The What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) has returned to form with a theoretical question that would surely lead to the death of everyone on this planet. Humans have learned to concentrate light into a small space to produce lasers, which can be very dangerous depending on their power. What if the sun did that, with all its power? What if the star concentrated all its light and heat into a single laser beam the diameter of, say, a meter? As you might guess, this is not good. Yet how each of us would die depends on where you are when it happens, and what would happen to the planet itself might surprise you. 

All in all, we would prefer the sun to stay the way it is, radiating heat and light in all directions, and sending us just the right amount to power life on earth.  

The French king Charles VI was a young and well-liked ruler, but in his early twenties began to show signs of mental illness, possibly schizophrenia. His physician advised keeping his stress level low, and keeping him amused. And so a wedding party in the year 1393 for one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting was turned into a project to raise the king's spirits.  

The most anticipated entertainment at the ball was a dance by six men in elaborate costumes portraying wood savages, a sort of wild men. They were covered with fur made of flax, affixed to a fabric coated with resin. They also wore masks to conceal their identities. One of the dancers was the king himself, but few knew that, nor which one he was. The dance was going over well until the king's drunk brother brought a torch near their faces to see who they were. The highly flammable costumes ignited, and the party was over. One of the dancers burned to death that night, while three lingered in agony for days until they, too, died. Read about the disastrous Ball of the Burning Men at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Philippe de Mazerolles) 

Stress is the body's natural reaction to changing conditions that we need to react to. It puts our bodies into "fight or flight" mode by releasing hormones that temporarily grant us the power to protect ourselves or our loved ones. That's all well and good when you are being confronted by a man-eating tiger or a forest fire, but our modern world doesn't work like that. We are safe from tigers, but still confront threats that cause stress. The problem is that modern stressors are constantly with us, and they are things we can't really do much about. Why is my boss mad? Why is my spouse mad? Will I be able to pay the bills? Will my child come home safely? Why are people driving so crazy? Is society collapsing? Living in a chronic state of stress is unnatural, and can take a toll on our health. Kurzgesagt explains the physiological effects of stress, how we can mitigate the damage. -via Laughing Squid 

Babycenter has released their list of the top baby names for 2025. The top ten names for boys and girls are listed above. They look familiar, so what's different from last year? Not much. For boys, Luca replaced Leo at number 10, and Levi and Lucas switched spots. For girls, Eliana replaced Ava at number seven, and the celestial Aurora replaced the celestial Luna -and the rankings changed a little. But this is the fifth year in a row that Olivia is the most popular name for girls. 

It's outside of the top ten that names get more interesting. There is a lot more movement in name rankings for girls, as usual, and quite a few new names appear on the top 100, like Catalina, Juniper, and Emersyn. Some old names are gaining popularity again, like Josephine and Vivian. See the top 100 names for both boys and girls in 2025 in the expanded list at Babycenter. 

And where are these names coming from? TV is a big influence, but they are also coming from sports, music, and literature. Check out the trends that may influence the popularity of baby names of 2026 in this article. 

Ignacia Fernández entered the Miss World Chile beauty pageant and went viral for her talent competition performance. While the majority of contestants who must participate in a talent competition choose to sing, Fernández was already a professional singer, having founded the progressive death metal band DECESSUS in 2020. She, of course, showcased one of their original songs at the pageant, accompanied by DECESSUS guitarist Carlos Palma. You can imagine that the judges weren't quite ready for that. However, they were impressed by her performance, which launched Fernández into the top 20 contestants.  

Last night, Fernández was crowned Miss World Chile, and will go on to represent Chile at the Miss World competition in Thailand later this month. You can hear more DECESSUS songs at their YouTube channel. And in case you are wondering, Fernández works with a vocal coach to protect her voice from death metal damage. -via Metafilter, where there's a serious discussion about what this kind of singing does to one's vocal chords.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who return their shopping carts to a store or cart corral, and those who don't. There's the same sort of dichotomy among people who never use turn signals or who stand in doorways, or any number of behaviors that separate those who consider others and those who don't. The shopping cart thing is one we see most often, because these people leave behind evidence. 

Hannah B. Waldfogel did some research into shopping cart behavior, which consisted of analyzing 564 videos posted by Cart Narcs in which people abandoned a shopping cart improperly and were then confronted about it. As you would guess, many were not happy about the confrontation and went into road rage mode. But not all. Waldfogel sorted out the types of responses, and the various excuses they gave. Then she offers some reasons why people develop a habit of abandoning shopping carts, and some ways that stores -and society- can encourage them to start doing the right thing. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Curlyrnd) 

When we first see a holodeck on the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data uses it to create a beautiful forest. We later see it in the franchise for recreational and training purposes. And let's not mention Reginald Barclay's unique and private uses for the holographic technology.

Adam Schwartz, a YouTuber who makes videos that lampoon Star Trek, gently suggests that "what happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck." He knows exactly how he would use it if granted sufficient privacy and confidentiality.

Where is your mind going? No, that's not what Schwartz has in mind for his holodeck time.

-via reddit

The annual Farmer's Almanac, which provided readers with weather predictions and tips for cooking, gardening, and home medical remedies, will cease publication in 2026 and its website will shut down in December of that year. The Hill reports that this icon of Americana was first published in 1818. It has financially struggled for years and is no longer a viable enterprise.

