Neatorama

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• The Ghostly Radio Station that No One Claims to Run
• Let’s Window Shop for French Fairytale Homes
• Cats in Art History
• How Dinosaurs Raised Their Young
• The Monster That Everyone Saw and No One Cared to Talk About
• The Final Fantasy Game That Came Out At The Wrong Time
• This Sparkling Water is Marshmallow-Flavored
• Chemists Have Found A Way To Recycle Some of Our Toughest Plastics
• The Hibakusha And Their Contribution To Radiation Studies
• Who’s More Likely To Cheat?
• The Funny Faces of Olympic Figure Skaters
• Gotta Eat the Plums! - A William Carlos Williams Video Game
• <i>The Walking Dead</i> Will Return in a Big Way

The Ghostly Radio Station that No One Claims to Run Posted: 27 Jul 2020 04:48 AM PDT In a swamp outside of St. Petersburg, Russia, there's a shortwave radio transmitter amongst a series of towers that makes no sense to most of us. Someone, somewhere knows exactly what is going on. It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, "MDZhB", that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it's been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it's joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues. Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as "dinghy" or "farming specialist". And that's it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz. It's so enigmatic, it's as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as "the Buzzer". It joins two similar mystery stations, "the Pip" and the "Squeaky Wheel". As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to. No one knows, but there are theories about the enigmatic broadcast. Read what we know, and what people think they know, about what's going on with MDZhB at BBC Future.  -via Strange Company

Let’s Window Shop for French Fairytale Homes Posted: 27 Jul 2020 04:48 AM PDT For the price of a small family home in San Francisco, you can buy a medieval castle with acreage in France. Messy Messy Chic gives us photographic tours of charming and historical homes for sale, some that need extensive restoration or renovation, and some that have been kept up nicely. All are utterly charming. They include abbeys, towers, chateaus, manors, estates, schools, fortresses, and ruins. See 18 historical French properties that are on the market now. We can dream, can't we?

Cats in Art History Posted: 27 Jul 2020 04:48 AM PDT A Virtual Exhibition : the cat in the History of Art https://t.co/jJAyaFSYDx The place of the #cat (#kedi) in the history of art, such is the virtual exhibition the Universal Museum of Art has been offering online for a while and… free of charge. pic.twitter.com/tFBFpUODqL — KEDISTAN (@KEDISTAN) April 24, 2020 The Universal Museum of Art grants us a virtual tour highlighting one of our favorite things -cats! For the first time ever, 75 works of art from Ancient Egypt to today are reunited around the subject of cats! Big cats, small cats, cuddly cats or playful cats, tiger-cats or kittens; all are waiting for you in an eighteenth century mansion decor. Come and let yourself be swayed by the furry friends and discover: cats hidden in every painting, waiting to be found; moments of pure tenderness captured by artists; cats who have snuck into domestic or even religious scenes; and fabulous accounts of felines with extraordinary powers. Use your mouse to move around the museum to see various artworks featuring cats, and click on the painting or sculpture to bring up information about it, and from there you can take a closer look. Some art is all about cats, while others contain a cat somewhere, but you have to look for it. The museum gives us clues. Begin your virtual tour here.  -via Nag on the Lake

How Dinosaurs Raised Their Young Posted: 27 Jul 2020 04:48 AM PDT For a long time, paleontologists assumed that dinosaurs laid hard-shelled eggs in nests that they often buried to protect them from predators. But more recent evidence shows that dinosaur eggs varied as much as the animals themselves, and some were soft-shelled -although those often don't keep their shape long enough to fossilize. Parenting strategies varied from dino to dino as well.   For example, consider the parrot-like dinosaurs called oviraptorids. Paleontologists have found the gorgeous skeletons preserved in a position where they seem to be sitting over nests of eggs. "It's tempting to call this brooding, like living birds," says San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist Ashley Poust, "but we're still unsure if that was part of their behavior." Still, the details would indicate that the dinosaurs constructed their nests with care. Scientists know from previous finds that oviraptorids laid two eggs at a time in a clutch of 30 or more. "This means that the mother would have to stay with or at least return to the nest, lay her pair of eggs, arrange them carefully in the circle, and bury them appropriately every day for two weeks to a month," Poust says. Those eggs would have taken months to hatch. While experts are still searching for definitive evidence, parent dinosaurs may have sat with these nests until the hatchling babies pushed their way out of the shells. Also, Zelenitsky notes, researchers have found a large number of oviraptorosaur nests with adult dinosaur skeletons nearby. "These dinosaurs were completely obsessed with their eggs," she says. Each species had to balance the danger of staying with their nests against the odds of their young surviving without them, and developed different egg architecture, nests, and parenting strategies to maximize the chances of survival and successful reproduction, with varying results. Read how different dinosaurs dealth with their young, as far as we know now, at Smithsonian. (Image credit: Emőke Dénes)

