Author: Shaunacy Ferro

It’s always a lot more exciting (and pleasant) to watch a storm develop online or on TV than to actually see it in real life. With that in mind, please enjoy this five-minute eye candy video of monsoons and supercell storms we spotted over on Gizmodo.

The videographer, Mike Olbinski, is an avid storm chaser, filmmaker, and photographer based in Arizona. This is one of his rare experiments in black-and-white video, giving it an eerie Wizard of Oz vibe.

If you’re really daring, you can join him on one of his storm-chasing tours in May.

[h/t Gizmodo]

Duct tape (or “duck tape,” if you really prefer) is useful in almost any situation, from hitting the dance floor at prom to making a wallet to securing your broken car mirror … or lifting a car, as MythBusters once discovered. The powerful tape, however, isn’t easy to carry around, so should that side view mirror break off when you aren’t close to home, you’ll be heading to the nearest hardware store. But you might consider ditching your roll for a pocket pack, as Laughing Squid suggests.

To make duct tape easier to carry, RediTape makes portable packs of duct tape that can fit in a pocket. They’re folded instead of rolled, so they’ll fit in a tool box, too. They come in a variety of colors (including fluorescent ones in case you’re using it to stay visible at night). At just 5 yards, the tape inside isn’t that long, but most duct tape uses don’t require a whole 10-plus-yard roll anyway.

They cost around $3 each.

[h/t Laughing Squid]

Though it’s easy to see shadows on a human scale, like your own when you walk down the street or the shadow of a building, it’s harder to notice the shadows cast by major geographic points, unless you happen to be standing right by a cliff. We just think, “Oh, the sun went behind the mountain.” But a selection of maps by Robbi Bishop-Taylor, a Ph.D student in geography based in Sydney, shows what those shadows might look like from space, as Gizmodo reports.

The maps show how shadows cast by hills and mountains across the world look just before sunset on the summer solstice. They were created using data sets on elevation models from Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation program, and other institutions.

See how immense the shadow from Mt. Etna is:

It’s an unusual take on the typical topographic map, since you see not only how tall certain geographical features are, but the impact they have on the sunshine of what’s around them. Plus, now you can see what it would be like if sunset happened at the same time all across the world.

High resolution prints are for sale on Etsy and start at around $8.

[h/t Gizmodo]

All images courtesy Robbi Bishop-Taylor via Imgur.

Finding a public toilet while traveling in China is about to become much easier. The country is planning what has been dubbed as a “toilet revolution.” As part of a major investment—$290 billion—to boost tourism between now and 2020, the government wants to build or upgrade 100,000 public restrooms, according to Reuters and CityLab.

By 2020, China wants to increase its tourism industry from 10.8 percent of its yearly economic growth to 12 percent, and part of that means making it more comfortable and appealing for people—especially those who aren’t used to squat toilets—to travel there. Positioning oneself over a smelly hole isn’t exactly on anyone’s list of exciting travel plans.

The plan will mostly target declining industrial cities in northern China, which the government hopes can remake themselves into tourist destinations.

According to the World Bank, only 77 percent of China has access to improved sanitation facilities, meaning that they provide hygienic separation of humans from excrement. (In comparison, the United States has 100 percent access.) Most of the areas lacking proper facilities are in rural China, though, which may not be hotbeds of tourist activity.

The China National Tourism Administration recently released a proposal for new sanitary standards for public toilets in tourist-heavy areas that include Western-style toilets, soap, no odors, and more. The bar for the highest restroom grade is pretty high, too—blowing any U.S. rest stop out of the water. To achieve a AAA rating, a restroom will have to broadcast music and provide services like wheelchair rentals. The new investment in public toilets will include upgrades to bring existing facilities closer to those standards.

[h/t CityLab]

Border control agencies are already using self-service kiosks to manage the crowds of international travelers entering their countries, but a high-tech type of kiosk in development can do more than just scan passports. The AVATAR—which stands for Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time—can detect travelers trying to lie their way through customs, according to Vocativ.

The self-service kiosks, created by the National Center for Border Security and Immigration at the University of Arizona in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security [PDF], scan travelers’ passports and ask the kinds of questions posed by human agents, such as “Do you have any fruits or vegetables?” Sensors can identify body cues like facial expression, vocal tics, pupil dilation—and even cues that human agents can’t see, like cardiorespiratory data—which could indicate that the person is lying and should be subject to additional screening. They can even see that you’re curling your toes, according to a press statement from AVATAR researcher Aaron Elkins of San Diego State University, a professor who studies deception.

The kiosks can be programmed to display several virtual agents, choosing from a woman or a man and a stern or a friendly face. They can be configured to interview in several languages.

AVATAR has been tested in a number of experiments in the European Union and North America, including a pilot program in Nogales, Arizona, in which it screened passengers in the Trusted Traveler program for suspicious or unusual behavior.

