TheDendrohyrax interfluvialisis a new species of a tree hyrax. Recently announced by scientists this week, it was actually initially discovered in 2009 by researchers in Nigeria. The researchers noticed a bark-like call in the night, and they discovered the species. But why did it take years to fully confirm its existence? It turns out that when it comes to an elusive, nocturnal, forest-dwelling animal in a remote region the process would not be easy. Check the video above to learn more!
It’s less of an official game and more of a fan-made crossover. Meet Yong Yi Lee, an artist who has worked with major gaming studies such as Ubisoft and Treyarch. Yi Lee has published his take on what Sesame Street characters would look like in the world of Bloodborne, and the results are, frankly, horrifying. Creative, yes- but it shatters the nostalgic image of these fluffy and funny puppets as the artist depicts them as cursed monsters with a lot of sharp teeth. Scary, but great art!
Look, I just hope the new Windows 11 is better than Windows 10. It doesn’t matter if the new operating system is less aesthetically pleasing, I just want software that doesn't update too many times (and randomly sometimes, too). A build of a supposed ‘new Windows’ software has spread online-- and it appears to be legitimate. The build looks like the discontinued Windows 10X builds, as ZDNet:
The leaked build -- which I first saw viaXDA Developers (which creditedBetaWorld on Baidu as the source) shows Build 21996.1 as the build number. This is from the "Cobalt" engineering branch. It also shows Windows Feature Experience Pack 321.14700.0.3 alongside the "Windows 11 Pro" dev build.
[...]
Some have speculated that Microsoft could deliver some pieces of Windows 11 via theFeature Experience Pack -- a mechanism Microsoft currently uses to deliver OS components and apps that can be updated independently from the base operating system. According to previous leaks, Microsoft is also expected tooverhaul the app store as part of Windows 11. The app store is currently a separate Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app.Windows 11 is expected to include the "Sun Valley" user-interface refresh, as well as some underlying improvements, such as better touch capabilities along with the new app store, based on various leaks. I've heard Microsoft will likely make Windows 11 available to OEM partners this month or next and release it to the mainstream user base this fall.
Saqqara is an ancient Egyptian burial ground just 20 miles south of Cairo that never received nearly as much attention as the grand pyramids of Luxor. Tombs at Saqqara had been raided for generations. In 1850, the director of Egypt’s Antiquities Service called it “a spectacle of utter devastation,” due to its ruinous condition. Nevertheless, archaeologists began exploring Saqqara, not realizing that it was much more extensive than it appeared. The further you dig, the more you find, and the further you go, the more pristine the burial conditions are.
One scorching day last fall, Mohammad Youssef, an archaeologist, clung to a rope inside a shaft that had been closed for more than 2,000 years. At the bottom, he shined his flashlight through a gap in the limestone wall and was greeted by a god’s gleaming eyes: a small, painted statue of the composite funerary deity Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, with a golden face and plumed crown. It was Youssef’s first glimpse of a large chamber that was guarded by a heap of figurines, carved wooden chests and piles of blackened linen. Inside, Youssef and his colleagues found signs that the people buried here had wealth and privilege: gilded masks, a finely carved falcon and a painted scarab beetle rolling the sun across the sky. Yet this was no luxurious family tomb, as might have been expected. Instead, the archaeologists were astonished to discover dozens of expensive coffins jammed together, piled to the ceiling as if in a warehouse. Beautifully painted, human-shaped boxes were stacked roughly on top of heavy limestone sarcophagi. Gilded coffins were packed into niches around the walls. The floor itself was covered in rags and bones.
This eerie chamber is one of several “megatombs,” as the archaeologists describe them, discovered last year at Saqqara, the sprawling necropolis that once served the nearby Egyptian capital of Memphis.
The Saqqara burials spanned 3,000 years, and are just beginning to reveal long-buried secrets. Read about the discoveries at Saqqara at Smithsonian.
Among skydiving aficionados, it is traditional to complete one's hundredth jump in the nude. But Rian Kanouff of Omaha, Nebraska went much further. He completed 60 nude jumps in 24 hours, thus establishing a Guinness World Record for the most number of nude jumps in a day.
