Saturn’s hexagon is a persistent approximately hexagonal cloud pattern around the north pole of the planet Saturn, located at about 78°N. The sides of the hexagon are about 14,500 km (9,000 mi) long, which is about 2,000 km (1,200 mi) longer than the diameter of Earth. The hexagon may be a bit more than 29,000 km (18,000 mi) wide, may be 300 km (190 mi) high, and may be a jet stream made of atmospheric gases moving at 320 km/h (200 mph). It rotates with a period of 10h 39m 24s, the same period as Saturn’s radio emissions from its interior. The hexagon does not shift in longitude like other clouds in the visible atmosphere.

In computer science, time formatting and storage bugs are a class of software bugs which may cause time and date calculation or display to be improperly handled. These are most commonly manifestations of arithmetic overflow, but can also be the result of other issues. The most well-known consequence of bugs of this type is the Y2K problem, but many other milestone dates or times exist that have caused or will cause problems depending on various programming deficiencies.

The Tetris effect (also known as Tetris syndrome) occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It takes its name from the video game Tetris.

The multiverse is a hypothetical group of multiple universes. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them. The different universes within the multiverse are called “parallel universes”, “other universes”, “alternate universes”, or “many worlds”.

Pinhead, or the Hell Priest, is a fictional character and the recurring antagonist of the Hellraiser franchise, first appearing as an unnamed figure in the 1986 Clive Barker novella The Hellbound Heart. When Clive Barker adapted the novella into the 1987 film Hellraiser, he referred to the character in early drafts as “the Priest” but the final film gave no name. The production and make-up crew nicknamed the character “Pinhead” and fans accepted the sobriquet, which was then used in press materials, tie-in media, and on-screen in some of the sequel films.

The Mir mine, also called the Mirny mine, is an open pit diamond mine located in Mirny, Sakha Republic, in the Siberian region of eastern Russia. The mine is more than 525 meters (1,722 ft) deep (4th in the world), has a diameter of 1,200 m (3,900 ft), and is one of the largest excavated holes in the world.

The Macdonald triad (also known as the triad of sociopathy or the homicidal triad) is a set of three factors, the presence of any two of which are considered to be predictive of, or associated with, violent tendencies, particularly with relation to serial offenses. The triad was first proposed by psychiatrist J. M. Macdonald in “The Threat to Kill”, a 1963 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is an insect-pathogenic fungus, discovered by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and currently found predominantly in tropical forest ecosystems. It infects ants of the tribe Camponotini, with the full pathogenesis being characterized by alteration of the behavioral patterns of the infected ant.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper “Three Models for the Description of Language”.

The Snowball Earth hypothesis proposes that during one or more of Earth’s icehouse climates, Earth’s surface became entirely or nearly entirely frozen, sometime earlier than 650 Mya during the Cryogenian period. Proponents of the hypothesis argue that it best explains sedimentary deposits generally regarded as of glacial origin at tropical palaeolatitudes and other enigmatic features in the geological record.

In discussion of science fiction, a Big Dumb Object (BDO) is any mysterious object, usually of extraterrestrial or unknown origin and immense power, in a story which generates an intense sense of wonder by its mere existence. To a certain extent, the term deliberately deflates this.

The dream argument is the postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore, any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and rigorously tested to determine whether it is in fact reality.

Blood Falls is an outflow of an iron oxide-tainted plume of saltwater, flowing from the tongue of Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney in the Taylor Valley of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Victoria Land, East Antarctica.

The Geologic Calendar is a scale in which the geological lifetime of the earth is mapped onto a calendrical year; that is to say, the day one of the earth took place on a geologic January 1 at precisely midnight, and today’s date and time is December 31 at midnight. On this calendar, the inferred appearance of the first living single-celled organisms, prokaryotes, occurred on a geologic February 25 around 12:30 pm to 1:07 pm, dinosaurs first appeared on December 13 and all of human history since the end of the last ice-age occurred in the last 82.2 seconds before midnight of the new year.

A mysterious, ancient tradition takes place each year in Mamoiada, a small village tucked into the middle of wild and mountainous Sardinia. On the day of Saint Anthony, the saint protector of animals and fire, the men of the village transform to become Mamuthones and Issohadores. Complementing one another like yin is to yang, mamuthones echo the darkness, while issohadores rope in the light.

Conspiracy 58 is a Swedish mockumentary from 2002, produced by Sveriges Television, the Swedish public broadcaster. The film examines the fictional KSP58 movement, that claims that the 1958 FIFA World Cup in Sweden did not really take place, but was faked and exists only as forged television and radio coverage in a conspiracy between American and Swedish television, the CIA and FIFA as part of the Cold War.

The use of profanity in films has always been controversial, but has increased significantly in recent years. The use of the word fuck in film draws particular criticism; in 2005, the documentary Fuck dealt entirely with this phenomenon. The word fuck is thought to be the taboo term used most in American film.

The X-Seed 4000 was a concept skyscraper. The idea was initially created and developed by Martin Pascoe. Its proposed 4-kilometre height, 6-kilometre-wide sea-base, and 800-floor capacity could accommodate 500,000 to 1,000,000 inhabitants. This structure would be composed of over 3,000,000 tons of steel. It was designed for Tokyo, Japan by the Taisei Corporation in 1995 as a futuristic environment combining ultra-modern and technological living and interaction with wildlife and nature. Methods of transportation within the X-seed would most likely include MagLev trains.

The expanding Earth or growing Earth hypothesis asserts that the position and relative movement of continents is at least partially due to the volume of Earth increasing. Conversely, geophysical global cooling was the hypothesis that various features could be explained by Earth contracting.

The Westbury or Bratton White Horse is a hill figure on the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, approximately 1.5 mi (2.4 km) east of Westbury in Wiltshire, England. Located on the edge of Bratton Downs and lying just below an Iron Age hill fort, it is the oldest of several white horses carved in Wiltshire.

“There are known knowns” is a phrase from a response United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave to a question at a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) news briefing on February 12, 2002, about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.

In astrophysics, spaghettification (sometimes referred to as the noodle effect) is the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (rather like spaghetti) in a very strong non-homogeneous gravitational field; it is caused by extreme tidal forces. In the most extreme cases, near black holes, the stretching is so powerful that no object can withstand it, no matter how strong its components. Within a small region the horizontal compression balances the vertical stretching so that small objects being spaghettified experience no net change in volume.

Ichthyoallyeinotoxism, or hallucinogenic fish inebriation, comes from eating certain species of fish found in several parts of the tropics, the effects of which are reputed to be similar in some aspects to LSD. Experiences may include vivid auditory and visual hallucinations. This has given rise to the collective common name “dream fish” for ichthyoallyeinotoxic fish.

In mathematics, the moving sofa problem or sofa problem is a two-dimensional idealisation of real-life furniture-moving problems and asks for the rigid two-dimensional shape of largest area A that can be maneuvered through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width. The area A thus obtained is referred to as the sofa constant. The exact value of the sofa constant is an open problem.

Miss Belvedere is a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere that was sealed in an underground vault on the grounds of the Tulsa city courthouse on June 15, 1957, as a 50-year time capsule.

An eigenface is the name given to a set of eigenvectors when used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition. The approach of using eigenfaces for recognition was developed by Sirovich and Kirby (1987) and used by Matthew Turk and Alex Pentland in face classification.

The China National Highway 110 traffic jam was a recurring massive traffic jam that began to form on August 13, 2010, mostly on China National Highway 110 (G110) and Beijing–Tibet expressway (G6), in Hebei and Inner Mongolia. The traffic jam slowed thousands of vehicles for more than 100 kilometers (60 mi) and lasted for 10 days. Many drivers were able to move their vehicles only 1 km (0.6 mi) per day, and some drivers reported being stuck in the traffic jam for five days. It is considered to be one of the longest traffic jams by some media.

Hellmouth, or the jaws of Hell, is the entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art, and then spread all over Europe. It remained very common in depictions of the Last Judgment and Harrowing of Hell until the end of the Middle Ages, and is still sometimes used during the Renaissance and after.

Mind uploading, also known as whole brain emulation (WBE), is the hypothetical futuristic process of scanning a physical structure of the brain accurately enough to create an emulation of the mental state (including long-term memory and “self”) and copying it to a computer in a digital form. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain’s information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain and experience having a sentient conscious mind.

An animal chimera is a single organism that is composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated from different zygotes involved in sexual reproduction. If the different cells have emerged from the same zygote, the organism is called a mosaic. Innate chimeras are formed from at least four parent cells (two fertilised eggs or early embryos fused together). Each population of cells keeps its own character and the resulting organism is a mixture of tissues. Cases of human chimerism have been documented.

Pareidolia is the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music.

Titanosaurs were a diverse group of sauropod dinosaurs, including genera from Africa, Asia, South America, North America, Europe, Australia and Antarctica. The titanosaurians were the last surviving group of long-necked sauropods, with taxa still thriving at the time of the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous. This group includes some of the largest land animals known to have ever existed, such as Patagotitan—estimated at 37 m (121 ft) long with a weight of 69 tonnes (76 tons)—and the comparably-sized Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus from the same region.

Metta Sandiford-Artest (born Ronald William Artest Jr.; November 13, 1979) is an American former professional basketball player. He was known as Ron Artest before legally changing his name to Metta World Peace in 2011.

