Researchers from Flinders University in Australia have discovered two Viking ship burials thanks to a combination of modern technology and drawings by antiquarian Ole Worm. These drawings, which showed more than 20 ship burials, are dated to be over 400 years old. For reference, at the present time, only ten of those burials have been found:

“Our survey identified two new raised areas that could in fact be ship settings that align with Worm’s drawings from 1650,” said Dr. Erin Sebo, lead author of the study published in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology.

“One appears to be a typical ship setting and the second remains ambiguous but it’s impossible to know without excavation and further survey.”

The recent survey is the first study of the Kalvestene site since the National Museum’s research in the early 20th century. It is the first to pair Ole Worm’s drawings with on-the-ground research.

Sebo and her colleagues used several approaches to survey the site, from studying relevant medieval records and taking aerial photogrammetry to scanning the island of Hjarnø with laser imaging, detection and ranging (lidar).



Image credit: Flinders University  via All That’s Interesting 

Look, some people love adding extra ingredients to their coffee. For example, some like adding cinnamon - which is good for brain health (and it makes coffee taste better). For Morgan Osborne however, she likes to add something unexpected in her coffee -- hot sauce. You read that right, the condiment we usually add to tacos- and with its spicy and slightly sour taste, you really won’t expect it to be added to coffee, right? Well, the director of culinary development at Archer Daniels experimented with it:  

Part of Osborne’s job is experimenting (read: playing around) in the kitchen, and the idea of adding hot sauce to coffee was something she cooked up alongside her colleague and fellow chef John Stephanian. “I’m not going to lie. I was very apprehensive to try hot sauce in coffee at first,” Osborne says. But at the same time, she had a hunch it could be downright delicious. “The concept of combining decadence and heat in places has been a consistent trend in the food industry, such as Mexican hot chocolate and jalapeño margaritas,” she says.

After many hours of experimentation and taste testing, Osborne drilled down a few guidelines that are key to keep in mind when blending hot sauce in coffee. The first step, she says, is choosing the right beans. “I recommend using a light roast, medium roast max, because you don’t want the bitter notes found in darker roasts to overpower the hot sauce,” she says.

Osborne also likes incorporating a few other warming ingredients to the mix for a rich, robust flavor. Specifically, she recommends two to three teaspoons of roasted cardamom seeds and a touch of vanilla. “You can either buy cardamom seeds pre-roasted at the store or you can roast them yourself on the stove,” she says. Cardamom is also good for gut health, so this step is actually making your morning coffee even more nutritious.

Image credit: Devin Avery via Unsplash 

Now that’s a breakthrough! Scientists have managed to partially restore the vision of a 58-year-old man with an inherited eye disease thanks to gene therapy. The scientists injected genetically engineered viruses into his eye. After being blind for decades, the man is now able to see small objects like a staple box when wearing a specialized pair of goggles: 

"These are very exciting results," says Raymond Wong, a stem cell biologist at the University of Melbourne developing treatments for eye diseases who was not affiliated with the study.

While the potential therapeutic benefits are enormous, Wong notes the technique has, so far, only been used in one patient. It forms part of an ongoing clinical trial to test the safety and tolerability of the gene therapy. Continued testing and refinement could see the technique help blind patients navigate day-to-day tasks more effectively. 

How did they do it? By re-engineering cells of the eye to make them more sensitive to light.

To learn more about the in-depth process involved in the man’s eyesight restoration, check the full article here! 

Image credit: Victor Freitas via Unsplash

Here’s 17 reasons why you should live alone, if you can afford it. It’s funny to read about now, because we’re not the people involved in these pranks. Alternatively, if you do have a roommate, here are reasons why you shouldn’t piss them off, unless you want to come home to 3,000 fake ladybugs on your bed, or any of the other pranks listed by Buzzfeed. Check the full list of pranks here. 

Image via Buzzfeed 

Now that’s dedication! Sebastião Salgado and his wife decided to bring life back to Minas Gerais, a rainforest that was completely dried out when he returned home to Brazil in 1994. After acquiring the land, the couple spent the next 20 years replanting the forest that died due to deforestation and uncontrolled exploitation of its natural resources, as IFLScience details: 

“The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed,” Salgado told the Guardian. “Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees. Then my wife had a fabulous idea to replant this forest. And when we began to do that, then all the insects and birds and fish returned and, thanks to this increase of the trees I, too, was reborn – this was the most important moment.”

The couple set up Instituto Terra with the noble goal of restoring the 17,000-acre property to its natural state. The organization they set up and ran recruited partners and volunteers, and together they set about planting 4 million saplings. 

Taking care of the plants – all carefully sourced and native to the area – they were able to restore the forest, which flourished over the next 20 years.

It wasn't easy. The land was dry, and the rains didn't return until 1999. They first had to restore nitrogen to the soil, planting legumes, before they could plant seedlings. Even then, after the first planting, most of the plants died in the ground.

“We made the holes too tight,” Salgado told the Smithsonian. “For weeks I was sick – sick to see this disaster.” 

