A lot of us are seeking different ways to alleviate stress and the anxiety caused by the pandemic. Some watch movies and tv shows, while some start a new hobby. It seems that lucid dreaming is something we can also try, given the amount of time we can sleep nowadays! Lucid dreaming has its benefits, as USA Today details: 

Lucidity Institute psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge, who has spent decades researching the science behind awakening in your dreams, points to studies where the visual imagery produced during lucid dreaming could improve physical and mental health. For example, someone who solves a problem or confronts a fear while lucid dreaming can wake with a sense of empowerment and courage, according to the Lucidity Institute FAQs.

“People aren't relying on alarm clocks in order to wake them up, so there’s less interference to help them recall dreams, and recall is key to lucid dreaming,” says Kristen LaMarca, a clinical psychologist in sleep medicine and writer of a concise new dream book, “Learn to Lucid Dream”. 

And since people are more isolated and without their normal routines, she says, it gives them “more room to have more of an inward reflective focus.”

image via USA Today

It’s rare to see news about space launches being cancelled, but even after months of preparation, launches can get cancelled even at the last minute. For example, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launch was cancelled due to bad weather. Check out other possible reasons for a launch cancellation over The Washington Post.

image via wikimedia commons

Kana Hashimoto (@himu1017) uploads eerily breathtaking photos of Tokyo at night during the pandemic. Hashimoto is an amateur photographer who takes nighttime photos of Tokyo as a hobby. Her photos feel like they are suspended in time, and make the viewers feel a sense of serenity and longing: 

“Five years ago, I became aware of and began doing nighttime photography,” Hashimoto told me. She added, “I like the night’s silent atmosphere and the light that floats up from the depths of the darkness. I also like the sense of longing one can feel throughout these streetscapes.”

Hashimoto, who admires the work of the contemporary Japanese photographers Miyako Ishiuchi and Seiichi Motohashi, did not begin shooting her nocturnal Tokyo scenes with the goal of producing a series. “During the state of emergency [imposed by the Japanese government, which was lifted on May 25], I tried to refrain from going out,” Hashimoto said. But even during that period, she did slip out into the darkness. “Not having contact with other people, when it came to going out at night to shoot photos, I used my best judgment.”

image via Hyperallergic

Here's disturbing news for you: bags (yes, plural) of human remains were found along the Seattle shoreline. At least one of the “several bags” was in the water according to the Seattle Police Department. Identities of the dead are unknown, along with the number of bodies involved.

image via wikimedia commons

If you’re looking for more articles or stories to read about in your quarantine time, try this list of the strangest unsolved mysteries compiled by Reader’s Digest! From the mysterious Voynich manuscript to the ghost ship Mary Celeste, these cases will surely make you think! Check out the full list here. 

image via Reader's Digest

Japanese social media went into a frenzy deciphering a mysterious object that appeared in the sky over northern Japan. The odd white object gave birth to different speculations, from UFOs to weather balloons to North Korean propaganda. Footage taken in Sendai showed a balloon-like object above a cross, as Reuters detailed: 

Television footage taken in the northeastern city of Sendai showed a balloon-like object above a cross, on which propellers seemed to be turning. Officials in the Sendai Weather Bureau said it had appeared near dawn and hung in the sky for hours, largely unmoving, until obscured by clouds.

By afternoon it was the third-most trending topic on Japanese Twitter, with theories including UFOs and North Korean balloons used to drop leaflets. One user said it could be spreading novel coronavirus, adding, “This gives me a very bad feeling, as if Godzilla might suddenly appear.”

Police could not be immediately reached for comment and a Sendai government official said inquiries were still proceeding, with both the size of the object and its origin, as well as its function, undetermined. No move had been made to retrieve it as of late afternoon.

“We have absolutely no idea what it is,” said a weather bureau spokesman, declining to give his name. “It may be some kind of weather monitoring equipment, but it definitely isn’t ours.”

image screenshot via Reuters

Tonya Ruiz is known for her realistic versions of Barbie dolls. During the pandemic, she began a “quarantine Barbie starter pack” project that everyone could relate to while at home. The dolls are accompanied by different miniature objects that reinforce the personality of the Barbie doll, as Designboom details: 

for example, the quarantine break baking barbie includes a mixer, flour, sourdough starter, eggs, bananas, butter, and milk; and a doll that is probably making a flour disaster around the kitchen. or the zoom ken that’s dressed from the waist up while wearing only red-hearted boxer shorts.

