Colorful and well-preserved Egyptian coffins have been discovered at the necropolis of Saqqara, just south of Cairo. Even if the wooden coffins are around 2,600 years old, the coffins still display painted decoration and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Preliminary investigations suggest that the individuals buried in these coffins were priests and high officials, as The Art Newspaper details: 

The Egyptian team, led by Mostafa Waziry, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, began excavating the burial shafts two months ago. The three shafts so far uncovered are between 10 and 12 metres deep, with the coffins found divided between them. Among the finds were 28 wooden statuettes of Ptah-Sokar, a god of the necropolis, and a bronze statuette of Nefertum, a god who represented the lotus blossom from which the sun god rose, which had an inscription on its base identifying its owner as the priest Badi-Amun. There were also amulets and shabtis—small figurines believed to magically perform agricultural work for the dead in the afterlife.

“We know from geophysical surveys that there was a vast network of temples, in addition to tombs, here, and [the discovery of the coffins] will be valuable to expand our knowledge of the cults that operated at Saqqara based on the inscriptions,” says Campbell Price, the curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum. “Coffin caches of this type are far from exceptional, but they tend to come from Luxor in the south. The real value of the recent find is the light these examples throw onto northern coffin styles, and no doubt also names and titles that previously have not been firmly associated with the Saqqara area,” Price adds.

Image via The Art Newspaper 

Surprisingly, this is a thing. Berlin-based artist Klara Liden climbs and contorts her body over some scaffolding as the camera rotates around to capture her movements. The whole unexpected crossover between art and parkour is still new to me, but somehow Liden mashes the two different worlds together for her exhibition in London called Turn Me On. Check out Art Review’s description of her exhibition: 

It’s a repetitive, strained bunch of movements Liden puts herself through, an interminable scaling of the carapace of some unnamed city. And the urban environment, its hidden grimy bits especially, are the sooty stars of this show. You’re greeted downstairs by three enormous glowing, floating oil tanks: big, plastic, flesh-coloured containers with a hole right through the middle, like the bellybuttons of concrete giants.

Upstairs you find a row of dirt-encrusted, graffitied junction boxes, plastic housing for a city’s wires and fuses. This is urbanity’s electric pulse, its high voltage heartbeat. Each is covered with the symbols of the street it once lived on: football stickers, the rushed tags of local gangs, the mould of damp weather, the accumulated grey smudge of pollution. The pollution and mould are the best things about the works: all those years of cars chugging by, of buses and taxis and cigarette smoke, inscribed darkly on the once pristine plastic of the boxes. It’s urban history in filth.

Image via Art Review 

I didn’t know they crown the best museum every year. This museum was one of the five museums picked by the Art Fund charity. Only a year after the Gairloch Museum in Wester Ross opened, it was hailed as UK’s museum of the year. The twist here is that it isn’t your regular museum, it’s a nuclear bunker. Well, formerly a bunker. The museum was renovated over eight years, which cost around £2.4 million, as the Scotsman details: 

The library at the museum features an archive of more than 4000 photographs depicting life in and around the north-west Highland village.

It is one of five UK museums which will secure a £200,000 prize pot, after the cultural charity decided to share its annual “Museum of the Year” title for the first time due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the sector.

The Art Fund judges hailed the restoration project as “a tale of people-power, determination, and local pride.”

They added: “The museum’s move in 2019 to a new home – not a grand new build but a repurposed nuclear bunker – transformed a village eyesore into an important visitor attraction.

"The redisplay of its collection, which encapsulates the history, culture, beauty and character of Gairloch, and its new home have reanimated the village’s pride in its heritage, created a buzzing new community hub, and produced a sustainable cultural landmark for generations of visitors to enjoy.”

Image via The Scotsman

Newcastle-based graphic designer Sean Ford’s Foil Series is minimalistic and beautiful. The series is actually an experiment that explores geometric forms and patterns and various foils and textures. It’s wonderful to see the different combinations of colors and textures in the background, along with a bright but simple geometric pattern. I’d like to have one as an art print, not gonna lie. 