Image via IFLScience 

Japanese collector @marumi_1985 has managed to amass an impressive collection of Game Boy games. His goal is to get every game released for that console in Japan! According to him, he has collected 99.3% of the games he needs: 

He’s still missing R-Type DX, Wizardry II, Wizardry III, Esparks, The Black Onyx, Deja Vu 1 & 2, Little Magic, and Earth Liberation Army Zas.

“There are a lot of Game Boy games that are surprisingly cheap,” he reported, which might explain how he’s been able to get so many. Even if he’s still missing some, his collection has helped him go viral in Japan.

He’s still missing eight games, by the way.

Image via Otaku USA Magazine 

Florida panthers are now coming back to reclaim territory north of the Everglades National Park. The once nearly extinct and rarely seen cats are now showing up in Florida. Panther biologist Brian Kelly and photographer Carlton Ward Jr. show the life of the Florida panther in a feature article by National Geographic magazine. Kelly and Ward discussed the process in trying to find panthers they could take photos of: 

"First things first is identifying the track and knowing if it's a panther or not. And then the real trick is following it," he said. "So because they go so far, like in any given night, a panther might walk oh, a couple of miles. Maybe more. To actually follow panther tracks to find the panther itself — it's way harder than it is for any of those African animals. Way harder."

Following their routes is the best way to figure out how to find them.

"The first thing you learn are which tracks are fresh enough to follow and find the animal, and which are not. Because if you start following tracks that are not fresh enough, you're not going to catch up to the animal. You're not going to find it," he said. "So, the key is identifying the difference between a couple of hours-old track and a couple of days-old track."

On this day, Kelly is visiting public land, but most of the range of the Florida panther is on private land. Huge ranches bracket the preserve, and the cooperation of ranchers is considered essential to their survival.

"It varies," Kelly said of the attitude of most ranchers. "Some are very amenable and work with us quite a bit, some not so much. At the moment anyway, we can get the information that we need from public lands, from state land. It's not a huge priority to push the envelope with private landowners."

Panthers "need a lot of room," he said. "That's the big challenge."

Image via NPR 

Yikes. The body of a 39-year-old man was found inside a dinosaur statue in Spain. The body was found by a father and son who noticed a smell coming from  the papier-mâché figure in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a suburb of Barcelona. The corpse was in the dinosaur’s hollow leg. The police are now investigating the circumstances behind the tragic incident: 

Three fire brigade teams were called to scene after the body was discovered, and firefighters cut open the dinosaur leg to retrieve it.

Local media report the man - who has not been named - was trying to retrieve a mobile phone he dropped inside the statue. He then fell inside the decorative figure and was left trapped upside down, unable to call for help.

Police have not confirmed how the man ended up inside the dinosaur, and are awaiting the results of his autopsy to find out how he died.

The decorative statue has been removed from its place outside the city's Cubic Building, where it had been used to advertise an old cinema.

Image via BBC 

It’s cliched and a disaster, apparently. The popular trend is people building beds into the back of their cars and traveling on their own. Dmarge’s James Booth decided to follow this trend by making a bed in the back of his 2006 Subaru Forester on his own. Booth shares his struggles on DIY-ing furniture that was not included in his car: 

This meant the basic design I chose (see: above) was still fraught with potential for f*ck ups (especially in my incapable hands).

I went with a design that involves a plywood base, with a hinge that allows you to flip the front third back when driving (and is propped up by two stilts when down). The whole bed is also supposed to be supported by three rectangular pieces of wood underneath, allowing for storage.

I abandoned the idea of storage space underneath when I realised how much glue (and how many screws) would be required, as well as hearing horror stories from friends whose beds had collapsed in the middle of the night and destroyed much-loved surfboards.

Instead, I chose to prop mine up with loose offcuts of wood (one in each corner). This also means when I park on an angle I can adjust my bed depending on the slope (the offcuts are of varying sizes).

To read more about his full experience, check the full piece here. 

Image via Dmarge 

The trend of revamping old vehicles into tiny homes has gone big on the Internet. Remember the US Army veteran who turned an old bus into a house on wheels? Well, architecture student  Caleb Brackney’s own project is similar to that previous renovation project. Brackney made a split-second decision and bought an old bus on Facebook, which he then turned into his own personal home: 

Inspired by a former mentor at school, Caleb bought the 26-year-old bus on Facebook Marketplace for $3,000 (€2,500) and spent another $7,000 (€5,760 ) on turning it into his home. He named it 'Roamer'.

"The name 'Roamer' also came from the town where I bought the bus. It was named Rome, Georgia."

After eight months of hard graft and lessons learned the hard way, he moved in.

"I definitely underestimated how long it would take to take everything out," says Caleb, recalling that "There were over 1000 screws holding the bus together," many of which were covered in rust.

Caleb plans to live in the tiny house for the next few years while he finishes his studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. "I want to be able to provide a perfect case study. I have enough to be happy. I'm content and live a really great life," he says.

