The news service of Swedish national television brings us news of an innovative program to provide safety lighting for bicyclists at night. This system, which is being tested in the town of Skara, launches when the bicyclist requests the lights through a phone app. Drones with bright lights fly to positions along the path that the bicyclist is taking and hover.
This approach, the project managers have determined, will ultimately be cheaper than the cost of permanently illuminating a bike path with street lights. It will also be safer than having bicyclists rely entirely on lights mounted on their own vehicles.
When you read the place name Cleveland, which place do you think of? The big city on Lake Erie where the river used to catch on fire regularly? Me, too.
But there's also a Cleveland, Tennessee and a Cleveland, Mississippi. There's even a Cleveland, Texas (I've been there), five different Clevelands in Wisconsin for a total of twenty-seven Clevelands across the United States.
But which Cleveland do you actually think of when you read or hear the name? Pudding has crunched the numbers for towns in the United States with the same name. I'm skeptical of their methodology for answering the question, which appears to be driven by the length of Wikipedia articles about these various towns. Explore the site and see if you agree with the familiarity ranking of your town.
Matt Dawson is a painter who lives in Louisiana. He recently became Internet famous when he published on Instagram a photo of his latest painting: Starry Waffles. It mimics the style and background of Vincent Van Gogh's iconic Starry Night, except that it shows a Waffle House restaurant instead of the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France.
Dawson explained to Fox 35 News Orlando that his painting shows a specific Waffle House in Sorrento, Lousiana. It has special memories for him: when his wife was sick, he frequently took her to medical appointments. They'd stop at this Waffle House on their way back home. It was a refuge in time of stress, which is exactly what an American diner should be in the middle of the night.
Does this building look like a chocolate bar standing three storeys tall? That's completely intentional. This is the Meiji Chocolate Factory in Osaka, Japan. The facility dates back to 1955. When it was refurbished in 2011, the architecture firm Taisei Design proposed covering on side with a facade that looks like Meiji chocolate. It's visible to passengers on a rail line that passes nearby.
This chocolate factory is one of seven buildings in Japan that are shaped like the products sold from or manufactured in them. See Spoon & Tamago for more, including a brewery shaped like glasses of beer and a pet supplies warehouse that looks like a dog.
A total of 3,888 identified casualties are buried in the British Commonwealth’s Ramleh War Cemetery. But one grave attracts a disproportionate share of visitors. It belongs to Private Harry Potter, number 5251351 in the Worcestershire Regiment. pic.twitter.com/NLcYk9Vqgj
I've read only the first novel in J.K. Rowling's generation-defining story, but I take it that Harry dies at the end. Otherwise, why would this grave exist?
A better interpretation is that a real person also named Harry Potter died. The Commonwealth military cemetery at Ramlah, Israel contains 3,888 interments, including Private Harry Potter. This Harry Potter joined the British Army at the age of 16 according to the official webpage of the Worcester Regiment, in which Potter served. He was deployed to British Palestine, where he drove trucks and earned the nickname "Crash Harry." In 1939, Arab guerillas ambushed a convoy that Potter was in. He was killed in action and buried nearby.
Private Potter's grave has become a tourist attraction since news reports about his grave in 2010. But he's actually one of at least thirteen Harry Potters buried in located war graves around the world.
Jake Carlini is an inventor attuned with the needs of the modern world. When 21st Century challenges emerge, he develops practical solutions for them.
In the past, he's made a reliable snorkel apparatus that allows him to run a mile underwater, a functional sword out of gym socks, and a jet-powered longboard. These are necessary technologies for modern life, but we can and shall, thanks to Carlini, achieve even greater heights.
Carlini has, through painstaking labor and experimentation, made functional roller skates out of four tiny bicycles. They're skatecycles and they're amazing. In this video, we see how he ushered in a new dawn of transportation.
I know that it doesn't look like a pillow, but it's designed to function as one. The crew of Sora News 24 found a strange product on Amazon and insisted on trying it. This invention is called the "Practical Model Pendulum Neck Stretcher Comfortable Sleep Pillow / Revolutionary Sleep Pillow With Your Own Head Weight for Comfortable Sleep."
Pillows are supposed to provide a place to rest your head during sleep. You can think of this invention as a hammock for your head. The straps wrap around your head and keep it suspended a couple inches off the ground with a tripod.