Image via Sean Ford 

Time to hit the nostalgia button for this one, folks. If you were way too young to experience the early years of the World Wide Web, there’s always an article or two about how that time went. The Internet was gawky, and painfully slow. While people complained about how tedious it was to connect back then, let’s not forget a good aspect when it comes to reminiscing about the old times: web design. The majority of web designers at that time only had experience with designing printed materials, as Mashable details: 

Many websites today look the same because there is greater “emphasis on accessibility, applicability and UX at the expense of visual originality,” Kovar said. That’s not a bad thing, added the UX designer based in Prague, but it does leave web designers from the ‘90s like him pining for colorful backgrounds and Comic Sans. Although, that aesthetic wasn't embraced by corporate brands, with many like Amazon, AOL, and AltaVista opting for box grids and just a splash of color just before the new millennium. (AOL was the most vibrant of the bunch at the time.)

While there are many services archiving the web, like the Internet Archive with its influential Wayback Machine, Kovar organizes the historical snapshots to provide better context about the internet’s past. Want to see what porn, music, movie, and soccer websites looked like decades ago? Kovar’s museum has a sampling. The museum also has a collection of search engines from the ‘90s, many of which you’ve probably never heard of. After all, Rough Guides, the travel guidebook brand, didn’t include Google in the index of its internet guidebook in 1999. (Yes, people wrote books for internet tourists back then.)

Image via Mashable 

Meet the Excalibur Superbia, dubbed as “the epitome of extravagance.” It sure is extravagant, as its listed price is a whopping $858,000. Just wow. This one-of-a-kind watch has six hundred triangular-cut diamonds and blue sapphires. The timepiece was a collaboration between Swiss watchmaker Roger Dubuis and Japanese interior design artists Kaz Shirane, as The New York Times details: 

Introduced last month at the new fair Watches & Wonders Shanghai, the opulent white-gold timepiece now is on display in the Chinese resort city of Sanya, on the island of Hainan in the South China Sea, while the brand courts five men from China, Italy and the United States who have expressed interest in the piece.

Mr. Andreatta said the watch was not designed for the Chinese market: It actually was a collaboration with the Japanese interior design artist Kaz Shirane, inspired by the mirrored observation deck he created for the Tokyo Tower in 2018 for the landmark’s 60th anniversary.

Image via The New York Times

Initially pitched as a one-stop-shop alternative to the mature but spatially fragmented system in Hollywood, Pinewood Atlanta was to be built as a great space for filming. After the initial company that handled the project left, the studio and town are now fully in the hands of local producers. The project is now called Trilith, a 235-acre town built within the 900-acre site of the studios. The town is a a dense, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use village, with a commercial town center, as FastCompany details: 

About 500 people are currently living in the town, which is planned to have a total of 1,400 townhomes, apartments, cohousing units, and 500-square-foot “microhomes.” Housing is available to rent or buy, and Trilith’s developers say it’s luring residents from within the film industry as well as people from other walks of life.

The studio side, now named Trilith Studios, is also being redeveloped, with new facilities geared toward more parts of the business, such as development offices and space for tech companies. These spaces are intended to bring in new types of companies in addition to the 60 vendors already providing production and ancillary services to productions on-site. The town side feeds into this ecosystem, creating the kind of place where people can work on months-long productions or years-long TV series without feeling like they’re living out of a suitcase.

Image via FastCompany 

It’s scary to know that our love for being always online has great potential risks. Take for example, our personal information stolen by hackers. Keeping track of apps and websites that access your information is difficult, and it’s also a hassle to read through long explanations of privacy agreements. If we leave our information floating around the web, well, hopefully it won’t get stolen, right? So what can we do to cover our digital tracks? Creative Bloq shares ex-hacker and Twitter user @somenerdliam’s tips on how to do so: 

Luckily, ex-hacker and Twitter user @somenerdliam stepped in last year, with his thread "How to delete 99.9% of your digital footprint from the internet", and the grateful Twitterverse went wild for it. Since posting, it's been retweeted 114,000 times and received over 425.1 likes. It's vital information for the modern world, and we think everyone should know about it.

While his advice isn't going to help you disappear completely (the author admits his knowledge isn't completely up to date, and the "99.9" claim in his title isn't a practical claim), the tips in the thread are a good starting point when it comes to monitoring your digital hygiene.

Check the full piece here. 

