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5 Ways to Cut Your Work Hours Without Skimping on Productivity
Stop burning the candle at both ends.
Alternate title: a roundup of historic torture devices.
In recent years, SanDisk has developed a reputation for storage card excess. In 2014, the company debuted a 512 MB SD card that retailed for $800—an amount that was probably more than the digital camera it was intended to be placed in.
At the time, it was thought to be the largest mini-storage device in the world. If that was a record, it has been broken by SanDisk’s announcement of a one terabyte card at the Photokina photography show in Cologne, Germany.
That’s a lot of storage. How much? The people at PC Ninja made this helpful chart:
According to SanDisk, the massive space on the card is a response to the increasing demand for 4K video, virtual reality software, and other memory-hogging applications that are expected to be in wide circulation in the coming years. Even photographers may soon gravitate toward higher capacity memory to avoid switching out cards while working. The downside? It might take longer to retrieve information—and losing it could mean losing weeks worth of work.
SanDisk only demonstrated a prototype of the card at the show; an official release date and price point are expected to be announced in the near future.
[h/t Gizmodo]
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September 20, 2016 – 11:30am
If you’re a disaster in the kitchen, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that people have been burning dinners and ruining pans for thousands of years. ScienceNordic reports that archaeologists in Denmark recently discovered a rare Bronze Age pot with what appears to be a layer of 3000-year-old burnt cheese crusted onto the bottom—possibly the result of an ancient cooking accident.
Archaeologists noticed that the pot, which was excavated in central Jutland, appeared to have a layer of white-yellow residue coating its bottom, so they sent it to the Danish National Museum for analysis. Researchers there ruled out meat and plant matter as possible sources of the residue, concluding that it was a “foamy, vitrified material” that looked a lot like cow fat. While researchers still aren’t completely sure what the substance is, they think it’s likely the result of cheesemaking gone awry.
“The fat could be a part of the last traces of curds used during the original production of traditional hard cheese,” archaeologist Kaj F. Rasmussen told ScienceNordic. ” The whey is boiled down, and it contains a lot of sugars, which in this way can be preserved and stored for the winter.”
Rasmussen observed that the pot, with its charred remains, tells a bit story, though we’ll never know the details for sure. He speculated to ScienceNordic that it may have been quickly discarded by an embarrassed chef thousands of years ago. “I cannot help but wonder if someone had a guilty conscience. It’s well and truly burnt and must have smelt terrible,” he said.
[h/t ScienceNordic]
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September 20, 2016 – 11:00am
Score another one for planet Earth: The president has signed off on the very first Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean. New England’s new Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument will protect chubby octopuses, ancient sharks, and underwater chasms deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Unlike its cerulean cousin the Pacific, the Atlantic Ocean is not known for its beauty or colorful wildlife. But the new monument’s 4913-square-mile area is home to astonishing biological and geological diversity, including three submerged canyons (Oceanographer, Gilbert, and Lydonia) and four extinct underwater volcanoes (Mytilus, Bear, Physalia, and Retriever). Scientific expeditions through the area have spotted creatures great and small, from sperm whales to tiny crabs and jellies.
The area’s protections will extend above the surface to include seabirds like Atlantic puffins. It’s a region of immense natural beauty and value, but it—like the rest of our oceans—is in very real danger.
This is why a coalition of 49 different ocean conservation organizations and aquaria wrote a letter this June [PDF] urging the president and his staff to put protections in place for the canyons and seamounts area. “While the area is largely untouched and wild today,” they wrote, “it is highly vulnerable to disturbance and should be protected now from the push to fish, drill, and mine in ever deeper and more remote places. As climate change and ocean acidification continue to affect ocean life, it also becomes more and more urgent to establish blue parks in important and relatively pristine ocean habitats such as this one.”
This week, their wish came true. Speaking at the 2016 Our Ocean Conference in Washington, D.C. on September 15, President Obama announced the monument’s official designation. “One of the reasons I ran for president was to make sure that America does our part to protect our planet for future generations,” he said. The president reminisced about his childhood in Hawaii, where he learned of the ocean’s “magic” and how “if the waves are a little too big and you’ve gone a little too far out, how it inspires fear and a healthy respect.”
