Some of us barely have knowledge of the sinking of the Titanic aside from what we get from pop culture or movies. One of the mysteries in the tragedy was the identity of a young boy who died. In the new Smithsonian Channel documentary, “The Curious Life and Death of…,” London-based historian Lindsey Fitzharris examines the story of the unidentified child, as The New York Post details: 

“He came floating toward us with a little upturned face,” John Snow Jr., an embalmer aboard the Mackay-Bennett, told a reporter from the Halifax Herald after the telegraph-cable ship returned to port with more than 200 bodies in late April, 1912. Dozens of the dead they found were so disfigured they had to be buried at sea, he said.

Unable to identify the toddler, the sailors were so moved that they held a funeral service and buried him in a Halifax cemetery with a headstone dedicated to the “memory of the unknown child.”

The identity of the boy remained a mystery for nearly a century until a group of forensic experts gradually pieced it together, using breakthroughs in DNA technology and the discovery of a pair of tiny shoes, which had been kept by a Halifax police sergeant tasked with burning all the victims’ clothing in 1912. He just couldn’t bring himself to destroy what remained of the youngest victim recovered by the sailors.

image via The New York Post

If you’ve tried to record a conversation using the iPhone’s screen recording feature, you’ll realize that it won't allow you to record the phone call. Some of us might want to keep phone call recordings for work, or to help us remember the important details in a conversation we weren’t able to jot down. It’s actually illegal to record phone conversations in some areas, and it would be too difficult for Apple to regulate a call recording system into the IOS, as Reader’s Digest details: 

“While it is not illegal in every state to record phone conversations, Apple wants to make sure that everyone stays compliant by not automatically adding the feature in its smartphones,” says Burton Kelso, a Technology Expert at Integral Computer Service, a computer repair company in Kansas City. “Also, Apple wants to ensure its user’s privacy when it comes to smartphone use.”

In addition to not having a call record feature built-in, Apple doesn’t allow apps access to the microphone and Phone app directly so it can be tricky to get around that limitation, but there are ways to do it

Image via Reader’s Digest

With the current situation, most of us are required to stay at home for our own safety. The work at home situation is quite a difficult transition for most businesses. Over a single weekend, Adobe had to shift their workforce of 22,000 people to working remotely. Changing a company’s processes and workflows takes more than a weekend, though. VentureBeat details the steps the company took to ensure that its workers can work smoothly at home: 

We realized pretty quickly that the only way to meet their needs was to completely rethink our support infrastructure.

Our first step was to launch an organization-wide open Slack channel that would tie together the IT organization and the entire Adobe employee community. Our 24×7 global IT help desk would front the support on that channel, while the rest of IT was made available for rapid event escalation.

As we began building the framework and interfaces on our Slack Channel, we realized the same, specific questions and issues were coming up frequently. By focusing on the most common and weighty issues, we decided to optimize our support for frequently asked questions and issues. We dubbed this AI and machine-learning-based Slack channel “#wfh-support,” and it had built-in natural language processing (NLP).

The chatbot’s answers could be as simple as directing employees to an existing knowledge base article or FAQ, or walking them through steps to solve a problem, such as setting up a virtual private network. We chose to focus first on the eight most frequently reported topics, and today we’re continuing to add capabilities as we learn what works and what delivers the biggest benefits.

Image via VentureBeat 

They’re roughly the same size too, I wonder how the mantis was able to pull this off! In this timelapse video, watch how a praying mantis devours a whole adult locust. The original time it took for the praying mantis to successfully eat the locust was three hours. You’ll end up scared or in awe of nature after watching. I felt a mix of the two. 

It’s hard to make friends. The harder battle is to keep your friends close, and to maintain the respect and bond you have with each other. It’s hard to accept that sometimes, we are to blame for friendships falling out. If you feel like you’re becoming a bad friend, but want a guide or checklist to see if  you really are and it’s not just the anxiety talking, check out the Huffington Post’s full list on the signs that indicate if you’re not being a good friend. It’s not bad to try your best to be a good friend! 

