A pair of ancient remains from Ethiopia have changed how we perceived human history. The skeletons, named Lucy and Ardi, reveal much about early human evolution. Lucy is the widely-known ancient human ancestor, found in 1974 by anthropologist Donald Johanson and his graduate assistant Tom Gray: 

When reconstructed, the pieces composed about 40 per cent of the skeleton (or 70 per cent after lab technicians created mirror image replicas of bones missing on the opposite side) of a petite female with an ape-sized brain who stood just over 1 metre tall.

The Hadar team collected hundreds more specimens of the same species later dubbed Australopithecus afarensis. These filled in parts missing from Lucy, including skull, hands, and feet. Today this fossil species is one of the best-known in the human family with more than 400 specimens ranging from 3 to 3.7 million years old.

The lesser known of the duo is Ardi, a 4.4 million year-old skeleton found by Ethiopian scholar Yohannes Haile-Selassie. Ardi was 1.2 million years older than Lucy: 

Shortly after the Ardi skeleton had been transported back to the lab, paleoanthropologist Tim White made a shocking discovery – Ardi had a grasping big toe of a tree climber. This revelation arrived alongside seemingly contradictory ones; Ardi’s other four toes displayed anatomy similar to upright bipeds.

More revelations affirmed the hybrid style of Ardi’s locomotion: she climbed trees, but also walked erect on the ground. Although badly damaged, Ardi’s pelvis showed muscle attachments unique to bipeds – alongside other anatomy typical of arboreal apes. As the discovery team later reported, “It is so rife with anatomical surprises that no one could have imagined it without direct fossil evidence.”

Ardi defied predictions in many ways. By the time she was discovered, molecular biology had amassed compelling evidence that humans were closely and recently related to chimpanzees (at the time scientists estimated the two lineages diverged as recently as 5 million years ago, but most now think the split was much  earlier). Many scholars shared the expectation: the older the fossil, the more it would resemble a modern chimp or bonobo.

Image via Science Focus 

How extreme you might ask? Some of them are standing at the ends of the Earth! These structures are built to withstand incredible temperatures and other environmental factors, so that scientists and researchers can work on tackling some of the planet’s biggest problems at their source (eg. climate change, rising sea levels). A series of research facilities and laboratories are built in the Antarctic, deep underwater, and some are alongside remote ecosystems. Wired lists some extreme structures that have been built and are just being built. Check the full piece here. 

Image via Wired 

The Rijksmuseum has doubled its collection of works online. From Rembrandt, to Vermeer, and to other artists who used art to cope with loss and loneliness during the plagues of their time, the museum in Amsterdam has digitized 709,622 works of art. Their expansive digital collection is free for downloading, sharing and editing with a free Rijksmuseum account, which is just great. 

Image via Open Culture

Just kidding, it’s not. It does look like one, though. Late physicist, biologist, and photographer Andreas Kay documented this odd creature during his time in Ecuador. The insect, a flatid planthopper nymph, looks like a walking piece of popcorn. Kay first shared the  video of the strange creature in May 2019, where the tiny insect is seen scurrying across his fingertip:

This is no ordinary bug, though—it looks like a tiny cloud or a piece of popcorn resting on little insect legs. There’s a reason for this strange appearance. The insect—which can be found in the Amazon rainforest—is covered with waxy white filaments for protection.

The unusual bug is one of roughly 12,500 known planthopper species on Earth. 

Planthoppers are insects that closely resemble plants that grow in their own environments. As their name suggests, planthoppers are able to “hop” around from A to B. Kay doesn’t capture this movement in the video, but we’re sure the insect would look just like a popping kernel.

Image via My Modern Met 

Crocodile tears have a use after all! Some bugs will actually land near a crocodile’s eyes to drink their tears. Ecologist Carlo de la Rosa noticed that some bugs were perched near a crocodile’s eyes while he was traveling the Puerto Viejo River in Costa Rica  He then found out that the bees and butterflies drink crocodile tears for their salt intake. 

