Don’t worry, these ones aren’t real. They look real scary at first glance though, not gonna lie. Mister Finch takes scraps of brocade and cotton fabric to form creatures that look like they came straight out of a fairy tale, or a horror film. His creations contain so much detail that will unnerve viewers (or take a second look to check if it’s real). The Leeds-based artist’s recent pieces are oversized spiders that he photographs suspended from the ceiling, as Colossal details: 

“I love the way this looks and enables me to dress and humanize them, which is something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Although the ongoing pandemic has stifled the artist’s foraging of fabrics and other materials in recent months, Finch notes that he’s been pulling textiles from his home stash and occasionally visiting fairs and markets. He’s also been scaling down his sculptures so that they’re easier to handle without assistance.

Finch published two books filled with his fairytale-style sculptures and settings in recent years—and currently is working on a third—which you can purchase in his shop along with cards and totes. Dive further into his eccentric projects on Instagram.

Image via Colossal 

What’s a famous mythical creature in your country? Have you ever wondered if other countries have the same kind of mythical beast in their fables and stories? No worries, as SavingSpot of CashNetUSA has put together a list of every country’s most famous mythical creature. This list is not just boring text, no, it comes in a stunning map, filled with wonderful illustrations, as Nerdist details: 

First SavingSpot compiled a long list of famous mythical beasts using Heather Frigiola’s Monsters and Mythical Creatures From Around the World, Wikipedia, and “numerous independent sites.” To then find each nation’s most popular legend “the research team ranked them by total search results on Google, using the search terms “[Country] + [Mythical Creature].”

What they found was that many countries share the same monsters, even though they sometimes have slight differences. For example lots of countries fear dragons, but not all dragons look the same.

Image via Nerdist

There’s a charm to the emptied-out malls, beaches, museums, and other tourist spots where a lot of people would be if it weren’t for the pandemic. These once busy venues are now shadows of their former selves. As sad as that may sound for the businesses and workers that will lose money this year, it is for everyone's safety.  Stacker compiled 50 photos showing how COVID-19 has affected the tourism trade. Check out Press of Atlantic City’s full piece on these gorgeous yet uncanny and calm photos here. 

Image via Press of Atlantic City 

Avee Shabazz of Birmingham, Alabama, wanted to help his daughter achieve her own financial freedom, so he bought her a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home for her thirteenth birthday. I only got a birthday cake for my thirteenth birthday, and Ajala Shabazz gets a house, wow (congrats to her though, a house is such a big deal!). Her dad wanted her to be comfortable as she grows up, as Atlanta Black Star details: 

“The objective is to be comfortable,” said Shabazz. “Whatever that means to her is what it means to her. She determines that, right? If she’s cool with having a house without paying bills and working a job, that’s her choice, right? But if she wants to grow it into a multi-million- dollar empire, that’s her choice.”

Ajala says she was excited to receive the big gift, but she also admits she was a little scared.

“I felt like I was too young, you know?” Ajala said. “Like, people always say you’re too young to do this or do that and my dad just gave me a house when I was 13.”

She says she instantly thought of all the things that could possibly go wrong.

“I’m not very good when it comes to responsibility,” she admitted. “And when I’m given responsibility, I suddenly feel anxious and nervous. Am I going to screw this up? Is something bad going to happen? I just think of all the possibilities.”

But her dad stepped in to offer her some encouragement. He believes she is ready and responsible enough. Shabazz is a real estate investor and says Ajala simply needs to do what she’s watched him do over the years.

Image via  Atlanta Black Star

This image taken by NASA’s Hubble Telescope shows the birth of a new star in the Cassiopeia constellation. Isn’t it amazing that we can get a glimpse of how the universe works outside the Earth? What seems like a lovely photo for us commoners tells astronomers a lot of things about how stars form in these stellar nurseries called Free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globules (frEGGs). 

(via LightStalking)

Image via LightStalking 

There may be danger in the chemicals mixed with the commercial cleaners and disinfectants we find handy during the pandemic. While these products can help us sanitize areas in our home (or other places) that can keep us safe from COVID-19, they also pose a threat to our own health. The chemicals that give disinfectants and sanitizers their pleasing scents are linked to cause headaches, skin rashes, asthma, immune system dysfunction, and heart trouble.

