It has taken quite a long time for society to see the beauty in non-skinny people. For years, being skinny has been the standard of beauty and fitness. But due to the continuous effort to promote body positivity, infiltrating social media, news, and pop culture, we see love and appreciation for bodies of different shapes and sizes. Elle’s Jes Baker shares her thoughts on the impact the movement has done: 

Curvier women with this feature are often called “Rubenesque,” after the voluptuous female nudes famously captured in great fleshy detail by painter Peter Paul Rubens five centuries ago—women whose body type was an ideal of the time. Rubens’s subjects, usually themes from Greek mythology, often included women lounging or twisting about, their bodies irresistibly soft-looking. The Flemish artist is quoted as saying, “My passion comes from the heavens, not from earthly musings.” Whether that was specifically about painting women or not, it certainly speaks to “heavenly bodies.” They are otherworldly. And suddenly Rubenesque is starting to feel more and more modern (and desirable) today.

On the modern-day canvas of Instagram, curvy models like Paloma Elsesser, Tara Lynn, Ali Tate Cutler, Tess Holliday, and Charli Howard have amassed devoted social followings, often garnering more likes and engagement when they post clear images of their “rolls.” Some influencers, like Megan Jayne Crabbe, who has more than a million followers, have built entire communities around normalizing their shape.

On the runway, rolls were anything but hidden at Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty show, where models like Margie Plus, Raisa Flowers, and Alva Claire walked in the singer’s cult-loved lingerie (lauded for its size range of XS–3X and 32A–46DDD). What once was almost always hidden has now moved proudly front and center. Witnessing this celebration of a body type we used to singularly abhor brings me an indescribable amount of joy; it’s apparent that a cultural shift is happening.

image via Elle

The Star Wars franchise has been rich with worldbuilding, history, and unique set designs and scifi gadgetry that is still celebrated today. With four decades of 11 films, six television shows, and a lot of releases in other media, it’s always been a wonder for many to think about the process behind the creation of any aspect of the famed franchise. Wired talks to Victoria Mahoney, the second unit director for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Mahoney shares what it’s like behind the scenes of the movie, and the process of its creation: 

If you thought even space opera scenery would get humdrum after seeing it all day, every day for months, think again. “I can tell you with my whole soul that every time we went to a new location, or we walked onto a different sound stage, I had the same feeling as when I walked onto the first one: ‘Hoooly shit,’” Mahoney says. “You’d hear everyone whispering through the crowd, ‘I love this set.’ [As a director,] what’s fun was finding how to celebrate each crew’s set and all the little, teeny hidden Easter eggs they tell you about. It was like a really great Rubik’s cube. You had to really study them.” Getting her to pick a favorite was difficult, but she settled on Ajan Kloss, the jungle planet where the rebels make their base. “The height and the scale was really something to see. A ship inside a soundstage! The crew had built a forest! There were so many places for really delicious shots and story points to be discovered.”

image via Wired

Sha Wellness Clinic is an elite holistic health center and spa located in Spain. Allure’s Jessica Cha shares her visit inside the world-renowned spa, experiencing private sessions, nutritional consultations, and other wellness packages. Cha tells of her experience of Sha Wellness Clinic’s Discovery program, which allows people to indulge in Sha’s offerings over the course of a few days: 

The next few days are a cornucopia of hourly appointments: a private yoga session, a general health exam, a nutritional consultation, a neurocognitive assessment consultation, an acupuncture session, a deep-tissue massage, a "therapeutic recipes" cooking class. It's Utopia for the wellness set. Every single aspect of your holistic health is measured and considered both quantitatively and qualitatively by medical experts, and then you're prescribed a proper course of action to optimize that facet of your well-being. Though they offer anti-tobacco, weight control, and stress management programs,

image via shawellness (Instagram)

If you ever found yourself traveling in the woods, you might have a hard time looking for a place where you can answer nature’s call. No, that isn’t a magical call of the forces of nature, it’s the call that you need to use the bathroom. That would be a difficult challenge, as you’d have to find the right place where you can settle down and let it all out. Australian studio Madelein Blanchfiels Architects designed a restroom that you can stumble towards in when you’re outdoors. The Kangaroo Valley Outhouse is a restroom designed to mimic the experience of camping, as Plain magazine details: 

Known for her purity of design and her penchant for crafting out unique spaces and experiences from any given site, Blanchfield’s outhouse is a simple cube slightly raised off-ground featuring facades completely covered with mirrors. With the landscape reflected on its surfaces, the cube completely blends into nature, rendering it virtually invisible save for the its legible edges.

