Meet the Architeuthis dux, the world’s largest known squid. The animal is capable of growing to about 46 feet (14 meters long)! For reference, that is about the length of a semi-trailer truck. This huge sea animal inspired the tales of krakens, and now with scientists catching the elusive squid on camera, we can say that we finally have footage of a live kraken (well, sort of): 

Now, a study published online in the journal Deep Sea Research Part 1: Oceanographic Research Papers delves into why these giants of the deep are so elusive, and explains how a team of researchers was able to capture the first footage of A. dux in its natural habitat in 2012, and again in 2019 in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to the study authors (many of whom were present for the 2019 giant squid sighting), the creature's evasiveness is due, in part, to its enormous eyes.

Giant squids can live thousands of feet below the ocean's surface. Very little sunlight can penetrate this deep so to adapt, the giant squid evolved the largest eyes in the animal kingdom. Each of these cephalopods' peepers are about as large as a basketball — roughly three times the diameter of any other animal, Live Science previously reported.

These huge eyes not only help giant squids make their way around the deep, dark ocean, but probably also make them extra sensitive to the bright lights that marine researchers mount to their submersibles and underwater cameras, according to the study authors. That sensitivity could explain why giant squids are so hard to find in their natural habitats; by the time a research vehicle reaches a squid's swimming grounds, the squid has long since fled the craft's lights and vibrations.

Image via Live Science 

Researchers from Wageningen University & Research believe that a facial recognition AI can be used to identify the emotional state of farm animals. If this machine could actually be created (and work), then checking an animal’s emotional state would no longer be exclusive to farming simulator games. However, there’s little evidence that emotion recognition systems could work, as the Next Web details: 

The same ‘science‘ driving systems that claim to be able to tell if someone is gay through facial recognition or if a person is likely to be aggressive, is behind emotion recognition for people and farm animals.

Basically, nobody can tell if another person is gay, or aggressive just by looking at their face. You can guess. And you might be right. But no matter how many times you’re right, it’s always a guess and you’re always operating on your personal definitions.

That’s how emotion recognition works too. What you might interpret as “upset,” might just be someone’s normal expression. What you might see as “gay,” well.. I defy anyone to define internal gayism (ie: do thoughts or actions make you recognizably gay?). 

It’s impossible to “train” a computer to recognize emotions because computers don’t think. They rely on data sets labeled by humans. Humans make mistakes. Worse, it’s ridiculous to imagine any two humans would look at a million faces and come to a blind consensus on the emotional state of each person viewed.

Researchers don’t train AI to recognize emotion or make inferences from faces. They train AI to imitate the perceptions of the specific humans who labeled the data they’re using.

Image via the Next Web

Alex Solis did not have to present me with this gruesome interpretation of the famous Super Mario character without his hat on. Listen, the game franchise’s Toad is cute, okay? However, Solis’ nightmare-like interpretation is way too difficult to unsee. The artwork is part of the artist’s series called #UnpopularCultureSeries.  If you’re looking for what Toad looks like without his mushroom hat, check out Super Mario Odyssey producer Yoshiaki Koizumi explaining it. For now, good luck unseeing Solis’ creation. Is it creative? Yes, of course. Is it something I didn’t need to see? Yeah! 

Image via Creative Bloq 

Too bad they don't have the actual item in the game. Then again, it is a game marketed for children. In the latest Animal Crossing: New Horizons update, dataminers have found an item that has some heavy implications. The item is the  Phrygian Cap, a seasonal hat that will be released in the game to celebrate Bastille Day on the 14th of July. So what does this cap imply? NintendoLife’s Kate Gray has the details: 

Time for a wee history lesson: the Phrygian Cap, also known as the Liberty Cap, was one of the primary icons of the French Revolution, symbolising the plight of the poor in revolutionary France, and their subsequent uprising against the nobility. You'll probably have heard of that bit, because it's the bit where a bunch of royals and other wealthy nobles got their heads lopped off by guillotines.

You see, the Phrygian Cap (or an early version of it, at least) used to be worn by Romans and Greeks who had been freed from the bondage of slavery, and therefore represented all those things that the French Revolutionaries were about: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Also, cool hats.

Bastille Day — the event that the cap celebrates in Animal Crossing — is a huge event in France, and its origins lie in the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Displeased by their treatment by the nobility, the people of Paris broke into the Bastille, a prison-fortress that was often used for political prisoners, and grabbed a bunch of ammunition with which to fight back. Basically, the storming of the Bastille was one of the final blows to the status quo of France's monarchy, and so the day is celebrated as a symbol of the Republic.

Image via NintendoLife 

Project Catchy Content is a new AI from Adobe that can analyze online content and tell its users if people engage with their content or not. In addition, the project can also tell its users why their website or content is gaining traction or not. According to Adobe’s latest Sneak (or a tease of a new tool to come), the AI promises to analyze online uploads and suggest everything from better colors to tweaked copywriting, in order to get the best possible response, as Fast Company details: 

As Steve Hammond, a VP of Adobe Experience Cloud who leads the Sneaks program, explains, the work stems from years of Adobe’s AI research. The company has already developed some powerful AI-based tools for creatives, such as Content-Aware Fill, which uses AI to analyze a scene and fill in plausible objects such as grass or water over a blemish that you’d like to cover up.

