Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969, so the show is now celebrating 50 years of teaching preschoolers how to recognize letters and numbers and get along with each other. Back in 1969, it was breakthrough television, something that hadn't been seen before. The Children's Television Workshop was innovating by using research into how children actually learn, and how that could be translated into television, while most children's programming at the time was busy selling breakfast cereal. Viewers loved the short segments, the experimental animation, and most of all, the Muppets.

The CTW team had known they wanted Jim Henson’s Muppets to be part of the action as soon as they met Jim Henson.

In fact, the casting director went so far as to say that if Sesame Street couldn’t have Muppets, it might as well have no puppets at all.

Yet the Sesame Street pilot programs had kept Jim Henson’s muppets separate from humans, on the advice of experts who felt that showing the two together would be confusing to kids.

The experts were wrong. The Muppets were what held the children's attention, so Henson designed new Muppets that could interact with humans, and they have done so ever since. Go behind the scenes and see Henson and his crew working on Sesame Street in a post at Considerable.

Kevin Harlan’s call of the black cat on the field is CLASSIC 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/cL1euA3IKg

— Complex Sports (@ComplexSports) November 5, 2019

What seems to be an already exciting football game is even made more exciting when a cat goes walking to the field.

“He’s walking to the three,” Kevin Harlan narrates. You can hear the crowd cheering.

“He’s at the two. And the cat is in the CDW red zone.”

The cat pauses.

“Now the policemen and state troopers have come into the field and the cat runs into the end zone! That is a touchdown!”

The crowd goes wild and continuously cheer for the cat.

Now that’s a game I’ll pay to watch.

(Video Credit: Complex Sports/ Twitter)

Part of Hitler's plan for sustaining Germany during his invasion of Europe involved ways to produce enough food without supplies imported from other nations- particularly nations that would be at war with his Nazi regime. One of those supplies was margarine. The butter substitute, at the time made with animal fat, was very popular in Germany, which consumed 17.5 pounds per capita in 1930.

It was also around this time that manufacturers discovered an even cheaper way to produce margarine: with whale fat. The advent of kerosene created a surplus of whale oil, which was previously used as lighting fuel, leading to a massive buy up at low-cost. In 1929, the two companies that would later merge to form Unilever—Margarine Unie, a Dutch company, and Lever Brothers, a British firm—successfully incorporated their vast stores of whale oil into widely popularized margarine products.

Whale fat was also widely used to wage war. Liquified blubber served as a handy machine lubricant and proved useful in manufacturing the nitroglycerine needed for explosives. In fact, Britain declared it a “national defense” commodity in 1938. Crucial to kitchens and battlefields alike, Germany and Britain that year purchased 83% of the world’s whale harvest between them. Many of those whales came from Norwegian whaling, which led the world in whale harvests by hunting along an unclaimed Antarctic coastline, today called Queen Maud Land.

Hitler's minions launched a plan to stake their own claim to the Antarctic coast in order to ensure a supply of whales. Their first expedition launched in March of 1938. Read how that went at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Michael George Haddad)

Although I prefer "Baby Shark" in the original Latin, this version by Episcopal priest David Sibley of Walla Walla, Washington will do for now. It follows the Agnus Dei liturgical chant.

Since people are as they are, Father Sibley found it necessary to pin this tweet.

-via Aelfred the Great

Leafhoppers, treehoppers, and planthoppers are insects that come in all shapes and sizes, some of which are beautiful, while others are pretty funny-looking. Ze Frank introduces them to us in an insect version of a fashion show, with a sidebar explanation of some of their more unsavory features in the middle. Just as you'd expect from Ze Frank.

One day I kept smelling a strange scent all evening. It was musky, feral, and funky. I couldn’t place it.

— Emily Taylor (@snakeymama) October 31, 2019

Biology professor Emily Taylor (@snakeymama) tells us the story of that one night she was alone in the dark and felt the presence of something she was totally unfamiliar with. Now, a woman who tracks rattlesnakes is not someone who panics for no reason, but as the story unfolds, it not only gets scarier, but also becomes more and more believable from the way she tells it as a scientist.

She eventually found out what was stalking her, but the question remains: would she have been less scared if she knew what it was all the time? That's what she says, but she's a fearless field biologist. Your mileage may vary. Read the whole story at Twitter. -via Boing Boing

Illustrator Ed Harrington has some pretty subversive ideas about the fictional characters you grew up with. He draws what you might call outtakes, or maybe behind-the-scenes images that you don't get to see in movies or TV shows. He-Man, the Jetsons, Winnie-the-Pooh, Star Trek, Sesame Street, and the Smurfs all get the Harrington treatment.



Check out a ranked gallery of Harrington's pop culture illustrations at Bored Panda, or all of them at Instagram. Then check out Harrington's designs you can wear yourself in his collection of t-shirt designs in the NeatoShop!

