This isn’t one of the faces the robot saw. Image: Creativity+

Cloud gazing seems like it should be a uniquely human activity—who else would stare up at the sky and turning wisps of clouds into shapes and faces? But, now, a robot can do that, too. What’s happening there? Is the robot…imagining?

This robot is named Cloud Face, and it’s a face-detection algorithm that can look at pictures of cloud and detect ones that look like human faces. The program comes from Shinseungback Kimyonghun, who describes it this way:

‘Cloud Face’ is a collection of cloud images that are recognized as human face by a face-detection algorithm. It is a result of computer’s vision error, but they look like faces to human eyes, too. This work attempts to examine the relation between computer vision and human vision.

Kimyonghun figured this out mostly accidentally. He told Fast Company that the whole thing started with a webcam that was supposed to capture human faces:

“One day, I hooked a webcam and a snack bag, and cast the fishing rod out to the window of my studio,” the studio’s Kim Yong Hun explains. “I expected that it would capture faces of passersby when they look at the bait. After a few hours later, it actually got some faces of people staring at it. However, there were also many images that were not faces. That was because the face-detection algorithm often found patterns of building walls and streets as faces.

At Fast Company, they sell the project as “an imaginative robot.” Mark Wilson writes:

Looking through the images almost kicks you in the gut. Because it’s one thing if Facebook can auto-tag my friend’s faces on my uploaded photographs, but it’s a whole other thing if some snippet of code can lay beside me on a grassy knoll, point to the sky, and make a convincing argument as to why a bit of puffy condensation resembles a dude on a train eating a donut.

But is this robot really “imaginative?” Can robots imagine?

It depends on how you describe imagination. In one paper, computer scientists talk about building a robot with “functional imagination,” which they describe as ” the purposeful manipulation of information that is not directly available to the senses – references to imagination always point to something that in reality is not there.” There are other researchers teaching robots to imagine what humans might want—in this case, how humans might want to arrange furniture in a room. Ashutosh Saxena at Cornell is trying to figure out how to get robots to put themselves in human shoes. IEEE Spectrum explains:

Essentially, what Saxena’s group is doing is teaching robots to use their imaginations by placing virtual humans in the environment that they want to organize, and then figuring out what those virtual humans are likely to do.

So the cloud face project isn’t the only thing where computers are creating fantasy images and scenarios. And there’s another project quite like the cloud face one, called Google Face. Created by Onformative, Google Face scours Google Earth for things that look like faces.

This concept—the idea that we can see faces in blobs (like the face on the moon)—is called “pareidoliak.” To humans, the world is full of faces in clouds, earth, grilled cheeses and oil slicks. We see them everywhere. And now, apparently, we’ve taught robots to, as well.

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My Robot Helper of Tomorrow

Will one of these guys be the next pope? Stay tuned! Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A self-appointed German bishop from the order of Corpus Dei (spoiler alert: it’s not an official order of the Catholic church) made it through Vatican security and infiltrated a meeting of cardinals preparing for the arduous process of choosing a new pope.

Ralph Napierski, the fake bishop in question, has been on the church’s radar for some time, says Time:

“He does not work with any of our institutions in any way,” a spokesman for the Berlin Catholic diocese told the German newspaper Bild Zeitung, according to Spiegel Online. The spokesman said Napierski is “self-aggrandizing,” writes angry letters and preaches about sex.

On Napierski’s website, which feature photographs of him posing as a priest with Church officials and politicians, he claims to be adept in “revealing the ancient hidden spiritual practices.” He is a proponent of “Jesus Yoga” and claims to have invented a system that allows people to control computers with their minds.

While the higher-ups of the Catholic church are unlikely to let a little Jesus Yoga distract them from the historic process of pope-selecting, the official police force of Vatican City, the Corps of Gendarmerie of Vatican City State, has acknowledged a need for tighter security during this week’s meetings:

Following Napierski’s attempted infiltration, the Vatican held discussions on improving their security procedures — which already include sweeping the Sistine Chapel for listening devices.

Monday’s meeting was the first in a series happening at the Vatican this week, during which the 103 cardinals present (out of 115 who are eligible to participate in the process) will mingle, discuss the future of the church and prepare themselves for the official Conclave, at which a new pope will be elected. Vatican officials have been working around the clock to get St. Peter’s Basilica and other important buildings ready for the process:

“It is unlikely we will set a date today,” the Rev. Thomas Rosica told reporters. “For one thing, the chapel is not yet ready.”

Workers have started installing floorboards to protect the chapel’s marble floors as well as the stove to burn the ballots and communicate the election results.

