As we head into autumn, the hype surrounding episode nine of the Star Wars saga will intensify greatly -after all, there are toys to be sold! Meanwhile, there are eleven existing Star Wars films to review. Eleven? Yeah, and that doesn't even count the Ewok movies or the holiday special. The Daily Dot ranked them not by opinion, or at least not by their opinions, but by scores from Metacritic, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes, sites which crunch the numbers on a lot of opinions. Those of us who have been around long enough to see all the movies in theaters know that those opinions rise and fall over time, but go see how all eleven films rank against each other as of today. The list will grow to twelve in December when Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens. Let's just hope it doesn't end up at the bottom.

While Vanessa and Alex, the founders of Messy Messy Chic, are off getting married, the rest of the team decided to post pictures of traditional bridal costumes from all over the world. Above, you see a Muslim bride from the Bulgarian village of Ribnovo, where the tradition is to cover the bride's face in thick gelena makeup and adorn her with sequins. Other regions of Bulgaria have their own particular wedding day makeup, elaborate but different.

In Ribnovo, however, the female in-laws are tasked with laying the bride down for the face painting sesh as she closes her eyes, and top off her look with a veil of tinsel, a necklace of money (which the groom will also often wear) and other trinkets. Perhaps most impressively, it’s only when the priest blesses the couple that the bride can open her eyes. It’s a two-day ceremony, but one that relishes in the gradual reveal of the bride, and her transition from single to married life.

Read of the different traditional ways the bride is made to look like queen for a day, from Mongolia to Morocco, at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Flickr user Ali Eminov)

In an era of audio streaming and other digital music platforms, you wouldn't see a lot of people consuming their music through vinyls. But you would be surprised that vinyl records are actually about to outsell CDs for the first time since the 1980s.

Nearly $224 million worth of vinyl records were purchased in the first half of 2019, a nearly 13 percent increase from the same time frame in 2018. People bought $247 million worth of CDs, which is still ahead of record sales but only a .8 percent increase from last year.

The reason record sales might outpace CDs, however, is because of the growth in the second half of 2018 — Rolling Stone points out record sale revenue grew by nearly 13 percent in the second half of 2018, and CD sales experienced little to no growth.

(Image credit: Mirta Fratnik/Unsplash)

The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, UK is the location where the prime meridian (0° longitude) was established in the Nineteenth Century, thus providing for a baseline of geographic standardization. You can follow that line (or any other line of longitude) up to the North Pole.

But the North Pole is usually not magnetic north, which is where compasses will point. Magnetic north does, however, move. And, and the moment, it allows compasses in Greenwich to point to both true north and magnetic north. The British Geological Society reports:

The angle a compass needle makes between true north and magnetic north is called declination. As the magnetic field changes all the time, so does declination at any given location. For the past few hundred years in the UK, declination has been negative, meaning that all compass needles have pointed west of true north.

The line of zero declination, called the agonic, is moving westward at a present rate of around 20 km per year. By September 2019, for the first time since around 1660, the compass needle will point directly to true north at Greenwich, London, before slowly turning eastwards. 

-via Kurt Schlichter | Photo: Virginia State Parks

This is the galaxy nicknamed “DF2”. Found some 60 million light-years from Earth, this galaxy has scientists baffled as it doesn’t have dark matter.

Because DF2 would be the very first known galaxy without the mysterious substance, the news of its discovery in 2018 quickly spread throughout the astronomical community. If confirmed, a galaxy without dark matter would throw a wrench into our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve. Every galaxy we know of so far has a sizeable chunk of the invisible matter, so finding one without it would mean one of two things: Either DF2 never had any dark matter to begin with, or it somehow managed to shed its dark matter during the course of its life.

Astronomers have different theories about the galaxy. Check them out on Discover.

(Image Credit: NASA/ESA/P. van Dokkum (Yale University))

A healthy baby girl was born after her mother was declared brain-dead by doctors. The baby was kept alive in her mother’s womb for 117 days, believed to be the longest artificially suspended pregnancy in a brain-dead mother. Czech doctors placed the 27-year old unnamed woman on artificial life support, and regularly moved her legs (to simulate walking) to help with the child’s growth. 

