Author: Kirstin Fawcett

Meet The Black Mambas, the world’s first all-female anti-poaching unit. According to Slate, its 26 members defy South African gender norms by spending their days patrolling the country’s Balule Nature Reserve—a job that’s traditionally only been held by men.

Balule Nature Reserve is home to many types of animals, but its rhinoceros are particularly vulnerable: Around 80 percent of the world’s wild rhino population lives in South Africa, making the country a magnet for illegal hunters. The animals are prized for their horns, which are sold and used for ceremonial or medicinal purposes in many southeast Asian countries.

The Black Mambas keep an eye out for illegal hunters (and confront them nonviolently), as well as search for trapping devices or rifts in the reserve’s fence. In 2016, filmmaker Dan Sadgrove visited South Africa to document the group in action—and last month, he released a short documentary chronicling their efforts, called The Rhino Guardians.

“The film in the end wasn’t just about the conservation of the rhinos, it was about the Black Mambas breaking away from a patriarchal society and being courageous in the face of fear,” Sadgrove recently told environmental website Mongabay. “[It’s] about them focusing on turning the ship around slowly through educating the youth, hoping they can bring these stories of conservation back into their families and stop poaching from within. I hope these Mambas can inspire other women in their villages to look outside traditional employment.”

You can watch the film below.

[h/t Slate]

Lots of cities select a cute, cuddly animal as their mascot, but the Indonesian city of Pontianak, located in Borneo’s West Kalimantan province, may take the opposite approach: According to Mashable, local officials are thinking about erecting a giant statue of a female vampiric ghost, in honor of the evil spirit the town is named after.

For those not familiar with Indonesian folklore, the pontianak—also known as kuntilanak—is the vengeful spirit of a woman who died in childbirth or while pregnant, and has returned to Earth to prey on the living. Tourism officials think that a 330-foot statue of the ghoulish phantom would attract visitors to Pontianak, after noting the popularity of similar public works in other Asian cities, The Jakarta Post reports.

For example, Singapore has the Merlion—a statue of an animal with a lion head and a fish body. The head symbolizes the lion that a mythical Malay prince is said to have encountered upon his arrival to the island (he named the region “Singapura,” or “Lion City”), and the tail symbolizes the city’s origins as a fishing village. Meanwhile, Kuching, Malaysia is filled with large cat statues; they reference the city’s name, which is derived from the Malay word for “cat.”

Mock-ups of the statue have been making the rounds on Facebook, and Indonesia’s Public Works and Public Housing Ministry reportedly told tourism officials that they would contribute funds for the project if the city council gives it the go-ahead. However, Pontianak’s giant ghost statue isn’t a done deal just yet.

The Straits Times reports that locals have formed a protest group against the statue, arguing that a giant ghost statue would be, well, pretty creepy. Group representatives have met with city council members, who’ve reassured them that the ghost statue is only in the planning stages at this point, and that they’ve heard no official word from government higher-ups.

“It’s only an idea,” said council official Irwan Suhandar, according to the paper.

[h/t Mashable]

In the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, thrill-seekers can opt for a hardcore hair-straightening experience. As Reuters reports, local barber Ramadan Odwan styles his customers’ hair smooth using a blowtorch—and people are lining up to reap the benefits of its burn.

For 20 shekels (around $5), customers can receive a haircut and have their strands fire-straightened. “People have gone crazy about it,” Odwan told Reuters. “Many people are curious to go through the experience and they are not afraid. People here love adventures.”

Odwan isn’t the only beauty professional to offer extreme salon services. One barber in Milan burns the ends of his patrons’ hair with candles; in Madrid, there’s a barber who trims tresses with a samurai sword. Still, Odwan may be the only stylist in Gaza to use flames instead of a flat iron.

Odwan coats customers’ hair with a protective liquid (he won’t reveal what’s in it) and uses a blowtorch to apply fire in short intervals.

“I control how long I apply fire, I keep it on and off for 10 seconds or 15 seconds. It is completely safe and I have not encountered any accident since I started it two months ago,” Odwan told Reuters. We’re crossing our fingers for him (and his intrepid customers).

Check out Reuters’ story for more pictures of Odwan in action.

#AWANInews Hottest cut of all – Gaza barber wields blowtorch https://t.co/oyBPfVF56s pic.twitter.com/I4YD8dvlHc

— Astro AWANI (@501Awani) February 10, 2017

[h/t Reuters]

Urban cyclists encounter many dangers: Path-clogging pedestrians and reckless drivers are among the most obvious, but bikers also face an under-the-radar road risk called “dooring”—the collision that results when a parked driver opens their car door into an oncoming pedaler’s path.