Archaeoacoustics is the use of acoustical study as a methodological approach within the field of archaeology. Archaeoacoustics examines the acoustics of archaeological sites and artifacts. It is an interdisciplinary field that includes archaeology, ethnomusicology, acoustics and digital modelling, and is part of the wider field of music archaeology, with a particular interest in prehistoric music.

Visual Essay.

Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) is a musical piece by John Cage and the subject of one of the longest-lasting musical performances yet undertaken. It was originally written in 1987 for organ and is adapted from the earlier work ASLSP 1985; a typical performance of the piano version lasts 20 to 70 minutes. In 1985, Cage opted to omit the detail of exactly how slowly the piece should be played. The performance of the organ version at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany began in 2001 and is scheduled to have a duration of 639 years, ending in 2640.

“Turner Doomsday Video” is the internal title of a video intended to be broadcast by CNN at the end of the world. The video, created at the direction of CNN founder Ted Turner before the network’s 1980 launch, is a performance of the Christian hymn “Nearer My God To Thee” performed by multiple members of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine bands.

Elephant’s toothpaste is a foamy substance caused by the rapid decomposition of hydrogen peroxide using potassium iodide or yeast and warm water as a catalyst. How rapidly the reaction proceeds will depend on the concentration of hydrogen peroxide. Because it requires only a small number of ingredients and makes a “volcano of foam”, this is a popular experiment for children to perform in school or at parties.

Prohibition of dying is a political social phenomenon and taboo in which a law is passed stating that it is illegal to die, usually specifically in a certain political division or in a specific building.

Angie Sanselmente Valencia (born 25 May 1979) is a former Colombian beauty queen and lingerie model believed to be the ringleader of one of the world’s largest drug syndicates.

Cicada 3301 is a nickname given to an organization that, on three occasions, has posted a set of puzzles to recruit codebreakers from the public. The first internet puzzle started on January 4, 2012, on 4chan and ran for nearly a month. A second round began one year later on January 4, 2013, and then a third round following the confirmation of a fresh clue posted on Twitter on January 4, 2014. The third puzzle has yet to be solved.

The Volcano Number (also Volcano Reference File Number, Volcano Numbering System, or VNUM) is a hierarchical geographical system to uniquely identify and tag volcanoes and volcanic features on Earth. The numbers consist of four numerals, a hyphen, then two or three more numerals. The first two numerals identify the region, the next two the subregion, and the last two or three the individual volcano.

Apeirophobia is the irrational and excessive fear of infinity and the uncountable, causing discomfort and sometimes panic attacks from intrusive thoughts of the infinity. It normally starts in adolescence, but in some rare cases, it can start before then. It may be caused by existential dread about eternal life after death.

Arachnacris is an Asian genus of large bush crickets in the sub-family Mecopodinae and tribe Mecopodini. They are found in tropical forest areas of Malesia.

Null Island is a name for the point on the Earth’s surface where the prime meridian and the equator cross, located in international waters in the Gulf of Guinea (Atlantic Ocean) off the west African coast. The name ‘Null Island’ serves as both a joke based around the suppositional existence of an island there and as a name to which coordinates erroneously set to 0,0 are assigned in placenames databases in order to more easily find and fix them.

Xenu also called Xemu, was, according to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, the dictator of the “Galactic Confederacy” who brought billions of his people to Earth (then known as “Teegeeack”) in DC-8-like spacecraft 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans (immortal spirits) of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is a public research center located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The Center is located in a former chapel named Torre Girona, at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), and was established on April 1, 2005. It hosts MareNostrum, a 13.7 Petaflops, Intel Xeon Platinum-based supercomputer, which also includes clusters of emerging technologies.

The Other World Kingdom (frequently abbreviated OWK) is a large, commercial BDSM and femdom facility, resort, and micronation, which opened in 1996 using the buildings and grounds of a 16th-century chateau located in the municipality of Černá in Žďár nad Sázavou District, Czech Republic. Although not recognized by any other country, it maintains its own currency, passports, police force, courts, state flag and state hymn.

Stubble burning is the practice of intentionally setting fire to the straw stubble that remains after grains, such as rice and wheat, have been harvested. The technique was widespread until the 1990s, when governments increasingly restricted its use.

The Philadelphia Experiment is an alleged military experiment supposed to have been carried out by the U.S. Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, sometime around October 28, 1943. The U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Eldridge was claimed to have been rendered invisible (or “cloaked”) to enemy devices.

The Zone of Death is the name given to the 50 sq mi (129.50 km2) Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of a purported loophole in the Constitution of the United States, a criminal could theoretically get away with any crime, up to and including murder.

Colors that do not appear in ordinary visual functioning. Different color theories suggest different hypothetical colors that humans are incapable of seeing for one reason or another, and made-up colors are routinely created in popular culture. While some such colors have no basis in reality, phenomena such as cone cell fatigue enable colors to be perceived in certain circumstances that would not be otherwise.

Heat haze, also called heat shimmer, refers to the inferior mirage observed when viewing objects through a mass of heated air. Common instances when heat haze occurs include images of objects viewed across asphalt concrete (also known as tarmac) roads and over masonry rooftops on hot days, above and behind fire (as in burning candles, patio heaters, and campfires), and through exhaust gases from jet engines.

The zoo hypothesis speculates on the assumed behavior and existence of technically advanced extraterrestrial life and the reasons they refrain from contacting Earth. It is one of many theoretical explanations for the Fermi paradox. The hypothesis is that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth, and one of its main interpretations is that it does so to allow for natural evolution and sociocultural development, avoiding interplanetary contamination, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo.

The Cholita Climbers of Bolivia are a group of Aymara women who summit different mountains all throughout Latin America while wearing their traditional dresses. The group was formed in 2015, and the women are all part of a tight knit community who work and live in the mountains. Their most recent expedition has become their most notable, as on January 23, 2019 they became the first Aymara women to summit Aconcagua.

Burj Al Babas is a residential development located near the Turkish town of Mudurnu. The homes in the development are designed to resemble miniature chateaux. The center of the complex was to include a domed structure containing stores, a movie theater, and other facilities open to residents. Construction began in 2014. The development was originally successful, but sales eventually stalled, causing the developer to enter bankruptcy.Falling oil prices and instability in Turkey have been cited as reasons for the lack of sales. As of January 2019, 587 of the planned 732 homes were started but none were finished.

Susan Charna Rothenberg (January 20, 1945 – May 18, 2020) was an American contemporary painter, printmaker, sculptor, and draughtswoman. She achieved a place of prominence through her iconic images of the horse, in which she synthesized the opposing forces of abstraction and representation.

Researchers know that high-voltage power lines have some strange influence on animals. Creatures from reindeer to elephants to birds tend to avoid the areas around power lines. This was mysterious because the structures seem passive and simple to walk or fly past. However, scientists now say this may be because power lines emit ultraviolet light, invisible to human eyes, that appears as frightening flashes to animals that can perceive ultraviolet light.

Deimatic behaviour or startle display means any pattern of bluffing behaviour in an animal that lacks strong defences, such as suddenly displaying conspicuous eyespots, to scare off or momentarily distract a predator, thus giving the prey animal an opportunity to escape.

The Richat Structure, also called Guelb er Richât, the Eye of Africa, Eye of Mauritania or Eye of the Sahara is a prominent circular feature in the Sahara’s Adrar Plateau, near Ouadane, west–central Mauritania, Northwest Africa. It is an eroded dome, 40 kilometres in diameter, exposing sedimentary rock in layers which appear as concentric rings.

Surface tension is the tendency of liquid surfaces to shrink into the minimum surface area possible. Surface tension allows insects, to float and slide on a water surface without becoming even partly submerged. At liquid–air interfaces, surface tension results from the greater attraction of liquid molecules to each other (due to cohesion) than to the molecules in the air (due to adhesion).

Déjà vu is the feeling that one has lived through the present situation before. This is a French phrase that translates literally as “already seen”. Although some interpret déjà vu in a paranormal context, mainstream scientific approaches reject the explanation of déjà vu as “precognition” or “prophecy”. It is an anomaly of memory whereby, despite the strong sense of recollection, the time, place, and practical context of the “previous” experience are uncertain or believed to be impossible.

Yareta or llareta (Azorella compacta, known historically as Azorella yareta, from yarita in the Quechua language) is a flowering plant in the family Apiaceae native to South America. It grows in the Puna grasslands of the Andes in Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile, and western Argentina at altitudes between 3,200 and 5,250 metres (10,500 and 17,220 ft).

The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal received on August 15, 1977, by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope in the United States, then used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and bore the expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.

Atomic gardening is a form of mutation breeding where plants are exposed to radioactive sources, typically cobalt-60, in order to generate mutations, some of which have turned out to be useful.

Visual Essay.

The cobalt blue tarantula (Cyriopagopus lividus) is a tarantula species (family Theraphosidae) native to Myanmar and over the border into Thailand. It was originally described as Haplopelma lividum.

Alain Robert is a French rock climber and urban climber, from Digoin, Saône-et-Loire, Burgundy, France. Known as “the Human Spider,” Robert is famous for his free solo climbing, scaling skyscrapers using no climbing equipment except for a small bag of chalk and a pair of climbing shoes. Since 1994, Robert has climbed landmarks including the Burj Khalifa, Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Empire State Building.

