To catch you up on the biggest space discoveries, observations, and milestones from 2016, NASA has compiled a “Best Of” mixtape of all the biggest achievements from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
This mixtape looks at some of the year’s most notable stories, both here on Earth and out in space, such as the OSIRIS-REx launch and the discovery that the observable universe contains 10 times more galaxies than we had initially thought. If you crave even more knowledge than NASA’s mixtape offers, the agency also has an expansive look back at 2016 on its website, going much more in-depth on subjects like possible water plumes on Europa and the dramatic shifts in Earth’s weather.
With all of the articles, videos, and eye-popping images to check out, NASA’s year in review should be more than enough to catch you up on 2016. It also sets the groundwork for more discoveries to come in 2017.
No one is immune to Facebook’s strict censorship guidelines—not even a god. Writer Elisa Barbari found that out recently when the social media giant took down an image she posted of a statue of Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, according to The Telegraph.
The statue, which has been in place since the 1560s, stands high above the Fountain of Neptune (or Fontana di Nettuno), located in the Piazza del Nettuno in Bologna, Italy. Barbari posted an image of the statue on her Facebook page, which is dedicated to “Stories, curiosities and views of Bologna.” Apparently, though, the nude god crosses the boundaries of good taste for the social media site, so they removed the image, explaining to Barbari:
“The use of the image was not approved because it violates Facebook’s guidelines on advertising.
It presents an image with content that is explicitly sexual and which shows to an excessive degree the body, concentrating unnecessarily on body parts.
The use of images or video of nude bodies or plunging necklines is not allowed, even if the use is for artistic or educational reasons.”
Barbari has now turned her Facebook page into a protest of sorts, with more modest images of Neptune reading “Si Nettuno, no censura” or “Yes to Neptune, no to censorship.” In a comment on that same image, Barbari finished her plea by saying, “How can a work of art, our Neptune, be the subject of censorship?”
This is far from the first time Facebook has censored a seemingly innocuous piece of art. Just a year ago, the site removed a post by a Danish politician because the image featured a nude statue of the Little Mermaid, an iconic part of the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen.
If you need another reminder that nothing can escape the all-seeing eye of the internet, this latest Friends find should do the trick. The folks at 22 Vision just released a video documenting a previously unthinkable connection between the long-running sitcom and 1990’s Home Alone. It turns out that Monica and Chandler may have bought the house owned by the McCallisters in the movie. How is that possible? With the help of some Hollywood trickery.
The McCallister family lives in Chicago, while Monica and Chandler are seen purchasing a house in the suburbs of New York in the final season of the show. So they obviously don’t live in the same on-screen house. However, the view of the neighborhood from inside Monica and Chandler’s house reveals the same exact one seen from inside the McCallister residence in Home Alone, right down to the blue garage of the Murphys’ house across the street.
As the video points out, it seems that the folks behind Friends simply reused stock footage from Home Alone for the set of the Bings’ new house. On the 22 Visions YouTube page, the channel even wrote, “This bizarre fact has been confirmed by the people who live in the Home Alone house in Winnetka, IL.”
TV shows and movies recycling certain bits of footage and sets is nothing new, but it’s usually fairly well hidden or too obscure to be noticed. So to make a connection between Home Alone and an episode of Friends from 2004 simply by looking at a blue garage outside the window gives a whole new definition to the term eagle-eyed.
Domino’s knows you love your pizza. They also know that you enjoy your pizza with all of the grace and dignity of a barnyard animal. Luckily, according to Adweek, the pizza giant has a solution for customers in the UK: an adult onesie with a stain-proof velveteen fabric that the company is calling “the world’s first ‘wipeable’ onesie.” So no longer does a slice of pizza falling cheese-down on your lap mean the end of that new pair of pants you just bought.
For £25 (about $30), customers can head to Domino’s shops and pick up one of these decorative onesies to sport while scarfing down pie after pie through the new year. The company knows the holiday is its busiest day, predicting up to 2.6 million slices will be consumed before midnight on New Year’s Eve. While the idea of wearing a glorified smock to eat pizza might seem a bit undignified, research shows that 73 percent of the British population changes into their pajamas the moment they get home each evening anyway, so this is really a match made in cheese-covered heaven.
The prototype for the onesie was created by fashion designer Charlotte Denn in just about 13 hours. The blue and pepperoni onesie also comes with extra large pockets on the legs to store drinks and any other necessities to help you get through pizza night. Domino’s isn’t just putting this onesie out to keep adults free of pizza sauce; for every outfit sold, the company will match it with a donation to charities like the Teenage Cancer Trust.
