Andrew Cotter posted a video of his dogs racing to eat their food on Twitter. The video was livelier thanks to the sports announcer’s colorful commentary as he films his dogs. Cotter made his dogs eating food seem like a real sports game! 

I was bored. pic.twitter.com/bVoC0hyNzC

— Andrew Cotter (@MrAndrewCotter) March 27, 2020

image screenshot via Twitter

A restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, is allegedly selling $2 frozen pizzas for $18. Coquin also advertises the pizza as  “gourmet Roman-style thin crust pizza, with house made marinara sauce and whole milk mozzarella.” The restaurant sells two variants of “gourmet pizzas”: a cheese pie for $18, and a pizza with toppings for $20. InsideHook has more details: 

Chef and owner Chip Grimalda told the paper that the restaurant has sold about 20 pizzas a day. “Everyone who’s ordered it has given us rave reviews,” he said. “Right now, we’re still getting (the needed) ingredients in: That may change in the future, but we’re just trying to, you know, make it through to the next week.”

However, The Post and Courier reports having witnessed Grimalda receive a pizza order on Tuesday, “go from the restaurant to his nearby apartment, then leave on a delivery run with corrugated cardboard boxes that read, ‘Fresh Pizza, Oven Baked.’” The publication also found four-pack boxes of Kirkland Signature Cheese Pizza with Breadcrumb Crusts inside the restaurant’s trash cans.

When asked if he was passing off frozen pizzas as homemade and selling them for marked-up prices, Grimalda said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s definitely not Costco, and that’s all I have to say.”

image via InsideHook

Bruce Willis crashes into a house as Doraemon in a new SoftBank ad. The actor doesn’t look like the famous character in the commercial at all. He wasn’t wearing a proper Doraemon costume, he just had a blue hoodie and white t-shirt on. In the ad, the company proposes that 5G is another secret weapon Doraemon can use, along with the Anywhere Door and 4D Pocket. While Bruce Willis doesn’t resemble Doraemon, it’s still funny to watch him crash through a house as Doraemon for a commercial.  

If you’re bored and have nothing else to do, try to pass time with adult coloring books! One hundred museums and libraries worldwide provided free coloring pages for download. This is thanks to the New York Academy of Medicine’s #ColorOurCollections initiative. You can choose from hundreds of coloring pages at colormycollections.org, as Book Riot details: 

Each winter, the NYAM holds a week-long online festival where museums, libraries, and other institutions provide black-and-white downloadable PDFs for coloring and education. This year, the event ran from February 3–7. There were over 100 participating institutions, although you can still download coloring pages from past years’ participants.

Some of this year’s participants include Memoria Chilena (Chile), Kansai University Open Research Center for Asian Studies (Japan), the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg (USA), Trinity Hall at Cambridge University (UK), and Bibliothèque nationale de France (France).

image via Twitter

Nick Haber, Catalin Voss, and Dennis Wall have upgraded Google Glass for children with autism. The final product, called Superpower Glass, provides behavioral therapy to children with autism in their homes. The six-year project has three main elements: face detection, emotion recognition, and in-app review. These main elements help autistic children learn as they interact with their environment, as the three proponents wrote on IEEE Spectrum:  

Our system provides behavioral therapy to the children in their homes, where social skills are first learned. It uses the glasses’ outward-facing camera to record the children’s interactions with family members; then our software detects the faces in those videos and interprets their expressions of emotion. Through an app, caregivers can review auto-curated videos of social interactions.

Over the years we’ve refined our prototype and run clinical trials to prove its beneficial effects: We’ve found that its use increases kids’ eye contact and social engagement and also improves their recognition of emotions. Our team at Stanford University has worked with coauthor Dennis Wall’s spinoff company, Cognoa, to earn a “breakthrough therapy” designation for Superpower Glass, which puts the technology on a fast track toward approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We aim to get health insurance plans to cover the costs of the technology as an augmented-reality therapy.

The kids are motivated to seek out social interactions, they learn that faces are interesting, and they realize they can gather valuable information from the expressions on those faces. But the glasses are not meant to be a permanent prosthesis. The kids do 20-minute sessions a few times a week in their own homes, and the entire intervention currently lasts for six weeks. Children are expected to quickly learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.