Image via Creative Bloq 

Less clutter, of course! But I know that it’s difficult to actually start decluttering, especially if we think that there’s nothing to be tidied up (most of the time, there might be something to throw away or to put away). In a new survey that studied the tidying habits of 2,000 Americans, 70 percent of those surveyed swear by cleaning to feel accomplished, 61 percent use it to de-stress, and 54 percent do it to feel relaxed afterward. Domino offers a list of benefits that we can get by simply decluttering. Check their list here! 

Image via Domino

No one expects to get a bomb from the sea out of nowhere,right? Well, an unexploded 45 kilogram bomb was found on Lord Howe Island’s Elizabeth Reef by a fisherman (imagine his freight upon seeing it). The angler was about 550 kilometers off the coast of the island and discovered the bomb, He quickly photographed his discovery and reported it to the authorities, as The Guardian details:  

Navy divers aboard HMAS Adelaide carefully removed the abandoned explosive on 25 September by floating it to the surface and towing it further out to sea where it was dropped into 550-metre-deep waters.

“That depth is really safe. It’s not going to ever get washed back up onto the reef,” senior marine parks officer John Pritchard said.

“There’s no deep-sea fishing or trawling allowed out there. It’s a recreational fishing zone only.

“The chances of that UXO (unexploded ordinance) ever coming back to the surface is negligible.”

The origin of the bomb is not known and divers couldn’t estimate its age owing to deterioration, a spokesman for the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, said.

Image via The Guardian 

Surprisingly, not a lot of oddball items(in terms of function). Some are actually for home use, small gadgets that can make organizing or cleaning easier at home. This is tame, considering that Amazon shoppers are willing to try out any products, even the outlandish items. When many shoppers buy one particular thing, you can bet it’s awesome. Inverse lists the genius products that are popular on Amazon right now, from a brush that can clean several blinds at once, to a folding board that can help you fold your shirts neatly. Check their full list here. 

Image via Inverse

Thanks, solar system, for giving us something good the next couple of months. A special ‘blue moon’ is expected to appear in our night skies, a couple of meteor showers, and some harvest moons (not the game, how can a game appear in the sky?). Forbes has a full stargazing guide for the heavenly phenomena that will appear in the coming weeks. Mark your calendars and have fun stargazing! 

Image via Forbes 

She’s totally engrossed with the song alright! Watch as The Beaner’s lovely teacup chihuahua, named Beanie, sings along to her owner’s dad’s song. Turns out that the song The Bearner’s dad is singing was made for her furry companion. So adorable! 

Believe it or not, researchers are getting new information about the brain thanks to psychedelics. Not only do psychedelic drugs prove effective for treating mental illness, but they also expose the brain regions that are affected by these drugs, as Discovery Magazine details: 

Treated disorders have included depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia, obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction. Dozens of clinical trials are underway, the majority investigating the therapeutic effect of psilocybin, the active component in so-called magic mushrooms. This natural compound belongs to the class of serotonergic psychedelics — those that activate serotonin (type 2A) receptors. 

Researchers are examining the distribution of serotonin 2A receptors to help pinpoint the brain areas affected by psychedelics. The greater the density of these receptors, the greater the likelihood that a particular brain region contributes to the psychedelic experience, according to a study published in Neuropsychopharmacology. 

Check Discover Magazine’s full piece on the topic here. 

Image via Discover Magazine

Considered a gender anomaly, this rose-breasted grosbeak is a "gynandromorphic,"meaning it contains both female and male characteristics that can sometimes be seen in physical traits on the body. Also, as if an added bonus (or emphasis that it is a gynandromorphic), Its body displays an even split down the middle between the male and female coloring, as Popular Mechanics detailed: 

The bird's right side shows red plumage (male), while and its left shows golden yellow feathers (female), according to scientists from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve in Pennsylvania, who recently discovered it.

The scientists were "very excited to see such a rarity up close, and are riding the high of this once-in-a-lifetime experience," they said in a press release. Annie Lindsay, bird banding program manager at Powdermill, said one researcher referred to the experience as “seeing a unicorn,” while another described the discovery as an adrenaline rush, because it was “so remarkable.”

Image via Popular Mechanics