Bees, in case you hadn’t heard, are dying off at an alarming rate—which is a huge problem when you consider the vital part they play in the world’s ecosystems. Bees account for 80 percent of all insect crop pollination, but beekeepers in the United States estimate that between April 2015 and April 2016, they lost 44 percent of their honeybee population. The situation is so dire that engineers from Poland aren’t willing to wait and see if the bee population recovers; they’re already creating a replacement.
The B-Droid is a project led by Rafał Dalewski of the Warsaw University of Technology’s Faculty of Power and Aeronautical Engineering, and its aim is to pollinate plants robotically. This is the fourth year of the project’s existence, and in that time the B-Droid robot has gone through multiple upgrades. The first model operated on wheels with a computer and cameras mounted on it to scope out any nearby flowers to pollinate. Since that time the B-Droid has evolved into a quadcopter drone that is able to move from flower to flower taking pollen samples. To accomplish pollination, the B-Droid moves in on a flower, brushes it for pollen, then moves on to the next plant, repeating the cycle as many times as necessary.
“[The latest quadcopter] is controlled by a system of external cameras and a ground station computer,” Dalewski told Digital Trends. “When cameras and [the] ground station provide information about flowers’ position, a route is planned and the quadcopter is launched and directed by the system toward a flower. When it reaches one flower and collects pollen, it flies to another and another, until it reaches all flowers in a dedicated area.”
The quadcopter model is still a work in progress, as it can only stay airborne for a few minutes at a time right now, but the wheeled B-Droid has already shown success pollinating strawberries and garlic. This past summer, it yielded 165 garlic seeds in one experiment. The seeds were also 6 percent heavier, indicating a higher quality seed than the alternative.
The dream of a drone army pollinating the world’s plants may still be a few years off. In the meantime, here are some ways you can help save the existing bee population right now.
Ghostbusters is a perfect idea for a movie, but what about its viability as a business? Are Venkman and Ray able to make ends meet by catching ghosts in New York City, or is the whole operation just one slow month away from closing up shop? Well, the folks over at Bizdaq decided to crunch the numbers to see just how much the Ghostbusters’ business would actually be worth in the real world.
The site took everything into account: Manhattan rent, equipment, and all the other expenses the team would have run into during their first year on the job. While the Ghostbusters never explicitly say how much they make per year, at one point, when they capture Slimer at the Sedgewick Hotel, they say, “For the entrapment, we’re gonna have to ask you for four big ones. Four thousand for that. But we are having a special this week on proton charging and storage of the beast, and that’s only going to come to one thousand dollars, fortunately.”
So the site guesses that each ghost nets about $5000, and they capture nine ghosts during the span of the film. Since the film takes place from early October through November 9, 1984, that means the team made an estimated $45,000 in about a five-week span. If that rate stays the same, it averages out to around $468,000 for their first year, which would be $1,092,731 in 2016 dollars.
Of course, that’s all money that the ‘Busters made before things like rent, utilities, salary, etc. were factored in. Bizdaq makes plenty of other calculations to see what the business is actually worth when all their expenses and assets are considered, leading to an estimated total of $627,483 in 2016 dollars. That’s an impressive haul for a first-year start-up, especially one that specializes in taking down sentient marshmallows the size of skyscrapers.
Taco Bell has always been the least traditional of the major fast food chains, but it looks like the company is now placing a bet on a hamburger joint staple: French fries. Or, more specifically, “loaded” French fries, according to the food blog Brand Eating.
The chain is testing new Loaded Fries Supreme and Seasoned Fries at one Taco Bell location near the campus of the University of California, Irvine. This might seem like a big deal for Taco Bell devotees in the U.S., but the company already offers similar loaded fries at locations in Japan, Canada, and numerous countries in Latin America.
The loaded fries at the UC Irvine location feature all the staples of a typical Nachos Supreme, like beef, sour cream, tomatoes, and nacho cheese—just don’t expect any beans. The Seasoned Fries, on the other hand, feature a “habanero” seasoning that, according to one employee, “wasn’t all that spicy.” While word of fast food tests never used to leave their designated areas, the Taco Bell fries have already found their way to Instagram, courtesy of some sociable foodies:
The Seasoned Fries go for just $0.50 or $0.75 with cheese, while the Loaded Fries Supreme are $1 for a normal order and $2 for Loaded Fries BellGrande, which is simply a larger order. Brand Eating points out that these low prices are likely just for testing purpose, and the products won’t be that cheap if they reach the national stage. If you want to see these Loaded Fries become a mainstay nationwide, you can show your support at the testing location at 4101 Campus Drive, Irvine, California.
2016 has been a tough year to get through, especially if you’re a celebrity. In the past 12 months, we’ve lost notable figures from all walks of life, including Carrie Fisher, David Bowie, Prince, Abe Vigoda, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Alan Thicke, Muhammad Ali, Anton Yelchin, and Jose Fernandez, just to name a few. But as the calendar makes its highly anticipated march toward 2017, one South Carolina man is taking an unusual step to make sure 2016 doesn’t claim the internet’s favorite 94-year-old: Betty White.
