— Chase Businelle (@ChaseBusinelle) January 21, 2025
From Houston to Pensacola, the Gulf coast is experiencing rather unseasonable weather. But in the South, we just roll with it. This sentiment is especially true in southern Louisiana, which had its first blizzard warning in history.
In my lifetime, we have gone from zero people ever having been in space (as defined as 50 miles above the earth) to more than 700 people who have been up there. Who are these people? Scientific American crunched the numbers to give us some neat visualizations about space travelers. The graphic above is the latter portion of the chart that tracks the ages of people who have gone to space. When the NASA astronaut program began, all astronauts were military test pilots and those who went to space in 1961 had a median age of 30. In 2024 that median age is 50, and the age spread for flights in 2020, the beginning of space tourism, went from 18-year-old Oliver Daemon to 90-year-old William Shatner. The outlier on the left half above is when 77-year-old John Glenn returned to space in 1998.
Other graphics show us what countries astronauts came from and how they've diversified over time. Then there's a chart of every space traveler with their background, mission type, duration in space, and other information. It's fascinating to get into the details and see how space travelers have changed over time. Check it all out here. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Zane Wolf)
You may have heard that eggs are bad for you because they cause high cholesterol. That was the conventional wisdom since the 1960s, but it's far from the whole story. We've learned a lot about cholesterol since then. It's all about fats, which we need, but not a lot, and come in many different types, some more harmful than others. Then there's HDL, or good cholesterol, which counteracts LDL, or bad cholesterol, and it's hard to keep up with which is which and how to regulate them in your body.
Luckily, we have this new TED-Ed lesson to set us straight on cholesterol and how to keep our arteries in good shape. Sure, it's about what we eat, but also about a combination of foods and other lifestyle choices that all work together to keep our cholesterol at a healthy level. Put another way, cholesterol levels are another reason to exercise and eat your fruits and vegetables. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Color us impressed! Digital artist (and we suspect, also a wizard) Greg Saniatan AKA slopsmcgee combined pottery, LEGO building, and stop motion animation to create this masterpiece.
Behold, Pottery with LEGO Bricks:
If you like that, check out Saniatan's other stop motion video called Painting with LEGO, where he re-creates The Great Wave by Hokusai with LEGO:
There's a saying that goes "It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit." Sadly, in the case of Martha “Marty” Goddard, her idea would never have flown if she hadn't agreed to let others take all the credit.
In the mid-1970s, Goddard was aghast at the minuscule rate of rapes that were reported and the small fraction of those that ever made it to court. Hospitals had no training in evidence collection, and even when they did, police officers did not know how to preserve it. That changed with the introduction of the “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” which is the trademarked name of what we know now as a rape kit. It is named after Louis Vitullo, the head of the Chicago Police Department's crime lab, but the idea came from Martha Goddard. Vitullo put the kit together after he dismissed Goddard's idea and threw her out of his office.
Goddard not only invented the kit, but also raised the money to produce it, and designed and taught training programs for using it. Read about the invention of the rape kit and the woman who made it work at the Atlantic. -via Kottke
(Image credit: Vartika Sharma)
We have always loved watching tires rolling around on their own, especially downhill where they can get up some impressive speed. This fascination even gave us a feature-length movie in 2011 titled Rubber. The guys from How Ridiculous had fun rolling tires down a hillside in New Zealand, and in one brief sequence, actually flew a drone through a rolling tire! They were as surprised as we are that it worked. Was it skill or just plain luck? It really doesn't matter as long as you have the footage. Still, you've got to have a bit of confidence to even attempt such a trick. That's special, but if you want more, you can see the extended sequence below.
An extended cut at only 12 minutes surprised me. I would post more of these guys' shenanigans if their videos weren't mostly around a half-hour long. A good time was had by all. -via Born in Space
Japan is rightly famous for its vending machines from which it is possible to purchase all needful things. The Swedish embassy in Tokyo decided to make use of this cultural niche by creating a vending machine that sells only Swedish products. Unseen Japan visited and photographed this wonder.
The correspondent found for sale Swedish branded teas and coffees, lingonberry jam, and canned surströmming, which is a variety of salted herring that Sweden is famous for. You can shop from it yourself in the Ikebukuro shopping district of Tokyo unless it is isekai'd.
I wonder why the sign is in English instead of Japanese or Swedish.
Food Nibbles is a British YouTuber who makes foods from unconventional sources. His playlists include foods from defunct restaurants, school lunches around the world, and the favorite foods of UK Prime Ministers.
I'm quite taken with the idea of eating foods from countries that no longer exist--at least as independent nations. First on the list is my own Texas, which was an independent republic before the United States joined it in 1845. Naturally, Food Nibbles made chicken fried steak.
For Yugoslavia, which collapsed in the early 1990s. To represent this temporarily unified nation of the south slavs, Food Nibbles selected pljeskavica, which is a beef dish.
-via Boing Boing
The unique culture of Japan stands out in many ways. One is that they have the world's most modern mass transit that is used by everyone, especially in the larger cities. Another thing is that those cities have rather compact train cars, sidewalks, passageways, elevators, and apartments in order to serve a huge number of people in the busiest parts of town. Also, Japan is unique for their obsession with kawaii characters that are used for advertising anything and everything.
