Vorkuta is a small town in Russia that gets plagued by temperatures as low as -45 degrees Celsius. The city has one of the fastest dwindling populations in all of Russia. Photographer Arseniy Kotov visited the city and was able to snap photos of how abandoned the city is. His photographs show the dilapidated structures covered by feet-long icicles and snow:  

Relics from former residents and the chipped, blue paint peek through the frost, much of which clings to the stairs and banisters and climbs the walls.

Kotov tells Colossal that often, buildings are transformed into similarly chilling caves when pipes burst due to lack of maintenance, leading to splashes of hot water, subsequent high humidity, and then ice growth on every surface. At the time of his visit, one family remained in the Severniy-district building, which was still connected to the central heating system that runs through Russian cities, making it easier to pass through some of the walkways thanks to warmth from the radiators. Although Kotov wasn’t able to meet the sole occupants, he did hear that they moved not long after his tour, saying:

As I know, locals said that after one week as I visited this building, he and his wife were resettled to another apartment, and this whole building was cut off from all the communications (water, heating, electricity). This is a usual story in Vorkuta: as less and less people are left, it becomes unprofitable to heat an entire building, and people are gradually moved to others where there are more inhabitable apartments. Local authorities call it a “managed compression strategy.”

Image via the Colossal

Wine company Murphy-Goode wine is now offering a job for someone who could pursue their love and enthusiasm for wine in Sonoma. The company is willing to pay a salary of $10,000 a month and pay their rent for a year as the new hire explore their passions for winemaking, as Food and Wine details: 

"The sky is your limit," the company said. In exchange, the company will pay its new employee a $10,000 per month salary, and give them a home to live entirely rent-free in Sonoma for a year as well.

Potential job duties including "pivoting your career/life to create an adventure of a lifetime in the wine industry, acquiring strong knowledge of vineyards, winery operations, and wine in general," and "learning the growing and dynamic world of E-commerce."

According to the company, the new hire will also work with the team to drive awareness and build demand for Murphy-Goode Winery, and must have a "willingness and excitement to learn about various aspects of the wine industry."

Beyond the job, the new hire will also get the chance to explore Sonoma Wine Country and will be tasked with developing working relationships across functions of the winery.

Image via wikimedia commons

Crypto art has been receiving a boon on social media, with the recent Beeple sale. Beeple, a computer science graduate named Mike Winkelmann, was able to sell a piece of crypto art at Christie’s for US $69 million. The owner of the $69-million art piece is now named in a digital record, called a nonfungible token or NFT,  that confers ownership that is stored in a global database: 

This database is decentralized using blockchain, so that no single individual or company controls the database. As long as the specific blockchain survives in the world, anyone can read or access it, and no one can change it.

But “ownership” of crypto art confers no actual rights, other than being able to say that you own the work. You don’t own the copyright, you don’t get a physical print, and anyone can look at the image on the web. There is merely a record in a public database saying that you own the work – really, it says you own the work at a specific URL.

Since crypto art is really just a link to a JPEG file, why would anyone spend a lot of money for it? The Conversation dives into the world of crypto art and its significance. Check their full piece here. 

Image via Artnome

Video game development gets bumpy and rough sometimes, and there’s a chance that games in development will be left there forever. Video games are a source of income and profit, and publishers will opt to cancel a game instead of putting more money in developing something that may not return their money or isn’t working out. Digital Trends lists some games that never got published along with the reason why they got stuck in development only. Check the full piece here. 

image via Digital Trends

Milan-based architecture firm LCA Architetti designed a simple farmhouse-style home in a small village in Italy. The home, called The House of Wood, Straw, and Cork, is a two-story building that exhibits modern sustainable architectural design. The farmhouse has an exterior made of cork, and is insulated with straw, as Yanko Design details: 

The home is further insulated through the use of straw, which is traditionally used as an insulator for other rural dwellings like barns and henhouses. The straw insulation consists of repurposed discarded rice plants handed over by nearby farmers in the area.

