Recently, a large black ring appeared in the sky above Shortandy, a village in Kazakhstan. It hovered for about 15 minutes before gradually dissipating. What was the cause? Aliens? Bigfoot? Miss Cellania? No, nothing so fanciful. According to a physicist, it’s just smoke from a nearby factory. The Independent reports:
However, Andrey Solodovnik, associate physics professor at the Northern Kazakhstan State University, quickly put these rumours to bed saying that the giant hoop was most likely a large smoke ring caused by combustion from a nearby factory.
The United States Marine Corps has a long tradition of fighting anyone anywhere with limited logistical support. Marines improvise. This tradition of ingenuity is aptly demonstrated in a training exercise at an aviation base in Yuma, Arizona. In the above photo, a CH-53E Super Stallion heavy lift helicopter carries an entire HMMWV in slings. The Super Stallion is thirsty, so it takes a drink from the KC-130T Hercules tanker.
Of course now . . . they’re pretty much useless. The first step is to acquire Cookie Monster, which Mikeasaurus has now done. The instructions are hypothetically useful if there are multiple Cookie Monsters. If there are, I doubt that there are many of them. So as you soon as you see a Cookie Monster, you should bag him. Hunting regulations vary by state, so you should check local laws before taking more than one Cookie Monster. There may be a limit as well as seasonal restrictions.
The Amazon River turtle is sometimes known as the Giant South American River Turtle because it can grow up to 200 pounds. That’s big enough that zoologists were able to attach a camera on the back of one and watch her swim through the waters of the Amazon River basin. Watch this turtle glide through the water amidst many baby turtles and interact with another adult turtle at the bottom of the river.
There's a lot to see in Paris, one of the great tourism capitals of the world. You can visit the Louvre and notice how small the Mona Lisa really looks. You can take one of those trick photos that makes you look taller than the Eiffel Tower. And, of course, there's that pharmacy in the Latin Quarter.
Yes, a pharmacy. Specifically, it's the Pharmacie de Monge. It's very popular with tourists from East Asia, especially South Korea. A third of its customers hail form East Asia. It's a popular place to visit while in Paris. That's because it sells cheap cosmetics. The owners have responded to this tourism practice by shifting their marketing to the East Asian tourist market. Quartz reports:
“Here it is seven times cheaper,” one 21-year-old student named Eun Ji, said. “No, not really—but it’s at least three times cheaper. And back home, there is not much choice.” The shop was put on the map 12 years ago, when a Korean journalist living in the area wrote about the pharmacy on a blog. Now, the store features in Korean tourist guides to Paris and—unusually for the city—capitalizes on this notoriety by employing several polyglot employees.
“Of the 50 employees, pharmacists or sales consultants, nine speak Korean, three speak Chinese, one speaks Japanese,” M magazine says. And it’s not just Asian customers seeking out these products in France. Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, and English are also spoken.
Redditor BlondeRed snapped this photo. There's a Kroger grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana where customers can pick their own living mushrooms from an active bed of them. That's a fancy Kroger! Or, as some redditors are calling it, "Kro-Gucci."
Some redditors suspect that it stinks, but BlondeRed says that it doesn't smell at all.
Twitter user BitBlt_Korry presents a classic, 8-bit pixelated look on this relief sculpture by making it out of toothpicks. The textured, visual effect is strikingly similar to the old game. He meticulously planned the entire project in a spreadsheet prorgam, then spray painted clusters of toothpicks with the basic colors. The project took BitBlt_Korry about 5 days and $84 of materials. You see more photos at a video showing how he made it at Kotaku.
Etsy seller Big Nerd Wolf makes tea hangers. These are paper attachments for tea bags. The arms of these figures hang off the edge of your tea cup, steeping the tea while making the bag accessible with your fingers. Also, they look cool.
The tea hangers are available for digital downloading. They include characters from Alien, Escape from New York, Star Wars, and The Legend of Zelda.
The late pop artist Keith Haring was noted for his simple human figures and forms. One of his more famous images is Five Dancing Figures, which he recreated in different colors and backgrounds.
Last year, the art magazine Garage Magazine asked balloon artist Robert Moy, the founder of the Brooklyn Balloon Company, to remake that famous Haring piece using only balloons. This time-lapse video shows Moy making his poppable pop art.
In 2012, world traveler Joel Oleson visited Antarctica. He stayed at the Russian base on the frozen continent. While there, he visited a penguin colony that had 3 different species: Adele, Chinstrap, and Gentroo. He and the other tourists were not allowed to touch the penguins. But they could let the penguins approach them.
Oleson lay on the ground. A curious baby penguin explored him, then hopped on his belly!
To honor the late actor Leonard Nimoy, Andrea Nyilas made this wooden table. Nyilas is skilled in marquetry, which is the art of using wood inlay in surfaces to create images and patterns. For this piece, Nyilas used walnut, maple, ash, chestnut, and root. You can see process photos at her Hungarian-language blog (translation).
The Komondor dog originates in Hungary, where it was a sheepdog. It looks like a sheep. Or, to modern owners, it looks like a mop. To complete the illusion, all that is necessary is to add a few props.
She's not as invulnerable as Superman, but small arms fire can't hurt her a bit. It just . . . nudges her. A little bit. Enough to be noticeable. And enough to annoy her.
