Entrepreneurs from Mexico developed a method of making cacti into vegan leather- and you won’t even notice it isn’t real leather! When Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez realized that environmental pollution is a serious problem, they were inspired to create vegan leather. The faux-leather is called “Desserto” and is made from cactus, as BoredPanda detailed:
Why cactus, you ask? The answer is simple—this plant doesn’t need much water to grow, it’s super resilient and strong and it can handle low temperatures without dying. Besides, it’s México so there’s plenty of cacti there.
The vegan leather these guys create is called “Desserto” and it’s the world’s first environmentally friendly organic material made out of Nopal cactus.
Photographers post wallpaper-worthy photos all the time. We save them because we can’t take photos as beautiful as theirs, and there’s no harm in admitting that. I do it all the time. However, this particular photo of a sunset from landscape photographer Gaurav Agrawal did the unexpected. The photo often made android phones crash when set as wallpaper, PetaPixel details:
Unfortunately, when it came time to export and share the photo after a few edits in Adobe Lightroom, he picked the ProPhoto RGB color space; that, it seems, was the root of the problem.
The color space attached to the photo is unreadable by a large number of Android phones, mostly those by Google and Samsung. When set as the wallpaper on the standard version of Android 10, sRGB is required, and the disparity sent these phones into an infinite re-boot loop. The issue is referred to as a “soft-brick,” because it was often only fixable by performing a factory reset and losing any data that wasn’t backed up.
This fact was discovered and shared widely on Twitter, causing the photo to go viral and inadvertently leading to thousands of phones being bricked as some Android users couldn’t resist the temptation to try using the photo themselves.
Agrawal tells the BBC that he’s sad about what happened. Since he’s an iPhone user (and always uses a photo of his wife as his phone background) he had no idea that choosing the wrong color space could cause such a kerfuffle.
“I didn’t do anything intentionally. I’m sad that people ended up having issues.” says Agrawal. “I hoped my photograph would have gone ‘viral’ for a good reason, but maybe that’s for another time… I’m going to use another format from now on.”
The PS5 hardware has been revealed. Along with the console’s specifications, a lot of games that will be released for the PS5 were also announced. One of the new games for the console is Spiderman: Miles Morales. Check out the teaser as shared by GameSpot! If you’ve seen the previous Spiderman games, then this one will certainly pique your interest. It has certainly piqued mine. Now I just gotta figure out if I can actually afford the console.
For me, the real horror lies in the Masterchef for adults, where the pressure of wanting to win the competition drives the competitors almost insane, and you also have Gordon Ramsay chewing them out like a drill sergeant. But it seems that even though Masterchef Junior is wholesome in some aspects, Cracked’s Dan Duddy lists three reasons why the show is like a lowkey horror show.
Vogue Italia invited kids aged two to ten years old to illustrate what they think a magazine cover should look like. The magazine sought 100 kids to reimagine the looks of the season. Eight artworks were then chosen to be the cover of the magazine’s June issue. Chief editor of Vogue Italia shares the reason behind the concept:
“Kids have been the most overlooked and least obvious victims of the pandemic,” said Emanuele Farneti, chief editor of Vogue Italia in a statement. “We’re starting from them to imagine a new world.”
Face masks are now frequently used for safety and as a precaution against the current pandemic. If you want to spice up your face mask collection, The Daily Beast shares some different stylish face masks in different colors and patterns. From neutral ginghams to polka-dot patterns, there are a lot of variations of face masks you can choose from!
Who knew there was a perfect way to cuddle? Cuddling is one of the gestures that can give someone comfort and warmth, and to know that there’s a way to do it perfectly is quite interesting! Scientists from Toho University in Japan studied the effect of different hugs on infants. Yahoo News has the details:
By monitoring heart rates for the infant and using pressure sensors on the adult's hand, the researchers assessed the baby's reaction to just being held, a hug with medium pressure, and what they called a "tight hug."
According to the results, published in the journal Cell, babies were soothed more by a medium-pressure hug than just being held but the calming effect decreased during a "tight" hug.
The researchers kept the length of the hug to 20 seconds as "it was almost impossible to avoid infant's bad mood during a one-minute or longer hold or hug," they admitted in their paper.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, for infants older than 125 days, the calming effect was greater when receiving a hug from a parent than from a female stranger.
