"Abandoned petrol station in Hawkes Bay. Not much service here," says Andrew.
Eye test lacks vision
This strange incident was reported in Indiana's Terre Haute Tribune in 1949: Harvey Bornstein, a studious 10-year-old, groped his way into Wilshire police station in Los Angeles to report that a middle-aged man came up and snatched his specs while he was playing on the street with another boy. Then the stranger held his open hand up before Harvey and asked: "How many fingers do you see?"
"Five," said Harvey instinctively.
"You don't need glasses," said the stranger. He threw the spectacles on the street, stamped on them and walked away.
A group working for the Materials for Life project in Wales is testing three different ways that concrete can heal itself. First, by using shape-shifting materials, known as shape-memory polymers, to repair large cracks in concrete. When these materials are heated with a small current, they can transform into a different shape that the material has "memorised". The researchers believe that these materials can be embedded into concrete and used to close cracks or make them smaller. The second way is by pumping both organic and inorganic healing agents through a network of thin tunnels in the concrete to help repair damage. And third, the team will embed tiny capsules containing both bacteria and healing agents into the concrete. Once cracks occur, these capsules will release their contents and, in the case of the bacteria, the nutrients that will enable them to function and produce calcium carbonate, which the researchers believe will heal the cracks in the concrete.
Dad bod defined
The "Dad Bod" is a male body type that is built upon the theory that once a man has found a mate and fathered a child, he doesn't need to worry about maintaining a sculpted physique. It's a physique that, according to a new study, is a "nice balance between a beer gut and working out", the result of going to the gym but indulging in a few pizzas once in a while and being okay with that. The study, which followed men for up to 20 years from adolescence, shows that dads do get a little squishier after the kids. Whether or not they lived with their children, becoming a father was linked to around a 2kg increase in weight over the study period, while remaining child-free was associated with a 0.5kg weight loss for a 1.8m-tall man. (Source: time.com)
Maps: By the end of 2015, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland expect a total of 1.3 million asylum applications from around the world, The New York Times reports. With this visualisation map showing the flow of asylum-seekers to Europe over the last three years, the scale of the problem becomes all too clear. As you over over each European country, you can see its share of asylum-seekers rise as the timeline runs its course. Each moving dot represents 25 to 50 people...