President Obama spoke of the future, of our responsibility to keep our planet safe for future generations. “The notion that the ocean I grew up with is not something that I can pass on to my kids and my grandkids is unacceptable,” he said. “So the investment that all of us together make here today is vital for our economy. It’s vital for our foreign policy. It’s vital for our national security. But it’s also vital for our spirit. It’s vital to who we are.”
Lee Crockett oversees ocean conservation for the Pew Charitable Trust. “For everyone who recognizes the value of this unique ecosystem and cherishes a healthy, productive ocean, this monument designation is a huge win,” he said in a press statement.
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September 20, 2016 – 10:30am
The movie industry has always pushed the limits of technology to create those incredible visual effects we see on the big screen. Specially designed cameras, state-of-the-art computers, and meticulous animatronics are just a few of the tools at the disposal of directors looking to bring their vision to life. But over the years, some of the most iconic effects have been completed using much more modest means, including a little paint, some simple prosthetics, and … a sock? Check out how some of Hollywood’s most memorable special effects shots were created.
The original Star Wars trilogy utilized nearly every trick in the special effects book to realize George Lucas’s vision of a galaxy far, far away. There were detailed models for intergalactic dog fights, stop-motion work for the famous Battle of Hoth, and groundbreaking creature designs for Jabba the Hutt and the other aliens that populated the world. But one of the most difficult sequences to crack was the speeder bike chase from Return of the Jedi.
You would think it was simple: get Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and some Stormtroopers on prop bikes, put them in front of some fake trees, and get filming. Well, the problem is the speed Lucas wanted was nearly impossible to convey with matte paintings or models—audiences needed to see trees whiz by in order to feel how fast these bikes were moving.
To achieve this, the team at ILM walked through a disguised path in the woods of Cheatham Grove, California with a Steadicam shooting one frame per second. Projecting that footage back at 24 frames-per-second makes it come out—you guessed it—24 times faster. Special effects guru Dennis Muren, who worked on the shoot, estimated the cameraman was walking 5 mph, so when you replay that 24 times faster, you’re over 100 mph. When that sped-up footage was projected behind Hamill and Fisher on their prop bikes—along with some clever editing, first-person shots, and even a few models—it made for one of the most memorable sequences of the entire trilogy.
While a tornado might not sound too daunting for today’s special effects teams, in the 1930s the crew of The Wizard of Oz needed to get creative to bring the movie’s twister to life. Special effects director Arnold Gillespie first tried to film a rubber cone to simulate the tornado, but it was too rigid to be believable. He then took inspiration from the wind socks found at airports and used a cloth muslin sock for the effect. The steel gantry that held the cloth from above the set cost more than the budget for the entire scene, but because of the sock’s pliability, it made for a perfect cyclone. To top off the effect, compressed air hoses shot sand and dirt at, and through, the sock, giving the illusion of giant clumps of earth being kicked up in the storm’s path.
There are a lot of prosthetic heads that have been blown up, mangled, and crushed throughout the grand history of the movie business, but few have been disposed of in more gruesome fashion than the melting face of Nazi Arnold Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark. For the movie’s climax, Steven Spielberg needed Toht’s whole head to melt on-screen in a full gory display, and to do this, a gelatin mold of actor Ronald Lacey’s head had to be made.
The head was created in different colored layers to get flesh, muscle, bone, and blood in there; then the whole contraption was melted using controlled heat. To get the effect just right, the head was melted gradually, but it was shot at less than a frame per second, so it unfolds quickly on screen when it is projected back at standard speed. Think of it as face-melting time-lapse.
Even if you’ve only seen the GIF, chances are you’re familiar with Louis Del Grande’s exploding head from David Cronenberg’s Scanners. For this scene, Cronenberg wanted a prosthetic head to explode without the use of pyrotechnics, since a pyrotechnic explosion would cause a spark or a flash on camera, which wouldn’t make sense since the head was supposed to explode due to telekinesis in the film.
For the actual head, the crew experimented with plaster and wax models before finally realizing that a gelatin mold of Del Grande’s head, lined with a plaster “skull,” would achieve the desired effect of a real head and skin. The mold was then filled with fake blood, wax bits, and “leftover burgers” to get that gray matter just right.
