If you’re the type who loves to grow his beard, and can walk outside freely without worrying that someone might shave it, then consider yourself lucky, as people who lived in Peter the Great’s time did not have your kind of luxury. At that time in Russia, men were not allowed to grow beards, and if the bearer really wants to keep his beard, then that person has to pay the beard tax and carry with him all the time a beard token. Of course, the next question would be: why?

The beard tax was just one part of a larger project: Peter the Great’s aesthetic reinvention of Russian culture. The tsar ordered his subjects to replace their familiar long Russian overcoats with French or Hungarian jackets. Mannequins set outside the Moscow city gates illustrated the new fashions for all to see. Tailors who continued to sell Russian styles ran the risk of steep fines, and anyone walking the streets in an old-fashioned robe was liable to have it shorn short by the Tsar’s inspectors.

Upon Peter the Great’s return from his travels in Europe, he immediately began “Europeanizing” his homeland, starting by shearing the beards of his court nobles at his welcome-home party.

Peter the Great’s beard tax would go on until his death in 1725, and the tax would only be lifted in 1772.

(Image Credit: U.S. State Department/ Wikimedia Commons)

Acoustic trapping is the phenomenon in which sound waves are made capable of moving matter thanks to the acoustic radiation force that they produce. A trained opera singer shattering a wine glass is an example of this phenomenon. Scientists have been studying this phenomenon since the 1980s, and they have used devices called “acoustic tweezers.”

"When an acoustic wave interacts with a particle, it exerts both an oscillatory force and a much smaller steady-state 'radiation' force," wrote the American Physical Society. "This latter force is the one used for trapping and manipulation. Radiation forces are generated by the scattering of a traveling sound wave, or by energy gradients within the sound field."

When tiny particles encounter this radiation, they tend to be drawn toward regions of certain pressure and velocity within the sound field. Researchers can exploit this tendency by engineering sound waves that "trap" — or suspend — tiny particles in the air. Devices that do this are often called "acoustic tweezers."

One of the common challenges of acoustic trapping is that sound waves bounce off reflective surfaces, which disrupts the device. This new acoustic tweezer has a solution to this problem: by adjusting ultrasonic transducers in order to create overlapping sound waves.

By changing how the transducers emit sound waves, the team can move the acoustic trap through space, which moves the bit of matter.

So far, the device is only able to move millimeter-sized pieces of matter with varying degrees of success. "When we move a particle, it sometimes scatters away," the team noted. Still, improved acoustic trapping and other no-contact lifting technologies — like optical tweezers, commonly used in medicine — could prove useful in many future applications, including cell separation, nanotechnologies, and biological research.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Kondo and Okubo/ Japan Journal of Applied Physics/ Big Think)

What is it like to be an athlete currently living in the Olympic Village for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics? We know that the bed is made from cardboard, but what else is there? United States rugby player Cody Melphy shares with us on his TikTok some stuff inside the Olympic Village, and well, from what he shares, living there “just feels like a royal summer camp,” according to a TikTok user.

The Village is located in the Harumi waterfront district, so some of the rooms have amazing views to a beautiful skyline and Cody shows that he’s one of those lucky people.

Check out Melphy’s stories inside the Olympic Village over at Bored Panda.

(Image Credit: codymelphy/ Bored Panda)

Tom McKay was not pleased when he found out that his $36-dollar camera, which he bought from Amazon, did not have the capability to balance the exposure level properly. As his desk faces the window, his face gets lit up like that of Edward Cullen’s (from Twilight). McKay then tried to fix this using the features present in Windows, but it still wasn’t enough. His face still looks rather unsettling.

That left me to find workarounds to manually adjust the camera feed. Most webcam software costs money, but I happened to have a free and open-source counterpart called Open Broadcaster Software Studio (OBS Studio) installed. I have to open up OBS Studio every time I want to use the webcam, but from there, it’s a few clicks to fix the exposure settings and come up with a significantly less creepy Zoom Meeting Tom than the above. OBS Studio takes the feed directly from the camera and outputs it to a virtual webcam, which can then be chosen as the video source in any videoconferencing software. Exasperating, but this is what I get for going cheap on a webcam.

But something strange started happening when he used the virtual webcam feature of OBS. His laptop would suddenly record him at random times.

… in early June I was very alarmed to discover 442 gigabytes of footage of me sitting at my computer, as well as other clips of my cats and partner wandering around, had piled up in F:/Recordings.

What was the reason behind this mystery? It turns out it was the default keyboard shortcuts in OBS.

More about this story over at Gizmodo.

