If you’re wondering how entities like Goodwill sell people’s donations and where the profits go, this piece from Good Day LA will fill you in. With people cleaning and emptying their closets, Goodwill has received a surge of donations. Find out how they sort, organize, and sell them here.
(via Flipboard)
Image screenshot via Flipboard
The way these sculptures move along with the wind is mesmerizing. If someone used a video of Anthony Howe’s kinetic sculptures for hypnotizing anyone, it could work. The Washington-based artist’s sculptures weigh hundreds of pounds, but they can move with the slightest breeze. Just watch how his artworks move on his YouTube channel. Honestly, it’s very pleasing to watch.
Image via Colossal
History has done these women a disservice. However, an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts aims to give them the recognition they deserve for their contribution to the fashion industry. The exhibition, called Made It: The Women Who Revolutionized Fashion, highlights female designers, artisans, and innovators who made their mark in fashion, as Fast Company details:
“While we’re interested in how women have contributed to fashion design, there are lots of other stories that emerge,” says Petra Slinkard, the museum’s curator of fashion and textiles who put together this exhibit.
She points out that for much of history, making clothes was one of the few socially acceptable professions for women. But female workers were often doing the most dangerous, back-breaking work. Two centuries after the French seamstresses formed a guild, 145 workers—most of them women—lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City.
Today, women make up 85% of the 40 million garment workers, which are some of the lowest-paid laborers in the world. “Since women’s job options are limited, women have been treated as expendable,” Slinkard says. “Employers also thought they could pay women less because they had husbands who could support them, which was not always true. We feature many single mothers in the exhibit.”
Image via Fast Company
We’re going full Vocaloid this time? Just in case you have no idea what Vocaloids are, they are AI singers that are fed songs to sing- actual songs created by humans. Back to the topic at hand, Spotify submitted a patent application to the European Patent Register. The patent, which offers near real-time plagiarism analysis for artists, also has another side to it. The patent, as Input Magazine points out, seems to be a building block for the streaming company to create its own AI-generated music:
Earlier this year, Spotify filed a patent application for a process that required a plagiarism interface. This process is focused on creating content using an AI model. Instead of training the model directly on existing content, however, it would clone the existing content and train its model on this cloned content — if it passes the plagiarism interface unscathed.
This process creates lawsuit-proof samples that could be used by Spotify to create its own music or be sold by the Swedish company to record labels, producers, etc. Considering all the data Spotify has on its users and how they respond to its music library, the potential for AI-generated bangers is limitless.
Image via Input Magazine
Well, it’s just a possible solution, but if it does work, then we can expect to sustain life on the red planet just like what was written on those sci-fi novels! Scientists have racked their brains in order to find a way to provide oxygen for NASA astronauts that would land on the planet in the 2030s:
The way NASA plans to address this problem is by deploying MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This system is in the testing phase on the Mars Perseverance rover, which launched in July. The apparatus will convert the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the gas in the red planet's' atmosphere into oxygen.
On Mars, oxygen is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, compared to 21% of the Earth's atmosphere.
Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have now said they may have come up with another technique that could complement MOXIE.
The MOXIE system essentially produces oxygen like a tree -- pulling in the Martian air with a pump and using an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2.
The experimental technique proposed by Vijay Ramani and his colleagues uses a completely different resource -- salty water in lakes beneath the Martian surface.
Image via CNN
Would you throw $10,000 on a bet? I wouldn’t! Well, at least Alpharad is aware of the fact that people won’t like where that huge amount of sponsored money will go- but hey, it’s content, right? Watch as he pulls other YouTubers into betting on Mario Party NPCs like it’s a horse race. Maybe the future of gambling will be betting on NPCs!
Maybe researchers can discover the dimensions Dr. Strange can travel in and out of, damn. All jokes (or references) aside, a new study shows that the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest atom smasher, could open a window to learning more about gravity, and possibly, unknown dimensions. Space gives us details on the wild theory that our universe may be studded with small black holes that they could exist in between atoms! Check the full piece here to learn more.