Check the full piece here. 

Image via Medium

It doesn’t seem that the pandemic will disappear soon. Some people are buying a lot of items and appliances to decorate or add more life to their homes for the winter holidays spent at home. During the early months we saw people flock to the shelves to buy toilet papers, disinfectants, fitness equipment, and bicycles. However, the trend has shifted, and people are now focused on buying kitchen equipment and decorations that can spark joy or calm the nerves. Check out The New York Post’s list on what people are buying for the winter. Maybe you can get an idea for what you can get for yourself this holiday season! 

Image via The New York Post

NASA announced plans to put 4G Internet on the moon. That’s right, the Internet is no longer an Earth-exclusive technology. NASA will partner with Nokia, designating the company as its official cellular provider. Maybe astronauts can now post selfies or statuses straight from the moon, as Paper Magazine details: 

Nokia is expected to upgrade to 5G from 4G over time, allowing astronauts to communicate through audio and video calls, among other things. The use of their internet and wireless communication will help with data transmission, including command and control functions, remote navigation of lunar robots, streaming high-definition video in space, exchanging biometric data, etc.

In a statement, Marcus Weldon, chief technology officer at Nokia, detailed the company's plans for moon mobile phone network technology: "Leveraging our rich and successful history in space technologies, from pioneering satellite communication to discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation produced by the Big Bang, we are now building the first ever cellular communications network on the Moon," he explains, "Reliable, resilient and high-capacity communications networks will be key to supporting sustainable human presence on the lunar surface."

Ultimately, according to Nokia, their and NASA's shared goal is to "deploy the first LTE/ 4G communications system in space" and "help pave the way towards sustainable human presence on the lunar surface."

Image via Paper Magazine 

A company has created a tool that uses artificial intelligence to create a lot of designs for urban developments in a short time. Delve, created by Sidewalk Labs, generates options based on different criteria such as budget, location, and size. The program then ranks the designs it generates so developers can pick the most plausible design for their projects, as Dezeen details: 

The project leverages machine learning, an application of artificial intelligence that uses a base set of data and learns and improves with experience. To create the basis for Delve designs, Sidewalks Labs made a starter model of core components typically used in neighbourhood developments.

"City neighbourhoods have unique personalities, but they also share a lot of the same core components," Sidewalk Labs' director of product management Okalo Ikhena told Dezeen.

"Our team has built a model of these core components that includes buildings, open spaces, amenities, streets, and energy infrastructure," Ikhena added.

"By applying machine learning to that model, Delve explores millions of design possibilities for a given project, measuring the impact of these designs to help development teams arrive at the one that's right for them."

Image via Dezeen

Maybe this program can help our archaeologists and historians to decipher old artifacts inscribed with a language they haven’t encountered or deciphered yet. The system’s creators, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), claim that the program can decipher a lost language without knowledge of its relation to other languages, as VentureBeat details: 

This CSAIL work, which was supported in part by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and spearheaded by MIT professor Regina Barzilay, a specialist in natural language processing, leverages several principles grounded in insights from historical linguistics. For instance, while a given language rarely adds or deletes a sound, certain sound substitutions are likely to occur. A word with a “p” in the parent language may change into a “b” in the descendant language, but changing to a “k” is less likely due to the significant pronunciation gap.

By incorporating these and other linguistic constraints, Barzilay and Luo developed a decipherment algorithm that can handle the vast space of transformations and the scarcity of a signal in the input. The algorithm learns to embed language sounds into a multidimensional space where differences in pronunciation are reflected in the distance between corresponding vectors. This design enables the system to capture patterns of language change and express them as computational constraints. The resulting model can segment words in an ancient language and map them to counterparts in a related language.

With the new system, the relationship between languages is inferred by the algorithm; the algorithm can assess the proximity between two languages. Moreover, when tested on known languages, it can accurately identify language families.

