Floor796 is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station! The goal of the project is to create as huge animation as possible, with many references to movies, games, anime and memes.

Most of the characters are clickable: you can find out what kind of character and follow the link to the source. Non-clickable characters are fictional.

A sad fact. I didn't realize it is this bad. Currently it is mostly escalation after escalation. What way out is there?

Ships used for building offshore windfarms. Some have legs for raising up off the ocean floor

The radar can detect airborne ICBM warheads up to 2500 miles away.

Wikipedia

Once a hurricane makes landfall, it’s usually the beginning of the end for the storm. But a tropical cyclone passing over warm, waterlogged ground can get a jolt of energy that refuels its fury, researchers reported in January at the American Meteorological Society’s meeting in Baltimore.

One of the fascinating things about sleep is we tend to think, oh, nothing's happening. I'm not getting anything done. But your brain is hugely at work. There are all these different stages of sleep where you can see these symphony of waves, where different parts of the brain are talking to each other, essentially. And so, we know for a fact that some of these stages of sleep, what happens is the brain will flush out toxins, like the amyloid protein that can build up over the course of a day. So just by virtue of that function, sleep is very important. But then on top of it, what we can see is that the neurons that were active during a particular experience, have come back alive during sleep. And so there seems to be some processing of memories that happen during sleep, and that the processing of memories can sometimes lead to some parts of the memory being strengthened, or sometimes you're better able to integrate what happened recently with things that happened in the past. And so, sleep scientist Matt Walker likes to say that sleep converts memory into wisdom, for instance.

Now there’s two words you don’t often see together. In fact, Google Trends lists zero occurrences of the phrase between 2004 and now. Even “German humor” produces a graph (albeit a rather flat one). But not only is there some evidence that Swiss comedy does exist, it might just be that being well-hidden is kind of its thing. Find it and laugh. Or don’t, and the joke’s on you!

That evidence, as it turns out, is cartographic. The Swiss Federal Office of National Topography, Swisstopo for short, is a decidedly serious institution. Many serious things—time and money, for starters—depend on the accuracy of its maps. In the case of its mountain maps, actual lives hang in the balance. Yet in decades past, the austere institute’s maps have served as the canvas for a series of in-jokes among its more fun-loving cartographers.

One of the most intriguing objects housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York is a container for something that few people have ever heard of: the lapis de Goa, or “Goa stone.”

Goa stones were a compound of gold, crushed gemstones, herbs, bezoars, and other exotic substances popular in the 1690-1750 period. Like the bezoars they imitated, they were thought to offer a powerful protection against poisoning. Tiny flakes would be shaved off and consumed (I picture them being dropped in wine glasses) by wealthy consumers in India and Europe. As you can no doubt tell from the incredibly lavish decoration of this particular Goa stone container, they were extremely valuable.

It almost looks like those tempera paintings on windows we did in grade school. Also, why are they empty? Don't they have a homeless problem.

Among all of the visual information published by the U.S. government, there may be no product with a higher information density than the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) aviation maps. Intended for pilots, the FAA publishes free detailed maps of the entire U.S. airspace, and detailed maps of airports and their surroundings and updates them frequently. The density of the critical information layered on these maps is staggering, and it is a miracle that pilots can easily decipher these maps’ at a glance. But they can.

2022 was the bad year that wasn't—at least for a mysterious paralyzing condition in children.

In the decade before, hundreds of young, healthy kids in the US abruptly felt their limbs go weak. Debilitating paralysis set in. In recent years, around half of affected children required intensive care. About a quarter needed mechanical ventilation. A few died, and many others appear to have permanent weakness and paralysis.

Together, the 100 most valuable brands in the world are worth more than $5 trillion.

Brands play an important role in driving shareholder value, yet pinpointing how much a brand is worth can be challenging. Investments in brand could pay dividends for many decades, but because those financial benefits are fairly open to interpretation, most financial regulators don’t usually accept brand assets on balance sheets.

To look at it another way, Apple is missing one of its most valuable assets on its financial reporting—a brand worth $516.6 billion.

This visualization ranks the top 100 brands by brand value, based on the annual global ranking from Brand Finance.

Right in the center of the island nation of Madagascar there’s a strange, almost perfectly circular geological structure. It covers a bigger area than the city of Paris — and at first glance, it looks completely empty. But right in the center of that structure, there’s a single, isolated village: a few dozen houses, some fields of crops, and dirt roads stretching out in every direction.

When we first saw this village on Google Earth, its extreme remoteness fascinated us. Was the village full of people? How did they wind up there?

Wikipedia

Gallery of his works (Warning: Depictions of nudity)

These wasps are not single-celled organisms though, and their brains alone contain 4600 neurons. For reference, the brain of a honeybee contains ~1 million neurons. Despite their extremely small heads (again, look at that head next to the SINGLE CELLED amoeba) the wasps can still fly, seek out mates, and find thrip eggs to parasitize. So…what? How?