New research suggests that making people follow a huge amount of “eco-friendly” tips makes them less likely to do anything about climate change. There are better ways to convince people to be more mindful of their habits that can potentially damage the Earth in the long run. We don’t need to be nagged or guilt-tripped to do something, right? Researchers at Georgia State University surveyed 2,000 people online to see how they responded to different messages about climate change, as Grist detailed: 

Some saw messages about personal sacrifices, like using less hot water. Others saw statements about policy actions, like laws that would limit carbon emissions, stop deforestation, or increase fuel efficiency standards for cars. The messenger — whether scientist or not — didn’t make much of a difference.

Then the respondents were asked about their thoughts on climate change. The people who read advice about individual action were less likely to report that they believed in human-caused climate change, supported climate-friendly political candidates, or would act to reduce their own emissions.

While the advice about personal behavior spurred a negative response from people across the political spectrum, the effect was much stronger among Republicans than Democrats, said Risa Palm, a professor of urban geography at Georgia State and the lead author of the study.

On the other hand, “when the message was linked with policy issues, it didn’t have this kind of negative effect,” she said. Palm’s study reinforces previous research that people prefer wide-scale changes that don’t require them to change their own behavior. They simply don’t feel like anything they could do would make much of a difference.

Image via Grist

What were you doing when you were twelve years old? Maybe not looking for fossils, right? Pretty sure I was just trying to survive school when I was that young. This 12-year-old boy, however, has already made a  significant scientific discovery. Aspiring paleontologist Nathan Hrushkin and his father, Dion, discovered the partially exposed bones at Horseshoe Canyon in Canada, as Fox News details:

The Royal Tyrrell Museum sent a team of experts to the conservation site, who uncovered between 30 and 50 bones from the canyon’s wall.

“All of the bones collected belong to a single specimen, a juvenile hadrosaur approximately three or four years old,” the Nature Conservancy said, in the statement. “While hadrosaurs are the most common fossils found in Alberta’s Badlands, this particular specimen is noteworthy because few juvenile skeletons have been recovered and also because of its location in the strata, or the rock formation.”

“My dad and I have been visiting this property for a couple of years, hoping to find a dinosaur fossil, and we’ve seen lots of little bone fragments,” said aspiring paleontologist Nathan Hrushkin, in the statement. “This year I was exploring higher up the canyon and found about four bones. We sent pictures and to the Royal Tyrrell Museum and François, the paleontologist who replied, was able to identify one of the bones as a humerus from the photos so we knew we’d found something this time.”

Image via Fox News 

Hey, some people believe that crystals and other sparkly objects can get rid of some of our impurities, so maybe metals can also do that for us? Believe it or not, copper has a long history of being used as ornamentation. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that copper bracelets were marketed as a treatment for arthritis pain. Check out Discover Magazine’s full piece on the long history of copper here.  

Image via Discover Magazine

Because of the pandemic, the 80th Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual conference was held online. The conference software they were using was just slightly too strict when it comes to banned words, as experts’ messages were being censored by the software. Take for example what happened to Tyrannosaurus rex expert Thomas R. Holtz Jr. He was typing “Hell Creek Formation,” the rock unit in Montana where the remains of North America’s last giant dinosaurs have been found, but was surprised to see four asterisks replace the ‘hell’ in ‘Hell Creek Formation.’ The New York Times has more details: 

Puzzled, he described the issue on Twitter. Colleagues chimed in with other words that had been rejected by the software system set up to filter out profanities: knob, pubis, penetrate and stream, among others.

“Most funny to us was the censorship of ‘bone,’ which, after all, are the main thing we work with,” Mr. Holtz said.

Jessica Theodor, president of the society, said participants kept finding other words that triggered the asterisks and alerted the society’s leaders, who then relayed the information to Convey Services. The company quickly removed the words as it learned about them.

Paleontologists began having fun with the system.

They typed in random words to see which ones would result in asterisks. One created a meme that compared their efforts with those of the velociraptors in the film “Jurassic Park” that threw themselves against an electric fence to find weak spots.

“A couple of us chuckled and started calling Hell Creek ‘Heck Creek,’” said Stephanie K. Drumheller, a lecturer and paleontologist at the University of Tennessee.

