You can get more than just beer soft serve ice cream at the Minnesota State Fair. There is also an art show using crops as the medium. Minnesota Public Radio reports that 451 people entered works, my favorite of which is this piece by Susan Du. It's a parody of Francisco Goya's famous painting Saturn Devouring His Son.

Many of the submitted works are seed mosaic parodies of other famous works of art, notably Magritte's Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe. Others are reminisces of icons of Minnesotan life. You can view them at Minnesota Public Radio.

-via Hegelian vs. Predator | Photo: /u/cybercuzco

A guy in China is testing the explosive power of different levels of firecrackers by placing them under a cooking pot and igniting them. He starts with the least powerful firecracker he has, which is still enough to lift the pot off the ground. As they increasingly get bigger, the pot flies to amazing heights. Do not try this at home! It appears quite dangerous, although if you're not in China, you probably can't get this variety of firecrackers.

He's purportedly testing the firecrackers, but I'm most impressed with the pot. How heavy is that thing? What is it made of? It goes to ridiculous heights before showing even the slightest dent. Up until the last explosion, it's only slightly damaged by falling, not from the fireworks. Yeah, that last one was a doozy, and the only one that made him walk any distance to retrieve the pot. -via Laughing Squid 

Here's a creepy and salacious love story that surely would have gone viral on the internet, if it hadn't happened in 1911. A pretty young woman named Marie Bondi developed a crush on the local undertaker. Leonardo Grasso was married, however, so how was she to get his attention discreetly? Her solution was to dress as a man and apply for a job as the undertaker's assistant. She not only got the job, but Grasso's attention, as he became close with his assistant "Mike." 

Shielded by the disguise, the two weren't particularly discreet. The affair was uncovered when a client caught the couple displaying affection right there in the funeral home in a room with a row of coffins. Mrs. Grasso had "Mike" arrested for masquerading as a man, which was apparently against the law at the time. As a result, Bondi went back to dressing as a woman, but that didn't stop her affair with Grasso. Read how all these shenanigans played out at Strange Company. 

The 61st Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition received more than 60,000 entries from 117 countries this year. The record number of entries has been winnowed down to the top 100 photos, which will all be a part of the annual exhibit at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, UK. The top winners will be announced on October 14. The museum exhibit will run from October 17 through July 12 of next year. 

Some of the top 100 images have been released for our enjoyment, six of them in the collection above. My favorite is the last one, featuring bats leaving a historical ruin. Photographer Sitaram Raul sat in total darkness in Banda, Maharashtra, India, aiming his camera at where he thought the bats might appear. He got pooped on, but also got some great pictures. Read the stories behind these photos and more, 16 in all, at BBC.  -via Damn Interesting 

Healthy ecosystems maintain a delicate balance of resources, plants, and animals. Remove one part of the food chain, and you get cascading effects that throw the balance off, and it could take many years to fix it even if we recognize the problem and can do something about it. Bringing in an invasive species can have the same devastating effect on a fragile ecosystem- just ask Australians about their rabbits and cane toads. That scenario is playing out now in the savannas of Kenya. The arrival of the big-headed ant (Pheidole megacephala) some twenty years ago has changed the diet of the lions who live there- they are eating more water buffalo and fewer zebras. It's a chain reaction that involves several other species along the way, and as the story is still playing out, we don't know how it will end, or how other species will be affected. I'm pulling for the lions, in any case.

The Minnesota State Fair opened on August 21 and will continue through Labor Day. Among the vendors is West End Brews, a local brewery that is offering a wide variety of intoxicating beverages, including a soft serve version of the locally-produced Pryes Brewing Royal Raspberry Sour Ale.

Charlie Burrows, the owner of the stand, talked with local news site Bring Me the News. It reports that Burrows worked with Pyres to create a recipe that would mix with the beer to create a freezable slush. The result has been a hit with fairgoers, so he plans to continue to develop the project in time for the fair next year.

-via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: Dustin Nelson

Way back when, people could gauge the passage of time by seeing how far a candle burned down. This has nothing to do with that- it has to do with the flicker of the flame. Candlemakers spent hundreds or even thousands of years getting rid of the flicker because it was annoying in your only light source. Now we are trying to engineer LED candles to mimic the flicker because people like it. So now wax candles are mostly flicker-free, but you can bring it back by tying three candles together.

By measuring the flicker of such candles with modern high-tech instruments, we've determined that candles flicker at 9.9 Hz, which is roughly one tenth of a second. With a lot of measuring equipment and an awful lot of candles, one could build a clock out of such knowledge. Read how this was determined at Tim's Blog. 

This project is an entry into HackaDay's One Hertz Challenge, in which entrants design a device that measures time in 1 Hz (one second) increments. If you are so inclined, you can read 116 entries so far.  -via Metafilter

The question is: how many sequels can a franchise have before it runs out of steam? The answer: not this many. Jurassic World Rebirth is the seventh movie in the Jurassic Park franchise. It made a ton of money, but at this point, going to a Jurassic movie is a habit. The 1993 movie Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a book by Michael  Crichton, was a wonderfully fresh idea, but you'd think by now this fictional world would have learned its lesson about dinosaurs. But no, they make the same mistakes over and over. What's different about Jurassic World Rebirth is that the dinos are mutants. You get the idea that they want to avoid the fate of the first movie in which we learned over the subsequent 30 years that dinosaurs didn't look like that. Not that it makes any difference to the audience; the plot is the same. Screen Junkies has fun tearing Jurassic World Rebirth apart. 

