Category: Coping with COVID
Your appendix is not, in fact, useless. This anatomy professor explains
NPR It was the first day of spring break in 1992 in Phoenix, and 12-year-old Heather Smith was excited for her family’s upcoming ski trip. But before Smith and her family had even packed their snow pants, she realized she didn’t feel good. “I woke up feeling just a little bit nauseous, and I wasn’t […]
Feb 6, 2024
See what your brain does when you look at art
BBC Video Headsets that show the impact of art on human brainwaves are to be toured at museums and galleries around the UK. They are connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG) monitor and allow people’s brainwaves to be visualised in 3D and in real-time on screen. The technology has already been used at the Courtauld Gallery […]
Jan 31, 2024
Passengers left screaming after Tesla detects ‘ghosts’ in graveyard
LadBible A Tesla driver and his passengers were left shaken up after the car started to detect ‘ghosts’ walking through a cemetery near to the real life house from The Conjuring. The bloke claimed to have been driving through a cemetery near to the Arnold Estate, which is the real-life inspiration for the 2013 flick, when figures started […]
Jan 24, 2024
Pediatricians See an Alarming Number of Noodle-Soup Burns
The Atlantic When the weather turns frigid, there is only one thing to do: make a pot of chicken-noodle soup. On the first cold afternoon in early December, I simmered a whole rotisserie chicken with fennel, dill, and orzo, then ladled it into bowls for a cozy family meal. Just as I thought we’d reached […]
Jan 16, 2024
Here are the most notable memes of 2023
NBC News 2023 marked another year of meme-ories. Like in past years, many online turned to memes as a form of escapism. “Memes seemed to be a primary way people dealt with and processed and reacted to news this year,” said Jessica Maddox, assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama. They also […]
Jan 2, 2024
Barbie, the Titan submersible and everything else we Googled in 2023
Washington Post A lost submersible, an NFL safety who collapsed on field, the Israel-Gaza war and a ‘Friends’ star who died were some of the most searched terms in the United States on Google in 2023, according to the search engine’s year in review. People also searched for the “Barbie” movie, asked how often people think about the Roman Empire and tried to […]
Dec 26, 2023
Namesake of the poinsettia, enslaver, secret agent and perpetrator of the ‘Trail of Tears’
The Conversation If people know the name Joel Roberts Poinsett today, it is likely because of the red and green poinsettia plant. In the late 1820s, while serving as the first ambassador from the U.S. to Mexico, Poinsett clipped samples of the plant known in Spanish as the “flor de nochebuena,” or flower of Christmas Eve, from […]
Dec 19, 2023
The unsung geniuses who uncovered why we sleep and dream
Nature Just 100 years ago, we understood astoundingly little about sleep and dreaming. A tight-knit band of researchers changed things, against sometimes considerable odds. Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep Kenneth Miller Hachette (2023) Sleep and dreaming are human universals. Yet only in the past century has science begun to appreciate […]
Dec 12, 2023
This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
MIT Tech Review The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the […]
Dec 12, 2023
