Did you know that there’s a stark difference between the velociraptors we see in movies and the ones that actually lived millions of years ago? Well, Jurassic Park portrays this species as smug, stealthy, and big hunters with a good brain. Velociraptors in real life, however, were different. Yes, they were carnivores, but they were small, fast, and feathery. Science Focus’ Ian Taylor details some facts about this species. Check the full piece here to learn more!
Image via wikimedia commons
Here’s a new suggestion on how to support our birds: instead of just installing simple bird feeders, why not go big and build a habitat in your backyard? Not only does it serve as a new aesthetic addition to your home, it could also serve as a shelter for wild birds that need to survive. The San Diego Union Tribune has more details:
The Audubon Society has made it really easy to discover the most bird-friendly plants for your neighborhood with its Native Plant Database created by Rowden, using data compiled by John Kartesz, director of the Biota of North America Program. All you do is enter your ZIP code (and your email address) to get a list of the best native plants for your area, along with nearby nurseries where they can be purchased and a list of the birds the plants are likely to attract.
The California Native Plant Society’s CalScape database and Garden Planner are additional resources for finding native plants best suited to your region.
And please note, this is much more than a landscaping tip. We’re talking about the future of our bird communities here, because the threat to their survival is high.
Birds have evolved to eat the seeds and insects native to the areas where they live, but farms, herbicides and urban development have destroyed many of those native plants, along with the insects that feed off them, causing ripples up the food chain. Think about how few insects you find on your windshield and grill these days. Then ask your parents what it was like a few decades ago, when a drive through the country left cars bristling with dead bugs. Our cars may be cleaner, but it means our birds have dwindling access to food.
image via wikimedia commons
The reasons are more than the oversaturation of young adult (YA) novels over the years, as Polygon’s Bashirat Oladele writes. Maybe it’s my disinterest over popular YA novels over time, but after the success of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner, to be honest, I barely see any coverage or movie adaptations for new novels. Oladele believes that the hype for this kind of fiction has faded as time passed, and for good reasons:
Which left nowhere for these stories to go after the injustices were overturned and the fascist villains were defeated. They all built momentum and excitement around action, but few of these stories ever considered what young-adult readers want to know: After one cruel leader is gone, what comes next? Injustice rarely ends with the death or departure of one unjust ruler, but YA dystopian stories rarely consider the next world order, and how it could operate differently, without stigmatizing its people. Revolution, post-apocalyptic survival, and restructuring society are fascinating topics, but apart from the Hunger Games’ brief coda about Katniss’ future PTSD, most YA dystopia stories just don’t explore these areas.
And just as YA dystopian stories weren’t particularly interested in the future, they also were rarely that interested in their pasts, or even their present. They almost never explored their societies in any depth, beyond declaring them to be evil, violent, and controlling. We don’t really know much about the destructive regimes in the Maze Runner or Divergent series — we just know they’re bad. The run of dystopian movies in particular only offered the quickest, shallowest explanation of why a government would force its children into mazes, or make them kill each other. The Capitol’s desire to terrorize its citizens in The Hunger Games, or The Maze Runner’s focus on population control and disaster response — these are political excuses for mass murder, but not nuanced ones.
Image credit: Lionsgate via Polygon
Is this Brian David Gilbert’s short film come to life? Do I have to contemplate whether or not some odd force is compelling me to type into spreadsheets? Fortunately, no! It turns out that the new update for Microsoft Excel allows its users to automate tasks. Meet Office Scripts, a new tool within the software that lets users record their actions inside an Excel workbook, as TechRadar details:
On its blog overview for the new update, Microsoft states "as an example, say you start your workday by opening a .csv file from an accounting site in Excel. You then spend several minutes deleting unnecessary columns, formatting a table, adding formulas, and creating a PivotTable in a new worksheet. Those actions you repeat daily can be recorded once with the Action Recorder.
From then on, running the script will take care of your entire .csv conversion. You'll not only remove the risk of forgetting steps, but be able to share your process with others without having to teach them anything."
You can even set a specific time to run a script on a schedule using Power Automate, formerly known as Microsoft Flow, allowing you to trigger a set of actions to react to a specific event, even outside of other applications and services. This can also be set to just respond to a timer to create hourly reports or declutter ongoing downloads.
Microsoft has provided a list of script samples and scenarios for you to use right off the bat, as well as instructional video tutorials to guide you through creating your own.
Image credit :Mika Baumeister via Unsplash
According to a new study, certain mammals live quite successfully among humans. The research, which was published in Global Change Biology hypothesized that ‘mammals with certain traits and life strategies are more likely to suffer outsized consequences from humans.’ The researchers discovered that smaller mammals, such as raccoons tend to appear frequently in areas with higher human presence-and they fare better among us and our urbanized structures:
Why do smaller, quickly reproducing animals fare better among us and our infrastructure? The researchers suggested it may be that they are better able to tolerate threats like sensory pollution and vehicle strikes or have a more generalist diet. Alternatively, areas near humans tend to have fewer predators.
