The 2-year old girl and her mother were visiting a bank in Vicenza, Italy. The young girl got bored and went wandering. She found an open time-lock safe, went inside, and closed the door. The safe was made so that, once closed, it could not be re-opened for 40 minutes.
Firefighters rushed to the scene. They used a hydraulic tool to break the safe open. The girl emerged scared, but unharmed 15 minutes later.
Considering how small the safe is, I wonder how she had enough air to breathe for that long.
You can have more than just meat and cheese with your stuffed pasta. It can be a dessert, too! Caroline of the food blog Pinch Me I'm Eating shows us how to make a chocolate-flavored ravioli. It's filled with a white chocolate mascarpone filling inside a cocoa-infused dough. She drizzled it with whipped cream and raspberry sauce and garnized the dish with fresh raspberries.
Cute overload? No: cute apocalypse. Reddtior SwilliP posted this photo her son napping with her aunt's Chiweenie puppy--that's a cross between a Chihuahua and a Dachshund.
The Tick became the Tick when . . . wait, how? The Tick's origin is mysterious. He simply appeared and went to work. He has a childlike mind and operates in an undetermined environment known simply as The City. Why?
That's because he is a child. That child was bitten by a tick and is slowly dying of Lyme disease. He's imagining that he's developing superpowers bestowed on him by the tick that bit him.
This is 1 of 10 dark and wacky fan theories that explain children's TV shows. Screen Rant describes them all, including the origin of SpongeBob SquarePants, who Inspector Gadget really is, and the unreality of Ash Ketchum's experiences in Pokémon.
The dog and his owner walked to the elevator at their apartment building in Springfield, Missouri. The man got on, but the dog didn't. Then the elevator doors closed around the dog's leash. The elevator began moving up, grabbing the leash and slamming the dog against the doors.
Thankfully, maintenance supervisor Brian Ussery was on the scene. He ran to the elevator, grabbed the dog, and broke his leash.
In what must have been an excruciatingly long minute, the dog's owner traveled to the fifth floor, then back down to the first floor to see if his dog was still alive. WGN reports:
Ussery said the dog's owner went to the fifth floor and was expecting the worst when he finally made it back to the first floor.
"The guy was freaking out. He didn't know what he was going to come back to," he said.
The dog's owner was extremely gracious and thanked Ussery for his quick actions. The dog was not injured.
A century ago, grocery shopping in America was very different from the way that it is now. Customers approached clerks who worked behind counters and asked for specific items. The clerks measured out the desired goods, then handed them to the customers, who placed them in handbaskets.
This necessarily created a limit on how much money a customer could spend because he could carry only as much as he could hold in a basket.
Late one night, Sylvan Goldman, a grocer in Oklahoma, suddenly had an idea for a solution: what if you stacked two baskets on top of each other and put them on wheels?
Goldman built a dozen carts and placed them in his grocery stores. They were, though practical, not popular. Women protested that they already had enough of pushing carts--that is, baby carriages--around. Men took the idea that they needed help carrying heavy loads as an affront to their masculinity.
Goldman found a solution: he hired attractive-looking actors to walk around his stores with shopping carts. This made using them socially acceptable. Zachary Crockett explains at Priceonomics, where he traces the history of this invention:
Finally, Goldman enlisted his own employees (and hired a team of actors — both men and women) to push the carts through his stores with beaming smiles, picking items off shelves with ease. Before long, herd mentality took hold: shoppers gradually began to accept and cherish the cart.
Once his stores were thriving with merry cart-pushers, Goldman filmed his success and showed it to other grocers. Soon, the carts were in high demand: Goldman sold them for $7 each, and quickly amassed a two year backorder.
Goldman and other inventors refined the shopping cart design to include telescoping baskets that fit within each other, thus saving space. The shopping cart became ubiquitous across the country and the world. Eventually, it became iterally iconic of consumerism:
Dan Webb is an artist in Seattle. He works in several different media, but it's his wood sculptures that are the most striking to me. For example, I Love You looks like a light balloon wafting in the breeze, but it's made of wood and steel.
Many of his other sculptures are carved so that they look only partially excavated from the wood, creating an appealing juxtaposition between the refined and the raw. Here's one called Rock that it totally ready to rock:
It's Istanbul in the Seventeenth Century. You, a nobleman of refined peerage and accomplishment, have been invited to visit the Sultan in the Topkapi Palace. As the Grand Vizier of the wealthy and powerful Ottoman Empire, this not a surprise, as you have visited there often.
