Thomas Edison recorded sound on tinfoil and played it back in 1877. That doesn't mean he was the first person to record sound, because that had already been done. But the first sound recordings couldn't be played back because there was no technology for doing so at the time. In the 1850s, French printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created sound recordings by causing a stylus to transmit patterns of sound vibrations on soot-covered paper.

I cover a plate of glass with an exceedingly thin stratum of lampblack. Above I fix an acoustic trumpet with a membrane the diameter of a five franc coin at its small end—the physiological tympanum (eardrum). At its center I affix a stylus—a boar’s bristle a centimeter or more in length, fine but suitably rigid. I carefully adjust the trumpet so the stylus barely grazes the lampblack. Then, as the glass plate slides horizontally in a well formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, one speaks in the vicinity of the trumpet’s opening, causing the membranes to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures.

In the 21st century, specialists at First Sounds harnessed computers to digitize those "phonautographs" and decipher the sounds that created them. You can hear recordings going back as far as 1853, and listen to a podcast about the process of retrieving sounds recorded 166 years ago, at Kottke.

For those who have not yet seen Avengers: Endgame or any of the other films in the MCU thus far, there might be spoilers in this ranking list of all Marvel movies in the Infinity War Saga, so be warned.

Now that the blockbuster epic of our beloved Marvel heroes has come to a close (for the most part) in Endgame, it is time for us to look back and see how each film fared as standalone movies and in connection with the whole storyline.

Of course, this list is not an authoritative or even an exhaustive one, it's just some guy's opinion. And hindsight is 20/20, so there might be certain rankings that would be totally biased. But here is one of many. Take it however you would like.

(Image credit: Joel_Tempero/Reddit)

During the days of black magic and witchcraft, there were specific artifacts that people believed to have supposedly magical powers, most likely due to the origins of the object, which people would associate to some otherworldly craft that could not be explained.

One such artifact is the "Hand of Glory" which people believed to have the power to render people asleep or paralyzed. The story was that the hand had been cut off from a man who was hanged and they preserved the said hand.

The name “hand of glory” most likely comes from the French main de gloire, a corruption of mandragore, which is the mandrake plant. Mandrake has a long association with magic and witchcraft. The roots and leaves of the mandrake plant contains an alkaloid that induces hallucination, blurred vision, dizziness, headache, vomiting, and a variety of symptoms when consumed. In sufficient quantities, it can even send a victim to unconsciousness. Antique doctors often used mandrake as an anesthetic during surgeries.

It's weird to think that a dead man's severed hand would have the power to do anything but alas, the things people do when they're bored. The hand was dried and pickled with salt. Now, it is displayed at the Whitby Museum.

(Image credit: Badobadop/Wikimedia Commons)

The movie won't be out until December, but we have a trailer, and that's enough for the remixes, parodies, and alternate versions. John Stratman took the trailer for Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker and made a pixelated version that would look right at home on an arcade video game console of the 1980s. Even the sound is deliciously retro.  -via Mashable

April 14th, 1912 the unsinkable ship called the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sealed the fate of 1,517 people. Here are 36 vintage photographs that show how the Titanic was built. As of mammoth proportions you don’t have to look long to understand the scale of this breathtaking vessel.

Via Amaze | Image: wikimedia

It's the end of an era. Endgame marks the close of the Infinity Saga, tying up all significant narratives from where the whole storyline began back in 2008 with the first Iron Man movie. But that doesn't mean that our heroes will be able to sit back and live easy.

We all know that the MCU has a phase four and there's even one more movie to cap phase three which is Spiderman: Far From Home, most likely giving us a sneak peek into what phase four holds but there are certain information on what we can expect for the next chapter of this epic franchise.

“The slate that we’re building over the next five years [is] not apples to apples,” said Feige to io9. “It is two very distinct things and I hope they’ll feel very distinct.”

New to the Marvel Cinematic Universe this time around is an extra focus on the tie-in television shows that will air on Disney Plus. While the Netflix shows (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and the like) and Agents of SHIELD technically were set in the same universe, the Disney Plus shows will actually center on the movie characters that we know.

Apart from the sequels that have been reported to come out in the next several years, there are some new players coming into the scene. For a list of all the possible upcoming Marvel movies that will form the new slate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, check them out on Polygon.

