Month: April 2017

From cactus to aloe, drought-resistant succulents come in an amazing variety of shapes and colors. This variety, and the fact that they’re easy to care for, make succulents the perfect plants for everything from a tiny planter on the counter to a lavish outdoor display—and all the creative displays featured below.

1. IN SHELLS

Megan Andersen-Read stuffed snail shells with cuttings of various small succulents that had begun to root, and then added just enough potting soil around those roots. She had enough shells that she was able to put some of these gardens around the house and more outside as accents for her larger garden.

2. IN A BOOK

It’s hard to throw out obsolete books, but it may be easier to turn them into something pretty, like a miniature garden. Instructables member loveisinmytummy found this project to be easier than it looks. You hollow out the pages and build the garden of your dreams in tiny form. The accessories are optional; use your imagination to create the literary world you want.

3. ON A WREATH

We expect fresh greenery on a Christmas wreath, but a wreath of live flourishing succulents is a lovely celebration of warm weather. Stephanie at Garden Therapy shows you step-by-step how to make your own succulent wreath, whether fully planted like the one shown here, or partially-covered. She also teaches you how to care for it, and how to refresh your wreath when the plants begin to show their age.

4. IN A BALL

To freshen up a space that’s too small for a wreath, how about a simple succulent ball? Instructables member marcellahella will help you create a little garden ornament that can go anywhere, and even move around to take advantage of different light and temperature conditions.

5. FRAMED

There’s no reason why your backyard fence or garden wall shouldn’t have its own artwork. Vertical gardening goes in a picture frame to display outdoors in this living painting project from Instructables member algert555. Once you have your framed shadow box built and loaded with soil, the fun comes in artfully arranging different succulents to create your masterpiece.

6. ON MAGNETS

Does your refrigerator get sunshine? If not, there must be some metal surface in your home that does. Instructables member AlexeyY4 offers a tutorial on putting living plants in wine corks that you can stick on a metal surface and move around as you see fit.

7. IN A TEACUP

Isn’t this charming—a miniature living diorama in a teacup! Muhaiminah Faiz made this one and gives us all the steps to create it and the accessories at Instructables.

8. ON A CHAIR

How many times have you seen a nice chair abandoned in the street because the seat was broken or missing? Instructables member DIYwithCaitlin rescued an old chair frame to make a lovely planter filled with succulents. If you have plants on the ground and hanging plants, this idea gives you an intermediate level to balance the visuals on your porch or in your garden. Succulents look great in a metal chair as well.

9. AS LIVING JEWELRY

Succulents can survive well enough as to be wearable for your wedding or other special occasion. Susan McLeary at PassionflowerMade will make custom necklaces, crowns, bracelets, and more composed of living succulents. After you wear them, they can be transplanted to soil to serve as a cherished souvenir. And if you have a gentle hand and patience, you can make your own succulent rings and earrings with instructions from Succulents and Sunshine.

10. IN WEARABLE TERRARIUMS

If the conditions are right, you can wear succulents for a long time. They can be small enough to fit into a jewelry-size terrarium and stay green for years, with proper care. Boobooplant sells them in tiny terrariums that you can wear as a necklace, keychain, or pendant.

11. IN PINE CONES

Megan Andersen-Read knows you can display succulents in anything, if you keep your eye out for possibilities. Even pine cones! Read her tutorial on how to build a hanging succulent garden in pine cones at Creative Live. A year later, she says the plants in the pine cones are doing just fine. Andersen-Read has also placed succulent gardens in toys and even shoes!

12. IN BROKEN POTS

Since succulents can be tucked into tiny spaces and they don’t need much water, they are the perfect plants to set into broken pottery. You’ll find instructions for building a broken pot succulent garden at MidwestLiving.

13. IN A BRICK

Bricks aren’t something you’d normally put on your dinner table, but as a planter for attractive succulents, they make a nice centerpiece, with or without candles. Arianna Thomopolous shows us how she carved holes in red bricks to make one for Mother’s Day. Those planters will last forever.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have successfully grown the first-ever working 3D brain circuits in a petri dish. Writing in the journal Nature, they say the network of living cells will allow us to study how the human brain develops.

Scientists have been culturing brain cells in the lab for some time now. But previous projects have produced only flat sheets of cells and tissue, which can’t really come close to recreating the three-dimensional conditions inside our heads. The Stanford researchers were especially interested in the way brain cells in a developing fetus can join up together to create networks.

“We’ve never been able to recapitulate these human-brain developmental events in a dish before,” senior author Sergiu Pasca, MD said in a statement.

Studying real-life pregnant women and their fetuses can also be ethically and technically tricky, which means there’s still a lot about our journey into the world that we don’t know.

“[This] process happens in the second half of pregnancy, so viewing it live is challenging,” Pasca said.

The latest project builds on earlier work from Pasca and his colleagues. In 2015, they devised a way to encourage pluripotent stem cells to grow, not into flat sheets, but into dense little spheres that can connect in three dimensions. The researchers used these spheres to grow two types of neurons, each found in a different region of the brain. Once the cells were functional, the researchers gently introduced the two groups to one another and watched to see what would happen.