The baby girl was born by cesarean section, weighing 2.13 kg (4.7 lb) and measuring 42 cm (16.5 inches) according to Brno’s University Hospital.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

During World War II, the US government was concerned about lice. Groups of people living in close quarters under primitive conditions (as in war) were an invitation to lice, which could spread typhus. In 1942, the government partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct an experiment to test various anti-lice preparations, headed by public health physician Dr. William A. Davis and entomologist Charles M. Wheeler. They needed lice and volunteers to be infested with them. Finding the lice was no problem, but finding volunteers was tricky. They first paid homeless people for their time, but found they were unreliable and would not follow instructions.

Eventually Davis and Wheeler hit upon conscientious objectors (COs) as potential guinea pigs. The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 allowed young men with religious objections to fighting to serve their country in alternative, nonviolent ways. At first they were put to work domestically at jobs such as building roads, harvesting timber, and fighting forest fires. But in 1942, inspired by the example of the British government, it occurred to U.S. officials that these young men were also a potential pool of experimental subjects for research, and they began to be made available to scientists for this purpose.

In theory, the COs were always given a choice about whether or not to serve as guinea pigs. In practice, it wasn't that simple. Controversy lingers about how voluntary their choice really was since their options were rather limited: be a guinea pig for science, or do back-breaking manual labor. But for their part, the COs have reported that they were often eager to volunteer for experiments. Sensitive to accusations that they were cowardly and unpatriotic, serving as a test subject offered the young men a chance to do something that seemed more heroic than manual labor.

Surprise: the volunteer guinea pigs were not paid for their scientific efforts, and therefore continued to do manual labor during the experiment. Read the details and results of the lice-infested underwear experiment at Weird Universe. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: National Museum of Health and Medicine via Flickr)

A mass of identical runners flooded the starting line. This was not your usual 5k. The scientists behind this contest will test both speed and the navigational ability of the competitors as they travel through a maze and choose the correct way on every intersection. Postdocs Mehdi Salek and Francesco Carrara stand by at the end of the course as they wait to identify each of the finishers. The participants, however, are not human. They are Escherichia coli bacteria. But what was the goal of the contest? It was individuality.

That there could be individual winners at all is a notion that has shaken the foundations of microbiology in recent years. Working in the lab of Roman Stocker at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), a team of microbiologists and engineers invented this unique endurance event. The cells at the starting line of Stocker’s microbial marathon were genetically identical, which implied, according to decades of biological dogma, that their resulting physiology and behavior should also be more or less the same, as long as all the cells experienced identical environmental conditions. At the DNA level, every E. coli cell had a roughly equal encoded ability to swim and steer through the course. A pack of cells that started the race at the same time would in theory all finish around the same time.

But that’s not what Salek and Carrara found. Instead, some bacteria raced through the maze substantially more quickly than others, largely because of varying aptitude for moving toward higher concentrations of food, a process called chemotaxis. What appeared to Salek and Carrara as a mass of indistinguishable cells at the beginning was actually a conglomerate of unique individuals.

Check out more of this study over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: CDC/Janice Haney Carr./ Wikimedia Commons)

Marissa Martinelli is a longtime reader of Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd. Martinelli used to chuckle at the disclaimer that was attached for over a decade at the webcomic, as she is an English major. It states:

Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

Before creating webcomics full time, Munroe worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center (he has a degree in physics).

… while he often uses pop culture or his personal life as fodder for his work, it’s true that sometimes understanding the joke requires knowledge of computer programming or the differences between branches of science. In 2016, though, the warning quietly disappeared from xkcd. When I asked Munroe this week why he took it down, he said he’s less worried about offending liberal arts majors than he is about encouraging others in his field who might genuinely look down on other majors.

“I get along with almost everyone I meet who did physics, but I think the flaw we have is that we think we could do everyone else’s field as well if we tried,” he said. “That attitude has done a little bit more harm than good. It’s nice to have a friendly rivalry, but sometimes that rivalry is only going in one direction, and then maybe it’s not really a rivalry. Maybe you’re just being a jerk. I’m trying not to be a jerk.”

It would be interesting, though, to see a physicist approach different fields, and this is what Munroe does in his new book called How to: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems.

