Listen, you really wouldn’t want to act like an asshole in a country that you’re just visiting, right? Pretty sure most of us would like a peaceful tourist experience once we get the chance to get out of our homes. If you’re planning to visit Japan in the future, make sure not to do certain things (that may offend or be considered rude by the residents). Check Live Japan’s list of rules and customs you should observe while visiting! 

Image via Live Japan 

Oh, to reach a destination without spending long hours on the road in traffic. Now that’s a future people can get behind! Fast technology transportation may be closer to completion. Hyperloop technology claims that it could transport people and goods at speeds of up to 600 miles an hour. A company developing the technology has managed to move its employees through a test system: 

Virgin Hyperloop became the first company to conduct a human test of the technology on Sunday at its 500-meter test track in the desert north of Las Vegas. The two volunteers, wearing casual street clothes, were whisked in a pod that was levitated by magnets inside a vacuum tube to 107 m.p.h. in 6.25 seconds.

The riders sat in molded seats covered in white vegan leather, housed inside the all-white carbon fiber-clad pod.

While the G-forces on the pod were three times that of an airplane, “it was much smoother than I expected,” said Sara Luchian, 37, one of the test riders and the company’s director of passenger experience. And unlike an airplane, there were no lateral forces that would have caused the pod to sway, she said.

“It felt not that much different than accelerating in a sports car,” said Josh Giegel, 35, the company co-founder and the other volunteer rider.

“This is a step of historical significance,” said Jay Walder, the company’s chief executive, pointing to 20 months of planning. “I don’t think you can overstate it. This is a moonshot moment. I have no doubt this will change the world.”

Image via the New York Times 

Okay, maybe exercise some caution instead, if you don’t want to think twice. According to experts, you really don’t have to regularly clean your ears. Dr. Kris Jatana, M.D., says that it might do us more harm than good because the ear canals are usually self-cleaning. Ear wax actually works to protect your ears from dirt and dust while keeping the inside of your ear moisturized: 

As Dr. Kris Jatana, M.D., told MedicineNet, "The two biggest misconceptions I hear as an otolaryngologist are that the ear canals need to be cleaned in the home setting, and that cotton tip applicators should be used to clean them — both of those are incorrect." 

"Using cotton tip applicators to clean the ear canal not only pushes wax closer to the ear drum, but there is a significant risk of causing minor to severe injury to the ear," Jatana warned. According to ear specialist Dr. Yu-Tung Wong, doing so may bring on punctured eardrums and hearing loss. "In severe cases, the cotton swab can damage many sensitive structures behind the ear canal and cause complete deafness, prolonged vertigo with nausea and vomiting, loss of taste function, and even facial paralysis," he told Cedars-Sinai.

Image via Health Digest 

Unfortunately, people outside of France can’t experience this latest feature yet. Netflix is now testing a feature that can give its users an ability to let the service take over and tell them what to watch. Direct is a new, always-running feature that serves as a real-time TV channel populated with shows, movies, and more from the service: 

For now, the feature is only being tested in France, where Netflix says it is being “gradually deployed” as of Thursday, November 5th, and will eventually be accessible to everyone in the country by early December. As the company says in a news release, traditional TV viewing is still very popular in France, and subscribers there want to have the option to view content on the service without having to choose what to watch first.

Not only is this a great way to avoid the stress of having to decide what to watch, but as Netflix puts it, “you can let yourself be carried away without having to choose a particular title and let yourself be surprised by the diversity of the Netflix catalog.” As an aside, this quote has been Google-translated from French, so it might not actually be a perfect translation. Regardless, having a “live TV channel” of Netflix content does seem like a great way to introduce people to shows and movies they might not have even considered watching before seeing them on Direct.

Image via BGR 

A St. Louis couple is not only facing felony gun charges for pointing guns at protestors, they are also in another legal dispute with a photographer who shot a viral photo of them. It turns out that the couple, attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey used a viral photo of them shot by United Press International (UPI) photojournalist William Greenblatt: 

 He hadn’t given the couple permission to use his photo in any way, and therefore their cards seemed to be a clear-cut case of copyright infringement.

“Being lawyers, they should know copyright laws, but apparently they feel like they don’t need to adhere to any of that,” Greenblatt tells PetaPixel.

In response to the cards, Greenblatt sent the couple a bill while UPI sent a cease-and-desist letter.

“I am in the business of selling images,” Greenblatt writes. “I do not give them away for free. Enclosed you will find an invoice for $1500.00, a normal charge for an image such as yours.”

Mark McCloskey responded by posting the letter to Facebook.

“This made my day: the photographer that trespassed into my neighborhood and stole a photo of us has sent us a bill!!!!!” McCloskey writes. “Now be nice and don’t bother him, but what chutzpah.”

