Author: Shaunacy Ferro

Medical codes can get incredibly specific. When you go to the hospital, the doctor won’t just enter your diagnosis as “concussion” or “traffic accident”—you’ll go into the system as suffering from an “animal-drawn vehicle accident” or having been in an “unarmed fight or brawl.” The beauty of these medical codes is that you can track exactly how many people went to the hospital after crashing their horse-drawn buggy. The healthcare search site Amino recently did exactly that, finding out the causes of a disproportionate number of injuries in every state through health insurance claims.

Amino’s researchers combed through 244 million health insurance claims in its database between 2012 and 2016, looking for the injuries that stuck out in each state compared to the national average. Tennessee, for instance, sees 1.6 times more injury diagnoses related to motor vehicle crashes than the national average.

The data (larger image here) represents only injuries that were reported and recorded by doctors, so it’s possible that a ton of people get in fist fights in places other than New York but just don’t go to the doctor for it. The data is simplified so that the 3000 medical codes for physical injuries down are combined into 170 common terms, like calling all 38 types of contusions “bruising.”

Amino found that New York is home to over 10 percent of the medically documented fist fights (the aforementioned unarmed brawls). There were 35,000 New York fist fight injuries diagnosed during the period analyzed, compared to around 296,000 nationally. Indiana’s most disproportionately common injury is “struck by object.” Rural states like Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Idaho, and Nebraska were home to a disproportionate number of the 43,000 “animal-drawn vehicle accidents” across the country—with 1000 (two percent of the national total) taking place just in Nebraska. Hawaii sees far more patients after “near drowning” than other states, as you might suspect of a state surrounded by water.

The major question is, what’s happening to people’s faces in Louisiana? And why are Missouri’s animals so dangerous?

For years, movie critics have been declaring the romantic comedy “dead,” but that hasn’t stopped us from streaming Pretty in Pink again and again. CableTV.com dove into Google Trends across the country to figure out which rom-coms are most popular in each state, at least according to Internet searches. (See a bigger version of the graphic here.)

For most states, the answer is Pretty in Pink. The 1986 John Hughes movie is still a hit more than 30 years later, clinching the top search result in 14 different states. South Carolina and South Dakota are very interested in the surprise-pregnancy humor of 2007’s Knocked Up. But in general, there aren’t a lot of other shared searches between states. People tend to search for movies set in that state—Alabama, unsurprisingly, loves to search for Sweet Home Alabama (2002), while Alaskans search for The Proposal (2009), and Washingtonians search for Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

Since these are just Google Trends, people might not be watching the movies they are searching for. Perhaps Hawaiians just really want to know where 50 First Dates was filmed. But the sheer volume of Pretty in Pink searches can pretty much guarantee that plenty of people do end up watching Andie and Duckie go to the prom.

Sand artist @sudarsansand sets Guinness record with world’s tallest sand castle https://t.co/0hq0M1KtYt pic.twitter.com/paU4fzP3pg

— Times of India (@timesofindia) February 10, 2017

Sudarsan Pattnaik puts all other beach architects to shame. The Indian sand artist just broke the record for the world’s tallest sand castle, The Times of India reports.

Pattnaik isn’t new to the sand castle game—he’s a professional who runs his own school dedicated to sand art. He recruited 30 students from his Sudarsan Sand Art Institute to assist on the four-day construction project that broke the record. The intricate castle stands more than 48 feet and 8 inches tall, and is inscribed with the words “World Peace.” The castle will be on display for two days.

Guinness World Records officials were on hand to confirm his win. The previous record-holding sand sculpture was 45 feet 10 inches, built in 2015 in Miami by the Sand Sculpture Company and Turkish Airlines. It took 19 people and two weeks to complete that structure, making the speed with which Pattnaik built his castle even more impressive.

[h/t The Times of India]

Banner image courtesy of iStock.

Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s monumental artwork along the shore of the Great Salt Lake, is getting farther and farther away from the lake itself. Though Smithson designed it in 1970 with the idea that the red-hued water on the lake’s northern shore would ebb and flow, ongoing droughts are likely to make it permanently dry, according to Hyperallergic.

The sculpture—a 1500-foot-long, 15-foot wide coil of rocks—has been completely obscured by the lake’s saline waters before. It was created during a low-level time in the lake’s history, and when the lake returned to normal levels just a few years later, it was completely submerged. It was invisible, viewed only through photos and videos taken during its creation. But since 2002, continued droughts in Utah have brought it above the water line for the long term. Rather than reddish water, the black basalt rocks that make up the sculpture are now covered in salt crystals.

The water is not going to come back to the sculpture anytime soon. The lake currently is experiencing its lowest water levels in recorded history. Between October 2015 and October 2016, the shoreline of the lake’s northern arm fell by almost 10 inches, from 4190 feet above sea level to 4189.2 feet. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s a drastic difference from the lake’s historic high-water mark, at 4211.2 feet above sea level.

Smithson may have actually been pleased with the development. According to the Dia Art Foundation, the museum that now owns the piece, Smithson was “fixated on the chance operations of nature that lead to a state of transformation.” As the shoreline continues to recede, the sculpture will continue to transform.

[h/t Hyperallergic]

A London-based research project has produced the most detailed ultrasound image yet of a 20-week-old fetus, The Telegraph reports. iFind (intelligent fetal imaging and diagnosis), an initiative led by researchers at King’s College London, is working on computer-guided ultrasound technology so that scans can be automated and uniform as well as more accurate.