So, the perfect hug is considered to be medium pressure from a parent, the scientists believe.
The infants are not the only ones who feel the benefits of a comforting hug, the research showed.
Parents also exhibited significant signs of calmness while hugging their child.
Nothing like a good game to beat out boredom! If you don’t have a gaming console like a Playstation or a Nintendo Switch, worry not! There are still good games available for the PC! While it will take a long time for you to go through the available games to find the right one, here’s Kotaku’s pick of the best PC games to get you on the track!
I’m terrible at remembering historical events, along with names of famous people and locations. Isn’t history easier to study when it’s presented in an entertaining manner? Watcher’s Puppet History does just that. The series presents historical events in such an entertaining and funny manner that you’d remember the event well. Or you’ll remember the catchy songs at the end of every episode. This episode about the dancing plague is not only entertaining, but the catchy song at the end will make you remember the dancing plague really well!
Fake photos are initially difficult to spot. There are some photos that look too real, but at a closer inspection, have been tampered with multiple times. So how can we actually decipher if a photo has been edited or fabricated? It can be spotted by looking at shadows included in a photo, as Hany Farid tells BBC:
One trick he has picked up over time is to check the points of light in people’s eyes. “If you have two people standing next to each other in a photograph, then we will often see the reflection of the light source (such as the Sun or a camera flash) in their eyes,” he explains. “The location, size, and colour of this reflection tells us about the location, size, and colour of the light source. If these properties of the light source are not consistent, then the photo may be a composite.”
Another giveaway is the colour of people’s ears. “If the Sun is behind me, my ears will look red from the front because you’ll see the blood,” he says. “If the light is coming from the front, you won’t see the red in the ear.”
Take shadow, for example. If you draw a line from the edge of a shadow in a photograph, to a point on the object that is casting the shadow, you can trace that further to reveal where the light in an image is coming from. If you map out several points on a shadow, the lines should intersect.
This weatherman from Austin, Texas, knows how to take advantage of his luscious greenery. It turns out that his yard is a good replacement for a green screen, as seen in this video shared in r/nextfuckinglevel. The weatherman used his yard to display the map for his weather forecast. Now that’s cool!
Twitter user SuperSartre is one supportive parent! When his son finally got his long-awaited Spider suit, SuperSartre made sure that his son would feel the power of the special suit. The Twitter user took photos of his son in the suit and made it appear as if he can really climb walls. Isn’t that adorable?
Tiny critters, around four inches big or less, build complex houses to protect them from predators and filter their food. These complex houses are all made from snot coming out of their homes. The tadpole looking creatures called giant larvaceans builds a new snot palace every day or so, and these infrastructures have piqued the scientists interests. Bioengineer Kakani Katija hopes to crack the snot palace architectural code so that someday humanity can replicate these houses, as Spectrum News 13 detailed:
Her team took a step toward solving the mystery of the snot houses and maybe someday even replicating them, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.
The creatures inside these houses may be small — the biggest are around 4 inches (10 centimeters) — but they are smart and crucial to Earth’s environment. Found globally, they are the closest relatives to humans without a backbone, Katija and other scientists said.
Together with their houses “they are like an alien life form, made almost entirely out of water, yet crafted with complexity and purpose,” said Dalhousie University marine biologist Boris Worm, who wasn’t part of the study. “They remind me of a cross between a living veil and a high tech filter pump.”
Also, when they abandon their clogged homes about every day, the creatures collectively drop millions of tons of carbon to the seafloor, where it stays, preventing further global warming, Worm said. They also take microplastics out of the water column and dump it on the sea floor. And if that’s not enough, the other waste in their abandoned houses is eaten by the ocean’s bottom dwellers.
Basketball fans and enthusiasts alike always have a team they look up to. Some will say their favourite team’s name, and some would actually give the exact year their favourite team played, and what made that team become their ultimate favourite. If you’re looking for a list of the greatest teams of all time, check out The Onion’s picks!
Rob Greenfield helped his friends build a tiny house in just three days. Well, three and a half days, to be precise. The tiny house is built from wood harvested from his friends’ property and some second hand materials. Watch Greenfield pull off the project with minimal materials and a limited amount of time!
