Author: Shaunacy Ferro

Chances are, you live in a much bigger place than your grandparents did decades ago. Average American home sizes have substantially increased since the early 1900s and have grown especially quickly in the past 50 years. However, data gathered by the real estate site PropertyShark.com shows that not all of the U.S. has grown equally.

The average new homes built across the country in the last six years were 74 percent larger than houses built in 1910, showing a 1000-square-foot increase. And because the number of people in each household is dropping (Shout out to all those single ladies!) that means the average American has more living space than previous generations. The average person in the U.S. has about 957 square feet of living space more than their grandparents—an increase of 211 percent.

Each city has experienced a different pattern of growth in living space, though. Miami began the 20th century with new homes slightly above the U.S. average size, but in the ‘60s, houses started getting smaller. Residential real estate in the city has actually grown in size over the last five years, but it still pales in comparison to the spacious houses of the Miami of 1910. San Antonio, by contrast, has been building bigger and bigger homes for more than a century.

Chicago has managed to largely evade the McMansion trend, although no doubt its suburban homes are a different story. The city’s new homes are only 4 percent larger than its 1910 homes were. Nashville, meanwhile, saw median square footage rise 7 percent from the 1910 level, but that’s not necessarily a great indicator of the city’s housing stock. The Music City has always had larger houses than the national average, and in the ‘90s, its median home size was almost 3000 square feet, compared to 2700 now.

These square footages are averages, so that doesn’t mean that every house built is a giant mansion. It’s also possible that in some of these areas, most new houses built are a reasonable size, but a handful of large developments skews the numbers. Head over to PropertyShark.com to see the interactive data.

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To celebrate 10 years since iTunes began renting and selling movies, Apple is offering bargains on film bundles. The tech giant is offering 10-movie bundles for just $9.99 each, The Verge reports.

You can get selections of the top 10 movies from the biggest studios—like Warner Bros., Universal, and Lionsgate—which are a mix of comedies and dramas from various years. The Sony Pictures bundle, for instance, features a combination of cinema including The Monuments Men (2014), Captain Phillips (2013), Easy A (2010), Julie & Julia (2009), and The Social Network (2010).

The other options bundle the top 10 movies of each year, giving you a cross-section of popular cinema from recent history. The packs take customers back to the days when movies like Wild Hogs (2007), 27 Dresses (2008), or Ted (2012) were some of the most downloaded movies of the year.

Check out the the film bundles for yourself on iTunes, only available today (September 12).

[h/t The Verge]

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The University of California, Davis is about to become the go-to authority on coffee science in the United States. With a $250,000 grant from Peet’s Coffee & Tea—the Berkeley-founded company that served as the original inspiration for Starbucks’s business model—it’s starting a multidisciplinary research center to study the art and science of coffee, according to SFGate. 

In a press release, the university announced that researchers at the center will study the microbiology of green coffee fermentation, the chemistry of roasting and brewing, the sensory science of drinking java, and the consumer psychology of how people buy their beans and cups o’ joe. The $250,000 grant from Peet’s Coffee will establish a Peet’s Coffee Pilot Roastery to research coffee in the post-harvest stage. The center will also offer short technical classes for baristas and other coffee professionals looking to up their game, and there will likely be other industry-funded research in the works. There will be research fellowships available, so be sure to brush up on your coffee chemistry, or revisit that thesis proposal on the connections between coffee and running to the bathroom.

UC Davis already offers a popular course in coffee and chemical engineering called Design of Coffee. It has a proven track record in beverage science, considering it’s had a wine and food science research center since 2008. The university hasn’t said when the new coffee research labs will open, but since it has to renovate a 6000-square-foot building to make room for the roastery, a sensory analysis lab, and other office and research spaces, it might be a while. 

In the meantime, you can take the more delicious research route and just try the best coffee shop in all 50 states. 

[h/t SFGate]

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This month, there’s more than one moon on view in Seoul. A 60-foot-tall work of public art called Super Moon has been erected—or rather, inflated—within the waters of Seokchon Lake, located in a park near the Han River.

The opaque, glowing space art is the work of FriendsWithYou, a Los Angeles-based art collective that specializes in cutesy, toy-like experimental installations that are often inflatable, rainbow-colored, and illluminated. It’s like Jeff Koons meets Sanrio.

Super Moon was commissioned by a massive Seoul shopping complex opening this winter, the nearby Lotte World Tower and Mall, but this particular lake is no stranger to odd art, having hosted Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s huge rubber duck in 2014.

During the day, the artists have set up a cloud-shaped bounce house and cosmos-themed mascots to interact with visitors. In addition to the moon, there are eight other planetary sculptures. At night, each of the sculptures glows, and programmable LEDs shift the colors of the moon sculpture.

“Super Moon is a symbolic manifestation of the immense power and serenity of our cosmos,” the artists say in a press release. “When we gather around the moon as a community, we all orbit together,” they explain, adding that they hope Super Moon viewers “can experience this sense of unity and peace.”

It’s on view until October 3, timed to coincide with the Korean harvest festival Chuseok (often likened to a Korean version of Thanksgiving), which happens around the fall equinox each year on the full moon. This year, the three-day festival takes place September 14 through 16.

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’Tis the season for National Geographic’s annual nature photography contest, and some of the latest entries prove competition will be fierce. Take a look at a few of the best, and submit your own work until November 16 to win a trip to the Galápagos. 

The Bay Area’s transportation infrastructure is so overloaded that BART is paying people to stop riding trains during rush hour, according to a Reuters report posted on SouthCoastToday. The program, called BART Perks, will let people accumulate points that they can redeem for tiny amounts of money if they ride early in the morning rather than during rush hour.