But the results might be a bit misleading. For example, the cameras might have captured a certain species showing up frequently near human disturbances not because the animals prefer it there but because humans are destroying their natural habitat.
The study noted another caveat: Once human disturbances become too intense, even once-tolerant mammals start responding negatively. In other words, there seems to be a threshold of human disturbances beyond which co-existence with other mammals becomes difficult or impossible.
"We suggest that such thresholds are critical to consider when attempting to promote 'landscapes of coexistence' (i.e., ecological conditions that allow the long-term persistence of sensitive mammal species in human-dominated landscapes) and functional connectivity between populations, particularly as several large mammal species continue recolonizing modified landscapes in North America and globally," the researchers wrote.
Image credit: Dan Gold via Unsplash
Finally, 100 years after being hung at a Rhode Island church, a stunning Tiffany stained-glass window can now be admired by visitors at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). The window, now known as the Hartwell Memorial Window, was painstakingly restored to prepare it for public viewing, as the Smithsonian details:
The iridescent tableau depicts a peaceful New Hampshire landscape full of lush, multi-colored trees. Dappled sunlight bounces off a flowing waterfall, while the imposing Mount Chocorua looms in the background. Per Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune, Tiffany artists soldered 48 layered-glass panels together to produce the 23-foot-high by 16-foot-wide scene.
In the work, “[w]arm light emanates from the setting sun, catching on the rushing waves of the central waterfall and dancing through the trees—the transitory beauty of nature conveyed through an intricate arrangement of vibrantly colored glass,” writes AIC curator Elizabeth McGoey in a museum blog post.
Image via Art Institute Of Chicago
Reading through multiple paragraphs and pages of history can be somewhat boring or tedious. If you want to learn about the history of a city, or how it developed over time, why not view it through visual media? Antonis Antoniou and Steven Heller have presented the visual history of New York through their new book, Decoding Manhattan. The book compiles over 250 architectural maps, diagrams, and graphics of the island of Manhattan in New York City:
In a very real sense, the island of Manhattan is a place created by a diagram: The Commmissioner’s Plan of 1811, which laid out the future streets north of Houston Street and south of 155th Street, was essentially a map disguised as a planning document. So there’s real conceptual beauty to Antonis Antoniou and Steven Heller’s new book, Decoding Manhattan, a rollicking, wide-ranging visual compendium of more than 250 maps, diagrams, and graphics, all related to that incomparable chunk of bedrock. It’s a fascinating, visually vibrant book, often quite funny, and catnip for someone like me, obsessed with New York City-themed historical images. I recently talked to the authors about the genesis of the book.
You can check ArchDaily’s full interview with the authors here!
Image Credit: Steven Guarnaccia and Pentagram New York, from Decoding Manhattan (via Archdaily)
We see ancient Greek clothing in art, television, and games. Our knowledge of ancient Greek clothing was derived from marble sculptures. That’s why we see a similar style in different modern depictions, and this is also why many would assume that the ancient Greeks wore only white clothes! This is untrue, however, as people from ancient Greece used natural dyes to add different colors in their wardrobes:
Ancient Greeks, indeed, were using natural dyes from shellfish, insects, and plants, to color fabric and clothing. Skilled craftsmen extracted dyes from these sources and combined them with other substances to create a variety of colors. In time the colors became bright. Women preferred yellow, red, light green, oil, gray, and violet. Most Greek women’s fashion garments were made from rectangular fabric that was normally folded around the body with girdles, pins, and buttons. Decorative motifs on the dyed fabrics were either woven or painted on. There were often geometric or natural patterns, depicting leaves, animals, human figures, and mythological scenes.
Although some women bought imported fabric and textiles, most women wove the fabric creating their own clothing. In other words, by using different textiles people differentiated by gender, class, or status. Greek pottery and ancient sculptures provide us with information on fabrics. They were brightly colored and generally decorated with elaborate designs. Ancient fabrics were derived from the basic raw materials, animal, plant, or minerals, with its main wool, flax, leather, and silk.
As time passed and finer materials (mostly linen) were produced, the draped dresses became more varied and elaborate. There was silk from China and a further variety in draping was created by pleating. It’s worth mentioning that the silk from China and fine muslins from India began making their way to ancient Greece after the victorious conquests of Alexander the Great.
Image credit: Engin Akyurt via Unsplash
British artist Matthew Simmonds carves miniature architectural models out of hunks of marble. Most of his models feature ancient ruins and older architectural styles, with grand archways, detailed ceilings, and some even come with mini-statues on display in their halls. Colossal has more details:
Within the spaces, Simmonds contrasts the rough, jagged edges of the stone with precise angles and detailed flourishes. “Drawing on the formal language and philosophy of architecture the work explores themes of positive and negative form, the significance of light and darkness, and the relationship between nature and human endeavor,” he says in a statement.