The results were extraordinary. Within three days, the two batches had begun reaching toward and networking with one another. Experiments on the new circuits showed that the still-growing cells were sending signals back and forth, strengthening connections between two areas of the brain. It was like watching a brain come into being.

“Our method of assembling and carefully characterizing neuronal circuits in a dish is opening up new windows through which we can view the normal development of the fetal human brain,” said Pasca. “More importantly, it will help us see how this goes awry in individual patients.”

Earlier this month, TLC announced that it was reviving the show that put the network on the map: Trading Spaces. The home improvement show was a ratings juggernaut for the network from 2000 to 2008, netting 9 million viewers per episode at its peak.

It succeeded with a simple premise: Two couples would trade houses, each helping an interior designer redecorate a room in the swapped home. They had just 48 hours and a $1000 budget. Then, the new room would be revealed to the homeowners. Some jumped with joy, others cried loudly offscreen. Now, all that drama is set to return sometime in 2018. But before Ty Pennington (presumably) dusts off his toolbelt, here are 10 fast facts about the original series.

1. IT WAS BASED ON A BBC SHOW.

Trading Spaces shook up both TLC and reality television when it premiered on October 13, 2000. But its concept wasn’t all that revolutionary. It was actually borrowed from the BBC show Changing Rooms, which ran from 1996 through 2004. On Changing Rooms, two couples also swapped homes to complete a quick interior redesign. There was even a breakout carpenter. Ty Pennington’s UK equivalent was “Handy” Andy Kane, who went on to record a super cheesy cover of “If I Had a Hammer.”

2. PAIGE DAVIS WAS NOT THE FIRST HOST.

Although she’s probably the person most associated with Trading Spaces, Paige Davis was not the show’s original host. Alex McLeod hosted the first 40 episodes and earned a Daytime Emmy for her work. But she quit the DIY series to pursue other projects, including Joe Millionaire.

3. THERE WAS A SECRET CARPENTER.

Besides Davis and its stable of designers, Trading Spaces boasted two other personalities: the carpenters. The originals were Pennington and Amy Wynn Pastor, but the pair weren’t churning out all that woodwork themselves. There was actually a third unseen carpenter, Eddie Barnard. According to Salon, he handled some of the more intensive projects but was billed only as “prop master” in the credits. Pastor felt super guilty about taking credit for his work when she first joined the show. “Every single day at the end of the shoot, I’d say, ‘I’m sorry,’” she recalled.

4. THEY WERE SERIOUS ABOUT KEEPING THE DESIGNS SECRET.

Since Trading Spaces relied on genuine reactions (be they positive or otherwise), the crew took great pains to hide any clues that might tip off the contestants. Good Housekeeping reported that sheets were hung from the windows so no one could sneak a peek inside, and any paint splotches on clothing were covered with duct tape before a producer or crew member went over to the other house.

5. COUPLES WERE ALLOWED TO DESIGNATE “PROTECTED” AREAS.

Although countless angry couples would probably dispute this, executive producer Denise Cramsey told SF Gate that their liability release forms included space to list “protected” areas. That obviously didn’t mean the entire room, but if you specified a door or piece of furniture, the designers allegedly wouldn’t touch it. If the form was blank, all your stuff was fair game.

6. THERE WERE THREE WAYS TO GET DISQUALIFIED.

At the height of its popularity, Trading Spaces got an average of 100 to 200 submissions daily. That meant the producers could afford to be a little choosy, but according to a former contestant, there were only three grounds for disqualification. The first was if the show’s tractor-trailer couldn’t pull up to the house or there wasn’t sufficient space outside for the carpentry. The second was if the owners refused to let the designers alter “many household items like the curtains, cabinets, flooring, or furniture.” The third was if it was more than a two-minute walk between the houses. The crew was constantly doing quick runs between the locations, so if your best friends lived the next neighborhood over, you weren’t getting onto the show.

7. FANS DISCUSSED THE SHOW ON MESSAGE BOARDS AND MADE A DRINKING GAME.

Trading Spaces was popular fodder on the emerging message boards of the early internet. Fans would post about their favorite episodes or defend their preferred designers. They also created a drinking game that included rules to take a drink every time “Ty climbs into cabinetry” or “someone mentions Genevieve’s bare feet.”

8. UNHAPPY COUPLES REDID THEIR ROOMS ALMOST IMMEDIATELY.

There’s a whole YouTube category of Trading Spaces “fails” or “hate it reveals” and, unsurprisingly, the homeowners in those clips did not keep their new rooms. Some couldn’t even wait 24 hours. In 2003, The Washington Post reported that Elaine and Bernie Burke ripped the burlap curtain in their redesigned bedroom off the next morning, throwing it in their yard to protect flowers from frost. April Kilstrom and Leslie Hoover had a much harder time: They were the miserable recipients of Hildi Santo-Tomas’s infamous hay room. The designer completely covered the walls of their living room, a space they shared with a toddler and baby, with strands of straw. According to SF Gate, it took the partners and three other adults 17 hours just to strip all the glue.

