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If snakes make you squeamish, you’re going to want to stop reading right now. 

Okay, don’t say we didn’t warn you. 

On Imgur, a mesmerizing gif of five snakes is, pardon the pun, snaking its way to the top spot on the image sharing platform. In the gif, each snake is confined by a set of walls with a different width, which makes the creatures slither in distinctly different patterns. 

Here’s a look.

This gif actually comes from this 2013 video,”Video for walking snakes between walls with different width.” The snakes were part of a study from the scientific journal “Interface,” which examined the “wave-like shape” of each snake under certain circumstances. You can check out that whole study here. 

Even if you’re not interested in the science behind it, the gif is still totally mesmerizing. Though, we’re not quite sure how mesmerized the snakes were. 

 You can watch the whole video here or below. 

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In the future, we’ll have so much more space in our homes.

No televisions means no entertainment centers. No computers means no large desktop towers, no desks overtaken by iMacs. 

This future is closer than you think, thanks to products like Microsoft’s HoloLens: a “mixed reality” headset that projects entertainment, as well as standard computer stuff like web browsing, into your field of vision.

No screen. No projector. Just a headset. This is HoloLens:

Looks kinda goofy, right? Yeah, agreed. But this is what it can do!

Yes, that is Netflix floating in space, on as large a screen as you’re capable of seeing in your scope of vision. This is the future of entertainment. And it’s already here.

Microsoft’s HoloLens is already in some homes:

There’s more than just a floating game of “Candy Crush” in this image. Do you see the rest of the platform floating nearby?

In another use case, HoloLens projects a virtual keyboard that doubles as a dictation service for search.

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Restaurant ratings based on numbers or stars often don’t tell the full story. 

That’s why Bo Peabody, a venture capitalist and co-owner of restaurants Mezze and Allium in Massachusetts, decided to create Renzell, a data-driven app that creates restaurant reviews with surveys and algorithms. 

The app focuses on eight different aspects of the dining experience: cocktails, design, food, hospitality, service, value, vibe, and wine or sake selections.

Each restaurant is reviewed by approved Renzell members, who must complete a 75-question survey addressing everything from the taste of the food to the comfort of the chairs. 

Once the survey is completed, the results are sent directly to the restaurants.

Peabody told Business Insider he was “frustrated as an operator of restaurants that none of the review sources are transparent with them … if you’re honest with the restaurants, they can get better to improve the entire guest experience.”

Currently available only in New York City (though they plan to expand to Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles by 2018) Renzell includes data-driven reviews of 54 restaurants. When deciding which restaurants to include, the Renzell team looked at qualities like its overall reputation, beverage programs, as well as its inclusion on lists by The New York Times, New York magazine, Zagat, and others. 

They’ll be adding more restaurants to the mix every September, though Peabody said there will never be more than 100 reviewed restaurants in each of their markets.  

As a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Peabody understands the importance of data. In the ’90s, he built a web hosting site called Tripod, which he eventually sold to Lycos for a reported $58 million. He also created Everyday Health, VoodooVox, Health Guru, and UplayMe. 

He says that Renzell fills a gap in the restaurant review space. While Michelin reviewers are a small and somewhat subjective group, Yelp is a huge pool of people that may write a review after only going to a restaurant one time.

The Renzell team focused on interviewing potential members who he says lead the “luxury restaurant lifestyle,” regularly eating at upscale restaurants and staying in tune with the different elements of the dining experience. New reviewers have to be referred by current members. 

“It’s going to be like the culinary version of SoHo House, where the club access becomes access to curated restaurant events,” Peabody said.

There are currently about 150 members, and more are being added all of the time. 

People can apply for membership through Renzell’s site. They’ll have to go through a short application process, which will verify that they have experience eating at high-end restaurants and that they are not affiliated with any restaurant media.

Though the membership is free for now, starting in the spring, it’ll cost between $250 and $500. In addition to restaurant reviews, that fee will also include a subscription to Renzell’s quarterly magazine, invitations to curated events, and special gifts from the eateries.