The last Conclave happened in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II and lasted for just over 24 hours. 

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In the Entire History of the Catholic Church, Only a Handful of Popes Have Resigned
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Will these cows look good with my outfit? Photo: Wikimedia Commons

That Italian leather handbag you’re sporting might have a more complicated history than you think.

According to environmentalists, deforestation in Brazil (removing trees so the land can be used for other, non-forest purposes) is on the rise, and the fashion houses of Italy are one of the culprits. Brazilian cows, who provide the leather used in products made by Valentino, Ferragamo and other high-end labels, need space on which to roam, graze and conduct important cow business, and ranchers are all too happy to engage in a little tree-burning to make that happen for their charges. The Guardian breaks it down:

A 2009 Greenpeace study proved that ranches were still illegally clearing rainforest and that the leather was going straight into the supply chain of major brands. One hectare of rainforest was lost to ranches every 18 seconds. Following the money as well as the trees, Greenpeace found that the enterprise was underpinned by state-funded banks. While former president Lula made speeches about saving the “lungs of the earth” (the Brazilian Amazon stores 80-120bn tonnes of carbon), the state sponsored its wholesale destruction.

By July 2012, official figures showed deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon to be down by 76% from its high in 2004, but NGOs monitoring the situation report an alarming new upturn. President Dilma Rousseff has recently allowed two reforms to the Forest Code that researchers claim will increase deforestation in Brazil by 47% by 2020. If you’ll excuse the phrase, we are not out of the woods.

On the plus side, some fashion houses are scrambling to avoid getting slapped with an anti-rainforest label, and are attempting to source environmentally clean leather:

A new version of Gucci’s Jackie bag will be unveiled at Paris Fashion Week. There have been many incarnations of this slouchy handbag since its launch in the 50s – named for Jackie Onassis, as it was one of her favourite accessories – and the style was most recently revived in 2009. But this latest version stands apart. Gucci had stopped using Brazilian leather in the wake of the 2009 Greenpeace report, but it now sources supplies for the Jackie bag from a deforestation-free zone.

The bag, which retails at more than $2,000 dollars, comes with its own passport, declaring it deforestation-free.

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Photo: HBarrison

Elephants seem to know that people mean trouble, according to new research conducted around Serengeti National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tanzania. Elephants living within the park’s boundaries, scientists found, are significantly less stressed than those living outside of its protective borders. Accordingly, the BBC reports, more elephants choose to make a home within the park than outside of it.

Though national parks in Africa are under siege by rampant poaching for elephant’s valuable tusks, parks do offer some protection from the threats of illegal hunting and habitat disturbance. Serengeti National Park contains no fences, however, so people and animals can come and go from its nearly 15,000 square kilometer expanse.

The new study aimed to see how elephants were doing within the park and in adjacent game reserves where human disturbance is greater. Rather than bother the elephants, scientists used the animals’ dung as a proxy for gaging stress levels. Animals outside of the park, they found, had higher levels of the stress hormone gluccorticoid than those living within its boundaries.

More elephants lived with the park, and researchers did not find evidence of single males roaming outside of the park. The researchers suspect that elephants may have learned to associate areas outside of the park with vehicles and hunting activities.

“I think elephants know where they are safe or not. However, sometimes they also are tempted by nice food outside the park which attracts them to such areas,” the researchers told BBC.

The researchers hope the study results will show park officials and decision makers that protected areas do indeed improve welfare for animals such as elephants.

“The elephant population in Africa is presently declining at an alarming rate,” the researchers said. “The world must find interest in it, if not there will be very few or no elephants in Africa in about five to six years.”

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A legacy of the Vanderbilt family (whose adopted symbol, the acorn, sits atop the terminal’s trademark clock), Grand Central is more than just ticket booths, tracks and platforms, of which there are 44, making it the largest train station in the world based on platform number.

It’s a city within a city, housing 50 shops, 20 eateries, five restaurants, newsstands, a fresh food market and multiple passageways to maneuver around it all. Its train and subway systems serve nearly 200,000 commuters daily. In total, every day more than 700,000 people pass through the terminal, a Beaux-Arts style transportation hub that took ten years and $80 million to complete.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

A quintessential New York spot, the 48-acre centenarian brings in approximately 21.6 million visitors each year. They come to see the cavernous main concourse and gaze up at the arched painted ceiling, to which as many as 50 painters contributed. The mural depicts constellations of the Mediterranean sky, but in reverse—an error that transportation officials explained away as an astronomical representation from God’s perspective.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

Visitors also come to survey the 50-foot statues on Grand Central’s south face depicting Mercury, Hercules and Minerva, the gods of, respectively, travelers, strength and commerce. And they come to see for themselves the famous four-faced, 13-foot-wide Tiffany glass and opal clocks.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

Grand Central Terminal has a storied past, with several well-kept secrets that have since been exposed. A “whispering gallery” in the dining concourse near the Oyster Bar, a restaurant as old as the terminal itself, allows a quiet voice to travel from one end to the other, thanks to acoustics created by low ceramic arches. Past a door inside the information booth is a hidden spiral staircase, leading down to another information kiosk.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

During World War II, German military intelligence learned of a once-secret basement known as M42, which contains converters used to supply electric currents to trains. Spies were sent to sabotage it, but the FBI arrested them before they could strike.

