Who would have thought that skateboarding and high school education can actually be complementary to each other? In Malmö, Sweden,  Bryggeriets Gymnasium is the first ever high school to use skateboarding as a teaching tool. Dwell’s Duncan Nielsen has the details: 

Bryggeriets Gymnasium is an innovative nonprofit high school that uses skating as a teaching tool. Traditional coursework is still required, but the school's roughly 150 students—many from Norway, Denmark, or the far reaches of Sweden—are also given the opportunity to pursue a skate-centric education that includes ancillary activities like photography, film, and the fine arts.

Well skateboarders, this might just be the school for you!

image credit: Andrew Parodi via wikimedia commons

Have you strategized on how you will potty-train your kids (or future kids)? If not, maybe this mom's strategy can be your inspiration :

To quote Sloane Hughes, "This training tactic probably isn’t featured in any parenting handbooks but it’s definitely a winner." 

Images (image and screenshot) credit: Shona McLoughlin

How should a cat ask to be let in the door when it’s too short to reach the doorbell? Well, it knocks politely of course.

Watch this orange tabby cat knock on the door using its rear leg. Getting no response, an unseen human encouraged the cat to make a second attempt. See until the end of the video to know if the cat knocked again!

(Via Laughing Squid)

After seeing a mom by a poolside take selfies with her daughter and then proceeding to ignore the daughter's request to spend time with her, Jen Flint wrote on Facebook about what she thought about parenting and social media: 

I sat there thinking about what I'd witnessed for awhile afterwards. I imagined the photos she took being perfectly edited and posted to social media with a caption like "Pool time with my girly! #Makingmemories". 

Somewhere another Mama is going to be at home with her children, the house a mess from their play, her hair unruly from a day of mothering and her clothes dirty with spit up or peanut butter. She's going to be tired because she's spent her day cooking, caring, cleaning and playing with her children. She's going to look at that photo and she is going to compare herself to the perfect Mama at the pool. The Adversary is going to whisper into her ear "you aren't good enough... You don't look like that Mama at the pool... You don't have money to buy expensive swimming suits like that and you don't have time to make memories like she is" and that young Mama is going to believe it. She's going to feel like a failure.

In addition to her viral Facebook post, she also elaborated more on the topic with Today: 

“What struck me is that when somebody else sees her pictures, they are going to think in their heads, ‘This mom spent all of this time with her kid, she’s at the pool and looking gorgeous, why can’t I be like that?’” Flint told TODAY Parents. “They are going to compare their whole life to this one moment that looks perfect, but wasn’t.”

Many of Flint’s younger friends “are seriously depressed” and struggling with self-doubt because of what they see on Instagram. “They feel like they’re not good enough,” Flint explained to TODAY Parents. “It’s important to remember what we see in our feeds is just one tiny moment. You don’t know what happened before or after the picture was taken.”

image credit: Elliot825 via wikimedia commons

Fourth of July is almost here! If you're looking for something sweet and patriotic for your Fourth of July dinner table, declare independence from boring ice cream. Behold Food Network’s Ice Cream Flag Cake .

image credit: Ralph Smith via  Food Network

Arby’s chief marketing officer, Jim Taylor told Fast Company their next big plan - Marrots:

“People love meat already. What Americans have a harder time doing is enjoying vegetables,” he says.  “So we said, ‘If they can make meat out of vegetables, why can’t we make vegetables out of meat?’ We’re going to introduce to the world a category we call ‘megetables’—we’ve applied for trademark. Our first vegetable is going to be the marrot.”

The plan to put carrots made out of meat - Marrots on the market. As to how it will be made, Taylor shared the details:

The marrot is a seasoned, marinated turkey breast, cut and rolled into the shape of a carrot. It’s cooked sous vide. Then it’s rolled in dehydrated carrot juice and oven-roasted. The marrot is finished with a brûlée of maple sugar and a sprig of parsley on top. Taylor points out that it’s high in protein and vitamin C—what Arby’s dubs a “meat snack.”

