Kids will find ways to scare that you would never have thought of in a million years. Adults look at a light fixture and see illumination. This little girl saw an opportunity.
"After converting my twins’ cribs to 'big girl beds', I quickly realized it was a mistake. I could hear a noise coming from the girls’ nursery during their nap time so I pulled up my Arlo Security app and realized one of my twins, Elise, was swinging from the chandelier. Thankfully she wasn’t hurt but the chandelier was immediately removed. This is just one, of many, reasons why I can’t have nice things anymore. My girls still ask for their chandelier but I’d be willing to bet their reason isn’t for utility."
Were you waiting for that fixture to "untwist" and swing her around like a ceiling fan? I was. -via Digg
If you've ever studied plate tectonics, you know that dry land on earth was once a giant supercontinent, then it separated into plates that began moving away from each other. But how did that get started? It could be the same way you ruined Mom's serving dish by treating it as a baking dish.
In a new study, led by planetary scientist Alexander Webb at the University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, scientists have come up with a new idea to explain why Earth's crust cracked into pieces.
According to the study, the early Earth's outer shell, or lithosphere, heated up, which caused it to expand and crack. This might seem like a simple explanation, but it contradicts many earlier theories.
I once lived in a house that had real, functional window shutters, and those things were cool, but heavy! Homes built more recently mostly use shutters as decoration only. The problem is that some people have forgotten what shutters were originally for, and how they worked. Scott Sidler is a historic preservation contractor, so he knows real from fake. He's seen so many poorly-thought-out shutters that he started using the Instagram hashtag #ShudderSunday to draw attention to them.
There are examples of shutters that aren't the right size, aren't in the right place, and would never work if anyone ever tried to cover a window with them. See a ranked gallery of Sidler's worst shutter finds at Bored Panda. Also check out his pictures of not only shutter failures, but also of lovely preservationist renovations at Sidler's Instagram.
The city of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has more than 100 Art Deco buildings. They were constructed in the 1930s by Belgian colonizers as a European neighborhood where the Congolese weren't allowed -except for household help.
“Art Deco architecture was abundant in colonial cities in the 1920s and ‘30s,” says the architectural historian David Rifkind. “Colonial authorities liked Art Deco because it portrayed an image of technological modernization that was intended to present colonization as a benevolent and ‘civilizing’ gift to native inhabitants.” Its association with glamour and international travel, says Rifkind, gave the impression that the colonizers were dynamic and forward-thinking.
In Bukavu, colonial-era buildings exemplify a particular type of international Art Deco architecture that emerged in the 1930s, according to Adedoyin Teriba, an assistant professor of art and urban studies at Vassar College. “There is no doubt that the buildings exemplify ‘Streamline Moderne,’” says Teriba. The style was inspired by aerodynamic engineering, as seen in the curvilinear edges of many of Bukavu’s buildings, imitating the surfaces of airplanes.
To architects and historians, these buildings capture a signature style of colonialism, of an imperial drive toward the future. But for today’s residents, these buildings are a daily reminder of both a painful colonial history and a frustrated, politically futile present.
While these buildings are a reminder of colonization, they are also beautiful and well-built, but are falling into disrepair. Preservationists want to keep them as both a part of history and as a tourist draw. Read about the Art Deco architecture of Bukavu at Atlas Obscura.
You've probably never seen an image of Earth like this one. It is centered on the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which gives us a taste of just how enormous it is. As Minnesotastan points out at TYWKIWDBI, there are places in the Pacific Ocean for which the antipode is also in the Pacific Ocean. On the bright side, this map features New Zealand prominently, while many omit it.
For a long time, common knowledge about human migration held that people who crossed over the Beringian land bridge stayed in the far north until around 13,000 years ago, when they began to populate North America, moving gradually into South America. But subsequent discoveries keep pushing this timeline back further. Now a cave in Mexico has evidence that humans lived there least 26,500 years ago.
Chiquihuite cave is perched high in the Astillero Mountains, 9000 feet above sea level and 3,280 feet higher than the valley below. Excavations there were launched when a 2012 test pit unearthed a few stone artifacts that suggested a human presence dating back to the Last Glacial Maximum between 18,000 and 26,000 years ago. More extensive excavations detailed in the new study were carried out in 2016 and 2017, unearthing some 1,900 stone points or possible tools used for cutting, chopping, scraping, or as weapons.