But he does not come off as a jerk, and in fact consults plenty of experts from those other fields and beyond, interviewing Col. Chris Hadfield about how to make an emergency landing and asking Serena Williams to test his theories for catching a drone by hitting tennis balls at one…

The book, according to Monroe, comes from the same way of thinking that inspired “What If?”, the blog in which he answers questions submitted by his readers — weird questions like “how much Force power can Yoda output?” and “If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?”

Check out more about this on Slate.

(Image Credit: Randall Munroe)

John Chambers may have just turned 70, but he still displays the vigor that he had back in 1995, when he became CEO at Cisco Systems. During his term, Chambers grew Cisco’s annual revenue from $2.2 billion in 1995 to $49 billion in the year 2015, when he stepped down.

He prefers to call himself a mentor to startup CEOs rather than a venture capitalist. When he’s not in Silicon Valley he can often be found in India, where he advises Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government on digital transformation and the economy.

Rich Kaarlgard of Forbes had a chance to talk with Chambers about AI, in which he says will “produce an impact two or three times what the Internet did and in a much faster pace.” See the interview over at the site.

(Image Credit: D1_TheOne/ Pixabay)

This is a dyeing poison arrow frog, a frog toxic to predators such as birds due to their skin containing high amounts of alkaloid.

Throughout the animal kingdom, the prey has used warning colors to warn their potential predators that they are dangerous or toxic to consume. An example of this is the black-and-yellow stripes of wasps.

This arrow frog is a bit different, though, as it has two colour forms: yellow stripes on a black background, or white stripes on a black background.

This diversity of colour signals goes against the accepted theory that warning signal colouration should be subject to strong, frequency-dependent selection.

In Amazonian butterflies, for example, it has been demonstrated that the fitness of a phenotype increases with its frequency – the more of these colour forms are around, the more chance a predator population learns to understand the signal and avoid the prey. Warning signals that are novel or unusual should be selected against due to their rarity.

And yet these two colour forms persist.

See the reason behind this phenomenon over at Cosmos.

(Image Credit: University of Jyvaskyla)

When I saw this sculpture, I knew that I had see more by the artist. Dug Stanat's work is a treat! He makes dark and funny creatures that he hopes "leads you into a little daydream." I can daydream about this cheery fellow titled Hell's Greeter.

Kursat Ceylan, a Turkish engineer, has been blind since birth. He applied his technical expertise to help himself and other people like him overcome that disability. The "WeWalk" is a cane that comes with a built-in sensor to detect obstacles. It can also be paired with a smartphone to provide digital navigation assistance. CNN reports:

The WeWalk stick has an ultrasonic sensor that detects obstacles above chest level and uses vibrations to warn the user. It can be paired with a smartphone to help navigation, and is integrated with a voice assistant and Google Maps. [...]

Ceylan, who has been blind since birth, says that connecting the stick to the Internet of Things and smart city solutions makes it user-friendly.

"As a blind person, when I am at the Metro station I don't know which is my exit ... I don't know which bus is approaching ... [or] which stores are around me. That kind of information can be provided with the WeWalk," he says.

-via Debby Witt | Photo: WeWalk

Walter Chandoha captured the hearts of the public with his beautiful photos of feline friends. With an archive believed to contain 90,000 photographs of cats over more than 50 years, along with photos that appeared in magazines and pet food packagings, Taschen released a book that featured 300 of his most celebrated images taken between 1942-2018. My Modern Met has the details: 

Chandoha began his career as a combat photographer during the Second World War and an art director postwar, but it was a chance encounter with a kitten during a winter’s night in New York City during 1949 that ignited his lifelong passion for photographing his fluffy subjects. Chandoha adopted the kitten and named him Loco, but little did he know his new pet would become his muse and determine the rest of his career.

“I relished the challenge of making photographs of cats and quickly saw the potential of attempting to capture their naturally expressive personalities,” Chandoha writes in his foreword to the book, just before he died earlier this year at the age of 98.

image credit: Walter Chandoha/Taschen via My Modern Met

Steffen Kraft, also known as ICONEO, produces lovely artworks that are often fantastical, but always relatable. Some are just clever images, while many illustrate what's wrong with our modern world in simple and often wordless fashion.  



You can see all of ICONEO's works at Instagram, and check out a ranked list of his social commentary images at Bored Panda.

ICONEO prints can be bought through Etsy.