The hotter it is, the slower you run
—but humidity plays a role too. When the air is full of moisture, sweating doesn’t cool you down like it usually would. You won’t be able to run as fast, because your body is trying to prevent you from overheating.
Source: LifeHacker – Here’s How Much Slower You Run When It’s Humid
Our photo of the day reveals the angelic side of an energetic tern.
Source: TreeHugger – Photo: Least tern adopts angel pose
If you try hard and believe in yourself, anything can be a knife—but turning rebar into a legit-as-hell kunai is a fresh take.
Source: Gizmodo – Blacksmith Makes a Rad Throwing Knife Out of Rebar
Another week has passed with another high-profile exclusive debuting on Apple Music. As it does each time an artist keeps a new album off its service, Spotify reiterated this week that those exclusives are “bad for the whole industry.” According to a…
Source: Engadget – Bloomberg: Spotify buries artists with Apple and Tidal exclusives
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report:Inspired by the success of Pokemon Go, a Belgian primary school headmaster has developed an online game for people to search for books instead of cartoon monsters, attracting tens of thousands of players in weeks. While with Pokemon Go, players use a mobile device’s GPS and camera to track virtual creatures around town, Aveline Gregoire’s version is played through a Facebook group called “Chasseurs de livres” (“Book hunters”). Players post pictures and hints about where they have hidden a book and others go to hunt them down. Once someone has finished reading a book, they “release” it back into the wild. “While I was arranging my library, I realized I didn’t have enough space for all my books. Having played Pokemon Go with my kids, I had the idea of releasing the books into nature,” Gregoire told Reuters. Though it was only set up a few weeks ago, more than 40,000 people are already signed up to Gregoire’s Facebook group.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Belgians Are Hunting Books, Instead Of Pokemon
Enlarge / Bubble wrap isn’t just for stress relief. (credit: George Ni)
To boil water using the Sun, we typically burn fossil fuels carrying several-hundred-million-year-old solar energy that was extracted from underground at great expense. It’s kind of Rube-Goldbergian. We’re fortunate that the Sun’s heat isn’t strong enough to boil the oceans (or us), but extracting the Sun’s energy at a significant scale is tricky.
The usual solution, as many magnifying-glass-toting children already know, is to concentrate sunlight and increase its intensity. Solar thermal plants, for example, use massive arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight and generate electricity. All that extra equipment gets pretty expensive—especially if you need the mirrors to track the Sun’s position across the sky.
So how do we engineer another way? In the past, researchers made clever designs to concentrate the heat generated by lower-intensity sunlight into small volumes of water. This heat consequently created higher localized temperatures. While they managed to boil water with this method, they weren’t able to ditch optical concentration completely.
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Source: Ars Technica – Floating solar device boils water without mirrors
These are several shots of the world’s new largest pearl, a massive 34kg (75-pound) behemoth that measures a foot wide and 2.2-feet in length. For reference, that’s about the same size, but not shape, as of one of my balls. They pearl beats the previous record holder (the Pearl of Lao Tzu, aka the Pearl of Allah) by some 61-pounds. Now that’s how I like to win contests: by an insane f***ing margin. One year I’m going to enter that Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest and eat every hot dog there, including the other contestants’. Plus at least 22-feet of raw dog coming out of the wiener-shaping machine. I’m a monster and I like to win. This pearl was actually discovered by a Filipino fisherman ten years ago in a giant clam, who kept it hidden under his bed for the last decade, clearly after reading Steinbeck’s The Pearl and learned a thing or two. Unfortunately, a house fire and the need to move caused him to finally hand the pearl over to a local tourism officer, who will probably reward the man with little to nothing. I know how these things work. Fingers crossed it’s just a whale’s tooth and this guy’s been playing everybody.
Keep going for a couple more shots.