Kanouff did not complete this task alone. He needed a well-organized team of pilots, ground crews, and parachute packers so that, as soon as he landed, he could immediately get airborne again to jump again. KOLN/KGIN News describes the process:
Volunteers who have decades of flying experience were taking him up in down in two different planes. Skydiving pals spent their day packing and re-packing parachutes, so he didn’t spend too much time on the ground. There were even nurses to make sure he wasn’t getting too overexerted. Some of the tents were full of supporters there to cheer him on.
“From the time he loads the plane ‘til he takes off and gets out is about five minutes,” said Scott Dvorak, who helped bring it all together. “Then, about a three-minute descent, so we’re about seven minutes there.”
“He spends about two minutes on the ground re-rigging and getting back in the plane for a total of 10 to 11 minutes per turn. That puts us at about six jumps per hour.”
For most of us, hiccups are nothing but a minor inconvenience. When we’re suddenly having hiccups, we can always just drink upside down or eat a spoonful of sugar. (It should be noted, however, that these “cures” are unreliable, contrary to popular belief). But for some of us who suffer from hiccups regularly, hiccups are a nightmare. Now there is hope for those people in the form of this specialized straw called HiccAway, which was invented by a neurologist.
… in a newly published research letter in JAMA Network Open, survey results from 249 volunteers around the world indicate that 90 percent of the users think this thing works better than traditional remedies.
The straw has a mouthpiece at one end and a pressure valve at the other, which requires you to suck harder than you would through a normal straw. This pressure causes your diaphragm to contract, stopping the uncontrollable influxes of air which rhythmically slam your vocal cords shut and cause the classic sound of a hiccup.
All that's required to stop these 'burps of the throat' is to submerge HiccAway in half a glass of water and begin sucking. Those who have used the device say it takes as few as one or two attempts for the hiccups to fade.
The Kickstarter product is currently patent-pending.
Learn more about this device over at ScienceAlert.
Talk about a serendipitous discovery! A ‘miniature Pompeii’ was randomly discovered by construction workers during renovations of an abandoned cinema in Verona, Italy. The buried ruins contained charred wooden furniture and the collapsed remains of a ceiling. Experts theorize that the site was probably abandoned after a fire:
The ancient site was probably abandoned after a fire, but “the environment was preserved intact, with the magnificent colors of the frescoed walls dating back to the second century,”Superintendency of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Verona, Rovigo, and Vicenza said in a statement, noting that the newly discovered artwork “evokes a miniature Pompeii.”
The modern-day building, the former Astra cinema, has been closed for 20 years, with construction first turning up signs of the lost Roman structure back in 2005.
image credit: Superintendency of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Verona, Rovigo, and Vicenza.
There are existing applications that turn a photo into a video. From Photoshop, to Premiere Pro, to After Effects, there are also plugins and other predictive algorithms that can do this task. This new algorithm however, aims to be the better version of the current applications for turning a photo to a video. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a deep learning method that only needs a single photo to make a believable video, as DIY Photography details:
Aleksander Hołyński explains that turning a photo into a video requires the algorithm to predict the future. “And in the real world, there are nearly infinite possibilities of what might happen next,” he adds. So, he and his team trained a neural network with thousands of videos of waterfalls, rivers, oceans, and other material with fluid motion. They would first ask the network to predict the motion of a video only by the first frame. Then, it would compare its prediction with the actual video, which helped it learn to identify clues that tell it what was going to happen next (such as ripples in a stream, for example).
The researchers tried to use “splatting,” a technique that moves each pixel according to its predicted motion. However, it posed another set of challenges. “Think about a flowing waterfall,” Hołyński told UW News. “If you just move the pixels down the waterfall, after a few frames of the video, you’ll have no pixels at the top!” So they had to come up with a solution for this, and they called it “symmetric splatting.” It doesn’t only predict the future, but also “the past” of an image, creating a seamless animation.
image credit: Sarah McQuate/University of Washington
Rémy Vicarini has an intense bond with his cat Cathode. As he explains their life together, things get more and more bizarre, but you'll enjoy every minute. See more of Cathode at YouTube and Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake
Set and scene designers for Star Trek couldn't invent everything that appeared on the show. So they selected real-life everyday objects from our time that would fit into their image of the future. In this case, Captain Janeway's office chair is a Signét 8400 Chair by HÅG, which is Norwegian design firm.