In general, people who use BART’s Clipper card to enter the subway earn one point for every ride they take, but riders who enter between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. get bonus points in different amounts, depending on how often you take advantage of these non-rush-hour trips. After 9:30 a.m., you get a single point for every mile you travel. There will be random opportunities to earn points, too, according to BART. The FAQs explain that “Occasionally, you will receive notification that a bonus box is available. These are special, limited-time opportunities to earn more points, personalized to your commuting history.”

At the end of the month, you can choose to get a payout ($1 for every 1000 points) or enter to win random cash rewards or more points, as laid out in the program’s FAQs [PDF]. The six-month pilot will end in February 2017, at which point the transit authority will evaluate whether it’s effective enough to continue.

Between BART’s sudden surge in ridership, thanks to the tech boom and the system’s aging infrastructure (not uncommon to American transportation systems, or U.S. trains in general), it’s facing increased equipment failures like electrical surges that cause delays, and on already crowded trains, customer satisfaction is at an extreme low. Asking people to stop riding the train during popular hours isn’t a real fix—people’s work schedules aren’t going to change over subway crowding—but it might at least relieve the system a tiny bit as riders wait for actual expansions in service and infrastructure upgrades, which will take years to complete. In the meantime, earn a dollar or two a month by getting to work really, really early.

[h/t SouthCoastToday]

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Antibiotic resistance is one of the “biggest threats to global health today,” according to the World Health Organization, and as antibiotic use has become more widespread, bacteria are evolving to survive what used to be lethal doses of medicine. Now, you can view that evolution for yourself, as Gizmodo reports. The research is published in the latest issue of Science.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology built a giant rectangular Petri dish—two-by-four-feet wide!—and dumped in 14 liters of agar, the jelly substance used to culture bacteria in the lab. They divided the Petri dish into sections, then watched as E. coli bacteria reacted to various doses of antibiotics in each part of the dish. The outermost section of the dish contained no antibiotics, the next just enough antibiotics to kill the bacteria, and so on. The highest dose of antibiotic administered (seen in the center of the dish) was 1000 times stronger than the lowest dose. Over the course of two weeks, scientists used a ceiling camera to watch as the bacteria adapted to their new environment, then turned the footage into a timelapse.

The bacteria could move through the sections of antibiotics, and as the bacteria reproduced and mutated, they moved into higher and higher dosed sections. The high doses of antibiotic initially killed many of the bacteria, but some microorganisms that started out in the lower doses of antibiotics mutated and evolved, allowing their descendants to survive more and more of the drug. After 10 days, some of the bacteria had evolved to survive the highest dose of antibiotics.

While Petri dishes aren’t an exact analog for the way bacteria evolve in real-life settings like hospitals, the visualization provides a scary glimpse into how bacteria can mutate to confound modern drugs. Watch it below, and remember: Take antibiotics only as prescribed, and skip the antibacterial soaps entirely! (They’ll be banned soon anyway.)

[h/t Gizmodo]

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Glacier National Park in Montana has a new employee, and she’s a little ruff around the edges. Gracie, a 2-year-old border collie, is the park’s first-ever Bark Ranger, a herding dog tasked with keeping wildlife at a safe distance from visitors, NPR and Montana Public Radio report. 

Most of her job description includes keeping bighorn sheep and mountain goats away from a busy parking lot in the park’s Logan Pass. The animals like to lick up poisonous antifreeze and nibble on discarded food and often get too close to visitors who are taking photos. 

Previously, park employees have tried to shoo away the animals by shouting, waving, and making loud noises, but they tend to return fairly quickly. When wild animals and humans meet, it’s dangerous for both parties, and animals can get used to humans feeding them, bringing them back regularly. 

The park has previously used trained dogs to drive away bears from roads during the visitor season. A Canadian National Park uses border collies to keep deer and their newborn fawns away from highly trafficked areas. Eventually, the animals learn to stay away altogether, as the Glacier National Park sheep and goats hopefully will. 

Gracie and her handler visit the parking lot to drive away any wild animals once or twice a week. The rest of the time, they’re out in the park teaching people about staying safe around wildlife. 

[h/t NPR]

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You don’t have to become president to have a street address in common with Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Wexford, the 1963 estate she designed as a presidential getaway, is up for sale, Curbed reports. 

The 166-acre property in Middleburg, Virginia was only used for one weekend by the then-First Lady and President Kennedy before he was assassinated. The one-story ranch house has a pool, tennis court, and a stable, so you can ride through the countryside just like the famously horse-crazy First Lady. 

Sure, the interiors are looking a little dated—photos show it’s been remodeled since the Kennedys left—but such is the price of historic significance. The asking price is $5.95 million.

[h/t Curbed]

All images © MRIS via Redfin

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Never underestimate the power of a lightning storm. A powerful storm that struck the Hardangervidda mountain plateau in southern Norway on August 26 killed more than 300 reindeer at once, CBC News reports.

The Norwegian Environment Agency posted photos of the scene, which looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. It’s not unusual for reindeer to be struck by lightning, as a spokesman for the agency told the Associated Press, but this was a particularly deadly storm. The reindeer had likely huddled together during the storm, making them an even larger target for lightning.

Some 2000 reindeer visit the plateau each year. It’s unclear whether it was the work of a single strike or multiple, but around 70 calves were killed in the storm. All 323 bodies remain scatted in the grass, though researchers from the Norwegian Environment Agency took samples to test the bodies for disease. Normally, they would be left to let nature do its work, but since the storm was so deadly, the agency is discussing whether or not to move the corpses.

[h/t CBC News]

All images courtesy Havard Kjøntvedt, Norwegian Environment Agency