Olympus Mons is a very large shield volcano on the planet Mars. The volcano has a height of over 21 km as measured by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). Olympus Mons is about two and a half times Mount Everest’s height above sea level. It is one of the largest volcanoes, the tallest planetary mountain, and the second tallest mountain currently discovered in the Solar System.

The Harbin International Ice and Snow festival is an annual winter festival that takes place with a theme in Harbin, Heilongjiang, China, and now is the largest ice and snow festival in the world. At first participants in the festival were mainly Chinese, however it has since become an international festival and competition, with the 2018 festival attracting 18 million visitors and generating 28.7 billion yuan ($4.4 billion) of revenue. The festival includes the world’s biggest ice sculptures.

Cortinarius violaceus, commonly known as the violet webcap or violet cort, is a fungus in the webcap genus Cortinarius native across the Northern Hemisphere.

Visual Essay.

The theremin is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the thereminist (performer). It is named after its inventor, Leon Theremin, who patented the device in 1928. The instrument’s controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas that sense the relative position of the thereminist’s hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude with the other.

Blue-ringed octopuses, comprising the genus Hapalochlaena, are four highly venomous species of octopus that are found in tide pools and coral reefs in the Pacific and Indian oceans, from Japan to Australia. They can be identified by their yellowish skin and characteristic blue and black rings that change color dramatically when the animal is threatened. They eat small crustaceans, including crabs, hermit crabs, shrimp, and other small animals.

Hiroo Onoda (19 March 1922 – 16 January 2014) was an Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer who fought in World War II and was a Japanese holdout who did not surrender at the war’s end in August 1945. After the war ended Onoda spent 29 years hiding out in the Philippines until his former commander travelled from Japan to formally relieve him from duty by order of Emperor Shōwa in 1974.

Radio telescope located in the Dawodang depression, a natural basin in Pingtang County, Guizhou, southwest China. It has a fixed 500 m diameter dish constructed in a natural depression in the landscape. It is the world’s largest filled-aperture radio telescope and the second-largest single-dish aperture, after the sparsely-filled RATAN-600 in Russia.

The radiography of cultural objects is the use of radiography to understand intrinsic details about objects. Most commonly this involves X-rays of paintings to reveal underdrawing, pentimenti alterations in the course of painting or by later restorers, and sometimes previous paintings on the support. Many pigments such as lead white show well in radiographs.

Orientation of a map with south up. Cultural diversity and media literacy educators use south-up oriented world maps to help students viscerally experience the frequently disorienting effect of seeing something familiar from a different perspective. Having students consider the privileged position given to the Northern hemisphere (especially Europe and North America) on most world maps can help students confront their more general potential for culturally biased perceptions.

Perpetual motion is the motion of bodies that continues forever. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work infinitely without an energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, as it would violate the first or second law of thermodynamics.

During the summer of 2000 and 2001 and the winter of 2001-2002, Carl De Keyzer stayed 6-7 months in Krasnoyarsk - Russia visiting 40-50 different prison camps, most of these former Gulags.

Pykrete is a frozen ice alloy, originally made of approximately 14 percent sawdust or some other form of wood pulp and 86 percent ice by weight . During World War II, Geoffrey Pyke proposed it as a candidate material for a supersized aircraft carrier for the British Royal Navy. Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relatively slow melting rate due to its low thermal conductivity, as well as a vastly improved strength and toughness compared to ordinary ice. These physical properties can make the material comparable to concrete, as long as the material is kept frozen.

The Darvaza gas crater also known as the Door to Hell or Gates of Hell, is a natural gas field collapsed into a cavern in Darvaza, Turkmenistan. Soviet geologists may have intentionally set it on fire to prevent the spread of methane gas, and it is thought to have been burning continuously since 1971.

The buttered toast phenomenon is an observation that buttered toast tends to land butter-side down after it falls. It is used as an idiom representing pessimistic outlooks. Various people have attempted to determine whether there is an actual tendency for bread to fall in this fashion, with varying results.

The Truman Show delusion, informally known as Truman syndrome, is a type of delusion in which the person believes that their lives are staged reality shows, or that they are being watched on cameras. The term was coined in 2008 by brothers Joel Gold and Ian Gold, a psychiatrist and a neurophilosopher, respectively, after the film The Truman Show.

Kowloon Walled City was an ungoverned, densely populated de jure Chinese enclave within the boundaries of Kowloon City, Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the walled city became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to the UK by China in 1898. Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. By 1990, the walled city contained 50,000 residents within its 2.6-hectare borders. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was controlled by local triads and had high rates of prostitution, gambling, and drug abuse.

In biological nomenclature, organisms often receive scientific names that honor a person. A taxon named in honor of another entity is an eponymous taxon, and names specifically honoring a person. Some creatures are named after famous figures such as Synalpheus Pinkfloydi, Librelula Maradoniana, Heteropoda Davidbowie, Eleutherodactylus Amadeus, Aptostichus Barackobamai and Agra Schwarzeneggeri.

Visual Essay

Visions of Mars is a digital time capsule placed on mars for its future human inhabitants. Developed and funded by The Planetary Society, it arrived at the Red Planet on 25 May 2008 onboard NASA’s Phoenix lander. Along with personal messages from leading space visionaries of our time, Visions of Mars included a priceless collection of Mars literature, and art, and a list of hundreds of thousands of names of space enthusiasts from around the world. The entire collection was encoded on an archival silica-glass mini-DVD designed to last hundreds—if not thousands—of years.

Human furniture is furniture in which a person’s body is used as a tray, foot stool, chair, table, cabinet or other item. In some cases a sculpture of a human body is used. Forniphilia is the practice of creating human furniture. Examples of human furniture have appeared in modern art and in pornography.

An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a “death spiral” since the ants might eventually die of exhaustion.

Visual Essay.

Point on the image plane of a perspective drawing where the two-dimensional perspective projections of mutually parallel lines in three-dimensional space appear to converge. When the set of parallel lines is perpendicular to a picture plane, the construction is known as one-point perspective, and their vanishing point corresponds to the oculus, or “eye point”, from which the image should be viewed for correct perspective geometry.

Artist, architect and designer, Gianni Pettena is a key figure of the radical architecture movement that was shaking up the architectural scene in Italy and Europe in the 1960’s. During his time spent in the U.S., Gianni Pettena nourished his research on space by drawing on the proposals then being made in Land Art. With his Ice House I project, he took advantage of the icy winters of Minnesota and poured water over former administrative offices. The building froze overnight, becoming entirely covered with a translucent layer of ice. Only perceptible through this new skin of ice, the architecture as such became invisible.

The Parental Advisory label is a warning label introduced by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1985. It is placed on audio recordings in recognition of profanity or inappropriate references. Shortly after their formation, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) assembled a list of fifteen songs with deemed unsuitable content. Particular criticism was placed on “Darling Nikki” by Prince, after PMRC co-founder Mary Gore heard her 11-year-old daughter sing the lyrics. The first album to bear the “black and white” Parental Advisory label was the 1990 release of Banned in the U.S.A. by the rap group 2 Live Crew.

The vehicle using the giant suppressor is an M109G 155mm self-propelled howitzer at an artillery range in Germany. The steel construction allows for it to be lifted into position and used when firing at a 30-degree elevation. But it cannot be attached to the turret, because tests showed it affected recoil and harm the turret barrel.

Plant arithmetic is a form of plant cognition whereby plants appear to perform arithmetic operations – a form of number sense in plants.

A safety coffin or security coffin is a coffin fitted with a mechanism to prevent premature burial or allow the occupant to signal that they have been buried alive. A large number of designs for safety coffins were patented during the 18th and 19th centuries and variations on the idea are still available today.

Bir Tawil is a 2,060 km2 area of land along the border between Egypt and the Sudan, which is uninhabited and claimed by neither country. When spoken of in association with the neighbouring Hala’ib Triangle, it is sometimes referred to as the Bir Tawil Triangle, despite the area’s quadrilateral shape; the two “triangles” border at a quadripoint.

In the early 1980s, James R. Murphy began teaching mathematics using string figures in an effort to engage students who didn’t “like” math. Kids found the activity enormously fun and, almost without realizing it, learned to the kind of focus and dedication necessary for solving a problem by completing a series of complex steps — a fundamental skill in math and science. Essentially, it was an early successful experiment in using gaming for education — something on the minds of many in our age of social innovation.

Unplanned fortunate discovery. Serendipity is a common occurrence throughout the history of product invention and scientific discovery. The term “serendipity” is often applied to inventions made by chance rather than intent. The origin of cheese, for example, possibly originated in the Nomad practice of storing milk in the stomach of a dead camel that was attached to the saddle of a live one, thereby mixing rennet from the stomach with the milk stored within. Other examples of serendipity in inventions include: The post-it note, the microwave oven, the Velcro hook-and-loop fastener, the Popsicle and the penicillin.

Impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It was formed when a large asteroid or comet about 11 to 81 kilometers in diameter, known as the Chicxulub impactor, struck the Earth. The date of the impact coincides precisely with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (commonly known as the “K–Pg boundary”), slightly more than 66 million years ago, and a widely accepted theory is that worldwide climate disruption from the event was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction in which 75% of plant and animal species on Earth became extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

A cortical homunculus is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological “map” of the areas and proportions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, or sensory functions, for different parts of the body.