When you arrive at the palace, you are, according to custom, served sherbet. In the past, the sherbet has always been white. But now it is red. Your blood runs as cold as the sherbet because you know what the color means: the Sultan has ordered your execution.
The gardener steps forward to carry out the duty traditionally given to him.
But wait! There's still a way out. According to Ottoman law, you may escape execution by outrunning the gardener/executioner in a 300-yard foot race. Smithsonian magazine describes this custom maintained by the Ottoman Empire for centuries:
For a grand vizier, however, there was still a chance: as soon as the death sentence was passed, the condemned man would be allowed to run as fast as he was able the 300 yards or so from the palace, through the gardens, and down to the Fish Market Gate on the southern side of the palace complex, overlooking the Bosphorus, which was the appointed place of execution. [...]
If the deposed vizier reached the Fish Market Gate before the head gardener, his sentence was commuted to mere banishment. But if the condemned man found the bostanci basha waiting for him at the gate, he was summarily executed and his body hurled into the sea.
In the glorious 1997 action movie Starship Troopers, insect-like aliens began their war against humanity by diverting an enormous asteroid to impact on and destroy the city of Buenos Aires, killing over 8 million people. 19 years later, the United States government is finally taking the bug menace seriously.
NASA has created and poured money into a new task force called the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. This organization is responsible for developing effective means of defending our homeworld from asteroid strikes. The Christian Science Monitor reports:
It will be a costly operation. NASA's program for tracking asteroids and other objects in near-space ran on $4 million in 2010, but it received $20.4 million in 2012, and the budget doubled to $40 million in 2014, according to a NASA statement. The 2016 US budget provides $50 million to set up a Planetary Defense Coordination Office. […]
A planetary defense system gives NASA a ready answer for the next time news reports of too-close asteroids alarm the populace.
"While there are no known impact threats at this time, the 2013 Chelyabinsk super-fireball and the recent 'Halloween Asteroid' close approach remind us of why we need to remain vigilant and keep our eyes to the sky," John Grunsfeld, an administrator for for Washington-based NASA Science Mission Directorate, said in a NASA report.
He was a man. She was an excavator. Theirs was a forbidden love. In this touching yet tragic ballet, our hero meets the earth mover of his dreams. They dance with passion and grace. In a brief idyllic moment, they enjoyed the fullness of love.
This is Modern Daydreams 1: Deere John, a short film by choreographer Mitchell Rose and and the Body Vox dance company. Savor this bittersweet story. Then watch Islands in the Sky, the fourth film in the series, which is a cherrypicker-based bromance.
Zach Weinersmith of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has some great ideas to spice up chess. We've seen some clever variants, such as a cylindrical board and a suicide bomber piece. But Weinersmith has made even greater improvements with pieces that behave in very different but not insurmountable ways.
Are we really so different? Crows and chimpanzees can use tools. Dogs can ponder their existence. And cats can give their kittens really dumb names like Fluf'y. We are not so removed from the brutality of the animal kingdom, nor animals from our allegedly higher life.
They're more compact than webbed swimming gloves, but accomplish much of the same effect. Trend Box sells these palm-less slip-on swimming aids. They increase water resistance and thus speed while swimming. And if they were transparent or painted to look like hands, they could create the impression that you actually have webbed fingers, which would obviously be an advantage in job interviews.
Do you want to stand out in a crowd? Do you want people to stare at you in public? Of course you do! That's why you are a fashion trend setter. And the latest weapon in your arsenal for public attention is the furry fingernail.
Cosmopolitan reports that Jan Arnold, the director of the CND nail polish company, debuted a line of furry fingernails at the recent Libertine Fall/Winter fashion show. Each one is a dab of fake fur held in place with CND brand nail polish.
Step 3: Smell Dating will mail you swatches from, uh, aromatically-enhanced t-shirts submitted by other users. Smell them.
Step 4: ask Smell Dating to connect you with a person whose smell you find appealing. Mutual matches will receive contact information.
That's Smell Dating, a project by artist Tega Brain. Right now, it's an experiment limited to 100 people in New York City. But it may take off and become a big thing. Tega Brain argues that the human sense of smell is an excellent way to discern relationship compatibility:
The olfactory apparatus is a nontrivial source of information and the extent of its impact on our social lives is currently unknown. However when it comes to long-term romantic partnership it may actually be riskier to ignore the powerful signal of scent than to rely on it. Smell researchers even speculate that high contemporary divorce rates may be related to the overuse of deodorants and the underuse of our natural olfactory intelligence.
