Your So-Called Life

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Chimp Fashion

Some chimp are creating their own "ear accoutrements," perhaps the animal equivalent of a fashion statement.

 

Yellowstone Grizzlies

Photography by James Yule

 

Pander to me!

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Find shelter here

Created by Spring Advertising for a Canadian charity. via

 

This Solar Powered Tent Can Power All Your Mobile Gadgets

This isn’t designed to haul around the hiking trails, as it would be too heavy for regular hiking/camping trips. But, it could probably be utilized well at events, and longer term camping. It’s designed to sleep 4 people comfortably, and would supposedly power you mobile devices through the built in solar panel array on the roof. 

 

Fast Food

Photograph by Roman Golubenko, National Geographic Your Shot

 

How Chillies Can Be Used to Treat Pain

Humans are, essentially, sadomasochists. 

For more 600 years we have sought out, cultivated, eaten, applied to our skin and even weaponised a chemical capable of making us feel heat and pain. Heat, it seems, is desirable. Whether in the kitchen or the bedroom, we have embraced the volcanic properties of the chilli pepper to enhance our food and spice up our love lives. But in The Pain Detective, published on Mosaic, chillies crop up unexpectedly. In the film, they feature as a component of a medically manufactured, super-hot patch being gingerly applied to Colin Froy's feet – not to inflict pain but, curiously, to diminish it. What is it about chillies that allows them to be both master and servant of pain? In an attempt to understand the heat properties of the wildly varied and abundant chilli, American pharmacist Wilbur Lincoln Scoville sought a measure of hotness that was more standardised and reproducible than the universal 'hand fanning' used to indicate too much heat. By 1912, Scoville had devised a scale to measure the sensation of chill intensity.
 The Scoville scale has been used ever since to rate the potency of chillies.

 

Professor Godzilla

Hendrix College, a small school outside of Little Rock, Ark., is about to get a new president. His name is William Tsutsui, a Princeton-, Oxford-, and Harvard-educated economist, but he's best known for a certain expertise that has landed him the nickname Professor Godzilla. Tsutsui first heard the infamous roar of the radioactive monster lizard when he was 8 years old, living in the tiny college town of Bryan, Texas.Tsutsui was an only child and biracial; his dad was Japanese, and he had an Anglo mom. There was only one other Asian-American family in Bryan. He felt like an outlier, he says, and was bullied so much he had to be transferred to a different school. But everything changed one day, as he lay on the shag carpet in his parent's bedroom, watching a big old Sylvania TV set. "I see this huge Japanese monster dragging his scaly feet through Tokyo, and I thought, 'That is so cool, I want to be that monster,' " he says. Life became more fun. 

 

The Mountain

Filmed over the course of 7 days at El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain, renowned as one of the best places in the world to photograph stars. Turn your sound on and activate full-screen HD for the full experience!

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Horsey Smile

Photograph by Oscar Medina, National Geographic Your Shot

 

Hi ! Nice to meet you.

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Woman’s Face Photoshopped In 27 Countries To Compare Beauty Standards In Different Parts Of The World

We’ve all seen the “Before and After Photoshop” versions of photographs, displaying the ways in which various media distort our perception of ideal beauty. But what would these images look like in other countries? With her series Before & After, Esther Honig, a radio journalist based out of Kansas City, asked just that. With the help of Fiverr, a website for freelancers, she got in touch with artists from forty different countries; emailing each a self-portrait, she wrote, “Hi, my name is Esther Honig. Make me look beautiful.” When they did not understand the assignment, she simply told them to make her look like the most popular fashion models. When artists from twenty-seven countries replied, she was astonished with the results.

 

Taft’s Bathtubs Weighed A Ton

William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States reportedly sat down one day for a nice long bath and got hopelessly stuck, needing six men to free him. Taft weighed about 340 pounds, and given his large size, the story isn’t totally implausible. That doesn't necessarily mean it's true. But what is true, according to Phil Edwards at Trivia Happy, is that Taft did have a love of bathtubs.
Very large bathtubs. 

 

5 minutes that prove we're living through the greatest time in human history

The last 200 years or so have been, by far, the best in human history. Though pockmarked by tragedy, the story, on the whole, is one of relentless triumph: triumph over disease, over poverty, and over early death.
 "Before the Industrial Revolution, life expectancy was about 30 years," says Don Bordreaux in a lecture for Marginal Revolution University. "Today in the United States, we expect to live to be about 80. Before the Industrial Revolution, one in four kids would die before the age of five. Today, in developed countries, it's more like one in 200."
 What's easy to forget, though, is that prior to the Industrial Revolution, human lives weren't constantly improving. Living standard stagnated for decades and centuries. Mass starvation and disease often wiped out improvements in an instant. This is, Bordreaux says, the hockey stick of human prosperity; so named because if you graphed the living standards of the human race over time, they would mostly be flat until the exponential advances of the past 200 years.

 

Joy Is Round

On fields throughout Africa, plastic bags, old clothes, and shredded tires transform into magic orbs—soccer balls.

 

The Gorilla Doctors of the Democratic Republic of Congo

When renowned zoologist Dian Fossey was murdered in 1985 there were less than 250 mountain gorillas left in the wild. The American, who dedicated her life to saving the species, inspired the Gorilla Doctors, who nearly 30 years later have brought the species back from the brink of extinction.The multi-national team operates in the heart of the jungle, treating maimed and critically ill gorillas as well as caring for orphans at two dedicated sanctuaries.

 

What is the opposite of two?

A lonely me, a lonely you.

 

All Hail The Corn Squirrel King

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Growing Grouper

This ten-inch-long juvenile goliath grouper in the Florida Keys may spend five years among mangroves, relatively safe from predators, before venturing out to the reefs. The species’ survival depends on mangrove forests, which are contending with coastal development. 

Photograph by David Doubilet, National Geographic

 

RC Plane Drawn With A 3-D Printing Pen Really Flies

If you can draw an airplane on paper, you could be well on your way to making a (toy) plane in real life. Just check out this project from maker and blogger Matt Butchard.

 

Mind-Blowing Lifelike Sculptures of Your Favorite Movie Stars

The Michigan-based artist Bobby Causey breathes life into his astonishingly realistic sculptures of iconic movie stars and characters. As if ripped straight from the silver screen, his latex figures of Heath Ledger as the Joker and Jack Nicholson in The Shining appear to be frozen in a moment of passion and suspense. Some of the meticulously-crafted characters are built on a one to six scale, but their miniature frame hardly detracts from their ability to express the thrill of a memorable cinematic moment.

 

5 Diseases You Can Get From Being Bitten—By A Human

As Uruguayan soccer player Luis Suárez demonstrated , sometimes people bite others.
 Here are five diseases you can get from human chomps.

 

Famous Paintings with Hip Hop Lyrics

Fly Art is a Tumblr account created by students and artists Gisella Velasco and Toni Potenciano. Since December 2013, the duo have been collaborating on mashups of hip hop lyrics and classic artworks, blending two seemingly disparate cultural artifacts into a surprising and often humorous cohesion.

 

Happy Birthday George Orwell

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