See more of the artist’s carved interiors, which are often less than a foot wide, on his site.
Image credit: Matthew Simmonds via Colossal
Twitch category Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches is now dominated with swimsuit-clad streamers ready to have fun in the water. However, the category, which was recently introduced to the platform, is now welcoming a new kind of content creators: rescued otters! Otters from the Marine Mammal Rescue Centre in Vancouver can be seen under the new category doing some adorable shenanigans, like splashing around and flipping underwater:
While it’s hilarious to see them next to all the people hanging out in their swimsuits, it’s actually a really clever use of the category. The grouping is new, and while many probably go to it looking for conventional hot tub streams, it seems to be grabbing attention for the otters. At the time of press the little otters had roughly 1,700 viewers with the channel being the third most-watched under the category.
But part of what sets the otters apart is that the handler managing the Marine Mammal Rescue Centre stream has leaned into the controversial hot tub category. The title of the broadcast jokes that the animals have the “THICCEST FUR” and that it’s the “HOTTEST” stream, referencing how human streamers format their broadcasts in all caps, if not endless emojis.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Want something cute or wholesome to complete a long week? Well I believe I’ve got something for you to check out: meowlfunctioning cats. Don’t worry, the cats I’m talking about are perfectly fine, they’re just acting weirdly. Internet users post their weirdest cat photos in the subreddit ‘What’s Wrong With Your Cat', and some of the posts there are just downright hilarious. Bored Panda compiles some of the best in their article here!
Listen, we know that there are a lot of ways to invade your privacy on the Internet. From advertisers to tech companies to hackers-- these establishments aim to track down your activity in every way possible, and to be honest, it’s very easy for them to do so. If you want your privacy back, USA Today states that the first step you should take is to shut down all the intrusive GPS trackers. It’s like disappearing from the Internet, if you think about it. Check their full piece here on how to restore your privacy on different social media platforms!
Image credit: Austin Daniel via Unsplash
A handwritten letter by Albert Einstein was sold for a whopping $1.2 million at an auction. The letter, which was sent to a rival physicist, included Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation. Adding to the letter’s value is the fact that it is one of the four known written records that has the equation in the physicist’s own handwriting. No wonder it sold for such a huge amount of money! Live Science has more details:
The one-page letter, written in German on paper with Einstein's blind-stamped personal Princeton letterhead, was sent to Polish American physicist Ludwik Silberstein, a well-known critic of some of Einstein's theories at the time. The document is signed "A. Einstein" and is dated Oct. 26, 1946.
The letter remained in Silberstein's archives and was recently auctioned off by his family. The document was expected to sell for $400,000, but ended up going for three times that after a late bidding war between two parties on May 18, according to RR Auction, the Boston-based company that sold the letter.
"E = mc2 is the most famous equation in the world," Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction, said in a statement. For that reason, it is "an important letter from a physics point of view."
Image via RR Auction
Now you can learn how to play the game. Meet the Egyptian Senet, one of the most popular board games of the ancient world. Senet is a game with deep links to the afterlife, played on a board that represents the underworld. The game was featured in tombs, showing the dead playing against friends and family. Senet was loved by Egyptian royals, as Open Culture details:
“Beloved by such luminaries as the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramesses II,” Meilan Solly notes at Smithsonian, Senet was played on “ornate game boards, examples of which still survive today.” (Four boards were found in Tut’s tomb.) “Those with fewer resources at their disposal made do with grids scratched on stone surfaces, tables or the floor.” As the game became a tool for glimpsing one’s fate, its last five spaces acquired hieroglyphics symbolizing “special playing circumstances. Pieces that landed in square 27’s ‘waters of chaos,’ for example, were sent all the way back to square 15 — or removed from the board entirely,” sort of like hitting the wrong square in Chutes and Ladders.
Senet gameplay was complicated. “Two players determined their moves by throwing casting sticks or bones,” notes the Met. The object was to get all of one’s pieces across square 30 — each move represented an obstacle to the afterlife, trials Egyptians believed the dead had to endure and pass or fail (the game’s name itself means “passing”). “Because of this connection, senet was not just a game; it was also a symbol for the struggle to obtain immortality, or endless life,” as well as a means of understanding what might get in the way of that goal.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
An international team of over 100 astrophysicists have banded together to create a huge 3D map of the universe (as we know it). The map features details that let us look back at how it expanded and formed its current known state. The project was a result of a 20-year-long survey of the night sky. Not gonna lie, I'm more interested in pivoting around the map and trying to look for different galaxies and clusters that I’m not aware of. Check the full video here.
Image screenshot via Flipboard