The Philip experiment was a 1972 parapsychology experiment conducted in Toronto, Ontario to determine whether subjects can communicate with fictionalized ghosts through expectations of human will.

Visual Essay

The Gombe Chimpanzee War was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania lasting from 1974 to 1978. The two groups were once unified in the Kasakela community. By 1974, researcher Jane Goodall noticed the community splintering. Over a span of eight months, a large party of chimpanzees separated themselves into the southern area of Kasakela and were renamed the Kahama community. The separatists consisted of six adult males, three adult females and their young. The Kasakela was left with eight adult males, twelve adult females and their young.

A Fata Morgana is a complex form of superior mirage that is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon. It is an Italian term named after the Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay, from a belief that these mirages, often seen in the Strait of Messina, were fairy castles in the air or false land created by her witchcraft to lure sailors to their deaths.

In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that, given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, producing a figure called a map, no more than four colors are required to color the regions of the map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. Adjacent means that two regions share a common boundary curve segment, not merely a corner where three or more regions meet. It was the first major theorem to be proved using a computer.

Tropical and subtropical cyclones are named by various warning centers to simplify communication between forecasters and the general public regarding forecasts, watches, and warnings. The names are intended to reduce confusion in the event of concurrent storms in the same basin. Generally once storms produce sustained wind speeds of more than 61 km/h; 38 mph, names are assigned in order from predetermined lists depending on which basin they originate.

Cydonia is a region on the planet Mars that has attracted both scientific and popular interest It contains the “Face on Mars”, located about halfway between Arandas Crater and Bamberg Crater. In one of the images taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976, a 2km-long Cydonian mesa had the appearance of a humanoid face. When the image was originally acquired, Viking chief scientist Gerry Soffen dismissed the “Face on Mars” in image 035A72 as a “trick of light and shadow”. However, a second image, 070A13, also shows the “face”, and was acquired 35 Viking orbits later at a different sun-angle from the 035A72 image.

Architecture characterised by the use of local materials and knowledge, usually without the supervision of professional architects. Vernacular architecture represents the majority of buildings and settlements created in pre-industrial societies and includes a very wide range of buildings, building traditions, and methods of construction.

Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. Deep Blue won its first game against world champion Garry Kasparov in game one of a six-game match on 10 February 1996. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, defeating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2. Deep Blue was heavily upgraded before playing against Kasparov again in May 1997. Deep Blue won game six, thereby winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½ and becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls. However, Kasparov accused IBM of cheating.

Cosmic latte is the average color of the universe, found by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the average color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper in which they reported that their survey of the light from over 200,000 galaxies averaged to a slightly beigeish white. The hex triplet value for cosmic latte is #FFF8E7.

Visual Essay

The Decline of Western Civilization is a 1981 American documentary filmed through 1979 and 1980. The movie is about the Los Angeles punk rock scene and was directed by Penelope Spheeris. In 1981, the LAPD Chief of Police Daryl Gates wrote a letter demanding the film not be shown again in the city.

Tardigrades are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals. They are the first known animal to survive after exposure to outer space. In September 2007, dehydrated tardigrades were taken into low Earth orbit on the FOTON-M3 mission carrying the BIOPAN astrobiology payload. For 10 days, groups of tardigrades, some of them previously dehydrated, some of them not, were exposed to the hard vacuum of outer space, or vacuum and solar UV radiation. Back on Earth, over 68% of the subjects protected from solar UV radiation were reanimated within 30 minutes.

Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan, in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus cassette series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting-edge downtown music, documenting the New York scene and advancing experimental composers of the time – the first 2 issues being devoted to NY artists from the downtown no wave scene. The series was financially supported along the years by funding from the New York State Council of the Arts, Colab and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Forensic facial reconstruction (or forensic facial approximation) is the process of recreating the face of an individual (whose identity is often not known) from their skeletal remains through an amalgamation of artistry, anthropology, osteology, and anatomy. It is easily the most subjective—as well as one of the most controversial—techniques in the field of forensic anthropology.

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. “Valley” denotes a dip in the human observer’s affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica’s human likeness.

Carstuckgirls.com is a website offering online images and videos of women trying to free their cars from a variety of obstacles, and selling tape and DVD recordings. Carstuckgirls.com has received several nominations and awards for its online imagery.

The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book that contains instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for home manufacturing of illicit drugs, including LSD. It was written by William Powell at the apex of the counterculture era to protest against United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

The Jarkov Mammoth (named for the family who discovered it) is a woolly mammoth specimen discovered on the Taymyr Peninsula of Siberia by a nine-year-old boy in 1997. The Jarkov Mammoth was recovered from a 23 tonne frozen block and transported to Khatanga under the supervision of French mammoth-hunter Bernard Buigues. This particular mammoth is estimated to have lived about 20,000 years ago. It is likely to be male and probably died at age 47.

Michel Lotito was a French entertainer, born in Grenoble, famous for deliberately consuming indigestible objects. He came to be known as Monsieur Mangetout (“Mr. Eat-All”).

Visual Essay

Visual Essay

The pineal gland is a small endocrine gland in the brain of most vertebrates. The pineal gland produces melatonin, a serotonin-derived hormone which modulates sleep patterns in both circadian and seasonal cycles. The shape of the gland resembles a pine cone from which it derived its name. The pineal gland is located in the epithalamus, near the center of the brain, between the two hemispheres, tucked in a groove where the two halves of the thalamus join. The pineal gland is one of the neuroendocrine secretory circumventricular organs in which capillaries are mostly permeable to solutes in the blood.

1893 painting by the German painter, sculptor, printmaker, and architect, Franz Stuck. Stuck was best known for his paintings of ancient egyptian mythology receiving substantial critical acclaim with The Sin in 1892.

The mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx) is a primate of the Old World monkey family. It is one of two species assigned to the genus Mandrillus, along with the drill. Mandrills are noted as being exceptionally colorful by mammalian standards. Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man: “no other member in the whole class of mammals is colored in so extraordinary a manner as the adult male mandrill’s”. The bright colors of mandrills are indeed not produced conventionally (no mammal is known to have red and blue pigments), being derived from light diffraction in facial collagen fibers.

Savonius wind turbines are a type of vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT), used for converting the force of the wind into torque on a rotating shaft. The turbine consists of a number of aerofoils, usually—but not always—vertically mounted on a rotating shaft or framework, either ground stationed or tethered in airborne systems.

The “tourist guy” was a hoax that featured a digitally altered photograph of a tourist on the observation deck of the World Trade Center, supposedly on the day of the September 11 attacks, showing a plane about to hit the tower in the background. The photo became an Internet phenomenon as many manipulated pictures spread online. The man in the photograph was identified as Hungarian Péter Guzli, who took the photo in 1997. Guzli said he edited the photo as a joke for his friends and did not realize it would spread across the Internet.

Embryo space colonization is a theoretical interstellar space colonization concept that involves sending a robotic mission to a habitable terrestrial planet, dwarf planet, minor planet or natural satellite transporting frozen early-stage human embryos or the technological or biological means to create human embryos.

Calculator spelling is an unintended characteristic of the seven-segments display traditionally used by calculators, in which, when read upside-down, the digits resemble letters of the Latin alphabet. Each digit may be mapped to one or more letters, creating a limited but functional subset of the alphabet, sometimes referred to as beghilos (or beghilosz).

Black Panthers is a 1968 short documentary film directed by Agnès Varda. The film focuses on the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, during protests over the arrest of Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton for the murder of police officer John Frey in 1967.

The Rungrado 1st of May Stadium is a multi-purpose stadium on Rungra Island, Pyongyang, North Korea. It opened on 1 May 1989, with its first major event being the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students. It is the largest stadium in the world by seating capacity. The site occupies an area of 20.7 hectares. The stadium is currently used for football matches, a few athletics events, and most often for the mass games of the Arirang Festival.

House Gymnastics originated during an attempt by Harrison and Ford to put up a bedroom blind. “The Brace” and “The 25th Element” were the first moves conceived. From there on in moves were being created on a daily basis. Language was developed to complement the physicality of House Gymnastics, and new moves and areas of were given names. As such, words such as “busted” and “amped” were developed and entered the “House Gymnastics” vocabulary.

The emerald cockroach wasp or jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) is a solitary wasp of the family Ampulicidae. It is known for its unusual reproductive behavior, which involves stinging a cockroach. This paralyzes the cockroach’s front legs and allows her to deliver a second, more precise sting in the cockroach’s brain. This second sting disables the roach’s escape reflex, essentially transforming it into a zombie to use it as a host for its larvae.

An electroencephalophone or encephalophone is an experimental musical instrument and diagnostic tool which uses brain waves (measured in the same way as an EEG) to generate or modulate sounds.

Synchronicity is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.

“HIGH FASHION” is a series of work taken by Pawel Jaszczuk between 2008 and 2010 of drunk salarymen sleeping in the streets of Tokyo.

An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is a phenomenon in which a person perceives the world from a location outside their physical body. An OBE is a form of autoscopy (literally “seeing self”), although this term is more commonly used to refer to the pathological condition of seeing a second self, or doppelgänger.

Gate Tower Building is a 16-floor office building in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Japan. It is notable for the highway offramp of the Ikeda Route that passes through the building.

Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal’s syndrome or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty.

