Science finally weighs in (no pun intended). If you’re planning to go on a diet to shed the extra pounds you’ve gained these past few months, then maybe avoiding all the carbs or cutting your carbohydrate intake is one of the options you have for your diet plan. Besides losing weight, what other side effects does giving up carbohydrates (such as rice, bread, etc.) have? Eat This, Not That lists the other things one might expect when they’re lowering their carb intake, according to experts. Check the full list here. 

Image via Eat This, Not That!

In order to preserve and store quarter of a million artworks against flooding, the Louvre museum has moved some of its treasures to a storage site in northern France. Trucks have quietly moved the precious artworks and artifacts from the museum’s basements and other sites to the Louvre Conservation Center, located in Lievin, France. The center already houses 100,000 works: 

With museums in France closed because of the pandemic, Jean-Luc Martinez, the director of the Louvre, has time on his hands. On Tuesday, he took a small group of reporters on a tour of the newly operational site, which is intended to become one of Europe’s largest art research centers and to welcome museum experts, scholars and conservators from around the world.

The Louvre sits on low ground along the banks of the Seine. In 2016, flooding in Paris was so severe that the museum itself was threatened, prompting a round-the-clock, emergency operation to wrap, crate and haul thousands of art objects out of underground storage and onto higher ground.

The conservation project in Liévin, costing 60 million euros, or about $73 million, began in late 2017 as a necessary response to the river’s unpredictable, inevitable rise.

“The reality is that our museum is in a flood zone,” Mr. Martinez said on the tour on Tuesday. “You can’t just pick up and move marble sculptures around,” he noted. “There was a danger

 that the sewers would back up and that dirty, smelly wastewater would damage the art. We had to find a solution. Urgently.”

Image via The New York Times

MetaHumans are detailed digital humans, created with Epic Games’ latest tool, the MetaHuman Creator. The new application aims to provide photorealistic digital humans, fully-rigged and complete with hair and clothing, without the time, hassle, and cost of creating one from scratch. Any sample characters made from the creator will be compatible with Unreal Engine projects! Check the company’s website on the tool for the full details, and  to start playing around to create your character. 

(via Twitter) 

Image via Twitter 

Twenty-five years after the release of the classic Nintendo Game Boy games, one user has revealed on Reddit that you can get some free items after a certain event in the games. According to the Reddit user, in order to get the five free Pokeballs from Professor Oak, the player needs to have won the rival fight next to Viridian City, you can’t have the Boulder Badge, and you can’t have any Pokeballs yet. The player needs to not buy or find any Pokeballs: 

What does this mean? Well, as the Reddit user further notes, this means that not only do you have to beat the second Rival fight with just your starter Pokemon (which would require a fair bit of grinding), but you need to do all of this and then think to head back to Pallet Town to talk to Professor Oak. And if you played either game, you'll know there's zero reason to do this. That said, if you do all of this, you will get five free Pokeballs for your troubles.

Image via wikipedia

Coelacanth, what we call a ‘living fossil’ for its appearance, is apparently not the living fossil that we all thought it was. An analysis of the fish’s DNA suggests that its genome has undergone some changes in recent evolutionary history. Even though they resemble near-identical species spotted in the fossil record, one species of coelacanth, the Latimeria chalumnae, has acquired new genes in the past 23 million years: 

What’s more, the finding is further evidence that the living fossil concept is outdated and somewhat of a misnomer.

Not much is known about coelacanths, but they’re not particularly aggressive, and they’re actually somewhat social, Isaac Yellan, the first author of the new study, explained in an email. L. chalumnae lives in the Indian Ocean and the waters off the coast of southeast Africa, and, though not extinct, the fish is elusive and critically endangered, said Yellan, a graduate student with the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.

Image via Gizmodo 

Illinois is now trying to convince its residents that they can eat Asian Carp. It’s easy to tell people that yes, they could eat the fish, but it’s another to encourage them to do so. It’s like marketing something that hasn’t been used by people before or something that people initially do not like. For the record, the Asian Carp has a mild flavor, low in fat, and makes ‘excellent table fare’, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). So what was the state’s first step? Changing the fish’s name: 

According to USA Today, a new name for the fish has already been proposed, and it will be revealed this summer, just before the Boston Seafood Show.

"To us in America, we think of carp as a bottom-feeding, muddy-tasting fish, which it is sometimes," Dirk Fucik, the owner of Dirk's Fish and Gourmet Shop in Chicago, told the outlet. "But Asian carp is a plankton-feeder. It's a different type of flesh—much cleaner, sweeter-tasting meat."