The artifacts were dated by 46 different radiocarbon samples of adjacent animal bones, charcoal, and sediment samples. To the team, they represent a previously unknown technological tradition of advanced flaking skills. More than 90 percent of the artifacts were of greenish or blackish stone, though those colors are less common locally, suggesting to the authors that they were singled out as desirable. The bulk of the material is from deposits dating to between 13,000 and 16,600 years ago, leading the scientists to hypothesize that the humans may have used the cave for more than 10,000 years.
Evidence from this cave and other sites indicate that people traveled from Asia to the Americas either much earlier than previously thought, or else they traveled across glaciers. Read about the implications of these finds at Smithsonian.
Canadian artists Catherine King and Wayne Adams live on an enormous floating island they built out of discarded and recycled materials on the west coast of Vancouver Island. They have lived there for almost thirty years now. The island, dubbed Freedom Cove, is 25 miles (by boat) from the nearest town, and doesn't have electricity, but it has what the couple needs.
The compound has everything you could possibly think of and more: a dance floor, an art gallery, a candle factory, four greenhouses, six solar panels, and access to a small waterfall that provides constant running water.
George Miller is the singer for the Kaisers and the New Piccadillys. He's also an artist and production designer. The lockdown meant he had plenty of time, so he's put that to use making marionette puppets of musical legends of the past. Ursula Cleary made clothing for them, and Chris Taylor designed retro-style art boxes for tech.
I’d made some marionettes for a video a few years earlier and since then had been toying with the idea of making one of Link Wray but never seemed to have the time, so lockdown seemed the ideal opportunity. I liked the notion of spending time making something that had no ultimate purpose other than self amusement and no deadline for completion.
George Orwell published his book Animal Farm in 1945 as an allegory for the political history of the Soviet Union. It's been used ever since then in schools, although not always smoothly. I read it for a junior high English class, which was not coordinated with our history class, as we never studied the USSR at all. World history class never even made it to the 20th century. But Animal Farm has a history of its own, including being shunned by Second World nations.
5. The Soviet Union banned Animal Farm until the Cold War was almost over.
In 1988, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy liberalized the USSR, a Latvian journal called Rodnik published Animal Farm in four installments. The Russian government newspaper Izvestia printed an excerpt later that year, saying: “It is good that the prose of this great English writer reaches our readers, albeit late.”
6. Many other governments have banned Animal Farm.
Beyond the Soviet Union, Animal Farm has also been banned at various times in countries like Cuba (where the book was set on fire by the government), North Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and countries in Africa. In Malawi, government minister Albert Muwalo was charged with treason and hanged in 1977; one alleged piece of evidence was his ownership of Animal Farm, a banned book. And in 1991, Kenya’s government banned a Swahili-language play based on Animal Farm that attacked corruption.
A Brooklyn family with a pedigreed French bulldog welcomed five puppies into the world in the summer of 1904. Sadly, the mother dog died only two days later, and the puppies were in dire need. The owners contacted the local pound for a possible canine wet nurse.
According to the news reports, the pound did not have a suitable dog to take on the important job. However, the superintendent remembered a stray cat that had recently been dropped off at the shelter with her newborn kittens.
He explained to Mrs. Fahnestock that all but one of the kittens had died, and the mother cat appeared to be grieving deeply over her loss. He thought she would accept the motherless puppies and nurse them.
Mrs. Fahnestock agreed to the experiment, and welcomed the mother cat and kitten into her home. The puppies accepted their new feline mother right away. The mother cat, in turn, purred joyously and seemed very happy to have these new fur babies.
The arrangement was custom-made for the papers of the time, so the cat, named Lady Gray, along with her kitten Bill Gray and the five French bulldogs became locally famous. The puppies later went on to win awards in dog shows, while always staying affectionately loyal to their cat mother. Read about the interspecies adoption saga at The Hatching Cat.
It turns out that yes, you can print a house. Watch as a computer-controlled printer on a huge (10 meter square) scaffold squirts concrete in a precise pattern to construct a two-story house in Antwerp, Belgium.
Kamp C, the provincial Center for Sustainability and Innovation in Construction, printed the first house in Europe. This is the first printed two story building worldwide. The house has a floor surface of ninety square meters and was printed with the largest 3D concrete printer in Europe.