9. SOME OF THE DESIGNERS STAYED ON TV.

After Trading Spaces ended in 2008, some designers (like Santo-Tomas) faded into relative obscurity. But a few stayed onscreen through new home decorating shows. Vern Yip appeared on HGTV’s Deserving Design and also served as a judge on the same network’s Design Star. Doug Wilson stayed on TLC as the host of Moving Up. Genevieve Gorder became a regular HGTV all-star, with credits including Dear Genevieve, Design Star, and Genevieve’s Renovation under her belt. She’s now a frequent contributor to The Rachael Ray Show.

10. GENEVIEVE GORDER ALSO DESIGNED HER OWN QVC LINE.

Gorder also debuted a QVC bedding line back in 2010. It’s currently unavailable, but you can still find her rugs at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Netflix has got a lot to offer its customers next month, with more than 75 new entries being added to its library—including more than two dozen Netflix originals, with new seasons of House of Cards, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Master of None among them. Which means the streaming network has to lose a handful of titles, too—some of them more disappointing than others. (What About Bob? and Grosse Point Blank will say goodbye, as will all of Scrubs.) Here’s everything leaving Netflix in May.

May 1

11 Blocks (2015)
Alfie (2004)
America’s Secret D-Day Disaster (2014)
Apocalypse: World War II: Season 1 (2009)
Bang Bang! (2014)
Bombs, Bullets, and Fraud (2007)
China’s Forbidden City (2008)
Civil War 360 (2013)
Contact (1997)
David Attenborough’s Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates (2013)
Day of the Kamikaze (2007)
Doomsdays (2013)
Fantastic Four (2005)
Flicka: Country Pride (2012)
Good Will Hunting (1997)
Heart of the Country (2013)
Invincible (2006)
Jetsons: The Movie (1990)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Jurassic Park III (2001)
Last: Season 1 (2015)
Loosies (2011)
Monkeybone (2001)
Mystery Files: Hitler (2011)
Mystery Files: Leonardo da Vinci (2010)
Ninja: Shadow Warriors (2012)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Psychic Investigators: Season 2 (2009)
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
Samurai Headhunters (2013)
Secrets of the Third Reich: Season 1 (2014)
Secrets: A Viking Map? (2013)
Secrets: Golden Raft of El Dorado (2013)
Secrets: Richard III Revealed (2013)
Shuttle Discovery’s Last Mission (2013)
Sinister (2012)
Small Soldiers (1998)
Speed Kills: Seasons 1-2
Stripped (2014)
The Day Kennedy Died (2013)
The Doors (1991)
The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (2011)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
The Real Story: Season 1 (2010)
The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)
Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)
Titanic’s Final Mystery (2012)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
Truly Strange: The Secret Life of Breasts (2014)
Turf War: Lions and Hippos (2009)
Turnaround Jake (2014)
Urban Legends: Season 3 (2010)

May 2

A.N.T Farm: Seasons 1-3
Blue Exorcist: Season 1
Good Luck Charlie: Season 1 – 4
Kickin’ It: Seasons 1 – 4
Scrubs: Season 1 – 9
Totally Spies!: Season 1
Twisted: Season 1

May 5

Amapola
Flubber
Grosse Pointe Blank
The Recruit
What About Bob?

May 7

Bob’s Burgers: Seasons 1-2
American Dad!: Season 7

May 11

American Dad!: Season 8

May 15

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown: Seasons 1 – 5

May 17

American Dad!: Seasons 9 – 10

May 19

Step Up (2006)

May 26

Graceland: Seasons 1 – 3

Whether you’re watching The Simpsons, Pokemon, or Adventure Time, there’s one color that stands out. Yellow has been a favorite choice of animators since cartoons were first colorized, and they aren’t just choosing the shade because it looks pretty. A combination of art theory and psychology helps explain yellow’s rise to prominence.

As Sploid reports, and ChannelFrederator lays out, a cartoon character’s color scheme is usually chosen to complement their background. In SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, the most common setting is the expansive blue backdrop of the ocean. According to the RGB color scale used in television screens, blue is in direct contrast to yellow, so bright yellow was the most visually appealing choice for the show’s title character. This bit of color theory also applies to shows set on land, where a lot of the action takes place against the blue sky.

Color complements are just one part of the yellow character trend; the color yellow holds a lot of significant connotations, too. It’s often associated with feelings of happiness, playfulness, and warmth—a.k.a. traits we see in many of our cartoon protagonists.

Using yellow is also an effective way to grab someone’s attention. That’s the reason why The Simpsons‘s creators chose yellow instead of a more natural skin tone for their characters—they figured the shade would be instantly recognizable to viewers flipping through channels. Yellow’s eye-grabbing qualities also explain its prevalence in restaurant advertisements.

You can learn the full story behind this colorful phenomenon in the video below.

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