Most states don’t track dooring accidents, so it’s hard to determine just how often they occur. However, Grid Chicago analyzed Illinois Department of Transportation data from 2011, and found that one in five bike crashes in Chicago were caused by dooring that year.

To prevent dooring accidents, The Telegraph reports that drivers in the Netherlands rely on a simple practice that’s been dubbed the “Dutch Reach”: After parking, they reach for their car door’s handle using their right arm instead of their left one, even though the latter is closer to the door. This method forces the drivers to pivot their bodies so they look over their shoulders, allowing them to notice incoming bikers on the street.

Children in the Netherlands learn this habit from their teachers and parents, and it’s even included on their driving tests. Now, the practice is starting to catch on in the U.S., thanks in part to vocal evangelists like Michael Charney. Charney, a doctor from Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded a website called dutchreach.org after a local woman named Amanda Phillips was killed in a dooring accident. It provides resources about cycling safety, and suggests ways to promote the Dutch Reach. Meanwhile, advocacy groups like the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition are also spreading the word.

Some U.S. cities, like Minneapolis, are starting to build protected paths for bike-loving commuters. But in most places, designated paths for cyclists are situated in a “door zone,” a.k.a. the buffer zone between parked cars and the main road. Until more cities invest in infrastructure changes to keep bikers safe, U.S. drivers can save lives by adjusting their habits.

Master the Dutch Reach by watching the tutorial below, courtesy of Outside magazine.

[h/t The Telegraph]

Aiming to reduce pollution and expand his country’s limited housing options, a South African inventor has created Nubrix, a brick made of recycled paper, France 24’s The Observers reports.

@EDjanic and his brick #Nubrix #StepUpAwards2016 #StepUpBootcamp pic.twitter.com/60wtvCOGSW

— Primestars SA (@primestarsSA) December 4, 2016

Elijah Djan, 21, is an industrial engineering student at the University of Pretoria. His innovative construction material has been years in the making: As a kid, Djan witnessed his father, a lecturer, burning old textbooks, and was inspired to take action. “I knew that it was bad for the environment, but my dad said he wouldn’t stop doing it unless I had a better idea for how to use the paper,” Djan says.

Djan watched a documentary on South Africa’s low-income housing shortage (as of 2011, nearly 2 million of the nation’s families lived in shacks and informal dwellings), and a business plan was born. A prototype for his brick scored Djan, then 11 years old, a national science prize; later, he tested the design and even built a still-standing wall from the bricks in his own backyard.

To turn Nubrix into a viable commercial product, Djan says he needs a regulatory board’s official certification of approval. For this to happen, the bricks need to be tested for fire resistance, water penetration, thermal capability, durability, and acoustics. Djan now has both the money and the opportunity to see if his product can meet requirements: In late 2016, the student won first place in the Gauteng Accelerator Programme (GAP) Innovation Competitions. The prize was €14,000 (nearly $15,000), and the chance to collaborate with mentors on his project.

“For me, these bricks are just a start. Eventually, I want to create all different construction materials made from recycled products,” Djan says. Considering that South Africans produced 108 million tons of waste in 2011 [PDF], and less than 10 percent of it was recycled, his ambition couldn’t be more timely—or necessary.

[h/t France 24 The Observers]

Most of us have met that quirky candy connoisseur who only eats pink Skittles or brown M&Ms. Willem Pennings, a mechanical engineering student at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, designed a device to make life easier for these discerning eaters: a candy-sorting machine.

On his blog, Pennings describes how the sorting machine—which was created using CAD software and contains 3D-printed parts—works. Users pour mixed candies into a funnel, and a tiny nozzle shoots same-colored sweets into their respective dishes. This process is made possible thanks to an RGB sensor (a color-sensing device). It can detect—and categorize—any type of item, so long as the individual pieces are regularly and evenly shaped.

Once in action, the machine works fast: It takes only two to three minutes to sort a 300-gram bag of Skittles or M&Ms, and it can sort two pieces per second.

Visit Pennings’s blog for a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your own candy-sorting machine. Keep in mind, however, that the project may take a long time, and cost a lot of money: Pennings himself worked on his own machine from May 2016 until last December, and spent nearly €500 (more than $530) on its parts and software.

[h/t The Kid Should See This]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has made around 375,000 images of public-domain artworks from its collections freely available online, The New York Times reports. Members of the public can download, edit, and distribute high-resolution photos from the Met’s website, with no copyright restrictions whatsoever.