SEE ALSO: The best New York City restaurant for every type of cuisine

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Move over JDate, there’s a new niche dating site in town: MouseMingle.com is made exclusively for single Disney fans looking for love.

The site debuted on December 1. A welcoming homepage reads: “Find YOUR Mickey or Minnie … MouseMingle.com is the place to connect people who love Disney and who want that same magic in their relationship.”

Los Angeles Magazine spoke with the site’s creator, David Tavres about the impotus for MouseMingle. “I’m not the guy who hits on women at the [Disney] parks, and there’s no flag that says, ‘Hey I’m single,’” Tavres said. “I found it hard to find women who were as interested in Disney as I am.” 

The site is free to browse, but requires a membership payment of $12.55 if you want to contact a fellow fan. As Los Angeles Magazine points out, the 55 is a nod to the year the original Disneyland park opened, 1955.

Browsing the photos, you can see many MouseMinglers are already sharing pictures of themselves, usually posing in one of the various Disney parks. Some Disney employees seem to also be active, posting images of themselves in their Disney work uniforms.

The site prompts newly registered users to indicate whether they’re in the market for a “Park Pal,” friendship, dating, or marriage. You can also indicated which Disney park is closest to you, and whether or not you hold an annual pass. 

But Mouse Mingle’s homepage indicates proximity to a park is not a requirement. “There are fans everywhere who want to find someone to share their Disney passions with.” Someday, your prince (or princess) will come.

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NOW WATCH: Disney’s plans for a new ‘Star Wars’ amusement park look like nothing you’ve ever seen

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Some kids just snap under the pressure of tests and homework. 

Just take the following 24 answers that range from sassy to the unintentionally inappropriate.

We browsed Reddit and Imgur for even more popular posts about children’s homework and test answers gone awry. 

As always, we can’t guarantee all of these are genuine, but they’re totally entertaining nonetheless.

This kid speaks for all of us.

Source: GoodbyeGraceful/Reddit

“Red solo cup.”

Source: fnsteffen/Reddit

“I had to clarify what my son drew on his homework,” this Reddit user said. Scissors.

Source: jde824/Reddit

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With only a handful of dates left on her marathon world tour for “1989,” Taylor Swift gave her crew a few days off.

But in typical Swift fashion, she went big, and booked an entire island near the Great Barrier Reef.

In an Instagram post, Swift said she took 125 crew members on a vacation to Qualia, a luxury resort on the privately owned Hamilton Island in Australia. While Aussie media went into a tizzy over reports that she’d booked the resort for her birthday party, Swift confirmed that it was for her crew.

On Instagram she thanked the people “who work tirelessly to make sure the 1989 World Tour stage gets built, the lights are on, the costumes are made, the guitars are tuned, and the show goes on.”

The crew has put on 79 concerts in 207 days. The tour is on pace to gross around $200 million.

Story by Tony Manfred and editing by Carl Mueller

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SEE ALSO: Taylor Swift gave a 12-year-old superfan who’s losing her hearing the surprise of a lifetime

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At today’s Microsoft shareholder meeting, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked about how Windows 10 has the potential to become the hub of a connected home, in response to an investor question.

And Nadella says that the Microsoft Xbox One video game console is a big part of those efforts, given its central status right in customers’ living rooms.

“The Xbox is just another Windows computer,” Nadella says.

It’s a sticky position from Nadella — Microsoft’s official party line is that while it’s moving the Xbox closer and closer in to the world of Windows 10, it’s still a dedicated games console and a different beast entirely. The goal is to distance itself from both the expectations and the baggage of the PC. 

The overall thinking in regards to the Xbox and the smarthome here, Nadella says, is that Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 onto everything, from laptops and desktops to tablets to, eventually, connected home devices.

Microsoft even has a special, low-overhead version of Windows 10 designed exactly for smart appliances.

Meanwhile, the Xbox One got an update in November 2015 that put a specialized version of Windows 10 at the core, hence Nadella’s comments.

Eventually, Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant, which is included with all consumer versions of Windows 10, will become the speech interface you use to control your Windows-powered smart devices and entertainment alike, kind of like what Amazon does with its Echo. 

