Can hand dryers - with their loud noises, damage someone's hearing? Nora Keegan, an eight grader from Calgary did a study to find the answer to that question. CNN has the details:
"Informally, parents have said that their children refuse to go into particular washrooms because the dryers are too noisy, and children say they 'hurt my ears,' " Nora wrote.
Using a decibel meter, Nora measured the peak loudness of 44 public-bathroom hand dryers from several positions. She positioned the meter to simulate the average ear height of a 3-year-old, an adult male and an adult female as well as her height at the beginning of the study: just over 4 feet. She also measured the loudness at the dryer's air jet.
In the end, of the 23 models of hand dryer that Nora encountered in the wild, a single dryer manufactured by Comac was consistently quieter than 85 decibels at all positions. Others were below 90 decibels but still above the EPA's threshold.
Here's a creative rendition of Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 5 for you: this version is sung using movie quotes from 156 movies. The amount of time, patience and creativity spent on this video is admirable.
I wouldn't do the same thing in my free time, though.
"Anyone who aged nearly 100 years can climb a solid grade VI (UIAA) can quite rightly be headlined as one of best climbers in the world " , Andreas Kubin claims. He details the story of Marcel Rémy, a 96 year old man who attempted a 6a multi-pitch rock climb:
Marcel Rémy, who a few weeks ago at the “tender” age of 96 attempted to climb Les Guêpes, a two-pitch route at St-Loup in western Switzerland first ascended in 1974 by Marcel’s sons Yves and Claude Remy.
Although Marcel managed to send the first pitch, a stiff 5c in its own right, on the slightly overhanging 6a second pitch he stood no chance. But as he told his sons Claude and Yves, he wants to return. Before he does though, he wants to train just a little more at the climbing wall…
Due to their latitude, Glacier Town, Alaska is never dark enough for fireworks. So, the town took their celebrations to the cliffs for Fourth of July - and drove cars off the precipice.
Now that's a different kind of boom for the Fourth of July.
Lieutenant Colonel Ross Franquemont took a stunning image of an eclipse, taken from U-2 airplane. This stunner won Air Space Magazine's Astronomy Photo Contest. Franquemont detailed the process and planning he had done to take that image:
Because of all the planning done by so many different people, I was fairly confident I could put the U-2 in the correct spot to see the eclipse.
The orbit was an elongated north-south orbit that was perpendicular to the path of the eclipse. I had never seen an eclipse from an aircraft personally, and had to try to imagine what I wanted to do. I knew I would only have minutes, so the cameras would have to be set up ahead of time. The only camera I held was a Nikon D810 that I borrowed from our public affairs office.
Going through my wide-angle camera confirmed that I did get a lot of shots of the inside of the cockpit during the main event. After landing, I avoided people because everyone wanted to look at my photos. I told them I would need to put them on my computer first.
I went home and started downloading everything onto my 2010 iMac. I use Lightroom CC, and to my pleased surprise, when I brought the exposure way up on the RAW files for those 30 black shots, there were three that actually had some corona on them. They wouldn't be the corona shot of the century but they were still recognizable as a corona. When I brought the exposure up on what looked like just a blip of sunlight, it showed the whole corona to make a diamond ring shot. In the end, I found that I actually had captured basically each stage of the eclipse. That was when I decided to put them all together in one picture and build a composite of the eclipse.
You’ve heard of MRI machines in hospitals being used to take images of internal body parts for diagnosing diseases in medicine, but scientists have now shown that the same process can also be used to visualize the magnetic field of a single atom:
Using a new technique, scientists have performed the world's smallest magnetic resonance imaging to capture the magnetic fields of single atoms. It's an incredible breakthrough that could improve quantum research, as well as our understanding of the Universe on subatomic scales.
You're probably most familiar with magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, as a method used to image internal body structures in medicine. An MRI machine uses highly powerful magnets to induce a strong magnetic field around the body, forcing the spin of the protons in the nuclei of your body's hydrogen atoms to align with the magnetic field, all without producing side-effects.
But for medical MRI scanners, this needs to be occurring en masse, with billions of protons, for the sensors to detect it.
To bring the process down to much finer scales, the researchers used a scanning tunnelling microscope, an instrument that can image surfaces at the atomic scale by running an extremely fine needle over them.
Now, I know there is the feeling of wanting to get back at someone you’ve had an argument with - but make sure it doesn't put you to jail for any sort of crime. Serina Wolfe may have gotten back at her boyfriend after their fight, but the law sure came after her:
A 24-year-old woman was arrested Monday in Florida and charged with leaving a $5,000 tip on her boyfriend's credit card after they had a fight in a restaurant.
