While Star Wars fans built a holiday around a pun (May the fourth be with you), Disney launched their own Star Wars holiday three years ago, called Force Friday. That's the day that the new Star Wars toys and merchandise are unveiled, giving you enough time to decide what you want to ask Santa Claus to bring you. Or your kids, we won't judge. This year, Force Friday is October 4th, but we already can see the new toys that will go on sale in October, because io9 has a rundown of them. Pick your favorites, or perhaps your price range, and you won't be taken by surprise when they're all sold out in November.  

(Image credit: Hasbro, Funko, Mattel)

When Indras Govender first set foot in the United States, he was astonished by the welcoming attitude he encountered whenever he went. “To come to a country and just walk into any restaurant or go anywhere you want, it was like, ‘Whoa,’” he stated as he recalled that moment.

Coming from apartheid-era South Africa, Indras and wife, Tilly, (now an assistant dean in the social sciences division of the College of Letters & Science) lived a life fraught with overt racism and discrimination due to their Indian heritage. It was the early 1990s. Nelson Mandela had just been freed after 27 years in state prison, and South African president F. W. de Klerk had just signed a peace accord to end the oppressive system. Still the effects of the 50-year-long regime lingered.

The life of the Govenders, however, was entirely different from where they came from.

“California’s quite the melting pot,” he said. “There are people from every country in the world here. And so you don’t feel out of place, and people are welcoming.”

It’s the feeling of that first welcome that Govender pays forward every day in his role as food and beverage manager at The Club & Guest House. Joining the campus in 2016 to head the newly revamped fine dining facility formerly known as the Faculty Club, Govender brings more than 10 years of experience as a restaurant owner, combined with his formal training as a certified public accountant and his genuine passion for the epicurean experience.

Learn more about Indras and The Club & Guest House over at The Current.

(Image Credit: Jeff Liang)

There are a lot of games available in the App Store of your smartphone, and you probably don’t have all the time in the world to play them all to see which ones are the best. Thankfully, EnGadget gives some of what they think are the best games, so that we’ll know when to start.

See their recommendations over at their site.

(Image Credit: tagechos/ Pixabay)

The aim was to unload a ton (probably several tons) of steel beams from a railroad car. Maybe it was too expensive for these guys to get a proper crane, but they did have four forklifts. Just coordinate them all at once and lift that load out! Hmm, what could possibly go wrong? A better question might be: Have you ever seen a train derailment at zero miles per hour? -via Digg

It took a lot of guts to undergo surgery in the days before anesthetics and antibiotics, when the pain was intense and the survival rate was abysmal. The decision pretty much had to be a matter of life and death. It's difficult to imagine how horrific surgery was for the patient, but we can get some idea from a professional writer who lived through a mastectomy. English novelist Fanny Burney put off surgery for breast cancer as long as she could, but in September of 1811 allowed herself to be put under the knife- while wide awake in her living room. She later wrote about the experience.

“I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision—and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, and the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp and forked poniards, that were tearing the edges of the wound—but when again I felt the instrument—describing a curve—cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left—then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.”

There's more. Read the story of Burney's operation at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

A second interstellar object had made its way into our solar system a few weeks ago, but Yale astronomers Gregory Laughlin and Malena Rice were not surprised to hear it.

Their research, which has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest that these strange, icy visitors from other planets will keep on coming.

We can expect a few large objects showing up every year, they say; smaller objects entering the solar system could reach into the hundreds each year.

“There should be a lot of this material floating around,” said Rice, a graduate student at Yale and first author of the study. “So much more data will be coming out soon, thanks to new telescopes coming online. We won’t have to speculate.”

More details on YaleNews.

(Image Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Watch as this star comes too close to a black hole and get ripped apart and then becomes gas. An amazing spectacle, if you ask me. A NASA satellite is reported to have witnessed the event.

It is one of the most detailed looks yet at the phenomenon, called a tidal disruption event (or TDE), and the first for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (more commonly called TESS.)

The milestone was reached with the help of a worldwide network of robotic telescopes headquartered at The Ohio State University called ASAS-SN (All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae). Astronomers from the Carnegie Observatories, Ohio State and others published their findings today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Amazing!

(Video Credit: Ohio State News/ YouTube)

Michael Bennett has a YouTube channel named “NuggetNoggin” where he shows himself diving into rivers in search of lost treasure. Lots of his content involve finding laptops, nail polish containers, or GoPros.