I had always wanted to make spoof barbies like I had seen on the ellen show,’ comments tonya ruiz on a youtube post where she shares behind-the-scenes footage of the project. ‘when the quarantine started and I saw a couple of funny pandemic barbies – I thought that I should make a barbie that everyone could relate to. I created the quarantine starter pack – curvy doll in stretchy pants. she was so well liked that I continued creating spoof / parody barbies.’

image via Designboom

This Japanese teacher took a great deal of time and effort to check one of their students’ essays. If you tasked your students with writing an essay in any language, I’m sure you wouldn’t expect someone to turn in an essay written in a Runic alphabet! The teacher was able to check the student’s essay after transcribing the essay to Romaji in three hours. 

image via Twitter

We’ve seen different kinds of anime over the years, but this Condom Battler Goro surprised me because of what it's based upon. It’s an anime promoting safe sex, and also a marketing ploy by Japan’s leading condom manufacturer, Okamoto Industries. The superhero anime is a 56-part series, but only  episodes 1, 19, 45, and 56 will be released for now. It’s still not known if the missing episodes will be released in the future. 

image via SoraNews24

Police in Lincoln, Nebraska, are looking for a suspect in a very specific costume. A man dressed in a ‘very cheap’ Deadpool costume was seen smashing windows and causing damage to a business at the Lincoln Mall. The man managed to break out over 20 windows. Hopefully the police find the suspect! 

image via abc8

If your back hurts after spending time browsing the Internet or doing work from home, then maybe it’s your posture that’s the root of the problem. I’m sure it is the cause of my back problems. While we can’t really go to physical therapists for advice during a pandemic, we can learn vicariously through Buzzfeed as they consult physical therapists about posture.  

For a long time, people rarely got a glimpse of an intact, giant squid. It seems that the situation changes as a dead yet intact giant squid was washed ashore at a beach in South Africa. Actually, humans have never successfully captured a live giant squid, and the dead specimens that wash ashore are usually partial. Salon has more details: 

The first-ever video footage of a giant squid in its natural habitat was captured just  seven years ago, in 2013.

Adéle Grosse of Cape Town told Live Science that when she saw the large tentacled sea creature on the beach, her initial instinct was to try to save its life.

"At first, I just wanted to get it back into the ocean. [But] on closer observation, one could see that it was dead," Grosse explained. She explained that she and her husband discovered the beached giant squid during a morning walk in Brittania Bay and that they were taken aback by its appearance.

"Oh my word, seeing it at first really took my breath away. Honestly, it looked like a majestic prehistoric animal," Grosse told Live Science. She is unsure how it died, although she noted that "we had big swells the night before, and it was my understanding that the swell washed up this beautiful squid onto the beach in the early hours of the morning. We looked for bite marks or injuries and could not really find anything."

image via wikimedia commons

For us, meat is just the juicy, tasty slab of tissue from animals. But some people think it’s more than that simple definition. People who are developing cell-cultured meat believe that meat can be the product of cultural consensus, not of killing animals. If people accept meat in various shapes and forms, then they can accept that meat can come from different methods. Cell-cultured meat is one of the methods that big food companies are looking at for the future, as NPR details: 

At the center of Chase Purdy's briskly paced and quietly bold Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food is Josh Tetrick, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and CEO of Just Inc. Tetrick's company and a handful of others like it are growing cell-cultured meat that tastes, feels and looks like the livestock-harvested meat that people are used to — except without the farms and killing of animals. And before anyone raises a skeptical brow: Yes, it's actually meat. Technically, at least. The struggle for mainstream acceptance of cell-cultured meat is real. Convincing the American public that cells grown in "serum" in a big vat is meat will be challenging, but it could happen — and sooner than you might think.

Meat, it seems, is all about what consumers are used to. For the sake of the planet and the future of food sustainability, it might be time to reconsider meat harvested from dead animals. If we're going to eat meat at all, eliminating the need to kill an animal that consumes food resources humans could otherwise be using — and that's also captive to an industry that pollutes the air and soil and deforests broad swaths of the planet — might be a good start.

image via NPR

Haribo gummy bears are one of the top-selling candies in the world. With the various flavors in its roster, it actually takes a lot of time and effort to add a new flavor that the masses will love. Popular Science details on the process behind the famed gummies flavors: 

Anointing a new flavor to the Haribo lineup, however, takes some confection-making perfection. The company’s food scientists test each recipe exhaustively for aroma, texture, and regional preferences. The last step is key to ensuring a gummy will succeed across multiple markets. For example, Triffler says, Americans and Germans don’t always agree on what a “lemon” candy should taste like, making it tricky to develop a single yellow piece for a mix that suits everyone’s tongues. The company even had to change up Riegel’s famous recipe when introducing Goldbears stateside in the 1980s.

Haribo is quite tight-lipped about what makes their gummies such a culinary delight. But outside of the candy industry, food scientists are upfront about the challenges of crafting gummies. “Most gummy confections contain 5 to 10 percent fruit juice and the rest is sugar water,” Vodovotz says. “There are non-synthetic flavors and dyes, but they’re really still mostly chemicals.”

image via Popular Science

A fossil soft-shell egg has been discovered in Antarctica. The egg is a large, football-sized egg believed to have been left by an ancient marine reptile known as a mosasaur. The fossil was estimated to be 66 million years old, as iflscience details:

"It is from an animal the size of a large dinosaur, but it is completely unlike a dinosaur egg," said lead author Lucas Legendre, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences,” in a statement. "It is most similar to the eggs of lizards and snakes, but it is from a truly giant relative of these animals."

It was previously believed that giant marine reptiles from the Cretaceous did not lay eggs, yet “nothing like this has ever been discovered.” Chilean scientists first came across the fossil nearly a decade ago, after which it sat unlabeled in the country’s collections at the National Museum of Natural History. Scientists referred to the more than 28-by-18-centimeter (11-by-7 inches) stone-like fossil simply as “The Thing”.

image via iflscience