A train platform with a concealed entrance, number 61, was once used to transport President Franklin D. Roosevelt directly into the nearby Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

In 1957, a NASA rocket was displayed inside the terminal, a move meant to encourage support for the country’s space program as it raced against the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. A six-inch hole was carved into the ceiling to help support the missile, and it remains amidst the mural’s 2,500 stars.

In 1976, a group of Croatian nationalists planted a bomb in one of the terminal’s lockers, and the subsequent attempt to disarm the device killed a bomb squad specialist and injured 30 others.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

The terminal’s interior has also been the backdrop to several Hollywood classics. In 1933, Bing Crosby received a star-studded sendoff at Track 27 in “Going Hollywood.” Twenty years later, Fred Astaire hopped off a train and danced up track 34 in a Technicolor musical number in “The Band Wagon.” The following year, Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck kissed inside the terminal before making their getaway in “Spellbound.” The 1959 action classic “North by Northwest” opens with a montage of New Yorkers bustling through the terminal, and Cary Grant later makes a nighttime escape through the main concourse.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

Once dedicated to long-distance travel, Grand Central Terminal is now home to the Metro-North Railroad, the largest commuter railroad service in the United States. Three train hubs have stood at 42nd and Park Avenue since the 19th century. In 1871, Grand Central Depot consolidated several New York railroads into one station until it was partially demolished three decades later. What remained, dubbed Grand Central Station, doubled in height and received a new façade. Several years later, in 1913, a decade-long project transformed the hub into the iconic terminal anchoring midtown Manhattan today.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

But the terminal’s fate hasn’t always been so secure. In the 1950s, multiple real estate developers proposed replacing it with towers, some 500 feet taller than the Empire State Building. By the late 1960s, the growing popularity of government-subsidized interstate highways and air travel had sapped the customer pool of railroads across the country. Grand Central wasn’t immune­. Over time, the ceiling became obscured by tar and tobacco smoke residue, and commercial billboards blocked out natural light from streaming in.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

By 1968, New York Central Railroad, which operated the terminal, was facing bankruptcy, and it merged with Pennsylvania Railroad to form Penn Central. The new company unveiled another tower proposal that year, but the plans drew significant opposition, most notably from former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The terminal became a historic landmark in 1978, following a Supreme Court decision to protect the transportation hub, the first time the court had ruled on a matter of historic preservation.

Credit: Bettmann Archive/Corbis Images

In the 1990s, the terminal saw a massive, two-year, $196 million renewal project under Metro-North. The ceiling of the Main Concourse was restored, revealing the painted skyscape, the billboard were removed to let light in and the original baggage room was replaced with a mirror image of the west staircase, a feature that had been included in original blueprints but hadn’t come to fruition.

But Grand Central Terminal won’t remain unchanged for long. A two-level, eight-track tunnel is being excavated under Park Avenue to bring in Long Island Rail Road trains, and by 2019, thousands more will be coming and going, arriving and departing, through this historic landmark.

Many thanks to Sam Roberts’ indispensable, comprehensive history “Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America.”

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Image: Benjamin Reed

The Civil War changed a lot of things in the United States—slavery was abolished, new battlefield medicine was perfected, the West was opened up to railroads and the nation was united. It also changed our money. Before the war, there were 8,000 different kinds of money being used in the United States. It wasn’t until after the war that the U.S. started to really use the dollar.

NPR’s Planet Money reports:

They write:

Banks printed their own paper money. And, unlike today, a $1 bill wasn’t always worth $1. Sometimes people took the bills at face value. Sometimes they accepted them at a discount (a $1 bill might only be worth 90 cents, say.) Sometimes people rejected certain bills altogether.

Those dollar bills looks quite different from our bills today, which weren’t designed until 1963, says The Dollar Bill Collector:

The current design of the United States one dollar bill ($1) technically dates to 1963 when the bill became a Federal Reserve Note as opposed to a Silver Certificate. However, many of the design elements that we associate with the bill were established in 1929 when all of the country’s currency was changed to its current size. Collectors call today’s notes “small size notes” to distinguish them from the older, larger formats. The most notable and recognizable element of the modern one dollar bill is the portrait the first president, George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart.

