The World’s Quietest Place!

can you stand the silence?! The longest anyone can bear Earth’s quietest place is 45 minutes.

The ‘anechoic chamber’ at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest place. It’s 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and if you stay there too long you may start hallucinating. The longest that anyone has survived in it is just 45 minutes.

Steven Orfield, the company’s founder and president, explained that the room is so silent that whoever goes becomes the sound of the area. “When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly”, he adds.

Sea Gypsies: The Life Of The Bajau Laut People

The Bajau Laut people of the south-western Philippines and Indonesia live their entire lives on the sea. Known as “sea gypsies” or “sea nomads”, they inhabit amazing villages built on stilts in the middle of the ocean.                                                      

Many Bajau people do not set foot on land except to trade fish and sea cucumbers for rice and (ironically) water, build new boats, or bury the deceased. In fact, they sometimes report feeling “landsick” when they do!

Even when their fragile, driftwood settlements are decimated in the typhoon season, or ransacked by pirates, they just take to their boats and start to build a new house.

These amazing people are so at home in the water that their bodies have physically adapted to it, giving them better underwater vision and the ability to hold their breath for up to five minutes while free-diving for their dinner.

The Secret Life of Ants, Shot by Andrey Pavlov

We’ve seen insects used as art protagonists before. Mike Libby turns them into steampunk hybrids, and Ubyka creates armed insect cyborgs, but I haven’t seen anything like what Andrey Pavlov does with ants.

Andrey Pavlov spent a lot of time studying ants, and he learned that they all follow a very specific path when they’re working. So all he has to do is find them, put the props right on their trail, set up some flash backgrouns and light reflectors, and just stand on the sidelines photographing the ants.

(clickt to enlarge)

The photo series created by this talented Russian photographer is called “Ant Stories”. And what beautiful stories they are… Have you ever seen something this extraordinary?

Sweden’s classroom-free school, Vittra Telefonplan – The Future of Education?

Facts:
• No classrooms.
• Each student receives a computer from the school which is used as a major tool for learning.
• Students are free to work independently.
• The ‘village’ is a tiny house meant for group work, and ‘organic conversation furniture’ allows the kids to interact with each other as well.
• Grades are not awarded!

(click photo to enlarge)

Goal:
they believe that by breaking down physical class divisions, children can be taught to live with intellectual curiosity, self-confidence and communally responsible behavior. According to the principal of the school, Jannie Jeppesen, the design is intended to allow ‘curiosity and creativity’ to flower in the children.


Official Website

A spider in Brazil can cause erections that lasts for hours

The Brazilian wandering spiders appeared in Guinness World Records 2012 as the world's most venomous spider. Its venom can cause priapism in humans. Priapism is a potentially painful medical condition, in which the erect penis or clitoris does not return to its flaccid state, despite the absence of both physical and psychological stimulation, within four hours. A component of the venom (Tx2-6) is being studied for use in erectile dysfunction treatments.

The eight-legged creature - also known as the armed spider, banana spider or Phoneutria nigriventer - is native to South and Central America.

The Facts You Didn't Know About Stalking

Stalking facts at a Glance:
1.  A common technique of stalkers is to kidnap, injure, or kill the victim’s pet, knowing that this will often devastate the victim emotionally.
2.  Victims of stalking often say it would be better to be murdered than have to go through the horrendous mental anguish of being stalked.
3.  Slashing the victim’s tires or vandalism/destruction of the victim’s home and property is standard behavior for stalkers.
4.  Friends and family who support the victim are themselves in danger. The stalker views these people as obstacles to what he wants and will turn his wrath on them as well. Cases exist where relatives or a new boyfriend of the victim have had their home burned to the ground.
5.  For someone being stalked, everyday things such as answering the phone or going out for a ride alone can no longer be done without constant fear.
6.  Stalkers have been known to hire private detectives to help track down the victim when they’ve moved to another state.
7.  Victims often are subjected to being followed, continual drive-bys of their homes and workplaces, and being inundated with unwanted phone calls, answering machine messages, letters, emails, notes left on doors and car windshields, and so forth. It is, for all intents and purposes, an act of terrorism.

Zombies: The Truth Behind The Fiction

The center of the zombie world is the island of Hispaniola, in the West Indies. Many peasant workers there believe that evil sorcerers called bokors have the power to bring their dead loved-ones back to life as unthinking puppets. The bokors are then said to use these unfortunates as their slaves. It is true that this Caribbean idea of zombies does exist, and that zombies can be found regularly walking the streets of the islands. Some people know members of their family or friends who have been turned into zombies, and as a precaution many poor peasant workers place heavy stone tablets on top of their loved-ones’ coffins to stop bokors snatching the bodies.

The reality is truly frightening, although it does not involve otherworldly powers. Psychiatric experts agree that the people identified as zombies by Haitian folk do have problems and suffer from a variety of serious mental health disorders. Some commentators have suggested that the idea of zombies was the way in which Haitian culture could explain these naturally unwell people. Others think it is something much more sinister. It is believed that by using natural, native resources, Haitian bokors can actually induce these mental illnesses.