Neatorama

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• Custom Face Mask Fails
• Joseph's Puzzle Machines
• Watermelon Omelette Cookies: Baking AI-Generated Recipes
• When Surgeons Said No To Gloves
• You Inflate This Chair by Screaming into It
• Printing the Guitar Emoji, And Playing It
• Why Is This Turtle Yellow?
• When Books Somehow Predict The Future
• This Guy Went Viral For Doing Nothing
• Microbes from Millions of Years Ago Revived in Lab
• Even Time Travelers Hate 2020
• Kinetic Sculpture of Waves
• This Handheld Game Console Can Fit On Your Keyring!
• Are Braces Really Necessary?
• Can This Bowl Really Stop Your Ice Cream From Melting?

Custom Face Mask Fails Posted: 30 Jul 2020 02:08 AM PDT the good news is my custom facemask arrived, the bad news is that they printed my face 20% too large pic.twitter.com/jBaVM7nbYI — Cameron!! (@cameronmattis) July 27, 2020 The moment face masks became an accessory, entrepreneurs went all out to provide what people want. We've seen masks with various fandoms, political slogans, and colors to match one's clothing. But the most intriguing idea is to have a face mask that showed a face. Many people ordered face masks printed with a photo of their own faces (personally, I would have gone with a movie star's face). However, this is a fairly new idea, and many small companies are learning as they go. People who have ordered custom printed face masks are beta testers as these providers work out the kinks, such as wrapping a photograph around the corners of a face, and getting the size of the picture to match the size of the face wearing it. As one person said, these are guaranteed to keep people six feet away! See some of the funniest custom face mask failures in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

Joseph's Puzzle Machines Posted: 29 Jul 2020 10:55 PM PDT Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously) shows us how complicated it is to design Rube Goldberg contraptions by quizzing us on how different mechanisms will turn out. I got the first one right, but by taking the wrong path. These questions gradually get much harder. This turned out to be a lot of fun! -via Boing Boing

Watermelon Omelette Cookies: Baking AI-Generated Recipes Posted: 29 Jul 2020 10:54 PM PDT The artificial intelligence doesn't eat anything, so perhaps its sense of taste should not be trusted. And an evil AI may even poison you by giving you bad instructions. Nonetheless, tech reporter Rachel Metz trusted the software from OpenAI to come up with a cookie recipe. She describes the results at CNN: The directions were pretty simple: stir the watermelon gently in a saucepan filled with sugar water over medium-high heat, add in the egg white, and mix in flour, baking powder and salt. The result was barely edible. It looked more like a watermelon omelette muffin than a cookie, and tasted like a sugary, gloopy nightmare. My four-year-old daughter was the only fan in our house, saying they tasted "weird" but also protesting when I threw them in the compost. -via Marilyn Terrell

When Surgeons Said No To Gloves Posted: 29 Jul 2020 07:43 PM PDT It is the late 1890s in Germany, and a new accessory designed to protect others just arrived in town. Surgeons at that time, however, didn't want to use such a thing. This accessory was meant to keep bacteria from spreading as surgeons put their hands inside their patients' body cavities. The accessory was surgical gloves. "Many historical accounts show deep impatience with past surgeons' hesitation to adopt surgical gloves," writes Thomas Schlich, historian of medicine… It would take "more than a decade of passionate argument" before surgeons finally accepted gloves as a necessity. Learn more about how surgical gloves became widely accepted in Germany, as well as how surgical gloves evolved over time, over at JSTOR Daily. (Image Credit: Vesna_Pixi/ Pixabay)

You Inflate This Chair by Screaming into It Posted: 29 Jul 2020 07:42 PM PDT Qing Deng's Aspirator is the perfect chair for 2020. To blow up the seat, scream into the funnel. Comfort comes to you only after suffering. Appropriately, this design won an honorable mention at the imm Cologne Pure Talents Contest. -via Core77

Printing the Guitar Emoji, And Playing It Posted: 29 Jul 2020 12:41 PM PDT With a few pairs of chopsticks, some rubber bands, a clothespin, and a lifesize printout of the bass emoji (actually a guitar emoji but with 3 strings), YouTuber Davie 504 manages to create a makeshift bass guitar that sounds similar to an acoustic bass. Wow! (Image Credit: Davie504/ YouTube)

Why Is This Turtle Yellow? Posted: 29 Jul 2020 10:36 AM PDT A group of people in Odisha, India were confused when they managed to rescue this little turtle, as never in their life have they seen a turtle that was completely yellow until that day. When they turned over the reptile to the Indian Forest Services (IFS), the institution was just as confused as they were, "but eventually came up with a theory." The turtle is a very bright yellow from head to toe, and the most likely explanation for his coloring is albinism. Albinism often causes an animal to be completely white, but sometimes non-mammal albino animals can be different colors — in this case, yellow.  "Most probably it was an albino," Susanta Nanda, an IFS officer, wrote in a post on Twitter. "One such aberration was recorded by locals in Sindh a few years back."  The adorable yellow turtle was very lively when he was first rescued, swimming around in a little tub of water, and he's quite a sight to see.  "Mark the pink eyes, one indicative feature of albinism," Nanda wrote.  The turtle would be under the care of the department officials for now, who would ensure his safety and well-being. Cute turtle! (Image Credit: Susanta Nanda IFS/ Twitter)

When Books Somehow Predict The Future Posted: 29 Jul 2020 10:36 AM PDT Fictional stories which somehow predicted the future are both amazing and scary at the same time. As we read through these decades-old works, sometimes we scratch our head, wondering if these authors had the power to look into the future, or just happened to explain their story very well. Mental Floss lists seven books that seem to have predicted a thing or two in the future. See them over at the site. (Image Credit: acekreations/ Pixabay)

