Vice explored El Salvador’s fireball festival, an homage to its active volcano.
Author: Patrick
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Smoking on screen with Cigfluencers
While, it never went away completely, smoking in movies and television shows is making a comeback. Combined with social media “Cigfluencers”, GenZ appears to be romanticizing cigarette smoking.
Dua’s photos became the first post on “Cigfluencers,” which is dedicated to showcasing stars — in archival photos and current snapshots — with cigarettes in hand. Not every celeb who smokes makes the cut, though. Oviatt, who is 26, carefully curates the vibe of the Instagram grid to his taste. He says the account feels like an extension of a blog post he wrote, in which he asked: “Is smoking only cool if you’re hot?” just a few days before “Cigfluencers” launched.
Both that question and the account’s growth — it now has more than 450 posts and 82,000 followers — illustrate how smoking has quietly slipped back into Western pop culture in recent years and is gaining traction with Gen Z.
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A roof paint blocks 97% of sunlight and pulls water from the air
A roof paint blocks 97% of sunlight and pulls water from the air.
Researchers at the University of Sydney and commercial start-up Dewpoint Innovations have created a nano-engineered polymer coating that not only reflects up to 97% of the sun’s rays, but also passively collects water. In tests, it was able to keep indoors up to 6 °C (~11 °F) cooler than the air outside.
That temperature differential results in water vapor condensing on the surface – like the fogging on a cold mirror – producing a steady trickle of droplets.
In trials on the roof of the Sydney Nanoscience Hub, the coating captured dew more than 30% of the year, generating as much as 390 mL of water per square meter (roughly 13 fluid ounces per 10.8 square feet) daily. This might not sound like a lot, but a 12-sq-m (about 129-sq-ft) section of treated roof could produce around 4.7 L (around 1.25 US gallons) of water per day under optimal conditions.
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Clever use of light and dark mode
Almost any modern web application or desktop application offers near the ability to switch between light and dark mode. In Common With applies this in a clever way when displaying a page of lamps.
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Defying roller coaster tycoon gravity
YouTuber, Tube Cody, created a video of a pair of roller coasters in Rollercoaster Tycoon synchronized to Wicked’s, Defying Gravity. Stick with it until at least a 2 1/2 minute mark.
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Life in Russia isn’t all that great
Two American families moved to Russia, and are finding out it’s really not all that good of a place.
But things weren’t hunky dory. In videos since deleted but viewed by NBC News, the family was distraught when Huffman, instead of being able to use his welding skills in a special engineering division of the Russian army, was sent to the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine war. At one point, a rumor spread online that Huffman had been killed. Last month, DeAnna Huffman, who took over the family’s YouTube channel while her husband was in the army, revealed that he had survived and returned from the frontlines. Derek Huffman uploaded a video of himself celebrating his daughter’s birthday and claimed he was on “vacation” from the Russian Army.
Right wing media is poison.
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Inside the Great British Bake Off
During the next couple of months, I inched closer to the show. I cleared interviews with home economists who quizzed me on the finer points of baking technique—how to tell when a meringue was done cooking, or how to get a thin, shattering crust on a loaf of bread. Next were screen tests, a first date with the camera. Toward the end, in-person baking trials. These days, it’s not until the thousands of applicants have been whittled to a final hundred that anyone even tastes the bakes. “The best amateur bakers in the country” is the line, although I get the sense that even the producers don’t fully buy this. Throughout the process, we were encouraged to practice, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, to get up to speed with things outside the amateur repertoire of biscuits and cakes. If any of us were truly skilled at baking, it was often because we had sought out “Bake Off,” not the other way around.
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2025 Dark Sky photography winners
2025 Dark Sky photography winners. The cool thing about this collection are the technical details in the locations about the photos.
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The logistics of feeding Alaska
Feeding the population of Alaska is a logistical endeavor, only made harder by all of the tariffs.
Getting fresh food to Alaska has been a challenge since the first settlers began scratching in the creek beds for gold. It was just too far from the continent’s more populated areas, separated from the contiguous United States by cold, stormy seas and, on the few precarious overland routes, avalanche-prone mountain passes. During the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s, authorities feared that the hordes of prospectors would starve, and stories from that time — almost legends at this point — depict entrepreneurial types struggling to bring unbroken eggs all the way to the Yukon gold fields or herd reluctant cattle over Alaska’s Coast Range. Thirteen decades later, the challenges remain. Alaska’s food prices are second only to Hawai’i’s. One recent federal study found that prices in Anchorage were 36% higher on average than those in the Lower 48. A 2023 report commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) described Alaska’s food supply chain as “unique and vulnerable to disruption.”
I wasn’t the only one surprised by Eby’s apparent willingness to threaten that supply chain — to hit Alaskans in the gut. “It’s going to be a big deal,” Alaska state Sen. Robert Myers, R, who also works as a commercial trucker, told the Alaska Beacon. “Fresh produce — the vast majority of our fresh produce … gets trucked up. If you want to get something up here fast, you put it on a truck, not a barge.”
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The perfect grocery store shopping list app does not exist
Planning a grocery shopping list seems like a thing technology could solve. But the complex the needs of meal ingredients, family budgets, how grocery stores are set up differently everywhere… It’s a recipe for insanity.