Now, when humans portray these characters, the costumes are invariably wide to imply their shortness and therefore cuteness. When a mascot goes out in public, there's always the possibility of getting stuck in those narrow turnstiles and elevators. They are forbidden to come out of their costume in public, and often have to rely on the kindness of strangers to make it to work. This series of pictures (click to the right to see them all) documents the hazards of the job. -via Boing Boing
The rule of thumb on the internet these days is that half the participants don't know much at all about proper language use, and the other half are cringing at the errors. It's best for your blood pressure to let those errors slide, but it's really hard not to judge someone for making the same language mistakes that have been pointed out a million times.
Elle Cordova (previously at Neatorama) illustrates the struggle between a grammarian, who really cares about language and how it should be used, and an errorist, who superficially appears to wax eloquent but is making language errors left and right. You have to really pay attention to get all the humor out of this one, as the errorist touches on every pet peeve you can imagine. When yours shows up, you'll want to rewind and see how many others you can identify. If you can keep up will all the errors the first time through, you'll be impressed with Cordova's extensive knowledge of self-replicating language mistakes endemic to the internet. -via Everlasting Blort
Can you read the document pictured above? Around the turn of the century, many schools quit teaching children how to read and write in cursive, instead using that class time to teach typing skills. While schools are starting to go back to teaching cursive, that still leaves a generation of Americans without those skills. Since much of our history is documented in beautiful handwritten cursive script, the National Archives and Records Administration is going above and beyond to preserve, transcribe, and make accessible the documents that tell the story of America. These include letters, pension grants, land records, and diaries. They want to put a lot of American history online to prepare for America's 250th birthday next year.
So they are seeking your help. If you can read cursive handwriting, you can sign up as a volunteer for the National Archives. Work as little or as much as you like, and help make those handwritten documents accessible to everyone. Read about the project and how you can get involved at Smithsonian.
PS: I had no trouble reading the declaration, but I ran into conflicting advice on whether "National Archives" should be treated as a single entity or a plural.
Frozen Hair Round 2:
— Voicesofjake (@Fischer3Jake) January 16, 2025
(Since everyone else is posting my video on this cesspool of an app, I will too!) pic.twitter.com/LKsdySTuZV
Jake Fischer of Voicesofjake shows us both how cold it is outside and how crazy he is by letting his hair freeze. The viral "wet hair challenge" involves going outside in the freezing cold with wet hair and seeing what kind of wild shape you can achieve when your hair freezes in place. It's not for the faint-hearted. Jake went for the straight-up look, and since he has long hair, that was very far up. But think of how cold it can be on your head to wait for the hair to freeze! I'd have to say no thanks, because my hair is short and it wouldn't look much different. Also because it is currently 5° above zero (-15° Celsius) outside my house, and that's just too cold. There are some challenges that aren't worth "winning." Jake also froze his pants off, meaning they were off when he froze them. -via Laughing Squid
Dune, one of the world's best-selling sci-fi novel, was inspired by giant sand dunes here on Earth.
In the late 1950s, Frank Herbert visited the Oregon Dunes, a 40-mile long stretch of windswept sand along the coast. The coastal sand dunes had been there for 100,000 years but human development had encroached on the area and the drifting dunes were threatening to swallow houses and roads. Humanity's answer was one of the largest geo-engineering project to stop the advancing dunes:
Herbert chartered a small plane to fly over the shifting sand dunes and what he saw inspired him to write that the project was "the first enduring answer to shifting sands in all history" and was "an unsung victory in the fight of men against dunes."
The moving dunes could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways," Herbert wrote in a letter to his literary agent
I visited the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, and it was fantastic. If you're ever in the area, do check it out. No need to ride a sandworm, you can rent dune buggies and ATV from local businesses.
BTW, I'm experimenting with a free new email newsletter publication called Geeky Pop Forever - it's basically like Neatorama, but focused on geeky pop culture topics. If you like movies, comics, video games and fan art, please check it out and, hopefully, subscribe.
Image: Rebecca Kennison/Wikimedia
We've talked about viruses as being an outlier that strains the definition of life. Viruses do not have the ability to reproduce on their own, but must harness a host cell of another species to replicate. But now there's a new type of life form that is even more primitive than viruses called obelisks.
Obelisks consist of a viroid-like disc of RNA, but they do not have the protein shell that viruses have. Their genetic information is completely distinct from any known species, putting them into a unique phylogenic group. They reproduce by infecting another cell, like viruses do. They haven't yet been classified into the Tree of Life because scientists aren't really sure where they belong. But obelisks have been found in the microbiome of humans, in the digestive tract. One type of obelisks studied infects the bacteria Streptococcus sanguinis, found in human mouths. The impact of obelisks in the human biome has not been determined, but they've been there all this time and just haven't been found until recently. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Ivan N. Zheludev et al. via Cell magazine)
Don't just mow your lawn! Channel your inner artist and create a Mowna Lisa. A grassterpiece, if you will.
For 11 years running, British mowing machine manufacturer Allett has a competition where lawn care enthusiasts prove that the grass is always greener on their side of the yard.
I'm partial to the 3rd Place winner of the 2023 Allett Creative Lawn Stripes competition. It's 3D shaped cube by Tito Triana of East Sussex, UK, who wrote:
I began by measuring out a cube using stakes and string and slowly began reducing the height of cut in the surrounding areas over a 4-week period. I always enjoy the added attention the lawn needs when cutting at such low heights and was impressed with how well the grass held up with daily mowing at 8mm. The 3D elusion is a result of different heights of cut as well as tapering the design from bottom to top which was a lot harder than I initially thought to do within scale across the shape and in a way that made it look realistic.
More unbeleafably fantastic lawn art over at Allett's 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 competitions.