This Guy Went Viral For Doing Nothing Posted: 29 Jul 2020 10:36 AM PDT Content creators are hardworking people. To keep their audience engaged and entertained, they always think of creative and crazy ways to keep their content relevant. But sometimes you don't need "high-quality" content to keep your audience entertained — you just need to be relevant. And if there's something that will always be relevant to people, it is doing nothing. … one vlogger and comedian recently went viral as he posted a video of himself doing absolutely nothing for 2 hours. Sounds rather crazy, right? Who would view that? But quite amazingly, the video has gone viral, earning over 800k views in 2 weeks. Whoa. Comedian Russell Peters had actually gone viral in the past for a similar video, claiming that men have the ability to sit for 15 minutes, doing nothing, thinking about nothing, and simply staring off into space. As of this writing, this video now has over 1.2 million views. What are your thoughts about this one? (Image Credit: sobat miskin official/ YouTube)

Microbes from Millions of Years Ago Revived in Lab Posted: 29 Jul 2020 10:36 AM PDT The abyssal plain of the South Pacific Gyre is a particularly dreary place. Not only is it deep under the ocean, it contains little organic matter to feed on. The sediment at the bottom accumulates very slowly, so that oxygen permeates deep into the ocean subfloor. Scientists from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and partner organizations retrieved cores from the sea floor 100 meters deep and nearly 6000 meters below the ocean surface. They found the cores contained oxygen throughout -and ancient microbes that may have been lying dormant for millions of years. Steven D'Hondt of the University of Rhode Island explains.  When they were first buried, D'Hondt says, these sediments would have contained about one million cells per cubic centimetre. "What's left are about 1000 cells per cubic centimetre, but they've been living under very challenging conditions for up to 100 million years." He continues: "Basically, they're only getting enough energy to repair their molecules as they break", with none left over to grow and divide. When brought into the lab and given more nutrient-rich diets, however, these bacteria prove to be not just alive, but able to revive, grow and multiply, exactly like normal bacteria. How they can do that, D'Hondt says, is a mystery. Either the individual cells are somehow surviving for "ridiculous lengths of time" or they "are reproducing with less energy than we thought possible". But one way or another "they are starvation artists". The discovery may have implications for the search for life on Mars and other planets. Then we have the questions of what could possibly go wrong with resurrecting ancient microbes, why this had to be done in 2020, and will hand sanitizer kill them? Read about the research at Cosmos magazine.  -via Metafilter (Image credit: JAMSTEC)

Even Time Travelers Hate 2020 Posted: 29 Jul 2020 09:39 AM PDT With all the many surprises — with most of them being bad surprises — that have happened since the beginning of this year, it might take a one in a billion chance for a person to say that he loves this year. And when we do get to time travel in the near future, I doubt that one would be willing to go back into this year. Image via Slice of Mallow on Facebook

Kinetic Sculpture of Waves Posted: 29 Jul 2020 09:38 AM PDT Ross McSweeney built this lovely hand-cranked wooden kinetic sculpture of a boat being tossed by ocean waves. It also includes fish jumping around it. It's just one of his kinetic sculptures you can see at YouTube or Instagram. McSweeney is working on making plans for his automatons available so that you can try them yourself. -via Laughing Squid

This Handheld Game Console Can Fit On Your Keyring! Posted: 29 Jul 2020 08:25 AM PDT The retro handheld console FunKey S is small but powerful! The console can run Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, SNES and PlayStation titles, but you'll need to get used to its very small screen. The FunKey S has the dimensions of 42.5 x 44.5 x 13.8 mm, and is built around open-source hardware and software. The novelty gadget is being sold for £57. Would you purchase one?  image via nintendolife

Are Braces Really Necessary? Posted: 29 Jul 2020 08:25 AM PDT Some people spend huge amounts of money to get the orthodontic treatments they need to realign some parts of their teeth. Having a metal wire attached to your teeth is both a pain and a nuisance, but braces are a guaranteed method for fixing one's crooked teeth. With all the pain and money people pour into treatments that can make your appearance look better, one can't help ask the question, "is it really necessary to undergo these treatments?" According to history, orthodontic treatments weren't to prevent health problems, but to create a more attractive profile, as Slate details:  Norman Kingsley, considered one of the early fathers of orthodontics, was a classically trained sculptor. During his day job as a dentist in New York, he applied his understanding of facial symmetry to the faces of patients, diagnosing what he referred to as "irregularities" and "deformities." "This was probably the cornerstone of the medicalization in orthodontics," said Alexander Spassov, an orthodontist and researcher in Greifswald, Germany. Angle's criteria gave orthodontists a measure that could supposedly identify which bites needed treatment and which didn't. Still, the transformation of orthodontics into a medical specialty was gradual and hard to trace back to a specific moment in history, Spassov said. For example, although Angle did help establish the specialty by founding both the first orthodontic school and the American Society of Orthodontists (today the AAO), he made no mention of health benefits, Spassov added. It was only later, perhaps after World War II, that orthodontics began to be seen as a preventative treatment for various ills, Ackerman said. image via Slate

Can This Bowl Really Stop Your Ice Cream From Melting? Posted: 29 Jul 2020 08:25 AM PDT Look, it's summer. It's hot, and sometimes you'd want to consume ice cream to ease the heat. However, it isn't a great experience if the ice cream melts before you finish it, right? Ice cream tastes better cold or frozen, and this bowl can keep your ice cream cold while you savor it. HOST's Ice Cream FREEZE is a plastic bowl insulated with a cooling gel that keeps its contents cold for hours. Just make sure to store it in the freezer for at least four hours before you use it!  image via Mental Floss

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