddaughter gets to read that letter, they get a piece of history that maybe their father or grandfather didn't get a chance to talk about," Lloyd told CTV News.

But according to the curator for the Army Museum Halifax Citadel, Ken Hynes, Lloyd might find it difficult to find the Canadian soldier’s official records, as the Library and Archives Canada haven’t released the records to the public, as some veterans are still alive to this day. Lloyd, however, is determined to search for Weisner’s relatives.

I wonder how the letters ended up in the box of truck parts.

What do you think?

(Image Credit: Arnie Lloyd/ Facebook)

After finding inspiration in nature, engineers at UNSW Sydney have developed this soft fabric robotic gripper that can grip and pick up objects without breaking them, similar to how an elephant’s trunk behaves. The engineers state that this technology could be applied in sectors where fragile objects are handled, such as in agriculture, and even in human rescue operations.

Dr. Thanh Nho Do, Scientia Lecturer and UNSW Medical Robotics Lab director, said the gripper could be commercially available in the next 12 to 16 months, if his team secured an industry partner.

He is the senior author of a study featuring the invention, published in Advanced Materials Technologies this month.

[...]

"Animals such as an elephant, python or octopus use the soft, continuum structures of their bodies to coil their grip around objects while increasing contact and stability—it's easy for them to explore, grasp and manipulate objects," he said.

"These animals can do this because of a combination of highly sensitive organs, sense of touch and the strength of thousands of muscles without rigid bone—for example, an elephant's trunk has up to 40,000 muscles. So, we wanted to mimic these gripping capabilities—holding and manipulating objects are essential motor skills for many robots."

Researchers have demonstrated in a test that a gripper prototype weighing only 8.2 grams could carry up to 1.8 kilograms, which is over 220 times its own mass.

Amazing!

Learn more details about this device over at TechXplore.

(Image Credit: UNSW Engineering/ TechXplore)

Obviously, the answer is no, but that’s what he thinks he is. In this short clip, Einstein the Texan Talking Parrot calls himself a chicken many times and then proceeds to make chicken noises.

That’s a weird-looking chicken right there.

See the clip over at Laughing Squid.

(Image Credit: Einstein the Talking Texan Parrot/ Laughing Squid)

Turkey — Ali Yerlikaya, mayor of Istanbul, has recently announced via Twitter that the resident cat of Hagia Sophia, Gli, has passed away due to old age. Gli was 16.

The famous cat has captured the hearts of the many who visit the Hagia Sophia. She has over 120 thousand followers on Instagram and has been a resident of the mosque for the past 16 years.

Among the famous figures charmed by her is former U.S. President Barack Obama, who was said to adore the cat during a trip in 2009.

Gli the cat will be sorely missed by her online fans and those who were lucky enough to score some one-on-one playtime with her.

May she find peace in cat heaven. Rest in peace, Gli.

(Image Credit: Ali Yerlikaya/ Twitter)

2020 is a tough year for all of us. With all the bad things that have happened within this year, one would think that all hope is gone. Thankfully, it isn’t the case, and Mother Nature has its own way of telling us that there is still hope that remains, through “a potato that naturally grew in the shape of a hand giving the peace sign.”

The potato was grown by a 73-year-old farmer named Shigeo Takaki from Kawamata Town in Fukushima Prefecture. It’s about 50 centimeters (20 inches) long, and he said that while he’s seen some of his potatoes grow in unusual U-shapes before, this was a first for him. He has no idea how it grew this way.

Thanks, Mother Nature!

(Image Credit: YokohamaNoHito/ Twitter/ SoraNews 24)

Who knew that you could turn something as boring as a napkin holder into a thing of beauty? I sure didn’t, but whoever made this sure did. The napkin holder looks a bit sharp, however, and it might wound a person if he’s careless.

What do you think?

(Image Credit: u/AlexRid3r427/ Reddit)

In 2004, British billionaire Richard Branson established Virgin Galactic, with a rather ambitious goal in mind: to make it possible for hundreds of people to become astronauts without training from NASA.

Branson is the only one among the group of the so-called space barons, the group of space-loving billionaires that includes Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who has publicly pledged to take a ride in the near future aboard a spacecraft he has bankrolled.

Bezos' company, Blue Origin, is working on a competing suborbital space tourism rocket. Musk's SpaceX, however, is focused on transporting astronauts and perhaps one day tourists on days-long missions to Earth's orbit.

Over the past decade, Branson announced virtually every year that his company would be flying customers in a year or so, but that promise was broken time and time again, for many reasons.

On Thursday, however, Virgin Galactic set yet another deadline for Branson's flight: Sometime between January and March of 2021.

Notably, that declaration didn't come from Branson. This time it came from Michael Colglazier, the recently installed CEO of Virgin Galactic whose goal is to guide the company as it grows from an engineering project in the California desert into a multibillion-dollar space tourism business. Colglazier was speaking not to reporters, but to Virgin Galactic investors who bought into Branson's vision after the company made its stock market debut in late 2019. (The company's valuation has grown to $4.5 billion, though it's still burning through more than $20 million per month as it trudges through the final stages of SpaceShipTwo's testing and certification process.)

More details about this over at CNN.

What are your thoughts about this one? Do you think Branson’s space flight will finally take off next year?

(Image Credit: Chatham House/ Wikimedia Commons)

Kristy Scott knows that Desmond, her gamer husband, tends to be too focused when playing video games to the point that he is "never aware of what is going on around him". To see how engrossed Desmond is when he plays video games, Kristy then decided to test her husband if he would notice his own baby.