However, getting the whole thing to explode was another challenge—nothing seemed to work. Well, the best solution is usually the most obvious, and special effects supervisor Gary Zeller decided to get the explosion right the only way he knew how: he sat behind the dummy, turned on all the cameras, and shot the back of the skull with a shotgun. Case closed.
To appreciate the special effects from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, you have to understand where we were as a planet when it premiered in 1968. Not only had we not yet landed on the moon (that would happen the next year); we had never even seen a full picture of Earth from space—that wouldn’t happen until 1972. Yet despite that, Kubrick managed to give audiences a vision of the moon and outer space that’s so authentic, it has actually become the subject of conspiracy theories. And one of the director’s crowning achievements in space photography? Gravity—or the lack thereof.
To realistically simulate life aboard Discovery One, Kubrick paid special attention to the artificial gravity that would have been necessary to help astronauts live comfortably, including how they went about their exercise. In one of the film’s most impressive scenes, audiences observe astronaut Frank Poole jogging in the ship’s rotating centrifuge, seemingly running upside down at points.
The movie is meant to show the ship’s rotation simulating gravity in space, yet to achieve the effect on-screen Kubrick had a mammoth $750,000 set built that would rotate like a Ferris wheel. Actor Gary Lockwood wasn’t actually running at all; he was simply moving in place at the same speed opposite the set’s rotation. Some inventive camera angles were then used to cap off the illusion.
The other, perhaps more impressive, use of this same technique came when a stewardess is seen seemingly walking upside down while taking a tray of food to the cockpit of the Aries. Despite all appearances to the contrary, the actress actually remained upright the entire time—to an audience, though, she looks to be a 21st-century Fred Astaire. This effect, again, implemented a rotating set and camera that moved along with it.
By this point, any movie buff knows how the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park were achieved—a little bit of animatronics and CGI and voila!—but what about the movie’s most famous non-dino scene: the rippling water cup. It seems simple enough, especially compared to the rest of the movie’s mammoth effects, but it took a little Earth, Wind, and Fire to inspire Spielberg to even do the scene in the first place.
On a drive, the director was listening to the iconic funk group when he noticed his mirrors were shaking along with the bass. He then called effects supervisor Michael Lantieri and told him, “We need to shake the mirror, and then I wanna do something with the water.” To get the rearview mirror to shake took nothing more than a small motor, but the water was a different story. It wasn’t until Lantieri experimented with different notes on a guitar that he finally found the right frequency to get Spielberg’s water trembling with the perfect rings.
Recreating this happy accident on set required a guitar string to be fed underneath the truck where the cup of water was being held. Someone would have to lay under the truck and actually pluck the string to get it just right for the screen. In a movie dependent on bringing prehistoric beasts back to life, it was a few water ripples that proved to be one of the more unique special effects problems to solve.
The creature effects designed for Ridley Scott’s Alien were a cut above what the sci-fi genre had to offer at the time, but the one moment that sticks out most is the infamous chestburster scene. To get the extraterrestrial fetus to burst from John Hurt’s chest cavity just right—and to get a legitimately terrified reaction from the actors along the way—Scott depended on two things: secrecy and a butcher shop.
To simulate a human body, Hurt had to slip underneath a prosthetic body with only his real arms, neck, and head sticking out from beneath a table. Then, the crew filled a fake chest cavity with all manner of animal organs taken from a local butcher shop, along with tiny hoses to spray fake blood when the time was right. This whole time, the rest of the cast was kept in the dark about the scene—the only thing written in the script was “This thing emerges” from Hurt’s character’s chest.
“This thing” happened to be a rabid alien puppet with sharp teeth, spewing blood and entrails all over the other characters when it finally emerged. The stream of blood was so violent that star Veronica Cartwright passed out when she got a face full of the stuff. This technique of pure shock was Scott’s doing, who didn’t want any of the actors to “act” scared. He wanted the real deal.
