The US Department of Energy, which oversees how nuclear materials are handled in the United States, found that, on occasion, nuclear materials workers had placed highly enriched uranium in their pockets. A report on the subject informs people who work with these hazardous substances to cease pocketing them:
Further, after interviewing chemical operators and reviewing revised Y-12 procedures, we confirmed that chemical operators are no longer allowed to place samples in their pockets and must check their pockets before removing their coveralls.
The risk was, thankfully, very low. CNS News summarizes:
According to a Y-12 Subject Matter Expert (SME), the possibility of “a nuclear criticality accident occurring during the incident was very low,” because the “minimum critical mass” for such an incident is over 700 grams, while the samples in question only contained 20 grams of uranium. Also, personnel wore proper protective equipment.
Aldana Ferrer Garcia, an architect from Argentina, calls her design line "More Sky." The purpose is to provide more outside space to urban apartment windows by pushing out the exterior wall and making use of the empty air. Leaning out or sitting in these windows permits the city dweller to experience the outside world just a bit more than with standard vertical windows.
Gil Batle, 53, spent over 20 years in California prisons for fraud and forgery. He has a natural gift for drawing, which he developed as a self-taught tattoo artist in prison. He's now out and living in the Philippines. But his memories are still behind bars. He carves scenes from prison and the criminal justice system into ostrich egg shells. These works are incredibly detailed relief sculptures that show the ugliness of life in prison.
Batle's work will be on display from November 5 to January 9 at the Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York City.
Note the symmetry between these top two sculptures.
By now, you've heard the great news: CBS is planning a new Star Trek television series in 2017. New Star Trek has not been present on television since the glorious conclusion to the franchise with the finale of Enterprise.*
There have been many spin-off and reboot attempts since the end of the original series in 1969. A few, such as The Next Generation, were successful. Others never made it to written scripts, let alone prepared pilot episodes.
A Harry Mudd spin-off series was, at one time, being considered. After TOS ended, there was a party at the studio. In Roger’s words, “Gene Roddenberry was there and we started talking and Gene said, ‘It’s a shame that series thing for you never worked out.’ I said, ‘what series thing?’ He said, ‘Oh, didn’t you know? Well, after the successful Harry Mudd episodes, NBC wanted to know if I would develop a spin-off series for you starring the Harry Mudd character. A space pirate, intergalactic con-man kind of thing.’ ‘My God Gene, I didn’t know anything about that. What happened?’ He said, ‘Well, the artists didn’t have enough time to develop it.’ And, of course, you couldn’t blame Gene; he didn’t want to let somebody take it off in a direction he didn’t approve of. Since he didn’t have the time to handle it all, the Mudd series project died. But it was a real blow to me because that was the first time I had heard of it. But what a great chance that would have been for me to star in my own spin-off series.”
You can read the rest of the Uproxx list here, including a 2004 reboot proposal by J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5. If there's one person who can definitely be trusted with the Star Trek legacy, it's Straczynski.
The cuttlefish is a master of camouflage. It has the ability to seemingly disappear into any natural background. But what about unnatural environments? A badly decorated living room is hardly what the typical cuttlefish might encounter on the bottom of the ocean.
Richard Hammond, the host of the BBC's Miracles of Nature, decided to find out. The show built a cuttlefish-sized living room with hideous decor inside an aquarium. It had vertical stripes, checkerboard patterns, and chintz. Then it released a cuttlefish into this aesthetic monstrosity.
The cuttlefish was well-motivated: it did not want to be publicly seen in such an environment. Although it was not able to precisely mimic the patterns in the room, it did a remarkably good job of vanishing into patterns, especially the ugly chintz sofa.
In the 1988 movie Big, Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia play on a giant electronic piano keyboard at a high-end toy store in New York City. Inspired by the scene, Russian artist and designer Roman Sviridov created this keyboard that uses repurposed skateboard decks as keys.
The company opened for business in 1995 as an online bookstore. It was the electronic equivalent of the welcoming bookstore chain stores where customers could browse, sit, and, possibly, buy a book.
