There are over 1,000 emojis in the world today. When trying to use one in a tweet or résumé, you can use menus and submenus on your smartphone to find the one you want. But that's not necessary on the keyboard system that Tom Scott rigged. It consists of 14 standard keyboards, all linked together with appropriate software. Each emoji--even those that aren't out to the public yet--is available with a single click.
Want to lie more effectively? Drink a lot of water an hour before the deed. That's one takeaway from a recent study by Dr. Iris Blandón-Gitlin of California State University at Fullterton and her colleagues.
They placed research subjects in 2 groups. Members of one group drank 5 glasses of water. Members of the other drank 5 sips of water. After an hour, the subjects were asked to lie persuasively about their opinion on a topic. Reviewers were more likely to judge people who, by this point, really needed to go to the bathroom, as truthful.
These results may be the result of the inhibitory spillover effect. The need to carefully control one's bladder reinforced the need to carefully control one's expressions and mannerisms. Popular Science explains:
This result adds evidence to something called the inhibitory spillover effect. If you are already using one type of self-control, it’s easier to be self-controlled at other things. However, this only works for simultaneous tasks. Other research has found that resisting the cupcakes at the office can deplete your inhibitory control resources, making it harder to ignore that post-dinner ice cream siren song.
The energy drink brand Red Bull commissioned photographer Dustin Snipes to show professional basketball player Anthony Davis performing a miraculous feat: dunking the sun into the net. Snipes and Davis made not only one, but many shots of this by lining up Davis and the camera at the right angles, then taking the photos at just the right time. You can see more photos in the series here.
Gene Kogan offers this clever and fresh take on Disney's Alice in Wonderland by editing the tea party scene to reflect the styles of famous artists. They are, in order:
Pablo Picasso Georgia O’Keeffe S.H. Raza Hokusai Frida Kahlo Vincent van Gogh Tarsila Saloua Raouda Choucair Lee Krasner Sol Lewitt Wu Guanzhong Elaine de Kooning Ibrahim el-Salahi Minnie Pwerle Jean-Michel Basquiat Edvard Munch Natalia Goncharova
As the video progresses, you see the characters and setting change styles with thumbnail versions of the original video and a sample painting by the artist.
That's what the sign at the museum said. Naturally, that's the first thing that visitors tried to do.
This is Do Not Look into the Eyes, an interactive sculpture by Norwegian artist Erik Pirolt. It's a ceramic head inside a glass container. Affixed to the container is a simple warning: don't look the sculpture in the eyes. When people did so, water sprayed out of the empty eye sockets of the sculpture, right at the visitor.
Modern humans struggle with two compelling needs: eating and taking selfies. For far too long, we've had to choose between the two, pausing from shoving food into our maws to take pictures of said food and post them to social media.
Now the future is here! The cereal company General Mills has invented the Selfie Spoon: a spoon with a built-in selfie stick. Now you can take an unending stream of selfies without uncomfortable pauses between bites of food. This is true model of productivity.
Yael and Shay of the Raw Edges design studio make novel and eccentric pieces of furniture. In the past, we've seen their bookshelf that seems to float in midair. This model, called Hole in the Wall, looks like it extends deep into the floor--as though there's been a transporter malfunction.
Last month, Tyler Balak was a few hundred feet out into the water at Buxton, North Carolina. He was enjoying a pleasant day surfing when he saw something moving in the water. At first, he thought it was a shark. Then, when he saw that it was a deer--a baby deer.
Balak picked up the fawn and carried her to shore. He and other people on the beach located a wildlife rescue center nearby and took the deer--which was clearly in shock--there. The Virginia Beach Pilot reports:
On the Internet, they discovered Hatteras Island Wildlife Rehabilitation, an animal rescue shelter 6 miles away in Frisco.
Lou Browning, president of the nonprofit, put the fawn in a padded room.
"It was coming out of its ocean shock at that point and ready to go ballistic," Browning said, adding that fawns can hurt themselves in captivity.
So Browning watched, and all signs pointed to a happy ending. The fawn had good muscle tone and no ticks around its eyes and ears. It moved well, could see and had no obvious injuries. A few hours after the deer arrived, Browning sedated it, took it back to Buxton and released it.
No one knows how it ended up so far out into the ocean.
Gallorette is a cow that, until recently, lived at Premier Longhorns ranch in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Her human has taught her to perform tricks in exchange for treats. She can bow and spin in a circle. Their interaction looks very similar to that of a person with a dog. I wonder if the training methods are the same.
The corgi stalks his elusive prey: the tube ferrets. Or vice versa. It's not clear who's hunting whom, and who's winning this contest of wits. The dog has size, but the ferrets have maneuverability. Place your bets.
Wilson calls its new product the Connected Basketball. The $200 ball is designed to help individual players monitor their practice. Interior sensors detect shots taken, shots made, free throws, and other common basketball feats. Wilson says that the battery is good for at least 100,000 shots. All of the information that it records is accessible through a smartphone app. CNET reviewed the ball and the app:
The Wilson app includes four game modes: Free Range, Free Throw, Buzzer Beater and Game Time. The Free Range lets you shoot from anywhere on the court, while the Free Throw sees how well you can shoot from the line. The Buzzer Beater and Game Time modes are used to test how well you can do in clutch situations, such as when the clock is ticking down to zero or your team is down by a few points. There's even crowd noise and sports commentator observations to get you in the zone.
Head lice require direct contact to easily move from host to host. When teenagers press their heads together to take a group selfie, they provide bridges that lice can easily cross.
Dr. Sharon Rink, a pediatrician in Appleton, Wisconsin, says that she's seen a surge of teenage head lice cases. She advises that teenagers keep their heads apart a bit when taking group selfies in order to reduce the likelihood of lice transmission. WBAY reports:
“People are doing ‘selfies’ like every day, as opposed to going to photo booths years and years ago,” says Rink. “So you’re probably having much more contact with other people’s heads.”
She says you should keep a little distance between you and your friends heads when taking a selfie, just in case one of them has lice.
“If you have an extremely itchy scalp and you’re a teenager, you might want to get checked out for lice instead of chalking it up to dandruff.”
And it's clearly not an accident. The beluga lands a trick shot, spraying water out of his mouth, over the lip of the tank, and right on the boy's head.
If it looks like a duck and quacks . . . well, it's actually a tomato. But it also looks like a rubber duck. Marie Davidek of Mt. Morris Township, Michigan grew it in her home garden. She's been raising tomatoes for many years, but has never produced one like this. Davidek doesn't want to slice the tomato up yet and hopes to find some way to preserve it.
When I was a young boy, I felt proud when I could get a stone to skip twice. That's nothing compared to what Kurt "Mountain Man" Steiner can do. For Steiner, stone skipping isn't just a casual activity to do while passing by a lake. For for more than a decade, he's carefully collected the best skipping stones and practiced constantly, refining his already world-class technique.
Steiner has secured Guinness World Records for stone skipping in the past by once attaining 40 confirmed skips. He has since more than doubled that number. Here he is getting the top title again 2 years ago with a full 88 skips. According to Guinness World Records:
He has collected more than 10,000 "quality rocks" and has sorted each according to its type, to prepare for the best possible throw. He looks for stones "that weigh between 3 - 8 ounces... that are very smooth (they don't have to be perfectly round), flat bottoms and are between 1/4 - 5/16th of an inch thick."