“That ability gives Photoshop an understanding between pixels, colors, and patterns,” says Hammond. But he explains that Catchy Content pushes Adobe’s image prowess farther, from editing to a deep evaluation. The AI classifies photos with all sorts of keywords (such as “swimming woman”), deconstructs their color palettes, and analyzes the accompanying text. It can then cross-reference all of this information against what people engage with—highly specific, demographic data—to develop a scorecard for your content.

The system is one giant AI analyzer that correlates what’s on your page to what people read, click, or buy.

[...]

There are no two ways about it: This is a cold and calculating way to view creative work. But it’s also an analytic tool that reaches a lot deeper than existing options such as Google Analytics or Parse.ly, which can often track how well a piece of content on the internet is doing but can offer very little in terms of actionable advice to improve it.

image via Fast Company 

In the depths of lake Lucerne in Switzerland, archeologists have discovered a sunken Bronze Age village. The underwater archeologists happened upon the village by accident. Divers from the Office for Urban Development of the City of Zurich were assisting with the installation of a pipeline when they found numerous wooden piles buried underneath a layer of mud. The discovery can rewrite Lucerne’s history, as it suggests that the region was settled much earlier than what was believed. Check All That’s Interesting’s piece on the discovery here. 

Image via All That’s Interesting

You could turn the animals into handbags, but you can also choose not to! Developed by Springloaded Games, Let’s Build a Zoo is a zoo management game where you can build your own zoo and fill it with over 500 types of animals. The game’s pixelated art style adds a cute and nostalgic flair as well. Don’t underestimate this game, though. There is a dark and twisted side to game, as PC Gamer details: 

One exciting hook of Let's Build a Zoo is the DNA splicing feature, which lets you turn those 500 animal types into hundreds of thousands by mixing up their genes in your lab. If your exhibits are a bit on the bland side, just take a crocodile, a duck, and some science, and whip up a crocoduck. Dr. Moreau would be proud.

Playing god with animal DNA sounds fun, if not exactly ethical. And it sounds like Let's Build a Zoo is going to be keeping tabs on just how evil you might be planning to get:

"Sure, you can build a loving environment for your animals, guests and staff," reads the press release sent to PC Gamer, "but with a fully-fledged morality system, you have the choice to go down an evil path, work your staff to the bone, and essentially turn your zoo into a meat factory."

An adorable pixelated zoo management game with a morality system? I'm definitely interested, and the potential for evil looks like it includes using your alligators to make handbags, your chickens to make drumsticks, and your pigs to make bacon. 

I don’t know about you, but the game’s premise has me hooked! I’ll be looking forward to this one when it launches on Steam. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the game, you can check their official website here. 

It’s likely that she didn’t receive the game console. A publisher commissioned the creation of a golden Nintendo Wii and had it delivered to Queen Elizabeth II as part of a publicity stunt back in 2009. Now, twelve years later, the luxurious console is available on eBay for $300,000. The story behind that eBay listing is that the golden Wii landed in the hands of Donny Fillerup, one of the guys behind the website consolevariations.com. Fillerup is now selling some items from his collection as he is looking to buy a new home. 

Image via Kotaku

Spoiler alert: the sculpture in question was not made by Da Vinci. A sculpture of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowering plants, has been the subject of long debates concerning its origins. Housed in the collection of Berlin’s Bode Museum, the art piece has been investigated by a trio of researchers to prove that Da Vinci didn’t create the sculpture. The team took samples from the bust and used radiocarbon dating and chemical analysis to pinpoint the work’s creation to the 19th century, which is 300 years after Da Vinci’s death: 

When the researchers analyzed samples taken from the bust, they determined that it was composed of spermaceti—a waxy material found in the heads of sperm whales and bottlenose whales—and beeswax. Per Mindy Weisberger of Live Science, spermaceti was rarely used by Renaissance artists but had become increasingly commonplace by the 18th century. At the time, noted Cosmos’ Martin Harris in 2014, the wax was used in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, industrial lubricants and candles.

The sculpture’s blend of terrestrial and marine sources complicated the dating process, as “carbon consumed by the organisms in deep and shallow seawater is older than that consumed on land,” write the authors in the study.

The scholars add, “To further complicate the procedure, the location of the marine source”—in this instance, the whale that provided the spermaceti—“must be known to accurately calibrate marine material.”

To overcome these obstacles, the team developed an entirely new calibration method that took into account the amount of spermaceti versus beeswax present in the Flora bust. Per the Art Newspaper, the analysis yielded a date range of 1704 to 1950.

