With the rising need for land to house the living, many countries are destroying cemeteries to get more space. In return, they are trying to change the way funerary rites are done, and how cemeteries operate, from promoting cremation over physical burial in Hong Kong, to creating columbariums and demolishing family tombs in Singapore. Japan is now promoting tree burial as a thoughtful new way to bury the dead:  

As a scholar who studies Buddhist funerary rituals and narratives about the afterlife, what interests me are the innovative responses in some Buddhist-majority nations and the tensions that result as environmental needs clash with religious beliefs.

The idea of tree burials has proven so popular in Japan that other temples and public cemeteries have mimicked the model, some providing burial spaces under individual trees and others spaces in a columbarium that surrounds a single tree.

Scholar Sébastian Penmellen Boret writes in his 2016 book that these tree burials reflect larger transformations in Japanese society. After World War II, Buddhism’s influence on Japanese society declined as hundreds of new religious movements flourished. Additionally, an increasing trend toward urbanization undermined the ties that had traditionally existed between families and the local temples, which housed and cared for their ancestral gravesites.

Tree burials also cost significantly less than traditional funerary practices, which is an important consideration for many Japanese people struggling to support multiple generations. The birth rate in Japan is one of the lowest in the world, so children often struggle without siblings to support ailing and deceased parents and grandparents.

Image credit: Cebas/iStock

That is way too cheap for a vehicle. It turns out that Alibaba has an electric vehicle catalog, with low-cost vehicles that are relatively usable. But is it worth the purchase? Electrek shares the experience of one of its readers regarding their purchase of a $1,700 electric mini-Jeep: 

This isn’t some electric Powerwheels toy – it can fit a couple of adults shoulder to shoulder. It’s more closely comparable to a golf cart in size and power, yet reaches a decent speed of 25 mph (40 km/h).

It’s also much cheaper than golf carts, which cost around $7,000 in the US.

Amazingly, this mini-Jeep is quite affordably priced at a mere $1,280.

But based on my conversations earlier this year with the Chinese factory, the final price shipped to a US port seemed to put it closer to $1,700.

That’s actually pretty close to what Electrek reader Kyle Day found when he set out to order his own electric Jeep.

He originally told me several months ago that he planned to buy one and have it sent to the US. I offered him my customs broker’s contact info (I have a problem and it’s called “buying too much weird stuff from overseas”) and I asked him to keep me updated about how the process went.

Check the full interview with Kyle Day here to learn more! 

Image credit: Alibaba via Electrek 

What kind of bath now? When photographer Tony Austin spotted a crow that was acting weird, Austin decided to take a photo of it. It turns out that the crow was taking an ant bath, as the photographer noticed the crow had ants crawling all over its body. Petapixel has the details: 

Anting is a maintenance tactic birds use in which they intentionally invite ants or other insects onto their feathers and skin. Oftentimes the bird will lie down in a location covered with the insects and do certain poses while the bugs are swarming its body. This is called passive anting, and this is what Austin observed and photographed.

While there are documented observations of anting behavior, scientists still aren’t exactly sure why birds engage in it. Theories include the birds getting rid of parasites, grooming their feathers, preparing the insects for consumption, taking pleasure in the sensations, and stimulating feather growth for molting.

Image credit: Tony Austin 

Alright, she’s been all over the Internet during the promotional campaign for Resident Evil: Village. The 'big-tiddy' monster vampire that almost every gamer wanted to be with when the demo for the game was released created a huge noise in the gaming community. Lady Alcina Dimitrescu can be both menacing and enchanting. Did you know that she was based on a real-life Hungarian noblewoman? GG Recon has more details: 

Born into noble stock in 1560, Bathory ruled her family estate with an iron fist. While her husband was away at war, Bathory apparently took control of the estate. Although his name was Count Ferenc II Nádasdy, Bathory's higher social standing meant she kept her maiden name, and he even changed his to Bathory. These days, Elizabeth Bathory is often referred to as The Blood Countess or Countess Dracula, and is said to have been the inspiration behind Bram Stoker's Dracula. 

According to sources, Bathory tried to retain her youth by bathing in the blood of virgin women. The bowels of her home were reportedly found filled with dead or dying women (usaully between the age of 10 and 14), who Bathory and her conspirators would kidnap and torture. It's claimed that girls would attend the castle for etiquette lessons and were then subjected to horrors. Some say they were burned with hot tongs and then dunked in icy water, while others were apparently covered in honey and live ants. Accounts of Bathory bathing in blood come from after her death, so it's unclear whether they were factual or just added to folklore to make her more of a local boogeyman.

