Sumalee and Kasem are two baby otters that live at Longleat, a wildlife park and zoo in Britain. In this video, Beverley Allen introduces them a large wading pool. Allen says:
I started off putting them in the sink with a little bit of water when they were about nine weeks old. Then they progressed to my bath, where I could make the water a bit deeper to let them practice their breathing. Now they're splashing around quite happily in a paddling pool, with a few toys to encourage them to play.
Frank Kachanoff, a psychology researcher at McGill University (Canada), conducted an experiment on the emotional responses of people to images of meat. He discovered a positive correlation between meat encounters and a calmer disposition:
Kachanoff recruited 82 men and asked them to punish an aide with various volumes of sound each time he made an error while sorting photos, some with pictures of meat, and others with neutral images. The researcher had anticipated participants who watched the aide sort meat photos would inflict more discomfort on him, but he was surprised when those pictures did not provoke aggressive behaviour.
“[W]ith the benefit of hindsight, it would make sense that our ancestors would be calm, as they would be surrounded by friends and family at meal time,” Kachanoff said in a press release.
Shawn Thompson and his friends spent three years making an amazingly detailed set of Halo armored suit costumes. At the link, you can view pictures that show how much effort and skill went into molding, casting, sculpting, and painting the components.
Defense contractor SPAWAR System Center Pacific has developed a system that turns a stream of seawater shot into the air into a functional antenna:
As the pillar of water is squirted through the current probe, a magnetic field is created and signal comes through to a hooked-up communication device.
Plus, depending on the height of the stream of water, you can get UHF, VHF and HF broadcasts, all from the same jet of H2O. You can even set up multiple jets of water, at different heights, to broadcast on different bands simultaneously. Handy.
The idea could prove particularly useful for ships, which struggle to find room for all the antennas on board. US Navy ships already have upwards of 80 antennas on deck, meaning real estate for extra towers is hugely limited. Instead, the sea water device can be placed anywhere on the deck.
American actor Dick Van Dyke claims that his life was saved by porpoises. Van Dyke fell asleep on his surfboard one day, and when we woke up, he could no longer see the shore. He asserts that porpoises pushed him back to land:
"I woke up out of sight of land ... and I started paddling with the swells and I started seeing fins swimming around me and I thought, 'I'm dead!'", he said
"They turned out to be porpoises [and] they pushed me all the way to shore. I'm not kidding."
CG artist Maxime Luère made this short film. It depicts the life of man, from his foolish teenage years to his growing maturity, and ultimately, his death of old age. Luère's medium is a series of Facebook updates.
Two years ago, Peggielene Bartels, a US citizen and resident of Maryland, received an early morning phone call. Her uncle, the king of a village in Ghana, had died. Bartels was the next in the line of succession, and so she became king of Otuam:
Nana Amuah-Afenyi VI is Bartels' new title, but she is better known as King Peggy. This straight-talking, 57-year-old is the first woman in her fishing community of 7,000 people in Ghana's Central Region to be anointed a king, or "nana."
She now juggles two lives — from the palace in Otuam and from a modest condo outside Washington, D.C. Since the 1970s, Bartels, a naturalized U.S. citizen, has been a secretary at Ghana's Embassy in Washington where she still spends most of her time, running royal affairs back home in Otuam over the phone and on trips to Ghana.
"So, when they told me, I was a little bit reluctant to accept it, because it comes with responsibilities. And here is a secretary in the United States, I have my own obligations, bills and stuff and becoming a king, you have to be really rich," she says.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130902212 via View From The Porch | Photo: Eric Don-Arthur/NPR
During the Cold War, the Swedish Air Force wanted to be able to land its fighter jets on roads and short airstrips throughout the country. The Saab Viggen fighter was therefore designed to land and take off from very short runways. As you can see from this video, this fighter can land, turn around backwards, and take off in under a minute.
Luxury home furnishings designer Windisch Nameek made a toilet brush and holder that's plated with 24-carat gold. The vendor suggests that the advantage to gold is that it won't pit, tarnish, or corrode. So it's a practical choice.
Filmmaker François Vautier put an ant colony inside a scanner and took a picture once a week every week for five years. This time-lapse video shows the colony gradually filling and eroding the machine.
Harvard University's Putnam Gallery has a collection of historical scientific instruments. Pictured above is Benjamin Martin's cometarium, which dates back to about 1766. Here's what it did:
This apparatus was designed to demonstrate how the speed of a comet varies in its orbit according to Kepler's law of equal areas. The comet Benjamin Martin chose for this instrument is Halley's Comet, which goes around the Sun every 75 1/2 years. Martin began producing cometaria before Halley's Comet made its predicted return, and so was betting that Halley would prove correct in his theory.
http://dssmhi1.fas.harvard.edu/emuseumdev/code/emuseum.asp?collection=120&collectionname=CHSI%27s%20Putnam%20Gallery&style=single¤trecord=67&page=collection&profile=objects&searchdesc=CHSI%27s%20Putnam%20Gallery&sessionid=C2E2B76B-E06A-4F9D-8DD1-8AECE2978F18&action=collection¤trecord=68 via CrunchGear | Photo: Harvard University
GoPet, a company that manufactures dog exercise equipment, makes a dog-sized hamster wheel. The company stresses that this design is both healthy for the dog and environmentally-friendly. There's a video at the link of several dogs using them.
On September 4th, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck New Zealand. Pictured above is a railroad track that crossed the fault line near Rolleston. Geographer Dave Petley of the American Geophysical Union writes:
The second image is particularly interesting. Note how the rails show high levels of deformation whilst the surrounding ground shows comparatively little. Notice also how the big kink on the left side has pushed the ballast aside and into the track side ditch This has happened on the right side too, but to a lesser extent. The right side bend nearest the camera has pushed the ballast towards the camera.
My initial hypothesis here (I am no expert on railway track deformation) in order to stimulate discussion is that the buckling may be the result of compressional deformation across a broad zone. The compression on the very strong railway line was accommodated when a weak point was found, leading to a comparatively rapid deformation to form the main buckle on the left. This then concentrated stress on both sides of the buckle, allowing the other (right side) bends to form.