Although it may come as a surprise, the findings of this study are clear: when sexually aroused or attempting to secure a sexual partner, people tend to be more willing rather than less willing to lie.

Scholars Gurit E. Birnbuam, Mor Iluz, and Harry T. Reis published the results of their research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

In the first study, the researchers exposed participants to sexually stimulating media, then asked them whether they agreed to or disagreed with an opposite-sex stranger's opinion. They were more likely to conform their stated opinion to the stranger's than a control group that had not been sexually stimulated.

In the second study, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about their dating preferences while subliminally exposed to erotic or landscape photographs. Participants were likely to provide different answers and, specifically, stricter partner requirements when viewing a landscape image.

For the third study, participants were asked to state their total number of past sexual partners in variously a formal survey and a flirtatious chat. While chatting with an attractive and apparently romantically interested person, participants were more inclined to lie about their number of past sexual partners.

The fourth study attempted to address methodological flaws in the third, as it was unclear whether encountering a potential sexual partner would make a participants more likely to understate or overstate the number of past sexual partners. This study had the same participants complete both the formal questionnaire and an online dating profile, each of which asked for the number of past sexual partners. Participants were, again, more inclined to lie to potential partners in an online dating profile.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: zenjazzygeek

Scientists have been on alert since July because of the warning signs in the Pacific Ocean. The waters around Hawaii were so unusually warm that divers could swim without their usually obligatory wetsuits. The once-bright coral are losing their color. These all point to a terrifying likelihood that the “blob” which appeared 5 years ago — which brought death in everything in its path — has now returned.

The original “blob” was an ocean heatwave that got its name for the splotch of red it made on maps in 2014 and 2015. Scientists had never seen anything like it before. It was massive, spanning the Pacific from Mexico to Alaska. Ocean surface temperatures rose as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit above average. In the reefs surrounding Hawaii, that was enough to kill between 50 and 90 percent of corals.

The scale of death was drastic, but there’s still some uncertainty over just how much was lost. “We were totally unprepared. We were naive as a science community,” says Greg Asner, director of Arizona State University Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, who is based in Hawaii.

More details about this news over at The Verge.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Arizona State University Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science)

Japan finally catches up to the trend of rage rooms, where people pay to smash things up, with the launch of the Crash Box Japan, the first rage room in Japan’s western Kansai region. Now people in Osaka can smash items such as dishes, old home appliances, furniture, bottles, and champagne towers to destress or release their rage. Crash Box Japan offers different options, from the 8-kilogram “Test Course” to the 45-kilogram “Giga Course”. 

(via SoraNews24)

image credit: via SoraNews24

During a livestream on YouTube and Twitch last January, professional StarCraft II player Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz from Poland showed everyone what humans are capable of when he defeated a multi-million-dollar artificial intelligence agent known as AlphaStar, which is specifically designed to crush human players in the popular real-time strategy game.

The public loss in front of tens of thousands of eSports fans was a blow for Google parent company Alphabet’s London-based artificial intelligence subsidiary, DeepMind, which developed AlphaStar.

The A.I. may have lost battle. However, it had already won the war. A previous version of the A.I. had already beaten Komincz five times in a row and defeated Komincz's teammate, Dario “TLO” Wünsch, as well. This shows that AlphaStar has sufficiently mastered the video game that machine learners have picked as a benchmark of A.I. progress.

In the months since, AlphaStar has only grown stronger and is now able to defeat 99.8 percent of StarCraft II players online, achieving Grandmaster rank in the game on the official site Battle.net, a feat described today in a new paper in the journal Nature.

The development of A.I. in games goes back in 1992, when IBM first developed a rudimentary A.I. which learned backgammon through trial and error. Over the course of time, new A.I. agents have slowly but surely conquered the gaming world, and mastery over our cherished strategy games has become one of the major ways artificial intelligence is assessed.

Know more about the development of A.I over at Smithsonian.com.

Personally, I think it is a scary thing to know that an A.I. had mastered a real-time strategy game which consists of trillions upon trillions of possibilities which are all conducted in real time. But hey, it’s just a game, right? What are your thoughts?

(Image Credit: Seanbatty/ Pixabay)

This time, hackers can now use lasers to hack any computer that receives voice commands.

In the spring of 2018, Takeshi Sugawara, a cybersecurity researcher, walked into the lab of the professor he was visiting at the University of Michigan. The professor was Kevin Fu. Sugawara wanted to show off something interesting.