Source: Geekologie – 75 Pounds, 2-Feet Long, Worth 0-Million: The World’s New Largest Pearl
A Dog’s Purpose is a movie about a dog that keeps getting reincarnated to help people with their lives. That means this is a feel-good movie where a dog dies many, many times. Horrific.
Source: io9 – The First Trailer For the Dog Reincarnation Movie A Dog’s Purpose Is a Sociopathic Nightmare
As a child, I was deprived of the joy that is “sugary cereal.” This denial sparked an obsession, and I am always looking for ways to cram more of the stuff into my life and mouth. I have found my next project, and it is a no-bake Golden Graham pie crust.
Source: LifeHacker – Make a Delicious No-Bake Pie Crust Out of Golden Grahams
From Dragon Age’s darkspawn to Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head, video games have no shortage of terrifying foes. But there is a single enemy that is scarier than any of them. A formless, invisible beast that can never be stopped: Time.
Source: Kotaku – The Scariest Video Game Monster Is Time
When the Spitzer telescope blasted off to space on August 25th, 2003, NASA didn’t think it would still be doing science by 2016. But since it’s alive and well 13 years later, the agency has granted it a two-and-a-half-year mission extension to make d…
Source: Engadget – NASA extends the Spitzer mission for two-and-a-half years
If you look closely at a map, you’re bound to find some really weird shit. Countries you never knew existed pop up, bodies of water reveal themselves, and the borders of countries look totally random. What’s more random about those borders is when they have weird panhandles or salients, basically appendages of land that have been hastily slapped onto the main body of a country. How did these tiny stretches of land get added?
Source: Gizmodo – Why the Heck Do Some Countries Have Weird Panhandles?
It appears that they have turned out to be a bad investment.
Source: TreeHugger – Is the McMansion era over?
For all those times when you really, really want to get your can of mixed nuts 3 days faster than the free shipping option, Amazon offers $10,000 one week shipping. Needless to say I opted for the free shipping.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – K Shipping Deal of the Day
Animals painted with fantastical realism undergo an extraordinary transformation in these large-scale artworks.
Source: TreeHugger – Artist’s murals of animals in mystical metamorphosis reconnect us back to nature (Video)
Oh really, Bruno Heller, showrunner of the hit Fox television show/Sisyphean punishment simulator Gotham? Superheroes don’t work well on TV? Do go on.
Source: io9 – Gotham Showrunner, Surrounded By Good Superhero Shows, Doesn’t Think Superheroes Work Well on TV
Mark Chediak, reporting for Bloomberg:Alphabet Inc’s Nest Labs is looking to enlist enough customers in California to free up as much power as a small natural gas-fired plant produces, helping alleviate potential energy shortages in the region following a massive gas leak that has restricted supplies. Nest, which supplies digital, wireless thermostats, is partnering with Edison International’s Southern California Edison utility to get households enrolled in a state-established energy conservation program. The company wants to attract 50,000 customers through next summer that could shrink their total demand by as much as 50 megawatts when needed, Ben Bixby, Nest’s director of energy businesses at Nest, said by phone. “We are building a citizen-fueled clean power plant,” he said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Alphabet’s Nest Wants to Build a ‘Citizen-Fueled’ Power Plant
Many video games, usually RPGs, contain a system by which the strengths and weaknesses of your character are defined by a set of attributes. Here is my definitive ranking of common video game attributes, ranked from worst to best.
Source: Kotaku – Video Game Attributes, Ranked
Engadget is re-reviewing the current generation of game consoles, each of which has benefited from firmware updates, price drops and an improved selection of games. We’ve already revisited the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. Now, at last, it’s Ninten…
Source: Engadget – The Wii U revisited: Looking back on a forward-thinking console
iOS: One of the annoying things about working with text on your phone or iPad is that properly formatting it can be a bother, especially when you’re copying and pasting between apps and get line breaks where you don’t want them. Clean Text for iOS aims to fix that.
Source: LifeHacker – Clean Text for iOS Helps Fix Your Formatting and More
