Author: Shaunacy Ferro

Pelicans dive into the ocean all the time. They hunt by spotting fish from high in the air before zeroing in and dropping down into the water dozens of feet below. While they make it look like no big deal, it’s a dangerous maneuver. From 40 feet up, if they hit the surface of the water wrong, it’s like slamming into a brick wall.

PBS’s video series Deep Look recently took a dive into how brown pelicans manage to pull this off without breaking their necks, going blind, or otherwise maiming themselves. Part good form, part physiology, it’s an impressive feat. The muscles around their back tighten to protect their spine, a membrane flashes over their eyes to protect their vision, and their sword-shaped bill slices through the water.

And once they hit, they’ve got a built-in life vest that keeps them floating along the surface of the water instead of plunging down into deeper waters. When the pelican takes a deep breath as it dives, air rushes into special sacks under their skin and in their bones, called pneumatic foramina, that act like a cushion against the water. Their signature gular pouch doesn’t just hold fish, either. It acts like a parachute to slow the bird down, only inflating with liquid instead of air (it catches up to three gallons of water in the process).

Watch the full video to find out more.

If you’re really into pelicans, you can also experience a GoPro view of a pelican learning to fly.

The American Shakespeare Center wants to see your fan fiction. As Vox reports, the theater company in Staunton, Virginia is in search of “companion pieces” that tell stories that are about, inspired by, or otherwise involve the Bard and his work. And they’re paying.

Jim Warren, the center’s artistic director, is looking for plays that “vibe off Shakespeare,” as he explains in a press release. This is how he describes what they’re looking for:

We’re not looking for a retelling of Shakespeare plays. We’re looking for partner plays that are inspired by Shakespeare, plays that might be sequels or prequels to Shakespeare’s stories, plays that might tell the stories of minor characters in Shakespeare’s stories, plays that might dramatize Shakespeare’s company creating the first production of a title, plays that might include modern characters interacting with Shakespeare’s characters, plays that will be even more remarkable when staged in rotating repertory with their Shakespeare counterpart and actors playing the same characters who might appear in both plays, plays that not only will appeal to other Shakespeare theater, but also to all types of theater and audiences around the world.

For the next two decades, the American Shakespeare Center plans to select two such plays every year, rewarding the chosen playwrights with $25,000 each, as well as travel and housing expenses to come to Staunton for rehearsals. Each year, there will be a call for plays inspired by a few specific works in Shakespeare’s oeuvre—this year, The Merry Wives of Windsor; Henry IV, Part 1; The Comedy of Errors; and The Winter’s Tale are on the docket.

The idea is that the new plays will complement the traditional pieces the theater plans to put on during the year. Playwrights will need to take into account that their work will be performed at the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia, which is a recreation of the type of theater that housed Shakespeare’s original performances—no fancy sets or lighting, using a small set of actors who play multiple parts and might need to cross-dress at some point. Basically, they’re looking for your rendition of Shakespeare in Love.

You have until February 2018 to submit.

[h/t Vox]

When astronauts finally make it to Mars, they’ll need something to eat. And while NASA is working on shelf-stable rations for those eventual missions, astronauts will ideally be able to grow their own plants while exploring other worlds. That’s where the University of Arizona’s inflatable greenhouse comes in, designboom reports.

The University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center is helping the space agency develop a closed-loop system that can provide astronauts with food, clean the air, and recycle waste and water in alien environments. This “bioregenerative life support system” uses plants and LEDs to recreate what’s essentially a miniature Earth environment, according to designboom.

The Lunar Greenhouse prototype is an 18-foot-long, 7-foot-wide cylinder that is designed to take the carbon dioxide that astronauts breathe out and turn it into oxygen through plant photosynthesis. Astronauts would introduce water into the system either from supplies they bring with them or that they find after they arrive, if possible. That water is then run through the cylinder, flowing along the plants’ roots and back into the greenhouse storage system.