Sugawara pointed a high-powered laser at the microphone of his iPad—all inside of a black metal box, to avoid burning or blinding anyone—and had Fu put on a pair of earbuds to listen to the sound the iPad's mic picked up. As Sugawara varied the laser's intensity over time in the shape of a sine wave, fluctuating at about 1,000 times a second, Fu picked up a distinct high-pitched tone. The iPad's microphone had inexplicably converted the laser's light into an electrical signal, just as it would with sound.

Six months later, Sugawara along with Fu and a group of University of Michigan researchers have honed this quirk into something deadlier. Using lasers, they can now hack to any computer that receives voice commands — from Amazon Echo speakers to your smartphone.

That spy trick lets them send "light commands" from hundreds of feet away; they can open garages, make online purchases, and cause all manner of mischief or malevolence. The attack can easily pass through a window, when the device's owner isn't home to notice a telltale flashing speck of light or the target device's responses.

"It’s possible to make microphones respond to light as if it were sound," says Sugawara. "This means that anything that acts on sound commands will act on light commands."

If this is not scary, I don’t know what is.

See more details about this over at Wired.

(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)

April 15, 2019. It was a sorrowful day for the world, as the Notre Dame was engulfed in flames. “I feel sad tonight to see this part of us burn,” said French president Emmanuel Macron in a tweet. Official sources stated that the fire was accidental, and it was most likely due to a technological malfunction. But it was only a matter of time before conspiracy theories about the event would circulate around the Internet.

Even before the fire was extinguished, conspirational websites such as 4chan began alleging that the fire had been started by the French government, Jews, or an Islamic terrorist group. Almost instantly, the charges spread to a receptive audience worldwide. It was the expected course of events. Big, impactful and shocking social events – a fire, a flood, a terrorist strike, a war, and so on – typically elicit conspiracy theories among large groups of citizens who question the official reading of the news.

But why do conspiracy theories seem to come up naturally when shocking events happen? How does it relate in the human life? Find out the answers over at Aeon.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: jambulboy/ Pixabay)

Have you ever gone to a forest? What did you notice upon going there? The thick trunks? The canopy? The artfully protruding roots? The fallen leaves? These are indeed, some beautiful things that you can find in a forest. But below the trees, into the earth, hidden from the eyes of man, is a vast underworld that is as beautiful.

For the past two decades, Suzanne Simard, a professor in the Department of Forest & Conservation at the University of British Columbia, has studied that unappreciated underworld. Her specialty is mycorrhizae: the symbiotic unions of fungi and root long known to help plants absorb nutrients from soil. Beginning with landmark experiments describing how carbon flowed between paper birch and Douglas fir trees, Simard found that mycorrhizae didn’t just connect trees to the earth, but to each other as well.

Simard went on to show how the mycorrhizae-linked trees form networks and exchange nutrients and water “in a literally pulsing web that includes not only trees but all of a forest’s life.” It can be said that it is highly similar to the internet and how we exchange information through the platform.

It’s not just nutrient flows that Simard describes. It’s communication. She—and other scientists studying roots, and also chemical signals and even the sounds plant make—have pushed the study of plants into the realm of intelligence. Rather than biological automata, they might be understood as creatures with capacities that in animals are readily regarded as learning, memory, decision-making, and even agency.

Amazing!

Know more details about this over at Nautilus.

(Image Credit: Picography/ Pixabay)

On April 9, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Faith Birol, went up on stage at a conference hall in Berlin filled with people. It was the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue (BETD), an event hosted every year by the German government which evaluates the ongoing transformation of the global energy sector. This year, Birol’s diagnosis was grim. While he admitted that renewable energy was getting cheaper by the day, and that its use was expanding as never before (according to his research), Birol warns that renewables weren’t being built fast enough to keep pace with CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.

“There is a growing disconnect,” Birol said, “between political statements, targets, and what is happening in real life.”

That disconnect ran like an electric current through the conference, buzzing in the subtext of every pronouncement and lighting up every networking lunch. The BETD attracts a wide range of energy- and climate-policy wonks—including fifty ministers and state secretaries from around the world—and no one involved in such work in 2019 could be unaware of the mounting climate chaos. Only months earlier, in late 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the committee charged with providing governments with scientific information about climate change, issued a special report on the environmental and socioeconomic consequences of global warming proceeding past 1.5 degrees. Breaking with the restraint that often characterizes scientific writing, the report baldly asserted that, without “rapid and far-reaching transitions” in, among other things, energy and industrial systems, a cascading array of disasters awaited that would make the current state of affairs—record-breaking heat across Europe, water-scarce Indian cities, the apocalyptic cataclysm of wildfires in Cali fornia and western Canada—seem like a tepid prelude. Humanity was running out of time to act.

It is now an inescapable fact that our time remaining on Earth is very short, and we will all die, unless we act. But how should we view the fact that we’re doomed?

Chris Turner believes that there is hope, and he is optimistic about the future. Find out why over at The Walrus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)