September 20, 2016 – 10:00am
Can we really protect ourselves from germs by snapping up our fallen snacks within five seconds? Two scientists at Rutgers have tested the rule and say the answer is a resounding “…sort of.” They published their findings in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
The five-second rule, for those of you not familiar (what, did you skip elementary school?), states that food dropped on the floor is still safe to eat as long as you pick it up within five seconds. The origins of the rule are murky, but study co-author Donald W. Schaffner attributes it to Genghis Khan. Speaking to the New York Times, Schaffner said the legendary warlord once claimed that food was safe to eat for a full five hours after it had fallen to the ground. As centuries passed and we learned about germs, that five-hour estimate became a lot more conservative.
Five hours, five seconds—does timing really matter? Schaffner and his co-author Robyn C. Miranda decided to find out. They dropped four foods (watermelon, bread, bread with butter, and strawberry gummies) on four different surfaces (stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood, and indoor/outdoor carpet) for four different periods of time (less than one, five, 30, and 300 seconds) and measured the amount of bacteria each sample collected. They were looking specifically at the bacterium Enterobacter aerogenes, which causes all kinds of nasty infections.
They found that there might be something to that five-second rule after all, or at least the idea of retrieving downed morsels as soon as possible. The longer the food samples sat on the ground, the more bacteria they attracted. But bacteria did manage to find them all, even the one- and five-second samples. Even the speediest hand couldn’t snatch a gummy from the jaws of instantaneous bacterial invasion.
Interestingly, the authors say, time may be the least important part of the equation. Two other components had a huge impact on a sample’s vulnerability.
The first variable is the type of food, specifically its moisture content. It’s biology 101: Bacteria love water. It’s why your dish sponge starts to reek if you don’t regularly squeeze it out. It’s also why bacteria swarmed the wet watermelon while paying little attention to the gummy strawberries.
The other thing that made a difference was the surface onto which the food had fallen. Tile and stainless steel were the grossest, while carpet was relatively clean, but each sample’s bacterial content was ultimately determined by interactions between all three factors (time, food, and surface).
Now, for the five-second question: Does any of this matter? Should we give up on every Dorito we ever drop again? That’s really up to you. Honestly, there’s already bacteria all over everything you will ever touch (not to mention the teeming bacterial ecosystem that lives in your mouth), and most of it is completely harmless.
“I’ve eaten food off the floor,” Schaffner told the Times. Still, he recommends considering the water content of your lost bite. “If I were to drop a piece of watermelon on my relatively clean kitchen floor, I’m telling you, man, it’s going in the compost.”
[h/t The New York Times]
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September 20, 2016 – 9:30am
Burj Khalifa // YouTube
Since construction began in 2004, the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai has been racking up superlatives. It holds records for the most floors, highest elevator, and tallest free-standing structure overall, standing at 2722 feet. Now the imposing tower can add another achievement to the list: Its facade doubles as the largest LED screen on Earth.
According to Motherboard, work on the screen began in 2014—four years after construction of the building was completed. The LED panels were put in place on the front of the Burj Khalifa by hand. One of the biggest challenges the team faced was inclement weather: Engineers often had to wait for rain, strong wind, and sandstorms to pass before going back out and finishing an installation.
The project concluded in 2015, and today the Burj Khalifa serves as the venue for one of the world’s most spectacular light shows. To see the behind-the-scenes process and the final result, you can watch the stomach-turning video below.
[h/t Motherboard]
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September 20, 2016 – 9:00am
The beauty of technology is that it can bring people together over great distances. It can also bring people and animals together—specifically, you and the insanely adorable sled dog pups that reside at Denali National Park & Preserve in Alaska.
The dogs have been part of park tradition pretty much since it was established in 1917. Harry Karstens, the first superintendent of the preserve (back when it was Mount McKinley National Park) was an experienced dog musher who first employed a team of canines to get around. Since then, the kennel has continued to provide valuable transportation—helping rangers to patrol, carry supplies, and create trails, even in the biting cold. They’re a particularly valuable resource as the federally protected area does not allow motorized vehicles.
But before they can get to work, they need to grow up. A new litter was born at the end of July, and thanks to the park’s Puppycam, you can check in on them whenever you like. The tiny huskies—Happy, Party, Piñata, Cupcake, and Hundo—were festively named in honor of this year’s National Park Service centennial.