(via Flipboard) 

Image screenshot via Flipboard 

If you notice your phone battery capacity dropping after a year or two of use: that’s normal, because rechargeable batteries slowly lose capacity over time. Charging your phone while you sleep is also a bad habit to adopt, especially if you’re partially charging your phone’s battery between 20 to 80 percent, as Make Use Of details: 

Manufacturers specify the life expectancy of smartphones through "battery charge cycles." A charge cycle is defined as charging the battery from 0 to 100 percent and then discharged back down to 0 percent. The number of expected charge cycles will tell you how many full cycles the battery can handle before it noticeably starts to lose capacity.

Avoid extremes to extend your battery life. Partial charges and discharges that combine to 100 percent count as a single full cycle. By partially charging and discharging between 20 and 80 percent, you could get 1,000 full cycles or more before hitting a noticeable drop in capacity. That's almost three years of daily charges.

Why does this happen? It's due to how your battery actually works. These batteries are made of a lithium cobalt oxide layer and a graphite layer. Lithium ions move from the graphite to the lithium cobalt oxide to release energy. Charging your battery moves those ions back to the graphite layer.

That's why either extreme damages the battery: you're compromising the cell's integrity because over-stuffing a layer with Lithium increases internal resistance.

Image via Make Use Of 

Uh, what? OpenAI has built a new model called DALL·E that could combine language and images in a way that will make artificial intelligence algorithms better at understanding both words and what they refer to. DALL-E is an attempt by developers to have AIs be better at understanding what words and sentences mean. Now where does the avocado armchair come in? Technology Review has that one covered: 

To test DALL·E’s ability to work with novel concepts, the researchers gave it captions that described objects they thought it would not have seen before, such as “an avocado armchair” and “an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog.” In both these cases, the AI generated images that combined these concepts in plausible ways.

The armchairs in particular all look like chairs and avocados. “The thing that surprised me the most is that the model can take two unrelated concepts and put them together in a way that results in something kind of functional,” says Aditya Ramesh, who worked on DALL·E. This is probably because a halved avocado looks a little like a high-backed armchair, with the pit as a cushion. For other captions, such as “a snail made of harp,” the results are less good, with images that combine snails and harps in odd ways.

DALL·E is the kind of system that Riedl imagined submitting to the Lovelace 2.0 test, a thought experiment that he came up with in 2014. The test is meant to replace the Turing test as a benchmark for measuring artificial intelligence. It assumes that one mark of intelligence is the ability to blend concepts in creative ways. Riedl suggests that asking a computer to draw a picture of a man holding a penguin is a better test of smarts than asking a chatbot to dupe a human in conversation, 

Image via Technology Review 

It’s something we are all familiar with: liquid glass. Scientists at the University of Konstanz have identified liquid glass as a new state of matter. Glass is actually not a liquid, as much as other people would tell you, it is an amorphous solid: 

Normally when a substance transitions from a liquid to a solid, the formerly free-flowing atoms line up into a rigid crystal formation. That’s not the case with glass though: its atoms “freeze” in their disordered state.

In the new study, the researchers discovered a form of glass where the atoms exhibit a complex behavior that’s never been seen in bulk glass before. Essentially, the atoms can move but aren’t able to rotate.

The team made this discovery in a model system of colloidal suspensions. These mixtures are made up of large solid particles suspended in a fluid, making it easier for scientists to observe the physical behavior of atoms or molecules. Normally these particles are spheres, but for this experiment the team used elliptical ones so they could tell which direction they were pointing.

Image via New Atlas 

Okay, so maybe we’re still in our homes, and it’s been a long year. That doesn’t mean we should stop dreaming of places we could travel when this whole pandemic is over, right? If you like daydreaming like me, or want to note future locations you want to travel to, Euronews has a list of the prettiest fairytale-esque villages in Spain. Check the full piece here. 

Image via Euronews

The aquarium becomes the goldfish's new home and new football field! A man from Guangdong, China, was able to train his five Ranchu goldfish to shoot a ball into a goal. Wow! Yang Tianxin trained his goldfish for a long time, and the results are worth his efforts. Now I will be waiting for the annual goldfish soccer event at sporting events, thank you very much. 