The printer only did the basic structure, while craftsmen installed windows and did the finishing work. This house is a prototype, but someday they might take this show on the road. -via Geekologie
Scientists at the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary were just trying to boost production of Russian sturgeon, using hi-tech reproduction technology and an American sperm donor fish, and ended up with a fish that isn't supposed to exist. This story brings to mind two pertinent quotes from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should," and "Life, uh, finds a way." Researcher Attila Mozsár described the experiment.
Russian sturgeons (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii) are critically endangered and also economically important: They're the source of much of the world's caviar. These fish can grow to more than 7 feet long (2.1 meters), living on a diet of molluscs and crustaceans. American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) filter-feed off of zooplankton in the waters of the Mississippi River drainage basin, where water from the Mississippi and its tributaries drain into. They, too, are large, growing up to 8.5 feet (2.5 m) long. Like the sturgeon, the have a slow rate of growth and development puts them at risk of overfishing. They've also lost habitat to dams in the Mississippi drainage, according to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. The two species last shared a common ancestor 184 million years ago, according to the Times.
Nevertheless, they were able to breed —— much to the surprise of Mozsár and his colleagues. The researchers were trying to breed Russian sturgeon in captivity through a process called gynogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. In gynogenesis, a sperm triggers an egg's development but fails to fuse to the egg's nucleus. That means its DNA is not part of the resulting offspring, which develop solely from maternal DNA. The researchers were using American paddlefish sperm for the process, but something unexpected happened. The sperm and egg fused, resulting in offspring with both sturgeon and paddlefish genes.
The picture here shows a sturgeon on top, then three of the hybrid offspring below it, all looking quite different from each other. About 100 of these hybrids, which the scientists call sturddlefish, now live at the institute, and it is not clear whether they can reproduce on their own. Read about the creatures at LiveScience. -via Metafilter
In the 19th century, tuberculosis was rampant. The disease attacked the lungs, and could ravage the body for years. TB was incurable at the time; patients either recovered or didn't. The only treatment was clean, dry, mountain air and pleasant surroundings. Sanitariums sprung up around the western US, and Colorado Springs was perfectly suited for tuberculosis patients due to its altitude, sunshine, moderate temperatures, and wide open spaces. The town began to lure TB patients soon after it was founded in 1871.
Tens of thousands of people went to Colorado Springs every year drawn by the lure of tuberculosis treatment. Once they checked into a sanatorium, patients were subjected to a range of bizarre treatment, such as forced feeding, mandatory bed rest, hypnotism, sunbathing and sleeping outside. The routine was torturous.
Each patient was forced to eat twice as much they wanted. A typical diet consisted of three large meals supplemented by raw eggs and several glasses of milk throughout the day. Some patients were fed laxatives to keep all that food moving. The idea was to rebuild the frail bodies of the patients wrecked by the disease. It was not uncommon for those who spent long months at the sanatorium to gain between 25 to 50 pounds.
Fresh air was considered the most vital of treatments, and for this purpose, nearly all sanatoriums had well-ventilated sleeping huts built in the style of teepees.
The game Operation debuted in 1965, and so generations of kids have tried to remove a patient's funny bone, spare ribs, or butterflies from the stomach. If you screwed up, an electric buzzer and a red nose pointed out your failure. The tasks are not at all realistic ....or are they? Real surgeons love the game, and many of them receive an edition for medical school graduation. Some were inspired by it, or used it for practice for their future profession. Dr. Anthony Rossi of Sloan Kettering said,
I actually played Operation a lot as a kid — I was obsessed with it. From an early age I knew I wanted to be a doctor, and I loved that game because of the precision that you needed. It’s also the rare game where both winning and losing was fun — even hitting the buzzer was fun. I’m left-handed, so I’d play the game left-handed and then I’d try it right-handed just to see how good I was. I love that game so much I recently bought it for my nephews and told them to try it with their dominant hand, and then their non-dominant hand.
The title of this point-and-click game is, I believe, a pun on the term six feet under, because there are actually a dozen cats involved. Anyway, the premise of Six Cats Under is that you are a cat lady who has died. As a ghost, you try to free all your cats from the apartment, but you don't have enough strength to open the door. You must manipulate what you can to get the cats to free themselves. This is not easy, and you might drive yourself crazy clicking on everything in the home. But give it a shot, because it's fun as well as maddening. It might be easier as a group project. If you become seriously stuck and want to give up, here's a play through video that will reveal all. - via Metafilter
