Recently, researchers at Harvard University released a study that makes a pretty surprising revelation: our concept of “threat” and the color blue, it turns out, is all relative and is not based on hard-and-fast rules. This is how the experiment worked: the researchers showed subjects a series of dots that ranged in color from very blue to very purple. For the first 200 times, the participants saw an equal number of blue and purple dots from the color spectrum. After that, the number of blue dots gradually decreased.
By the end, the subjects’ interpretation of the colors was different: dots they thought were purple in the first experiments they now saw as blue. This happened even after researchers told the subjects that the number of blue dots would decrease and they would be paid in cash for correct answers.
The team also had similar results when they conducted experiments about whether a face was threatening or a research proposal was unethical. Even when the rate of threatening faces or unethical proposals decreased, the subjects picked them out at the same ratio, and viewed benign faces or proposals as being threatening and unethical.
So what does it all mean? The researchers think the results might explain why so many people are pessimistic about the state of world affairs. The authors of the study believe that as social problems decrease (poverty, illiteracy) and become less common, issues that previously seemed minor or insignificant start to seem more problematic.
Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, one of the most famous couples of the Jazz Age, lived in Montgomery, Alabama in 1931-1932 and the top floor of their home is now available to rent on Airbnb.
Zelda worked on her only novel Save Me the Waltz in the house and her husband wrote part of his novel Tender is the Night there. The couple’s daughter also lived with them in the home before she went away to boarding school.
The home is now a museum and is part of the Southern Literary Trail. The first floor of the home is the museum dedicated to the life and work of the writers, and the second floor is where tourists can stay for $150 a night in a two-bedroom apartment. Sounds like fun!
YouTube is the new TV. In fact, they’ve even launched their own version of the standard cable TV subscription that lets you watch live TV via YouTube. And with billions of views across all its videos YouTubers are cashing in.
All this is to say that there’s no doubt that YouTube has become a major launchpad for tomorrow’s celebrities (Justin Bieber was famously discovered on YouTube). If you’re at the top of your game, there are major bucks to be made in the form of YouTube partnerships, endorsements, and exposure to new opportunities.
The list below features 15 of YouTube’s most popular independent stars (as opposed to mainstream music artists, etc.), as compiled by SocialBlade. These stars aren’t just reaching millions of people worldwide – some are also making millions of dollars in the process.
Brazilian vlogger and comedian Felipe Neto has the distinction of being the first Brazilian YouTube channel to hit 1 million subscribers. He also released a Netflix special in 2017.
Yuya is a beauty vlogger who posts all kinds of beauty tutorials on her main channel. Her popularity has earned her features in Vogue and on TV in her native Mexico.
NigaHiga (Ryan Higa) was one of the earliest breakout stars of YouTube, producing a variety of content from comedy sketches and music videos to musings on pop culture.
Vegeta777 (Samuel de Luque) is a popular Spanish gaming YouTuber who is best known for using video games to create elaborate narratives of his design, including dubbing his own voiceovers.
VanossGaming (Evan Fong) is a gaming YouTuber from Canada. His signature style features the masterful use of editing to compress hours of footage into a single engaging moment.
Comedy duo Smosh (comprised of Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla) was another one of YouTube’s earlier stars. Recently, Padilla left Smosh to start a solo account.
Jacksepticeye (Seán William McLoughlin) is an Irish gamer and YouTuber who found fame after getting mentioned by PewDiePie (featured later in this list). I particularly like his videos due to his energetic narration and charming Irish accent.
Dude Perfect was started by a group of friends and former athletes who all knew each other from college at Texas A&M. Their videos often revolve around sports and trick shots, with a fun, casual style.
ElRubiusOMG (Rubén Doblas Gundersen) is a Spanish YouTube sensation. As with many of the other entries on this list, his main focus is video game reviews, walkthroughs, and commentaries.
HolaSoyGerman (Germán Garmendia) is arguably the biggest YouTube star in Latin America. The Chilean comedian and musician can boast having not one, but two YouTube channels in the top 20 list – the main one listed here and another, gaming-focused channel called JuegaGerman.
