12 Recent Developments and Discoveries That Are Chicken Soup for the Cynical Soul

A robot built by four Purdue students solved a Rubik’s Cube in .103 seconds.

Airbnb’s app now allows you to hire local professionals like chefs, personal trainers, photographers and makeup artists.

Major tourist destinations are already seeing distressingly low foreign tourists thanks to the trade wars (and threats of war-wars) that the U.S. government is waging, and we’re projected to lose a total of $12.5 billion in travel revenue. That’s a seven percent drop from last year, and a whopping 22 percent drop from 2019. 

Airports that serve foreign tourists visiting Disney parks and the Grand Canyon saw dips in British and South Korean travelers of 15 percent, a 24 percent drop from Spain, a 28 percent drop from Germany and a 33 percent drop from Ireland.

Instead of “I’ve fallen and I can’t up”-style Life Alert systems, the next generation of tech to make you feel a little less scared for your aging parents is eldercare robots. The Elderly Bodily Assistance robot (or E-BAR) is capable of helping old folks sit and stand, and can hypothetically catch them if they fall.

An Austrian mountaineer believes he can climb Everest in a week instead of the usual 40 days by breathing xenon, which (according to limited studies) boosts red blood cell growth and lowers the risk of altitude sickness.

When asked if he’d vaccinate a new baby for measles, he waffled quite a lot for a guy who’s the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, and said, “My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant, I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.”

Cosigned.

While the NBA draft is overseen by independent accounting firm Ernst & Young, people are skeptical that the Dallas Mavericks legitimately won the lotto for the number one overall pick, when they had just a 1.8 percent chance of doing so. Skeptics believe it was a reward for their otherwise baffling move to trade Luka Dončić to the Lakers mid-season.

Flamingos use a special combination of bill chattering and foot stomping to create tiny tornados to catch their prey.

Instead of making air travel more affordable and comfortable for regular people, they’re making it more expensive and insane for the obscenely rich. They’ve added a new super-premium tier that gives rich jag-offs noise-canceling headphones, caviar and fancy pajamas.

An international organization dedicated to fighting light pollution has named Teton County, Wyoming the first International Dark Sky Community in the world.

Norwegian researchers have noticed that a herring spawning ground has spontaneously shifted over 500 miles. Spawning locations are passed down through the generations via social learning, and scientists believe what they’re seeing is some kind of collective memory loss.