[Don’t try to tell me you haven’t wondered the same thing! -egg]

There are two main reasons why ancient Greek statues have small penises:

Firstly, they’re flaccid. If you compare their size to most flaccid male penises, they are actually not significantly smaller than real-life penises tend to be.

Secondly, cultural values about male beauty were completely different back then. Today, big penises are seen as valuable and manly, but back then, most evidence points to the fact that small penises were considered better than big ones.

[…]

All representations of large penises in ancient Greek art and literature are associated with foolish, lustful men, or the animal-like satyrs. Meanwhile, the ideal Greek man was rational, intellectual and authoritative. He may still have had a lot of sex, but this was unrelated to his penis size, and his small penis allowed him to remain coolly logical.

“Why do all old statues have such small penises?” | How To Talk About Art History

Marine biologists with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expedition in the Mariana Trench encountered a luminous red-and-yellow jellyfish in April, Scientific American reports.

It is believed to be the first time a human has ever seen this species. The scientists will continue searching the extreme ocean depths through June 10.

From the NOAA video description:

This stunningly beautiful jellyfish was seen during Dive 4 of the 2016 Deepwater Exploration of the Marianas expedition on April 24, 2016, while exploring the informally named “Enigma Seamount” at a depth of ~3,700 meters.

Scientists identified this hydromedusa as belonging to the genus Crossota. Note the two sets of tentacles — short and long. At the beginning of the video, you’ll see that the long tentacles are even and extended outward and the bell is motionless. This suggests an ambush predation mode. Within the bell, the radial canals in red are connecting points for what looks like the gonads in bright yellow.

Scientists view never-before-seen glowing jellyfish in Mariana Trench ocean depths

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/143888807081/death-by-gps-ars-technica-what-happened-to-the

Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there — we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now.

But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.

Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their lifespans increase by more than two years. American women in that bracket have registered an almost three-year extension to their life expectancy.

Meanwhile, the poorest five percent of Americans have seen essentially no gains at all.

Now a three-year gain in average lifespan might not, at first glance, seem earth-shakingly significant. But consider this: If doctors could by some miracle suddenly cure all cancer, federal health officials tell us, the average overall American life expectancy would increase by just three years.

In other words, as MIT’s Michael Stepner puts it, the changes in life expectancy we’ve witnessed over the last 15 years rank as “the equivalent of the richest Americans winning the war on cancer.”

The Death Gap

[I really love this guy’s work. -egg]

Jeremy Mann (previously here and here) paints cityscapes set during the low-lit moments of the early morning or evening, just when natural light has begun to creep in or fade from a city’s car-lined streets. Using oil paints, Mann applies and wipes away areas of the canvas to recreate these hazy environments, adding layers of paint back on top of the slightly smeared works with more detailed strokes. This layered effects makes the works appear like double exposed images, two scenes gently blurring into one.

Source: New Oil-Based Cityscapes Set at Dawn and Dusk by Jeremy Mann

[The author makes the common mistake of believing that Deep Learning Is Magic (flavor of the day: regret-based learning is magic), but it’s still a very interesting post. -egg]

Swarms of real life, human trolls have already been able to achieve some remarkable things.

For example, there’s the well-known incident where Time’s Man Of The Year Poll met 4chan. Twice.

But real-life trolls have to sleep. They have to eat. Whilst it might not look like it, they get tired, and angry, and dispirited.

Chatbots don’t.

And the only limit to the number of trollbots you can control is the amount of processing power they require. That might initially look like a pretty major limiter, given that machine-learning applications tend to require at least a single graphics card of some power each. But a), thanks to cloud computing that’s actually pretty affordable – an Amazon GPU instance on Spot Pricing will cost you $0.13 an hour or a little over 2 dollars a day – and b) there’s no reason that one instance of the trollbot software can’t control hundreds of social media accounts all posting frantically.

So what does this mean?

Source: Rise Of The Trollbot – Charlie’s Diary

[Very cool! -egg]

Experts have long talked about using multiple rotors on electric helicopters as an alternative method of personal transport. And today, the company responsible for creating an 18-rotor electric helicopter just managed to successfully complete its first manned test flight—which means our dream of using multicopters just moved one step forward.

The Volocopter VC200 is the world’s first certified multicopter, and while may not be the most impressive or ambitious demonstration of the technology, it show remarkable stability and ease of use. The device doesn’t require constant monitoring of controls, which makes it ideal for users new to the technology.

Check out this video of of its maiden flight in the video below.

Watch The UFO-Like, 18 Rotor Volocopter Take its First Manned Flight

“Today, we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos,” Stephen Hawking said today in New York. “Because we are human, and our nature is to fly.”

The famed physicist was speaking at a press conference to launch Breakthrough Starshot, a new space initiative that promises to apply Silicon Valley thinking to space exploration. Hawking, billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are the organization’s board of directors. Hawking says the $100 million program will send small “nanocraft” to explore Earth’s nearest solar system, Alpha Centauri.

Former NASA Ames Research Center director Pete Worden is directing the project, supported by a committee of leading scientists and engineers.

“Imagine hundreds of spacecraft the size of a butterfly, propelled by light beams at record-shattering speeds and journeying to distant stars 4.37 light years away — far deeper into space than human-built probes have ever ventured,” CNN reported of what may be the most ambitious space exploration project in history–one that may not be completed in our lifetimes.

The piece to read on today’s big space news is Dennis Overbye’s, at theNew York Times. He asks, “Can you fly an iPhone to the stars?”

Source: Steven Hawking wants to send tiny ‘nanocraft’ space probes to Alpha Centauri / Boing Boing

It’s unnerving to discover a wasp’s nest dangling outside your house, but perhaps it would be a tad less so with the help of biology student Mattia Menchetti who cleverly realized he could give colored construction paper to a colony of European paper wasps. By gradually providing different paper shades, the wasps turned their homes into a functional rainbow of different colors. This isn’t the first time scientists have encountered insects producing colorful materials with the aid of artificial coloring. In 2012, residue from an M&M plant caused local bees to make blue and green honey, and a similar—though admittedly more tragic—incident involving bees and the dye used inMaraschino cherries occured recently in New York. You can see more of Menchetti’s experiment on his website. (via Booooooom)

Source: When Given Colored Construction Paper, Wasps Build Rainbow Colored Nests

“I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” Billy Preston, who died in 2006, once said. “She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”

Source: Aretha Franklin’s American Soul