(Image credit: Marvel, Marvel Studios/IMDb)

For far too long, people believed that Theodore Roosevelt once rode a moose across a river. It was just the kind of thing he would do, after all -and we have a photograph! Alas, the photo is not real, but the story behind it is rather interesting. It was part of a newspaper illustration that featured three of the four candidates running for president in 1912. William Howard Taft was shown riding an elephant, Woodrow Wilson was on a donkey, and Roosevelt was placed on a moose. Yep, each candidate was astride the symbol of their political party. Strangely, all three men served in the office: Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909, Taft was running as the incumbent, and Wilson won the election. Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party also ran, but did not make the cut for the illustration. That's one fake historical picture; read about four others at Cracked.

When fire broke out at Notre Dame cathedral last month, we learned it was being remodeled and repaired -as it had been on and off for hundreds of years. Many Gothic cathedrals in Europe spent centuries under construction, and quite a few are still not completed. You can be sure that as soon as they are, there will be remodels and repairs planned. Cathedral construction has always been a quest to be the biggest and the best, which undercuts any plan to get it done quickly and/or economically. An American example is the cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, which is still incomplete more than 100 years after breaking ground. Breaking ground itself was a bigger project than was planned.

Ground broke on December 27, 1892, and almost immediately it became clear just how many unknowns the project would hold. Workers discovered that – unlike at St. Luke’s across the street - there was nothing solid to build on. Excavation revealed loose rock, compressible earth, and underground springs. Workers had to dig 72 feet down before they hit bedrock, by which point said springs had turned the hole into a lake. It would take ten years before they drained the hole and built back up the foundation.

The choir called for eight massive granite columns: each 54 feet tall, six feet in diameter, and weighing 160 tons. To cut the 310 ton blanks down to size, the church commissioned Philadelphia Roll and Machine Works to build a custom 135 ton, 86-foot-long lathe at the cost of $50,000 (in today’s dollars, $1.5 million). To transport them from Vinalhaven Maine required a specially built barge.

The rule of the iron triangle is that adjustments in one leg affects the other two. A larger budget may shorten the timeline, but a larger scope almost always means a ballooning schedule and budget. For St. John the Divine, the property cost $850,000 (today, $24 million). The extra foundation work then required a $500,000 ($15 million) gift from J.P. Morgan, “to get us out of the hole.” As a fundraiser, each column was dedicated to a sponsor for $20,000 ($610,000), but their unit cost ended up being $25,000 ($761,000). By 1900 the cathedral had spent more than $2 million ($60 million), and all they had was a single stark crossing arch.

Construction continued through wars, recessions, and the deaths of those responsible for both financing and building the cathedral. Read the saga of St. John the Divine cathedral at The Prepared. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Olivier Perrin)

In any movie, there will always be the big stars whose names get plastered on the posters and the movie screen but there are those silent characters with minor roles that we can still grow to love. In the above photo, we see C-3PO meeting E-3PO in Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back. There are many other minor characters throughout the whole Star Wars franchise. Popular Mechanics' Darren Orf lists the best minor characters in Star Wars here.

(Image credit: Lucasfilm; Darth Culator/Wookieepedia/Fandom)

We may have asteroids whizzing past us but there are no imminent threats of any big space rock coming our way. Not yet, at least. Still, it's better to be prepared and just recently, the Planetary Defense Conference concluded, and various space agencies will be conducting simulations on what to do or how to respond when an asteroid alert starts buzzing.

This year, the simulated situation is dire. The story starts in March when scientists discover a near-Earth asteroid that’s estimated to be between 330 to 1,000 feet wide. The asteroid, dubbed 2019 PDC, is expected to pass by Earth on May 13th at a safe distance of 12 million miles. But after following 2019 PDC’s trajectory for a couple of weeks, the fictional scientists initially determine that the asteroid will swing back by Earth again in 2027. And when it does, the rock has a 1 percent chance of slamming into the planet.

Though one percent seems like negligible, we cannot deny the fact that it is probable. Furthermore, there are various other factors that might tip the scales against us, so what will we do in the case a giant asteroid is coming to hit us to oblivion?

One option is to create spacecraft that could rendezvous with the asteroid and ram into it, changing the object’s speed and direction so that it will most likely miss Earth. “That would be enough to make it miss the Earth, if it was done years ahead,” says Chodas. NASA is already working on a real mission that would test out this process in space. It’s called the Double Asteroid Redirect Mission (DART), and it will slam into a small asteroid moon, an object that orbits around another asteroid. It’s supposed to launch in 2022.

