Humans

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The GIF is dead. Long live the GIF.

The GIF as an art form—a short and silent loop—has never been more popular than it is right now. Yet the GIF as a filetype, the way we store the library of ones and zeros that computers translate into animation, is quietly embattled. Behind the scenes, a war to exterminate it has been raging for years, and it never really ended. All these years after Burn All GIFs Day, the GIF remains both deeply flawed and yet strangely irreplaceable. Whether this latest frenzy of GIF popularity enshrines it forever or kills it for good, you can be damn sure we’ll never see anything quite like it again.

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Juno.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured a unique time-lapse movie of the Galilean satellites in motion about Jupiter. The movie begins on June 12th with Juno 10 million miles from Jupiter, and ends on June 29th, 3 million miles distant. The innermost moon is volcanic Io; next in line is the ice-crusted ocean world Europa, followed by massive Ganymede, and finally, heavily cratered Callisto. Galileo observed these moons to change position with respect to Jupiter over the course of a few nights. From this observation he realized that the moons were orbiting mighty Jupiter, a truth that forever changed humanity’s understanding of our place in the cosmos. Earth was not the center of the Universe. For the first time in history, we look upon these moons as they orbit Jupiter and share in Galileo’s revelation. This is the motion of nature’s harmony.

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Why no aquarium has a great white shark – usually

There are several aquariums around the world, including one in Georgia, that house whale sharks, the biggest fish in the sea. But not one has a great white shark on display. Aquariums have made dozens of attempts since the 1970s to display a captive great white shark. Most of those attempts ended with dead sharks. By the 2000s, the only group still trying was the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which spent a decade planning its white shark program. In 2004, it acquired a shark that became the first great white to survive in captivity for more than 16 days. In fact, it was on display for more than six months before it was released back into the ocean. In the following years, the Monterey Bay Aquarium hosted five more juvenile white sharks for temporary stays before ending the program in 2011. It was an expensive effort and had come under criticism due to injuries that some of the sharks developed in the tank. Responding to those critics, Jon Hoech, the aquarium’s director of husbandry operations, said: “We believe strongly that putting people face to face with live animals like this is very significant in inspiring ocean conservation and connecting people to the ocean environment. We feel like white sharks face a significant threats out in the wild and our ability to bring awareness to that is significant in terms of encouraging people to become ocean stewards.” Check out the video above to learn why white sharks are so difficult to keep in captivity and how the Monterey Bay Aquarium designed a program that could keep them alive.

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Human or Machine: Who wrote the poem?

Quake with true fear of just reproach my shame
while her eyes came to me we sweetly sing
hand clasped in her breast her withered hands fling
yet by and claim loves boon nor let the tame
But this affliction sure thy heart inflame
he in silence come and assistance bring
then comes a small bright spark comes wandering
sorrows for him you gave that love once came.

Click through for more.
(Machine btw)

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Will Forensic Scientists be able to create visual profiles of suspects from DNA alone?

Then, in June 2015, Monica Quaal, a lead DNA analyst at the lab that works with the sheriff’s office, learned about an intriguing new way of exploiting the information contained in a DNA sample—one that would not require a suspect’s DNA or a match in a database. Called DNA phenotyping, the technique conjures up a physical likeness of the person who left the sample behind, including traits such as geographic ancestry, eye and natural hair color, and even a possible shape for facial features.

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Eat Crickets

The practice of farming crickets for human consumption is still in its infancy in the U.S., and the crickets here are participating in an experiment to discover how to create a better edible insect. Like with most livestock, there are a number of variables—temperature, humidity, feed, water sources, housing—that are constantly adjusted to create a bigger, tastier, and more nutritious product. The crickets live to breed and then meet their deaths at the hands of an industrial freezer. Eventually, they are churned into cricket powder or sold wholesale to restaurants or companies making cricket products, like Exo’s cricket-flour protein bar or Bitty Foods’s cricket baking flour.