Posted earlier this week, Michael went down to the bottom of Edisto River and managed to find a waterproof case. Inside the case was an iPhone. Amazingly, the iPhone still works despite it being submerged for 15 months!

Michael then returned the phone to its rightful owner.

(Video Credit: nuggetnoggin/ YouTube)

Between 1799 and 1804, reindeer farmer Ossip Shumachov watched a mammoth emerge from the ice during the summer thaws in a remote part of Siberia. By the time he brought tusk trader Roman Boltunov to see it, it had notably deteriorated from the intact specimen the ice had ejected. To be specific, the meat had been removed by animals. But Boltunov took some measurements and drew a picture of the mammoth.   

The drawing is crude, and depicts a strange swine-like creature with tusks pointing in opposite directions. The sketch “is a very good example of a reconstruction hindered by extreme ignorance of basic animal anatomy,” paleoartist Mauricio Anton wrote in an email. “The body and legs are shapeless, and each foot ends in a sort of hoof-like structure unlike anything seen in elephants (or any other animal).” Even so, this somewhat laughable caricature was the first reconstruction of a mammoth known to science that was based on more than bones, McKay writes on his blog Mammoth Tales. Much to the chagrin of stuffy Russian biologists, it played a pivotal role in science’s early understanding of mammoth anatomy.

Eventually, Shumachov's mammoth was removed from the tundra in pieces: bones, skin, and hair. It was the world's first mammoth to be reconstructed and put on display. Boltunov's original drawing has been lost; the image above is a copy. Read the story of what came to be known as Adam's mammoth, and the drawing that accompanied it, at Atlas Obscura.

Apparently the Martha Stewart brand is more than just refined, tasteful decor and furnishings. It can cut a swath through the winter hell outside your home in order to prepare a Vietnamese-style chicken soup in your Instant Pot. Her buddy Snoop will provide brownies.

I don't need a snow thrower here in Texas. But if she offers a stump grinder, I'll look into it.

-via Aaron Starmer | Photo: Snow Joe

A few years ago, when I heard that some people play money to watch other people play video games, I was confused. It was explained to me that this is similar to watching other people play sports. That makes sense, although I don't see the appeal of that activity either.

I nod and smile when young students at my college tell me about their favorite streamers on Twitch. Given that it's a huge industry and it's possible to earn money through it in a variety of watching-other-people-play-video-games related professions, I can respect it.

With the appropriate cheat codes, I could probably make it through this fake video game left by Jeff Wysaski's Obvious Plant project.

Living costs aren't getting any cheaper so if you're looking for a nice place to stay at an affordable price then the Residence 9 may not be the one for you.

However, if luxury is what you're looking for then there's no other place that screams luxury than Ireland's most expensive one-bedroom apartment, the Residence 9 which can be found inside the InterContinental Hotel in Ballsbridge, Dublin.

The other rather special aspect about Residence 9 is the price - it's asking €1.2m. This makes it the single most expensive one-bedroom apartment in Ireland bar none, and quite likely the most expensive one-bedroom apartment ever offered for sale in Ireland at any point in time.

But the advantages for those who will pay it are myriad, particularly for a high-end commercial traveller, who might need an office and meeting room and residential base in Ireland with everything thing rolled into one.

(Image credit: Residence 9 via Independent.ie)

(Image credit: Mister Global)

Thursday night was the annual Mister Global competition in Thailand. The 2019 winner of the male beauty pageant was Kim Jong-woo of South Korea. If you have an hour, you can see the entire competition, including the swimsuit stroll, on video.

Or you can see all the contestants in portraits of their national costumes in a gallery at imgur. Although some appear a bit over-the-top, they do not approach the levels of the Miss Universe national costumes, and each contestant paid a lot of attention to representing their nation's culture. Well, except for the guy from the USA. -via Metafilter

Films tell various kinds of stories and they often try to communicate a certain message. There are also times when they can be subversive and include ideological elements that attempt to influence its viewers.

Propaganda in films isn't something new. And even today, films are being used to bring forth a certain propaganda or at times, a cause or an advocacy. In this second part of Escapist's two-part series, they explore the different pop culture propaganda present in films.

(Image credit: Escapist Magazine/screen cap)

It's a grand symbol of the entire Rebel Alliance and the work of Luke Skywalker. Redditor Marcus_Nery made this custom ceiling fan. One of its best features is that if it takes damage, R2 can do minor repairs on the spot.

Disney should definitely market these. There should be a huge consumer market for them.

-via Geekologie