The scientists and engineers at the University of Arizona and NASA’s Kennedy Advanced Life Support Research project are currently trying to figure out what seeds, plants, and equipment will be necessary to make the system work on the moon or Mars. It may need to be buried underground to prevent radiation damage, hence the LEDs, but in certain environments, it may be able to work with just sunlight.

Scientists have already been working on growing plants beyond Earth’s atmosphere without a dedicated greenhouse. Several kinds of plants, including vegetables and flowers, have been grown on the International Space Station. But for longer-term exploration of other worlds, we’ll need something more permanent than a space station.

“The greenhouses provide a more autonomous approach to long-term exploration on the moon, Mars and beyond,” the Kennedy Space Center’s Ray Wheeler said in a press release. It would, of course, be a lot easier to travel to Mars with a bunch of seeds than to bring along years’ worth of food and air purification equipment.

[h/t designboom]

There’s a familiar saying in the tech world: If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Which means, if you’re not paying to use a service, the company providing it has to be profiting in a different way, and that’s usually by selling the data it collects on its users to third parties. This is perfectly legal—you give the company permission to do so by signing off on its terms of service. As The Intercept highlighted earlier this week, the latest tech company to catch flak for giving away data on its often unwitting customers is Unroll.me, a service that helps you organize and unsubscribe from email newsletters. If you’re a user, it’s probably time you revoked its access to your information. But doing so, unfortunately, is a little more complicated than just deleting your account on the site.

The initial revelation came out as part of a New York Times profile on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, which revealed that Uber bought information on Unroll.me users from a data analytics service called Slice—data that Unroll.me users probably didn’t know the company was collecting in the first place, like their emailed purchase receipts. “Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber,” the Times reported.

Presumably, when you signed up for Unroll.me, you thought you were giving the company access to your email so that it could help you sift through annoying spam newsletters—not so that it could sell other companies information about the stuff you buy.

Despite issuing an apology, the company isn’t going to stop how it does business. “We never, ever release personal data about you,” Unroll.me says, but it’s still going to collect information from your email. “All data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only.” But most people would rather not have a company trading data on what they buy.

So yes, it’s probably time you deleted the service. To do so, you’ll need to go into your email settings. Here’s how to do it in Gmail:

1. Go to “My Account.”

2. Under “Sign-in and Security,” click “Connected apps and sites.”

3. Go to “Apps connected to your account” and click on Unroll.me. Hit “remove.”

4. Start looking through those privacy statements and terms of service pages, even if they’re full of legalese. For an easy way to see what a company wants to do with your data, search the page for the term “third party.”

[h/t The Intercept]

The craft beer business is booming. In the U.S., there are 5300 small breweries, and according to some industry leaders, this is the “greatest time in history to be a beer drinker in America.” But where is the best place to find a microbrew?

On the data visualization site The Pudding, Russell Goldenberg breaks down the geography of U.S. craft beer production and consumption to show you just why Santa Rosa, California might be the best place for beer in America. His visualizations—spotted by FlowingData—are based on data from RateBeer and designed to weigh both the quantity of breweries within the area and user ratings of those beers.

Using his interactive infographic, you can adjust the ratings—the number of breweries, the size of your radius, and the weighting of quantity versus quality—to see which cities fare best. (If you’re just looking at quantity, Denver comes out on top.)

To understand how booming the business of craft beer is, check out this infographic, which graphs how many new breweries have opened in each state per capita between 1997 and 2016. While a fair amount of new breweries opened in cities in ’97, there were none with more than one per 100,000 people. That’s substantially less than have been startiing up more recently in places with reputations as craft meccas, like Colorado, Oregon, and California (which, thanks to its giant population, actually has a really low new-brewery-per-capita ratio).

See all the beerfographics on The Pudding.

[h/t FlowingData]

You may not be able to afford adult summer camp, but you can pretend to be hanging out at Camp Firewood with all your friends. Wet Hot American Summer is set to become a role-playing game.