Humans and animals exposed to vacuum will lose consciousness after a few seconds and die of hypoxia within minutes, but the symptoms are not nearly as graphic as commonly depicted in media and popular culture. The reduction in pressure lowers the temperature at which blood and other body fluids boil, but the elastic pressure of blood vessels ensures that this boiling point remains above the internal body temperature of 37 °C. Although the blood will not boil, the formation of gas bubbles in bodily fluids at reduced pressures, known as ebullism, is still a concern.

An anechoic chamber is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from waves entering from their surroundings. This combination means that a person or detector exclusively hears direct sounds (no reverberant sounds), in effect simulating being inside an infinitely large room.

Visual Essay

The world’s first photograph was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. Captured using a technique known as heliography, the shot was taken from an upstairs window at Niépce’s estate in Burgundy.

The Portuguese man o’ war (Physalia physalis), also known as the man-of-war, bluebottle, or floating terror is a marine hydrozoan found in the Atlantic Ocean and Indian Oceans. It is considered to be the same species as the Pacific man o’ war, which is found mainly in the Pacific Ocean.

Operation Midnight Climax was an operation carried out by the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKUltra, the mind-control research program that began in the 1950s. It was initially established in 1954 in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals.

Apparent retrograde motion is the apparent motion of a planet in a direction opposite to that of other bodies within its system, as observed from a particular vantage point. Direct motion or prograde motion is motion in the same direction as other bodies.

A pointing machine is a measuring tool used by stone sculptors and woodcarvers to accurately copy plaster, clay or wax sculpture models into wood or stone. In essence the device is a pointing needle that can be set to any position and then fixed. It further consists of brass or stainless steel rods and joints which can be placed into any position and then tightened.

The Odeillo solar furnace is the world’s largest solar furnace. It is situated in Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via, in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales, in the south of France. It is 54 metres (177 ft) high and 48 metres (157 ft) wide, and includes 63 heliostats. It was built between 1962 and 1968, and started operating in 1969, and has a power of one megawatt.
It serves as a science research site studying materials at very high temperatures.

Terminator 2 is heralded as a milestone in computer graphics and marked the first time that a lead character in a feature film had been created, as least in part, through the use of computer graphics created by Industrial Light & Magic.

The demon core was a spherical 6.2-kilogram (14 lb) subcritical mass of plutonium 89 millimetres (3.5 in) in diameter, manufactured during World War II by the United States nuclear weapon development effort, the Manhattan Project, as a fissile core for an early atomic bomb, that was involved in two criticality accidents, on August 21, 1945, and May 21, 1946.

Saddam Hussein, the late President of Iraq, wrote four novels and a number of poems. The first two books (Zabibah and the King and The Fortified Castle) were “Written by He Who Wrote It”, a traditional way in Arabic writing to preserve anonymity.

The Rag Chair was designed by Dutch designer Tejo Remy in 1991 and is layered from the contents of 15 bags of rags. It arrives ready made but the user has the option to recycle its own discarded clothes to be included in the design. Each piece is unique.

Ricardo López, also known as the “Björk stalker”, was a Uruguayan-American pest control worker who attempted to kill Icelandic musician Björk in September 1996. López developed an obsession with Björk in 1993, and became angry over her relationship with musician Goldie. Over the course of nearly nine months, López made a video diary musing about Björk and other topics at his apartment in Hollywood, Florida.

Type of housing development in which multiple similar homes are built on a tract (area) of land that is subdivided into individual small lots. Tract housing developments are found in world suburb developments that were modeled on the “Levittown” concept and sometimes encompass large areas of dozens of square miles.

The raven paradox, also known as Hempel’s paradox, Hempel’s ravens, or rarely the paradox of indoor ornithology, is a paradox arising from the question of what constitutes evidence for a statement. Observing objects that are neither black nor ravens may formally increase the likelihood that all ravens are black even though, intuitively, these observations are unrelated.

Hell money is a form of joss paper printed to resemble legal tender bank notes. The notes are not an official form of recognized currency or legal tender since their sole intended purpose is to be offered as burnt offerings to the deceased as a solution to resolve their assumed monetary problems in the afterlife. This ritual has been practiced by the modern Chinese and across East Asia since the late 19th century.

Some complex improvised firearms are not only well-built, but also use mimicry as camouflage, taking the appearance of other items. Improvised firearms in the form of flashlights, cellular telephones, canes and large bolts, have all been seized by law enforcement officials. Most of these are .22 caliber rimfires, but flashlight guns have been found ranging from small models firing 22 Long Rifle to larger ones chambered for 410 bore shotgun shells.

Central Asian sport in which horse-mounted players attempt to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal. Buzkashi is the national sport and a “passion” in Afghanistan where it is often played on Fridays and matches draw thousands of fans. Traditionally, games could last for several days, but in its more regulated tournament version, it has a limited match time.

Bloop was an ultra-low-frequency, high amplitude underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1997. By 2012, earlier speculation that the sound originated from a marine animal was replaced by NOAA’s description of the sound as being consistent with noises generated via non-tectonic cryoseisms originating from glacial movements such as ice calving, or through seabed gouging by ice.

Vincenzo Peruggia (8 October 1881 – 8 October 1925) was an Italian museum worker, artist, and thief, most famous for stealing the Mona Lisa on 21 August 1911.

Futurist meals comprised a cuisine and style of dining advocated by some members of the Futurist movement, particularly in Italy. These meals were first proposed in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia’s Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, published in the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo on December 28, 1930.Marinetti’s culinary polemic advocated the introduction of scientific methods in the kitchen—a “cooking laboratory” replete with chemicals, ultraviolet lamps, electrolysis, and the use of perfumes to enhance the tasting experience to highlight olfactory sensations.

Visual Essay

The Ijen volcano complex is a group of composite volcanoes located on the border between Banyuwangi Regency and Bondowoso Regency of East Java, Indonesia. It is inside an eponymous larger caldera Ijen, which is about 20 kilometres (12 mi) wide. The Gunung Merapi stratovolcano is the highest point of that complex. West of Gunung Merapi is the Ijen volcano, which has a one-kilometre-wide (0.62 mi) turquoise-coloured acidic crater lake recognised as the largest highly acidic crater lake in the world.

Clathrus ruber is a species of fungus in the family Phallaceae, and the type species of the genus Clathrus. It is commonly known as the latticed stinkhorn, the basket stinkhorn, or the red cage, alluding to the striking fruit bodies that are shaped somewhat like a round or oval hollow sphere with interlaced or latticed branches.

Technophobia is the fear or dislike of advanced technology or complex devices, especially computers. Although there are numerous interpretations of technophobia, they become more complex as technology continues to evolve. The term is generally used in the sense of an irrational fear, but others contend fears are justified. It is the opposite of technophilia. It is also known as technofear.

Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used specifically to refer to the time system used in France for a few years beginning in 1792 during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds (100000 decimal seconds per day).

Grover Sanders Krantz was an American anthropologist and cryptozoologist, he was one of few scientists not only to research Bigfoot, but also to express his belief in the animal’s existence. Grover Krantz donated his body on the condition his dog Clyde was kept close to him.

A facial recognition system is a technology capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces, typically employed to authenticate users through ID verification services, works by pinpointing and measuring facial features from a given image.

33 Thomas Street is a 550-foot-tall (170 m) skyscraper in Tribeca, Lower Manhattan, New York City. The exterior walls have no windows. It is a telephone exchange or wire center building which contained three major 4ESS switches used for interexchange telephony. 33 Thomas was described as the likely location of a NSA mass surveillance hub codenamed TITANPOINTE, in an investigation by The Intercept, and in a documentary short film by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras titled Project X, both drawing on the surveillance disclosures of Edward Snowden.

“When not worn these pieces are totally flat,” read the words at the back of a stage on which men in white lab coats presented clothing on hangers as if at an auction. A video showing the garments on models also played. The challenge for Spring ’98 involved geometry, specifically how to make two-dimensional garments that would lie perfectly flat when not on a three-dimensional body.

Some types of science can say what could happen many, many years from now. For example, astrophysics can say how planets and stars form, affect each other, and die, particle physics can say how atoms and other matter act over time, evolutionary biology can allow us to see how living things change over time, and plate tectonics can say how continents shift over time. By observing the past and present, astrophysicists, particle physicists, evolutionary biologists and geologists can make good guesses about what might happen in the future.

Visual Essay

In 1948, Swiss pharmacologist Peter N. Witt started his research on the effect of drugs on spiders. The initial motivation for the study was a request from his colleague, zoologist H. M. Peters, to shift the time when garden spiders build their webs from 2am–5am, which apparently annoyed Peters, to earlier hours. Witt tested spiders with a range of psychoactive drugs, including amphetamine, mescaline, strychnine, LSD, and caffeine, and found that the drugs affect the size and shape of the web rather than the time when it is built.

Vantablack is a material developed by Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom and is one of the darkest substances known, absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light (at 663 nm if the light is perpendicular to the material). The name is a compound of the acronym VANTA (vertically aligned nanotube arrays) and the color black.

The Gouldian finch (Chloebia gouldiae), also known as the Lady Gouldian finch, Gould’s finch or the rainbow finch, is a colourful passerine bird that is native to Australia.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux was one of the earliest exponents of French Neoclassical architecture. The Oikema is the informal title for a ‘House of Pleasure‘, and is a part of his plan for the Ideal City of Chaux. The phallic-shaped house was to be an integral part of the city. The drawings first appeared in L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la legislation, Tome 1, 1804. There, under the heading “Oikema. Fragments d’un monument Grec,” is a text on the utopian brothel.

