Oddity Central |
- Mexico’s Butterfly Forest – A Unique Natural Wonder under Threat
- Turkish Man Creates Glasses That Conceal Phone Screen from Anyone but the Wearer
- The Amazing Story of a Blind Professional Photographer and Rock Climber
- Human Balloons – People Are Injecting CO2 under Their Skin for Cosmetic Purposes
- Just Add Water – Machine Makes Instant Beer from Concentrate
- Boston Man Commits to Never Telling a Lie Again, Ever
| Mexico’s Butterfly Forest – A Unique Natural Wonder under Threat Posted: 10 Jun 2016 09:59 AM PDT Every year, hundreds of millions of Monarch Butterflies from Canada and the United States journey as far as 2,500 miles to the forests of Michoacan, Mexico in what is known as the world’s largest insect migration. Countless butterflies cluster together both on the trees and on the ground, covering large areas into carpets of orange and black. It’s a breathtaking sight to behold, but as always, human greed is threatening to destroy it. The great monarch migration is one of nature’s most fascinating mysteries. Tiny butterflies from places like Toronto, Winnipeg or Detroit embark on this epic transcontinental journey and somehow make it all the way to central Mexico. Nobody knows exactly how they do it, but some experts believe they are guided by celestial navigation and magnetic fields. The Monarch butterflies start to arrive in Michoacan in late October to make their winter home in the trees high up in the mountains of the natural reserve. Once here, they will spend the next five months clustering together in large masses made up of thousands of tiny bodies that often look like colorful beehives. Often times, these clusters become so heavy that they cause tree branches to bend or even snap. But there’s a purpose to all these clustering – it allows the monarchs to survive in the low nighttime temperatures at these high altitudes.
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| Turkish Man Creates Glasses That Conceal Phone Screen from Anyone but the Wearer Posted: 10 Jun 2016 04:51 AM PDT Don’t you hate it when you’re using your smartphone on public transportation and notice strangers looking at it over your shoulder? Those people are the worst! But thanks to Celal Göger special glasses, you won’t have to deal with them ever again. Göger, a 42-year-old mobile phone repairman from the Turkish town of Bismil, Diyarbakır province, has invented special glasses that interact with a smartphone’s screen so that only the wearer can see it. He said he came up with the idea for the glasses four months ago, when, while checking his emails on the local tram, he noticed people on the packed vehicle were staring at the screen of his phone. He realized it was a serious privacy issue that surely other people were facing on a daily basis. So he went back to his phone repair shop and started working on a solution.
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| The Amazing Story of a Blind Professional Photographer and Rock Climber Posted: 10 Jun 2016 04:00 AM PDT Justin Salas was only 14 when he lost his sight almost completely and was declared legally blind. Now 22, the ambitious young man is a living example that nothing is impossible – even though he can’t see, Justin is a professional photographer and skilled rock climber. Justin’s blindness wasn’t the result of an unfortunate accident or a sudden occurrence where he woke up one morning to find that he couldn’t see anymore. His eyesight had always been poor and he started wearing glasses when he was 5-years-old. But it wasn’t until his freshman year of high-school that his vision started deteriorating at a rapid pace. His glasses no longer helped and tests revealed that his optic nerves were dying, although the cause was a mystery for all the doctors he’d seen.
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| Human Balloons – People Are Injecting CO2 under Their Skin for Cosmetic Purposes Posted: 09 Jun 2016 08:45 AM PDT Some people would try anything in their desperate attempt to combat the natural effects of aging. One trend that’s been blowing up (pun intended) in recent years is Carboxy Therapy – pumping carbon dioxide under the skin to treat stretch marks, loose skin, cellulite or dark circles under the eyes. So how does Carboxy therapy work, you ask? It’s quite simple really. Using a fine needle hooked up to a carbon dioxide tank, gas is slowly pumped under the skin. The procedure itself is reportedly not painful at all, with patience feeling nothing but a tingling sensation. Once under the skin, the CO2 causes a slight disruption in the red blood cells due to the sudden overflow of a gas that our bodies produce naturally as cellular waste. Blood vessels expand, improving circulation to the oxygen deprived area and leaving the skin looking healthier and more youthful. It works differently for various conditions. For example, CO2 destroys fat cells, which helps remove cellulite, while in the case of stretch marks, the increased blood flow improves collagen production.
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| Just Add Water – Machine Makes Instant Beer from Concentrate Posted: 09 Jun 2016 07:41 AM PDT Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have an espresso machine for beer and bypass the whole fermentation process? It sounds like simple wishful thinking, but it turns out such a thing actually exists, and has for some time now. SodaStream has been selling home carbonation machines that let you turn tap water into soda for over two and a half decades, and now it looks all set to enter the beer market, as well. The company has apparently come up with an instant beer concentrate that works with their soda machines, allowing anyone to turn water into beer at the press of a button. The new Beer Bar kit turns SodaStream machines into microbreweries, enabling you to create crafted beer in seconds by simply adding a unique “Blondie” concentrate. The resulting brew has 4.5% alcohol content and allegedly has a "smooth authentic taste and a hop-filled aroma." According to a company statement, one liter of Blondie yields three liters of cold brewski.
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| Boston Man Commits to Never Telling a Lie Again, Ever Posted: 09 Jun 2016 04:24 AM PDT Can you imagine never telling another lie – not even an innocent one – for the rest of your life? How about for a whole day? Yeah, me neither, which is why Keith Frankel’s commitment to a no-lie lifestyle is so intriguing. Up until six months ago, Keith Frankel, a product design executive at Boston education software startup Firecracker, was no different than the rest of us – he would lie on a daily basis, and he was fully aware of it. He admits he had been aware of his ability to lie both persuasively and effectively and that his skills only got better with age. “Sometimes, my career necessitated that I play my little trump card in order to succeed at 'the game'. Other times, my personal life could be made just a bit more convenient with a little fib here or there. To no surprise, the more I lied, the better I became at lying in the future. Lying, like any other skill, only gets stronger the more you use it,” Frankel says. He didn’t really see the harm in lying, at first, especially since his little white lies didn’t really have disastrous consequences on the lives of those around him, they were just “little deceptions, teeny, tiny misdirections.” But at one point, Keith realized that having his friends and family seeing him constantly lie to other people had planted seeds of distrust in them – they knew that he could very well lie to them if he so wished (and he admits he did). He felt these ‘tiny erosions of trust’, as he calls them, not only weakened his relationship with his loved ones, but also called into question everything he claimed to be and will eventually become. Worse still, once plated, these seeds of doubt slowly whether relationships and are almost impossible to address effectively.
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