Image via The Huffington Post

There are a lot of expectations when it comes to women’s appearance. They’re expected to wear makeup, and be skinny and curvy in the right places. These expectations are being broken down and society is slowly becoming more inclusive. The dominant trends that we see forced on women are influenced by history, technology and consumerism. Bright Side delved into the past to understand the origin of today’s beauty standards. Check the full piece here.

Image via Bright Side  

Celebrities are trying their best to push new projects during the quarantine. No one is pushing people to be extremely productive and come up with new inventions or creative work, but there’s also no harm in trying out new things. Channing Tatum has written a children’s book set to be published next year. The One and Only Sparkella is a picture book described as “a charming ode to self-esteem and the love between a father and daughter,” as Uproxx details: 

It details a little girl named Ella attending school for the first time, which doesn’t start off so well, partly because of her sparkle-heavy couture. “But with a little help from her dad,” the description reads, “she soon learns the importance of just being herself, no matter what other people say.”

On Instagram, Tatum described the genesis of the book, his first. No surprise that it’s the product of spending a lot of time hunkering down with his own young daughter. “Guys, I don’t know about you but things got a little weird for me in quarantine,” Tatum wrote. “I ended up accidentally locking myself in my 7 year old daughter’s room. And I ended up finding my inner child. So this is what I created for my little girl. From what is, I guess, the little girl in me. Thanks for reading.”

Image via Uproxx 

It’s the well-known brick phone! The Nokia 3310 is loved by a lot of [not-so young] people for its sturdy casing, the right shade of midnight blue, the long-lasting battery (did you know it can last at least a week without a recharge?), and the god-tier game, Snake II. There’s a sense of nostalgia, with the memories of the past associated with the classic gadget. You’ll see new thinkpieces singing praises of the 3310, as Wired details: 

That explains the enduring nostalgia it invokes. Every year or two someone writes a new commemoration, anniversary or no. In 2018 a company called HMD Global even resurrected the 3310, in a fashion, turning out a feature phone that recalls the iconic design while adding contemporary touches—a basic web browser, a low-end camera—to help it function in today’s world.

That reinvention feels in some ways misplaced. If you miss the Nokia 3310, it’s not with the caveat that you wish you could log onto Facebook from it. You miss it because it reminds you of a time when Facebook didn’t exist. The internet has always been bad in parts, but in the 3310 era it was at least something you could reasonably ignore for long stretches of time. The 3310 couldn’t do much because there simply wasn’t much to do: no tweets to send, no News Feeds to refresh, no photo filters to swipe through. Your phone was primarily a phone, not a purposefully addictive portal into infinite knowledge and existential weight.

Image via Wired 

SaveAFox blesses our feeds with this video of two foxes. It’s about time we knew what foxes really say, right? Do they sound like the viral song from a long time ago? Apparently not! Well, if you’re just in to witness foxes being cute, this one’s for you too!

if you miss riding on a plane, maybe this video game can help! Airplane Mode, developed by Hosoji Auji for AMC Games, is "the only flight simulation game where players can experience the intense excitement of being an economy class passenger on a long-haul flight." The game lets players realistically experience riding a plane in the economy class, as UPI details: 

The game allows player's to simulate the experience of taking a long flight in real-time, with available activities including rifling through an in-flight magazine, completing Sudoku puzzles, watching movies from the 1930s and looking out the window, which features realistic satellite imagery of the flight path.

The players are also treated to experiences including in-flight meals, turbulence and WiFi outages.

"Crying baby not guaranteed on every flight," the game's description reads.

Auji told CNN that he discovered while developing the game that everyone he talked to seemed "to have a strong opinion about flying. And while there have been 30-plus years of flight simulation games, the passenger experience has never really been taken into account."

"A large part of the commercial flight experience is largely predictable," Auji said. "Our goal was to design this standardized flight and then layer it with delights, annoyances and idiosyncrasies that the frequent flier will surely find relatable."