The Monster That Everyone Saw and No One Cared to Talk About Posted: 27 Jul 2020 04:48 AM PDT The summer of 1817 was peculiar in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as that's when the sea serpent was spotted. But today it is an afterthought to those who serve the tourist trade in this seaside town. Unless the locals near Loch Ness or Area 51 or any other mysterious sighting in history, they just don't talk about the sea serpent that might have become the town's legacy.   Most cryptid sightings are one‐on‐one occurrences: someone alone at night, on a backcountry road or in an isolated woods. Sometimes it's a small group. Maybe there's a fuzzy photograph, but soon enough the creature vanishes, never to return. But the Gloucester sea serpent was different. Scores of people saw it—people came from all over, gathered on the shore to gawk, and there it was. Visible from shore or from a boat, exactly as expected. Different people on different days, all independently, all with more or less the same basic descriptions. No other cryptid in the long history of such beasts can boast such visibility—not Bigfoot, not Nessie. Whatever it was, it was not a hoax or a hallucination. The Gloucester sea serpent faded from memory because the New England Linnaean Society got it wrong, creating a new species based on a snake plagued by rickets. When their error was exposed, the original sightings, it seems, were forgotten. But while Jacob Bigelow's analysis of the rickety snake disproved the holotype specimen, Bigelow didn't disprove the sightings themselves. The people who saw the sea serpent all agreed it was much bigger than a normal snake anyway. The story of the Gloucester sea serpent is explained here, in which scientists erroneously declared it a new species and then were disproven. That let the wind out of the sails as far as the town of Gloucester was concerned. Yet other cryptids remain popular, including a couple that were thought to be legendary and then were found alive. Read about them and what makes a cryptid spark the public's imagination at LitHub. -via Digg

The Final Fantasy Game That Came Out At The Wrong Time Posted: 27 Jul 2020 04:48 AM PDT There are a lot of installments to the Final Fantasy franchise that it's hard to pick which one is the best game out of them all, however one can point out that there are specific titles that have a deep impact and relevance to people, like Final Fantasy VII. With a lot of games available for players, it can't be helped that some installments in the franchise would not be remembered well, like Final Fantasy IX. This underrated entry is one of the most definitive games ever, and series creator Hironobu Skaguchi's favorite. Check out IGN's full piece on Final Fantasy IX here. image via IGN

This Sparkling Water is Marshmallow-Flavored Posted: 27 Jul 2020 03:22 AM PDT Strawberry, lime, lemon, and cherry are the usual flavors that sparkling water products have. Ugly Drinks, however, want their drink to deviate from this common line of flavors, and so they created this sparkling water that tastes like marshmallow. This marshmallow-flavored drink is part of Ugly Drinks's limited-edition flavors which include Cherry Cola and Sour Apple. If you want to try some marshmallow sparkling water, you can pick up a 12-pack here. With a price of $2.50 a can, you're looking to gamble 30 bucks on something you may or may not enjoy after the first few sips. Would you drink this? Why or why not? (Image Credit: Ugly Drinks/ Technabob)

Chemists Have Found A Way To Recycle Some of Our Toughest Plastics Posted: 26 Jul 2020 10:28 PM PDT There are many types of plastics that we use directly or indirectly in our daily lives. Of the many types of plastics, thermosets are some of the toughest. These are plastics that are very durable and are heat-resistant. These features, however, are also what makes them very difficult to break down and recycle. But scientists may just have found a way to break this plastic down, while keeping its original strength. The study suggests that by changing the way they're made, we could keep the original strength of these thermosets, but make them able to be broken down and recycled. Currently, around 75 percent of the plastic we use in items such as plastic wrappers and plastic bags can be broken down and then reused. But thermosets, which are found in things such as car parts, aren't reusable. The new approach involves slightly adjusting the mixture that makes up thermoset plastic, adding particular types of building blocks (or monomers) called silyl ethers that are more susceptible to being pulled apart and reshaped. More details about this over at ScienceAlert. (Image Credit: Cjp24/ Wikimedia Commons)