I found this information on Star Trek + Design, a website created by a Trekkie with time on his hands during the pandemic. The author, Eno, has carefully researched many of the objects, such as furniture and tableware, that appear in the Star Trek franchise.
Parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction in which an egg can grow and develop into an embryo without being fertilized by sperm. This kind of reproduction keeps the gene pool undiluted, and it doesn’t waste both energy and time on mating. There are also disadvantages in parthenogenesis. The first is the loss of genetic diversity, which helps in the survival of a species, especially in changing environments. The second disadvantage is recombination of genetic materials, which can result in birth defects or non-productive eggs.
Researchers have found workers of a species of honeybee in South Africa that produce asexually via parthenogenesis. Even more amazing is the fact that these honeybees seem to have found a way to avoid recombinations, which make their offspring nearly identical to themselves.
More testing showed that one line of worker bees in the hive had been cloning themselves for approximately 30 years—a clear sign that workers in the hive were not suffering from birth defects or an inability to produce viable offspring.
For the third anniversary of their song "Youngblood," Michael Clifford, the lead guitarist of the band 5 Seconds of Summer, contacted Seth Everman and asked him if he wanted to do something with them. Together with the whole band, Seth recreated the chorus of the song, but with stuff that you can’t even imagine being used as percussion instruments.
This is a brain tissue sample from a 45-year-old woman undergoing surgery for epilepsy. The sample, which was smaller than a sesame seed, is about a millionth of an entire brain’s volume. The sample was preserved, and then stained with heavy metals, which revealed the cellular structures.
Computational programs stitched the resulting images back together and artificial intelligence programs helped scientists analyze them. A short description of the resulting view was published as a preprint May 30 to bioRxiv.org. The full dataset is freely available online.
Charting the varied shapes of some 50,000 cells and the 130 million connections between them, neuroscientist Clay Reid describes the image as “absolutely beautiful.”
“In the best possible way, it’s the beginning of something very exciting.”
After expending massive manpower and resources into developing a nuclear bomb to end World War II, the US was pretty proud of the scientific breakthrough. But once the war was over, what could we do with this amazing ability besides killing people and flattening cities? The sunk cost was way too much to abandon. So how could we harness nuclear energy for something good?
What has to be the most spectacularly violent infrastructure proposal in American history came out of the federal government's Project Plowshare, conceived in 1951 as a way of, well, "beating atomic arms into plowshares." It was our exploration of constructive uses for nuclear weaponry. Bombs detonated underground, officials theorized, could make for cheap ways of moving large volumes of earth—be it for mining, hollowing out caverns to store natural gas, or prepping for other kinds of infrastructure. Dams and reservoirs could be created with single bombs, while dozens-long chains of detonations could carve new canals or even entire harbors.
Project Plowshare was running alongside another massive federal effort in the 1950s and '60s: the birth and rapid expansion of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System. Really, it was a matter of time before the those twin ambitious would collide. And collide they did, in a rugged stretch of the Bristol Mountains in southeast California through which highway planners hoped to route the yet-to-be-completed I-40 as one of America's major east-west corridors and a replacement for dinky old Route 66.
Ah, well, not to put spoilers on this article, but this AI believing it's a god is reminiscent of the main conflict of a particular Persona game (no I will not elaborate on which it is). Lab technician Travis DeShazo has created a bot that was trained to generate pseudo-biblical verses. The AI, called GPT-2 Religion A.I., learns from its massive inventory of religious training texts and churns out new bible-esque verses. The results from the AI is posted on the Twitter account for the AI:
The results are fairly convincing, too, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. “Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god of wisdom,”reads one message, posted on the @gods_txt Twitter feed for GPT-2 Religion A.I. “This is the knowledge of divinity that I, the Supreme Being, impart to you. When a man learns this, he attains what the rest of mankind has not, and becomes a true god. Obedience to Me! Obey!”
Another message, this time important enough to bepinned to the top of the timeline, proclaims: “My sayings are a remedy for all your biological ills. Go out of this place and meditate. Perhaps some day your blood will be warm and your bones will grow strong.”