NiemanLab notes that the Farmer's Almanac is distinct from the Old Farmer's Almanac, which appears in calendar format and provides weather predictions. That publication, which first appeared in 1792, will continue to provide people with occasionally accurate weather forecasts.

-via Marginal Revolution

On November 10th, 1975, a sudden storm blew over Lake Superior, with gale force winds and 60-foot waves. The freighter named the Edmund Fitzgerald, with a crew of 29, was caught in the confluence of three storms and sank, with no survivors. The Great Lakes are not just lakes, they are more like inland seas, and are more dangerous than oceans due to their geography. But they are also useful transportation for industry. The Edmund Fitzgerald is only one of many tragic shipwrecks on the Great Lakes (6000 in the previous century), but the ship was notable as the best ship on the lakes long before the wreck, and the ship’s captain, Ernest McSorley, was a legend in the industry. The run launched on November 9th was to be his last before retirement. Then the haunting song by Gordon Lightfoot that came out in 1976 made the Edmund Fitzgerald a household name.  

Read an interview with John U. Bacon, author of the book The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald about what we know and don't know about that shipwreck, including some stories of crew members and their families, at Smithsonian. 

Movie plots are usually different from the books or other source material they are made from. First off, they have to be made shorter; after all, few bestsellers can be read in two hours or less. But the story is also sometimes changed to give it a happy ending, which these days is considered crucial for box office success. Neither Gone With The Wind nor Casablanca had a happy ending, but both films did okay. Those movies weren't screened for focus groups before release. If a focus group of typical movie viewers doesn't like something about a movie, it can be changed by deleting scenes or even filming reshoots to change the story. 

Adding a happy ending isn't the only reason movies get changed. Sometimes scenes are deleted before they are even shot. Mental Floss looks at seven films you know and love and how and why they were completely changed from the original plan. 

Ricardo Daniel de Paula is an engineer. But like every working person in the world, he's actually into sales. He's selling himself to prospective employers and this business card is an ingenious way to immediately stand out among his competitors in the job market as an inventive and skilled engineer.

At Hack A Day, de Paula describes how he designed and built this PCB board with a USB-C interface that turns this business card into a peripheral keyboard. It demonstrates capacitive touch technology, which is one of de Paula's specialties, and is inexpensive enough that, in limited numbers, de Paula can give it away.

-via Nag on the Lake

Three astronauts were supposed to return to earth this week from China’s Tiangong space station, but their homecoming was delayed because a piece of space junk hit the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft they were to use. They will eventually take another spacecraft home, but the incident highlights how crowded space has become. Well, "space" is pretty big, but most human space activity occurs in low-Earth orbit (LEO), which is where satellites operate. There have been discarded objects in orbit since space flight commenced, but it is growing quickly with the proliferation of multiple, sometimes hundreds, of satellites at a time, such as the Starlink system. 

Space stations, spacecraft, and satellites are now equipped to perform avoidance maneuvers, but with an estimated 45,000 pieces of plastic and metal moving at up to 27,000 kilometers per hour, incidences like the damage to Shenzhou 20 will happen more often. There is also the danger of the Kessler syndrome, in which colliding space junk sets off a chain reaction, leading to massive satellite outages and exponentially more space junk. Read about the latest incident and the growing threat of space junk at Scientific American or at the Internet Archive.  -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: xkcd) 

The 1960 film The Time Machine was based on H.G. Wells' 1895 story of the same name. If you were a child when you first saw it, you were so wrapped up in the story that you didn't think about the spectacular effects. If you were an adult, you may have dismissed the effects as old-fashioned, but they were way ahead of their time in 1960. You may be surprised to learn that The Time Machine was made on a shoestring budget, and what effects were pulled off were a result of hard work and clever workarounds. Parts of the story itself were reworked from the original, because in 1960 we had the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over us, adding a terrifying taste of realism to the apocalyptic storyline. 

There were 65 years between the published story and the movie. Now the movie itself is 65 years old, which seems weird for a movie set in the Victorian era about time travel that spans close to a million years. And in case you now want to see the entire movie again, it's available for free at YouTube. 

A good dinner out with friends can be a captivating experience. Choose the right venue for your meal, final or otherwise. Consider some of these restaraunts built out of jails and rounded up by The Takeout.

Among them is the Old Jailhouse of Sanford, Florida. As the name indicates, the restaurant directly markets itself after the former use of the building. Until 1959, it was the local lockup. Now it offers traditional Southern food.

The menu doesn't mention boiled eggs. I think the managers should offer a meal of 50 of them that are free if you can eat them within an hour without throwing up.

Here's a game in which you can compete with your friends (or enemies) and they'll never even know it. Pickaball is an animated digital pinball machine with no flipper controls, so I guess it's really a ball run. Name the balls in the upper right with a comma between each. It starts you out with three balls, but you can add a bunch of names if you like. 

I don't know how the initial rankings are determined, although I'd guess it's random. They change quickly as the balls fall, and the list keeps up with who gets through the finish line in what order. This could be a way of deciding the order of play for a game, or who has to take the trash out, or any number of decisions between a group of people. Or you can play it for fun, to see what weird icon your characters get and to root for one of them to win. Full disclosure: I played with the same three names until I finally won. -via Boing Boing