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Watch these adorable baby octopuses hatch

If you’ve never seen an octopus hatch, now is your chance. These cute baby Caribbean reef octopuses, the size of a pinky nail, were hatched at the Virginia Aquarium. The way they immediately darken to purple is a fun surprise. According to The Verge : The video, posted by the Virginia Aquarium, shows a baby Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) no bigger than a pinky nail hatching from a bundle of eggs. As for the color change, these octopuses are known to be masters of disguise. “It was going into an instant camouflage as soon as it came out of the egg,” says Julie Levans, senior curator at the aquarium. These octopuses use specialized muscles to open and close little sacs of pigment in their skin called chromatophores — and this little guy was probably responding to the black tabletop beneath its tank. The baby octopus’s mom arrived at the aquarium about six months ago, and four months later, she laid between 100 and 200 eggs. Since this softball-sized species is solitary and also sometimes cannibalistic, this octopus lives alone at the aquarium. The eggs themselves weren’t surprising — female octopuses typically lay eggs. “What did catch us by surprise was the fact that they were fertilized,” Levans says. ICYMI: Your daily squee has arrived. #octobabies pic.twitter.com/D9e5T5bkun — Virginia Aquarium (@VAAquarium) February 7, 2018

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Watch these adorable baby octopuses hatch

Inside Hong Kong’s insanely cramped and illegal "coffin homes"

Photographer Benny Lam spent several years documenting grim living conditions in Hong Kong where people live inside tiny “coffin cubicles” within illegally divided apartments. The images are grim glimpses of life in the city with the most expensive housing market in the world. The photo series is titled “Trapped.” From National Geographic : Pushed out by soaring rents, tens of thousands of people have no other option than to inhabit squatter huts, sub-divided units where the kitchen and toilet merge, coffin cubicles, and cage homes, which are rooms measuring as small as 6’ x 2.5’ traditionally made of wire mesh. “From cooking to sleeping, all activities take place in these tiny spaces,” says Lam. To create the coffin cubicles a 400 square flat will be illegally divided by its owner to accommodate 20 double-decker beds, each costing about HK$2000 (over $250 USD) per month in rent. The space is too small to stand up in.

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Inside Hong Kong’s insanely cramped and illegal "coffin homes"

Chandelier containing living microalgae to "purify the air"

https://youtu.be/Lxd43iH-CX0 Artist, inventor, and bio-hacker Julian Melchiorri created “Exhale, the Bionic Chandelier,” a hanging electric light that “purifies the air indoors through photosynthesis performed by living microalgae enclosed into leaf modules.” Exhale is now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent collection. From the project page: Exhale is also the first living object which continuously grows while performing biologically-driven depurative functions. The light of the chandelier illuminate the space but also stimulates photosynthesis performed by tiny microalgae, this living microorganisms feed on carbon dioxide while releasing breathable oxygen into the room. This biological process performed by the chandelier establishes and explores a new symbiotic relationship between object and people where life-giving resources are constantly exchanged, and where each other waste enables respective metabolic processes. This exchange recalls how biospheric systems work, where waste ultimately doesn’t exists but is a valuable resource for other elements in that system. Bionic Chandelier (via The Kid Should See This )

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Chandelier containing living microalgae to "purify the air"

Limited edition Bicycle Karnival Midnight deck of playing cards

This purple and black deck of cards is absolutely lovely. I like to tell myself that decks with lovely and unexpected art work distract people from mistakes as I’m performing sleight of hand. Mostly, I just like fancy decks of cards. Limited Edition Karnival Midnight Purple Deck Playing Cards by Bicycle via Amazon

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Limited edition Bicycle Karnival Midnight deck of playing cards

Amateur radio astronomer discovers long-lost satellite

In December 2005, NASA lost contact with the IMAGE satellite. After trying to reconnect for two years, the agency gave up. Over a decade later, hobbyist Scott Tilley was able to confirm that IMAGE is not only still in orbit, but also transmitting data. Tilley stumbled on the find while looking for another satellite named Zuma. Via the Washington Post : When Tilley caught a signal after a week of searching, on Jan. 20, he almost ignored it. Whatever it was, it was orbiting much higher than Zuma was supposed to be. There are hundreds of active satellites in space, most of which didn’t interest him. “I didn’t think of it much more,” he wrote on his blog. But as he continued to scan for Zuma, he came across the signal again — stronger this time — and out of curiosity checked it against a standard catalogue. The signal matched for IMAGE. But IMAGE was supposed to be dead. Tilley had to Google the old satellite to find out what it was, as it had been all but forgotten on Earth. Eventually, he came across a decade-old NASA report on the mission’s failure. “Once I read through the failure report and all the geeky language the engineers use, I immediately understood what had happened,” Tilley told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News. Then he rushed to contact NASA himself. • NASA’s IMAGE RECOVERY

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Amateur radio astronomer discovers long-lost satellite

