Yunomine Village, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan — The sun had not yet risen, but the kitchen staff of this traditional Japanese Inn, called Ryokan Adumaya, is already busy preparing their local specialty for their guests.

In one corner of the brightly lit kitchen, Jitsuo Shinka was stirring a large pot of rice porridge, nimbly scooping it in his ladle and gently letting it spill back into the mixture. As the porridge came to a boil, a thick, slightly yellowish foam built up that threatened to spill over the rim of the metal pot.

We all know that porridge is a common dish in many places, so what makes this porridge stand out from the others? The answer is found in the water used.

… it is made with water from Yunomine’s ancient onsen (natural hot spring).

[...]

According to local residents, cooking with onsen water does not radically alter the taste of food, but it does make it milder in flavour. Unlike regular tap water, it also has the benefit of keeping meat tender, even if you cook it for a long time.

Know more about this Japanese village, as well as the properties of the hot spring water, over at BBC.

(Image Credit: Michiyo Nakamoto/ BBC)

Detroit — Had she regained consciousness a little later, her blood would have been drained and she would have been embalmed. Thankfully, this young woman, named Timesa Beauchamp, who was declared dead, opened her eyes at the funeral home just in time before any of this could happen.

The Southfield fire department acknowledged it was involved in a bizarre set of events Sunday that began when a medical crew was summoned to a home where a 20-year-old woman was unresponsive.

Paramedics tried to revive the woman for 30 minutes and consulted an emergency room doctor, the department said.

The Oakland County medical examiner’s office said the body could be released to the family without an autopsy, according to the fire department.

But then came a startling discovery at the James H. Cole funeral home in Detroit: The woman was still alive more than an hour later.

More details about this story over at AP News.

That was close!

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

For over 30 years, Paul Knapp Jr. has been taking travelers out into the Carribean Sea to let them hear the songs of the humpback whales. He has guided some 4,000 people on these listening trips. Science and tech journalist Dyllan Furness is one of these people, and he writes about his experience over at Outside Online.

After 20 minutes, we reached Knapp’s most reliable listening location, an indistinctive stretch of open water just west of a peninsula. Knapp cut the engine, plugged a hydrophone into a pair of boat speakers, and dropped the device into the water. “OK,” he said as the cable ran through his fingers, falling to 50 feet below the surface. “Let’s see if we hear anything.”

Within seconds, a chorus of cetacean song filled the air—humpbacks emanating a series of elevated chirps and bellows and downward-spiraling moans. I’d listened to countless whale recordings in preparation for the trip, but they failed to convey how haunting the songs are in person. Knapp fell silent for a few minutes before rattling off guesses at the whales’ numbers and distance from us—two or three of them, maybe three or four miles away.

Furness is lucky enough to have been able to listen to the humpback whales in person. But perhaps there will be no more humpback whale songs to listen to in the future, and that is because of human-made noise, as well as seismic blasts, which affect zooplanktons (a main food source for whales).

More about this story over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: NOAA/ Wikimedia Commons)

One of the most common problems that teens and adults have to deal with is acne. It is a skin condition present in many places around the world, affecting millions of people. It is said that up to 50 million Americans are affected by acne annually. But what is it, really?

Here’s what actually happens in your skin to form a zit: A hair follicle becomes clogged with natural oil, known as sebum, along with dead skin cells and bacteria. This is accompanied by inflammation, part of the body’s immune response, which is what causes the redness and swelling. The more sebum and bacteria, the more acne. But then things get tricky.

Part of what makes acne so difficult to treat is that there are many contributing factors. Hormone fluctuations spur many acne flare-ups. So, changes in women’s hormones during menstruation, pregnancy or menopause makes acne more common in women.

Unfortunately, there is no cure for acne. But there are many ways to reduce their occurrence on your face.

More details about this over at Discover Magazine.

(Image Credit: Kjerstin_Michaela/ Pixabay)

All squirrels are created cute. Some squirrels are just cuter than others. Such is the case for these Japanese dwarf flying squirrels, which can only be found in Honshu and Kyushu, both remote Japanese islands.