Image credit: Jyinnovbsoce1m from i.ytimg.com via Blogspot

Hey, space nerds- here’s your chance! A Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7, hailed as one of the rarest photo lenses in the world, will be up for auction in Vienna, Australia. The lens was designed for NASA, who needed a device that could capture photos of the moon during its Apollo missions. Out of the ten lenses to be ever made, NASA had six of them: 

"This is one of these ten lenses that Zeiss made at that time," said Andreas Schweiger, of Leitz Photographica Auction, which is running the auction. "Most probably, this is one of the lenses delivered to NASA."

Schweiger spoke to Insider last week via Zoom from his office in Vienna, where his team's readying for a live auction at the city's Hotel Bristol, scheduled for June 12.

For the last few weeks, boxes containing historic and rare camera equipment have been arriving at the auction company's doorstep. Most came from private collectors. 

"They get their camera as a gift from their grandparents, for example, or they find maybe a camera in the attic," Schweiger said. "When they don't know what to do, they look up on the internet and hopefully they find us."

Image credit: Leitz Photographica Auction

Meet  Ngoc Like Tattoo, a Vietnamese tattoo artist that conceals unwanted marks or scars in the body with detailed and intricate artworks. She inks colorful floral designs and large animal-inspired motifs over scars caused by cesarean sections, wounds, or operations. The cool thing about her body art is that they are well-designed to hide the scars underneath: 

Ngoc’s work is particularly noteworthy since tattoos have long been frowned upon in Vietnam. “It is my hope that our stories can give people a new perspective about the art of tattooing, about it's not only superficial but also spiritual healing power,” Ngoc writes on Facebook. “I am extremely delighted that I am able to help reduce the stigma of tattooing in Vietnam as well as inspiring so many people struggling with their scars to step up, take charge, close their wounds with a meaningful piece of art and live the happy and fulfilling life that we all deserve to have.”

Image credit: Ngoc Like Tattoo

It wasn’t even staged on a game that provides a feature that could let its players film short clips or movies like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, no! Remember the roguelike game with the sexy, well drawn characters from Supergiant Games? Sure, Hades is obviously set in Greek mythology, so there’s no surprise that fans wanted to pay homage to its source material: 

Six months in the works, the Iliad Project is a community reading of Homer’s timeless epic, initially streaming live on Twitch later this month. Leading the charge is Wriste13, a Hades speedrunner who’s played the game since well before its official 1.0 release last September. (If you’ve kept tabs on the game’s speedrunning community, you’ll recognize him as the champ of the Hermes Cup.) More than two dozen members of the community—from other speedrunners to actual Hades voice actors to some folks who just love the game—will participate. The Iliad Project even tapped Greg Kasavin, Supergiant’s creative director, to draft and read an introduction.

“The main goal is that the Hades community produces something like this...and that we get a nice wide swath of readers in terms of variety,” Wriste told me over a Discord voice call last week. “We have familiar names, like Jawless Paul, who is a YouTuber, and we have Courtney Vineys, who did the voices [in Hades] for Dusa and Aphrodite. But we also have a lot of smaller streamers and some people who aren’t even streamers, or who barely have a social media presence. They just love the game.”

Image credit: Supergiant / Kotaku

Meet Henricus Antonius “Han” van Meegeren, a Dutch art dealer who was so good at forging artworks that he even managed to trick art critics and high-ranking officials into buying his art pieces! When he was put on trial for supplying artworks to the Nazi party, he had to painstakingly prove that he committed art forgery to save his life. But how did this story begin, anyway? The Collector has the details: 

Hoping to prove his artistic talent, Han van Meegeren began copying paintings from several famous artists, including Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, Frans Hals, and even Johannes Vermeer himself. Forging Vermeer paintings was especially lucrative because of how scarce they were– only about thirty-five Vermeer artworks were in a decent condition by the twentieth century when his work was popularized. This “copying” quickly turned to complete and total art forgery after art experts examined van Meegeren’s work and acknowledged it as genuine.