(Image Credit: Tom McKay/ Gizmodo)

A small group of prehistoric people went inside a cave now known as the Axturra Cave, located in Spain. Worming their way through passages, the group finally arrived at their destination: a 40-feet long limestone wall which stood eight feet above the cave floor. With their engraving tools, the group carved images of horses, bison, deer, and mountain goats. The question is, why?

In 2015, two scientists rediscovered this masterpiece, now known as the Ledge of Horses, along with dozens of other carvings and paintings in other hard-to-reach corners of Atxurra Cave. Faded by time, some figures had nearly vanished. Researchers flooded the chambers with LED lights and took photographs, which they ran through software to detect elements not visible to human eyes. They recreated the art in digital form, allowing the modern word to behold it.

But those artists of old did not have LED lights or any sort of modern lighting back when they made their masterpiece. What they had were torches with flickering light, and that may just be the key to how to look at the art in the same manner that these ancient people looked at it.

Over the years, archaeologists have proposed that Paleolithic societies created the art as part of hunting rituals or psychedelic drug trips, or as historical records, teaching devices, or graphic novels, where a series of panels conveyed a continuous narrative. In some caves, animals or parts of their bodies are rendered several times, juxtaposed or superimposed in different positions. The light and shadows thrown by flames may have created the illusion that these figures were moving, according to some researchers, who call this art form “proto-cinema.” At Chauvet for example, the painting of an eight-legged bison might have appeared, by torchlight, to be a four-legged animal striding across the wall.

Marc Azéma, an archaeologist and filmmaker, made this case in his book La préhistoire du cinema [The Prehistory of the Cinema]. In 12 French caves, Azéma identified more than 50 animal figures that might have been drawn to look as if they were galloping, tossing their heads, or swishing their tails.

“The flickering light, the dancing shadows, the warm glow from the fire, many people have argued that this creates a sense of theater, that you’re looking at an ancient version of cinema,” says University of Victoria archaeologist April Nowell.

Nowell himself had this unforgettable experience when he and his colleagues went into the cave with their flame mimicking lamps. He tells his story over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Olivia Rivero and Maria Soto/ IÑAKI INTXAURBE/ Atlas Obscura)

The city of Fukuoka wants to cheer up the kids in their local children’s hospital, and one of the ways they thought of was to repaint one of their port cranes to make it look like a giant giraffe. The initiative, which was unveiled by the city’s mayor over a week ago, is planned to be completed by February 2022, and is expected to cost about 100 million yen (about $900,000). The city has six cranes, and if the first one becomes popular, the city will consider painting the other five.

Now this is wholesome.

(Image Credit: Fukuoka City/ Spoon & Tamago)

It was finally time for Nick Elliot and his wife to bring home their newborn daughter, Macie. This meant that Tommy the Doberman would finally meet his little sister. But how would he react upon seeing the baby girl? Nick and his wife hoped that Tommy would be very loving to the new member of the family, just as he was to them.

“We have had him around family and friends, toddlers and children in the past, and his whole character changes. He gets down to their level and just lies with them, letting them stroke him,” Elliott told The Dodo. “He is so gentle and careful — it must be a natural instinct.”

And when that moment came, Elliot was delighted as things went exactly as he hoped. Tommy loved Macie.

“[We] both greeted Tommy and got him settled before bringing Macie in," Elliott said. "We let him smell her worn clothes and told him ‘gentle’ ... we brought Macie in, and he was naturally really inquisitive and gentle.”

“It was like he instantly accepted her, as he always wanted to be close, but never touched her,” he added.

But Tommy did not just want to be close with Macie. He also wanted to take care of him, and he had that opportunity one day when Macie cried for a bottle of milk.

Find out what happened over at The Dodo.

(Image Credit: Nick Elliot/ The Dodo)

Zooming in on beach sand is a colorful adventure. Thanks to coral debris and shells, beach sand is given vibrant colors, unlike dull industrial sand, which is mainly composed of quartz. But coral debris and shells are not the only things you can find in beach sand; you may also find microplastic embedded in it, when you view it under a microscope. This is what photographer Ole Bielfeldt, who goes by the name Macrofying in social media, found out.

The image above shows us the objects that give beach sand its many colors.

(Images Credit: Macrofying/ Colossal)

In 2015, a floating bridge made from cardboard suddenly appeared above the houses in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, France. The said bridge was held by giant helium balloons, and was created with the help of local residents. The residents then helped in demolishing the floating bridge afterwards.

In 2017, another cardboard structure appeared, this time in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. This time, the structure was not a bridge, but rather a leaning tower. Hundreds of people came to take a photo of the spectacular view.

