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Jasmin Paris, first woman to complete The Barkley
The Finisher is a 45 minute documentary of Jasmin Paris, first woman to complete The Barkley Marathon. It makes for a good sequel to the Barkley Marathon documentary.
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Millennials became uncool?
A tale old as time, a younger generation calling an older generation uncool. And now, Gen Z hath judged Millennials.
In fact, much of the ire provoked by gen Z’s teasing is driven by a sense that the younger generation are merely jumping on a cool and trendy bandwagon built by millennials. “We paved the way for gen Z to be killing it on TikTok with our crappy Myspace accounts and MSN-ing each other from our university bedrooms,” says 41-year-old Lizzie Cernik, who believes millennials have a strong work ethic and are “tough cookies”
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Drone summons lightning
It’s like something out of a sci fi movie–a drone summoning lightning.
Earlier this month, the Japanese telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) successfully used a drone equipped with a lightning-proof cage to essentially summon lightning in an effort to mitigate damage from an incoming thunderstorm. According to NTT, lightning causes up to 200 billion yen ($1.4 billion) damage a year, so using these lightning drones could go a long way towards protecting sensitive equipment and population centers during severe weather events.
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The Speed Project, a secret ultramarathon
The Speed Project is a secret ultra-marathon, starting in Los Angeles and ending in Las Vegas.
This, he explained, was a welcome to the Speed Project, a 340-mile relay race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with no designated route, no specific rules and only one goal: to get there as fast as possible.
Arend, the founder of the race, didn’t want video to leak out, because the underground lore was why most of the runners were here. Many of them considered the Speed Project a cult that gathered once a year; not only were there no rules, but there were no spectators and no prize money for the winners. There wasn’t even a website or an entry form. The only way in was through Arend’s WhatsApp.
It’s like Cannonball Run in footrace form.
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Introducing the Slate truck
Two segments of the U.S. car market that are non-existent: an affordable truck and a basic electric vehicle that isn’t $35,000+. The Slate truck aims to do both for approximately $20,000. Open sourced specifications allow for customization. If the build quality is good and the aftermarket accessories create a healthy modding community, this thing will sell. And it’s not ugly!
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Import Immature
Spencer Wright muses on how the world changes, there are things that never mature, namely, imports.
I bring all of this up because the weird thing, and stick with me here, is that the world around us doesn’t mature. It keeps changing, even as we mostly stop doing so. The world doesn’t care that we’re not up for changing as much anymore, and actually maybe it seems to change more quickly the older we get, whether because culture actually accelerates over time or because of how we perceive the world as we age. Either way, to some extent each of us wakes up one day, and we’re forty-one, and we’ve shifted down like three gears. Life still feels crazy but we really have trimmed a lot of the extraneous stuff, we’re streamlined, we’ve chosen some kind of course, and maybe we’re even following it a bit. And for some reason, without really realizing it, we kind of expect the world to have chosen a course too. But the world, god bless it, is changing directions all the time, being immature as ever.
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A universal antivenom
It sounds like a joke based on a basic misunderstanding of science, but a man who’s been slowly injecting himself with snake venom may now provide a source for a universal antivenom.
Over nearly 18 years, the man, Tim Friede, 57, injected himself with more than 650 carefully calibrated, escalating doses of venom to build his immunity to 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes — mostly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in the video — to sink their sharp fangs into him about 200 times.
This bit of daredevilry (one name for it) may now help to solve a dire global health problem. More than 600 species of venomous snakes roam the earth, biting as many as 2.7 million people, killing about 120,000 people and maiming 400,000 others — numbers thought to be vast underestimates.
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Cats bringing dead gifts
My mother feeds a local feral cat named, Rigby. While the cat has never left dead gifts, he has been seen carrying dead animals. Most recently, a squirrel.
There are a couple of hypotheses for why cats bring their catch home, Emmanuelle Baudry, an urban ecologist at Paris-Saclay University, told Live Science. The main hypothesis is that this behavior is maternal. In the wild, mother cats go out and hunt and then bring the food back for their kittens. This not only feeds the young cats but also provides something for them to play, practice how to hunt and recognize prey. So, in the context of human pet owners, our cats may see us as “not so efficient kittens,” Baudry said.
But that doesn’t mean your pet is insulting you. To the contrary: “It’s somewhat of a compliment,” Liff told Live Science. “They feel comfortable in their home. They consider you part of their family.