Image screenshot via AMC Games

Escapism is one of the coping mechanisms people turn to during stressful times. Some of us feel trapped and isolated from the rest of the world. So what’s the harm in trying to mentally get out of the situation you’re in? Davit and Mary Jilayvan created a computer-generated community called Sonora Art Village. The village is full of colorful walkways, brightly-painted houses, and oddly-shaped courtyards and lots, as Plain magazine details: 

There is no rhyme or reason to the design of this community. “The houses are located chaotically, each house has its own colorful path,” they say. A jumble of medium and small houses exist alongside semicircular arches, passageways, small overhanding volumes, and social spaces such as a community pool and basketball court. They envisaged a lot of stairs as well, and we can very well imagine ourselves climbing each of them in anticipation of what we’d find at the top –  “Making it feel like you’re going up and down in a game like Supermario,” as the siblings put it. 

The surreal village exudes an intriguing appeal; it would without doubt be certified as ‘highly Instagramable’ if it actually existed. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, what’s certain is that creating this utopia helped the siblings deal with the isolation and loneliness of lockdown. “We wanted to create a place where people can come and feel for a while in a completely different place, far from the grey reality, to feel like being in some bright 3D space, or even a cartoon,” they note. “It’s a place free from prejudice. We tried to create a completely different atmosphere that would exude joy, love and happiness.” More images from their project on their Behance.

Image via Plain magazine 

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is known for having puzzle room-type mini dungeons, where the player is asked to solve a number of puzzles strung together. The thing about these mini-dungeons, called shrines, is that any player can solve them in their own way. While there is a recommended way to solve each shrine, people can get creative and do it their own way. Such is the case of Twitter user @MrOrdun. His solution is to not solve the shrine puzzle, instead opting to head straight to the end of the shrine. How did he do it? Watch the video here. 

Image screenshot via Twitter 

It sounds spooky, I know. Anthony Dickens has revealed a musical concept called ‘circle guitar’. The instrument is a self-playing electric guitar that can exceed the performance of a human thanks to the motor-driven spinning disc in its body, as Designboom details: 

the radical design is essentially a self-playing electric guitar that uses a built-in mechanical step sequencer disc, rotating underneath the strings. the project has already caught the attention of many musicians -including radiohead guitarist, ed o’brien and grammy-winning writer and producer paul epworth – gaining growing popularity. 

anthony dickens has built the circle guitar with the help of a team of brilliant engineers to generate sounds, textures, and rhythms that would be impossible with a conventional electric guitar. 

Image via Designboom

A lot of us turn to movie rating sites or reviews to check if the film we’re about to watch is a waste of time. Criticism is subjective, but that doesn’t stop people from taking it as advice. However, not all movies with low ratings or bad reviews are bad. Some of them are actually public favorites! Buzzfeed compiled a list of movies that the people loved but critics didn’t. Did your favorite film make it in the list? 

Image via Buzzfeed 

Modern times can make us feel very stressed. Along with the looming pandemic, financial and social problems that make it harder for people to relax or sleep peacefully. Trying to get a good night’s sleep while stressed is a difficult feat, as CNN explains: 

Let's say you have been feeling extra overwhelmed lately. That, Breus said, prompts your body to release cortisol, the primary stress hormone. This coincides with sugar (or glucose) entering the bloodstream, which elevates your blood pressure.

Next thing you know, Breus said, your muscles tense up, your heart pumps faster and your brain kicks into overdrive. It's the old fight-or-flight response you learned about in grade school. In other words, your body is now in survival mode.

That is what makes falling asleep very tricky.

When that stress persists week after week, the body adjusts to the higher cortisol levels. This continues to prevent you from getting quality shut-eye but can also lead to serious problems like heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and depression, according to Breus.

CNN recommends some apps that can help you fall asleep even in these difficult times. Check their full list here. 

Image via CNN