Wet Hot American Summer: Fantasy Camp is being crowdfunded on Kickstarter by humor publisher The Devastator. At press time, the project was less than $2000 away from its $12,500 goal (with nearly a month to go). The game is officially sanctioned by the original movie’s co-writer and director David Wain, and according to the Kickstarter, the game’s rulebook will include never-before-seen material and playing tips from members of the cast and crew, including Joe Lo Truglio, Marguerite Moreau, Michael Ian Black, and Wain himself. You can get the print version of the manual for $20 or a digital copy for $10.

Because it’s a role-playing game, all you need is the manual and some friends. You can either design your own summer camps and create your own characters, or you can play as your favorite characters from the film and Netflix series, pursuing three different story lines: “Save the Camp,” “Superstardom,” and “Bonfire Boinking.” In each version, your character will attend classic camp activities like the talent show, complete counselor chores like flushing out contraband from campers’ bunks, and hoard special items to make your last day of camp the best ever (read: beer).

Take a look at a preview below:

[h/t Den of Geek]

David Lynch, the visionary director of surreal films such as Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead, has some perfectly offbeat hobbies. He records dance music. He designs night clubs. He makes furniture. He is a crusader for transcendental meditation. But weirdest of all just may be his predilection for weather reporting.

In the mid-2000s, Lynch enjoyed sitting at his desk at home in Los Angeles and describing the weather, and regularly put videos of his amateur meteorology online, as Vulture recently reminded us. Unlike his twisted films, his weather reports were (mostly) played very straight: he just talked about the sunshine, the blueness of the sky, and the current temperature. Their very existence was surreal enough.

Once, he even did one with his favorite muse, Laura Dern:

02/01/2005 🌤 A classic weather report from @DAVID_LYNCH and @LauraDern. pic.twitter.com/csCNRoG0Fs

— Eric Thirteen (@eric_x_thirteen) July 1, 2016

Please enjoy a few more of these gems:

Of course, it’s David Lynch, so sometimes things got weird:

The site where Lynch kept his archive of videos is no longer up, but we suggest going through YouTube’s search results for “David Lynch weather report” to see all the weird and wonderful reports yourself.

[h/t Vulture]

A new app promises to make you just a little less embarrassing at your next round of karaoke. Vanido, which is billed as a “personal singing coach,” provides daily lessons and real-time feedback to help improve your voice and your ear, as The Verge reports.

When you first sign up, the app—free on iOS with an Android version in the works—determines your vocal range, tailoring exercises to your natural vocal abilities. After that, the app assigns practice activities that involve various singing techniques, including chest voice, head voice, and foundational skills—though it doesn’t actually explain what those categories mean.

Fortunately, users don’t necessarily need to understand those categories to complete the tasks. Similar to playing the music video game Rock Band, notes appear as colored bricks that move across the screen. When they cross over the line, you have to hit that note, which you hear through your headphones simultaneously. A continuous orange line representing your voice illustrates which note you’re singing, helping with adjustments.

However much you might want to turn this into performance boot camp, Vanido limits practice time. You can only take up to three lessons a day, although you can repeat them as many times as you’d like.

After a few days of trying the app, I have, disappointingly, not gained the vocal range of Whitney Houston. In fact, I can’t really tell if I’ve improved at all, even though the app records and scores every note I sing into my phone.

It’s hard to tell how well you’re doing based on your “VANI XP” level. And along with the score from each complete lesson, the app includes an encouraging note, meaning that I can’t really tell if I’m “doing great!” or if the app is just trying not to wound my pride. Based on how horrifying my voice sounds coming through my headphones, it’s the latter.

Still, being able to see my pitch and exactly how far I’ve strayed from the note makes my lack of skills into a challenge to overcome, rather than simply an embarrassing disappointment. Each completed exercise feels like winning a game. I would often go back and repeat the same lessons immediately to get a better score. I looked forward to practicing every night, even though I refused to do it before everyone in my apartment was safely asleep.