Image via VentureBeat 

AQUA, created by OG Design, is a contained and sustainable gardening system. The compost system lets people curate their own self-sustaining indoor garden. AQUA  is composed of a container for food waste, an elevated light structure, and three soil pots. The system turns food waste into fertilizer for the soil pots, as Yanko Design details: 

OG Design conceptualized AQUA in order to “[keep] food from entering landfills” and for users “to cultivate their own small vegetable garden,” because food accounts for 46.2% of combustible waste. The interest in gardening, especially indoor gardening, and sustainable living is rising with younger generations as city living becomes more popular. In urban spaces, ecologically conscious living is tricky as there’s less yard space and community gardens can be hard to come by. AQUA makes sustainable living possible for any city home, from the small efficiency studio to the three-story townhouse. As long as you’ve got a kitchen counter or windowsill, your personal vegetable garden awaits.

Image via Yanko Design

Losing someone, even a pet, is tough. Some people take a long time to accept their departure and move on. A woman from Cedar Falls, Iowa, lost her precious cat Mr. Tufts some time ago, leaving her in mourning. However, she decided to get a new cat that looks exactly like her previous furry companion. It’s not coincidence, because her new cat is a clone of the previous one, as Oddee details: 

ViaGen Pets is a pet cloning and genetic preservation company. They have extensive experience in cloning animals. The firm’s helped preserve the endangered Przewalski’s horse through cloning, for example.

Christman and the cat lady contacted ViaGen after Mr. Tufts had passed, asking about the possibility of cloning him. The company said that they could definitely do it, but it would cost the cat’s owner dearly.

Sounds like a deal with the devil, but no eternal souls were exchanged in this transaction. Only cold, hard cash. A total of $35,000 worth of it.

Apparently, no price was too high for our cat owner, since she coughed up the money. Christman sent the extracted genetic material over to ViaGen, and their experts got to work.

Melain Rodriguez, ViaGen’s client services manager, said they replaced the nucleus of a female cat’s egg with one of the frozen cells from Mr. Tufts. Then, they joined the egg and cell together and transferred the whole shebang to surrogate cat mother.

After a normal feline pregnancy and birth, Mr. Tufts Jr. entered the world.

Image via Oddee 

She should not have stolen it in the first place. This Canadian woman decided to return the ancient artifacts she stole after fifteen years of bad luck. The woman, named Nicole, went to Pompeii in 2005 and took two ancient white mosaic tiles, a piece of a ceramic wall, and fragments of an amphora case. Nicole returned these artifacts along with an apology letter, as Vice details: 

“I was young and stupid. I wanted to have a piece of history that no one could have,” Nicole, now 36, says in the letter.

Nicole has since blamed her heist on years of terrible luck, including two battles with breast cancer, a double mastectomy, and her family’s financial struggles.

“We are good people and I don't want to pass this curse on to my family or children,” the letter says. “Forgive me for the gesture made years ago, I learned my lesson...I am asking the forgiveness of the Gods.”

Nicole then writes that she plans to visit Italy soon, so she can apologize in person.

Image via Vice 

Because of the pandemic, most live events are cancelled for everyone’s safety. That’s why most of us can’t go to live concerts and experience seeing our favorite artists perform their songs live. A new innovative speaker called Oda might just be an alternative way for concert goers to listen to their faves’ live music, as Fast Company details: 

Oda is unique in that it’s more akin to having Zoom on sleep mode all the time, and musicians can just walk up, activate it, and play.

The Oda speaker is paired with a membership ($79 for a three-month “season”), which gives the listener access to programming that plays through the speaker—and nowhere else. 

Musicians are paid for evening performances or weekend residencies. The artist is in charge of the experience: They simply press a button to activate the speakers and play direct to listeners. Just like a live tour or a ballet, there’s a calendar of performances, so there’s no changing the channels, but listeners can check out the lineup online before buying a membership. Listeners can put the speaker on “do not disturb” mode if they don’t want to listen to music; they can also use the Oda speakers to play their own music via Bluetooth or a line-in connection.

Image via Fast Company

Your dog probably knows you so well (by your scent or something else) that it can recognize you even when you’re disguised well, or not at all. This dog owner tried to see if his dog can recognize him even if his face is completely covered by some sunglasses and a face mask. Will the dog recognize his owner while happily strolling in the park? Watch to find out!