Documented history goes back a lot further than science. We have written chronicles of dates when people were surprised that the sky grew black and the sun didn't shine. Oh yeah, they knew weather, but some dark days couldn't be explained by storms. In October of 1762, the skies over Detroit turned black and a sulfurous rain fell that was black even when it hit the ground. There was no industrial pollution back then, so what was it? We don't know to this day. One day in 1857, the skies over Baghdad turned black for a short time, then red, with red sand falling over the town. In 1938, skies over Siberia turned black. No rain this time, but accounts from that day tell us that radio signals could not get in or out in the region.  

Many historical accounts of daytime darkness can be explained now as solar eclipses or volcanic clouds. But those weren't the explanation for any of the eight mysterious dark days on this list. A couple can be explained by rare weather phenomena, but most have no definitive cause to this day. Read about eight incidents of daytime darkness at Mental Floss. 

I saw the latest update video on Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot and found it a bit underwhelming. We've followed Atlas for years, and he's learned how to tidy up around the factory. Meanwhile, we've been watching robots in a kickboxing tournament. So I skipped it. This particular video is about a collaboration between Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute, which is profoundly interesting if you own a factory, or if you work at a Toyota factory and could be replaced by a robot, but not so much to the general public. 

But apparently I wasn't the only one who found it a bit ho-hum. YouTuber dhant122 saw that what the video lacked was an inner monologue, or an exterior monologue, for that matter. So he fixed it. Now Atlas is the factory worker facing constant drudgery that's made worse by his nemesis Tom, who is quite the work bully. -via Laughing Squid 

In 1938, airplanes were still a novelty to most Americans, the Great Depression was still in full swing, and President Roosevelt was watching events in Europe that would lead to another war. Although it would be years before America joined in, he knew the US had to be ready. Roosevelt asked for 10,000 airplanes; congress approved only half as many. But within a couple of years, it seemed inevitable that the US Army Air Corps would need exponentially more. The government enlisted the Ford automotive company to make airplane parts, but when Ford executives saw how slowly airplanes were built, they went all in on making them entirely. After all, they were famous for churning out cars fast on an assembly line. Planes, however, would need a bigger line.   

In 1941, Ford built the Willow Run plant in Detroit to build B-24 Liberators. At the time, it was the largest factory in the world, with an assembly line over a mile long. They also built a runway to test the planes. With thousands of workers at a time, the plant produced an entire B-24 in little over an hour, 248 of them in one month! Read how the Willow Run plant helped to win World War II at Jalopnik.  

If you only watch the first five minutes of this video from Kurzgesagt, you might start to think that we should all be taking some form of amphetamine all the time. What could be better than taking a drug that helps us focus, be more productive, and deal with the mind-numbing drudgery and boredom of the modern world? Those qualities are exactly why so many people take some form of speed, both legally and illegally. Amphetamines have legitimate medical uses, like getting kids with ADHD through school. They have fueled armies in war. But there are enormous costs associated with such drugs. If we were all using them, we wouldn't be able to get along with each other, and they eventually lead to disability and death. Besides that, productivity shouldn't be the biggest goal in our lives, because society is about more than winners and losers. The video is 9:45; the rest is ads. 

As we've previously noted, Indian weddings can be grand spectacles--even if there isn't a couple getting married.

These weddings almost seem competitive with couples attempting to outdo each other with original pagentry. The Instagram photography account shared this video of a groom named Fenil arriving in the greatest of all wedding vehicles: a Batmobile. It is, specifically, the tumbler Batmobile that appeared in The Dark Knight trilogy.

Fenil and his clearly very lucky bride create a dramatic impression among the innumerable wedding guests. Let us hope that he and his bride were able to depart the scene in the Batmobile, too.

-via Dave Barry

Master LEGO artist Neil Snowball composed this shirt entirely out of LEGO supplies, including approximately 25,000 bricks. How is it flexible? With the aid of 210 LEGO nets.

Joshua Hanlon of the Beyond the Brick fan community put on the shirt, which seems remarkably sturdy. The design is a massively expanded version of a treasured minifig torso. Hanlon says that it's comfortable, although it does weigh about 30 pounds.

-via The Awesomer

If you were raised eating instant mashed potatoes, you might think that is what mashed potatoes are supposed to taste like. But once you've had freshly-mashed potatoes with some butter and cream and a little salt, it's hard to go back to the dehydrated stuff. Midcentury cooks relied on instant mashed potatoes (IMP) because they were fast and easy and didn't spoil. And to be honest, those were reasons why IMP was invented. 

That was hundreds of years ago, when the Andean communities of South America took the liquid out of potatoes to make them last forever, or at least during hard times. Those freeze-dried taters called chuño were also crucial for an army on the move as the Incan Empire expanded. They didn't taste like much, but they filled a warrior's stomach and weren't too heavy to carry. The US Army developed IMP for World War II for the same reasons. And that was the beginning of the consumer market for IMP, although they had to be improved before veterans would touch them. 

Once you start thinking about instant mashed potatoes, you realize that a lot of modern life has followed the same path. Take something good and "improve" it by making it more convenient, and in the process, it loses the qualities that made us like it in the first place. Read about instant mashed potatoes and the ways they mirror modern society at Duck Soup. -via Nag on the Lake