Hopefully, doing all of these exercises means that someday my voice won’t be quite so embarrassing. One day, maybe the app will even give me enough positive feedback to convince me to let someone else hear me sing.

[h/t The Verge]

All images courtesy Vanido

Banning trans-fatty acids had a measurable impact on public health in the state of New York, according to a new study recently highlighted by Popular Science. A review of New York State Department of Public Health data from 2002 to 2013, published in the JAMA Cardiology, finds that there were 6.2 percent fewer hospital visits related to heart attacks and strokes in counties that banned foods that contained trans-fatty acids (trans fats) compared to counties that didn’t have a ban in place.

In 2007, New York City, which has five counties, became the first U.S. metro area to ban trans fats in restaurants, bakeries, and other eateries. Six other counties in New York state followed suit over the subsequent five years. Trans fats in foods like Twinkies, Girl Scout Cookies, coffee creamers, and microwave popcorn typically come from partially hydrogenated oils, which have been found to increase the risk of stroke, heart disease, and more. The bans did not apply to packaged food, so people in those 11 counties likely still had some trans fats in their diets, but nonetheless were eating less than their counterparts in the 25 counties in the study without a ban in place.

The study, led by Yale cardiologist Eric Brandt, found that within three years of instituting a ban on trans fats in restaurant foods, counties saw a 6.2 percent total decline in people who went to the hospital for heart attacks and strokes. The data showed that specifically, there was a 7.8 percent decline in heart attacks and 3.6 percent decline in strokes for both men and women.

The FDA began requiring companies to list the amount of trans fats contained in packaged food in 2006, causing many companies to begin reducing or eliminating them from products. After New York City instituted its trans fats ban, California followed suit, as did several individual cities like Philadelphia and Seattle.

It’s impossible to say that the decline in hospital visits was solely due to a reduction in trans fats in diets, but consider how harmful research has shown them to be: Eating just 2 grams of trans fats a day is considered to pose a dangerous risk to your cardiovascular health.

Despite the bans, trans fats still pose a risk to consumers. Any product with less than 0.5 grams per serving can claim to have 0 grams of trans fat, meaning that some foods (like Girl Scout Cookies) can market themselves as trans fat–free but still contain partially hydrogenated oils. That will change soon, though. In 2018, trans fats will no longer be “generally recognized as safe” by the FDA. This will essentially ban the unhealthy oils—since companies would have to prove they are safe to eat before using them.

[h/t Popular Science]

California legislators are looking to put the state’s notorious car traffic to good use. State officials recently approved a plan to generate electricity from vibrations produced by cars driving down freeways, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The California Energy Commission recently voted to put $2.3 million into two piezoelectricity projects, which convert pressure into power. One pilot will test a 200-foot-long piece of asphalt on UC-Merced’s campus, while the other experiment will be built by the San Jose green technology company Pyro-E. The company’s technology is expected to generate enough power to supply 5000 homes using less than a half-mile of piezoelectric highway.

The idea is that highways could produce energy mechanically, much like a watch runs on the mechanical energy of a spring. Stacks of the inch-long devices would be installed under roads, moving slightly each time a car rolled over them. The high volume of cars passing above each day would in theory turn that little bit of movement into a significant source of energy. The same idea has been floated for wood flooring, sidewalks, and dance floors.

The technology is still in its early stages, though, and there’s no guarantee that California’s roads will be generating power anytime soon. (If it was more advanced, you would have seen a lot more electricity-generating dance floors, after all.)

If any state is likely to implement these unusual sources of power, though, it would be California, which is already a leader in sustainable energy in the U.S. In one recent milestone, California’s solar panels produced 40 percent of the state’s power on one day in March, though it was only for a few hours. The state plans to get 50 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030 [PDF]. If it can turn L.A. and San Francisco gridlock into power, it’ll reach that goal in a heartbeat.

[h/t San Francisco Chronicle]