One of the best foods that you can order at Chinese restaurants is steamed grass carp. Grass carps are a good choice for those who don’t like fish that much, due to their flaky meat that only has a mild taste and not that fishy.

And then there’s steamed grass crap, which I don’t recommend eating.

Image via Engrish.com

Did you know that you release up to 1.5 liters of gas everyday? Are you aware of the fact that the microorganisms in your body outnumber your own human cells 10 to 1? How much do you know about the human body?

Check out the funny and the scary facts about the human body that Cracked Plasticians and Shea compiled, over at Cracked.

(Image Credit: Cracked)

When you think about dinosaurs, does the creature's anus come to mind? It was certainly not addressed directly in Jurassic Park, a 1993 documentary about paleontological experimentation.

The anus is soft tissue, not bone, and thus unlikely to be preserved by the fossil record. But Slate author Riley Black directs us to this scientific study about the subject. Researchers Phil R. Bell, Michael Pittman, Thomas G. Kaye, and Christophe Hendrickx have carefully studied the Psittacosaurus, for which a few soft tissue samples remain preserved to modern times. They conclude that this dinosaur had a cloaca similar to that of crocodilian species. From their abstract:

Here, we describe the outer morphology of the only known non-avialan dinosaur cloaca, preserved in an exceptional specimen of the early-diverging ceratopsian dinosaur Psittacosaurus. We clarify the position of the cloaca with respect to the ischia and caudal vertebrae and document the scales immediately adjacent to the abdomen and tail. We find that the cloaca is from a near-sexually mature subadult individual and is most similar to the cloaca of crocodylians, to the exclusion of lepidosaurians and birds. 

-via Dave Barry | Image: Current Biology

You can see starfish in the ocean, but you've probably never studied a live one this closely. They have no brain, but they have five arms and a lot of "feet" on the underside of those arms. They use those feet to move around, using hydraulic engineering. Starfish also use their feet to smell. Yeah, they are weird. -via The Kid Should See This

While building this Lidl store in Dublin, Ireland, construction crews found the remains of an 11th Century house. Lidl worked with archaeologists to continue construction while also studying the site and educating the public about it. Two sections of the newly-opened store have glass floors where shoppers can watch archaeologists at work, carefully excavating and examining the remains of this Norse-Irish home.

-via Colossal

You've probably enjoyed the animated musical stylings of Bongo Cat occasionally over the past couple of years. Now you can be Bongo Cat and make your own music with this web toy. Use your keyboard to hit the various rums, or you can switch to paint or marimbas when you like. Musical talent is not included, but you might find yourself spending enough time with this toy to attempt to develop some. -via Metafilter

In Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead, and other fictional zombie worlds, the zombies are the monsters, intent of killing and devouring innocent human life. But in the original zombie folklore, the zombies themselves were the victims.

In Haitian folklore, a zombie is an animated corpse with lack of cognition or free will, whose soul is said to be imprisoned and possessed by magical means, and whose body is controlled by its master. The symbolism of slavery in this concept is impossible to ignore, shedding light on how European slave drivers, plantation owners and colonial powers used the fear of “zombification” amongst Haitian people; the fear of being trapped in their enslaved bodies forever, to discourage suicide amongst the workforce. Despite France being the first country to abolish slavery, French plantation-owners worked their African slaves so hard, the rate of death of slaves at Haiti’s Saint Domingue plantations was higher than anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. Fictional horror was born from real-life horror.

The concept of zombies was brought to the US in the 1920s through a book about Haiti, and Hollywood went to work turning the legend into a whitewashed movie monster. Read about the origin of zombies and see a documentary about them at Messy Messy Chic.

(Image credit: Jean-noël Lafargue)

Tattoos have been around for thousands of years, and the easier they become, the more people get them. In 1891, Samuel O'Reilly patented an electric tattoo machine, which led to a sharp rise in the popularity of tattoos. Soon they were flourishing on the bodies of London's upper crust. A 1907 article from The Washington Times featured an interview with a tattoo artist referred to only as South, who told tales of the kinds of tattoos he'd been doing in London. Some of his clients just wanted a nice body decoration, but others found practical uses for the ink.

Another woman, fearing the last will and testament of her husband, by which she was to inherit all his lands, tenements and other property, might be lost or destroyed by enemies, arranged with the decorative artist to reproduce the document on her back. The matter was placed in the hands of one of London’s foremost practitioners and the will was borrowed and loaned to the tattooist, in order that  he might copy the chyrography as well as the words of the testator. The document contained 500 words and several signatures and legal phrases showing it had been properly filed.

