The year 1975 was just yesterday, but it was also 50 years ago. That was back went you could go into a record store and watch the staff open a case of new vinyl albums with artful and easy-to-see covers. Some of the new releases had been eagerly awaited, like Physical Graffiti. Led Zeppelin's sixth album contained the titled track to their fifth album, Houses of the Holy. It was just the kind of thing they'd do. Other albums were surprisingly good, like Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. He must've been really young when he recorded it, and it was his third album.
One that I'd looked particularly forward to was the new Queen album, A Night at the Opera. A fellow I admired (who I eventually married) introduced me to Queen with their album Sheer Heart Attack a year earlier. The first single from A Night at the Opera was a nonsensical operatic tune named "Bohemian Rhapsody." Oh, I see now that you're having trouble believing those albums are 50 years old. Well, they will be sometime this year, and so will 17 other classic albums that were released in 1975 that you can read about at Mental Floss.
Have you ever heard of a depressed fish? The Kaikyokan aquarium in Shimonoseki, Japan, closed to the public last month while the facility undergoes renovations. But that doesn't mean the fish and other aquarium animals aren't still there. A large sunfish that lives in a solitary tank began acting strangely. He quit eating his usual jellyfish diet, barely swam, and banged his head against the walls. The fish appeared to be sick. Caretakers couldn't figure out what was wrong, but suspected he might be lonely without the crowds of people filing through to see him every day. They couldn't bring in visitors during the renovation work, but they did the next best thing, by hanging clothing and cardboard cutouts of people on the side of the tank! What's even more impressive is that the scheme works. The fish has started eating again, and all seems to be well. -via kottke
Neodymium magnets are immensely powerful--so much so that getting one accidentally stuck up your nose may require a hospital visit.
Grant Slatton, a software engineer, used the magnetic force of a set of magnets to good effect to build a levitating bed. When the magnets are set in opposition to each other--five in the frame and five in the base--they can hold his bodyweight in the air.
The guidewires keep the bed hovering in the proper spot. The magnets, Slatton explains, must be very close to each other to maintain repulsion.
Slatton appreciates the fame the bed brought him when he first shared it on the internet in 2012. But he also notes that the bed wasn't particularly comfortable.
Just yesterday we had a mini-tutorial on cholesterol, and now we find out a possible consequence of too much of it, featuring that hapless superhero Florida Man.
As reported in the journal JAMA Cardiology, a man in Florida was on a carnivore diet for eight months. He was eating cheese by the pound, butter by the stick, and hamburgers with added fat. His motivations weren't clear, but he reportedly lost weight and improved his "mental clarity." But when he noticed a painless yellow discharge from his hands, he went to a Tampa hospital. It was cholesterol oozing from his skin! His cholesterol level was more than 1,000 mg/dL (high cholesterol is anything over 240 mg/dL). He was diagnosed with xanthelasma, which is when the body is so overloaded with cholesterol that it, yes, oozes out. Read more details on the case at Ars Technica.
(Image credit: JAMA Cardiologym 2024, Marmagkiolis et al.)
To advertise the release of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar on its streaming service, Netflix created this really neat billboard in Los Angeles that looks like the sarcastic robot TARS. No word on its humor or honesty setting.
Via vienna.pitts
Scientists who keep their eyes on seismographs picked up a unique signal last year that lasted nine days. It went right past most of us, but researchers couldn't figure out what it meant. Did we really have an earthquake that lasted nine days? The signal was too steady for that, besides being strangely sustained. There was also a tsunami in Greenland, a wave taller than any seen before. Did an earthquake cause that? It took almost a year for scientists to figure out what happened to cause the nine-day anomaly, but when they did, it was not only surprising, but almost comical to picture. Yet it's not funny, because these extreme events will only get worse as the temperature of earth rises. Reid Reimers of SciShow explains how the mystery of the nine-day signal was unraveled. There's a 40-second promotional break at the three-minute mark. -via Damn Interesting
— 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
