Dexterity is one skill I find very useful for a number of things and one which I would like to have more of. Just look at this guy who does a pretty impressive contact juggling routine with his dragon balls. Watch his remarkable feat on Geekologie.

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There were a lot of dark days and many terrible things that happened during WWII. One of them is the Aktion T4 program, a memo signed in October 1939, which granted permission to physicians to conduct euthanasia on people who have incurable or terminal diseases.

Earlier, in May 1939, Hitler had received a request from the parents of Gerhard Kretschmar, who was born blind and missing limbs. The Kretschmars wanted to kill their child. Hitler authorized Brandt to have Gerhard killed. Records show Gerhard died on July 15 of “heart weakness.” He was five months old.

Historians look at the murder of Gerhard Kretshmar as the beginning of Aktion T4, the Nazi “euthanasia” program. From January 1940 until the end of 1941, when Aktion T4 officially ended, 70,000 people with disabilities were murdered at six sites: Brandenburg, Bernburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Pirna-Sonnenstein.

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Hoping to catch the audience that wasn't allowed to watch The Walking Dead when it debuted in 2010 (or several years afterward), AMC has a new yet-untitled series scheduled to launch in the spring of 2020. It features high school students who have been sequestered inside a walled city for the ten years of the zombie apocalypse, so they of course have to go out of it to find themselves. Read more about the show at the A.V. Club. Meanwhile, the 10th season of The Walking Dead has begun. The news out of New York Comic-Con is that the show has been renewed for an 11th season, and Lauren Cohan will be returning as Maggie ...sometime.

I had never heard of Avner the Eccentric until a couple days ago. I've missed out on so much!

Avner Eisenberg has spent decades perfecting his crafts, which include clowning, prestidigitation, pantomime, and acting. Every detail in his staging, movement, and expression is executed at genius level. He is a wonder to watch.

You can watch a much longer performance here.

-via reddit

There are some people who believe that sentient reptilian humanoids are ruling the earth behind the scenes and making all the political decisions in the world. Though these lizard people have been stuff of legends since ancient times, the modern conception of the lizard people conspiracy theory actually originated in 1929, with Robert E. Howard's story "The Shadow Kingdom".

This and subsequent works by Howard would go on to popularize some version of these Lizard People, including in works by a close friend of his, H.P. Lovecraft. The concept caught on from here and has shown known signs of stopping in science fiction since.

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Oils obtained from animals like whales and sharks are usually marketed as healing products or remedies for an assortment of conditions. But during the 16th to 19th centuries, there was another popular oil treatment which was extracted from earthworms.

This foul-sounding tonic was brewed up by apothecaries across Europe, who would store it in these fancy syrup jars. Each jar has a shortened version of the words OLEUM LUMBRICORUM — Latin for ‘oil of earthworms’ — painted boldly on the front.

This labeling was important so the apothecary didn’t mix up your treatment with, say, the oil of puppy dogs or the oil of sperm whale heads (both real things!).

(Image credit: Collection of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford)

The Glenlivet is a brand of refined Scotch whisky. It is an icon of high taste and sophistication.

So people like you and I probably wouldn't even reach for a bottle. So The Glenlivet wants to reach us where we are.

Eating Tide laundry detergent pods is so 2018. But let's give The Glenlivet plaudits for at least trying to keep up with the times. The distiller now offers its aged whisky in packets that you can safely swallow whole. Food and Wine magazine reports:

Speyside distillery The Glenlivet—the world's second best-selling brand of Scotch—has unveiled its "Capsule Collection," described as "glassless cocktails" that are instead served in a casing produced from seaweed-extract, billed as "one of nature's most renewable resources." (Apparently, reusable glassware just isn't sustainable enough!) Each capsule contains 23 milliliters of booze that can be enjoyed simply by popping the whole thing in your mouth and biting for "an instant burst of flavor." Drinkers can then simply swallow the capsule which is "fully biodegradable" (which hopefully could have gone without saying!)

-via Ian Miles Cheong | Photo: The Glenlivet

How many scoops would you like today? You can't go wrong with ice cream, right?

Although you may balk at ice cream flavored to taste like guinea pig meat, people in Ecuador might not. In that nation, guinea pigs are more likely to be a source of food rather than pets.

And so food stall owner María del Carmen Pilapaña has developed an ice cream flavor that many people enjoy. The Associated Press reports:

Pilapaña’s operation is small. It consists of two tables in an open area lined with dentists’ clinics and other businesses. Even so, demand is growing. Every week, the entrepreneur prepares 150 servings ($1 for a cone) of guinea pig ice cream. [...]

Pilapaña manages to concentrate guinea pig flavor after cooking and preparing a pate from the animal’s flesh, adds milk or cream and refrigerates the concoction until it has the rough consistency of ice cream. The taste is similar to chicken.

The beetle and mushroom ice creams include fruits such as pineapple and passion fruit. Beetle ice cream has a slight aroma of wet earth.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: AP/Dolores Ochoa

Video games aren't just mindless entertainment. They're not merely violence-filled bloodbaths either. Many video game designers and developers are including more socially, morally, and politically-relevant content in games that could educate and inform players about the realities and contexts of the games which they play.

Perhaps the most obvious way that developers incorporate these types of content are in the games’ narratives. Developers use space, dialogue, plot, and other narrative tools to deliver games with prominent social, moral, and political dimensions. Some games are fairly explicit in their politics.

Don Daglow’s Utopia (1982) is about being a better political ruler than your opponent—even if that means bankrolling a guerrilla insurgency against them. Other games take a more subtle approach.