Our system is intended to ameliorate a serious problem: limited access to intensive behavioral therapy.

image via IEEE Spectrum

Urban planning decisions, like most nationwide or citywide decisions, have almost always been made and directed by men in power. There are features and details in the current planning of various cities that cater specifically to men. An equal urban plan needs data from everyone to be able to create an efficient and effective city system for everybody. Income, gender, race, or sexuality shouldn’t matter in a properly and equally planned city, as treehugger details: 

But when cities were planned, most of us were left out of the meeting room. By "us," I mean anyone who wasn't a privileged man with access to education and power. In a profile for dezeen, British writer Caroline Criado Perez describes how cities have never been designed for 50 percent of the population: "Things like zoning are really very biased against women."

So biased, in fact, that she wrote an entire book about it, called "Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men." This kind of gendered data gap has led to city planning and public spaces that just don't function for everyone equally.

"The vast majority of information that we have collected globally, and continue to collect — everything from economic data to urban planning data to medical data — has been collected on men, male bodies, and typical male lifestyle patterns," Perez states.

It is an imbalance we still struggle with today. Writing for MobyCon, a private consultant group that worked with the Dutch government to develop a modern, groundbreaking approach to mobility for all, Melissa Bruntlett says:

Our personal lived experiences influence how we see the world, and how, as planners and designer, we find solutions to mobility challenges. The fact is that despite gains in many countries to balance gender roles in daily life, men and women experience the world differently. Our differences in height, body types and even values have an impact. By aiming to have more gender parity of voices in the room, you have a much greater chance of hearing more balanced approaches and ideas.

image via treehugger

The Dineobellator was a coyote-size carnivorous feathered dinosaur. The remains of the said carnivore were found in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin. The newly-discovered dinosaur remains suggested that its unusual tail and claws helped it to hunt and kill during its time. Paleontologist Steven Jasinki said that Deinobellator is a new species from the Late Cretaceous (70-68 million years ago) period, as the Smithsonian magazine detailed: 

Steven Jasinski, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania and lead author of the study in Scientific Reports, says Dineobellator is a new species from the Late Cretaceous (70-68 million years ago) that belongs to dromaeosaurid, a group of clawed predators closely related to birds. These rare fossils have features that suggest raptors were still trying out new ways to compete even during the dinosaurs’ last stand—the era just before the extinction event that wiped them out 66 million years ago. “This group was still evolving, testing out new evolutionary pathways, right at the very end before we lost them,” Jasinski notes.

The name Dineobellator pays homage to the dino’s tenacity and that of the local Native American people. Diné means ‘the Navajo people,’ while bellator is the Latin word for warrior.

“Due to their small size and delicate bones, skeletons of raptors like Dineobellator are extremely rare in North America, particularly in the last 5 million years of the Age of Dinosaurs,” says David Evans, a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Even though it is fragmentary, the skeleton of Dineobellator is one of the best specimens known from North America for its time, which makes it scientifically important and exciting.”

image via Smithsonian magazine

Slap Wraps, or Slap Bracelets, were 9-inch pieces of stainless steel covered in decorative fabric. The item can envelope someone’s wrist in one quick motion. In addition, the motion of slapping the bracelet to your wrist was entertaining, especially for children. However, some schools banned the use of the part toy and part accessory because of the item being and a distraction and some knock-offs of the bracelet can cause harm to students. Mental Floss details the history of the 1990s phenomenon:  

Slap Wraps were the invention of Stuart Anders, a Fort Prairie, Wisconsin, native who graduated from college with a degree in education in 1983. Teaching jobs were hard to come by at the time, so Anders took on substitute positions and coached sports.

Anders pulled out a self-rolling tape measure, which curled up with the flick of his wrist, and began fidgeting with it. He thought it would make a cool bracelet, provided someone covered the steel in fabric.

He called the company who made the tape measure, but they were no longer manufacturing it. Anders didn’t know what else to do. While he thought the idea of a snap bracelet could be successful, he didn’t have the money or other resources to commit to producing them himself. But he kept the prototype on his steering wheel.

