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It's like Mad Max, but with Hot Wheels.
Make Magazine's Gareth Brandwyn explains how much fun it is to convert a regular die cast toy car into a post apocalyptic combat car for the popular tabletop game Gaslands.
BRB, getting myself some Hot Wheels to Mad Max-ify!
Portuguese artist Sergio Odeith specializes in painting giant anamorphic insects. Here, he took converted a concrete dome into a giant beetle.
View more of Odeith's anamorphic graffiti below:
In the erstwhile Mulberry Bend area of New York City, the most feared man was not a mob boss, a hit man, or even a gang member. He was the local banana vendor, Casoli Paracrotti. Considering how he was treated, you have to wonder whether he ever sold any bananas at all.
During the late 1890s, whenever the tiny, friendless fruit merchant in dirty rags pushed his cart around Mulberry Bend, the crowds would immediately disperse. The more religious among them would mutter prayers and turn away, while the superstitious clutched their talismans and rubbed the feet of dead rabbits. Even the children scurried away in fright, screaming their warning: "The banana man is coming! Be quiet, or he'll kill you!"
Paracrotti was not a criminal mastermind, a crooked law patrolman or a man of violence, but he was what the Italians refer to as a jettatore-- a jinx, a bringer of bad luck, possessor of the dreaded "evil eye". And it has been written that more than 50 persons met their demise simply by being acquainted with him. For this reason Paracrotti was a lonely man; no man wanted to be his friend, no woman wanted to marry him, and even inside the Catholic church on Roosevelt Street he was relegated to the back pew, shunned as if he were the carrier of a deadly and highly contagious disease.
You may feel sorry for Paracrotti, but first read the history that brought him from southern Italy to New York, and the extensive trail of dead people he left in his wake. Paracrotti was arrested several times, but he doesn't come across as an evil man. His reputation as a jinx came about because he was careless and not all that smart, with deadly consequences. -via Strange Company
You're looking at "Hyperion," the largest and most massive cosmic structure found early in the formation of the universe - just 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
The galaxy proto-supercluster has a calculated mass of 1 million billion times that of the Sun.
“Understanding Hyperion and how it compares to similar recent structures can give insights into how the universe developed in the past and will evolve into the future, and allows us the opportunity to challenge some models of supercluster formation,” physicist Olga Cucciati said. “Unearthing this cosmic titan helps uncover the history of these large-scale structures.”
Photo: ESO/Luis Calcada and Olga Cucciati
Only 20% pf purchases at IKEA are planned ahead of time, the rest are impulse buys. The secret is the layout, which is a maze. You have to look at everything in the store to get to the meatballs. I've never been to IKEA, but can imagine that if you see something you like, you might consider putting off that purchase until later, but then you think about having to negotiate that maze again on another day, and so you go ahead and buy it now. My desire to shop at IKEA has dropped considerably after watching this video. Maybe I can sneak in the out door and get some meatballs someday. -via Tastefully Offensive
Amazing and gothy animal X-rays taken during health checks at our veterinary center: a thread pic.twitter.com/MRuMgSiZTL
— Oregon Zoo (@OregonZoo) October 17, 2018
Have you ever wondered what a beaver's tail looks like inside? Or a toucan's beak? The Oregon Zoo posted several x-rays taken during veterinary checkups to show us how strange and different these creatures are.
Ball python pic.twitter.com/ntUxMKzurh
— Oregon Zoo (@OregonZoo) October 17, 2018
Toco toucan pic.twitter.com/GNxcufCaRW
— Oregon Zoo (@OregonZoo) October 17, 2018
-via Mashable
This note was left on the gate at the water this afternoon. No name or number left but whoever you are, rest assured your rose is in place in the middle of the lake. pic.twitter.com/GAQcbQRSZJ
— BVGS Rowing (@BVGSRowing) October 18, 2018
Members of the BVGS Rowing club based in Birmingham, UK, found this note at the lake. It says,
Please can someone throw this into the lake for me? My late husband ashes are in the lake and I can't get to the lakeside in my wheelchair anymore and gates are locked. Have to drive back up north tonight. Thank you x
I believe it's getting a little dusty in here. -via TYWKIWDBI
After realizing that their Ariake warehouse was plagued with problems and inefficiencies, Japanese clothing retail giant UNIQLO worked to overhaul the warehouse.