Asian carp have become an increasingly big headache in the United States. They were imported into the country in the 1970s to eat the algae at wastewater treatment plants, and to help clean up catfish ponds. Flooding and other water-related accidents helped them escape from those controlled environments, and they're now found in the Missouri and Illinois Rivers, and Illinois is doing everything it can to keep them out of the Great Lakes. 

The idea of reducing the Asian carp population by putting them on American plates has been proposed before, but it's been a hard sell so far. Clay Ferguson, a Ph.D student in Virginia Tech's Department of Food Science and Technology admits that the word 'carp' is off-putting, because people tend to think of that fish as being 'dirty.' 

"It's a misconception that we're trying to get past," Ferguson told the Augusta Free Press. "Silver and bighead carp [...] don't rummage through the mud."

Image via Food And Wine 

They look so realistic, we can’t help but wonder. Just a little. All jokes aside, the 3-D printed eyeballs featured in the photo above were created by Weta Workshop, who designed effects for Xena: Warrior Princess and The Lord of the Rings. For their latest project, the New Zealand-based workshop is perfecting highly realistic human eyeballs:

Adam Savage went to New Zealand for his YouTube series Tested to check out Weta’s 3D printing lab. There, designers are hard at work perfecting. Savage talked to Weta founded Richard Taylor and 25-year-old 3D artist Tor Robinson about the project, and why it’s so important to create these detailed eyeballs.

Taylor went on to detail some of the challenges in creating eyes that look absolutely human. It comes down to getting the veins right, which can be challenging when painting. That’s where a specific type of 3D printing called “voxel printing” comes into play. The technology helps create the translucent look of the eye.

Image via Nerdist 

A video posted on Twitter is showing how Disney handled its animation process during its hand-drawn animation era. The clip shows various clips of different Disney films side-by-side, showcasing instances of recycled animations. Same movement or actions, different characters or movies. The video has been viewed over 11 million times, and people have mixed reactions to it: 

The montage beings with a clip of Winnie the Pooh's Christopher Robin alongside one of The Jungle Book's Mowgli, both clambering over rocks. Although the films were released 10 years apart (1977 and 1967 respectively), the characters' actions are eerily identical. The clip also reveals the Jungle Book also borrowed animations from The Sword in the Stone, released a year previously.

It seems the responses fall into one of three categories: confused, indignant or impressed. Many are are simply stunned to see that some of their favourite childhood films recycled animations, while others decry the practice as lazy. But many point out how laborious the animation process was in the 1960s and 70s (if only a few of today's best laptops for video editing had been knocking about), and call the recycling practice efficient, and even inspired.

Image via CreativeBloq

Apparently, sleep isn’t just enough. Sleep is great, don’t get me wrong, however, we haven’t really fully rested if we just sleep. There are other types of rest that we need so that we aren’t chronically tired and burned out. TED-Ed Blog’s Saundra Dalton Smith, M.D. lists the seven kinds of rest that we need to be fully refreshed and restored physically and mentally. Check the list here. 

Image via wikimedia commons 

A new study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior has suggested that countries in hotter climates feature more spicy food is not because of a stomach-lead adaptation to our natural environment. In other words, the frequently used spices in these countries don’t serve as a medicine against food-borne illnesses. The study debunks the Darwinian Gastronomy theory, the theory that food scientists have held on for years: 

Using this theory, it seems obvious that hot countries with higher levels of foodborne illness must be warding off illness with all the extra spices they add in comparison to cooler countries who tend to use fewer spices.

But Lindell Bromham, the study's first author and professor of ecology and evolution at the Australian National University, argues this theory simply doesn't hold up when you expand the datasets you're looking at.

"The theory is that spicy foods helped people survive in hot climates where the risk of infection from food can have a big cost in terms of health and survival," Bromham explained in a statement. "But we found that this theory doesn't hold up.

"Spicier food is found in hotter countries, but our analysis provides no clear reason to believe that this is primarily a cultural adaptation to reducing infection risk from food."

they found that the road accident prevalence was a better predictor of spice use than the prevalence of foodborne illnesses — an explanation Bromham points out as being unlikely.

"This doesn't mean that spicy food shortens your life span or makes you crash your car," explains Bromham. "Instead, there are many socioeconomic indicators that all scale together, and many of them also scale with spice use."

