No matter what everyone tells you, whether it’s okay to be unproductive during these trying times, or to try and be productive during quarantine, no one can really tell you what to do. Do what entertains you, no one is stopping you! However, if you’re looking for ways to polish your foreign language skills, or you would want to learn a new one, Fast Company offers six ways to learn for free: 

Rosetta Stone. The grandfather of language companies is offering free three-month subscriptions to learn any of 22 languages.

Babbel. The course hub just opened up three months of free classes in a dozen languages.

Fable Cottage. These fun audio and video stories in French, German, Spanish, and Italian are usually locked under subscription, but are now freely accessible.

Conjuguemos. This teachers’ mecca of games, activities, and worksheets in seven languages (including Latin and Korean) is perfect for building an awesome curriculum of the nuts and bolts—verbs, grammar, and vocab. Free during the outbreak.

iCulture. Don’t miss Carnegie Learning’s immersion package of videos, articles, and songs in French, Spanish, or German, which are free through June.

Mango. The company provides high-speed learning in 70 languages for companies and schools. Its online language portal is freely accessible.

In addition, you can check apps such as LingoDeer and the cult classic, DuoLingo. 

image via Fast Company

United We Stream is a collaboration between 40 clubs and other nightlife businesses in Berlin. The project streams DJ sets from different clubs in Berlin every evening. United We Stream replaced the nightlife in Berlin, since clubs and establishments are closed down due to the pandemic. The Guardian has the details: 

In each United We Stream set, DJs play alone, illuminated by light projections against empty dancefloors. It’s a conscious decision to remind viewers that the streams aren’t a soundtrack for lockdown parties, but reflect how “critical, unbelievable and dramatic” the situation is, says Lutz Leichsenring, press spokesperson for the Club Commission, the non-profit organisation behind the initiative.

The Club Commission is requesting donations as it aims to raise €1m with United We Stream to support Berlin’s clubs. Around €320,000 has been donated already, with the money to be distributed later by a panel, according to financial need. A Club Commission study found that around 9,000 people are employed in the nightlife sector, and that in 2018 it generated turnover of €1.48bn, with one in three tourists going to Berlin to party. Despite their success, Berlin’s clubs were already facing a cocktail of challenges before the coronavirus crisis, including gentrification and speculative buying in a breakneck property market.

image via The Guardian

Houseparty is an app that lets you connect (and party) with your friends even if you’re all far away from each other. Houseparty is a free video chat app that lets you play games with friends. The app is a Snapchat-Zoom hybrid, and has been gaining popularity during the pandemic. The Huffington Post has more details: 

 “It’s a super fun way to host game night with friends,” Woods said. In fact, she and her friends schedule game nights on Houseparty a couple times a week. Woods also pops into the app throughout the day when she’s notified that friends are online. “It’s a quick five minutes of play to break up the day, then I’m back to work.”

If you want to ping someone to come online, you can simply “wave” at them, “kind of like a nudge for those familiar with Words with Friends and other similar games,” Woods said. Once you have a party room open, you can play a game. Woods is partial to the drawing game, in which one person uses their finger to draw a picture of the word at the top of the screen while the other parties try to guess what it is. “There’s also an off-brand Cards Against Humanity-style game (called Chips and Guac) that was OK, but is best for a larger group of five to six,” she said.

image via The Huffington Post

Listen, if you see someone wielding this chain whip, run. Just, run away. This metal chain whip packs a huge punch. While the whip can be easily avoided, when it hits you, oh boy. I’d rather not think about that. Let’s all just marvel at the power this hardcore whip packs. 

(via Digg)

image screenshot via Digg

Kidding, it’s not from hell. However, with how it looks, you might say it’s an object from hell. A new patience-testing jigsaw puzzle called “Pure White Hell” has been released by Japanese board game manufacturer Beverly. The 2,000 piece puzzle is blank. There is no image on the puzzle pieces. The only image you’ll form once you successfully piece all the pieces together is a blank white image. 

image via Amazon

Reddit user u/VaynMaanen recreated the entire map of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). In the new ACNH, players can personalize their islands thanks to the terraform ability. The terraform ability allows users to do landscaping in their new digital homes. Check out the comparison of the actual map of Hyrule and the remade version from nintendolife!

image via nintendolife

Due to a lot of establishments being closed during this pandemic, there have been shortages of some important items. Food and sanitary items are few of the resources that are hard to find these days. While the majority are looking for what they need, here’s one resource that is still abundant: chicken wings. That’s right, chicken wings aren’t really flying off the shelves. Usually, chicken wings are eaten in bars and restaurants, and they are difficult to repackage for retail, as Vice details: 

Obviously countless restaurants and sports bars are closed across the country now too, and chicken wings aren't necessarily high on customers' takeout list. Super estimates that 70 percent of wings are eaten in bars or restaurants, with the other 30 percent coming from supermarket or deli sales. They're not exactly flying off the shelves right now though –– and that's partially because it can be difficult to repackage them for the retail market.

