With NASA planning to return to the moon, and with long-range plans to build a base of some kind there, the moon needs to keep time. Physicists at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology have created Coordinated Lunar Time, or "Moon Time," for the purposes of timekeeping on the lunar surface. The time will have nothing to do with the length of a lunar day, which is a month long, and there will be only one lunar time zone. So why do they need a special time system for the moon? Wouldn't it just be easier to coordinate the time with Houston?

It's because timekeeping is about a lot more than just scheduling a wakeup call from ground control. Clocks on the moon will be used to calculate locations, like GPS does on earth. Despite the fact that satellite clocks are some of the most precise clocks ever developed, they still lose a little time relative to earth because of their speed and the influence (or lack thereof) of gravity. In other words, time moves slower in space. Low-orbit satellites are launched with software that takes these effects into account, but the moon's distance will require a different system to keep lunar time working the way it should. The importance of Coordinated Lunar Time is explained in greater detail at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Airwolfhound)

We already know that the human body cannot survive being ejected into the vacuum of space. We've seen it in the movies, and it's not pleasant. But that's where this TED-Ed lesson starts, because they want to cover all the scenarios. With a spacesuit, a body is much safer, but still not safe because we are exposed to conditions that don't occur on earth, like unshielded radiation. So astronauts travel in spaceships, to a space station that's built to keep them safe. But is it really safe? Even with strict environmental controls, astronauts must deal with microgravity in bodies that evolved to work properly in earth's gravity. It takes a while, but even that will damage the human body in surprising ways. These findings might put a damper on your desire to volunteer for interplanetary travel. Find out more in our previous posts on NASA's twin study of a year in space. -via reddit 

Robert Reinhardt, the owner of the Roberto Confectionary in Tatabanya, Hungary mixes traditional Hungarian cuisine into his ice cream flavors available to hungry Hungarians experiencing the summer heat.

France 24 reports that his shop has become wildly popular since he began offering ice cream that tastes like paprika chicken, cabbage stew, and meat pancakes. Additionally, Reinhardt helps his customers experience foreign cuisines with ice cream flavored as spaghetti Bolognese or bacon and eggs.

It's cheap, too, at about $1.41 USD a scoop. If I were in Hungary, I'd spend an afternoon and twenty bucks experimenting with the different flavors available.

-via Dave Barry

You want to go into the water? That's a bad idea unless you have a boat so large that sharks don't even consider you to be below them on the food chain.

Jayden Grace and Joe Cook were recently fishing off the coast of Mooloolaba, Queensland when a Great White Shark approximately 16 feet long charged and bit into their metal boat. Grace, whose voice you can hear in the video, expresses astonishment and fear at the shark's bold attack.

-via Dave Barry

Redditor /u/reddituser0346 shares photos of ice cream treats being sold at a movie theater in Australia. The carefully shaped ice cream held in place by a chocolate shell resembles the facehugger stage of the xenomorph's life cycle. So it's as dangerous as much of that continent's wildlife.

The original poster suggests eating the ice cream after first mounting it in the mouth of the famous Dune sandworm popcorn bucket.

-via Totally Gourmet

Etsy seller Lisbanoe Leather Craft in the UK offers precisely rendered leather goods, including this impressively realistic backpack that looks like the shell of a tortoise. The preparation, she says, is "very labor intensive", taking four weeks of work for each backpack. But the result is an astonishingly detailed work of painted leather.

Ask people why they love fall, and you'll get plenty of different answers. There's Halloween, which is always fun. Apple cider. The temperatures drop to a comfortable level. Turkey and dressing. Beautiful leaf colors. Pumpkin spice. Football. Harvest festivals. The kids finally go back to school. You have to admit, there's a lot to like about autumn.    

But you can make lists of why all the other seasons are nice, too. Winter is cozy and has the biggest holidays. Spring brings warmth and the renewal of nature. Summer is leisure time. Still, people are just plain excited to welcome autumn, and scientists have conducted experiments that point out three specific ways autumn makes us feel good. They are the colors of nature, the feeling of starting a new year, and the nostalgia of holidays and traditions. Read the science behind how these things make autumn special for us at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Darb02)

Twisters is the sequel to the 1996 movie Twister, but 28 years later, who cares about that. The only thing people recall from the earlier movie is the flying cow, and the new one doesn't have that. While the new movie has better special effects, that seems like a missed opportunity. Twisters was released last month and received generally favorable reviews, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have all kinds of weirdness that Screen Junkies can pick apart in an Honest Trailer. But what about the science? Scientists who were consulted for the film have politely distanced themselves from it, or else tell us that the solution in the movie is not at all feasible at the scale it's portrayed. But if you can let the fast-paced science explanations wash over you, you might enjoy Twisters. Then again, you might feel like you've seen the whole thing after you've watched this. -via Geeks are Sexy 

Redditor Sabrine_Heester_2001 was told she was getting a 10% raise at work. The next paycheck she received didn't make any sense, so she emailed the HR department and received this answer. She was making an hourly rate of $26.35, which is nice, but with a 10% raise, it was boosted to $26.38! While any raise in pay is something to celebrate, it's not a 10% raise. Can you see where the math went wrong?

Ten percent can be rendered as 0.10, or it can be rendered as 10/100. Unfortunately, this calculation included both, therefore ten percent was taken of ten percent, so her "raise" was a thousandth of her previous pay, or 2.63 cents. They generously rounded that up to three cents. Most calculators will do percentages for you, but a pencil and paper is all you need to move a decimal point one place to the left and add that to the original pay rate. Doing it quickly in my head gave me $29, but it's actually $28.98. Sabrine_Heester_2001 tells us that reporting this messy math to her boss got everything straightened out quickly, but you have to wonder about the HR department and their history of calculating raises.  