The initiative—a part of the Met’s new open access policy—includes partnerships with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Artstor, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Art Resource, and Pinterest in order to improve access to the museum’s images. For example, web users can now find images, save, tag, or “pin” images of artworks on Creative Commons, as Hyperallergic reports. The Met has also named a new “Wikipedian in Residence,” Richard Knipel, who’s responsible for uploading pictures into Wikimedia Commons, documenting their metadata, and creating new articles on various artworks or topics.

The images feature 200,000 artworks, including famous paintings like Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware and El Greco’s The Vision of Saint John. They comprise a large portion of the Met’s collections, although many other of the institution’s public domain works—think engravings, posters, and prints—have yet to be digitized. (Another 65,000 Met artworks have been digitized, but they don’t fall under public domain.)

“Our comprehensive and diverse museum collection spans 5000 years of world culture,” Met director Thomas P. Campbell said in a statement quoted by Artnet. “Our core mission is to be open and accessible for all who wish to study and enjoy the works of art in our care. Increasing access to the museum’s collection and scholarship serves the interests and needs of our 21st-century audiences by offering new resources for creativity, knowledge, and ideas.”

As Hyperallergic points out, the Met’s website has contained hundreds of thousands of publicly accessible images since 2014, but visitors were only able to download them for free if they were intended for non-commercial or scholarly use. Now, all of those images have CC0 1.0 or Creative Commons Zero licenses. You can browse the newly available works by going to the Met’s Collection page and selecting the “Public Domain Artworks” filter on the left.

Digitized images of the Met’s collections will be rolled out gradually, AFP Relax News reports.

[h/t The New York Times]

The Terminator is back—this time, in board game form. Space Goat Productions, a Washington-based comic book studio, has announced that it’s launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund an official game based on the classic 1984 movie. The campaign is slated to go live on February 15.

Space Ghost Productions has teamed up with Lynnvander Studios—the Canadian game design studio responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the Board Game and Galaxy Quest: the Board Game—to design The Terminator game. In a news release, it’s described as “an asymmetrical strategy game played across two boards, one in 1984 and one in 2029.” One player controls the game’s Skynet machines (Hunter Killer flying machines, Terminator Endoskeletons, and a few new robots), and other players are members of the human resistance fighting against the machine uprising.

The Terminator Kickstarter isn’t live yet, but fans of the movie can sign up to receive email updates. Once it’s up and running, the campaign will provide backers with a discount on The Termination Box, a box of game accessories and miniatures. For more information, visit the game’s website.

Feeling sniffly, but not sure if you’re coming down with a bug? Take a cue from your used Kleenex. As the American Chemical Society’s latest Reactions video explains, the color and consistency of snot can serve as a barometer of your health.

Our noses and sinuses always produce mucus, which keeps both the nose and throat moist and humidifies the dry air we breathe. Normally, mucus moves from the sinuses to the nose and then into the throat, at which point we swallow it (without really noticing). But when we’re ill, we generate extra mucus to fight the viral infection as part of our inflammatory response.

Not only do our bodies make more mucus when we’re sick, we’ll notice that our snot looks different, too. Normally, it’s clear and watery. But when we’re congested, it thickens and turns yellow or white, thanks to a high concentration of living and dead white blood cells that may have been deployed to fight a cold. If your mucus appears green, an enzyme called myeloperoxidase (which helps reduce acids) and immune cells called neutrophils may be present. Green snot means that your immune system is likely working at full force to battle a viral infection.

If your snot is yellow, white, or green, take it as a sign to get some extra rest and take care of yourself. While you’re bearing the brunt of a cold or sinus infection, the ACS recommends seeking relief by taking a medicine specifically designed to relieve symptoms (such as runniness and congestion). However, they also warn that if you use antihistamines and decongestants too often, their effectiveness can gradually decrease. Keep in mind, too, that scientific literature reviews have found little solid evidence that cold medicine actually works—meaning you may be sniffling up a storm until your immune system conquers your infection once and for all.

[h/t Reactions]

This winter, consider building a snölykta in the front yard instead of a snowman. The traditional Swedish lanterns are made from dozens of individual snowballs, piled into a hollow pyramid. Stick some LED lights inside before sealing the top, and enjoy the cozy glow from the comfort of your warm home (preferably while sipping a mug of hot chocolate).

Learn how to make your own snölykta by watching the timelapse video above, created by Daniel Troger.

[h/t The Kid Should See This]