"When you sell to food service, it's in a big bulk container," Russ Whitman, senior vice president at commodities market firm Urner Barry, said. "When you sell it to me and you, it has to be in a tray or a bag that we can pick up. Not all facilities can do that."

There's no real consumer demand for chicken wings right now—despite the fact that other meat sales are surging. The National Chicken Council reports that meat department sales were up by 76.9 percent during the week of March 15, when compared to that same week one year ago, with chicken sales jumping by $183 million. Chicken breasts made up more than half of the sales total, followed by chicken thighs, and chicken legs. (The biggest seller overall was ground beef, which was up by 73.1 percent compared to this time last year.)

If you're into chicken wings, though, and are cool with making them at home, there's a chance that they could become one of the best bargains in the meat case. On Wednesday, the wholesale price for a pound of wings was $1.25, 35 cents a pound lower than they were at the beginning of the month. It could be a decent time to stock up—and you don't have to sleep in a Buffalo Wild Wings to get them.

image via wikimedia commons

Youtuber Joana Ceddia shares online what she’s done doing the quarantine. From adopting “children”, to being able to paint her whole ceiling, watch all her shenanigans while stuck at home! 

People dye their hair for different reasons. Some dye their hair to portray a particular image. Some do it to fit in with the latest trend, or to go against the standards of beauty. Some would just want to randomly change something about them. Regardless of the reason, it’s important to point out that someone’s hair color, or their hair style, has been one of the ways that society judges someone. For women, it’s one of the ways that they can be objectified, to the extent that the way they style their hair is an indicator of whether or not they’re worthy of attention. Terrible, I know. Being one of the products that helps people in changing their image, hair dye has a long history, as CNN details: 

In its early iterations, hair coloring was done by both men and women to enhance their looks or hide white strands, according to Victoria Sherrow's "Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History."

Ancient civilizations used rudimentary hair colorants, based on recipes that included cassia bark, leeks, leeches, charred eggs, henna -- still commonly used across the Middle East and India -- and even gold dust.

Ancient Greeks favored gold and red-gold shades, associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, health and youthfulness. Likewise, high-class Greek and Roman prostitutes opted for blonde hues to suggest sensuality.

It wasn't until the Middle Ages in Europe that hair dyeing began shifting into a predominantly female habit.

Bleaches, often made with blended flowers, saffron and calf kidneys, were particularly in vogue, although Roman Catholics associated blond hair with lasciviousness.

Red dyes, often a mix of saffron and sulfur powder -- the latter of which could induce nosebleeds and headaches, was popularized during the 16th-century reign of Elizabeth I of England.

The hue was a favorite in Italian courts as well, thanks to Renaissance artist Titian, who painted female beauties with red-gold locks. In the 18th century, European elites favored perfumed white and pastel powders made from wheat flour dusted lightly onto natural hair and wigs.

While most hair dyes were composed of plants and animal products, the evolution of the practice also saw the use of dangerous, even lethal methods to change hair color: lead combs to darken it, or sulfuric acid to lighten it.

It wasn't until the early 20th century that hair dye as we know it -- chemical, in a rainbow of colors, shop-bought or salon-applied -- came to be.

image via CNN

Tardigrades are microscopic, eight-legged micro-animals. They are also known as “water bears”. These water bears are something you wouldn’t normally see as a livestream on Twitch. Well, you can see these tardigrades live now on Twitch. Canadian artist Julie Laurin started a full, narrated hour about the micro-animals on Laurin's Twitch channel. The stream is part of a project called “A Tiny World”, as ScienceAlert detailed:

"By sharing this journey with you, my hope is that maybe you'll be inspired to get your own microscope, or to look closer at the little objects and creatures all around you!" Laurin's description of the project reads on an official website.

So where is Laurin finding all of these critters? In dirt found on her balcony.

"There are hundreds and hundreds of #Tardigrades that live on my balcony and I think they thrive in this brownish-greenish film and dirt that has formed over the years due to improper draining," Laurin wrote in a tweet.

First discovered by biologists in the late 1700s, tardigrades are tiny micro-animals that can be found in a huge variety of environments, from oceans to sand dunes.

They're also immensely resilient creatures: they can survive the vacuum of space, adapt to severe dehydration, and can even block intense blasts of radiation. But they might have an Achilles heel after all, according to recent research: global warming.

image via ScienceAlert

Do you miss playing card games with your friends? Virtual card table website playingcards.io now lets users play “Cards Against Humanity” with their friends online. Now you and your friends can laugh and be entertained even without playing the game in real life. The website allows everyone to see the game, while the players’ individual hand is only for them to see. 