Even then, we aren't sure that the impact would be big enough to send that asteroid flying elsewhere or even destroying it completely. Thankfully, there are no threats like that yet. If only we had a band of superheroes who would save us average people from sure destruction, whether it be an asteroid impact or an alien invasion, then we could rest easy.

(Image credit: Pixabay)

Not to mention, it will be on April 13, 2029, a Friday. A near apocalyptic miss on the asteroid's part there but it will be very close to Earth for a short period of time, just enough for us to see its 1,000-foot wide mass grazing some of our satellites and barely scraping the outer edges of the Earth's atmosphere.

That asteroid, called Apophis, stretches about 1,100 feet (340 meters) across and will pass within 19,000 miles (31,000 kilometers) of Earth's surface. That might sound scary, but scientists are positive that it will not hit Earth. Instead, it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance for scientists to truly understand asteroids near Earth.

"The excitement is that an object this large comes this close about once per thousand years, so it's all about, What's the opportunity?" Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist at MIT, said yesterday (April 30) during the International Academy of Aeronautics' Planetary Defense Conference, which is being held here this week. The asteroid's proximity and size will also add to the encounter's brightness, so Apophis will capture eyeballs — about 2 billion people should be able to see it pass by with their naked eyes, he said.

Hopefully, we will be some of the lucky ones to see the asteroid in its full splendor. On another note, a few key point that scientists have been discussing are how the Earth's gravitational pull as well as the sun's radiation (called Yarkovsky effect) will affect Apophis' orbit.

That phenomenon, called the Yarkovsky effect, results from the temperature differential between the day and night sides of the asteroid. The tweaks the Yarkovsky effect cause in an asteroid's orbit are so small that scientists struggle to distinguish the nudges from instrument hiccups. 

Although scientists have pinpointed Apophis' trajectory in 2029 to within a path just 7.4 miles (12 km) wide that stays thousands of miles away from Earth, they can't quite rule out possible impacts decades in the future — and that's in part because of uncertainty about the Yarkovsky effect.

Other ideas of using this opportunity to further study asteroids have also been popping up. Some even suggest putting a seismometer on Apophis like what previous missions such as the Mars InSight did or sending a probe to explore it like what Hayabusa2 did on the asteroid Ryugu.

Whatever scientists do in response to this opportunity or phenomenon, I'm just grateful that we will live to see it and not have to run in panic and find shelter before the big asteroid blows our Earth to smithereens. The rest is up to the planetary defense teams and asteroid experts.

-via Popular Mechanics

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Farming has always been a human-intensive-heavy labor. Robotic company Iron Ox aims to change that by making farming automated. The startup company which started last October, now sells a variety of leafy greens at Bianchini’s Market, San Carlos branch.

Despite claiming that their farming is “autonomous”, Iron Ox’s farming process is not fully automated. Humans are still needed in the job to plant the seeds, and the robots would be the one tending the plants. Then, the humans would pack the plants when they’re ready to eat. In other words, humans are still needed for a lot of work. But I guess, tending plants is one less thing to worry about, and this would be the first step towards fully automated farming.

More details of this at The Verge.

(Image Credit: Iron Ox)

Our friends over at Geeks Are Sexy have been covering pop culture conventions for many years, and this May the 4th, they've got a tribute to Star Wars. Take a look at some of the neatest Star Wars cosplayers who have been featured on their site over the past nine years.

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan in his first solo show in Britain in 20 years makes a daring exhibition — a gold toilet. And of all places to display his masterpiece, what would be most fitting but a palace? This 18-karat gold toilet will be displayed at Blenheim Palace, home of the Duke of Marlborough.

"I am constantly inspired by the past and how nothing has really changed, so to show my work at Blenheim Palace -- a place full of history and humanity -- is significant to me," said the artist in a press release.

The exhibition, hosted by the Blenheim Art Foundation, will feature new works by the artist, but the main attraction is sure to be "America" -- the fully functioning gold toilet that will be plumbed into a room adjacent to the one in which Winston Churchill was born.

The work could be seen as a comment on the social, political and economic disparities in the United States, a press release announcing the exhibition reads.

The interpretations of the artwork vary from person to person. What is your interpretation of the artwork?

(Image Credit: Jacopo Zotti/ Menomenopiu Architects/ Maurizio Cattelan Archive)