It even feels like the fabric is sentient as it dances against these beautiful landscapes. London-based photographer Neal Grundy’s ongoing series, Transient Sculptures, consists of photos of shimmering fabrics dancing in front of different landscapes. His photos capture the movement of the fabrics in a single moment, as Plain Magazine details: 

In his ongoing series, Grundy employs his still skills in capturing a collection of shimmering fabrics dancing in front of a range of landscapes. His work is all the more beautiful given the lives of his ‘subjects’ that are lost outside of the moment the shutter snaps. His photographic sculptures capture the fabric in a single moment, its solid structure a mere illusion only recorded then and there by the camera. Shot during the UK’s Covid lockdown in early 2020, the series is backdropped by East Sussex’s coastal landscape. Discover more of his work on his website and on Instagram.

Image via Plain Magazine

US Coast Guard veteran Craig J. Gordnier transformed a 1999 Blue Bird school bus into a house on wheels. The transformation was a solo project that ran for 200 days. The result of his hard work was a surprisingly spacious and cozy home. It even comes with an espresso bar! Designboom has more details: 

craig began by raising the original roof by 20 inches, resulting in a maximum ceiling height of 8ft 6 inches. the interior is split into kitchen, living, and sleeping accommodation, with the bed located at the rear of the bus and the kitchen counter positioned at the front. 

partitioned off from the bed is a rainfall shower with skylight above. the bus also features a tiled hearth to match the shower, an artificial fireplace, an 11ft poured epoxy kitchen counter, a full espresso bar, a queen size pull out couch, and stainless steel appliances. everything is 100% powered by the sun thanks to solar panels on the roof.

the new home was designed and built by craig and he now lives and travels full time in the 1999 blue bird. to see more pictures of the transformation, and to follow craig on his journeys across the US, you can check out his instagram page here, where he posts to over 11k followers.

Image via Designboom 

People in the past envisioned flying cars by the year 2010. Yeah, sorry about that, but we have yet to achieve the flying cars we see in films. While most of us are scrolling through various ‘yearly fortunes’ and tarot card readings for a sneak peek of what can happen to us this year, it’s also fun to check out what people from a full century ago envisioned for us. Entrepreneur’s Jason Feifer compiles the predictions people from 1921 had for the year 2021. Do you think some of it will come true or has already come true? 

Image via the Entrepreneur

 The deadly dance floor where John the Baptist was sentenced to death has been found by archaeologists. A courtyard uncovered at Machaerus in Jordan is likely the area where Salome danced so well that she was able to ask for John the Baptist’s head as a reward. Live Science has the details: 

At Herod Antipas' birthday party, Herodias' daughter, named Salome, performed a dance that so delighted Herod Antipas that the king promised her anything she wanted as a reward. Salome, goaded on by Herodias, asked for the head of John the Baptist. Herod Antipas was reluctant to grant the request, according to the Bible, but he ultimately decided to fulfill it and had John the Baptist's head brought to Salome on a platter. 

A courtyard uncovered at Machaerus is likely the place where Salome's dance was performed and where Herod Antipas decided to have John the Baptist beheaded, wrote Győző Vörös, director of a project called Machaerus Excavations and Surveys at the Dead Sea, in the book "Holy Land Archaeology on Either Side: Archaeological Essays in Honour of Eugenio Alliata" (Fondazione Terra Santa, 2020). The courtyard, Vörös said, has an apsidal-shaped niche that is probably the remains of the throne where Herod Antipas sat. 

Whether or not the discovered area is the actual location where John the Baptist was beheaded remains unknown. But hey, at least we can associate a place in real life towards the event now, right? 

Image via Live Science 

Don’t worry, it’s not a fictional movie. A feature film based on the Rubik’s Cube will be made by Hyde Park Entertainment Group and Endeavor Content. The film isn’t the only media that Hyde Park Entertainment is making based on the iconic toy. The company, in partnership with Glassman Media, is also making a game show based on the toy. 

Image via wikimedia commons