Jennifer Raffaeli, the park’s kennels manager, told CBS Sunday Morning: “We always joke that they’re the happiest government employees you’ll ever meet.” Based on a few minutes of webcam footage, we think that seems about right.
For even more sled pup goodness, check out Denali’s dog blog, meet the pooches online or in person, and even consider adopting one once their government service has come to an end.
[h/t CBS Sunday Morning]
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September 20, 2016 – 8:30am
Trade routes have developed since ancient times to transport goods from places of production to places of commerce. Scarce commodities that were only available in certain locations, such as salt or spices, were the biggest driver of trade networks, but once established, these roads also facilitated cultural exchange—including the spread of religion, ideas, knowledge, and sometimes even bacteria.
The Silk Road is the most famous ancient trade route, linking the major ancient civilizations of China and the Roman Empire. Silk was traded from China to the Roman empire starting in the first century BCE, in exchange for wool, silver, and gold coming from Europe. Alongside spreading trade, the Silk Road also became a vital route for the spread of knowledge, technology, religion, and the arts, with many trading centers along the route—such as Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan—also becoming important centers of intellectual exchange.
The Silk Road originated in Xi’an in China and travelled alongside the Great Wall of China before crossing the Pamir Mountains into Afghanistan and on to the Levant, where goods were loaded on to ships destined for Mediterranean ports. It was rare for tradespeople to travel the full 4000 miles, and so most plied their trade on only sections of the route. As the Roman Empire crumbled in the fourth century CE, the Silk Road became unsafe and fell out of use until the 13th century, when it was revived under the Mongols. Italian explorer Marco Polo followed the Silk Road during the 13th century, becoming one of the first Europeans to visit China. But the famous route may have spread more than trade and cross-cultural links—some scientists think it was merchants traveling along the route who spread the plague bacteria which caused the Black Death.
Getty Images
Unlike most of the other trade routes in this list, the Spice Routes were maritime routes linking the East to the West. Pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg were all hugely sought-after commodities in Europe, but before the 15th century access to trade with the East was controlled by North African and Arab middlemen, making such spices extremely costly and rare. With the dawning of the Age of Exploration (15th to 17th centuries), as new navigation technology made sailing long distances possible, Europeans took to the seas to forge direct trading relationships with Indonesia, China, and Japan. Some have argued that it was the spice trade that fueled the development of faster boats, encouraged the discovery of new lands, and fostered new diplomatic relationships between East and West (it was partly with spices in mind that Christopher Columbus set out in 1492 and ended up finding America).
The Dutch and English especially profited from the control of the spice trade in the East Indies—modern-day Indonesia, especially the area known as the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, which were the only source of nutmeg and cloves at that time. Wars were fought, lands colonized, and fortunes made on the back of the spice trade, making this trade route one of the most significant in terms of globalization.
The Incense Route developed to transport frankincense and myrrh, which are only found in the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula (modern Yemen and Oman). Frankincense and myrrh are both derived from tree sap that is dried in the sun; these nuggets of sap can then be burned as incense or used as perfume, and were also popular in burial rituals to aid embalming. The camel was domesticated around 1000 BCE and this development allowed the Arabians to begin to transport their valuable incense to the Mediterranean, an important trade hub. Frankincense and myrrh became a significant commodity for the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians—indeed it was said that the Roman emperor Nero had a whole year’s harvest of frankincense burned at the funeral of his beloved mistress.
The trade flourished, and the overland route was, at its height, said to have seen 3000 tons of incense traded along its length every year. Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote that it took 62 days to complete the route, although it is clear that at times the exact route shifted when greedy settlements pushed their luck and demanded taxes that were too high from the caravans coming through. By the first century CE, this ancient overland route was largely redundant, as improved boat design made sea routes more attractive.
Amber has been traded since c.3000 BCE, with archaeological evidence revealing amber beads from the Baltic having reached as far as Egypt. An Amber Road linking the Baltic with the rest of Europe was developed by the Romans, who valued the stone as both a decorative item and for medicinal purposes.