Unitree Robotics has announced that its G1 robot is going into mass production for consumer sales. You can buy one for only $16,000! Let's see what this little (4' 4") robot can do. I see he can dance. It can walk on uneven terrain. But why would I spent $16K for a robot to do that? Can it reliably load my dishwasher? Can it drive? We see from the video that teh G1 can manipulate things with its hands, because it gives us the example of crushing nuts. If that's supposed to be a metaphor, it's not going to sell robots. Besides, if you look at that scene slowly in full-screen mode, you'll see that the nuts are already cracked. CNET gives us a review as best they can, considering all they have to go by is a promotional video. They mainly compare the price of the G1 to other much more expensive robots that you may be more familiar with. I don't believe they will sell a lot of humanoid robots until they can be seen doing something we need them to do. We already have robots to do heavy lifting and manufacturing; they just don't look like humans and don't dance so well. -via Born in Space

What we know now as England was part of the Roman Empire for a few hundred years until the Romans withdrew around the year 300 CE. When they left, the natives were speaking a Celtic language, and some knew Latin. By the year 700, the people had their own language, Old English, and were spread over the countryside tending farms. We know that the English language owes a lot to Germanic influence, and that many Germans and Danes had moved to England. But was that a matter of conquest or just old-fashioned immigration?

Only the stories of royalty were chronicled, and even those accounts are spotty and often inaccurate compared to Roman records. But we don't know much about the everyday people of early England. Archaeologists keep digging them up, but until fairly recently, could not identify who they were or where they came from. That changed when advanced DNA analysis enabled us to trace which parts of Europe these long-dead people descended from. Add to that new isotope analysis techniques that tells the story of where an individual lived at different stages of their lives. These tests have been opening doors to the lives and ancestry of early medieval Britons who made England into, well, England. Read their stories in an article from the September issue of Smithsonian magazine.

(Image credit: Duncan Sayer)

Warning: this video is bloody and can be traumatic until it get really silly in the second half.

Have you ever been doing something normal like flossing your teeth and a tooth, or part of a tooth, just falls out? It's happened to me, and it was not at all fun, but in my case, it was only one tooth at a time. Or maybe you've had nightmares like that. At any rate, that's what happens in the award-winning horror short Tooth. Director Jillian Corsie was inspired to make it after the weird feeling she got when her mother gave her the baby teeth she had saved. We all know losing baby teeth isn't nearly as horrific as losing them as an adult, because they won't be replaced like baby teeth, and you can't just stick them back in. That said, if we could turn our nightmares around to make them less believable like this scenario, they might not be as scary. -via Nag on the Lake

Check out this bug with the long neck! It's not only long, but it's jointed in the middle. This is the giraffe weevil  (Trachelophorus giraffa), native to Madagascar and only studied since 2008. So why the long neck? Only the males have this long neck, and they use it for mating dances and fighting over short-necked females of the species, although such fights are rarely deadly. In that they resemble their namesakes, but African mammal giraffes also use their long necks to reach food at the tops of trees. The giraffe weevils live in the trees they eat, a species called the giraffe beetle tree for some reason.

Giraffe weevils have a cousin native to New Zealand, but only the Madagascar species has a bright red carapace covering their wings. The insects are sold as souvenirs in Madagascar, and are sometimes used in art. See more of these long-necked bugs at Ark in Space.

(Image credit: Axel Strauß)

There has never been a photograph taken of the Milky Way galaxy. It would take centuries to get a probe far away enough to capture its shape. Yet we have artist's renderings of the galaxy like the one above. How can we possibly know the galaxy's shape when we are inside of it? The truth is that we don't know, but we are learning more about it all the time. The premise we start with is what we can observe. What we see in the skies as the Milky Way is a band of distant stars, which are the nearest of the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy. That suggests the galaxy is disc-shaped. While we can't see our own galaxy as a whole, we can see other galaxies, and those that are disc-shaped tend to have arms moving in a spiral. So we can assume that the Milky Way also has arms in a spiral. But that is old news.

With ever more powerful space imaging technology, we are making discoveries that give us a better idea of what the Milky Way looks like. The movement of the stars we know suggest what is hidden behind them by space dust and signal interference. Radio signals penetrate that dust and can map hydrogen gas between stars. There have been many breakthroughs that reveal the size, shape, and texture of the galaxy without us ever seeing what we are studying. Read about the technology that shows us more and more of what we cannot see at Sky at Night magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Nick Risinger)

You know Maurice Sendak as the author and illustrator of the children's book Where the Wild Things Are. But his first paying job as an illustrator came in 1947, when he was still in high school. Sendak had a reputation in the Brooklyn school as a talented artist, and when his physics teacher Hyman Ruchlis wrote a book explaining nuclear science, a hot topic due to the bombs that ended World War II, he asked Sendak to illustrate it. For his efforts, Sendak received a thousand-dollar advance, 1% of royalties, a title-page credit, and a passing grade in physics. He drove a hard bargain. 

Atomics for the Millions explained how nuclear science works, from the basic concept of atoms to weapons to the future of nuclear energy. Sendak's illustrations broke down those concepts into metaphors that the general public of 1947 would understand. Sendak later expressed his disappointment in his early work, but the images are quite charming. See more of these images from the now-public domain book Atomics for the Millions at Physics Today. -via Ars Technica