A World War II bomb was found in Poland. Weighing 12,000 pounds, the “Tallboy” or “Bomb, Medium Capacity,” detonated as Navy divers attempted to diffuse it. Yikes! Good thing all divers were out of the blast radius when the bomb went off, as Nerdist detailed:
Reuters described the Whoops-a-booms-y in a recent report, which comes via Digg. According to Reuters, the UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) dropped the bomb in 1945 near the port of Szczecin, in an attack on a German cruiser. It lied there, dormant, until September 2019, when workers deepening the waterway near the port discovered it. (Unfortunately, no signs of either the One Ring to rule them all, nor Godzilla, were reported along with the discovery.)
Don’t worry, it’s not a human tooth! A woman found a massive tooth at a beach in South Carolina. When Missy Tracewell posted the photo of her find on Facebook, social media users quickly put on their thinking hats on and started speculating on what type of creature could have owned the tooth:
"I would hate to meet face to face the mouth that it came out of. It had to be a big shark," one user wrote.
"Man I'm SO jealous!! I'm here at hunting Island right now and I've found about 48 smaller teeth so far but I've never found any that big. I'm so so so jealous," another replied.
Some, including Tracewell, suggested that the tooth belonged to a megalodon, an extinct species of shark that roamed the depths millions of years ago. They were the largest shark to ever live at nearly 60 feet in length.
Now, this is a great way to breathe new life into these things (ha!)! Industrial designer Sachi Tungare turned the 300 cigarette stubs she collected into different sculptures, such as bowls, lamp shades, and vases. The Delhi-based designer wanted to find out how can people properly repurpose or dispose of cigarette butts, as Fast Company detailed:
So Tungare began experimenting with ways to transform cigarette waste into something new. For weeks, she donned plastic gloves and gathered thousands of cigarette butts, ending up with enormous bags in her backyard. “It was a very stinky, dirty process,” she recalls. She found a way to sanitize the cigarettes with an enzyme-based organic bleach, then separated the plastic from the paper in order to recycle both. She dissolved the cellulose acetate, creating a solution that could be poured into molds. When the water evaporated, it hardened into the designs she created. She then paints them before leaving them to dry. “The beauty of the process is that when the water evaporates, it leaves a swirl pattern,” she says.
Now this is fascinating to watch. If you’re familiar with the multiplayer game Among Us, then you probably know how much the Internet loves the simple but charismatic game of doing tasks, or betraying all of your friends (or random people you play with). It’s a great game with simple but stylistic art style. But what happens if you render the game in full HD, kind of like the realism you would see in console games? Fat Dino shares what the game could be if rendered in the Unreal Engine.
This minimalistic structure doubles as a functional closet and stylish furniture. Meet Ori’s Pocket Closet, the winner of the A+Product Award for the Smart Building & Technology category. This movable wall is built smart indeed, as it provides a huge amount of storage space for clothes and other items while not grabbing a lot of your home’s surface area:
Ori’s smart space technology allows building space to be used more efficiently, optimizing designs with flexibility to enable the allocation of more units. Ori’s Pocket Closet is a smart, transformable spatial solution and divider that meets residential needs by increasing storage, privacy and room division — creating a walk-in closet, an entertainment center, home office and additional storage to any residential unit.
Born out of the MIT Media Lab, Ori’s sophisticated smart space technology enhances functionality and comfort through space optimization, increasing organization potential and space utility. Architects and designers now have a viable system that can be integrated earlier in the design process, reducing construction time while maximizing storage potential and square footage.
The Storm King Art Center’s picturesque views have attracted more visitors to Upstate New York. From the view atop the center’s Museum Hill to the intimate installations that can be spotted, such as Mark di Suvero’s sculpture Pyramidian (1987–98), the sculpture park is now accommodating more pieces to attract more visitors. During the pandemic, the center has become a hot destination, as Art News details:
During the current pandemic, with indoor museums seeming less appealing, the art center has become a bona fide destination—tickets are now selling out weeks in advance, making Storm King one of the hottest New York art spaces right now.
But before it became the sensation it is currently, Storm King started out relatively small. “The project began as a family-led institution,” John Stern, the president of Storm King since 2008, told ARTnews. “My grandfather started this from his love of the Hudson Highlands.”