That design means so much to us that we like our money spotless, rather than dirty. As Smart News has reported:

People like their cash fresh and clean, like OutKast’s wardrobe, and they’re more likely to hold on to those neat bills than spend them quickly. Dirty cash, on the other hand, encourages fast spending. At least that’s the conclusion of a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

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To Save Money, Ask for Pretty, New Dollar Bills
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Tycho Brahe. Image: Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle

The story of Tycho Brahe is a weird one: it includes events like losing his nose in a duel over a mathematical formula, replacing it with a golden one and having a pet moose who died after getting drunk and falling down some stairs. Brahe’s death was sensational, as well—researchers found extremely high levels of mercury in his mustache hairs, suggesting he had been poisoned. Or perhaps not. A new analysis of the body, exhumed in 2010 to settle the matter, suggests that Brahe was not murdered at all. The BBC writes:

“It is impossible that Tycho Brahe could have been murdered,” [investigation leader Jens Vellev] explained. When asked whether other poisons could have been used, Dr Vellev said: “If there were other poisons in the beard, we would have been able to see it in the analyses.

But if you love potentially murdered eccentric people, never fear. Here are some quite odd cases in which the people were probably murdered:

Regiomontanus: Also known as Johannes Müller von Königsberg, this mathematician lived in the mid 15th century. He became a university student at the age of 11 and got a Master of Arts at 21. He was the first to write a book using symbolic algebra, and a crater on the moon is named after him. In 1476, he went to Rome, never to return. Many believe he was assassinated.

Ottavio Bottecchia: Winner of the 1924 and 1925 Tour de France, Bottecchia was one of the greatest cyclers of the early 20th century. But when he returned to the race in 1926, he was in bad shape and performed quite poorly. Just a few months later, while training alone near his home, Bottecchia was found beaten and bloody on the side of the road. His bicycle, however, was intact, and propped up against a tree nearby. Cycling Revealed explains the three possible explanations:

• The Police Report : “death due to a freak accident.” The investigating officer, under the watchful eye of the local Fascists, stated that Bottecchia had trouble freeing his feet from the strapped toe clips on the pedals after a large drink of water. He lost his balance and fell, striking his head on a sharp rock.[...]

• Theory Number 1 : …Bottecchia was hungry and stopped for a snack at a local vineyard. The owner of the vineyard spotted him stealing the grapes and confronted Bottecchia. The argument grew violent and the furious owner threw a rock, striking Bottecchia on the head.[...]

• Theory Number 2 : The iron-fisted Fascists, who were angry at Bottecchia’s success and his failure to fully support the Fascist Party, had him killed. At the hospital, the attending physician diagnosed the injury as a fracture at the base of the skull, broken clavicle, and a large number of bruises.

This last theory has the most proof: twenty years later, an American immigrant confessed on his deathbed that the Fascists had contracted him to kill the cyclist, and, in 1973, a priest who issued Bottecchia his last rights also claimed this theory was accurate, according to Cycling Revealed.

The Dyaltov Pass hikers: In 1959, nine skiers were found dead in the Ural Mountains. The victims had fractured skulls and broken ribs. One had her tongue cut out. All their clothing was highly radioactive. At their funeral, people noted that their skin was noticeably tan. To this day, no one knows who or what killed them. One theory, according to the St. Petersburg Times was that the local Mansi people had murdered the skiers for trespassing. But that didn’t explain the radioactivity, and the wounds they sustained were far beyond a human’s strength, said the doctor:

Further debunking the theory, a doctor who examined the bodies in 1959 said he believed that no man could have inflicted the injuries because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged,

“It was equal to the effect of a car crash,” said the doctor, Boris Vozrozhdenny, according to case documents.

Another theory was some sort of explosion. This would explain their tanned faces, the radioactivity, and the force of the wounds. But there was no sign of an explosion or missiles in that area at all.

Jimmy Hoffa: A notorious labor union leader and strong-arm, Hoffa had a lot of enemies. Which is why when he disappeared from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Detroit in 1975 everyone assumed he’d been offed. The question is: who did it? And, perhaps more interestingly, where did they put the body? To this day, no one has discovered Hoffa’s remains, and his disappearance remains a mystery. In 2009, mafia hit man Richard Kuklinski claimed that he had offed the Hoff in the book “The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer” written by Philip Carlo. Weird NJ writes:

Carlo claims that after killing Hoffa with a combo blackjack/hunting knife to the head and packing him into a handy body bag, Kuklinski drove to a Kearny, New Jersey junkyard, where he engaged in a bit of overkill to dispose of the body, eventually storing it in a car that would become scrap metal.  According to many media accounts, including a story about the book in the April 17 edition of the Bergen Record, the claim has been dismissed as a hoax.

