When this kid tried to strike a golf ball for the first time, he just made it move a few centimeters away from its original position. But on his second strike, however, something amazing happened — an event that could be considered as just dumb luck or pure talent.

Watch the video on Reddit.

Well, what do you think? Was this kid lucky, or is he a prodigy?

(Image Credit: u/disobsidious/ Reddit)

This person believes that he is better than others, he doesn’t take advice from other people, and he doesn’t trust them, too. Aside from that, he also believes that he doesn’t make any mistakes, and so he doesn’t learn from these said mistakes. These traits are true for a narcissistic person.

In refusing to acknowledge that they have made a mistake, narcissists fail to learn from those mistakes, a recent study from Oregon State University – Cascades found.

The mental process of analyzing past actions to see what one should have done differently is called “should counterfactual thinking.” Counterfactual thinking is the mental process of imagining a different outcome or scenario from what actually occurred.

All of us engage in some level of self-protective thinking, said study author Satoris Howes, a researcher at OSU-Cascades with the OSU College of Business. We tend to attribute success to our own efforts, but blame our failures on outside forces — while often blaming other people’s failure on their own deficiencies.

“But narcissists do this way more because they think they’re better than others,” Howes said.

Learn more about narcissists, and how to handle them in the workplace, over at Neuroscience News.

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Graceful, quick-witted, flexible, and just overall amazing, Olympic figure skaters are indeed spectacular performers. Passionate at what they are good at, they put their all on every action, may it be a twist or a spin, and along with it, their facial expressions, too!

See the funny pictures over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

Tests and exams just might be the universal method of measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, or intelligence. For both the child and the adult, tests are to be taken seriously when the stakes are high. And since some tests have high stakes, some people, old or young, resort to cheating. But how do we identify these people? Who is more likely to cheat?

This is what researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela tried to answer. They reported that…

…the people most likely to cheat were the ones with a personality that can only be described as lazy, or low on conscientiousness. The cheaters were also lower on the trait of agreeableness, meaning that they weren’t particularly nice people.

This profile of student cheaters helps to provide insight into why some young people take such a dishonest approach to education. The question is, however, do they “grow out” of this behavior or do they continue to be cheaters throughout their adult lives?

More details about this over at Psychology Today.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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On August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima by the bomber plane Enola Gay. An estimated 90,000 to 120,000 are said to have died, either instantaneously or over the following days, because of the atomic bomb. Three days later, another atomic bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki, killing around 60,000 to 70,000.

There were some people who survived these horrifying events, and they came to be known in Japanese as hibakusha. Unfortunately, while they may have survived the atomic bombs, they could not escape the deadly effects of the radiation caused by them. Nevertheless, their suffering was not in vain.

Collectively, they have left an important legacy. Most of what is known today about the long-term health effects of radiation has come out of research with those survivors. The work, now run by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), is making “major contributions to our understanding of radiation effects,” even today, says Richard Wakeford, a radiation epidemiologist at the University of Manchester. RERF studies also underpin the limits that countries have set for occupational and medical exposure to radiation.

Meet some of the survivors and read their stories over at Science Magazine.

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There are many types of plastics that we use directly or indirectly in our daily lives. Of the many types of plastics, thermosets are some of the toughest. These are plastics that are very durable and are heat-resistant. These features, however, are also what makes them very difficult to break down and recycle. But scientists may just have found a way to break this plastic down, while keeping its original strength.

The study suggests that by changing the way they're made, we could keep the original strength of these thermosets, but make them able to be broken down and recycled.

Currently, around 75 percent of the plastic we use in items such as plastic wrappers and plastic bags can be broken down and then reused. But thermosets, which are found in things such as car parts, aren't reusable.

The new approach involves slightly adjusting the mixture that makes up thermoset plastic, adding particular types of building blocks (or monomers) called silyl ethers that are more susceptible to being pulled apart and reshaped.

More details about this over at ScienceAlert.

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Strawberry, lime, lemon, and cherry are the usual flavors that sparkling water products have. Ugly Drinks, however, want their drink to deviate from this common line of flavors, and so they created this sparkling water that tastes like marshmallow. This marshmallow-flavored drink is part of Ugly Drinks’s limited-edition flavors which include Cherry Cola and Sour Apple.

If you want to try some marshmallow sparkling water, you can pick up a 12-pack here. With a price of $2.50 a can, you’re looking to gamble 30 bucks on something you may or may not enjoy after the first few sips.

Would you drink this? Why or why not?

(Image Credit: Ugly Drinks/ Technabob)

With no humans visiting the zoo to keep them occupied, staff at the Newquay Zoo in Cornwall, England had been looking for ways to keep their resident penguins entertained. Thankfully, a patron donated a bubble machine to the zoo, and the zoo staff used the device wisely.

Penguin caretaker Dan Trevelyan said the bubbles help to keep the penguins’s predatory reflexes sharp.

“In the wild, these guys are marine predators who are very sensitive to objects and movement,” said Trevelyan. “The bubble machine is fantastic, as all the movement and new shapes and colors really stimulate these guys. They have a great time chasing them around. And all these donations are really appreciated.”