This was one of the most difficult tasks of the artist, and likewise the most painful ordeal through which any of his clients ever passed. It required a week for the document to be reproduced, and the woman was in great pain at the completion of the tattooist’s task, but now that the needle pricks have healed, the will can never be lost as long as the woman lives.

Parents tattooed their babies for identification, and old folks got inked to feel young again. Read more stories of London's tattoo craze at Strange Ago. -via Strange Company

#NightmareBeforeChristmas I, Jack the #PumpkinKing grow tired of the same old thing #HoboNickel #CoinCarving by #DavidHjHe @davidar29827307
#Film #jackskellington #Halloween #HalloweenCountdown pic.twitter.com/QVcH6t86gH

— Hobo Nickel Society (@Hobo_Nickel_Soc) October 23, 2020

The term "hobo nickel" comes from the American experience during the Great Depression, when some impoverished people carved images and designs into coins, often the soft 5-cent coin, to sell. The Hobo Nickel Society is an organization dedicated to preserving this craft and promoting its modern practitioners.

For Halloween, the society is tweeting out images of the best Halloween-themed hobo nickels.

It’s understandable to have unskippable ads on free-to-play mobile games. After all, that’s how they can earn money. But to have unskippable ads on a game that you paid for full price is not, and that’s what the NBA 2k series of games does for the last few years, with this year not being an exception.

The ads usually turn up as part of a pre-game video, and while in previous years they’ve been for brands like Converse and the TV show Snowfall, this year it’s an Oculus Quest commercial that’s got fans upset.

Fans have been and continue to be pissed every time this happens, and if you’re wondering why, it’s because this is a full-priced video game, not a free-to-play mobile title. Folks have already paid in full for the game itself, then been fleeced at every turn to spend on microtransactions, and now have to sit through an ad as well? Get outta here.

In response to the uproar, the NBA 2k21 Twitter account posted an apology on the platform.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Stevivor/ YouTube)

In this two-minute clip, Good Comparison shows us how the legendary Leonidas line from the film 300 sounds like in 12 languages, including Spanish, French, Russian, and Japanese.

Which one is your favorite and why?

Today, the term "caveman" really just means earlier versions of humans, but did they really live in caves? Humans arose in Africa, and eventually migrated to the rest of the world, which was colder and meant they needed shelter. A cave seems like the perfect place to hide from both predators and the elements. But there's a reason we know them as cave men- caves happen to be where we found evidence of early humans.

If caves were not quite as important as was portrayed by the caveman stereotype, why did we find so many traces of palaeolithic life in caves? The answer to that is two-fold: On the one hand, the already existing stereotype of the caveman and early finds in caves naturally oriented more research in caves. It is a selection bias. On the other hand, the conditions for the preservation of fossils in caves are extremely good. Caves not only shelter humans from rain and wind, but also all other kind of things that are left behind in them. Adding to the protection from the weather, many caves accumulate sediment steadily over time burying archaeological traces. They are ideal grounds to conserve a glimpse of the past.

The truth is that people lived in caves and a lot of other places, too, but those other places are not so easy to detect. Read about the many kinds of shelters early humans used and how we manage to find them at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Jaroslav A. Polák)

The new Photoshop's AI is amazing and feeds our questions about our new world of appearances and deep fakes. It can definitely gives us a good laugh!

When it comes to making slo-mo hair flip videos, a person needs two basic elements: a person with long hair, and a camera that has a slow motion feature. Other elements are optional, but if you want to make your video unique, then you should go and do just that.

Check out this clip of a woman flipping her hair, and find out what makes this video unique, over at Reddit.

(Image Credit: u/jaxjax55/ Reddit)

What’s a famous mythical creature in your country? Have you ever wondered if other countries have the same kind of mythical beast in their fables and stories? No worries, as SavingSpot of CashNetUSA has put together a list of every country’s most famous mythical creature. This list is not just boring text, no, it comes in a stunning map, filled with wonderful illustrations, as Nerdist details: 

First SavingSpot compiled a long list of famous mythical beasts using Heather Frigiola’s Monsters and Mythical Creatures From Around the World, Wikipedia, and “numerous independent sites.” To then find each nation’s most popular legend “the research team ranked them by total search results on Google, using the search terms “[Country] + [Mythical Creature].”

What they found was that many countries share the same monsters, even though they sometimes have slight differences. For example lots of countries fear dragons, but not all dragons look the same.

Image via Nerdist