A computer composed a piece of music!
This electronic music prodigy is known as the Iamus computer. It's located at the Universidad de Málaga (University of Malaga) In Spain and is the First computer to ever master the human musical language. On October 15th 2010, Iamus composed its first fragment of music, Opus One.
Hello world! premiered exactly one year later. Although the piece is slightly chaotic and unusual, it is considered remarkable that the computer was able to compose the piece without any human intervention during or after the process.
However, the computer and the team didn’t stop there. Iamus has also composed the world’s first computer-generated orchestral piece, Tránsitos, which was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2011. You can listen to Hello World! here.
There’s a fake town on Google Maps!
Nobody is quite sure how the town came to be on the map. One explanation is that it’s a paper town, a fake place added to maps to make counterfeits easier to spot.
Another example of a paper town would be Agloe, New York. This town was created by a map company but was made real by a man who founded the Agloe General store in its supposed location, therefore bringing it into existence.
Google, however, sticks by the explanation that an error was made when creating the map. They are still not sure how it came to be in their databases.
The mystery of Argleton caused a stir in the local community when it first showed up. One man even walked to the field where it was supposed to be, just to see if it really did exist!
One third of leprosy cases in America are caused by armadillos!
If a person eats an infected animal, they are extremely likely to catch the disease. Leprosy is a disease which can cause skin sores, nerve and muscle damage and, occasionally, limbs falling off.
It is easily treated nowadays with antibiotics, however in biblical times it was notorious and one of the biggest killers in the middle east at the time. The widespreadness of the disease may have dipped over the years, but the highly contagious infection still exists today.
However, the average worldwide number of cases annually is only around 250,000, which is much lower than other diseases. Today, lepers can join colonies away from society to help prevent the spread of infection and give them support and specialised treatment. While leper colonies were historically feared and looked down on, modern day ones are much nicer places.
A baby in the Philippines was born without a skull!
Sadly, due to his family not being able to afford a life-saving operation, Pagayaw only lived for four days. His brain had become severely infected through exposure.
However, people have survived worse brain anomalies. One man, named Phineas Gage, was stabbed in the brain by a piece of debris from a small explosion. The metal rod had shot through his eye, piercing his brain.
Despite losing roughly a quarter of his grey matter, he survived for 13 years after the accident. He suffered from epilepsy and his personality seemed drastically changed, but nevertheless it was extraordinary that he survived at all.
Humans can survive for up to 2 minutes in space!
You could suffer from really bad sunburn if you’re on the wrong side of the planet and within 10 seconds you’d start experiencing swelling skin and the bends, gases bubbling up inside you due to decompression. After about 30-40 seconds, you’ll probably fall unconscious from lack of oxygen. Injuries start to build up and, after 1-2 minutes, you’d probably be dead.
One test subject at a NASA research center was accidentally left in a near-vacuum for 15 seconds in 1965. He was in a simulate environment when his suit failed. He reported feeling and hearing the air leaking out of the spacesuit he was in and his last conscious memory, 14 seconds into the ordeal, was the water in his mouth boiling. He regained consciousness when the test chamber had a pressure equivalent to a 15,000 feet altitude.