… she purchased a realistic doll - which she says was made funnier by the fact it looked nothing like their child - and dressed it in her son's clothes, wrapping it in a blanket and hat to better hide its true identity.

Kristy waits until her husband is fully distracted by the game before asking Desmond to look after their son and placing the doll in his lap.

What happened next? Find out on this short video.

Via Mirror

(Image Credit: The SCOTTS/ YouTube)

At around 1:34 AM on election night, Emily Harrington began her free climb of El Capitan’s Golden Gate route. Her goal: to finish the whole climb within a day. Was she able to achieve her goal? Yes, she was, and it was nothing short of amazing.

Of course, Harrington knew that it was going to be difficult, as she already attempted this route twice last year. But this time, she just knew that she could do it, and her intuition was correct.

Over the course of the next 21 hours, 13 minutes, and 51 seconds, Harrington motored up the 3,000-foot line, becoming the first woman to achieve this feat, as well as only the fourth woman ever to free-climb El Capitan in a day, on any route. (In 1994, Lynn Hill became the first person to free-climb the Nose in under 24 hours. Steph Davis and Mayan Smith-Gobat have each climbed Freerider, in 2004 and 2011, respectively, in a day.)

More details about her climb over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: Jon Glassberg/ Wikimedia Commons)

The toddler phase is the phase in which a child develops his or her food preferences. To put it simply, it is the phase in which a child becomes picky with what he or she likes to eat. With that in mind, how will you, the parent, get your child to eat food that he/she doesn’t want? How To Dad gives us some tips through this funny video.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: How To DAD/ YouTube)

This is the way the skin communicates with the person: it tells the person, in a visual manner, which area of the body is damaged, by changing the said area’s color. Seeing how useful this ability would be to objects, scientists are trying to replicate this ability.

There’s a practical side to the fancy. When an object suffers an impact that is expected to cause damage, it is necessary to examine every centimetre of its surface to understand the extent of the damage, which takes time and money. Think of cars and planes in particular.

And the idea isn’t fanciful. Researchers already are experimenting with spiropyran, a molecule that changes colour, due to a change in its chemical structure, when it is physically stimulated.

Learn more details about this over at Cosmos Magazine.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: KIST/ Cosmos Magazine)

We usually take small talk for granted, but it turns out that it's also an important part of our lives. Scientists say that small talk can be good for our mental health and well-being.

“From a scientific perspective, we know that close relationships are the most important ones,” says Timon Elmer, a psychologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. "It's good to focus on those. But there is merit in talking to strangers, if that is in your personality.”

[...]

Building rapport with strangers can leave people feeling heard, respected, and emotionally validated. These random opportunities to engage in small talk can help boost moods and erode loneliness. Researchers who study relationships sometimes define loneliness as feeling as though the quantity and quality of social interactions you participate in don’t live up to what you’d like them to be.

And so, scientists encourage us to find ways to engage in small talk in these trying times.

More details about this over at Discover Magazine.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

The ear of fresh corn today is packed with 18 rows of plump kernels. But did you know that this wasn’t what it looked like before? That’s right. It is thanks to the power of genetic engineering that we’ve been able to make ears of fresh corn flavorful and more packed, compared to its ancestor, which only had 6 to 8 rows of kernels, and looked like “something you’d weed out of your lawn than something you’d put on the grill.”

The juicy version we eat today is the result of thousands of years of breeding and selection. The same is true for most every modern crop: They have been genetically modified over and over to feed an ever-growing, urbanized population.

But it seems that we have to genetically modify our food once again, because of the worsening condition of our planet.

The old strategies of improving size and yield are no longer enough. A couple centuries of human greenhouse emissions have caught up with us. With the world likely to get at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer, on average, by the middle of the century, and with extreme storms, rains, and drought already happening more frequently, growing conditions are changing faster than farmers and their crops can adapt. Zachary Lippman, a professor of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, likens the situation to an arms race—only this time around we are competing against ourselves.

The question is, how do we plan on doing it?

More details about this over at Nautilus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: keem1201/ Pixabay)

For four months, Ximena Velez-Zuazo and her teammates surveyed over 1,851 acres of desert in the Paracas National Reserve, battling stifling heat as well as sandstorms during their stay. Their mission: to catch glimpses of elusive Peruvian terns, who have survived in the harsh environment for years.

The tern is nearly invisible in its native habitat, which looks more like a moonscape than anything you would expect to find on Earth. Its desert camouflage makes it almost impossible for scientists to track, but that’s exactly what our team set out to do.

Peruvian terns are part of a small group of terns (Sternula) that are slender, with long beaks and short legs. They have white feathers with black “caps” that look like masks, and they lay their eggs in shallow depressions in the bare ground. They are found in Paracas National Reserve, Peru’s oldest marine protected area, where reports suggest they began nesting as early as 1920. One hundred years later, the Reserve treasures the largest nesting colony in the country.

But Peruvian terns are on a path toward extinction, and the population in Paracas is no exception. According to the IUCN’s Red List of Endangered Species, Peruvian tern populations are decreasing. A 2018 survey of Paracas’ nonbreeding terns reported fewer individuals than in the past, and the last survey of the Reserve’s breeding population was conducted nearly a decade ago. Our team wanted to find out how many terns still nest in the park and what threats they face. Locating them would be the hardest part.

More about this story over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute)