Did you know that we shed different types of tears based on our emotions?
Each tear type is composed of unique chemicals — mainly salt, water, and lysozyme — that give them their variable structure.
Emotional tears contain a natural painkiller
According to scientist Claire Phillips, tears of grief contain the neurotransmitter leucine enkephalin which helps relieve the body in times of stress. In such a way, our tear ducts can act as a natural painkiller.
There’s a biological and evolutionary reason we feel better shedding tears after experiencing a traumatic event.
Iceland’s government, in partnership with the country’s tourist agency Promote Island, will allow anyone in the world to scream into an app and broadcast it into the nation’s vast wilderness.
Let it all out on a speaker in Iceland
All one needs to record a loud scream, wail, or shriek — whatever they want to get off their chest — at lookslikeyouneediceland.com and their frustration will play on one of the seven speakers situated around Iceland’s vacant countryside.
Looks like you’ve been through a lot. It looks like you need to let it out. It looks like you need Iceland. Record your scream from anywhere in the world at https://t.co/sTLs7Fafhi and we’ll release it in Iceland. You’ll feel better, we promise! #LetItOutIcelandpic.twitter.com/YFoZeMIMNi
While the world remains alert and anxious over the spread of COVID-19, a bookshop owner in Paris has been trying to lighten the mood.
Philippe, owner of the local bookstore, has been buying up giant bears and distributing them to his local neighborhood of Les Gobelins, Paris.
The teddy bears first appeared in cafes, restaurants, and bars but — according to the bears official Facebook page — been seen in front of the Eiffel Tower, riding the metro, and more.
The bears help make social distancing a little more bearable (see what we did there) in Paris.
A report issued in Nature reveals that staying inside is the leading cause of myopia.
The finding refutes the myth that nearsightedness is the result of intense reading sessions and screen activity.
Myopia is prevalent in East Asian countries, where the focus on studying means staying indoors rather than benefiting from the outside environment.
According to another study in journal Lancet, 90% of young adults in China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are nearsighted compared to 30% in Britain.
Outdoor light is beneficial to the eyes because it triggers the release of dopamine in the retina.
One myopia researcher recommends spending at least three hours a day in natural light, even if means sitting under a tree.
But what scientists really needed was a mechanism: something to explain how bright light could prevent myopia. The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development. The best evidence for the ‘light–dopamine’ hypothesis comes — again — from chicks. In 2010, Ashby and Schaeffel showed that injecting a dopamine-inhibiting drug called spiperone into chicks’ eyes could abolish the protective effect of bright light 11 .
William Mullan is a photographer who specializes in taking pictures of rare apples from around the world.
The golden Knobbed Russet, the star-shaped api etoile, hard red Black Oxford apple — these are just a few of the varieties that appear in Mullan’s 200-page photo-book, Odd Apples.
Writes Atlas Obscura on how Mullan’s fascination with apples came to be:
Mullan was born in the United States, but grew up in the United Kingdom, where a teenage encounter with an Egremont Russet led to his love of apples. Its spicy, persimmon-like flavor “just blew my mind,” he says. But many of the apples he’s photographed were born in North America, including such romantic cultivars as the Black Oxford and Hidden Rose.
“There’s just this sense of infinity with [apples] that I love,” Mullan says. While he imagines he’ll move on to other subjects in the future, for now, he’s still entranced by apples.
Even better, during his exhibits, he slices the apples open and passes the edibles around for his audience to enjoy.
Treadmills were originally torture devices, meant to break the mind, body, and spirit of English prisoners.
Two hundred years ago, the treadmill was invented in England as a prison rehabilitation device. It was meant to cause the incarcerated to suffer and learn from their sweat.
Groups of prisoners were forced to walk 6 hours a day, pumping out water, milling corn powering the mills, thus the term “tread-mill.”
Treadmills evolved into a mechanism for punishment to prevent poor people from committing crimes to take advantage of the necessities in jail.
via twitter
via twitter
Britain banned treadmills in 1989, seeing their punishment no longer useful.
An 1885 British Medical Journal article called “Death on the Treadmill,” chastized Durham Prison for the treadmill-induced death of a prisoner with heart disease. Its overall high death rate—one fatality a week—prompted the conclusion that “[t]he ‘mill’ is not useful, and has proved itself occasionally injurious.”
Having banned treadmills in 1828 to adopt a “collective industry” where prisoners became factory workers, America revamped the treadmill as an exercise machine.
It resurfaced in 1913 with a U.S. patent for a “training-machine.” In the 1960s, the American mechanical engineer William Staub created a home fitness machine called the PaceMaster 600. He began manufacturing home treadmills in New Jersey. (He used it often himself, right up until the months before his death at the age of 96.)
As this article points out, treadmills are the top-selling training equipment in the US but still come with all the baggage (injuries and boredom) that prisoners endured in England.
Given the paramount importance of social distancing to impede the spread of the coronavirus — everything from sitting nearly 7 feet apart or shopping 7 feet apart — we’ve collected some of the most compelling illustrations across the web.
The reality is that the longer people don’t comply with social distancing or space/physical distancing, the longer we’re going to have to do it to put an end to this pandemic.
Help flatten the curve — stay at home and stay connected with your friends on social media! Conversely, unplug and read books or spend the extra time on a personal project.
Only go out for groceries, medicine, and other essential items.
There are also memes, of course, because…the internet…
Eye patch, parrot, and wooden leg, and a limp. Those are the essential ingredients to becoming a pirate.
But did you know that pirates wore an eye patch, not because of a missing eye, but because the patch increased their sight instantly inside low lit areas?
Early technology to avoid temporary blindness
During raids, pirates needed the ability to flip up the eye patch so they could quickly snag a cannonball faster below the deck of the ship.
So one eye was trained to see in daylight, the other in dark. The pirate patch was an early technology to solve the issue of temporary blindness caused by going to a dark room from a brightly lit space.
Instagram 3D artist Frank J Guzzone gives us at least an imaginative glimpse into the workings of an eye.
Don’t get carried away by the reality or irreality of the visualization. Just admire the concept.
Eye doctors on Twitter have promptly responded to Twitter account ZonePhysics with rightful criticism. “There’s no windstorm in the anterior chamber,” writes Dr. Cheryl G Murphy in debunking the graphic tweeted with the headline “This is your eye under microscope.”
As someone who stares at eyes under the microscope day in and day out, that’s not even close. Not that much movement on the iris. There’s no windstorm in the anterior chamber. Peripheral cornea blurred for no reason. The actual iris magnified is much more beautiful than this.