For those who are excited to grab these marrots on your next grocery run, I have bad news for you. Marrots are only an idea in Arby's kitchen at the moment. Maybe, one day, you'll be able to snag them for real.

image credit: Arby's via Fast Company

What car can you buy that will have the most significant positive impact on the American economy? Cars.com answered that question, publishing the results on a ranking of cars based on the percentage of their components that are American-made: 

1. Jeep Cherokee

2. Honda Odyssey

3. Honda Ridgeline

4. Honda Passport

5. Chevrolet Corvette

6. Acura MDX

7. Honda Pilot

8. Chevrolet Colorado

9. GMC Canyon

10. Acura RDX

11. Chevrolet Camaro

12. Toyota Avalon

13. Ford F-150

14. Honda Accord

15. Toyota Tundra

(via cnet.com)

image credit: Guillaume Vachey via wikimedia commons

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Today was a big day! - - So happy to have Hero by my side through my life’s journey. We had a Super Devine night 💍👰

A post shared by The Super Collies (@thesupercollies) on Jun 15, 2019 at 7:07pm PDT

What's more fun than seeing the bride and groom take their first dance as newlyweds on their wedding reception? How about seeing the bride dance with her dog?. 

Celebrity dog trainer Sara Carson Devine from America’s Got Talent impressed guests in her wedding with a performance of a Footloose dance routine with her Border Collie Hero.

(via indianexpress.com)

In a heartwarming video that went viral, a father with dementia remembered a song he composed. What started as a simple nudge of encouragement from his son to try playing, turned out to be one of the most touching videos to date:

Nick Harvey asked his father to play “Where’s the Sunshine,” a piece Paul Harvey composed in the 1980s as music director of a British secondary school. Nick Harvey said that, like many of the other songs his father wrote for school productions, it could have “easily been good enough for the West End stage.”

Nick Harvey wasn’t sure his father would remember this one. It’s clear in the video Paul Harvey wasn’t sure about that, either.

In the video, he hesitates as he begins, then confidently and fluidly plays the composition he wrote decades earlier. His son posted it on Twitter. Within a day, it had been viewed more than 2 million times. Tens of thousands of people reacted with awe and admiration. Celebrities including James Corden and British singer Emeli Sandé retweeted it.

Dad has dementia. Sometimes he drifts into another world and I feel like I’m losing him. He is never more present, however, than when he plays the piano.

He came to mine today and I asked him to play one of his compositions. He thought he wouldn’t be able to remember it. pic.twitter.com/EQGcXBwB3w

— Nick Harvey (@mrnickharvey) June 23, 2019

The man in the video, Paul Harvey told the Press Association that he is happy that he has given such a positive effect on people:

In an interview with the Press Association news agency, Paul Harvey said he is happy his music is reaching masses of people, even at this late stage in his life, and even though he has dementia.

“I am very pleased that something I’ve written has had such an effect,” he said. “It’s come so late in life, it shows that it can happen at any time.”

(via The Washington Post)

Burnham, England has launched a new campaign to combat loneliness. The English seaside town's police have installed "chat benches" where people would sit down and have the chance to talk to anyone. Yahoo Lifestyle has the details:

“The Chat Bench is a very simple concept where a sign is placed on a bench, typically in a park or a town centre, in a location used by a good cross-section of the community,” said Burnham-On-Sea Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) Tracey Grobbeler to Burham-On-Sea.com.

“The sign simply helps to break down the invisible, social barriers that exists between strangers who find themselves sharing a common place,” said Grobbeler.

“Simply stopping to say ‘hello’ to someone at the Chat Bench could make a huge difference to the vulnerable people in our communities and help to make life a little better for them.”

“A simple ‘Hello’ or ‘Are you OK?’ can make such a difference to a person.”

In addition to combat isolation and loneliness, these chat benches also serve another purpose:

The Burnham-On-Sea Police Department introduced the chat benches to coincide with World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, which encourages community members to appreciate and engage with the senior population — and to raise awareness of the physical, emotional and financial abuse many older people endure.

image credit : Burnham-On-Sea.com via Yahoo Lifestyle

Plastic waste has led to the rise of plastic pollution, a feat that we have yet to fully defeat by segregating our garbage or by proper waste disposal. It seems that there is another feat of plastic pollution that we need to defeat :

Researchers have identified a new, and perhaps more permanent type of plastic pollution, one that incorporates itself right into the rocky shoreline: “plasticrust,” a veneer of plastic encrusted right onto wave-licked rocks.