Body Worlds is a traveling exposition of dissected human bodies, animals, and other anatomical structures of the body that have been preserved through the process of plastination. Gunther von Hagens developed the preservation process which “unites subtle anatomy and modern polymer chemistry”, in the late 1970s.

Lenticular clouds are stationary clouds that form mostly in the troposphere, typically in perpendicular alignment to the wind direction. They are often comparable in appearance to a lens or saucer. Nacreous clouds that form in the lower stratosphere sometimes have lenticular shapes.

Sex in space, specifically human sexual activity in the weightlessness of outer space, presents difficulties due to Newton’s third law. According to the law, if the couple remain attached, their movements will counter each other. Consequently, their actions will not change their velocity unless they are affected by another, unattached, object.

The tempescope is an ambient physical display that visualizes various weather conditions like rain, clouds, and lightning. Based on weather forecasts from the internet, it can reproduce tomorrow’s sky in your living room.

The Euthanasia Coaster is a hypothetical steel roller coaster designed to kill its passengers. In 2010, it was designed and made into a scale model by Lithuanian artist Julijonas Urbonas, a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Urbonas, who has worked at an amusement park, stated that the goal of his concept roller coaster is to take lives “with elegance and euphoria.”

Dempsey and Firpo (sometimes referred to as Dempsey Through The Ropes) is a 1923–1924 oil canvas painting by George Bellows, depicting the September 14, 1923 boxing match between American Jack Dempsey and Argentine Luis Firpo. As time passed by it has become Bellows’ most famous painting. The work has been in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art since the museum’s opening in 1931.

Space debris is a term for defunct human-made objects in space—principally in Earth orbit—which no longer serve a useful function. These include derelict spacecraft—nonfunctional spacecraft and abandoned launch vehicle stages—mission-related debris, and particularly numerous in Earth orbit, fragmentation debris from the breakup of derelict rocket bodies and spacecraft.

Visual Essay

A wolf collar is a type of dog collar designed to protect livestock guardian dogs from attack by wolves. Wolf collars are fitted with elongated spikes to stop wolves from attacking dogs on the neck. Such collars are used by shepherds in many countries including Italy, Spain and Turkey.

In astronomy, a syzygy is a roughly straight-line configuration of three or more celestial bodies in a gravitational system.

The “Cool S” is a graffiti sign in popular culture that is typically doodled on children’s notebooks or graffitied on walls. The exact origin of the “Cool S” is unknown, but it may have originated from geometry textbooks and has appeared around the early 1970s as a part of graffiti culture.

On 13 August 2004, the Olympic Games came home to Greece for the XXVIII Olympiad at an estimated cost of approximately €9bn. A decade after the sporting extravaganza, many of its once-gleaming Olympic venues now lie abandoned. For many Greeks who swelled with pride at the time, the Games are now a source of anger as the country struggles through a six-year depression, record unemployment, homelessness and poverty, with many questioning how the nation has benefited from the multi-billion-dollar event.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider and the largest machine in the world. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.

Stride jazz piano, often abbreviated to stride, is a jazz piano style that arose from ragtime players. Prominent stride pianists include James P. Johnson, Willie “the Lion” Smith, Fats Waller, and Luckey Roberts.

Bioluminescent bacteria are light-producing bacteria that are predominantly present in sea water, marine sediments, the surface of decomposing fish and in the gut of marine animals. While not as common, bacterial bioluminescence is also found in terrestrial and freshwater bacteria. These bacteria may be free living (such as Vibrio harveyi) or in symbiosis with animals such as the Hawaiian Bobtail squid (Aliivibrio fischeri) or terrestrial nematodes (Photorhabdus luminescens).

A meltwater channel (or sometimes a glacial meltwater channel) is a channel cut into ice, bedrock or unconsolidated deposits by the flow of water derived from the melting of a glacier or ice-sheet. The channel may form on the surface of, within, beneath, along the margins of or downstream from the ice mass. Accordingly it would be referred to as supraglacial, englacial, subglacial, lateral (or ice-marginal) or proglacial.

Paris syndrome is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting or going on vacation to Paris, who feel that Paris is not as beautiful as they had expected it to be. The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution, derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.

The Monobloc chair is a lightweight stackable polypropylene chair, usually white in colour, often described as the world’s most common plastic chair. The name comes from mono- (“one”) and bloc (“block”), meaning an object forged in a single piece.

Visual Essay

A vishapakar also known as vishap stones, vishap stellas, “serpent-stones”, “dragon stones”, or simply as vishaps, are characteristic menhirs found in large quantities in the Armenian Highlands, in natural and artificial ponds, and other sources of water. They are commonly carved from one piece of stone, into cigar-like shapes with fish heads or serpents. Supposedly they are images of vishaps, mystical creatures.

Miamira magnifica is a species of colourful dorid nudibranch, a sea slug, a shell-less marine gastropod mollusk in the family Chromodorididae. Previously synonymised with Ceratosoma this genus is considered valid on the basis of molecular phylogeny.

Joseph Jarman (September 14, 1937 – January 9, 2019) was an American jazz musician, composer, poet, and Shinshu Buddhist priest. He was one of the first members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Fly Geyser, also known as Fly Ranch Geyser is a small geothermal geyser located on private land in Washoe County, Nevada, about 20 miles (32 km) north of Gerlach. Fly Geyser is located near the edge of Fly Reservoir in the Hualapai Geothermal Flats and is approximately 5 feet (1.5 m) high by 12 feet (3.7 m) wide, counting the mound on which it sits. The geyser contains thermophilic algae, which flourish in moist, hot environments, resulting in multiple hues of green and red, coloring the rocks.

Visual Essay

Published in 1979, this self-defense book shows how the British Commandos fought in the Second World War in unarmed hand-to hand combat. Topics Include: Blows, Releases, Holds, Throws, Miscellaneous Advice, Use of the Knife, The Smatchet, Disarming an Opponent of His Pistol

Casa do Penedo (Portuguese for Stone House or House of the Rock) is an architectural monument located between Celorico de Basto and Fafe, in northern Portugal. It received its name because it was built from four large boulders that serve as the foundation, walls and ceiling of the house.

Monumental collection of photographs by Alyse Emdur of prison inmates representing themselves in front of visiting room backdrops. Such backdrops, often painted by inmates, are used within the prisons as portrait studios. As inmates and their visitors pose for photos in front of these idealized landscapes they pretend, for a brief moment, that they are someplace else. The photographs are given to these visitors as gifts to take home and remember the faces of their loved ones while they are incarcerated.

Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German apothecary Julius Neubronner, who also used pigeons to deliver medications. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness to which a lightweight time-delayed miniature camera could be attached. Neubronner’s German patent application was initially rejected, but was granted in December 1908 after he produced authenticated photographs taken by his pigeons.

Visual Essay

Tremoctopus is a genus of pelagic cephalopods, containing four species that occupy surface to mid-waters in subtropical and tropical oceans. They are commonly known as blanket octopodes, in reference to the long, transparent webs that connect the dorsal and dorsolateral arms of the adult females. The other arms are much shorter and lack webbing.

Freezing rain is the name given to rain maintained at temperatures below freezing by the ambient air mass that causes freezing on contact with surfaces. Unlike a mixture of rain and snow, ice pellets, or hail, freezing rain is made entirely of liquid droplets.

Giant smiley face planted in 2011 into a hillside along highway 18 near Willamina, Oregon. Douglas fir was planted for the eyes and mouth and the rest of the face was filled out with larch. A rope was used to measure the circle out and the eyes and mouth were triangulated from that point.

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Macrocilix maia is a moth in the family Drepanidae first described by John Henry Leech in 1888. It features two symmetrical patterns resembling flies feeding on bird droppings and uses the disguise because a lot of predators tend to skip on insects feasting on bird droppings, associating them with potential disease.

The Teatro del Mundo was designed by Aldo Rossi for the Venice Biennale in 1979. The idea was to revoke the floating theaters, so typical of Venice and its carnival in the eighteenth century. It was built in a shipyard, was towed by sea to your site in the middle of the water, where it remained through the Biennial.

In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids—liquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including aerodynamics (the study of air and other gases in motion) and hydrodynamics (the study of liquids in motion). Fluid dynamics has a wide range of applications, including calculating forces and moments on aircraft, determining the mass flow rate of petroleum through pipelines, predicting weather patterns, understanding nebulae in interstellar space and modelling fission weapon detonation.

Arborglyphs, dendroglyphs, silvaglyphs or modified cultural trees is the carving of shapes and symbols into the bark of living trees. Smooth-barked tree species, such as beeches, birches, and aspens, are most frequently carved. Some of the carvings are historicly or culturally significant — examined by historians, archeologists, and landscape ecologists.

Visual Essay

Flabellinopsis iodinea (Spanish shawl) is a species of aeolid nudibranch, a very colorful sea slug. This is a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Flabellinidae.

A Lichtenberg figure, or Lichtenberg dust figure, is a branching electric discharge that sometimes appears on the surface or in the interior of insulating materials. Lichtenberg figures are often associated with the progressive deterioration of high voltage components and equipment. The study of planar Lichtenberg figures along insulating surfaces and 3D electrical trees within insulating materials often provides engineers with valuable insights for improving the long-term reliability of high-voltage equipment.