The Xbox One is getting Cortana in an update early next year, putting it in a good position to be the point of interface between you and your smart stuff.

Nadella’s comments reveal a fundamental truth behind the situation: The Xbox is closer to a cheap Windows computer than ever before. It’s even getting the Windows Store app market some time next year, though the details remain hazy. 

Microsoft has been trying for decades to get a Windows computer into the living room. Now, not only does it seem like Microsoft finally succeeded — we’ve learned a little bit about what the endgame might be. 

SEE ALSO: Microsoft explains where the Xbox falls into CEO Satya Nadella’s master plan

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Why is it that we’re often drawn to the biggest price tags, and tend to scoff at things with small ones?

“In assessing what material things are important and worth paying attention to, we’re oddly prejudiced against cheapness, and frustratingly drawn to the expensive, for reasons that don’t necessarily stand up to examination,” explains The School of Life in its mini documentary, “Why We Hate Cheap Things.”

There are both historical and psychological explanations for why we dismiss cheap things. Here’s the gist:

SEE ALSO: 15 things you’re better off buying used

We associate cheap prices with a lack of value.

“When we have to pay a lot for something nice, we appreciate it to the full,” explains The School of Life. “Yet as its price in the market falls, passion has a habit of fading away.” 

The danger in this ingrained association of cheap prices with lack of value is that we end up overlooking, or losing appreciation for, things that are low cost but truly have value.

Take the example of the pineapple, which Christopher Columbus first brought back to Europe from the Americas. At the time, the fruit was extremely hard to transport and expensive to grow, so only royalty could afford to eat them — a single fruit sold for today’s equivalent of £5,000 (or about $7,500 at today’s exchange rates). It was so revered that temples were built in its honor, reports The School of Life.

Today, the pineapple looks and tastes the exact same, yet you can buy one for a mere $3, thanks to advances in technology and its accessibility. “Now, it’s one of the world’s least glamorous fruits. The pineapple itself hasn’t changed, only our attitude to it has,” explains The School of Life.

For most of history, there truly was a strong correlation between cost and value.

We tend to associate cheap prices and lack of value because for a while, the expensive products were indeed the better products.

“The higher the price, the better things tended to be, because there was simply no way both for prices to be low and quality high,” explains The School of Life. “Everything had to be made by hand, by expensively trained artisans with raw materials that were immensely difficult to transport.”

The Industrial Revolution changed things.

The relationship between price and value held true until the end of the 18th century, with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, when we figured out how to make high quality products at cheap prices, thanks to advances in technology.

“However, despite the greatness of these efforts, instead of making wonderful experiences universally available, industrialization has inadvertently produced a different effect,” explains The School of Life. “It seemed to rob certain experiences of their loveliness, interest, and worth.”

Today, society essentially disallows us from getting excited over cheap things. It would be considered strange to get hyped over a $3 carton of eggs from a chicken, yet we’re allowed to get giddy over caviar — a different type of egg — because of its price tag.

“We’ve been looking at prices in the wrong way,” argues The School of Life. “We’ve allowed them to set how much excitement we’re allowed to have in given areas, but prices were never meant to be like this. We’re breathing too much life into them, and therefore dulling too many of our responses to the inexpensive world. We are already a good deal richer than we are encouraged to think we are.”

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HSBC laid off staff within its London-based global marketing department on Wednesday, including the marketer leading the division.

Among those out is Amanda Rendle, the bank’s global head of marketing for commercial banking, global banking, and markets, a source told Business Insider. She had been with HSBC for 15 years.

Around half a dozen staff within the marketing department have been laid off in London and there’s the potential that more roles will be cut in the various teams within the group marketing division’s global offices as HSBC looks to cut costs, our source said.

HSBC’s chief marketing officer Chris Clark is not affected by the changes.

HSBC told Business Insider it does not comment on the status of its employees.

The global marketing department had only recently restructured to create a “strong global function” alongside its local teams in six markets, Rendle told Campaign Magazine back in September.