Despite the fact that his paintings were forgeries, van Meegeren was very technically proficient. Van Meegeren studied the lives and techniques of the Old Masters and he secretly worked for years, perfecting the craft of art forgery ever so slowly. He went as far as to mix his own paints, using only the pigments and oils in use during the time of each artist.

However, Han van Meegeren’s meticulous dedication to his art forgery didn’t stop there– he researched the canvases used by each artist and carefully applied resin, then baked the paintings, to give them a “cracked” look so they seemed appropriately aged. He even went through the painstaking process of creating his own period-accurate brushes, using badger hair to replicate Vermeer’s style perfectly.

Image credit: 100 Voorwerpen

Don’t worry, it’s not malware or applications that can secretly get your personal information. These easter eggs are a bit of fun, some of them are hidden in code just to say ‘hi’ to the user who was bored enough to read through many lines of code. Some companies sneak job ads into their HTML: 

Companies like Yahoo and eBay have spent years sneaking job ads into the HTML that makes up their websites in the hopes that curious coders would find them. Other sites might have unicorns, guns, or obscure, cryptic messages. Even if you’re not particularly web-savvy, it’s not hard to crack open your favorite site’s source code and comb through it for a bit. If you’re also a diehard Chrome user, then all you need to do is type “view-source:” before a website’s URL. You can also access these codes in any browser by right-clicking on a webpage and hitting “view source.”

Check Gizmodo’s full list of fun Internet easter eggs here! 

Image credit : Shoshana Wodinsky

You’ve heard of the darkest black paint in existence, get ready for the whitest paint yet! Researchers from Purdue University have created the newest shade to help curb global warming. Hopefully, coating buildings with this paint may cool them off enough to reduce the need for air conditioning. The Brighter Side has more details: 

“If you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet, we estimate that you could get a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. That’s more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses,” said Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering.

The researchers believe that this white may be the closest equivalent of the blackest black, “Vantablack,” which absorbs up to 99.9% of visible light. The new whitest paint formulation reflects up to 98.1% of sunlight – compared with the 95.5% of sunlight reflected by the researchers’ previous ultra-white paint – and sends infrared heat away from a surface at the same time.

Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80%-90% of sunlight and can’t make surfaces cooler than their surroundings.

The team’s research paper showing how the paint works publishes Thursday (April 15) as the cover of the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Two features give the paint its extreme whiteness. One is the paint’s very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate, which is also used to make photo paper and cosmetics white.



Image the Brighter Side 

Hey, now that’s a worthy venture to look into! Gizmogo is an online used electronic product recycling platform that buys broken phones,tablets, or computers. The Chino, California-based platform is part of a larger recycling company that aims to keep old electronics out of landfills. The question now is what do they do with the old gadgets they buy? Well, Gizmogo actually either refurbishes them or recovers the precious metals inside to be reused: 

The company accepts phones, tablets, laptops, computers, gaming consoles, cameras, lenses, drones, smartwatches and even iPods if you still have one. The website will walk you through a short evaluation process and then give you an estimate for your item. If you accept the estimate, it’s time to send in your gadget. Depending on its size, the website will either generate an instant label you can stick on your box or send you a small box to ship your smartphone in.

I tried the entire service – without informing Gizmogo – with my son’s old iPad Mini. It has a cracked screen and has been sitting unused in my garage for several months. Gizmogo said they would pay me $80.55. I sent the tablet in and about a week later, the cash was in my PayPal account.

Competitors include Gazelle, Swappa and Gylde. Of course, with these instant trade in sites, you will certainly get less for your gadget than you would doing all the hard work yourself and listing it on eBay, but that takes a lot more time and effort. You have to decide what’s best for your situation.

Gizmogo says they typically pay within 24 hours of receipt and evaluation. Keep in mind the initial number is only an estimate and could change based on the condition of your gadget.



Image credit: Rich DeMuro

When you think about flower arrangement, do you think about scaffoldings? I sure don’t. Personally, when someone mentions flower arrangements to me, I personally think of huge vases for bouquets. For floral designer Julius Værnes Iversen, however, it’s more than that. Iversen is the founder of Tableau, a design studio that uses flowers and contrasting materials for their installations. Tableau’s floral arrangements are unique and eccentric: 

The floral arrangements are equally eccentric: soon after its establishment, the studio found viral success with a series of monumental gypsophila clouds; other installations have featured bundles of exotic blooms interspersed with humbler varieties such as reindeer moss and asparagus fern, often in bright block colours, and arranged on scaffolding. Bouquets are an exuberant juxtaposition of natural and dyed flowers.