The Iranian composer Morteza Hannaneh (1923 - 1989) co-founded the Teheran Symphony Orchestra and the Farabi Orchestra. He was a pioneer in modern national music in Iran.

Blue is a 1993 drama film directed by Derek Jarman. It is his final feature film, released four months before his death from AIDS-related complications. Such complications had already rendered him partially blind at the time of the film’s release, only being able to see in shades of blue. The film was his last testament as a film-maker, and consists of a single shot of saturated blue colour - specifically International Klein Blue (RGB 0, 47, 167, CMYK 100, 72, 0, 35). This fills the screen, as background to a soundtrack where Jarman’s and some of his long-time collaborators’ narration describes his life and vision.

Form follows function is a principle associated with late 19th and early 20th century architecture and industrial design in general, and it means the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.

Visual Essay

Tonic immobility is a natural state of paralysis that animals enter, often called animal hypnosis. Some sharks can be placed in a tonic state. The shark remains in this state of paralysis for an average of fifteen minutes before it recovers. Scientists have exploited this phenomenon to study shark behaviour. The effects of chemical shark repellent have been studied to test effectiveness and to narrow down dose sizes, concentrations, and time to awaken.

In September 1969, newly arrived first-year sculpture students at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London were handed name badges and a cube of polystyrene wrapped in brown paper, and ushered inside a bolted and padlocked room. Inside, they found their names pasted at distanced intervals on the floor, along with a list of rules. Students were told that they were not allowed to leave the room between 10 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., except to fetch tools, and were silently supervised by at least one professor at all times.

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Artworks from French Hardcore and Punk bands demo tapes (1987-1997).

The Fossa dei Leoni, also referred to by the acronym FdL, was an association of ultras supporters of Italian professional football club Associazione Calcio Milan. Established in 1968, it was the first ultras group to form in Italy.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a neurosurgical procedure involving the placement of a medical device called a neurostimulator (sometimes referred to as a “brain pacemaker”), which sends electrical impulses, through implanted electrodes, to specific targets in the brain (brain nuclei) for the treatment of movement disorders. While its underlying principles and mechanisms are not fully understood, DBS directly changes brain activity in a controlled manner. The technology invented by psychiatrist Robert G. Heath in the 1950s and ’60s has been described as among the most controversial experiments in US history.

Visual Essay

The Binoculars Building is the unofficial name of what was formerly known as the Chiat/Day Building, a commercial building built in 1991 for advertising agency Chiat/Day located in Venice, Los Angeles, California, designed by architect Frank Gehry.

Entoloma hochstetteri is a species of mushroom found in New Zealand and India. The small mushroom is a distinctive all-blue colour, while the gills have a slight reddish tint from the spores. The blue coloring of the fruit body is due to three azulene pigments. Whether Entoloma hochstetteri is poisonous or not is unknown.

Photographs by Ken Werner taken on Halloween night on Polk Street in 1976, 1977, and 1987; on Castro Street in 1979 and 1980; at the Hookers’ Ball in 1978 and 1979, and at the Beaux Arts Ball in 1980.

Maki Asakawa (1942-2010) was a Japanese jazz and blues singer, lyricist and composer. She was one of Japan’s finest singers, with a unique style influenced by black American music that ranged from pained blues ballads to R&B. Born in northern Japan, she quit her office job to move to Tokyo, started singing in clubs and US military bases, and discovered Billie Holiday.

A flamethrower is a mechanical incendiary device designed to project a controllable stream of fire. First deployed by the Greeks in the 1st century AD, flamethrowers saw use in modern times during World War I, and more widely in World War II. Most military flamethrowers use liquid fuel, typically either gasoline or diesel, but commercial flamethrowers are generally gas torches using fuels such as propane; gases are safer in peacetime applications, because their flames dissipate faster and often are easier to extinguish when necessary.

Asperitas (formerly known as Undulatus asperatus) is a cloud formation first popularized and proposed as a type of cloud in 2009 by Gavin Pretor-Pinney of the Cloud Appreciation Society. Added to the International Cloud Atlas as a supplementary feature in March 2017, it is the first cloud formation added since cirrus intortus in 1951. The name translates approximately as “roughness”.

Telescopefish are small, deep-sea aulopiform fish comprising the small family Giganturidae. The two known species are within the genus Gigantura. Though rarely captured, they are found in cold, deep tropical to subtropical waters worldwide.

High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment is a camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which has been orbiting and studying Mars since 2006. The 65 kg (143 lb), US$40 million instrument was built under the direction of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. It consists of a 0.5 m (19.7 in) aperture reflecting telescope, the largest so far of any deep space mission, which allows it to take pictures of Mars with resolutions of 0.3 m/pixel (about 1 foot), resolving objects below a meter across.

Five thousand orange tablets with an estimated street value of about $46,000 were seized and tagged as evidence in the northern German city of Osnabruck.

Just as Jenkins captured his professor Charles White in In The Spirit of Charles White, he also documented his friend the artist David Hammons, who was also a student of White’s. Filmed in Los Angeles in the period just before Hammons moved to New York City, King David records this pivotal moment in his artistic career.

Mishka, which means “Teddy Bear” in Russian, was a Siberian Husky. Her most famous video, which was uploaded more than 12 years ago on February 7, 2008, has been viewed over 109 million times. In it, we see Mishka vocalizing, and sounding very much like she’s saying “I love you.”

The 1989 Japanese Grand Prix was a Formula One motor race held at Suzuka Circuit, Japan, on 22 October 1989. This race became one of the most notorious in F1 history, as the culmination of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna’s tumultuous two year rivalry as teammates at McLaren. The Japanese Grand Prix decided the 1989 Drivers’ Championship in Prost’s favour, after a collision on lap 47 at the final chicane between him and Senna put them both off the track.

A civil defense siren (also known as an air-raid siren or tornado siren) is a siren used to provide an emergency population warning to the general population of approaching danger. It is sometimes sounded again to indicate the danger has passed. Some sirens (especially within small towns) are also used to call the volunteer fire department when needed.

An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) is an artifact of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in an unusual context, which challenges conventional historical chronology by its presence in that context. Such artifacts may appear “too advanced” for the technology known to have existed at the time, or may suggest human presence at a time before humans are known to have existed.

The Mano del Desierto is a large-scale sculpture of a hand located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, about 60 km to the south and east of the city of Antofagasta, on the Panamerican Highway. The nearest point of reference is the “Ciudad Empresarial La Negra” (La Negra Business City). It lies between the 1309 and 1310 km marker points on the highway in Newyork.

Detroit techno producer Claude Young is well-known for his dark but dreamy productions on Frictional Recording, 7th City or Djax-Up-Beats labels in the 1990s.

Aerial photo calibration targets are curious land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts used for the development of aerial photography and aircraft. They were made mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, though some apparently later than that, and some are still in use, though their history is obscure.

James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.

Maratus volans is a species in the jumping spider family (Salticidae), belonging to the genus Maratus (peacock spiders).Both sexes reach about 5 mm in body length. Females and immatures of both sexes are brown but have color patterns by which they can be distinguished from related species. Also, the males dance to attract females.

Mobile society, mobile housing – the housing system Instant Housing is directed towards the special situation and needs of each of its users. There are various versions of Instant Housing for the differing climatic conditions of distinct locations (mosquito net, rain tarpaulin) as well as variable possibilities for mobility.

Snake handling, also called serpent handling, as a religious rite is observed in a small number of isolated churches, mostly in the United States, usually characterized as rural and part of the Holiness movement. The practice began in the early 20th century in Appalachia and plays only a small part in the church service. Participants are Holiness, Pentecostals, Charismatics, or other evangelicals.

272 page book features the photography of Peter Beste who spent 9 years documenting Hip Hop culture in Houston alongside writer Lance Scott Walker.

Heavy experimental aircraft designed and tested in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. It was of unusual configuration, with twin booms and large underwing pods housing fixed landing gear and machine gun turrets. In the passenger version, seats were arranged inside the 2.3-meter thick (7ft7 in) wings.

Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St. John’s Dance and St. Vitus’s Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, in the Holy Roman Empire, in 1374, and it quickly spread throughout Europe; one particularly notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518, also in the Holy Roman Empire.

A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, with its head down near the ground, and drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes.

Tanzanite is the blue and violet variety of the mineral zoisite (a calcium aluminium hydroxyl sorosilicate), caused by small amounts of vanadium. Tanzanite belongs to the epidote mineral group. Tanzanite is only found in Tanzania, in a very small mining area (approximately 7 km (4.3 mi) long and 2 km (1.2 mi) wide) near the Mererani [sw] Hills.

Catacanthus also known as The Man-faced stink bugwhich literally means “having downward-pointing thorns ” is a genus of insects within the family Pentatomidae. The insects belonging to this genus are found in Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Japan and South Korea.Discovered in 1778 by British entomologist, Dru Drury, the species hails from Southeast Asia and India, where it congregates in dense groups of several hundred on fruit trees and flowering flame trees.

Piano Piece for Terry Riley #1, Mimeograph, 1960.