In June, HSBC said it would eliminate up to 50,000 jobs as part of plans to refocus on Asia and save up to $5 billion in annual costs by 2017. Banks are also often known to lay off staff at the year-end anyway in a bid to cut costs and breathe new life into their organizations the following year.

The bank has faced a number of perception challenges in recent months, including being hit with separate multi-million dollar fines over money laundering in its Swiss banking arm, mis-selling its consumer banking products, and for Libor rate-fixing.

Rendle told Marketing Magazine in July that through marketing, HSBC was looking to take the brand back to its 150-year-old roots: “I think from the banking crisis a lot of banking brands have had to go back and look at their purpose and look at what they are there for. They have to go back to customers and say ‘this is what we are here for and we’re going to re-orchestrate the business to be for the customer.'”

Here’s HSBC’s most recent TV ad released last month, created by London-based ad agency JWT, which is responsible for the bank’s brand advertising activity:

Last month HSBC announced its third quarter results, which saw it report a 32% pre-tax profit hike, partly because it is getting fined less. However, its revenues were hit by a slowdown in Chinese economic growth.

HSBC has been warning the market for the last six months that it is on the cusp of relocating its London headquarters, due to constantly changing regulations in the City — a move backed by some of its most prominent shareholders and one that will no likely see more disruption within the marketing division.

SEE ALSO: Facebook has poached a senior Microsoft exec to lead its marketing in Europe

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Real-estate mogul Donald Trump is furiously defending his claim that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims celebrated in New Jersey as the World Trade Center buildings collapsed on September 11, 2001.

But the sources Trump and his campaign are citing as evidence are pushing back.

On Monday, Trump tweeted a link to a years-old video of Curtis Sliwa, an anti-crime activist and local media personality, saying that people had called his show about the supposed Muslim celebrations.

“Good job Curtis,” Trump wrote, adding that the media fact-checkers who disputed his claim should send their apologies to his Twitter account.

Sliwa responded by accusing Trump of doctoring the video of him discussing the attack. Sliwa said the full video actually suggested that there weren’t “thousands and thousands” of people partying in New Jersey as the towers went down.

“It was just a dozen teenagers,” Sliwa told MTV News.

MTV News once did a detailed investigation on the Muslim-celebration rumors and only found evidence of a small number of kids running amok after being let out early from school.

“Quickly the adults came out, they disciplined them, they took them back into their homes,” Sliwa said. “There was no repetition, no continuation thereafter.”

Sliwa also demanded Trump apologize for taking his comments out of context:

On Tuesday, several Trump campaign accounts touted another piece of supposed evidence backing up Trump’s claim about the World Trade Center attacks: an old CBS story that addressed allegations of eight people celebrating the attack.

Trump campaign adviser Dan Scavino said the report proved Trump “100% correct.”

But the CBS reporter who was apparently quoted in the story, Pablo Guzmán, fired off a flurry of tweets at Scavino saying that his report was being misinterpreted. (A CBS News report confirmed the authenticity of Guzmán’s Twitter account.)

“There were many such [anecdotes] circulating then. I went on air when law enforcement sources told me might be something,” Guzmán wrote. “As I reported, my ‘source’ — actually, from Jersey City [Police Department], and also Port Authority [Police Department] — were told eight people seen.”

In additional tweets, Guzmán stressed that the eight people who were being investigated was a far cry from the “thousands” claimed by Trump.

“Eight cheering is 8 too many. But not ‘thousands.’ And disgusted Muslims also called police about people on roofs,” he continued. “Real life not usually black or white. Real life is complicated. Telling the truth can get difficult. But if you don’t follow an agenda, it can get done.”

A wave of media fact-checkers have disputed Trump’s claim about September 11 since he first made it at a November campaign rally while making the case for surveilling mosques. But Trump has repeated the claim time and time again, even getting into an especially nasty spat with a New York Times reporter who said Trump was incorrect to cite his own years-old report.

SEE ALSO: Donald Trump declares massive victory on his widely disputed claim about 9/11

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