Today, a facilities crew with fewer than a dozen members maintains the giant complex. They trim trees, replant native flora, and refurbish the sculptures. It often takes a full day to mow Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, a 240,000-square-foot rolling swell of grass. At any given time, the grounds contain around 115 sculptures, including permanent installations by Alexander Calder, Sol DeWitt, Isamu Noguchi, and Nam June Paik. Storm King senior curator Nora Lawrence explained that commissioned artists are encouraged to create works in tandem with the environment, with the understanding that the demands of the land may inform the final outcome. (Mercurial Upstate New York weather exerts its own will, too.)
Unlike conventional museums, Storm King will grapple with more existential threats in the coming years, as climate change demands new strategies of preservation. In the meantime, the institution faces expected challenges, such as how to be a better community partner or keep programming incisive. “We all want to continue to present people with what they’ve always loved about Storm King, but help evolve the idea of what outdoor sculpture can be,” Lawrence said.
Now this is just adorable. It’s nice to see how much love and attachment kids have with their furry companions. The little boy who can be seen sneaking out of bed to cuddle with his dog was usually found asleep next to his dog by his parents. They were curious to see how the little boy sneaked out to cuddle, so they set up a camera to record the whole ordeal. This is just adorable, really! Let the dog sleep next to him on his bed, please!
Under is a Michelin-starred restaurant located in Lindesnes, Norway. The restaurant is partially submerged five and a half meters below sea level in the North Sea. Dining inside makes you feel like you’re in a submarine, watching sea creatures swim along. Monte Cristo Magazine describes the restaurant as a grey whale in mid-dive, describing how the structure liquefies into the space between land and water. They relay how this one-of-a-kind restaurant tries to survive during the pandemic:
All is quiet, the lapping of waves hushed above. Ellitsgaard sits in the dining hall in chef’s whites and linen apron, his left arm outstretched and crawling with tattoos. He is framed by the 27-square-metre window that opens onto the wonders of the sea: sugar kelp forests, silvered pollack, and a lumpfish Ellitsgaard and his team affectionately call Ernie.
Forced to remain at home, the head chef grew restless after the first week. “I was building a garden, a project that would have taken me two years to finish but now I could do it in a week, and painting some stuff in the house. Then I didn’t know what else to do.” Like many businesses in Norway, the restaurant was buoyed up by a robust government support scheme. Staff stayed in the village and spent some days on Under’s fishing boat, Knipseren, watching fishermen pull up stone crab and langoustine. Ellitsgaard dove for sea urchin, the restaurant manager foraged for sorrel leaves. The restaurant itself was transformed into a sub-sea stage for livestreamed concerts, including a music video collaboration between composer Hans Zimmer and Norwegian DJ Alan Walker.
Ellitsgaard started visiting the restaurant, too, in the same way one sits beside a loved one in the hospital. The undercurrent of uncertainty loomed—but it felt good to be back. With his sous-chef on the other line, they tested and tasted and sketched out menus, as if Under itself were daring them to push harder.
Do you struggle when it comes to learning new languages as an adult? Apparently this phenomenon also applies not only to a select few, because scientists found new data on how language learning is notoriously difficult for adults. A new study offers an answer as to how the adult brain processes language learning:
Their results suggest learning a new language as an adult actually reroutes brain networks, igniting shifts that can have long-term implications on memory and cognitive function.
As skills improve, language comprehension changes how the two halves of the brain split functions, the study suggests. Language production — speaking that language — doesn't cause the same changes. In particular, the language lateralization changes observed were greatest when it came to reading a new language, smaller when it came to listening, and negligible in speaking.
Based on these findings, it appears that language production is hardwired in the left brain — but comprehension is more flexibly shared across hemispheres.
Co-author Kshipra Gurunandan is a researcher at the BCBL Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language. She tells Inverse these findings imply that, in some ways, adult brains are more flexible than previously hypothesized.
"The brain remains flexible enough to learn new languages well into adulthood, even if nailing the accent might get harder with age," Gurunandan says. "We surmise that for an adult, it might be easier to learn a language that has sounds similar to one’s native language."