Sustainability was a top priority in constructing The House of Wood, Straw, and Cork, and the house’s commitment to energy-efficiency is exhibited through the recycled material used for insulation, as well as the cluster of solar panels found on the home’s roof. Coupling the use of recycled straw and cork for insulation with photovoltaics for solar energy, The House of Wood, Straw, and Cork stands as a self-powered home, decreasing the overall consumption of energy and emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2.

Image via Yanko Design

Building and cultivating a personal art collection can be a difficult and tedious feat. From picking the real (and right) art pieces for your collection to finding the right platforms or access to purchase these artworks, the processes involved in creating a collection can be intimidating. An art buying and discovery platform aims to make the job easier for young art enthusiasts, as Apartment Therapy details: 

That’s essentially the ethos behind Salon 21, an art buying and discovery platform for young art enthusiasts with a focus on democratizing art by providing access to makers through digital artist talks and curated events. Founder Alex Bass knows a thing or two about building a collection with limited resources; she outfitted her prewar West Village studio with a mixture of her own artwork and personal pieces by friends, artists she admires, and even a piece from the famous street artist Trevor Andrew, aka Gucci Ghost, which she won in an Instagram contest… but more on that later!).

To see tips on starting your personal art collection, you can check the full piece here. 

How does one make a human face from a huge number of pipes? Well, Korean sculpture Yi Chul Hee  is known for using tightly stacked metal pipes cut at interesting angles to create stunning pieces. The artist is basically amazing! From human forms, to life-sized animals, to abstract art pieces, the sculptor utilizes the material and light and shadows that breathe life to his artworks, as My Modern Met details: 

“Pipe sculpting does not consist of sculpting the pipe but the cylindrical space in the pipe,” the artist explains. “This space takes on a new shape each time the surface or the cutting line of the pipe changes and the different shapes thus created give rise to the creation of unique works with a black hole pattern. They are called pieces of pipes but in reality they are pieces of space (the black hole) in the pipe. The charm of my work lies in these pieces seen in three dimensions which give an original and refined rhythm, variable according to the angle of view.”

This insight into Yi’s work may help one better appreciate the incredible detail made of a single material. It is interesting to think that the void is more important than the solids as he describes his process. As you scroll through the photos of each incredible structure, try to focus on the void, or black hole as he describes them, and the range of shadows you can find within.

Image via My Modern Met 

Researchers have discovered that a seafood fraud is happening on a global scale. From an analysis of 44 studies, 36% of seafood samples from restaurants and supermarkets in more than 30 countries were mislabelled. Thankfully, no ‘fake’ fish was made from plastic or other materials. The Guardian has more details: 

Sometimes the fish were labelled as different species in the same family. In Germany, for example, 48% of tested samples purporting to be king scallops were in fact the less coveted Japanese scallop. Of 130 shark fillets bought from Italian fish markets and fishmongers, researchers found a 45% mislabelling rate, with cheaper and unpopular species of shark standing in for those most prized by Italian consumers.

Other substitutes were of endangered or vulnerable species. In one 2018 study, nearly 70% of samples from across the UK sold as snapper were a different fish, from an astounding 38 different species, including many reef‐dwelling species that are probably threatened by habitat degradation and overfishing.

Still other samples proved to be not entirely of aquatic species, with prawn balls sold in Singapore frequently found to contain pork and not a trace of prawn.

Fish fraud has long been a known problem worldwide. Because seafood is among the most internationally traded food commodities, often through complex and opaque supply chains, it is highly vulnerable to mislabelling. Much of the global catch is transported from fishing boats to huge transshipment vessels for processing, where mislabelling is relatively easy and profitable to carry out.