Image via the Smithsonian 

Psychology professor Michelle D. Miller points out a problem in the widely-cited 2014 study on the effectiveness of written note-taking versus using a laptop. According to Miller, when other scholars attempted to repeat the experiment in the study, titled  “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking,” they weren’t able to get the same results: 

“Some patterns found in the original study replicated, but some—most notably the conceptual recall question advantage—did not,” Miller writes in a forthcoming book, “Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology.” Miller is quick to note that the authors of the original study did nothing wrong, and that it is typical for small studies to have findings that turn out to be “fragile” when submitted to follow-up studies. As she notes: “All this back and forth is good social science, but from a practical standpoint it leads to one fairly glaring conclusion: If the supposed advantage of handwriting is flaky enough, or simply small enough, not to reliably show up across studies, we probably shouldn't be remaking our classroom policies because of it.”

Miller has been looking into what learning science says about all kinds of narratives that float around technology and teaching these days. Do learners remember less when they can fall back on search engines? Do younger generations that grew up with technology—so-called digital natives—really function better with machines than older folks do? And can tech be used to help boost students' memory of what they’re taught?

Image via unsplash 

I don’t think I’ll be able to handle the height if I ever get a chance to swim in this pool. Meet the Sky Pool, a special outdoor pool in London’s Nine Elms business district. The most distinct feature of this outdoor location is that it is suspended 35 meters above the ground between two residential buildings. The transparent pool is made of acrylic and can hold up to 148,000 gallons of water: 

The impressive sky pool is the centerpiece of Embassy Gardens, a new 2,000-home development in the Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station regeneration zone. When it opens, next month, Sky Pool will become the most exclusive place to take a dip in all of Britain.

Sky Pool will nor only be offering swimmers breathtaking views of the House of Parliament, the London Eye and London’s city skyline, but also the thrilling experience of floating in the air, tens of meters above ground, with nothing but a transparent layer of acrylic separating them from the chasm below.

Apparently, transporting the bool from Colorado, over the Atlantic was an adventure in itself, but designing and installing it between the two new residential buildings was even more challenging, with engineers and workers having only inches of tolerance.

Image via Oddity Central

Meet the aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis), a particularly unique lemur that has its own taxonomic family. Dubbed as the weirdest primate in the world, the aye-aye is also the world’s largest nocturnal primate. The lemur spends the night eating and traveling, and sleeps in elaborate nests made of leaves and branches during the day. In local lore,  aye-ayes bring bad luck and death and must be killed on sight (ouch). Check World Wildlife’s full piece on the creature here. 

A clip of a seagull freeloading on another seagull’s back as they fly through the sky has gone viral! In a video posted by Twitter user buitengebieden_, a seagull can be seen on the back of another, using the other one as a makeshift uber ride. The nine-second video clip has been watched by nearly three million people, and I can assure you, it’s hilarious! Check the video here. 

Image screenshot via Comic Sands 

The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted by Hieronymus Bosch between 1490 and 1510, has been a cause of debate and different interpretations as to what Bosch wanted to portray in this artwork. From sexual freedom, to acid trips, to anti-church ideology, the triptych oil painting’s meaning leaves a lot to imagination. London curator James Payne believes that the artwork is just “pure and simply, hardcore Christianity:”

Depicting the Biblical creation of the world on its outer panels, the work opens up to reveal elaborately detailed visions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, then humanity indulging in all known earthly delights, then the consequent torments of Hell. It is that last panel, with its abundance of perverse activities and grotesque human, animal, and human-animal figures (recently made into figurines and even piñatas) that keeps the strongest hold on our imagination today.

Payne’s explanation goes into detail on all aspects of the work, highlighting and contextualizing details that even avowed appreciators may not have considered before. While identifying both the possible inspirations and the possible symbolic intentions of the figures and symbols with which Bosch filled the triptych, Payne emphasizes that, as far as the artist was concerned, “his images were a realistic portrayal of sin and its consequences, so in that sense, it wasn’t surrealism, it was realism.” This bears repeating, given how difficult we moderns find it “to look at this painting and not see it as surrealism or a product of the subconscious, not see it as a sexual utopia, a critique of religion, or even a psychedelic romp.” Just as The Garden of Earthly Delights tells us a great deal about the world Bosch lived in, so our views of it tell us a great deal about the world we live in.

Image via wikimedia commons

A moonbow is the rare nighttime counterpart of a rainbow. Photographer Brian Haislip was lucky enough to see and take a shot of a double moonbow as it seemed to entangle itself with a crash of lightning (an added bonus, if you ask me). The magical photos that he got are beautiful: 

“This particular night,” he tells My Modern Met, “the lightning calmed down around 10 p.m. so I packed up and went back home to edit the lightning shots I got.” He heard more thunder in the distance around midnight. He was exhausted but as a self-proclaimed “storm addict,” he decided to grab his camera and head back to the same spot.

“The storm ended up not producing very much lightning, so I decided to call it a night,” Haislip recalls. “As I was getting ready to pick my camera up, I started seeing this crazy-looking white formation off in the distance, I had no idea what it was. At that time, the full moon peeked out from the remaining storm clouds, and all of a sudden this full double moonbow appeared. I was not prepared for something like that, which is why the double moonbow picture is out of focus… really threw me for a loop!” Once he realized what he had seen, he adjusted the settings on his camera and snapped as many shots as he could. “During that brief time, I was able to capture a few streaks of lightning coming out of the dissipating moonbow.”

Image via My Modern Met