Image via Inverse

The long-toothed dart moth is the 11,000th species to be added to National Geographic’s Photo Ark, a project that aims to document every species living in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries around the world. The moth is a type of cutworm, moths that look almost the same, so much that it’s hard for scientists to tell them apart. This is one of the reasons why the dart moth hasn’t been studied that much: 

When Sartore and his team captured the long-toothed dart moth along New Mexico’s Pecos River in September 2020, they sent a photo of the mysterious species to Bob Biagi, an editor at the species-identification website BugGuide. His response: “We have been waiting for your image for at least 130 years.”

Cutworm moths are so named because their caterpillars emerge from the soil at night and snip the stems off plants, usually seedlings, toppling them over. Some species, such as the army cutworm, are considered agricultural pests, but most aren’t harmful to crops, Kawahara says.

Cutworm moths also help feed bats (they’re particularly “meaty,” Kawahara says) and pollinate night-blooming flowers. Moths’ role as pollinators is often overshadowed in the public eye by butterflies and bees, he says.

Earth is home to about 160,000 known species of moths and butterflies, but perhaps another 200,000 remain unidentified. “There are so many insects that we don’t know much about,” says Scott Bundy, a professor of entomology at New Mexico State University.

Image via National Geographic 

Norman Rockwell used photos to create his illustrations, with his creative process starting with an actual camera. Rockwell used photos, taken by different photographers, that featured his neighbors and friends. Critics have dismissed his illustrations of the American life as idealistic, but this doesn’t mean that his artworks shouldn’t be admired, no! Whether or not you think that his pieces are realistic or unrealistic, he used photos for his art: 

The cameramen included a German immigrant named Clemens Kalischer: “An artist-photographer himself, Kalischer was at odds with the tracing techniques and saccharine subject matter in Rockwell’s work. After all, Rockwell never painted freehand, and almost all of his paintings were commissioned by magazines and advertising companies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shutter, Rockwell directed every facet of every composition,” as you can see by examining his paintings and reference photos together, featured as they’ve been on sites like Petapixel.

Image via Open Culture

Even without the implications and other scientific explanations surrounding this animation of the long history of how the Earth’s tectonic plates moved around, the animation is still very pleasing to watch. However, the animation is a result of the efforts of scientists, as they combined magnetic data and geological data to create the high-fidelity simulation:  

In the past decade, similarly painstaking plate tectonics reconstructions have been made but only for limited windows of geologic time. This is the first time this type of full-blown plate tectonics reconstruction has been assembled for an uninterrupted fifth of Earth’s history.

“A lot of things we look at and care about in the present day are dependent on 10- to 100-million-year time cycles in plate tectonics,” said Andrew Merdith, a geoscientist at the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in France and the study’s lead author. By looking further back in time, more cycles are revealed, allowing scientists to unravel the planetary-scale processes that made the world we live in today.

“Plate tectonics is that really big picture that you can put other things into,” said Lucía Pérez-Díaz, a structural geologist and tectonics expert at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the work. And a lot of things have happened in the past billion years that this new recreation can help contextualize.

It includes the time Earth was a giant snowball 700 million years ago; the proliferation of complex animal life 540 million years ago; the greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history 252 million years ago; the evolution of flowering plants 130 million years ago; the creation of the Himalayas 45 million years ago; and — right at the last geologic second — the appearance of modern humans.

Its scientific uses aside, the animation also resonates with people on a visceral level.

“It’s quite hypnotic,” Dr. Pérez-Díaz said, “even for me, and I see them all the time.”

Image via the New York Times

The quarantine has most of us stuck at home trying to do other things or take up hobbies that we didn’t have the time for pre-Covid. It is a good time to put your creative mind to test and try to conceive, plot, and write a story or a novel. But creating an original story is easier said than done. Sometimes, the inspiration doesn’t hit you when you want it to, but Esquire’s tips might help you along as you create the next literary masterpiece! Check the full list of tips, straight from established and emerging writers, here. 

Image via Esquire 

The A-12 is an aircraft built for strategic, high-altitude reconnaissance. It’s a spy plane, of course! The airplane is meant to outrun enemy air defenses to bring back intelligence for the CIA. The aircraft flew until 1968, and now, the public can see photos of the intelligence aircraft that have been shared by Thornton “TD” D. Barnes, who worked on the spy plane at Area 51. Check more photos of the A-12 here. 

Image via Popular Mechanics