(via Business Insider)

image via Business Insider

The Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossils Showcase is a gem show that welcomes 65,000 visitors each winter. Held in Arizona, the show houses thousands of vendors with their new shiny pieces. With 50 separate shows around the city. There are also the oddballs that really catch attention, such as a $70,000 geode “the size of a Volkswagen Beetle,” as CNN details: 

While diamonds and precious stones hold a place of honor, there's no shortage of oddities for sale, from animal pelts and skulls to personalized rubber ducks. Over the course of a single day of this year's showcase, which ran from January 30 to February 14, photographer Daniel Arnold saw a $70,000 geode "the size of a Volkswagen Beetle," a baby goat being led around a parking lot by a cowboy, and enough tie-dye to rival a Grateful Dead concert.

"A proper, polished gem show takes over the convention center, and the rest of the city becomes Its swap meet parking lot," Arnold said. "It's an idyllic post-apocalyptic scene, like a very fun version of the end of the world."

image via CNN

On the shores of St. Clair, Michigan, the ice season only lasts for a few weeks, unlike 30 years ago, when the ice would last for a month. The unpredictability of ice can be attributed to a trend (of less ice cover and shorter duration), or maybe  the seasons just go in cycles. However, the unpredictability does have a big effect on people’s livelihood. The ice season in the area was a “disaster”, according to bait shop owner Veronica Pinto. Due to the unpredictable ice last year, a lot of ice fishing events were cancelled. Bait and tackle sales were way down, as The Huffington Post detailed: 

“It’s been a terrible time to be trying to sell fishing tackle. Nothing is predictable,” she says. “We don’t have the seasons anymore like we used to.”

Pinto doesn’t think the lakeside economy here in St. Clair Shores can absorb another bad ice year.

Not everyone agrees that what’s happening this year is a trend. Tim Muir, president of the Lake St. Clair Walleye Association, which puts on the Cold as Ice festival, is one of them.

“I mean, it goes in cycles,” he says. “Some years you get a lot of ice and it’s all the way through March, and other years there’s no ice, sorta like this year.” 

It may be counterintuitive, but Sacka, Pinto and Muir are each correct, in their own ways. Long-term climate data show a definite trend toward less ice cover overall and a shorter duration of the ice on the Great Lakes since 1973. But year-to-year, the variability is so high you might miss it.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climatologist Jia Wang says maximum ice cover during the 2020 season was about 16% across the entire Great Lakes basin. The average since 1973 is 55.7%, ranging as low as 11.9% in 2012 and as high as 80.9% in 2019. 

image via The Huffington Post

The species Giganotosaurus were huge land-dwelling carnivores that roamed ancient Patagonia. They were the race of dinosaurs that ruled the land before tyrannosaurs took their throne. Recent finds from eastern Utah show that the shark-toothed dinosaurs actually held the tyrannosaurs back. For millions of years, it is thought that the tyrannosaurs were the largest-dwelling carnivores, but it seems Giganotosaurus were the more dominant species, as Discover magazine details: 

“There was nothing inevitable about the rise of tyrannosaurs,” Brusatte says. In fact, it seems that the carcharodontosaurs held them back.

“It seems like tyrannosaurs exploded to huge size only after the carcharodontosaurs went extinct, or became much less common,” Brusatte says.

The dominance of the carcharodontosaurs may have also limited the expansion of tyrannosaurs into the Southern Hemisphere. To date, the only evidence of these tyrants below the equator is a questionable fossil from Australia. It may be, Cuesta says, that carcharodontosaurs and other large predators — such as the strange, horned abelisaurids — may have prevented tyrannosaurs from gaining a claw hold. The picture may change with new finds. “The fossil record is annoyingly patchy and incomplete,” Cuesta says, but the current pattern indicates that tyrannosaurs required other large carnivores to get out of the way before they could take over that role between 80 million and 66 million years ago.

image via Discover magazine

Edna follows a routine when she goes to doggy day care. She plays hard, finds the fluffiest dog at daycare that day, and then uses them as a pillow. Edna does need all the rest after playing in her first three to four hours in daycare! Edna snuggles any fluffy dog, regardless of size, even tiny wiener dogs, as The Dodo detailed: 

As soon as she decides it’s naptime, Edna finds the fluffiest dog at day care that day … 

… and uses them as her napping spot. “All the dogs seem to enjoy the snuggling company,” Brianna Gottfried, one of Edna’s family members, told The Dodo. “Even the tiny wiener dogs.” 

When she was a puppy, it was definitely easier to use other dogs to take naps … 

When it’s finally time to go at the end of the day, Edna is usually still fast asleep on one of her friends, and it takes some effort to wake her up and get her home again. 

“When it’s time to go home I always have to peel her off of another dog,” Gottfried said.

image via The Dodo