The Hibakusha And Their Contribution To Radiation Studies Posted: 26 Jul 2020 10:25 PM PDT On August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima by the bomber plane Enola Gay. An estimated 90,000 to 120,000 are said to have died, either instantaneously or over the following days, because of the atomic bomb. Three days later, another atomic bomb, nicknamed "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki, killing around 60,000 to 70,000. There were some people who survived these horrifying events, and they came to be known in Japanese as hibakusha. Unfortunately, while they may have survived the atomic bombs, they could not escape the deadly effects of the radiation caused by them. Nevertheless, their suffering was not in vain. Collectively, they have left an important legacy. Most of what is known today about the long-term health effects of radiation has come out of research with those survivors. The work, now run by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), is making "major contributions to our understanding of radiation effects," even today, says Richard Wakeford, a radiation epidemiologist at the University of Manchester. RERF studies also underpin the limits that countries have set for occupational and medical exposure to radiation. Meet some of the survivors and read their stories over at Science Magazine. (Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Who’s More Likely To Cheat? Posted: 26 Jul 2020 10:24 PM PDT Tests and exams just might be the universal method of measuring a person's ability, knowledge, or intelligence. For both the child and the adult, tests are to be taken seriously when the stakes are high. And since some tests have high stakes, some people, old or young, resort to cheating. But how do we identify these people? Who is more likely to cheat? This is what researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela tried to answer. They reported that… …the people most likely to cheat were the ones with a personality that can only be described as lazy, or low on conscientiousness. The cheaters were also lower on the trait of agreeableness, meaning that they weren't particularly nice people. This profile of student cheaters helps to provide insight into why some young people take such a dishonest approach to education. The question is, however, do they "grow out" of this behavior or do they continue to be cheaters throughout their adult lives? More details about this over at Psychology Today. What are your thoughts about this one? (Image Credit: Pixabay)

The Funny Faces of Olympic Figure Skaters Posted: 26 Jul 2020 10:23 PM PDT Graceful, quick-witted, flexible, and just overall amazing, Olympic figure skaters are indeed spectacular performers. Passionate at what they are good at, they put their all on every action, may it be a twist or a spin, and along with it, their facial expressions, too! See the funny pictures over at Sad and Useless. (Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

Gotta Eat the Plums! - A William Carlos Williams Video Game Posted: 26 Jul 2020 01:39 PM PDT American poet William Carlos Williams is most famous for his short work "This Is Just To Say", which goes as follows: I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold It's quite an adventure and thus the basis for an excellent video game by Calum Rodger, which is free and playable in your browser. Drag the character around the kitchen and click on objects to interact with them. Eat as many plums as you can. -via Nag on the Lake

<i>The Walking Dead</i> Will Return in a Big Way Posted: 26 Jul 2020 09:59 AM PDT The Walking Dead season ten was abruptly truncated due to the coronavirus lockdown after 15 episodes. The last scheduled episode was put on pause. Now, during the virtual San Diego Comic Con, AMC's Walking Dead symposiums have revealed what the franchise has planned. First off, the episode we were missing will air on October 10. Watch the first few minutes of it here. Note I did not say that The Walking Dead "finale" will air on October 4th, because — twist — it will no longer be the finale. At Comic-Con, Angela Kang also announced that, although production has not yet begun, the plan is to add an additional six episodes to season 10, which will air in 2021. It sounds like, instead of jumping to season 11 in its traditional February slot, the series will add additional season 10 episodes in the Spring and, presumably if all goes well, begin season 11 in the fall. Following the singular Walking Dead episode on October 10, the new spinoff series Walking Dead: World Beyond will premiere, followed by The Talking Dead. Fear the Walking Dead will begin its season six the next day, on October 11th. The Comic Con trailer is here. Also read some details of what you can expect to see.

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