Image via The Guardian

Hermes’s Birkin Bags, which sell for $200,000 each at auctions, have a possibility of getting devalued. Material science company MycoWorks has revealed that it spent three years collaborating with Hermes to create Sylvania, a sustainable material that looks and feels like leather. Sylvania, made from mushrooms, is the company’s attempt at swapping traditional leather with eco-friendly alternatives: 

For thousands of years, people have used leather to create everyday objects like footwear and bags, prizing the material for its durability and beauty. But over the past century, the fashion industry has mass-produced leather to churn out billions of shoes, purses, and accessories, with the global market for leather goods valued at more than $400 billion. This has come at a terrible cost to the planet.

Cows generate methane, a greenhouse gas significantly more potent than carbon dioxide, thereby accelerating climate change. Tanning and dying leather requires chemicals that go on to pollute waterways. Then there’s the animal rights component: Last November, Hermès came under fire from animal rights activists for its plans to build one of the biggest crocodile farms in Australia to produce exotic leathers for its bags.

Scientists and fashion companies have spent decades developing sustainable and humane alternatives to leather. Some brands have created “vegan leather” from plastic, but this is also problematic since the material does not biodegrade and sheds microplastics that end up in our food chain.

Image via Fast Company

You can also believe that the quaint nest is something you can see in Studio Ghibli movies. I sure would! Photographs of a tiny hummingbird’s cozy (and honestly adorable) home were taken by conservationist and wildlife educator Bianca Soares in Paraguay. The hummingbird can be seen sitting in a small nest that fits it quite nicely, and has a leaf for a roof over its head.  Check the full video here to see more photos of the bird on its nest. 

(via Flipboard)

Image via Flipboard

It’s not what we view as monsters, worry not. Researchers have just confirmed the details of a collision that occurred in 2016, when the IceCube Neutrino Observatory was able to detect the most energetic antimatter particle ever. The ultralight particle smacked into the Antarctic ice with the energy of 6,300 mosquitos, as LiveScience details: 

This antineutrino, an antimatter counterpart of the wispy, difficult-to-detect particles known as neutrino, collided with an electron somewhere in the ice of Antarctica at nearly the speed of light. That collision created a shower of particles detected by the buried IceCube Neutrino Observatory — a facility responsible for much of the important high-energy neutrino research of the last decade, as Live Science has reported. Now, IceCube physicists report that that particle shower included evidence of a long-theorized but never-before-seen event known as "Glashow resonance."

[...]

It's usually difficult to wrap one's mind around the numbers involved in high-energy particles. A single neutrino has a mass of about 2 billion-billion-billion-billionths of a gram, and thousands of low-energy neutrinos from the sun pass through your body every second of the day without noticeable effects. A neutrino with 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) of energy is another beast entirely. According to CERN, the European physics laboratory, a teraelectronvolt (TeV) is equivalent to the energy of a single mosquito flying at 1 mph (1.6 km/h). And 6.3 PeV is 6,300 TeV. So turn that single mosquito into a swarm of 6,300 (or accelerate it to Mach-8.2, more than four times the top speed of an F-16) and you've got the energy of the single infinitesimal particle required for Glashow's resonance.

Another way to think of 6.3 PeV: It's 450 times the maximum energy that the Large Hadron Collider — CERN's 17-mile-long (27 kilometers), multibillion dollar accelerator responsible for the detection of the Higgs boson — should be able to produce by the late 2020s following ongoing upgrades.

Image via LiveScience 

The dinosaur won’t pull a Jurassic Park on us, thank goodness. Paleontologists have identified a new genus and species of a bird-like dinosaur  from a single foot bone found in Catalonia, Spain. The creature, designated as Tamarro insperatus, existed roughly 66 million years ago, as Syfy details: 

“During the late Cretaceous (77-66 million years ago) in the run-up to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, Europe was a series of islands populated by diverse and distinctive communities of dinosaurs and other vertebrates,” explained lead study author Dr. Albert Sellé and his colleagues from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafon at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Museu de la Conca Dellà in their report published in Scientific Reports.

“Many of these animals exhibited peculiar features that may have been generated by lack of space and resources in their insular habitats.”