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Meriwether Lewis’ Mysterious Death
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Tides rise in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as Hurricane Sandy approaches. Photo: WarmSleepy

Until recently, most New York City residents lacked the impetus to demand infrastructure changes that would make their city more storm-proof. After the beating the city took from Hurricane Sandy, however, that may soon change.

Some improvements are already in motion, according to the New York Times Green Blog’s Mireya Navarro. Officials with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the electricity supplier Consolidated Edison say they are incorporating flood-protection measures, such as more highly elevated transformers and other equipment. The city is expanding wetlands to serve as natural barriers to encroaching waters, too.

Still, some complain that the city is spending too much time planning and not enough time acting.

For example, the Storm Surge Research Group from Stony Brook University, amongst others, calls for sea gates that could close during a storm and block surge from the Long Island South and the Atlantic Ocean. The research group recommends installing movable barriers at several points along the East River. Though these gates could, in theory, prevent an abnormally high tide from flooding the city, they come with an approximately $10 billion price tag. Other less costly mitigation strategies include increased pumping capabilities in subway stations and designing floodgates to block water from entering the city’s many underground tunnels.

By midcentury, the waters surrounding the boroughs’ 520 miles of coast will likely be two feet higher. Climate scientists say New York can count on only more and more severe flooding events such as this one, with the city’s potential flood zones likewise expanding with the rising sea levels.

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A fire tornado? If you had asked Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton back in ’96 if that could happen, they’d probably have said: “When cows fly.” But filmmaker Chris Tangey, the man who captured a 100-foot-high twister of fire on tape leaving a path of destruction across the Australian outback on Tuesday, will tell you otherwise.

The rare footage of the whirlwind has spread like—ahem—wildfire on YouTube and other media outlets this week. In case you missed it, the report from a local news station:

According to the video, the last rainfall in Alice Springs, Australia, where the video was taken, was April 24. Combine that with the build up of dry, old growth and you’ve got the perfect conditions for a tornado of this kind. “It was a dance of giants in front of me,” Tangey says in the video, “I had never seen anything like it.”

Tangey was scouting movie locations in the Northern territory when he spotted the swirl of fire, the Australian Times reports:

“It sounded like a jet fighter going by, yet there wasn’t a breath of wind where we were,” Mr Tangey told the Northern Territory News.

“You would have paid $1000 a head if you knew it was about to happen.”

The column of fire raged for about 40 minutes, Tangey said.

To call the event a “fire tornado” may be a misnomer, however. According to Mark Wysocki, New York’s state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, the columns of dust are more similar to a dust devil.  The Huffington Post reports:

“‘I would just call them fire vortices but that doesn’t sound so sexy to the public, so I would call them fire devils,’” he told Life’s Little Mysteries.

Like the dust devils that spring up on clear, sunny days in the deserts of the Southwest, a fire devil is birthed when a disproportionately hot patch of ground sends up a plume of heated air. But while dust devils find their heat source in the sun, fire devils arise from hot spots in preexisting wildfires.”

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The Tornado That Saved Washington
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Maykah’s first toy, Roominate, comes with real circuits. Image: Roominate Kickstarter

Science toys for girls are often, well, terrible. While boys get cool explosions and slime, girls get “Beauty Spa Lab” and “Perfect Perfume Lab.” And everything is always, as a rule, pink. But a team of female engineers are trying to buck that trend. They’re developing toys for girls that will actually inspire young women to go into math and science.

“When we looked around at girls’ toys today, we did not see the kinds of toys that inspired us when we were young,” wrote Alice Brooks, Bettina Chen and Jennifer Kessler wrote at Women 2.0. So the three of them, all graduate students at Stanford, formed a company they call “Maykah.” Their first toy, Roominate, updates the game of playing house: with circuits and custom-built parts, girls won’t just keep house but learn about what goes into building one.

Like many startups these days, Maykah launched a Kickstarter to fund the Roominate project. They hoped for $25,000 and got $85,965. In Silicon Valley, still largely dominated by men, support is widespread. Here’s the company’s Kickstarter video:

Parents could start ordering toys last week, although the final price hasn’t been set yet. The Maykah team hopes that their toys will help put a dent in the highly skewed gender ratio found in the engineering world, where only about 25 percent of the tech-force is female.

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