fjord fairlane

Ground-breaking is to begin next year in Norway to create the world’s first waterway tunnel to be navigable by large, steamer-sized vessels, as Super Punch reports. The seventeen hundred metre massive engineering project is not meant to make sea-faring routes shorter by carving out a short-cut or more direct path, but rather to protect ships at this most treacherous point along the Norwegian coast, entering the Stadhavet Sea where the waters and weather of the North and Norwegian seas come together quite violently.

5x5

i spit in your general direction: on the contrary, the Archerfish is far more accurate, inviting a discussion on the intelligence of very small brains, via Æon magazine
 
dank meme: the leak dump of tactics for exploiters aren’t all best-practises, nor the most up-to-date

what the dormouse said: journey down a rabbit hole in Shropshire leads to the discovery of a fantastic Templars’ grotto, via Boing Boing

allen wrench: Swedish lifestyle and furnishing empire introduces tables and chairs that snap together by means of a wedge dowel

oh, aunt jess: a curated collection of Murder, She Wrote guest-star trading-cards

flipping the script

Writing for Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok confronts us with a preview of an unsettling theatrical experiment conducted by New York University, wherein professors reversed the genders of the two US presidential candidates and directed professional actors to recreate the debates—portraying not only the dialogue and tone but also their respective body language.
Audiences expected confirmation of their beliefs that as few could stomach the behaviour of Candidate Trump on the dais, no one could tolerate such conduct coming from a woman. Instead their actual reception was quite different and spectators (participants in the experiment) could hardly reconcile themselves to what they were feeling, relating to the actress and harbouring distrust for the actor. What do you think is going on here? There’s a clip from the NYU campus at the link up top. Does unscripted lashing out come across as extemporaneous speech when one sees it coming from a woman?

bed of nails

A far better solution than surfaces coated with antimicrobial chemicals which are just as prone to propelling the survival of the fittest as any other hygienic strategies, material science to looking toward the dragon fly, as TYWKIWDBI informs, for a novel way to repel germs.
Engineers have created a structure out of black silicon, nanopillars, that are very punishing to the cellular membranes of bacteria, just like the topology found on the insects’ wings. Once on this sort of surface, should the microbe move it will be sheared to pieces. Other research projects have yielded nano-structures that inhibit the bacteria sticking at all or being disruptively slippery to discourage cohesion and infection.