These incredible creatures can only be found on Honshu and Kyushu islands, remote locations in Japan. While there are around 50 different species of flying squirrels all around the world, these ones – known officially as Pteromys momonga – are one of only two ‘Old World’ species.

They’re rather small, measuring out at between 14 and 20 centimetres and weighing between 150-220g. Also, while other many other flying squirrels have one mating cycle per year, the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel has two.

Learn more about these cute animals over at UNILAD.

(Image Credit: @kristinecake/ Twitter)

Only a few animals can survive the subzero temperatures of Antarctica. One of those animals is penguins, who have an ingenious way of keeping themselves warm while ensuring that no one dies as they travel across the frozen terrain and bombarded with gusty winds. What do they do? They huddle. This phenomenon is already amazing enough on its own, but once we look deeper into this, it becomes even more amazing.

“A penguin huddle looks like organized chaos,” said François Blanchette, a mathematician at the University of California, Merced. “Every penguin acts individually, but the end result is an equitable heat distribution for the whole community.”

It turns out that penguins execute their huddles with a high degree of mathematical efficiency, as Blanchette and his team discovered. More recently, Daniel Zitterbart, a physicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, helped develop and install high-resolution cameras to observe undisturbed huddling behavior. Zitterbart’s team recently discovered which conditions cause penguins to huddle, and they are investigating the possibility that the penguins’ mathematical behavior may reveal secrets about colony health over time.

Learn more about this interesting mathematical phenomenon over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Nature on PBS/ YouTube)

Paying online bills. Using GPS. Sending emails. These are just some of the things that we could do today, and it’s all thanks to our satellites, man-made machines that orbit around our planet. Sooner or later, however, these machines cease functioning, and this created a new problem for us to solve. That problem is space junk.

Technically referred to as orbital debris, space junk is any defunct human-made object remaining in space or reentering Earth’s atmosphere. Experts estimate that there are already millions of pieces of space junk in orbit, ranging from chips of paint and scraps of metal to used-up rocket stages and defunct satellites. The debris multiplies each time objects collide or a fuel leak causes a satellite or rocket to explode.

Eventually, this debris will fall back to Earth as atmospheric drag causes it to spiral into lower and lower orbits, a process that can take anywhere from weeks to millennia. (Atmospheric drag is similar to the force you feel when you put your hand out a car window as it’s moving, only much weaker because the density of air in space is so low.) Most debris will burn up as it reenters the atmosphere, but there are some exceptions. In 1978, a Soviet Union spy satellite powered by uranium failed in orbit, just months after it had launched, and fell back toward Earth. Instead of burning up on reentry, fragments—some of which were radioactive—scattered across the Canadian North. Just this past May, an almost twenty-tonne chunk of space junk from a recent rocket launch passed over Los Angeles and New York before crash landing in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Mauritania. It was moving so fast that scientists couldn’t predict with certainty where it would land.

While they may not be raining down on Earth, space junk also poses another problem — it could collide with our active satellites (including the International Space Station), which could wipe out satellite communications and cost us millions of dollars.

One way in which we could solve this problem is by retrieving these space junk. But, like any other space project, this one would be very expensive as well.

More details about this over at The Walrus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: NASA/ Wikimedia Commons)

Growing up, I have encountered people who are okay with artificial developments such as vaccines and GMOs. I also have encountered people who are not okay with “unnatural” methods, as they believe that 100% natural should be the way to go. But natural is not always good all the time.

… Given a choice, most people gravitate toward the natural over the artificial. After all, natural environments are preferable to garbage dumps, natural foods are nearly always healthier than stuff concocted in a chemistry lab. Yet it needs to be said loud and clear: Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good. “Smallpox is natural,” Ogden Nash noted. “Vaccine ain’t.” …

Reading 19th-century critic and essayist John Ruskin, who wrote “There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather,” one cannot help conclude that Mr. Ruskin didn’t get out much. By the same token, “doing what comes naturally” can be very bad advice indeed.