Greenblatt says the couple has yet to respond to his letter, and that it’s not money he’s after — he simply wants to protect his copyright as a photographer.

“People steal work all the time. They take it and feel that it’s theirs. […] It makes me mad that they feel they can use the image just because it’s of them,” the photographer says. “It’s not even the money. I could care less about the money.

Image via PetaPixel 

Let’s get real, it’s hard to keep up with a healthy diet. Some of us might not have enough resources or time to prepare a well-balanced diet. But there are other ways to look out for our health, too. Cardiologist Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University, shared what nutrients to look out for when you’re buying  packaged food. Check out Well and Good’s full piece here to know more!

Image via Well and Good 

Meet the Azzam, the world’s most expensive luxury yacht that belongs to Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of UAE. The yacht is far bigger than a football field, and larger than US Navy ships. A luxury water vehicle of this size and grandeur doesn’t come cheap at all, as the Azzam is estimated to have cost around $605 million : 

On average, a 100-meter superyacht can fall between $100-200 million. The Azzam is nearly six times this size. That’s hint number one.

Then there is the annual upkeep, usually standing at about 10% of the yacht’s, value, easily running into thousands of dollars, sometimes also touching millions. Being Middle East royalty helps in one living the good life. Of course, this is also the country where you get to see the craziest cars on the road, especially in Dubai.

Maintaining a yacht is no cakewalk. When you calculate dockage fees, annual maintenance and repairs, staff salaries, insurance premiums, and gas charges, one realizes that a yacht is much like a white elephant. Of not much use, but a lot of expense. Most yachts, therefore, can only be owned by the super-rich as a means to show off their wealth and also reap its harvests.

Considering it belongs to the president of the UAE, the details of what went inside are confidential for obvious security purposes.

That said; Azzam employs a staff of 50. The construction of the interior was by Germany’s Lürssen Yachts while for the exterior design, Italian firm Nauta Yachts were hired.

Image via Hot Cars 

The Gladstone Library is a Victorian Gothic style building that houses 150,000 works, including the books, papers, and letters of its founder, William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone was a four-time British prime minister who died in 1898. The library is also a registered charity that provides bed and breakfast  for those seeking time and space to write, or merely rest, in its unique atmosphere, as the Daily Beast details: 

“We provide a place to think, resources to help you think and people to share your thoughts with,” the library’s director and warden, Peter Francis, said. “Our main group of visitors are writers and academics but the three subject areas also entice individuals, so students, clergy, historians and politicians.”

It also has offered residential courses with titles like “Welsh in a Week” or “Jane Austen in a Week” and its website has a helpful A-to-Z guide that includes directions from train stations and tips for local walks including a Hawarden Characters and Customs tour.

Image via the Daily Beast 

We’ve seen a lot of discussions and theories as to what happened to the English settlers that mysteriously disappeared in 1585. What happened to the Roanoke Colony remains a mystery, but archaeologists and researchers are looking for new artefacts that can give us an idea of what happened to the colony. A team from the First Colony Foundation, a North Carolina nonprofit dedicated to researching the history of the ill-fated colony, has found a secret message on a centuries-old map : 

But researchers uncovered a new lead in 2012 while examining a map that White had painted of the Elizabethan-era United States, titled La Virginea Pars. Hidden in invisible ink, presumably to guard information about the colonies from the Spanish, were the outlines of two forts, one 50 miles west of Roanoke—the same distance away that the colonists had told White they planned to move, according to his writings.

The First Colony Foundation’s team of archaeologists, led by Nick Luccketti, set out to investigate the site in Bertie County, North Carolina, in 2015. Promisingly, the possible settlement was close to a Native American village called Mettaquem, typical of early European settlements.

There was no sign of a fort, but just outside the village wall the archaeologists found two dozen shards of English pottery at what’s been dubbed Site X. Ground-penetrating radar revealed another possible dig site two miles away.

Image via Art Net

Japanese company Muji has unveiled its work for earthquake-resistant architecture. The company has created a single-story wooden house in the Yamaguchi prefecture. The home is conducive to a holistic living environment, making movement around the house unrestricted by offering large hallways and entries into the house. The bonus perk? The home is durable against earthquakes:

The single-story abode has a terrace, garden, and airy rooms. Muji's house is open. There are no rigid separations or divisions like you may notice in the average modern house. By relying on an open face for the house, Muji architects emphasize architectural flexibility and instant adaptability. Your working and living habits are not dependent on or inhibited by austere lines and cuts in the house. The house sprawls 1,096 square feet, is mostly wooden, offers an airy environment during the summer, flexible dining units, and is priced at a little over 19 million yen. That's $182,000.