You know you’ve made it when South Park is spoofing you. PewDiePie (Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg) is a Swedish YouTuber whose boisterous video game commentary and playthroughs have earned him widespread fame and a sizeable fortune.
Let’s face it: dating is tough. Many people turn to online dating to meet new people, and while this turns out well in many cases, there are also plenty of cases that turn out… weird.
A fella named Xavier was gracious enough to take to Twitter and share this riveting story of his female friend’s recent “Netflix and Chill” adventure. Buckle up for this story…it’s time to let Xavier take over.
For a few weeks every four years, the World Cup seems to completely take over the world. Whether or not you keep up with it, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that Americans say ‘soccer’ and almost everyone else on the planet uses the term ‘football.’ So what gives? Well, it’s time for a history lesson.
What we in the U.S. call soccer has been played in England since the Middle Ages. It started out as a game for the common folks, but in the early 1800s young men at the country’s most privileged schools started partaking in the sport. The rules of ‘football’ were standardized by the Football Association in 1863.
Different sports began to splinter off from traditional English football, including rugby, and it became known widely as association football. The nickname for the sport was now assoccer, which, after a while, was shortened to soccer. Meanwhile, also in the late 1860s, American football was established at the college level, but in other parts of the world it was known as gridiron football or American football. Confused yet?
Over in England, they dropped the “association” that preceded “football” and just made it football. So there were now two completely different sports on opposite sides of the Atlantic called football. To deal with the confusion, people in the U.S. started calling English football by its old nickname, soccer. And those are the terms we still use today.
Today, the term soccer is used in the countries that have their own versions of football: America, Canada, and Australia. Now get back to watching the World Cup!
Alright, get your mind out of the gutter. The fact of the matter is that Uranus is an unusual planet in our solar system. The planet has a strange tilt and rotates around the sun on its side. Each pole of Uranus faces the Sun for 42 years before switching to the other side.
So why does Uranus tilt? Scientists have long suspected that a major collision at some point in history caused the planet’s unusual orientation. And they were right. Astronomers at Durham University in England led an international team of researchers and studied 50 different possible impact scenarios.
The team concluded that a huge rock and ice formation twice the size of Earth hit Uranus during the formation of the solar system about 4 billion years ago. The impact caused Uranus’ tilt and also the planet’s low temperatures.
The researchers believe that debris from the collision might act as a thermal shield and that the heat from Uranus’ interior is trapped, making the planet’s outer atmosphere very cold. The team also believes that the impact could be the explanation for Uranus’ rings and moons.
I know, right? This means you could waste fewer of them because you’re not going to use them before they turn brown and yucky, but it also means you can stock up while they’re on sale and tuck them away for a rainy, guacamole-less day.
The mind-blowing hack comes Natasha Labarriere-Mueller, stay-at-home mom of two, and it went viral after she posted it on Facebook.
“They do not brown, they do not lose their texture, they come out perfect when thawed…and last up to 4 months in the freezer.”
She educated everyone at Costco that day and then returned home to share her life-changing knowledge with all of us. She even includes a handy how-to link on Instagram.
Go ahead and learn all about history the old-fashioned way. Read book after book, show up to that 8 am for yet another pop quiz by your professor who looks like Jeff Goldblum. Or, you could have an infinitely better time scrolling through these memes. I know I’m a lot more likely to remember Julius Caesar through dank memeage than an over-priced textbook.
One of the most popular memes this year is the “Distracted Boyfriend” meme. There was a solid month or so where it was being widely shared in its various iterations all over social media.
In case you’ve somehow missed it, it’s a meme that’s based on this stock photo of a young man who clearly has eyes for other women, even though he’s out with his girlfriend.
Obviously we all know that people cheat on their boyfriends, girlfriends, and spouses. And a lot of us have heard of the stupid games that people play in relationships, such as ghosting and others. Now it’s time to add a new phrase into the complex intimate relationship: micro-cheating.
Dating expert Melanie Schilling describes micro-cheating as “a series of seemingly small actions that indicate a person is emotionally or physically focused on someone outside their relationship.” People addressed the issue on Twitter.