And if you haven’t fully realised just how unique this outhouse is from its exteriors, then the stunning contemporary interior bath fixtures will. Equipped with a sink, toilet and a free-standing bathtub, this Aussie outhouse is pure luxury ensconced in the midst of nature — definitely a game-changer for non-camping enthusiasts.

image via Plain magazine

Every year, we watch people on the New York streets wait for the annual ball drop, a long running tradition on New Year's Eve to welcome the new year. But did you know that this tradition was inspired by a Victorian-era contraption? Royal Navy officer Robert Wauchope created the time ball for navigation. His goal was to give the exact time for mariners, as time would make shipping safer. BBC has the details: 

His ball, first demonstrated in Portsmouth, England, in 1829, was a crude broadcast system, a way to relay time to anyone who could see the signal. Typically, at 12:55, a creaky piece of machinery would raise a large painted orb halfway to the top of a pole or flagstaff; at 12:58, it would proceed to the top; and precisely at 13:00, a worker would release it to drop down the pole.

“It is a clear signal,” said Andrew Jacob, a curator who operates the time ball at the Sydney Observatory in Australia. “It’s easy to see the sudden movement as it begins to drop.”

Before the time ball’s invention, a ship’s master would typically come ashore and physically visit an observatory to check his watch against an official clock. Then he would quite literally bring time back to the ship. Wauchope’s invention let sailors calibrate their shipboard timepiece, called a chronometer, without leaving their boat.

As for the New Year’s connection, that came in 1907. The New York Times newspaper had instituted a midnight celebration in Times Square several years earlier, punctuated by dynamite and fireworks. After authorities banned the explosives, promoters needed something splashy to mark midnight and found inspiration in New York’s popular Western Union Telegraph’s time ball, which had been operating on the roof of the company’s Broadway headquarters since 1877.

The newspaper constructed an impressive orb weighing 700 pounds and covered with 100 25-watt lightbulbs. But in the spirit of showmanship, organisers altered time ball protocol, making the crucial moment of demarcation the moment the ball landed, not when it was released.

image via wikimedia commons

Ron Mallett is an astrophysicist who has spent his adult life believing that time travel is possible. According to him, with the help of scientific equations and principles, a time machine could be built. Mallett is a professor of  physics at the University of Connecticut. He investigates black holes and general relativities, theories of space, time and gravity. He also theorizes about time travel, with the dream of building a time machine that would let him see his father again. CNN has the details: 

It all hinges, says Mallett, on Einstein's special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity.

"To put it in a nutshell, Einstein said that time can be affected by speed," says Mallett.

Mallett gives the example of astronauts traversing space in a rocket that's traveling close to the speed of light. Time would pass differently on Earth than it would for the people in the rocket.

"They could actually come back finding out that they're only a few years older, but decades have passed here on Earth," he says.

Mallett points to the 1968 sci-fi classic movie "Planet of the Apes," at the end of which [spoiler alert] an astronaut realizes that he hasn't traveled to a distant, ape-ruled planet, but merely returned to Earth in a post-apocalyptic future in which mankind has been subjugated by simians.

"That is an accurate representation of Einstein's special theory of relativity," says Mallet. "So the upshot is that, according to the special theory of relativity, if you're traveling fast enough, you respectively are traveling through time. And effectively, that would be a representation of time travel."

image via CNN

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is known for her psychedelic sculptures that were turned into luxury handbags, and her Infinity Rooms. Kusama has now created a balloon for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. If you’ve seen the red balloon full of white polka dots at the parade, that is Kusama’s Love Flies Up to the Sky, a 34-foot-tall balloon based on a character from her My Eternal Soul exhibition. Elle has the details: 

But it's her ability to evoke real emotion through the simplest polka dot pattern or flower wall that makes her one of the most beloved contemporary creators on the planet. It's also what attracted top brass at Macy's.

There's something wonderfully universal about Kusama's work. As ELLE.com's own digital art director Mia Feitel put it, her innate ability to bring a "democratic quality to her work gives it instant mass appeal. The idea that you can spread happiness through a red polka-dot, or that a hall of mirrors can transport you to infinity — is something that can be understood by every culture [and] city."

image via Elle

The simple hand sign to tell someone “okay” is now also a hate symbol, with actual white nationalists using the symbol to “trigger” liberals. It all started when some trolls on 4chan thought it was funny to trick the media into thinking  that the “okay” hand sign is a secret Nazi symbol. The trolling work until it was used by white nationalists. The Washington Post looks into the impact the hand sign as as a hate symbol, and how the Internet can change the meaning of simple things because online racists think it’s funny to radicalize these things.

image via wikimedia commons

The coolest legos are a minifigure and a four-block stack. Why? It’s because a team of temperature physicists managed to cool these lego blocks to the lowest temperature possible. The legos were subject to temperatures that reached 1.6 millidegrees above absolute zero (-273.15 °C) for an experiment that can develop quantum computing, as Geek.com detailed: 

Strapped inside a custom-made (record-breaking) dilution refrigerator—the most effective fridge in the world, capable of reaching 1.6 millidegrees above absolute zero (-273.15 °C)*—the toys did what no human can: survived.