Image via The New York Times

In the 35 years that people spent diving to the wreckage of the Titanic, no human remains have ever been found or recorded. People are still asking the question of whether or not we may still discover the remains of the people who were onboard the iconic ship. The question has been discussed in an ongoing court battle to block RMS Titanic’s plan to retrieve the ship’s radio equipment, as Daily News details:   

Lawyers for the U.S. government have raised that question in an ongoing court battle to block the planned expedition. They cite archaeologists who say remains could still be there. And they say the company fails to consider the prospect in its dive plan.

“Fifteen hundred people died in that wreck,” said Paul Johnston, curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “You can’t possibly tell me that some human remains aren’t buried deep somewhere where there are no currents.”

The company, RMS Titanic Inc., wants to exhibit the ship’s Marconi wireless telegraph machine. It broadcast the sinking ocean liner’s distress calls and helped save about 700 people in lifeboats.

Retrieving the equipment would require an unmanned submersible to slip through a skylight or cut into a heavily corroded roof on the ship’s deck. A suction dredge would remove loose silt, while manipulator arms could cut electrical cords.

RMS Titanic Inc. says human remains likely would’ve been noticed after roughly 200 dives.

“It’s not like taking a shovel to Gettysburg,” said David Gallo, an oceanographer and company adviser. “And there’s an unwritten rule that, should we see human remains, we turn off the cameras and decide what to do next.”

Image via Daily News 

We’ve seen the ancient female warriors called Amazonians referenced in multiple movies and shows (Wonder Woman is an Amazon, if you remember). For a long period of time, researchers thought that female warriors were merely fictitious in nature. However, thanks to recent excavations, discoveries, and development of new technologies that can analyze remains, scientists and historians can now confirm that female warriors were in fact real, as Inverse details: 

Scientists now believe the amazons described by the greeks were actually scythian warrior women — nomads who ranged from the black sea to china between 200 and 900 bce.

In 1988 scientists in Russia unearthed a scythian skeleton.

the body was entombed in a wooden sarcophagus and surrounded by weapons, including a quiver filled with arrows.

in june 2020, genetic analysis of the remains proved the body belonged to a girl.

In 2019, the don expedition, headed by scientists at the russian academy of sciences uncovered the graves of four female warriors.

Image via Inverse

Even if dogs and humans can’t understand each other verbally, there are other ways where they can form great relationships and bonds. Yes, if you’ve got yourself a furry companion, you can read their body language to know what they’re feeling! From the position and movement of their tails, to their facial expressions, to their posture, The Spruce Pets gives us some tips on what our canine friends are feeling or thinking when they move their bodies a certain way. Check the full piece here! 

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The shortest unit of time is the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule. The record time for that event is 247 zeptoseconds. What is a zeptosecond, you ask? Prepare yourselves, cause this is a mouthful. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second. To put it simply, it’s a decimal point followed by 20 zeros and a one at the end. Yep, that small! 

Image via Live Science

If you look at the photo real close, maybe you can find the well camouflaged snake. This photo was posted a few years ago by Twitter user @SssnakeySci, a PhD student studying pythons, boas, and pit vipers, but has gained traction on Twitter because most users are trying their best to spot the snake hidden in plain sight. Can you see the snake? 

Image via Prevention

Are our lives something straight out of a Matrix film? Are machines sucking up our life force and turning them into batteries as they make us live in a simulation? Before laughing at the ridiculousness of the idea, just know that this is a real question that scientists are asking, and are researching. The odds of us living in a simulation are 50%, as Giant Freakin Robot details: 

The discussion has been intense, with some producing mathematical and experiential proof that we are indeed living our lives in a simulation.

In 2003, the University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom revealed that in his mind, our reality is actually a computer simulation that has been dreamed up by a highly advanced civilization. In his abstract, taken from The Philosophical Quarterly, Bostrom states these three arguments, which he says he argues that at least one is definitely true.

the human species is very likely to become extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage;

any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history (or variations thereof)

we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Bostrom concluded with this: “It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we shall one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is false unless we are currently living in a simulation.”

Image via Giant Freakin Robot 

We’re familiar with the grandeur and widely-celebrated olympic games every 2-4 years. But the beginnings of the Olympic games aren’t as widely-accepted, or well-organized. Watch as Puppet History’s the Professor tells the story of the 1904 Olympic games held in St.Louis. Oh, what a disaster! I can’t believe rat poison got to be a discount energy drink. 