Their solution? Get rid of 90% of the human workforce and replace them with robots.
From Japan News:
The robotic system is designed to transfer products delivered to the warehouse by truck, read electronic tags attached to the products and confirm their stock numbers and other information.
When shipping, the system wraps products placed on a conveyor belt in cardboard and attaches labels to them. Only a small portion of work at the warehouse needs to be done by employees, the company said.
The automation (watch the video clip above) is both eerie and intriguing at the same time.
We are used to stories of alien abduction, which all seem to have some elements in common: short grayish men with large eyes take the abductee into a spaceship, where they are given a physical examination. It's a familiar story to us, but it wasn't common 60 years ago. In fact, it was unheard of before the 1961 incident involving Barney and Betty Hill of New Hampshire.
The point is that "alien abduction" just wasn't a thing that could happen to a person in 1961. All of those abduction tropes, the stuff you saw in X-Files, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Independence Day and parodied in shows like South Park, none of that existed at the time. This is where it all started.
The guy, Barney Hill, was a 39-year-old mailman with chronic ulcers. His wife Betty was a 41-year-old social worker. They lived in New Hampshire. On the night of September 19, they were on a long drive back home from a road trip in Canada, and at 10:30 p.m. they saw a light in the sky. Typical UFO stuff so far -- they described the object as bright, round, and silent, moving erratically. Thinking this looked more interesting than the moose rodeo or whatever they'd gone to see in Canada, they followed the object, stopping at various points to get a closer look through binoculars.
At some point, the object noticed them.
The Hills arrived home hours later than they expected, and they noticed some things that were not quite right, but they didn't recall what happened during that missing time. It took nightmares, hypnosis, and five years before the story leaked to the public of how Betty and Barney had been taken and examined by aliens. What would have been considered a hallucination or delusion in one person was more convincing when it came from two people. Read the story of Betty and Barney Hill and some possible explanations at Cracked.
Here's a strange intersection between pop culture and ancient tradition. The Waghi people of Papua New Guinea heard of Lee Falk's comic hero the Phantom and decided that the immortal hero is the perfect adornment of their war shields!
Photos: (L & R) Christopher Johnstone (M) Artwhatson - via oobject
When Timothy LaBranche found himself flying in an empty airplane cabin, he decided to have a little fun: he snapped a selfie of himself sitting in every single seat, and then stitched them together into "100 Tims on a Plane" - via PetaPixel
Why drink in a bar alongside prickly bar patrons when you can drink accompanied by actually prickly hedgehogs?
The Chikuchiku Cafe in Japan is opening a hedgehog bar, where you can sit and enjoy your beer alongside the cute critters.
via Design Taxi
This. Is. Insanely. Cool!
Check out this intricately engraved coin by Roman Booteen, which in addition to the amazing surface art, also has a neat little mechanical surprise.
Don't forget to check out Booteen's Instagram for many more neat coin and lighter carvings.
Enhance!
I betcha you'll yell that too as you zoom into all of the insects in British photographer Levon Biss' site Microsculpture.
Biss collaborated with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to capture various insects at high magnification. He explained:
Each image from the Microsculpture project is created from around 8000 individual photographs. The pinned insect is placed on an adapted microscope stage that enables me to have complete control over the positioning of the specimen in front of the lens. I shoot with a 36-megapixel camera that has a 10x microscope objective attached to it via a 200mm prime lens.
I photograph the insect in approximately 30 different sections, depending the size of the specimen. Each section is lit differently with strobe lights to bring out the micro sculptural beauty of that particular section of the body. For example, I will light and shoot just one antennae, then after I have completed this area I will move onto the eye and the lighting set up will change entirely to suit the texture and contours of that specific part area of the body. I continue this process until I have covered the whole surface area of the insect.
The result is simply stunning. Check out more over at Levon Biss' Microsculpture - hit the hamburger icon at the upper left-hand corner.
Don't miss the behind-the-scenes video:
Ancient Egyptians built their pyramids using large stone blocks, but mathematicians only need numbers - specifically, palindromic prime numbers - to build these interesting mathematical pyramids.
G.L. Honaker, Jr. of Bristol Virginia Public Schools and Chris K. Caldwell of University of Tennessee at Martin start with the simple pyramids above, centered on the prime number of 2 ...