Gestoso thinks plasticrust was forged by water, not fire.

“[The crusts] likely originated by the crash of large pieces of plastic against the rocky shore, resulting in plastic crusting the rock in a similar way algae or lichens do,” Gestoso told Earther.

Gestoso hopes that the plasticrust’s discovery can contribute to awareness about the consequences of plastic waste, as unsettling as the news is.

Make sure to be aware of your use of plastics and their disposal. While big contributors to plastic pollution (regardless of form) are manufacturers, we can do our part to minimize the pollution’s effects, to some degree. 

(Via Earther)

image credit : Ignacio Gestoso via Earther

Planes are usually found in an airplane hangar, not alongside a civilian's car in a parking lot. In Washington State's Boeing's Renton Factory, however, planes and cars are parked alongside each other.

These planes are grounded 737 Max jets, parked in the parking lot due to a lack of space in the factory. Jalopnik.com has the details:

Thanks to an issue with faulty sensors in the Boeing 737 Max flight control systems, those planes have been grounded after multiple crashes were found to be related to the issue. Grounded planes are, by definition, not in the air, and as such need to be stored, on the ground, somewhere.

The imagery of planes parked alongside regular cars is quite a spectacle, and the Internet made sure of letting everyone know:

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Ze Planes! Ze Planes! #boeingfield #boeingseattle #b737max #grounded #avgeek #aviationlovers #megaplane #megaaviation #planeaddict #aviationenthusiast #shotoniphone

A post shared by DPermadi77 (@dpermadi77) on Jun 21, 2019 at 9:04pm PDT

image credit: K5 News Seattle via Jalopnik.com

Various parts of the UK saw a pink rainbow in their skies, thanks to science. The pink appearance of the rainbow was a result of the lower position of the sun at sunrise and sunset, as Metro UK reported: 

The pink appearance of the rainbow is a result of the lower sun at sunrise and sunset.

An optical illusion is caused by colours at the red end of the spectrum being refracted, making the rainbow appear pink.

image credit: APEX via Metro UK

In humanity's continuing journey to finding life outside Earth, NASA has discovered a puff of gas on Mars that might be what humanity has longed for. NYTimes has the details:

In a measurement taken on Wednesday, NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air, a gas that on Earth is usually produced by living things. The data arrived back on Earth on Thursday, and by Friday, scientists working on the mission were excitedly discussing the news, which has not yet been announced by NASA.

Two decades later, planetary scientists thought Mars might have been warmer, wetter and more habitable in its youth some 4 billion years ago. Now, they are entertaining the notion that if life ever did arise on Mars, its microbial descendants could have migrated underground and persisted.

Methane, if it is there in the thin Martian air, is significant, because sunlight and chemical reactions would break up the molecules within a few centuries. Thus any methane detected now must have been released recently.

When hope for a possible sign of extraterrestrial life exists, there also comes the multitude of disclaimers and possible reasons that it isn’t a sign of extraterrestrial life: 

On Earth, microbes known as methanogens thrive in places lacking oxygen, such as rocks deep underground and the digestive tracts of animals, and they release methane as a waste product. However, geothermal reactions devoid of biology can also generate methane.

It is also possible that the methane is ancient, trapped inside Mars for millions of years but escaping intermittently through cracks.

Of course, this remains to be a scientific investigation and its conclusion will be reached after the interpretation of data, as NASA’s spokesperson says : 

The agency’s spokesperson added, “To maintain scientific integrity, the project science team will continue to analyze the data before confirming results.”

image taken from wikimedia commons

The Guardian showcases a collection of calling cards not of 1970s-80s businessmen, but of gang members. These business cards display the street gangs' symbols, nicknames, and territories, and enemies for assertion, recruitment and affiliation tokens.

I wonder: do modern-day street gangs have business cards as well?

image via The Guardian