In Far Cry II (2008), for instance, the player contracts malaria and their advancement depends on how well they manage the symptoms. The game’s creative director noted that this was intended to make players aware of the perniciousness (and persistence) of the disease in Africa.

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Two weeks before the debut of the Pixel 4 flagship smartphone, giant tech company Google was reportedly pulling the plug to their controversial “field research” program. The company’s “field research” program is said to involve offering subjects in US cities a $5 gift certificate in exchange for their facial scan, according to the New York Daily News which reported that a Google contracting agency was “actively targeting homeless people in Atlanta,'' while also “tricking unwilling college students into participating.”

Originally, the company told us, the idea was to make sure the Pixel 4’s new Face Unlock feature would recognize a diverse array of faces, which could keep it from being biased against people of color — a legitimate concern for facial recognition tech.

According to The New York Times, Google claims it immediately suspended the program and opened an investigation after reading the Daily News’ story. It wouldn’t discuss details with the Times, but did say it’s true it hired contractors from Randstad for the research, the same contractor named in the Daily News’ expose, and Google reportedly called the alleged details “very disturbing.”

What are your thoughts on this one?

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Childbirth is one of the most painful experiences women could have. But more painful than that is when normal delivery procedure fails and it then becomes a C-section. Though there are many aspects to a C-section than we might realize, nobody really talks about it as much. But these women want that to change and to break the stigma on having C-sections.

Despite how common the procedure has become, C-sections are rarely portrayed on TV, and little has been done to normalize the conversation around them. Add to that common misconceptions about C-section—that it’s “the easy way out” or a vanity-driven choice—and a dip in self-esteem that can accompany the tell-tale scarring, and women may face a physical and mental recovery period that takes months, or even years.

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Last January greeted California’s beekeepers with worry that they wouldn’t have enough bees to pollinate their biggest money-making event of the year — the almond bloom. Gene Brandi, who is the former president of the American Beekeeping Federation, who happened to be a California beekeeper, stated that the winter losses were were “as bad or worse” than he believes it has been, and he was right about it.

It was another grim year for America’s beekeepers, already reeling from more than a decade of colony losses that threaten the commercial honeybee industry. An annual survey released in June by the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP), a nonprofit collaboration of leading research labs and universities, found that beekeepers lost 38 percent of their colonies last winter, the highest winter figure since the survey began 13 years ago.

Managed honeybees play a crucial role in the nation’s food production, contributing an estimated $15 billion to the U.S. economy each year by helping to pollinate at least 90 crops.

So what keeps the bees from flourishing? It’s the Varroa destructor, a parasitic Asian mite that snuck into the US over 30 years ago. How are they a danger to bees? Find out over at Undark.

(Image Credit: 12019/ Pixabay)

Plants do not have brains or neurons, so how can they possibly be intelligent? We know that plants communicate with each other through the exchange of chemicals. We know they react differently to different threats. We know they can share resources and support each other. We assume that plants developed these abilities through millions years of natural selection. They tend to do what is good for the species; that's why they've survived. Still, as we narrow the definition of intelligence, we find out more about how plants display their own type of "thinking." Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano conducted an experiment in which she dropped potted Mimosa pudica plants from a height of six inches. The plant is famed for closing up its leaves when disturbed.

The first time Gagliano dropped the plants—fifty-six of them—from the measured height, they responded as expected. But after several more drops, fewer of them closed. She dropped each of them sixty times, in five-second intervals. Eventually, all of them stopped closing. She continued like this for twenty-eight days, but none of them ever closed up again. It was only when she bothered them differently—such as by grabbing them—that they reverted to their usual defense mechanism.

Gagliano concluded, in a study published in a 2014 edition of Oecologia, that the shameplants had “remembered” that their being dropped from such a low height wasn’t actually a danger and realized they didn’t need to defend themselves. She believed that her experiment helped prove that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning.” The plants, she reasoned, were learning. The plants, she believed, were remembering. Bees, for instance, forget what they’ve learned after just a few days. These shameplants had remembered for nearly a month.

The more we find out about plants and their reactions to the environment, the more intelligent they seem, although it would have to be a completely different type of intelligence than we are used to considering. Read an overview of what we've learned about the amazing abilities of plants at the Paris Review. -via Strange Company

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It can take Anais Hayden seven hours to complete a dog's haircut and dye job. But people will wait patiently for this groomer in Atlanta, Georgia to complete her work because the results are absolutely fabulous.

Unless you are a student of Russian history, you probably only know Catherine the Great as the empress who amassed a remarkable collection of royal treasures and had a scandalous number of lovers. But there's a reason she was called "the Great." She was masterful at taking an opportunity when it presented. Catherine had no royal blood, but married the future tsar Peter II, then arranged to replace him during a military coup.   

If Catherine had considered the magnitude of the task that confronted her that morning, she may have headed straight back to bed rather than boldly accept the army’s invitation to become their tsarina. Russia in the mid-18th century was a vast, unruly and, in many ways, backwards country, blighted by poverty and massive inequality. Thanks to her riotous love life, her passion for high art and her fabulously expensive tastes, Catherine would carve out a reputation as one of the most colourful rulers in European history, arguably becoming in the process the most powerful woman in history. But it was her achievement in turning Russia from basket case into a bona fide world superpower that earned her that most prized of epithets, ‘the Great’.

Read about the tsarina who ruled so completely that her own son made it illegal for a woman to ever rule Russia again, at History Extra. -via Damn Interesting