Read more of David Barash’s article about this over at Nautilus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)

August 24, 1995. Midnight. People were already lining up at CompUSA and BestBuy, as they were looking forward to getting a copy of the most anticipated software at that time. That software was Windows 95. Twenty-five years later, 95’s legacy, through its features, still lives on to this day, from the Start button, to other ambitious features of the said software.

… PC geeks were choosing between Pentium or 486 processors, IDE or SCSI hard drives, double-speed CD-ROMs, and Sound Blaster audio cards to experience the best of Windows 95. Microsoft added a lot of features to Windows 95, but the biggest was a new Start button, menu, and task bar that made it a lot easier to discover applications and navigate the operating system. Multitasking improvements and the graphical interface were a big leap from Windows 3.1 and the days of MS-DOS, but the interface was rather similar for Macintosh and OS/2 users at the time.

More about this story over at The Verge.

(Image Credit: Microsoft/ Wikimedia Commons)

We all know that giant pandas are already endangered, and so it is always nice to hear news of them giving birth to their cubs, which would increase their numbers. On August 21, at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C, a 22-year-old giant panda named Mei Xiang gave birth to a giant panda cub. Currently, the newborn panda was about the size of a stick of butter.

The cub's sex will be determined after neonatal exams are completed at a later date.

The cub will also be named after 100 days.

Mei Xiang "picked up the cub immediately and began cradling and caring for it," according to a Zoo release. "The panda team heard the cub vocalize and glimpsed the cub for the first time briefly immediately after the birth."

Awesome!

(Image Credit: smithsonianzoo/ Instagram)

You might have heard of Laika as the first dog to be launched in space, but did you know that she was not the first animal to be launched there? In fact, there were already lots of animals who have been into space over a decade before her, from fruit flies, to mice, to numerous monkeys.

Know more about the animals launched before Laika, as well as the animals launched after her, over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center)

Smartphones indeed have evolved through time. Before, these devices only had limited functions, but now, they have proven to be indispensable, because of their versatility. With only a smartphone, you could already do lots of things, like make music, edit videos, and take amazing photos. But those are not the only things that we could do with our smartphones

Scientists have experimented with the smartphone, and they found out that we could use smartphones to help us monitor our health, such as gauging fertility (if you’re female), and even detecting serious diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cancer.

Learn more about this over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: deeptuts/ Pixabay)

Asbestos is now known to be a dangerous substance which can cause various diseases such as asbestosis and pleural disease. People exposed to this substance could have higher risks in developing certain cancers. But before asbestos was known to be a material dangerous for one’s health, it had different uses for different kinds of people. Kings and nobles have used asbestos to display grandeur, while scammers used it to create false relics.

According to legend, Charlemagne liked to lay out his lavish banquets on a sparkling-white tablecloth spun from pure asbestos. After his guests had eaten their fill, the king would pluck the tablecloth off the table and fling it into the hearth. In the blaze, the cloth turned fiery red, but did not burn. When it was plucked out, it was cleaner than ever, with the debris of the meal roasted away.

[...]

The wondrous properties of the material made it a prime tool for the creation of false relics: its incombustibility served as proof of authenticity. Scammers passed off chunks of asbestos as fragments of the True Cross, and the monks of Monte Cassino bought an asbestos towel under the impression that it was the cloth Jesus had used to wash his disciples’ feet.

Asbestos has always been a strange substance in history. Where you find it, however, is even stranger.

More details about this over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: Aram Dulyan/ Wikimedia Commons)

What do you do if you don’t have the prop needed for the scene? As the popular meme says, you improvise, adapt, and then overcome. But hey, it really does resemble a real defibrillator, at least from a distance.

Image via 9GAG on Facebook

Farmers in Botswana are getting frustrated because their cows are being killed and feasted on by predators in the area, like lions and leopards. Thankfully, we humans know a thing or two about these animals — that they are ambush predators who love to sneak up on their prey and avoid being detected. With that in mind, scientists attempted to use this knowledge to give the cows a better chance of staying alive.

It involves painting a pair of eyes on the cows' rear ends.

[...]

Incredibly, none of the cows with the eyes were killed by predators.

Knowledge is power, indeed.

More details about this study over at Mental Floss.

(Image Credit: wernerdetjen/ Pixabay)