“Our results are significant because we found that the clamping arrangement between the Lego blocks caused the Lego structures to behave as an extremely good thermal insulator at cryogenic temperatures,” team leader Dmitry Zmeev said in a statement.

“This is very desirable for construction materials used for the design of future scientific equipment like dilution refrigerators,” he added.

Invented 50 years ago, the dilution fridge is at the center of a global multi-million-dollar industry, and is crucial to the work of modern experimental physics and engineering, including the development of quantum computers.

image via Geek.com

Ichiran ramen not only provides great ramen bowls, but also a booth that customers can mind their own business (ramen). Some people like to slurp away in private booths, so this feature of Ichiran ramen is a bonus. While people mind their own ramen bowls at Ichiran, one diner received a note from the booth beside him that caused them so much fear. Twitter user @nyoronyoro0515 shared his experience, including an image of the note. SoraNews24 has the details:

The note, written in the red ink of the Ichiran pen that sits inside every booth for ordering purposes, says:

“Don’t say anything. When you’ve finished eating, come to the toilet.”

Needless to say, the diner who received the note didn’t know what to make of it, and seeing as it was only him and an older man next to him inside the restaurant at the time, there was no one else it could’ve come from.

The diner says he hadn’t said a word the whole time during the meal, so he wasn’t sure why the note began with a request for him not to speak. But then “come to the toilet”? That was the part that was particularly unnerving for him, especially as the language used in the note was very casual and almost demanding in tone.

A number of commenters online found it amusing that the note was written on Ichiran paper printed with the words “kodawaritai oishisa ga aru” in the bottom right-hand corner. This loosely translates to “It has a deliciousness you’ll want to obsess over“, and while it’s meant to be used for the noodles, it takes on a whole other meaning if, as many believe, this note was actually an invitation to get frisky in the bathroom.

image via @nyoronyoro0515

After a huge meal, we feel a wave of tiredness that makes us drowsy and in need of a bed to lie on. This is normal, and not just a random coincidence because you want to laze around. This phenomenon is called the postprandial dip, or at its extremes, a “food coma”. Food coma is the way your body takes a break to digest all the food that you’ve ingested, ABC News detailed: 

The science of food comas is mostly based on animal models and inferences from our current knowledge on how the body works, says Emma Beckett, a nutrition scientist at the University of Newcastle.

There are three main theories, and Dr Beckett thinks they probably all play a role to some extent.

The first theory involves the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system — that's the rest and digest pathway, as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system which is fight or flight.

"We've got a bunch of nerves around the digestive tract. And one of those big nerves — the vagus nerve — signals between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract," Dr Beckett says.

"From an evolutionary point of view, if you've come across abundant food — the feast period — you don't want to be going running around and risking losing that food."

image via wikimedia commons

Humongous monsters are often painted as a villain of any story, monsters such as King Kong and Godzilla are viewed with awe by the movie goers. Some of us might just remember these movies with the big, bad monsters as mere action flicks, but there’s also something else included: analogies. Watch as Overly Sarcastic Productions explain the metaphors behind these huge movie monsters. 

Here’s a shocking revelation: most of the famous people on Instagram have Lord Farquaad’s haircut, the short bob with the ends notably flipped inwards. From Selena Gomez to Kylie Jenner, a lot of celebrities are sporting this hairstyle. Has Lord Farquaad finally gained influence in the masses? Maybe so, as Elle details: 

 Jesus Guerrero, the stylist behind the Kardashian-Jenner flips says it's "an easy chic look" that will help you channel your inner Lord. "I love how simple it is, yet it exudes so much power," adds Guerrero.

image via Elle

A 65 year-old man became Santa Claus on the streets as he threw wads of cash to passersby and screamed, “Merry Christmas”. However, the money he gave away wasn’t his, but from the Academy Bank in Colorado Springs. David Wayne Oliver threatened the bank to give him an undisclosed amount of cash, which he then tossed all over the place. Reuters has the details: 

A police spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment, but Colorado Springs television station KKTV reported that eyewitness Dion Pascale recounted Oliver stepped outside the bank and tossed the money “all over the place.”

Pascale said bystanders retrieved some of the money and returned it to the bank as Oliver walked to the Starbucks, sat down and appeared to be waiting for police to arrest him, KKTV reported.

image credit: via Reuters

Ben Workman is a Utah man who does a “magic trick”: he opens up his car with the object in his hand. The trick behind it is one of the four chips implanted in his hands, a Tesla key to unlock his car with a wave of his hand. According to Workman, a piercing studio helped him implant the Tesla key. UPI has the details:

"I play tricks on people who don`t know I have it in my hand. I try and convince them a banana is the key and then I hold a banana up and [the chip] unlocks the door," he told KSTU-TV.

The other chips in Workman's hands allow him to unlock doors at work, log on and off of his computer and share contact information using the same technology as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

He said most of the chips were installed by a family member, but he required the help of a piercing studio to implant the Tesla key.

image credit: screenshot via ABC7 News Bay Area