Then Amazon began selling other needful things that you couldn't normally find in a bookstore, such as cars, houses, and livestock--all available with a few mouse clicks.
Now, Amazon is taking a novel step. It's opened a physical retail store. Yesterday, Amazon Books in Seattle opened at 9:30 AM with more than 5,000 print books available for purchase.
But those stores offered something Amazon couldn’t: the instant gratification of owning an item the second it was purchased, as well as the personal touch of a knowledgeable sales clerk.
Amazon is betting that the troves of data it generates from shopping patterns on its website will give it advantages in its retail location that other bookstores can’t match. It will use data to pick titles that will most appeal to Seattle shoppers.
This, believe it or not, is a car seat for children. It was the definition of car safety during the 1930s. But given that even seatbelts were not standard back then (and would not be for years to come), it shouldn't be surprising that car safety for children took a while to develop.
Simon Schaffrath and his wife Saskia Repp live in Frankfurt, Germany. They’re expecting their first baby in November—a son that they’ve named Theo.
Schaffrath is a photographer, so he put his skills to use to let people know about their joyful news. He turned Repp’s bulging belly into a landscape and Photoshopped himself into the scene. He golfs during the summer, skis during the winter, and takes full advantage of the terrain that his wife offers.
Little Theo is participating in the process--though not always helpfully. At one point, he kicked so hard that the plaster on his mommy's belly cracked.
"Cows, like dogs and humans, experience joy." We are thus informed by Animal Place, an animal rescue sanctuary in Vacaville, California. On this 600-acre facility, neglected farm animals can find new and joyful lives.
In this video, Panda (black and white) and Jazzy (brown) arrive and immediately make new friends. Everyone in the herd, both old members and new, is happy at the new arrivals. They run and romp in the fields together.
I remember kilig so well. I remember a particular moment of it when I saw my future wife across the room at our workplace early in our courtship. Kilig is a wonderful word, so it's sad that it doesn't exist in the English language.
The jewelry brand Vashi commissioned artist Emma Block to illustrate 29 words of love that have no close English equivalents. You can view them here, including words from Urdu, Welsh, Tamil, Dutch, and Hebrew.
Give Chaz Hutton a pen and a sticky note and he'll explain how to make adult decisions and why they're not working. He draw simple graphs, flow charts, and decision trees that illustrate frustrations with everyday life. Yes, I could make work easier if I just spent 3 minutes tying down computer cables beneath my desk. But that would mean not sitting down. And my body isn't built for that kind of punishment anymore.
This is Busójárás, a traditional festival in Hungary that takes place toward the end of February. It began with the Croatian minority living in the town of Mohács in the southern part of the country, but has since spread nationwide.
As part of the festival men known as busós wear heavy coats and horrifying masks. The goal is to look so frightening that winter flees to make way for spring. They also parade in homemade floats down city streets and the Danube River. You can see more colorful photos of this lively festival at the Daily Mail.
Swiss Water is a company that, in 1933, developed a means to remove 99.9% of caffeine from coffee beans and 100% of joy from life. Taking pride in his unholy achievement, the company has opened a pop-up "coffee" house in Manhattan. In the midst of the moral decay of American civilization, customers to the Art of Coffee Without Caffeine can partake of the product until November 8, provided that the upstanding people of New York City do not put a stop to this deviancy before then.
40 years ago this past weekend, the British rock band Queen released its famous song "Bohemian Rhapsody." This bizarre and majestic mixture of musical styles and stories has since become a cultural icon for multiple generations.
The original video, directed by Bruce Gowers – later of “American Idol” – took three hours to make and cost 3,500 pounds ($5,400).
In 1992, the unforgettable car singalong in “Wayne’s World” took about 10 hours to shoot, director Penelope Spheeris told the BBC. Afterward, there were complaints from the actors of sore necks and headaches from all the headbanging.
Mike Meyers, who played the film’s title role revealed to Vanity Fair in 2014 that the song was nearly replaced with a Guns N’ Roses track.