“AVATAR has been tested in labs, in airports, and at border crossing stations,” Elkins said in the press release. “The system is fully ready for implementation to help stem the flow of contraband, thwart fleeing criminals, and detect potential terrorists and many other applications in the effort to secure international borders.” However, not all machines built to detect lies are accurate—polygraph tests are largely useless at sussing out dishonesty, according to many psychologists—so there are plenty of reasons to proceed cautiously with this kind of technology.

[h/t Vocativ]

When you really want to destroy an iPhone beyond recognition, molten metal is a foolproof option. YouTubers The Backyard Scientist (a channel obsessed with molten aluminum) and GizmoSlip decided to test out what would happen if an iPhone was dropped in a vat of the super hot stuff. Lucky for us, they documented the entire thing in a video spotted by Nerdist.

The process involves giant bubbles of hot plastic, a few flames, and more. The phone can still be fished out, only it’s more like a black block of bendy tofu than a smartphone. It floats, too, though the slightest poke breaks the submerged gadget into pieces.

While this would be a great way to melt away your technology anguish, it’s probably best not to mess with molten metals at home.

[h/t Nerdist]

The modern incarnation of the ironing board is a century-old design. The folding design sold ubiquitously today was invented in 1914, though the original model came with a wood table. A new company, however, is trying to finally improve on our current equipment for ridding clothes of wrinkles.

Flippr, launching on Indiegogo, has two sides and rotates. You can put your shirt or dress on it like you’re outfitting a super-thin mannequin, and then all you have to do to iron both sides of the clothing is flip the board.

The edge of the board slides out from the body and fits nicely inside shirt sleeves, so you don’t need to take the shirt off the board to iron out those wrinkles. A clip on one side of the board holds pant legs to keep them from sliding off. And a metal rack attached to the board holds your hot iron when you’re finished.

Ironing isn’t usually the most physically tasking item on people’s household chore list, but the current system isn’t exactly convenient. Flippr doesn’t come cheap at $124, but it does show a vast improvement from the board sitting in your closet. If you’re steaming up your dress shirts all the time, it might be worth it. And if it’s too pricey for you now, perhaps it will at least inspire other manufacturers to take a second look at their own ironing board designs.

All images courtesy Flippr

Thanks to a geomagnetic storm tonight, January 5, some people won’t have to travel all the way to the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights. The Aurora Borealis will be visible as far south as the high latitudes of the U.S., meaning that Maine, Michigan, and other northern states could get a glimpse, according to NOAA and other weather centers (as spotted by the Daily Mail).

Outside the U.S., the lights may be visible in the UK, particularly Scotland, and in the central to northern regions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

Tonight’s forecast calls for a G1 geomagnetic storm—the lowest level of geomagnetic storms. G1 storms happen about 1700 times per each 11-year solar cycle.

This is where NOAA predicted the storm to be around 4 p.m. ET:

And here’s where different levels of storms create the Northern Lights. This storm has a Kp level of 4 on a scale of 0 to 9. The higher the number, the greater the disturbance to the geomagnetic field.
 

 
The winter is already the best time to see the Northern Lights since there are long, dark nights. To check out some sites that provide real-time updates on where you can see the lights, look over on AuroraWatch.

[h/t Daily Mail]

Where towns get built throughout history may seem pretty random to the modern eye, but there’s actually a pretty simple calculus that can explain why cities develop where they do, according to a new video, spotted by Gizmodo, from the explainer YouTube channel Wendover Productions.

If each town is only 10 miles from another, people within that 10-mile radius only have to travel five miles to get to the nearest town to buy or sell goods—which was useful before cars. Rural areas that built towns before the auto age often have towns only about 10 to 15 miles apart for this exact reason.

People don’t want to walk very far to get something they buy every day, like coffee, but will venture farther to make a rarer purchase, such as new tires or a new laptop. Shops that people visit all the time tend to be more common because they don’t need as many individual customers to stay afloat. Meanwhile, specialized businesses that consumers shop at infrequently generally need to be located in areas with higher populations.

However, geographic considerations can change that model. It’s hard to build cities on mountains and move goods across ranges, but mountains can also protect against invading forces, and they can have resources like coal and gold. Cities are built on ports so merchants can move goods in and out efficiently. Rivers are necessary to provide a water source for citizens as well as a transport route to the ocean. If there are natural resources, people have historically gravitated toward them, setting up shop right where they can grow crops or build factories.

And that’s before you even consider the history of how Europe and Asia developed early empires, which one theory hypothesizes could be due to climate similarities across continents from east to west, and differences from north to south.

Watch the full video for a much more in-depth explanation:

[h/t Gizmodo]

At 105 years old, the French cyclist Robert Marchand is already a world record holder—several times over. In 2012, at age 100, he set the world record for most kilometers ridden in an hour by someone aged 100 or over, completing 24.251 kilometers (about 15 miles). In 2014, he broke his own record by 2.5 kilometers (another mile and a half). Now, he’s at it again. On Facebook Live (in view of an enthusiastic velodrome crowd), he’s trying for a third time to break his own record. The longtime cyclist is the reason the over-100 record category exists in the first place. 

[h/t Time]