Good thing that it’s not the real one. I’m pretty sure no one would agree to be instant food for the sake of thrill. Nijigen no Mori, a new theme park close to Kobe, Japan, is opening a Godzilla-themed attraction. It’s the only place where you can head straight into a life-sized Godzilla’s mouth. Don’t worry, like I said, the Godzilla there isn’t real. I think. Visitors take on the roles of researchers and embark on a journey to learn more about the well-known creature, as Nerdist details: 

It culminates in staring down a 75-foot-tall Godzilla replica at the other end of a death-defying zipline ride.

Like all good theme park rides, the attraction begins with an in-universe movie that informs the public that the kaiju invasion has started. From there, visitors can check out a kaiju museum and shooting gallery game before moving on to the half-buried beast. A very excited and slightly nervous reporter for Sun TV had the chance to film his flight into Godzilla’s mouth.

Image via Nerdist 

Endangered short-tailed chinchillas are one of the main obstacles to a gold mine project. The South American rodent was hunted almost to extinction for its expensive fur. It seems that the animals are in the midst of another danger: capitalism. Gold Fields, the company behind the gold mine project, has stated in a mining conference in 2017 that the company was determined to find a way to protect the colony. Undark has more details: 

Operation chinchilla will hardly have the drama of an elephant capture. The short-tailed chinchillas are being moved via small traps to an area that scat and other evidence suggest was once a part of their range, according to Luis Ortega, the Chilean environmental manager overseeing the rodent removal. The animals are easy prey: Fur hunters can scoop the rabbit-sized rodents by hand from their shallow dens, Ortega said.

“We use a trap that is baited inside and closes when the chinchilla enters,” he added. The device, a Tomahawk trap, sounds fearsome but is non-lethal. The bait is a mix of almonds, nut shells, and grass, with an added sweetener the rodents curiously find irresistible: vanilla extract.

“The entire process must be carried out for each of the nine rocky areas where the animals will be removed during the construction of the mine,” Ortega said. “According to the government approved process, two attempts to capture specimens must be made on each rocky area, each lasting 10 days.” If the attempt is unsuccessful, the operation must be suspended for 20 days before it is attempted again, to minimize disturbance.

When each chinchilla is trapped and taken to its new territory, it will be placed in a wire-mesh enclosure for a few weeks to adapt to its new surroundings, and then monitored with radio collars — techniques also often used with transfers of megafauna like rhinos and Cape buffalo.

Image via Undark

The Universal Waste Management System is probably the most expensive toilet in the universe. Probably the toilet with the longest name too. NASA spent $23 million on the waste system. The newest space toilet is smaller and lighter than the old version, and easier to maintain, especially when it springs a leak. One of the biggest upgrades this toilet has compared to the previous iterations of space toilets is that it allows astronauts to pee and poop at the same time, which also means that female astronauts can finally use the toilet with ease: 

This matters more for the women in the astronaut corps, for whom the two bodily functions can be trickier to separate. For years, women astronauts have been carefully positioning themselves over the bowl, exchanging tips with their colleagues on best practices, and trying to make do with hardware that wasn’t built for their bodies.

Space toilets don’t look quite like the one in your bathroom. With the older latrine models on the ISS, astronauts urinate into a handheld funnel and defecate into a device that looks like a smaller version of a traditional toilet seat. A fan inside each apparatus suctions the waste away from the body, an important function in an environment where everything floats. The urine is transformed into the next day’s water, while the feces are compressed in a removable container and eventually dispatched on a special trash spacecraft that burns up in the atmosphere in the majestic manner of a shooting star. It’s careful business for men and women alike. Hold the funnel too close to the body, cutting off airflow, and liquid can end up pooling near the top. Lose contact with the seat, and waste might escape. Forget to turn on those fans before you start, and things can get messy.

Image via The Atlantic 

God bless the power of xCloud. Thanks to Microsoft’s cloud gaming service, gamers can now play their favorite games (that are available on the service) anytime, anywhere. No one expected it to work perfectly on a fridge, though! Twitter user Andy Robinson shares a short clip of playing Doom Eternal on his Samsung fridge. Well, I guess now you can play games while waiting for your food! 

Image screenshot via Twitter