Image via Space
Thanks to remote sensing equipment, experts have discovered an ancient landscape of mounded villages in the Amazon. The ancient villages, which could only be seen below the rainforest canopy, were laid out like a clock face. These mounded villages were estimated to have been built between 1300 and 1700 AD:
This is further evidence the rainforest has long-been occupied by indigenous communities, whose cultures rose, fell, transformed, and rose again, long before Europeans made an impact in the Americas. The research shows after the abandonment of the large geometrically patterned ceremonial earthworks, around AD 950, a new culture arose with communities living in mounded villages with highly defined concepts of social and architectural space.
The circular mound villages are connected across the wider landscape through paired sunken roads with high banks that radiate from the village circle like the marks of a clock or the rays of the sun. The villages have both minor roads and principal roads, which were deeper and wider with higher banks. Most villages have paired cardinally orientated principal roads, two leaving in a northward direction and two leaving in a southward direction. The survey reveals that the straight roads often connect one village to another, creating a network of communities over many kilometers.
Image via Phys.org
We will probably continue evolving until our species is fully wiped from the Earth. Surprisingly, human evolution hasn’t stopped after Homo sapien became the last hominid to exist. Thanks to our environment constantly changing, along with natural selection, our bodies are trying to adapt to changes- just not in very obvious ways. Inverse writes about the three ways modern humans are evolving. Check the full piece here.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Are you waiting for Marvel’s phase 4 of movies to come out? If you want to keep the hype train running, you might want to rewatch all previously-released Marvel movies, in chronological order (I mean, you could still watch them in their release order, but maybe some movies wouldn’t make sense in the whole cinematic universe’s timeline...and that could get confusing). Alternatively, if you’re looking for another reason to watch the huge heap of Marvel movies, maybe you could finally watch them in chronological order! Regardless of motivations, ShortList has got us covered with their guide on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Check it out and have fun!
Image via ShortList
What do officials mean by inappropriate, anyway? While Salma El-Shimy was not arrested because of indecency, authorities still claim that the Egyptian model and influencer’s outfit, a short white dress with a pharaonic beaded belt and necklace, was “inappropriate.” She was actually arrested for having a photoshoot at an archaeological site in Giza without a permit. She has been released from arrest and is now awaiting trial.
(via Art Net)
Image via Art Net
The answer usually comes in the form of emulation or replaying old games (hey, there’s no harm in replaying old games). However, my bet is on the fact that if you do have an old Wii console, it’s probably stashed somewhere in your home. It doesn’t really have to sit unused, as it could be repurposed for different kinds of things besides gaming, if you have the time and patience to tweak a few things here and there. Make Use Of lists some ideas you could use for your old Nintendo Wii. Check their full piece here.
Image via Make Use Of
Ah, the power of optical illusion! A morphing installation outside the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts wows visitors with its rippling lines and geometric forms. The installation’s shape fully emphasizes the mural that covers it. The mural, called Moving Dunes, was designed to challenge the role of perspective in visual representation:
“We feel that the installation is a kind of public/exterior extension of the exhibition,” Proulx tells My Modern Met, “so the visitor could immerse themselves in an abstract and playful environment, a giant ‘trompe l’oeil' in reference to cubist techniques.” The architecture firm achieved that aim through the use of an optical illusion process called anamorphosis, which requires the viewer to observe the mural from a particular vantage point in order to fully appreciate its form. Experiencing it from alternate viewpoints would break the illusion.
Image via My Modern Met
British Royal Air Force was able to capture photos of the world’s largest iceberg as it headed towards the South Atlantic, specifically toward South Georgia Island. The photos of the iceberg, called A68a, were taken by a British military aircraft, which was able to get close to the iceberg:
In a Facebook post, British officials note that because of the iceberg's massive size, it's nearly impossible to photograph it in full with the exception of satellite imagery.
The chunk of ice cleaved off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in 2017 at a reported size of roughly 2,300 square miles. Researchers have noted for some weeks now that A68a has been on a collision with the island of South Georgia.
The iceberg is roughly 130 miles off the island's coast and could run aground in shallow coastal waters.
The government there said Saturday that it's keeping a close eye on the iceberg's trajectory.
Image via NPR
Yikes. At least put some clothes on, man! Imagine seeing him break into your home in real time! A family from Massachusetts discovered a naked man breaking into their home from their security cameras. The man picked up a rock and smashed a window on the door. Don’t worry, the family managed to call the cops on him. But why was he butt naked?
(via Flipboard)
Image via Flipboard