Then they got serious:
See how they did it: Palindromic Prime Pyramids [PDF] - via Cliff Pickover
Archaeologists working at an ancient Roman site in Italy discovered the remains of a young child with a rock intentionally inserted into its mouth. They surmised that it's placed there as a ["vampire burial" rites to prevent the child - possibly infected with malaria - from rising from the dead and spreading the disease.
"Locally, they're calling it the 'Vampire of Lugnano'," University of Arizona archaeologist David Soren told Science Daily:
The 10-year old was the first at the cemetery to be found with a stone in its mouth. Similar burials have been documented in other locations, including in Venice, where an elderly 16th-century woman dubbed the "Vampire of Venice" was found with a brick in her mouth in 2009. In Northamptonshire, England, in 2017, an adult male from the third or fourth century was found buried facedown with his tongue removed and replaced with a stone.
These types of burials are often referred to as vampire burials, since they are associated with a belief that the dead could rise again. Other examples of vampire burials throughout history include bodies being staked to the ground through the heart or dismembered prior to interment.
Photo: David Pickel/Stanford University
Norwegian history re-enactor Ola Onsrud demonstrates how 14th-century knights battled while wearing full armor, or harness, as he calls it. It's nothing like the movies. A slashing motion will get you nowhere, so it doesn't even make sense to defend yourself like the sword fights we see in film. You can see more videos of armored hand-to-hand combat at Laughing Squid.
It worked on horses so why not humans?
Panasonic has created Wear Space, a high-tech version of horse blinders (or blinkers) that block out your peripheral vision and minimize distraction from your co-workers. It's a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a U-shaped fabric wrap that goes around your head.
Kang Hwayoung, a member of the Panasonic team that developed the device told Japan Times:
An increasing number of companies have started to extend use of hot-desking in their offices, with workers freely choosing space to work, while startups often use co-working offices.
More diverse working styles have become a trend. “On the other hand, everyone sometimes wants to be alone and concentrate,” said Kang Hwayoung, a member of the team that developed the device.
Thus, the 330-gram Wear Space’s ability to create a semi-personal space will come in handy, she said, adding that the concept is (literally) to “wear space.”
Covering your head with the fabric partition can also stop people from trying to make small talk.
(Photo: Panasonic)
There's a video clip of it in action, too:
Imagine yourself as a deer in the woods ... with a predator wolf nearby. Can you spot it before you're its lunch?
See the larger image over at reddit and let us know if you've found the big bad wolf.
Image via r/pics
When the Charleston Water System noticed that their pumps at the Plum Island Wastewater Treatment Center in South Carolina had clogged, they couldn't just call in any plumber ...
They had to call in a crack team of divers (SEAL Team no. 2, anyone?) to dive into up to 90 feet of raw sewage - in complete darkness - to find and remove the clog by hand. Here's what they found:
"As we expected, they came up with these large masses of wipes in their first two loads, with more to come. They also found a baseball and a big piece of metal."
The Charleston Water System tweeted some pics, and said, "Don't flush stuff like this. Joking of course, but you should only flush #1, #2, and toilet paper."
More pics below for those of you who aren't yet thoroughly grossed out by now.
On Wednesday, Canadians were able to legally buy marijuana for recreational use. Each province has the authority to set limits on when and where cannabis is sold. There were long lines in many locations, and the biggest glitch so far is demand outstripping supply. The above picture is from Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, where marijuana is being sold through the state-controlled liquor stores. The main joke is how the sales at the nearby McDonald's is going to soar.
Sometimes the best puns arise by accident or error. English contains a multitude of idioms, and it's hard to keep up with them all, so we end up with mixed metaphors, malaprops, malaphors, and malaproverbs. You might even include malamanteaus. They are all mangled combinations of familiar idioms.
He knows where all the skeletons are buried.
Until the cows freeze over.
Give them an inch, then they take a foot, and soon you don't have a leg to stand on.
Once bitten, twice shy, three times a lady.
We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
Don’t count your chickens until the barn door is closed.
You'll find more examples and links for plenty of mixed metaphors at Metafilter.
You may not notice, but there's something very disturbing going on quietly in the wild: insects are disappearing at an alarming rate.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that arthropod biomass (including insects, centipedes, and spiders) have declined 10- to 60-fold in the past 30 years.