Bart found a receptive audience in Eugene Murtha, who had just opened Main Street Toy Company in Simsbury, Connecticut, in 1988. Murtha, a former vice president of Coleco during that company’s Cabbage Patch Kid craze, immediately saw the potential in Anders's invention. He agreed to distribute Slap Wraps, paying Bart and Anders royalties.

image via Mental Floss

The eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii grew to such a huge scale that even astronauts from space could see it. Astronauts A.J. Feutsel and Ricky Arnold shared their photos of the volcano from outer space. From the International Space Station, the two astronauts were able to take photos of the massive eruption of the volcano. 

(via PetaPixel) 

image via PetaPixel

In a new video from Tasty, pastry chef Rie is challenged to recreate a recipe from Cooking Mama, a famous cooking game. Rie first tries to play the game to get a grasp of the recipe. Do you think she’ll be successful in recreating the recipe from Cooking Mama? 

Hero’s Armory manufactures sword-shaped keys inspired by fiction that can make unlocking doors more interesting. The keys were produced thanks to a Kickstarter campaign with the support of 1,365 people. Some keys were based on swords featured in video games, such as a key inspired by Link’s Master Sword (from the Legend of Zelda)! The keys sell for $12.99 and come in 21 different designs!

image via boredpanda

Researchers from the University Hospital of Bonn, Germany have found that eating too much salt can impair the body’s ability to fight against bacteria. The researchers studied mice and ten human volunteers to see the effect of salt intake. Eating too much salt in your diet causes your body’s immune cells, the neutrophils, to be impaired. NewScientist has the details:

Next, the team gave 10 healthy women and men who were 20 to 50 years old an extra 6 grams of salt a day on top of their normal diet, in the form of three tablets a day. After a week, some of their immune cells, called neutrophils, had a greatly impaired ability to engulf and kill bacteria compared with the same tests done on each individual before they took extra salt.

The team didn’t examine the effect of high salt intake on the body’s ability to fight viral infections.

The World Health Organization recommends that people eat no more than 5 grams of salt a day to avoid high blood pressure, which can cause strokes and heart disease. In the UK, people eat 8 grams on average, suggesting many consume as much or more than the volunteers in the study.

image via wikimedia commons

KVTM reporter Deion Broxton was reporting when a herd of bison began to walk toward him. Broxton was in Yellowstone National Park when the animals approached. The reporter did not want to mess with the large animals, and walked away to a further distance. His reaction to the approaching herd was quite something, and it became a perfect side-eye reaction gif. 

(via Digg)

Here's the video of the bison I shot once I got a safe distance away lol pic.twitter.com/uL3XiR2ISR

— Deion Broxton KTVM (@DeionNBCMT) March 26, 2020

If you’re running out of ideas on how to bond with your furry companion during quarantine, why not try doing yoga with your pet? Twitter user @ATLnewsgirl shared a video of a dog doing yoga with its owner. The dog seems like a yoga veteran, as it awaits the next yoga pose its owner instructs him to do. Watch as the dog follows its owner as they go through a whole yoga routine! 

Just in case you need it, here’s a dog doing yoga in Italian. You’re welcome. pic.twitter.com/zTKp3MbI8e

— Amanda in Atlanta (@ATLnewsgirl) March 25, 2020

image screenshot via Twitter

Jose Manuel Ballester recreates classic paintings such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The Spanish artist recreates these paintings with a twist: he removes all human figures from his recreations. His reimagined paintings seem to ask the question, ‘What would happen if humans left the scene of these paintings?’ His work give a new look and life to the classic paintings, as The Colossal detailed:  

In an interview with Bored Panda, Ballester said that while his Concealed Spaces series often is regarded as humorous, it has multiple meanings. “After a deeper look it’s not difficult to find transcendence and the multiple possible interpretations, both as new images and as related to their original counterparts,” he said.

One of the clearest aspects in this series is the way we can understand art from the point of view of each period, which has a unique way of looking and understanding reality shared by artists, who develop their creativity inside those period’s values and connect with ideas and universal precepts extended in time.

image via The Colossal