Typically, a 20-week ultrasound (also called a mid-pregnancy scan) helps detect fetal abnormalities like spina bifida, but current scans can’t catch everything. One researcher The Telegraph spoke to estimated that only about half of all congenital abnormalities show up on the 20-week scan.

One issue with current ultrasound systems is that technicians can only use one probe for imaging because they need their other hand to work the settings on the machine. The iFind researchers want to create a robotic system that can take ultrasounds with multiple probes. By collecting a large dataset of high-quality 3D ultrasound images, the algorithm will learn to recognize organs and detect normal versus abnormal development.

The high-definition video recently captured by iFind is clearer than typical ultrasounds because the new algorithm can correct for the fetus’s normal movement during the scan, creating a more focused image (similar to steadying your camera in low-light conditions). The result is an unprecedented look at a fetus in the womb that could give parents and doctors a much better idea of the baby’s condition.

[h/t The Telegraph]

A newly discovered photograph of Harriet Tubman is going up for sale at Swann Auction Galleries in New York City, according to Jezebel.

The previously unrecorded image is part of an 1860s carte de visite collection, a type of miniature photo album that was popular at the time. Tubman’s photo is one of 44 photo cards of abolitionists and politicians collected by Emily Howland, a Quaker abolitionist.

The photo (left) is a particularly rare find because of how young Tubman was when it was taken. It dates back to just after the Civil War when she was in her early forties. (Tubman was born sometime between 1819 and 1823, but the exact date is unknown.) Many of the known photos of the abolitionist and suffragist show her later in life. The famous photo on the right was taken sometime in the 1870s when she was in her early fifties.

The photograph is going up for auction on March 30.

[h/t Jezebel]

All images courtesy Swann Auction Galleries

Since 2011, an estimated 4.9 million people have fled their homes in Syria to take refuge in other countries. About 656,000 of those refugees are now living in Jordan, where some will find work with an unlikely employer: IKEA. The Swedish home-goods giant is launching a new textiles line that will be crafted in Jordan by Syrian refugees, according to CNN.

The new rugs and textiles, which will hit showrooms in 2019, will provide jobs for about 200 refugees, mostly women. The company is working with local women’s organizations to design the project and make sure that the hours are flexible enough that women who need to care for family members can still work.

The company’s nonprofit arm, the IKEA Foundation, has already been working to assist those fleeing conflict in places like Syria and Sudan. Its flat-pack refugee shelter was awarded the London Design Museum’s award for design of the year in 2016. In November 2016, it also teamed up with the Red Cross to build a replica of the real home of a displaced family in Damascus inside one of its Norwegian stores.

The rugs and other goods will be sold in a limited edition in the Middle East, so they may not make it to your neighborhood IKEA.

[h/t GOOD]

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Edward Hopper, the quintessential American realist painter behind Nighthawks. To honor him, Orbitz animated some of his classic works, Nighthawks included. Scroll through the GIFs to bring Hopper’s work to life, and learn to name-drop a few of his less famous paintings, too.

Even in an increasingly digital world, there’s still a need for printed text. But wasting paper could be a thing of the past with new technology under development by a research team from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the University of California, Riverside; and China’s Shandong University. This new paper is printed with light instead of ink, allowing it to be reused up to dozens of times, Co.Design reports.

The paper, described in Nano Letters, is blue rather than white, and it’s covered in a nanoparticle coating that is sensitive to UV light. These titanium dioxide nanoparticles are mixed with Prussian blue pigment (the blue color in blueprints), which becomes colorless when its particles gain electrons. The reaction that occurs when these pigments are exposed to UV light turns the blue clear. After about five days—or 10 minutes at 250°F—the paper fades back to solid blue, erasing the writing.

A UV light printer can either print white text on a blue background or be programmed to print the background itself instead, resulting in blue text against a white background. The nanoparticle coating can be used over and over again, allowing one sheet of paper to be reprinted 80 times before it has to be thrown away.

The researchers hope to one day be able to print in full color with a similar system. They are currently working on a laser printer compatible with their light-printable paper. Until it hits the market, you’ll have to content yourself with buying notebooks that can be erased in the microwave.

[h/t Co.Design]

The fishing pole of the future might just be a robot. Researchers at MIT have created a soft, transparent device that’s capable of catching and releasing a live goldfish, LiveScience reports. Described in a study in Nature Communications, it’s made of a hydrogel that can change shape when water is pumped into or out of it.

The researchers created three different types of hydrogel robots to test the material’s capabilities, each made of small tubes inspired by glass eels—a transparent, juvenile eel. One robot was shaped like an appendage of a claw machine; the other, like a pool noodle; the third, like a fish’s fin that flaps back and forth. The noodle-shaped hydrogel robot was capable of enough force to kick a ball underwater, while the claw-shaped robot was quick enough to catch a live fish—and gentle enough not to squish it in the process.

Because the hydrogel is mostly water, and the robots are powered by water, they could be made invisible in the future. But they could also be used for less-than-sneaky purposes, like to assist surgeons. They’re wet and soft, so they could be more delicate than human hands in manipulating organs and tissues during a procedure, the researchers suggest in a statement.

[h/t LiveScience]

Teaser image courtesy Hyunwoo Yuk/MIT Soft Active Materials Lab