The bubbles, which cause no harm to the animals, have in the past also proved popular with the Zoo’s squirrel monkeys and Sulawesi crested macaques.

Wholesome!

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It seems that many people in the UK have decided to learn a new hobby while on lockdown, as sales of musical instruments and equipment in the country have increased by 80 percent between April and June.

According to Gear4Music’s chief exec Andrew Wass, electric and acoustic guitar starter packs were a go-to for many people looking to pick up a new instrument. And electric pianos and keyboards were also right up there in terms of instruments people chose…

Speaking to BBC, Wass pointed out that people over lockdown seemed keen to have a hobby “they can get into”.

“Maybe they played music at school and have found themselves indoors and decided to come back to it,” he said.

Knowing that music has great benefits to one’s mental health, I can see why people started to learn or get back to music in these challenging times.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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In the year 1980, the World Health Organization declared that they had finally eradicated smallpox. Ever since then, no naturally occurring smallpox has been reported. But before this triumphant year, smallpox was a dreaded disease. Said to be responsible for the death of around 500 million people across the globe, I could only imagine how people were fearful of this disease.

This recent study has uncovered ancient traces of the variola virus (the virus that causes smallpox) in the remains of some Northern Europeans that lived during the Viking Age. It is thought of that some of these were Vikings themselves.

The new finding pushes back the proven record of smallpox infecting people by almost 1,000 years, to the year 603.

Researchers had previously discovered ancient traces of variola virus DNA in a mummy from the mid-1600s, which put the common origin of modern strains in the 16th or 17th century...

The team reconstructed nearly complete genetic blueprints of four of the 11 ancient viruses, which reveal that the Viking-era strains belong to a now-extinct group of variola viruses. During that period, smallpox may have been widespread throughout Europe and could have caused serious disease... It’s also possible that if Vikings were infected, they may have spread the disease as they traveled. 

More details about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Thames Valley Archaeological Services/ ScienceNews)

Connections play an essential role when it comes to being successful in career and, pretty much, life in general. This is why we humans devote a significant portion of our time building relationships and connections with other people. It’s not only humans who practice this, however, as animals, such as dolphins, also do this.

Researchers at Georgetown University and Duke University report that dolphins under age 10 seek out peers and activities that could help them forge bonds and build skills they'll need in adulthood.

The results were published July 14 in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

The team analyzed nearly 30 years' worth of records for more than 1700 wild bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay in Western Australia. Since the 1980s, researchers have been taking boats out into this remote bay and noting things like the sex, age and behavior of any dolphins they encountered.

[...]

The study revealed that, even though young dolphins flit from group to group as often as every ten minutes throughout the day, they tend to spend more time with a few close friends.

More details about the study over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Madison Miketa, PhD, Shark Bay Dolphin Project/ EurekAlert)

As global temperatures rise up as our planet gets warmer and warmer, it is no surprise that our icebergs, and even places under permafrost, are starting to melt. Places such as Alaska have suffered much over the years because of this phenomenon, as documented by this study published recently in Nature Publishing Group journal Climate and Atmospheric Science. The study compared how rainfall affects permafrost thaw “across time, space, and a variety of ecosystems”.

As Siberia remains in the headlines for record-setting heat waves and wildfires, Alaska is experiencing the rainiest five years in its century-long meteorological record. Extreme weather on both ends of the spectrum—hot and dry versus cool and wet—are driven by an aspect of climate change called Arctic amplification. As the earth warms, temperatures in the Arctic rise faster than the global average.

While the physical basis of Arctic amplification is well understood, it is less known how it will affect the permafrost that underlies about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, including most of Alaska. Permafrost locks about twice the carbon that is currently in the atmosphere into long-term storage and supports Northern infrastructure like roads and buildings; so understanding how a changing climate will affect it is crucial for both people living in the Arctic and those in lower latitudes.

More details about this saddening news over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: National Park Service/ Wikimedia Commons)

A shell is essential for a hermit crab. It helps him protect his soft abdomen, and helps him maintain the proper humidity level. At some point in time, however, a hermit crab has to abandon his home to search for another one, for many reasons. One is when the crab grows too big for its shell. Another reason is when some sort of fungus enters the shell, which makes the crab uncomfortable.

Watch as this hermit crab slowly moves to its new home.

(Video Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

With extraordinary talent honed through countless hours of training, Taiwanese artist Han Tsu Tung makes wooden sculptures that seem to have come from another world, but unfortunately glitched as they arrived in our dimension.

Wow!

See his amazing masterpieces over at his Instagram account.

(Image Credit: han_tsu_tung/ Instagram)

As someone of Asian descent, I can say that a part of me died when the woman did not wash the rice before cooking, and then washing it after it was cooked. That’s clearly not the right way to cook rice. Aside from that, metal should not be used to scrape the saucepan.

If there’s something on the Internet that could trigger an Asian, it might just be BBC’s Egg Fried Rice Video.

In the words of Uncle Roger, “who cooks rice like this?”

(Image Credit: mrnigelng/ YouTube)