In addition to keeping your head off the ground, it's supposed to stretch your neck. So it's a lot like this device that Barney Fife used on The Andy Griffith Show to increase his height:
When death comes to families, there is often a need to clean out homes quickly. This can be challenging for families in mourning, so they may hire professionals to do the job. In Japan, there's a growing industry of people who respectfully and efficiently pack up a deceased person's possessions for storage, sale, or disposal. It's called ihinseiri.
Animism is foundational in Japanese culture. There is, as a result, attachment to and attribution of meaning to physical objects owned by deceased people. Ihinseiri workers are not simply laborers who work as movers, but professional mourners who sort and arrange possessions in emotionally and spiritually sensitive ways.
Ihinseiri firms can move quickly after someone has died, but it's also possible to hire them before someone has passed on. As a client is preparing for the final journey, s/he can hire these companies to do much of the preliminary decluttering and packing before death. Dr. Allison was able to shadow some of these workers on the job. She described the activity "as if a gentle dust buster had been programmed to silently, automatically empty the house."
The visual style—especially the human movements—of the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise is instantly recognizable. Autoescola Brasiliense chose well to release its latest ad to resemble Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It shows the viewer playing a student who enrolls at this full-service driving school to learn how to operate motorbikes, cars, buses, and commercial trucks.
The actor is Matheus Senna, a bodybuilder and cosplayer. His Instagram page is filled with similar cosplays of Grand Theft Auto in real life. Ad director Anderson Mascarenhas perfectly executed this project with Senna’s help, making you feel like you’re really playing the game.
In the classic TV series Exosquad, when humanity set about genetically engineering a slave race that would one day rise up in rebellion against them, they helpfully gave their slaves two opposing thumbs.
Thumbs are useful. They're pretty much the only reason we humans are in charge of this planet and not dolphins. So let's make best use of this advantage by doubling them.
Dani Clode and Tamar Makin of Cambridge University 3D printed a thumb that can be attached to a hand. The motor is strapped to the wrist and the battery on the upper arm. The controlling sensors are attached to big toes. So, if I understand this Guardian article correctly, twitch your toes to open and close the extra thumb.
At a recently science exhibition, Clode and Makin gave 600 people the chance to try it. 98% were able to figure out the control system within a minute, so this is clearly user-friendly technology.
You may have seen the viral photos of a casket decorated with an M&M candy theme. It's real and the story behind it is deeply heartwarming.
Fox News reports that Mary Stocks Martin of Snowflake, Arizona died at the age of 86. She was a teacher for many years who signed her name "MSM" in cursive. Kids often mistook her signature for "M&M" and began giving her M&M candy. She gradually collected a lot of M&M paraphernalia and became known as "the M&M Lady".
Years before her death, she decided that she wanted to be buried in a casket that looked like an M&M and had one of her sons build it. Martin recently passed on and her family conducted an M&M-themed funeral. Those who attended marked her passing by dropping M&Ms on the casket and dressing in M&M t-shirts.
Tradition is apparently no longer important to modern Britons. Although they will keep the monarchy, they are throwing away one of the great customs associated with royalty: rubbing the monarch at his or her coronation with ambergris.
My headline is borrowed from IFL Science, which explains what's going on.
As King, Charles is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. His coronation on May 6 is, among other purposes, a religious ceremony. He will be annointed with sacred oil. This oil is made from olives from the Monastery of Mary Magdalene and the Monastery of the Ascension in Israel.
The anointing oil will not contain ambergris, which is a substance that originates in the intestines of sperm whales. Many nations ban the harvesting of ambergris as part of general bans on the exploitation of whales.
Yes, we're familiar with robotic cameras that enter the human body rectally. But the new F3DB robot arm from the Medical Robotics Lab at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia can do much, much more.
The Daily Mail reports that the tip of the robot is equipped with a bioprinter that permits it to add biomaterials deep inside the body, effecting healing repairs. The length and rigidity of the arm is adjustable to suit the needs of particular procedures. It is partially controlled with artificial intelligence to provide an enhanced printing experience.
-via Dave Barry, who jokes "We were promised flying cars."
Roman Booteen is a Russian artist who specializes in carving images into coins. In past years, we've shown some ofhis works. Since then, he's really stepped up his game. This symbol-laden coin shares the story of Lilith, a figure in Jewish folklore. A counterpart to Eve, she converses with the serpent at the Wood of Life (Lignum Vitae). When a tiny button on the edge of the coin is pushed, Lilith moves her leg and a key pops out of the tree.
I can't tell what is written beneath the key when it falls out. Can you?
Street Art Utopia tells us that this tree is in Moscow. Marilyn Monroe innocently experiences a "delicious" breeze in an iconic scene from the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch.
