Tag: weird

The weird science behind your favorite gummy vitamins

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  • Chewable vitamins are now the most popular way for American adults age 35 and younger to consume supplements.
  • But the sugary treat wasn’t always this popular — it took a lot of trial and error, and a few different gummy brands, to nail down the formulas we see today.
  • Though early gummy vitamins used gelatin to achieve the familiar, chewy texture, it wasn’t ideal because it takes up too much space. 
  • Nowadays, many manufacturers use pectin, and the category is worth billions globally.  
  • Read Business Insider’s full investigation into the world of gummy vitamins here.

Vitamins are big business. According to Andrew Stablein, a research analyst at Euromonitor, the supplement industry will surpass $36 billion this year. 

And thanks to the Kardashians and a few lucky strokes of marketing genius, chewable vitamins are now the most popular way for American adults age 35 and younger to consume supplements, despite skepticism

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Weird Circles Keep Popping Up Around the World. Alan Turing Predicted Them in 1952.

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From Popular Mechanics

A pattern described by computer science icon and polymath Alan Turing continues to show up in new scientific research 70 years later. The “Turing pattern” is a widespread phenomenon where noisy systems form stable patterns after being stimulated. The latest example is in “symmetrically spaced” patches of desert grasses, which grow in naturally orderly equilibrium to maximize each patch’s access to limited water.

➡ The world is weird as [email protected]#!. Let’s explore it together.

In Africa and Australia, desert grasses grow in what are called fairy circles. In the new study, published in the Journal of Ecology, scientists explain:

“This pattern has been explained with scale-dependent ecohydrological feedbacks and the reaction-diffusion, or Turing mechanism, used in process-based models that are rooted in physics and pattern-formation theory.”

But modeling a true Turing pattern isn’t as simple as pointing and labeling. Scientists must analyze, which is more challenging

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LG’s Wing is a weird, surprisingly practical smartphone

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When it comes to offering more screen real estate on a smartphone, manufacturers have two options: either go with a flexible display à la Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 2, or attach a secondary screen like the LG Velvet. While the latter is obviously the easier (and cheaper) option, both implementations have a common problem: multi-tasking only works well when both apps are in portrait orientation, due to the design of most apps. 



a laptop computer sitting on top of a table: LG Wing 5G

LG Wing 5G

This can be a big problem. If I watch YouTube and Netflix videos in landscape, but then load Twitter or Facebook on the bottom half of the phone, these would be stretched wide, making it difficult to read text or view images. This is where the LG Wing 5G’s bizarre swivel-screen design comes in, and having used a pre-production unit for about a week (and having used both the Velvet and the Galaxy Fold), this

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Verizon is about to launch preorders for the weird LG Wing smartphone

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Verizon is boasting that it will be the first wireless carrier in the United States to offer LG’s strange new Wing smartphone, a model that features two displays with a pivoting arrangement. If you’re nostalgic for old school phones that had hidden, sliding keyboards, it’s easy to see the LG Wing’s appeal — you can get all of the benefits of swiping on a small keyboard with the visual real estate of landscape mode.

If you’ve been using mobile phones long enough, there’s a good chance that at one point in time, you used a phone that had a physical keyboard. These phones differed from traditional candy bar-style phones by offering a full miniature QWERTY keyboard hidden behind the display and accessible via hinges. A full keyboard made it easier to type out text messages and emails.

Of course, society soon transitioned to touchscreens, which have many of their own

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Why Tesla’s internet-connected cars are suddenly acting weird

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The outage, however, provided a glimpse into some of the real-world issues created by the evolution of increasingly connected vehicles that rely on the Internet. Telsa vehicles use mobile connections for a wide range of functions, including remotely setting heating and air conditioning and making service appointments. They also unlock the features of vehicles’ Autopilot driver-assistance system, which can navigate highways and city streets between waypoints set by the driver. A feature to summon a vehicle in a crowded parking lot, for example, was inaccessible because it is accessed through the app.

“It’s like what you see in a lot of other areas of our lives,” said Karl Brauer, a veteran auto industry analyst who works as an executive analyst at the website iSeeCars. “When we get this increased convenience, we tend to become a lot more expectant and dependent on it.”

On social media, users reported a range of

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