Tamarro insperatus belonged to a family of animals known as Troodontidae, a group of unique theropod dinosaurs whose sizes vary from between 1.7 pounds for Mei long up to the 100-pound Troodon formosus.

According to the research paper, the existence of European troodontids has been controversial and subject to debate for decades, mostly due to the absence of any sizeable fossil record except for a few discovered teeth. 

Image via Syfy

A yellowed painting of the Last Supper was hiding in plain sight, so to speak, as it hung unnoticed on a church wall in Ledbury. England. The 12- by- 5-foot canvas came close to being discarded, but was saved and analyzed by experts. According to experts, the artwork was actually created in Titian’s workshop, as the Smithsonian details: 

Staff at the St. Michael and All Angels Church initially asked art historian and conservator Ronald Moore to restore a 19th-century copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. But when Moore approached the painting, which hangs above the church’s altar, he found himself drawn to the less prominently displayed canvas.

“I could see it was a bit special, but I didn’t know how special,” the scholar tells the Telegraph. “It’s about ten feet off the ground, so you can’t see it unless you stand on a ladder.”

After studying the work for some 11,000 hours, writes Lianne Kolirin for CNN, Moore and researcher Patricia Kenny found a number of telling clues, including Titian’s signature, a virtuosic underdrawing of the artist himself and a 1775 letter penned by collector John Skippe that references his purchase of a Titian painting. One of Skippe’s descendants donated the Last Supper scene to the Ledbury church in 1909.

“It’s so big and nobody’s taken any notice of it for 110 years,” Moore says to the Telegraph. “Anything coming from Titian’s workshop is very important indeed.”

Image via the Smithsonian 

Have you wondered why flamingos frequently stand on one leg? According to zoologist  Dr Paul Rose, flamingos are more stable on one leg than they are on two. How is that possible? Apparently, the ligaments and tendons in a flamingo’s legs can be locked in position, and that reduces any muscular effort to stay in one place. Standing on one leg is basically an energy-saving activity for these winged creatures:  

“If you’re a flamingo, you’re going to want to sleep on one leg as you can activate this locking mechanism and just stay there. Sleeping on two legs would mean constantly maintaining your balance.”

Interestingly, they aren’t the only animals to engage in this behaviour. Ducks, geese, swans and flamingos are birds of a feather, using similar locking mechanisms in their legs to stay perfectly balanced.

“So many birds stand on one leg. It just so happens that because flamingos have such long legs, we see it more,” says Rose.

“Yet we can even see this behaviour in humans to some extent if they’re in a queue: people will rest more weight on one leg than the other.”

Image via Science Focus

What was the story behind the well-known (and well-used) Bluetooth logo? At first glance, it just seems like a fancy or creative way to use ‘B’ as a logo. However, the story behind Bluetooth's name and logo is actually interesting! The name ‘bluetooth’ belongs to a Viking-era king with a bad tooth, and the logo the engineers that developed Bluetooth used is hiding a secret message: 

Engineers Sven Mattisson Jim Kardach were working on the technology in the late 1990s when they realised it needed a catchy name to make it stand out from the confusing plethora of wireless tech being developed at the time. And the concept of 'Bluetooth' was, like all the best ideas, devised over a beer.

According to France24, the two men began discussing history while drowning their sorrows after a disappointing pitch. They "talked at length" about Vikings, including the king of Denmark, Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson – a name said to refer to his dead tooth. 

The king is most famous for uniting Norway and Denmark, a parallel which delighted Mattisson and Kardach who were "seeking to unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link" (which is, of course, exactly the same as bringing warring nations together).

But it isn't just the name that has a surprising history – the Bluetooth logo is also hiding a secret. It turns out the design actually contains two letters, rather than just a slightly insect-like B. What you're actually looking at is a superimposition of the Nordic runes for the letters H and B (below), for 'Harald Bluetooth'.

Image via CreativeBloq