Marty, a black Maine coon cat that patrolled the highest peak in the northeast U.S. for twelve years has died. The cat was the Mount Washington Observatory's mascot, loved as a special companion for the observers and state park staff, as AP News details:
The Mount Washington Observatory staff have had a cat at the 6,288-foot (1,915-meter) summit, called the “home of the world’s worst weather,” since 1932. The observatory had recently shared the news that Marty would retire from the mountain early in 2021.
A two-million-year-old skull has been discovered in South Africa by Australian researchers. According to them, the skull can provide more information on human evolution. The skull, a male Paranthropus robustus, is believed to be a “cousin species” to Homo erectus, as BBC details:
The two species lived around the same time, but Paranthropus robustus died out earlier.
The research team described the find as exciting.
"Most of the fossil record is just a single tooth here and there so to have something like this is very rare, very lucky," Dr Angeline Leece told the BBC.
The researchers, from Melbourne's La Trobe University, found the skull's fragments in 2018 at the Drimolen archaeological site north of Johannesburg.
It was uncovered just metres away from a spot where a similarly aged Homo erectus skull of a child was discovered in 2015.
Co-researcher Jesse Martin told the BBC that handling the fossil pieces was like working with "wet cardboard", adding he had used plastic straws to suck the last traces of dirt off them.
The current pandemic made a lot of us work from home. Most of our houses aren’t conducive to a working environment, maybe some of us are just using our dining room table, or any flat surface where our computers and files can be placed while we work. If you have the same issue, this article might just be a good place to get some inspiration on how to DIY a portion of your home into a ideal home office:
For four months, Kris McDonald and his wife both crowded around the dining room table to work from home. It was, as he says, “no longer working.” But when his wife put in an order for a new desk to call her own, they both realized that they didn’t actually have a place to put it—yet.
The unfinished attic in their home was sitting empty, so Kris drew up plans to turn it into a small “Jack and Jill” office space that would give them each a desk on opposite sides of the room. That way, they’d have their own space and would be able to retreat to their living areas in off-hours.
Check how Kris McDonald and his wife did the transformation over at Apartment Therapy.
Remember the Four Seasons location where Trump supporters were supposed to address the press? It turns out their staff made the wrong booking, and booked a Philadelphia landscaping business smack dab between a crematorium and a sex shop (instead of the hotel). The Internet had a field day laughing at the whole event, but it seems that even after former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and other supporters of President Donald Trump addressed the press, they still hadn’t had enough. Now the location exists in virtual reality (VR) and furries are rejoicing in the location:
Now, it exists in VR —complete with weathered detailing and a last-minute Trump 2020 podium. And rejoicing furries.
Coopertom, a fursuiter and popular YouTuber, posted a video on Twitter on Monday morning of furries circling the scene in joy on the massively multiplayer virtual reality platform VRChat.
According to a tweet, virtual versions of a neighboring crematorium and sex shop are “in the works.”
Have you ever wondered how big video game maps would be in real life? Alternatively, how do in-game maps compare to each other? Well, worry no more as MrRanker compares the in-game maps of different games. I was watching the entire thing as I waited for the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s map to show up. Did you see the map from your favorite game?
At a first glance, Sophia looks like an ordinary human. However, she is actually a social robot created by David Hanson, a former Disney Imagineer. Sophia’s features were inspired by Audrey Hepburn and Hanson’s wife. The social robot was designed and built to inspire feelings of love and compassion in humans. Photographer Giulio Di Sturco visited Sophia’s place of creation to know more about the star, as National Geographic details:
But for photographer Giulio Di Sturco, seeing Sophia at press events as her creators promoted their AI business SingularityNET wasn't enough. As he searched for a visual metaphor for the future, he wanted to see the robot's place of creation, too.
Eventually, Di Sturco became the first photographer to step inside Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics—a frenetic space spilling over with robotic parts and human technicians stitching them together. The setting's strangeness only deepened once he started photographing his most peculiar subject.
“In the beginning, it was a bit difficult. [Sophia] didn’t recognize the camera ... but after three days, she kind of learned,” Di Sturco says. “I don’t know if the engineer put something in the software, or if she went online and did some research, but she started to pose.
“It was actually really strange—at one point, I realized I was even speaking with her,” he adds. “I had to step back and realize that she was a robot, not a human being.”