In the early hours of Monday 8 August 2016, the semi-submersible drilling rig Transocean Winner ran aground near Dalmore in the Carloway district of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. The rig had been under tow by the tug Alp Forward in winds of galeforce, when the tow line broke. The rig subsequently drifted ashore at Dalmore and became stuck fast on rocks at 07.30 BST.

Aggressive mimicry is a form of mimicry in which predators, parasites or parasitoids share similar signals, using a harmless model, allowing them to avoid being correctly identified by their prey or host. Zoologists have repeatedly compared this strategy to a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Les Apaches was a Parisian Belle Époque violent criminal underworld subculture of early 20th-century hooligans, night muggers, street gangs and other criminals. After the news about their notoriety spread over Europe, the term was used to describe violent street crime in other countries as well; for example, “Russian apaches”.

Pangaea Proxima (also called Pangaea Ultima, Neopangaea, and Pangaea II) is a possible future supercontinent configuration. Consistent with the supercontinent cycle, Pangaea Proxima could occur within the next 300 million years. This potential configuration, hypothesized by Christopher Scotese, earned its name from its similarity to the previous Pangaea supercontinent.

Chandra Oppenheim was a child star like no other. As the daughter of famed conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim, she was born into the heady New York City of the late 1970s that spawned punk, hip-hop, no wave, mutant disco, and Madonna.

On May 6 2001 during a game between Inter Milan and Atalanta Bergamo a group of Inter Milan ultras smugled a scooter into the San Siro, set it on fire and attempted to hurl it from the tiered stand on to the pitch.

Namio Harukawa (春川ナミオ, Harukawa Namio, May 1947 – April 24, 2020) was a pseudonymous Japanese fetish artist best known for his works depicting female domination (“femdom”), with erotic asphyxiation through facesitting appearing as a frequent subject of his art.

Armillaria ostoyae (synonym Armillaria solidipes) is a species of plant-pathogenic fungus in the family Physalacriaceae.It is known as having grown possibly the largest living organism by area – estimated by scientists as a contiguous specimen found in the Oregon Malheur National Forest covering 3.7 square miles (2,400 acres; 9.6 km2) – and colloquially called the “Humongous fungus”.

Shuttle Endeavor transported through the streets of Los Angeles and Inglewood from October 11–14 2012 along La Tijera, Manchester, Crenshaw, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevards to its final destination at the California Science Center in Exposition Park.

In 2009, filmmaker Manthia Diawara, along with his camera, documented his conversations with Martinican philosopher, writer, and poet Édouard Glissant aboard the Queen Mary II on their transatlantic journey from Southampton, England to New York City. This intellectual voyage encapsulates Glissant’s life’s work and studies on his theory of Relation and the concept of Tout-monde, amongst several other of his philosophical suppositions.

A multiple gondola pile-up happened at the Hochzillertal ski area near Kaltenbach, Austria on December 09, 2018. Six, 10-passenger gondolas on the “Wimbachexpress” collided due to high wind as a storm ranged in the area. The gondola cars were empty at the time due to the strong wind. Thankfully no one was injured.

30 acre (12 hectare) sculpture garden created by landscape architect and theorist Charles Jencks at his home, Portrack House, in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Like much of Jencks’ work, the garden is inspired by modern cosmology.

Tangerine Dream live equipment, 1975.

Visual Essay

Eye strain, also known as asthenopia, is an eye condition that manifests through non-specific symptoms such as fatigue, pain in or around the eyes, blurred vision, headache, and occasional double vision. Symptoms often occur after long-term use of computers, digital devices, reading, driving long distances or other activities that involve extended visual tasks.

The frilled shark (Chlamydoselachus anguineus) is one of two extant species of shark in the family Chlamydoselachidae, with a wide but patchy distribution in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This species is found over the outer continental shelf and upper continental slope, generally near the bottom, though there is evidence of substantial upward movements. It has been caught as deep as 1,570 m (5,150 ft), although it is uncommon below 1,200 m (3,900 ft).

In the fifty years following the first mention of empathy in the neuroscience literature, significant gains in understanding the neural basis of empathy have been made. Converging strands of evidence support simulation-based models of empathy, such that, for example, empathy for pain recruits networks involved in the first-hand experience of pain. Similarly, empathy for other distinct sensory and affective states (e.g. tactile pleasure, fear) leverages the networks involved in the firsthand experience of those states.

Gold is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis, and from the collision of neutron stars, and to have been present in the dust from which the Solar System formed.

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French photojournalist Jack Burlot was 18 when he began his career by covering the Vietnam War. He later covered various conflicts in the Levant. So it was quite a change for him to come to a quiet, peaceful country like the UAE. He arrived in Abu Dhabi in 1974 on an assignment from the Gamma Agency to cover the oil boom here.

The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), now extinct, is one of the largest known carnivorous marsupials, evolving about 4 million years ago. The last known live animal was captured in 1933 in Tasmania. It is commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger because of its striped lower back, or the Tasmanian wolf because of its canid-like characteristics. It was native to Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Australian mainland.

The Goûter Hut, is a mountain refuge in the French department of Haute-Savoie. It is located at a height of 3,835 metres (12,582 ft) on the Arete du Goûter in the municipality of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains. It overlooks the Glacier de Bionnassay, and is the highest wardened mountain hut in France.

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Low Taek Jho (born 4 November 1981), often called Jho Low, is a international fugitive sought by the authorities in Malaysia, Singapore, and the United States in connection with 1MDB fraud. Low allegedly purchased a US$325,000 white Ferrari as a wedding gift for Kim Kardashian in 2011. The Department of Justice (DoJ) was reported to have sought restitution from other famous celebrities who had received gifts from Low, among them Leonardo DiCaprio, who has since returned Picasso and Basquiat paintings; and Miranda Kerr who returned diamond jewellery with a market value of US$8 million.

The Banggai cardinalfish is a small tropical cardinalfish in the family Apogonidae. It is the only member of its genus.This attractive fish is popular in the aquarium trade. It is among the relatively few marine fish to have been bred regularly in captivity, but significant numbers are still captured in the wild and it is now an endangered species.

The Osaka Demonstration Robot by Arata Isozaki consists of a head, body, base and two arms of different lengths. The head contains two control rooms. In the first ambiant data is collected and processed, and then transmitted to the main control room from which the robot receives instructions to respond by emitting smoke, smell, light, and sounds. The body of the robot can rise up to a height of twenty-four feet. When the body is up, the base becomes a stage and it is then possible for the body of the robot to go through a repertoire of movements.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in Green Bank, West Virginia, US is the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope. The Green Bank site was part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) until September 30, 2016. Since October 1, 2016, the telescope has been operated by the independent Green Bank Observatory.

Variety of a solid state Tesla coil that has been modified to produce musical tones by modulating its spark output. The resulting pitch is a low fidelity square wave like sound reminiscent of an analog synthesizer. The high-frequency signal acts in effect as a carrier wave; its frequency is significantly above human-audible sound frequencies, so that digital modulation can reproduce a recognizable pitch.

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Ancient hand powered Greek analogue computer which has also been described as the first example of such device used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance. It could also be used to track the four-year cycle of athletic games which was similar to an Olympiad, the cycle of the ancient Olympic Games.

A solar cooker is a device which uses the energy of direct sunlight to heat, cook or pasteurize drink and other food materials. Many solar cookers currently in use are relatively inexpensive, low-tech devices, although some are as powerful or as expensive as traditional stoves, and advanced, large-scale solar cookers can cook for hundreds of people.

In Balkans folklore, Dhampirs (sometimes spelled dhampyres, dhamphirs, or dhampyrs) are creatures that are the result of a union between a vampire and a human. This union was usually between male vampires and female humans, with stories of female vampires mating with male humans being rare.

The United States Bullion Depository, often known as Fort Knox, is a fortified vault building located next to the United States Army post of Fort Knox, Kentucky. It is operated by the United States Department of the Treasury. The vault is used to store a large portion of the United States’ gold reserves as well as other precious items belonging to or in custody of the federal government. It currently holds roughly 147 million troy ounces (4,580 metric tons) of gold bullion, over half of the Treasury’s stored gold.

Thousands of black grackles take over a Walmart parking lot in Houston, Texas.

A lucid dream is a dream during which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment; however, this is not actually necessary for a dream to be described as lucid.

Real-life kung fu master Nathan Ingram stars in this gritty, low-budget martial arts epic as a local karate school owner who clashes with a gang of drug traffickers posing as the owners of a rival dojo. Directed by Charlie Ahearn in 1979.

Cable-stayed bridge on the border between the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan in China. As of 2016, the bridge is the highest in the world with the road deck sitting over 565 metres (1,850 feet) above the Beipan River. The bridge is part of the G56 Hangzhou–Ruili Expressway between Qujing and Liupanshui. The eastern tower measures 269 m (883 ft) making it one of the tallest in the world. The bridge spans 1,340 m (4,400 ft) between Xuanwei city, Yunnan and Shuicheng County, Guizhou.

Internet domain name and web portal currently owned by Clover Holdings LTD. The domain name was the focus of one of the most publicized legal actions about ownership of domain names. Sex.com was sold at a reported $14 million price to Escom LLC in January 2006.

Viper species found in the rainforests and savannas of sub-Saharan Africa. Like all vipers, it is venomous. It is the largest member of the genus Bitis, and it has the longest fangs – up to 2 inches in length (5 cm) – and the second highest venom yield of any snake next to the King cobra.