These installations, called “monumental constructions”, were planned and directed by French artist Olivier Grossetête. Grossetête is able to build these “unusual, ephemeral and useless” structures in various places across the world with the help of local communities, who aid in both construction and demolition of the works.

Check out photos of Grossetête's wonderful installations over at DesignBoom.

(Image Credit: Olivier Grossetête/ DesignBoom)

(Image Credit: Yverdon/ DesignBoom)

If you’ve played Age of Empires II back in the early 2000s, then you will definitely recognize this video of two kings having a chess match by the fireplace, as this was the intro video for the game. The intro video cuts back and forth from the chess match and the “real soldiers represented by the chess pieces.” But what is really happening in the chess match? Who is winning and who is losing? Using multiple angles from the intro video as reference, YouTuber Spirit of the Law recreates the board setup and analyzes the game through a chess engine.

(Image Credit: Spirit of the Law/ YouTube)

The Moon is here in this picture. Yep. It’s fully visible. But if you can’t find it, that’s all right. The photographer couldn’t find it, either, so you’re not alone. It is only thanks to the long exposure of the camera that we can see it. Let me give you a hint: You can find the Moon in the blue sky. The question is, why is it so difficult to find?

For one reason, this photograph was taken during a total lunar eclipse, when the Earth's shadow made the Moon much dimmer than a normal full Moon. For another, the image, taken in Colorado, USA, was captured just before sunrise. With the Moon on the exact opposite side of the sky from the Sun, this meant that the Sun was just below the horizon, but still slightly illuminating the sky. Last, as the Moon was only about two degrees above the horizon, the large volume of air between the camera and the horizon scattered a lot of light away from the background Moon.

Have you found the Moon? If you did, then congratulations!

(Image Credit: Jimmy Westlake (Colorado Mountain College)/ NASA)

Before a newborn mammal opens its eyes, its retinal waves are already active, and its brain is already anticipating its environment. By the time that this newborn mammal opens its eyes, it has already made visual sense of the world, and is “prepared to respond immediately to environmental threats.” At least this is true for mice, as this study led by graduate students from Yale only focused on these mammals. 

"At eye opening, mammals are capable of pretty sophisticated behavior," said Crair, senior author of the study, who is also vice provost for research at Yale." But how do the circuits form that allow us to perceive motion and navigate the world? It turns out we are born capable of many of these behaviors, at least in rudimentary form."

[...]

Mice, of course, differ from humans in their ability to quickly navigate their environment soon after birth. However, human babies are also able to immediately detect objects and identify motion, such as a finger moving across their field of vision, suggesting that their visual system was also primed before birth.

Amazing!

(Image Credit: Rama/ Wikimedia Commons)

Archaeologists in the Abu Qir Bay in the Mediterranean Sea stumbled upon an interesting piece of history when they scanned the bottom of the bay using a sub-bottom profiler. Buried beneath some five meters of clay and debris was a ship that had a 25-meter-long hull. Archaeologists believe that this wrecked ship was once an Egyptian warship, built with speed in mind over capacity and agility.

“Finds of fast galleys from this period remain extremely rare,” said IEASM archaeologist Frank Goddio, who led the project. The Abu Qir Bay ship is only the second warship ever found from the last few centuries BCE—the Ptolemaic Period in Egypt and the era of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage.

Learn more about the sunken ship, as well as the ancient Egyptian port city, over at Ars Technica.

(Image Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities/ Ars Technica)

Dogs help us in many ways. They can be a source of comfort for us when we’re stressed, anxious, or depressed. They can also be a source of encouragement for us to stay fit. But dogs do more than help us psychologically; they can also help us in potentially life-threatening situations. 

We've all heard the cliche of the dog rescuing humans from a burning building, but it's been demonstrated experimentally, too: Dogs will help a trapped human, particularly when that human expresses distress.

However, when it comes to food, don’t expect your dog to share one bit of it to you, even if you’re the one who gave it to him. This was what animal researchers found out on their study (which is now published over at the journal PLOS One).

Learn more about this over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: SNGPhotography/ Pixabay)

The food manufacturing company Kraft has partnered with ice-cream maker Van Leeuwen, and the partnership of the two has produced a rather interesting ice cream flavor: macaroni and cheese. I know that cheese ice cream exists, but mac and cheese ice cream is unheard of.

The ice cream was made available on July 14th at Leeuwen’s website, as well as in scoop shops in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston. The ice cream will be sold until supplies run out.

I wonder what the ice cream will taste like.

(Image Credit: Van Leeuwen/ Technabob)