Ben Guarino of The Washington Post wrote:
The researchers trapped arthropods on the ground in plates covered in a sticky glue, and raised several more plates about three feet into the canopy. The researchers also swept nets over the brush hundreds of times, collecting the critters that crawled through the vegetation.
Each technique revealed the biomass (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) had significantly decreased from 1976 to the present day ... Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold.
“Everything is dropping,” Lister said. The most common invertebrates in the rain forest — the moths, the butterflies, the grasshoppers, the spiders and others — are all far less abundant.
“Holy crap,” Wagner said of the 60-fold loss.
So what, you think? You should be concerned: insects are at the bottom of the food pyramid of the forests in the world, and their crashing population will adversely affect all the animals that depend on them for food - and ultimately, the health of the forests themselves. Not only that, insects are our main pollinators for crops, so we depend on them for our food supply.
The study linked climate change as the driving force behind the collapse of the forest food web.
(Photo: Chris Huh/Wikipedia)
We know in our heads that suspension bridges are flexible, but we don't normally see them put under so much stress that they have a visible bend. The weight limit on the one-lane Beaver Bridge in Beaver, Arkansas, is ten tons. The bus could easily be twice that, possibly several times that. You have to wonder what it feels like to ride that bus, and then you have to wonder what damage it's doing to the bridge over time. -via Digg
Update: The bus was 35 tons, and thanks to this video, the bridge is now closed for inspection. -Thanks, Christophe!
When loggers were loading a log of a chestnut oak tree onto a truck, they noticed something odd wedged inside: a mummified remain of a dog!
The year was approximately 1960 when the dog ran into a hole at the bottom of a tree and shimmied 28 feet up. “He’s a hunting dog, so we assumed that he was chasing something in the tree,” Bertha Sue Dixon, who runs a museum called Southern Forest World, told Newsweek. (Southern Forest World is where the dog now resides.)
But as the tree narrowed, the dog became stuck. He never caught his prey and no one pulled him out. Unable to escape, he remained in the accidental trap and perished.
Twenty years later, loggers found the immobile canine. Instead of pulping the log, they donated it whole to Southern Forest World.
Naturally, they named the dog "Stuckie."
(Photo: Scott Beahan/Shutterly Perfect Portraiture) - via ATI
Why stick to one flavor combination when you can have nine?
This clever peanut butter and jelly sandwich hack involves three rows of jam, honey, and fluff or marshmallow creme and three columns of crunchy peanut butter, nutella, and creamy peanut butter.
Genius!
via Bits & Pieces
There are people who bake pies. Then there are professional bakers that bake pies. Then there is Lauren Ko of Lokokitchen.
Check out Ko's beautiful geometric pie designs over at her Instagram. They're amazing!
David Zach of the band Remedy Drive was trying to get a selfie with baby elephant in Thailand, but the baby elephant had a different idea ...
House Party is a musical living room that explores prized possessions in their native habitat. All the materials used to create this artwork, from the furniture to the computers, were scavenged from the discarded trash. The music is a mix of mechanical and synthesized sounds. The piece was created while an artist in residence at Recology SF.
From the perspective of 2018, the TV series Dallas is a relic of the 1980s. The outrageous dealings of the obscenely wealthy Ewing family was termed a "primetime soap opera," but it pioneered so many TV tropes we take for granted today: an unethical protagonist, a continuing story arc, and end-of-season cliffhangers. As the show turns 40, we have a chance to learn how that all came about. The show's creators wanted an "epic saga," but they didn't know a thing about Dallas, the city.
Jim Schutze was a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald from 1978 to 1991: Of course, Dallas hated Dallas at first. It was everything that Dallas felt that it was not. The boots, the hats, the ranching, the oil. That was all Houston.
Bob Miller was the show’s on-set men’s costumer: [When we shot scenes in downtown Dallas,] we had a whole stock of cowboy hats to give to the background actors, just to make sure Larry didn’t look odd. He didn’t want to be the only person walking around in a hat.
The people of Dallas didn't think much of the show at first, but at least it shifted the world's view of the city as the place where Kennedy was shot. As Dallas grew to be a global phenomena over 14 seasons, Dallas residents managed to embrace it. The cover story of this month's Texas Monthly magazine is an extensive oral history of Dallas. -via Metafilter