According to a complaint from Pinellas County deputies, Serina Wolfe and her boyfriend ate last Thursday evening at the Clear Sky Café in Clearwater Beach, west of Tampa, when they got into a "verbal argument" about her wanting him to buy her a plane ticket home to upstate New York.
When he refused to do so, he placed a temporary hold on his credit card.
When her boyfriend later confronted her about the charge, Wolfe denied leaving the huge tip, according to the complaint, so he then reported the transaction as fraudulent to his credit card company.
But when the restaurant was told about the transaction on Monday, it was already too late as the server had been paid the $5,000 tip.
When Wolfe was arrested Monday, she allegedly admitted to using the card to pay the pricey tab.
"[The boyfriend] believes the defendant was drunk or trying to get back at him," read the arrest report.
Court records show she was charged with third-degree grand theft, a felony, and held on a $1,000 bond.
So instead of committing a crime, just vent about your argument on any social media site of your choice, okay?
Love doing dares? Love wiping the smile of the darer's face after successfully doing their dare? There's (usually) no harm in that. However, there are some dares that you simply shouldn’t do as it puts your life at risk.
Sydney Morning Herald details a dare gone wrong, and it may convince you to think before you take on a dare:
On Saturday, December 1, David went to a Christmas party. The next day he didn't feel well but thought it was just a hangover.
On Tuesday, December 4, David was diagnosed at the Mater Hospital with a salmonella infection. Salmonella is a foodborne pathogen, which can also be transmitted from person to person. In most cases, it only causes diarrhoea, stomach cramps and fever, but in compromised patients, those with health conditions or the young and old, it can be much more severe.
David’s family thought chicken was the cause of the salmonella. Then on the Sunday, according to Hannah, David's partner, Allira, was talking to one of his friends and remembered, "Oh, David ate a gecko that night I’m pretty sure".
The following Tuesday, December 11, a week after being diagnosed, David died during surgery.
His family said he suffered mass organ failure and " basically rotted from the inside out".
Bringing the dead back to life is such a prevalent theme in science fiction, but can it be done with actual science? Nenad Sestan of Yale's Neuroscience department explored the possibility of bringing dead brains back to life in his experiments, as Matthew Shaer details for the New York Times:
When I met with Sestan this spring, at his lab in New Haven, he took great care to stress that he was far from the only scientist to have noticed the phenomenon. “Lots of people knew this,” he said. “Lots and lots.” And yet he seems to have been one of the few to take these findings and push them forward: If you could restore activity to individual post-mortem brain cells, he reasoned to himself, what was to stop you from restoring activity to entire slices of post-mortem brain?
In the course of his research, Sestan, an expert in developmental neurobiology, regularly ordered slices of animal and human brain tissue from various brain banks, which shipped the specimens to Yale in coolers full of ice. Sometimes the tissue arrived within three or four hours of the donor’s death. Sometimes it took more than a day. Still, Sestan and his team were able to culture, or grow, active cells from that tissue — tissue that was, for all practical purposes, entirely dead. In the right circumstances, they could actually keep the cells alive for several weeks at a stretch.
Sestan's research does not actually focus on the revival of dead beings, but on the research of cellular restoration, as he told Shaer:
If the path to cellular restoration really did lie in the perfusion of a whole brain, his experiment would be entering entirely unexplored territory. “It’s kind of amazing, considering everything that came later, but that was the origin,” Sestan told me. “We didn’t want to restart life, you know?”
CVT Soft Serve is a popular food truck in Los Angeles. With its great soft serves and vintage looking truck, influencers are naturally attracted to the ice cream truck. One would think that attracting influencers means getting more customers, however Joe Nicchi, the owner of CVT Soft Serve tells The Guardian that is not the case at all:
CVT Soft Serve, a popular truck in Los Angeles, has started to receive weekly requests from self-proclaimed Instagram “influencers” who promise to post a photo of Nicchi’s ice-cream – if they don’t have to pay. Nicchi has always said no, but this week he found an unusual way to profit off of the influencers: he publicly told them to go away.
“This is a money-making thing. I can’t give away my ice-cream for free,” he said, noting that he had paid for his first truck with his salary from shooting a commercial.
The soft serve at CVT (which stands for his three flavor offerings: chocolate, vanilla, or twist) and his vintage-looking truck are very Instagrammable. Influencers quickly noticed. In his first year, he got a small handful of influencer offers, typically people emailing suggesting promotional deals in exchange for free ice-cream.
“They love using the word ‘exposure’. It’s so ridiculous,” he said.