Considering Tableau’s innovative spirit, it may come as a surprise that Iversen’s background in flowers is as traditional as it gets. He joined his family’s more conventional chain of flower shops, Blomster Bjarne, two decades ago, at the age of 12. He later became its accountant, before taking over the reins alongside his brother Magnus in 2015, following the death of their father. But Iversen yearned for an additional creative outlet, a platform that would allow him to reconcile his passion for art and design with his floral expertise. Already he was gaining recognition for ‘odd-looking flower installations’ created under his own name for Danish fashion houses. With Tableau, he could push the boundaries of what can be done with flowers.

Image credit: Tableau via Wallpaper

The wonders of filmmaking! Photographer and filmmaker Mrinal Bahukhandi used a 35mm analog camera to snap the photos used in the music video for Better Man. The music video is composed of clips that were made of a shutter burst of 8 frames per second. This particular composition is what tricks the viewer to believe that the video is in full motion, really. The Mumbai-based artist details his experience in creating the film: 

Tech nowadays is excellent and contemporary digital cameras can shoot up to 22 fps and there are ample plugins and filters to simulate the vintage look, but that simulation would have been no fun at all as compared to a workflow of exposing 600 feet of fresh Kentmere 400 ISO, 35mm film stock, that was hand-rolled using a bulk loader into 100 reusable film canisters. Using the Nikon F5 SLR, these cans were exposed and 8 frames per second — that translates to approximately 5 seconds of real-time footage per film roll.

This video is not only a tribute to the founders of the first motion picture cameras but also to early 20th-century cinema as well. One of the earliest practitioners of motion-picture was a French stage magician named Georges Méliès who innovated “special effects” in cinema. His stories were often inspired by the science fiction novels of Jules Verne, like in the case of his most popular film “A Trip to the Moon” (“Le Voyage dans la Lune”). The iconic moon landing shot from this film stirred the concept for the Better Man music video. 

Image credit Mrinal Bahukhandi 

It’s in Australia. Are we surprised?  In Mallacoota, Australia, kangaroos hop down the main street every day. Seeing kangaroos in the area is normal, and a delight for tourists, of course.  Nadine Cresswell-Myatt shares her experience in her visit to the the isolated city: 

Mallacoota has just over 1,000 residents, nearly half aged over 60. Many holidayed here through their working lives and chose to retire here. The township is in the heart of the Croajingolong National Park — 338 square miles of coastal wilderness. Recognized as a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, there are over 1,500 plant species and diverse wildlife, including kangaroos, wallabies, echidnas, koalas, platypuses, and possums. Challenges include a 3-day Wilderness Coast Walk, scrambling over boulders, crossing river estuaries (which may require swimming), and trekking isolated beaches. 

Fortunately for the less gung-ho, namely me, Mallacoota also offers short scenic walks close to town. Kangaroos on the local golf course often outnumber players. Short coastal walks mean spotting penguins, dolphins, and seals. Or whales from April to October during their migration. Twitchers — dedicated birdwatchers — can tick off over 300 species, including Crimson Rosellas, orange and black Eastern Spinebills, Black-faced Monarchs, green and red Olive-backed Orioles, and even elusive lyrebirds.

Image credit: Scott Kingman

Say goodbye to the old triangular design! Actually, you can still buy classic triangle tents at your local camping shop, but there are now new and modern designs that are still comfy, cozy, and good for outdoor camping. Yanko Design curates a list of modern tents that fit both your Instagram feed and your outdoor camping needs! One of the examples are Belgium’s tree tents. Designed by Dutch artist Dre Wapenaar, these ‘Tranendreef’ tree tents are suspended above the ground and basically hang on the tree like fruit: 

The tent is suspended above the ground and basically hangs on the tree like fruit. The guests use a ladder to get inside/outside. It can host two adults and two small children. Originally installed as part of a public art project called ‘Pit’ (hence the avocado shape we assume) organized by Z33, it brought art into the public space of Borgloon. The designer also created ‘field furniture’ – seating, washing, toilet, and BBQ units to complete the camping site with the tents.

Check more designs here! 

Image credit: via Yanko Design