Image screenshot via Euronews 

David Hockney’s new art exhibit, titled The Arrival Of Spring, showcases 116 works in praise of the natural world. While his artworks look simple, they’re still wonderful to look at! Hockney used an iPad and a stylus to create these paintings. The original works featured in the exhibition are a demonstration in uniformity, though - all the 116 works are identically sized, in similar color palette of neon yellow, shocking pink, felt-pen lime and turquoise: 

Hockney uses the free app Brushes, and it shows in every millimetre of these huge enlargements. Forget the virtuoso subtlety of his draughtsmanship in the 60s and 70s, or the originality of his American paintings. What you are looking at here is the expressive limitation of his virtual tool box.

A graze of parallel lines stands for a leaf or cloud; dots of different density are used for seeds, flowers or rising suns; grass comes ribbed, knitted or in sharp little toothpicks. Ready-made motifs proliferate. Blossoms are arrays of danish pastry whorls, both ugly and unpersuasive. Even the innately beautiful structure of a tree is undermined by the stick-figure lines, which lack all eloquence or fluidity. The register is as false and fudged as an electronic signature.

Image via The Guardian 

Kindergartners saved themselves from a hostage scenario by annoying their hostage taker with a lot of questions. The children managed to keep themselves and the bus driver, Kenneth Corbin, safe from the hijacker, 23-year-old army trainee Jovan Collazo. Collazo moved all the students on the front to keep them in his proximity, which just resulted in giving the kids a chance for their barrage of questions: 

Authorities believe that Callazo, who was on his third week at Fort Jackson, was trying to get home when he hijacked the bus.

“As we were traveling, I guess he realized there were several students on the bus — kind of scattered throughout,” Corbin was quoted as saying. “He decided to move all the students upfront so he could keep us all in close proximity, and when he did that, especially some of my kindergarteners, they started asking questions.”

“They asked him, ‘Why are you doing this?’ He never did have an answer for this one. They asked, was he going to hurt them? He said ‘no.’ They asked, ‘are you going to hurt our bus driver?’ He said, ‘no. I’m going to put you off the bus,'” Corbin recalled.

Corbin added that Callazo might have sensed more questions coming from the children and just told them, “Enough is enough already,” and ordered Corbin to ‘stop the bus, and just get off.”

Corbin, who was trained to handle such situations, shared that he remained calm and just followed Callazo’s instructions, explaining that he was thinking of the kids and did not want to agitate the hijacker.

Image via The Inquirer 

When Florida neurologist Dr. Thomas Newman left the world of the living at 73 years old, he left a carefully curated collection of baseball cards to his family. The collection is worth over $20 million. Wow! According to Joe Orlando, chief executive officer of Collectors Universe, Newman’s collection "exhibits the kind of depth and level of quality that are rarely achieved." The Insider has more details: 

It includes a Mickey Mantle rookie card from 1952 expected to sell for more than $1 million, and a mint condition Babe Ruth card from 1933 that Memory Lane expects to break the current record price of $5.2 million for a single baseball card.

"He jokingly called his cards his 'paper babies,' and spent almost every day attending to his collection in one way or another," his wife Nancy Newman said in a statement released by the auction house. "It gave him such pleasure. The only reason he would ever sell a card was if he had acquired the same card in a higher grade."

Memory Lane's public online auction will take place from June 21 to July 10.

Image via Insider 

It’s like the lost city of Atlantis! Well, a lost city that finally re-emerged after its disappearance. Unfortunately, no advanced technology or civilization has been found, only remains. After 70 long years, remains of the lost village of Curon have now reappeared in Italy. Initially, the only sign that Curon once existed was a 14th century church spire rising out of the middle of a lake. Now, however, locals  around Lago di Resia in South Tyrol, Italy, can see the remains of the submerged city. 

Image via Prevention 

Healthy recipes are all over social media. Sometimes, I get pressured to actually try and eat something leafy because of these dishes that float online. Listen, don’t be pressured to make those healthy recipes. They’re nice to look at, and the nutrients and other benefits you can get from them are also nice. But did you know that most Internet users who ‘like’ and ‘share’ these recipes end up cooking fatty dishes? Fast Company has the details: 

In this new paper, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the researchers point out that social media could be another powerful tool in this effort to shape dietary behavior because, well, we’re all on it. In the United States, 98 million people are active monthly users of Pinterest, which is equivalent to 18% of the adult population. The platform has become a popular recipe sharing site, with more than 60% of users reporting that they’d made a new recipe that was inspired by something they saw on the site. “There’s tremendous opportunities in social media to influence healthy behavior,” Hong Xue, the lead researcher, said in a statement. “We’re only beginning to understand its potential and pitfalls.”

Last summer, the researchers analyzed food-related content on Pinterest. (They did not collaborate directly with the platform on this project but simply gathered publicly available comments, captions, photos, and videos from the site.) They found that there’s a culture of promoting healthy recipes on Pinterest: Nutritious recipes that were low in calories, sodium, and sugar, and high in vegetables and lean meats tended to be rewarded with repins and likes, which motivated users to share more of this content. But when the researchers tracked engagement—which they measured in terms of comments and photos or videos of meals people actually cooked—the majority opted for recipes with more sugar and fat.



Image via Fast Company