He said an assistant to a famous actor – a woman on a television show who he declined to name – recently asked if he would donate ice-cream to the cast and crew. In exchange, the actor offered to take a photo at his truck.
His response: “As much as I’d love to do that, I don’t think my kid’s school accepts celebrity photos as a form of tuition payment.”
After getting tired of all the emails and demands for a free cone in exchange for ‘exposure’, Nicchi eventually posted a sign saying “Influencers Pay Double”, which trended on the internet:
“Nicchi eventually became so tired of influencers that he put up his anti-influencer sign at the truck, making clear that people who requested a free cone would get the opposite – they’d have to pay $8 instead of $4. A customer took a photo and posted it to Reddit, which then went viral.”
“...writing on Instagram that he would “never give you a free ice-cream in exchange for a post”. The image, tagged #InfluencersAreGross, spread around the globe, and now Nicchi says his business is booming, attracting fans across southern California who share his disdain of influencers.”
A startup company has come up with a new solution in data storage, and it’s a very biological solution. Startup Catalog has announced that it crammed all of the text in Wikipedia’s English -language version into the same genetic molecules our bodies use - DNA. Cnet has the details:
Catalog uses an addressing system that means customers can use large data sets. And even though DNA stores data in long sequences, Catalog can read information stored anywhere using molecular probes. In other words, it's a form of random-access memory like a hard drive, not sequential access like the spools of magnetic tape you might remember from the heyday of mainframe computers a half century ago.
Although DNA data can be disrupted by cosmic rays, Catalog argues that it's a more stable medium than the alternatives. After all, we've got DNA from animals that went extinct thousands of years ago. How much do you want to bet that USB thumb drive in your desk drawer will be still useful even 25 years from now?
In a feat of scientific effort and excellence, scientists from Yokohama National University managed to teleport a photon into a diamond. Eureka Alert has the details:
Researchers from the Yokohama National University have teleported quantum information securely within the confines of a diamond. The study has big implications for quantum information technology - the future of how sensitive information is shared and stored.
So by extension, the diamond is now a quantum diamond - as Tristan Greene calls it, a “Quantum Bling”. Besides the implication of a new type of bling people might obsess over, the Quantum Diamond also provides a new path towards the data storage:
"Quantum teleportation permits the transfer of quantum information into an otherwise inaccessible space," said Hideo Kosaka, a professor of engineering at Yokohama National University and an author on the study. "It also permits the transfer of information into a quantum memory without revealing or destroying the stored quantum information."
To manipulate an electron and a carbon isotope in the vacancy … the team attached a wire about a quarter the width of a human hair to the surface of a diamond. They applied a microwave and a radio wave to the wire to build an oscillating magnetic field around the diamond. They shaped the microwave to create the optimal, controlled conditions for the transfer of quantum information within the diamond.
One of the models who have been frequently featured on romance novel covers has announced his retirement. After posing for over 630 covers, Jason Baca told People that it’s time for him to step back:
“As of today, I’ve appeared on 635 book covers with a few more coming down the pipes from previous shoots,” Baca, 45, tells PEOPLE exclusively.
Despite the successful modeling career that he’s established, Baca says that he’s now taking a step back because “the passion isn’t there.”
“I’m one of those types that either you go about what you want in life wholeheartedly or not at all! My desire in the beginning was there. Someone could say something negative to me about it and it would bounce right off of me with no effect,” he says. “I knew what I wanted, being on covers was the object of my desire.”
In machine learning, scientists can “train” a computer system or artificial intelligence to do something - like classifying information or simulating models - without giving it explicit instruction. Instead, they let the computer figure the problem out itself.
Astrophysicist Shirley Ho of the Flatiron Institute and Carnegie Mellon University and her colleagues used machine learning to see if computers can simulate the universe … and were completed baffled that not only had the AI simulated the universe, but that it could simulate it so well:
What it does is accurately simulate the way gravity shapes the Universe over billions of years.
"It's like teaching image recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it's able to recognise elephants," said astrophysicist Shirley Ho of the Flatiron Institute and Carnegie Mellon University.
It’s like the modern-day equivalent of the biblical plague of locusts invading Egypt: : mayflies have invaded Ohio. The swarm of mayflies was dense that a weather radar was able to capture it. CNN World has the details:
These mayflies come from the waters of Lake Erie.
They won't be around for long, though. Individual mayflies live up to two days once they come on land. The swarms typically last about a month.
Ohio Sea Grant dispels the fear of a plague, telling the residents that the swarm is nothing but a good indicator and wouldn’t disturb them for long:
Residents may find them annoying, but the mayfly swarm is an indication of good water health in the Great Lakes.