Large deposits of amber are found under the Baltic Sea, formed millions of years ago when forests covered the area. The amber washes ashore after storms, and can be harvested from the beaches across the Baltic, which is how many local amber traders built their business. However, during the crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, the Baltic became an important source of income for the Teutonic Knights, who were granted control of the amber-producing region. The Knights persecuted the local Prussians brutally, and anyone attempting to harvest or sell amber was put to death. Today traces of the old Amber Road can be found in Poland, where one of the major routes is known as the “Amber Highway.”
This ancient route winds precipitously for over 6000 miles, through the Hengduan Mountains—a major tea-producing area of China—through Tibet and on to India. The road also crosses numerous rivers, making it one of the most dangerous of the ancient trade routes. The main goods traveling the route were Chinese tea and Tibetan warhorses, with direct trades of tea-for-horses and vice versa being the main goal of merchants plying the route. Parts of the route were used starting c.1600 BCE, but the entire route began to be used for trade from about the seventh century CE, and large-scale trade was taking place starting in the Song dynasty (960–1279).
At least one piece of research suggests that in the period 960–1127 some 20,000 Tibetan warhorses were traded along the route every year in exchange for an eye-watering 8000 tons of tea. As sea routes became more popular, the significance of the road lessened, but during World War II it once again grew in importance as the Japanese blocked many seaports, and the Tea-Horse Road became an important route for supplies traveling between inland China and India.
Salt has long been a precious commodity—it’s been used to flavor and preserve food, and as an antiseptic, for example. But easily harvested salt was a scarce mineral in antiquity, and so areas rich in salt became important trading centers. Routes connecting these centers to other settlements also became commonplace. Of the many such routes that sprang up, one of the most famous was the Roman Via Salaria (Salt Route), which ran from Ostia, near Rome, across Italy to the Adriatic coast. So precious was salt that it made up a portion of a Roman soldier’s pay, and it is from this that we get the word salary (from the Latin for salt, sal) and the phrase “Not worth his salt”—the latter because a soldier’s salt pay would be docked if he did not work hard.
Another important salt route across Europe was the Old Salt Road, which ran 62 miles from Lüneburg in northern Germany, which was one of the most plentiful salt sources in northern Europe, to Lübeck on the north German coast. During the Middle Ages this route became vital for providing salt for the fishing fleets that left Germany for Scandinavia, as the salt was used to preserve the precious herring catch. It would take a cart delivering salt some 20 days to traverse the Old Salt Road, and many towns along the way grew wealthy by levying taxes and duties on wagons as they passed through.
The Trans-Saharan Trade Route from North Africa to West Africa was actually made up of a number of routes, providing a criss-cross of trading links across the vast expanse of desert. These trade routes first emerged in the fourth century CE, and by the 11th century caravans made up of over a thousand camels would carry goods across the Sahara. Gold, slaves, salt, and cloth were the most important commodities on this route, but many other objects also found their way into the caravans, from ostrich feathers to European goods such as guns.
The trade route was instrumental in the spread of Islam from the Berbers in North Africa into West Africa, and with Islam came Arabic knowledge, education, and language. The Trans-Saharan trade route also encouraged the development of monetary systems and state-building, as local rulers saw the strategic value in bringing large swathes of land, and thus their commodities, under their control. By the 16th century, as Europeans began to see the value in African goods, the Trans-Saharan trade routes became overshadowed by the European-controlled trans-Atlantic trade, and the wealth moved from inland to coastal areas, making the perilous desert route less attractive.
The Tin Route was a major Bronze Age to Iron Age trade route that provided early settlements with access to a vital ingredient for metal-making—tin. Copper must be alloyed with tin to make bronze, an advance that occurred in the Near East around 2800 BCE and created a stronger, better metal than the type used previously. This new technology put tin much in demand, and as it is not found in many places, it became an important item for trade.
One such tin route flourished in the first millennium BCE from the tin mines in Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain, over the sea to France, and then down to Greece and beyond. Evidence for this route is provided by the many hillforts that sprung up along the way as trading posts. Historians believe that trade passed both ways up and down this route, as the hillforts provide evidence of exotic artifacts, including coral and gold. No written accounts survive from this period, but the archaeological record shows that technology and art traveled the route between northern Europe and the Mediterranean alongside tin—thus providing a vital link across Europe.
September 20, 2016 – 8:00am