Demetrios Hrysikos of Spartanburg, South Carolina, set up a GoFundMe page to raise money so he can travel to wherever the actress is in order to ward off the malicious spirit that is 2016. “Help 2016 catch these hands if it goes anywhere near Betty White!” Hrysikos wrote. “If she’s okay with it, I will fly to where ever Betty White is and keep her safe till Jan 1, 2017.”
The odds that Betty White will want this stranger to hold vigil over her until the stroke midnight on January 1, 2017 are pretty slim, so Hrysikos will be donating the actual funds raised to the Spartanburg Little Theater in order to, “help craft new stars of stage and screen to carry [the] mantle of the legends that have left [us] this year.”
So far, the GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $3500 from 341 people in just one day. 2016 may have been designed to seemingly crush our spirits, but the collective sense of humor (and irony) of the internet can never be extinguished.
Like so many things in life, the future of eldercare seemingly lies in robotics. On December 8, IBM and Rice University announced that they have collaborated on a prototype robot designed to help the elderly and assist their caregivers.
Named IBM MERA (Multi-Purpose Eldercare Robot Assistant), the project is a Watson-powered robot that can help read a patient’s vital signs, answer questions about their health, and recognize and assist if there is a fall. The prototype was created by IBM alongside Rice University students and faculty from the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Psychology. The robot currently resides inside IBM’s “Aging in Place” research facility in Austin, Texas.
In addition to running on IBM systems—such as the Cloud and Watson technologies—MERA also implements CameraVitals, a system that can read vital signs by recording a patient’s face. This technology was developed by Rice’s Ashutosh Sabharwal and Ashok Veeraraghavan.
The combination of IBM Watson’s speech functions and CameraVitals can potentially help get information to caregivers quickly and at all times of the day, especially in an emergency situation. Watson’s speech and text capabilities also come into play if a patient has any health questions for the MERA, such as “What are the symptoms of anxiety?” or “What is my heart rate?,” according to the university. The idea is that the MERA will implement these systems to help the elderly live independently, while still being provided with the basic care they need.
“Now is the time to invest in, care for, protect, and empower our aging population so they can live more independent lives,” Arvind Krishna, IBM Research’s senior vice president, said. “Our new research on ‘embodied cognition,’ which combines real-time data generated by sensors with cognitive computing, will explore how to provide clinicians and caregivers with insights that could help them make better care decisions for their patients.”
Both IBM and the university stress that the number of people aged 65 and up in the United States will continue to grow in the coming decades, with estimates pointing at 92 million by 2060, making advancements in eldercare vital as the overall population ages.
The 2015 Japanese census laid out a frightening realization for the country: its population is shrinking. In just five years, between 2010 and 2015, Japan’s population shrunk by almost 1 million—an unusually high drop for a country not dealing with a disaster like famine or plague. But while everyone is quick to blame so-called “parasite singles” or a lack of immigration, Toyota is looking for a solution. Their recent proposal? Robots.
In October, the car manufacturer introduced the Kirobo Mini, a robot designed to form an emotional connection with a population that is getting older and not reproducing at a rate to sustain population numbers. This is actually a miniaturized version of the original Kirobo robot, which was slightly larger and sent to the International Space Station to keep astronauts company during long voyages (it was also the first-ever talking robot in space).
“He wobbles a bit, and this is meant to emulate a seated baby, which hasn’t fully developed the skills to balance itself,” Fuminori Kataoka, Kirobo Mini’s chief design engineer, said. “This vulnerability is meant to invoke an emotional connection.”
In addition to all that wobbling, the Kirobo Mini will blink its “eyes,” mimic the high-pitched type of baby talk familiar to new parents, and recognize facial expressions through the use of a built-in camera. It’s small enough to sit inside a cradle that snaps into a vehicle’s cup holder, but powerful enough to simulate the intelligence of a 5-year-old.
Toyota didn’t come right out and say it, but the belief among many is that these companion babies are designed to tap into the parental instincts of Kirobo owners, possibly leading them to want a real child of their own.
This strategy is similar to the one used by team behind Yotaro, another robot baby introduced in Japan in 2010. This one used projection technology to put an emotive face on the robot, promoting a bond with its owners (and hopefully leading to some flesh-and-blood babies in the future).
“A robot can’t be human but it’s great if this robot triggers human emotions, so humans want to have their own baby,” Hiroki Kunimura, the project leader for the Yotaro robot, told CNN at the time.
Each Kirobo Mini will retail for 39,800 yen, or $390, when it is released next year.