Remove the DRM from iTunes movies with TunesKit

More and more people watch movies and TV shows at home, exclusively through the use of streaming services like Hulu or Netflix, but I’m not one of them. I’m not against streaming: the problem is that my partner and I live, full-time, in a 40 foot long motorhome, puttering around North and Central America. A lot of times, our rambles take us to places where the Internet connectivity is lousy. The upload/download speeds we get from RV parks or in the parking lots we surf are good enough for me to do my work online, but make for a buffering-filled nightmare if I even think about streaming anything. And if we decide to camp for a few weeks in a national park, I have to travel back towards civilization and a cellphone signal, just to check my email. We read a lot of books, but we both love movies. To keep us entertained, I’ve collected a hard drive full of just over 500 movies, and close to 300 hours of TV shows. Some are ripped from DVDs that I bought over the years, but most of them were purchased and downloaded from Apple. For the last several years, I’ve had a real hate on for iTunes. So far as software goes, it’s twitchy, slow and far from user friendly. I can’t count how many times that iTunes has lost the artwork for the movies that I own. It makes me a little nuts. I also absolutely loathe iOS 11’s TV app. It takes forever to show me what movies I have loaded on my tablet or phone and, as I don’t stream, I find it’s constant suggestions of what to watch really intrusive. Sadly, since Apple locks the video content they sell with DRM, there’s not a lot of options for freeing yourself from either app. Unless you’re prepared to spend some cash. While it’s far from perfect, I found that TunesKit’s $40 DRM Media Converter will rip the digital rights management locks right out of iTunes purchased content. Would Apple frown on this? Yep. But I have a hard time caring: If I buy something, I should be able to do what ever I damn well please with it. In this case, what I please involves my using apps and hardware other than those approved by Apple to watch the films I own. For this purpose the utility that Tuneskit’s software provides works a treat. To use it, all you have to do is open Tuneskit on your computer. Tuneskit, in turn, will access your iTunes library. This allows you to choose which of your iTunes videos you want to strip of their DRM. The amount of time that it takes to create a DRM-free copy of each video file you feed into the software depends on how long the video in question is. On the whole, I found the user experience to be relatively fast and frustration free. Almost. After buying the Mac OS version of the software, I discovered that it isn’t compatible with Mac OS High Sierra. A quick email conversation with Tuneskit’s support department revealed that the latest version of the operating system made the application unusable. Because of this, they offered me a license for the Windows version of the software. After installing it on my MacBook’s Bootcamp partition, the app worked perfectly. Since then, I’m able to watch videos purchased through iTunes using any iOS video app I want to, on my computer or Android handset. If you’re so inclined, you can still watch your videos and transfer them to your iPhone using iTunes, too. It’s worth mentioning that the software works on content rented from iTunes as well. But removing the DRM from rented videos to keep after the rental period is up is theft, plain and simple. Do what’s right for you. If you’ve had enough of being told by Apple what to do with the movies you own, I think Tuneskit’s a pretty good way to go. Screen capture: Seamus Bellamy

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Remove the DRM from iTunes movies with TunesKit

Fidel Castro’s eldest son commits suicide

The eldest son of Fidel Castro, 68-year-old Fidel Angel Castro Diaz-Balart, committed suicide after a months-long treatment depression. Living in Cuba, Diaz-Balart, also knows as “Fidelito,” was hospitalized for his depression but had been released for outpatient care. According to NBC : He was known for studying how to develop nuclear energy on the island of Cuba, according to his official bio from the Academy of Sciences. Diaz-Balart is the cousin of NBC News and Telemundo anchor Jose Diaz-Balart as well as current Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Florida, who is a staunch anti-Castro figure. His uncle, Raul Castro, has led Cuba since 2008 when he took over the role of president of Cuba from Fidel Castro — who ruled his island home beginning in 1959, antagonized 11 U.S. presidents and died in 2016 aged of 90. The way in which he killed himself has not been disclosed. https://youtu.be/icyD0xTIzQA

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Fidel Castro’s eldest son commits suicide

Watch warehouse with automated vertical storage shelves reduces storage area by 94%

Static shelves with bins holding small parts take up a lot of space. It’s interesting to see this case study of how a traditional warehouse was able to use wasted air space to reduce storage area by 94%. (more…)

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Watch warehouse with automated vertical storage shelves reduces storage area by 94%

Naked mole rats do not die of old age according to research

With its pink hairless body and huge incisors hanging out of its mouth, the naked mole rat isn’t a particularly handsome creature. A rodent that is neither rat nor mole but the only species currently classified in the genus Heterocephalus , the nearly blind, nearly hairless naked mole rat lives in almost complete darkness its entire life. It has also recently been discovered that these rodents live to around 35 years, as opposed to a “regular” rat’s six years, and the naked mole rat doesn’t seem to actually age before it dies. According to Phys Org : A team of researchers at Google-owned Calico Life Sciences LLC has found that the naked mole rat defies Gompertz’s mortality law. In their paper published in eLife, the group describes their study of the unusual-looking rodent and describe some of its unusual traits. Naked mole rats are very nearly hairless. They evolved that way by living in a harsh underground environment. They are also almost ectothermic (cold blooded). And now, it seems they do not age—at least in the traditional sense. Reports of long-lived mole rats prompted the team at Calico to take a closer look—they have a specimen in their lab that has lived to be 35 years old. Most “normal” rats, in comparison, live to be just six years old, and they age as they do so. The team collected what they describe as 3,000 points of data regarding the lifespan of the naked mole rat, and found that many had lived for 30 years. But perhaps more surprisingly, they found that the chance of dying for the mole rats did not increase as they aged. All other mammals that have been studied have been found to conform to what is known as Gompertz’s mortality law, which states that the risk of death for a typical mammal grows exponentially after they reach sexual maturity—for humans, that means the odds of dying double every eight years after reaching age 30. This, the researchers claim, suggests that mole rats do not age—at least in the conventional sense. They do eventually die, after all. To see these delightful creatures in action, here’s a short National Geographic clip from 2012: https://youtu.be/A5DcOEzW1wA Image by Jedimentat44

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Naked mole rats do not die of old age according to research