Image via Input

Did you know that 40 percent of the Universe’s matter was missing? Well, it’s actually an assumption made by the scientists, since this ‘missing’ matter was never detected. Until now, of course. Researchers from France’s National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) claimed that they found the missing 40 percent hidden away in a galaxy-connecting cosmic web, as Futurism details: 

The filaments of gas that make up the cosmic web are thought to connect networks of galaxies across vast voids of nothingness in the universe, according to a CNRS press release. Sometimes they also serve as a source of fresh material for nearby galaxies or black holes, making the web itself even more threadbare and faint.

The French researchers suggest that it’s because these cosmic web filaments are so diffuse, and the signals they give off are so weak, that they went undetected for 20 years even though all the data was in plain sight.

Image via Futurism 

If games include dogs and cats in their games, they should allow the player to pet them! I do not care if the dog looks like a horrible creature from Greek mythology, Cerberus is still a dog and I would like to pet the good boy (the Hades developers did let its players pet the Underworld dog, so good job!). But in general, most players would love to interact with pets and animals, even in the simplest ways (let me pet the dogs in Breath of the Wild, please). This mechanic apparently does not come easy. Check out Polygon’s Jenna Stoeber investigate how the petting mechanic is coded in games. 

The largest penguin species, the Palaeeudyptes klekowskii stood at  around 6 foot 8 inches. Wow, the penguin, should it have survived until today, would have rivaled basketball players’ heights! The mountainous bird’s 37-million-year-old fossilized remains were uncovered in Antarctica. The "colossus penguin" was truly the Godzilla of aquatic birds, as Tree Hugger details: 

Scientists calculated the penguin's dimensions by scaling the sizes of its bones against those of modern penguin species. They estimate that the bird probably would have weighed about 250 pounds — again, roughly comparable to LeBron James. By comparison, the largest species of penguin alive today, the emperor penguin, is "only" about 4 feet tall and can weigh as much as 100 pounds.

The fossil was found at the La Meseta formation on Seymour Island, an island in a chain of 16 major islands around the tip of the Graham Land on the Antarctic Peninsula. (It's the region that is the closest part of Antarctica to South America.) The area is known for its abundance of penguin bones, though in prehistoric times it would have been much warmer than it is today.

P. klekowskii towers over the next largest penguin ever discovered, a 5-foot-tall bird that lived about 36 million years ago in Peru. Since these two species were near contemporaries, it's fun to imagine a time between 35 and 40 million years ago when giant penguins walked the Earth, and perhaps swam alongside the ancestors of whales.

Image via Tree Hugger 

Long distance relationships are hard to maintain, alright. After long months of no contact with Voyager 2, NASA has finally reestablished communications with the spacecraft. The reason behind the lack of communication for eight months was less of a run-in with space shenanigans, but more of a case of routine maintenance, as Live Science details: 

In March, NASA announced that Deep Space Station 43 (DSS-43) in Australia, the only antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager 2, required critical upgrades and would need to shut down for approximately 11 months for the work to be completed.

During this window, Voyager 2, which is currently over 18.7 billion kilometers (11.6 billion miles) away from Earth and getting farther all the time, wouldn't be able to receive any communications from Earth, although its own broadcasts back to us would still be received As part of the refurb, DSS-43 is getting two new antennas, upgraded heating and cooling equipment, power supply equipment, and other electronics to support the new transmitters. When the work is complete, the upgrades will provide longevity to a cornerstone of a facility that's already legendary.

"What makes this task unique is that we're doing work at all levels of the antenna, from the pedestal at ground level all the way up to the feedcones at the centrer of the dish that extend above the rim," says NASA Deep Space Network project manager Brad Arnold.

"This test communication with Voyager 2 definitely tells us that things are on track with the work we're doing."

Image via Live Science 

Before anyone can pull some jokes, here’s a spoiler alert : it’s your face. According to dermatologists, people need to stop washing their faces in the shower. While it is convenient to wash our faces while we shower, it can cause a major moisture loss in our facial skin. The longer you spend in the shower, the higher the chance that doing so is drying your skin out, as Health Digest details: 

Dr. Justine Hextall, a consultant dermatologist, agrees, telling Women's Health that the longer you spend in the shower, the higher the chance that doing so is drying your skin out. "Natural moisture factors like ceramides, fatty acids, and oils help retain moisture levels in the skin," Dr. Hextall explained. "The problem is that they're water soluble — so if you run your face under the shower for 10 minutes you could literally rinse them away."

Secondly, shower water is often too hot, not only for your facial skin but for your entire body. "We may love hot showers, but our skin does not," Dr. Joshua Zeichner, M.D., a board-certified dermatologist, told Well+Good. "Hot water can strip the skin of oils, leading to dryness, irritation, and inflammation," he explained. According to Dr. King, showering with hot water can even result in broken capillaries. "A general rule of thumb for showering is to make it not too long, not too hot, and not too frequent," she advised Marie Claire.

Image via Health Digest