To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 Video games

Bertie the Brain is one of the first games developed during the early history of video games. It was built in Toronto by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The four meter (13 foot) tall computer allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of tic-tac-toe against an algorithm, presented by its creators as artificial intelligence. The player entered a move on a keypad in the form of a three-by-three grid, and the game played out on a grid of lights overhead. The machine had an adjustable difficulty level. After two weeks on display by Rogers Majestic, the machine was disassembled at the end of the exhibition and largely forgotten as a curiosity.

Kates built the game to showcase his additron tube, a miniature version of the vacuum tube, though the transistor overtook it in computer development shortly thereafter. Patent issues prevented the additron tube from being used in computers besides Bertie before it was no longer useful. Bertie the Brain is a candidate for the first video game, as it was potentially the first computer game to have any sort of visual display of the game. It appeared only three years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game to use an electronic display. Bertie's use of light bulbs rather than a screen with real-time visual graphics, however, much less moving graphics, does not meet some definitions of a video game.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Paranormal

John Titor (May 5, 6 or 7, 1998) is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war, none of which came true. Subsequent closer examination of Titor's assertions provoked widespread skepticism. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax. A 2009 investigation concluded that Titor was likely the creation of Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, along with his brother Morey, a computer scientist.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Acoustics

Sonoluminescence is the emission of short bursts of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound.

🔗 Dams 🔗 Czech Republic

In early 2025, beaver activity in the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, Czech Republic, contributed to the restoration of a wetland ecosystem. A family of beavers constructed a series of dams that accomplished environmental goals set by the Czech government, which had delayed its proposed project since 2018 for bureaucratic and financial reasons. The beaver-built dams saved the Czech government approximately US$1.2 million, providing ecological benefits including improved water quality, enhanced biodiversity, and better water retention.

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Economics 🔗 Urban studies and planning

The great horse manure crisis of 1894 refers to the idea that the greatest obstacle to urban development at the turn of the century was the difficulty of removing horse manure from the streets. More broadly, it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies. The phrase originates from a 2004 article by Stephen Davies entitled "The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894".

The supposed problem of excessive horse-manure collecting in the streets was solved by the proliferation of cars, buses and electrified trams which replaced horses as the means of transportation in big cities. The term great horse manure crisis of 1894 is often used to denote a problem which seems to be impossible to solve because it is being looked at from the wrong direction.

The name refers to a supposed 1894 publication in The Times, which said "In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure". The reasoning was that more horses are needed to remove the manure, and these horses produce more manure. An urban planning conference in 1898 supposedly broke up before its scheduled end due to a failure to find an answer to this problem. No such statement in the Times, nor conference result, is known, but in 1893 London there was a complaint that horse manure, formerly an economic good that could be sold, had become a disposal problem, an economic bad.

The supposed crisis has since taken on life as a useful analogy.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Electronics

Electromagnetically induced acoustic noise (and vibration), electromagnetically excited acoustic noise, or more commonly known as coil whine, is audible sound directly produced by materials vibrating under the excitation of electromagnetic forces. Some examples of this noise include the mains hum, hum of transformers, the whine of some rotating electric machines, or the buzz of fluorescent lamps. The hissing of high voltage transmission lines is due to corona discharge, not magnetism.

The phenomenon is also called audible magnetic noise, electromagnetic acoustic noise, lamination vibration or electromagnetically induced acoustic noise, or more rarely, electrical noise, or "coil noise", depending on the application. The term electromagnetic noise is generally avoided as the term is used in the field of electromagnetic compatibility, dealing with radio frequencies. The term electrical noise describes electrical perturbations occurring in electronic circuits, not sound. For the latter use, the terms electromagnetic vibrations or magnetic vibrations, focusing on the structural phenomenon are less ambiguous.

Acoustic noise and vibrations due to electromagnetic forces can be seen as the reciprocal of microphonics, which describes how a mechanical vibration or acoustic noise can induce an undesired electrical perturbation.

🔗 Insects 🔗 Insects/Ant 🔗 Birds 🔗 Ecology 🔗 Insects/Hymenoptera

Kleptoparasitism (originally spelt clepto-parasitism, meaning "parasitism by theft") is a form of feeding behavior in which one animal — i.e. the kleptoparasite — deliberately takes food from another animal, often via aggressive confrontations. The strategy is evolutionarily stable when stealing is less costly than direct predation, such as when food is scarce or when physically weaker/less assertive victims are abundant and unlikely to fight back.

Many kleptoparasites are arthropods, especially bees and wasps, but including some true flies, dung beetles, bugs and spiders. Cuckoo bees are specialized kleptoparasites which lay their eggs either on the pollen masses made by other bees, or on the insect hosts of parasitoid wasps. They are an instance of Emery's rule, which states that insect social parasites tend to be closely related to their hosts. The behavior also occurs among vertebrates including birds such as skuas, who persistently chase and harass other seabirds until they disgorge their food; and hypercarnivorous mammals such as spotted hyenas and lions, who routinely rob killed prey from each other and other mesopredators such as cheetahs. Other species might also opportunistically indulge in kleptoparasitism, especially when driven by the desperation of hunger and when scavenging isn't an option.

🔗 United States

🔗 Australia 🔗 Australia/Northern Territory 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Weather 🔗 Weather/General meteorology

Hector is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia, from approximately September to March each year. Hector, or sometimes Hector the Convector, is known as one of the world's most consistently large thunderstorms; specifically, a small mesoscale convective system (MCS) or large multicellular thunderstorm. It reaches heights of approximately 20 kilometres (66,000 ft).

🔗 Marine life 🔗 Animals

Deepstaria enigmatica is a very rarely seen giant jellyfish of the family Ulmaridae first described in 1967 by F. S. Russell.