It's like a scene straight out of a sci-fi movie: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 asteroid mission has successfully landed two rovers on an asteroid called Ryugu.

The photo above was taken by Minerva-II 1A rover during a hop after it landed on the asteroid. The rovers are designed to hop along the asteroid's surface, and take photos and data, as well as collect samples.

This photo was taken by the second rover, shortly after separating from the spacecraft, on its way down to the asteroid.

Photo: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

It's an '80s song set to a '50s beat, and Generation Z doesn't understand at all. But the rest of us can enjoy Postmodern Jukebox with guest musicians Casey Abrams and Snuffy Walden performing Toto's "Africa." -via Laughing Squid

DAREDEVIL RACCOON: Incredible video shows a raccoon climbing roughly nine stories up a building off the Ocean City Boardwalk. It then appears to turn around and jump from the building, spiraling toward the ground. Then it gets up and walks away…

MORE: https://t.co/a7MU4FnFDT pic.twitter.com/njbzrFcWTF

— FOX 29 (@FOX29philly) September 21, 2018

South Carolina resident Micha Rea was walking on the boardwalk of Ocean City, New Jersey, when he spotted a raccoon scaling a building.  When the animal reached the ninth story ... it JUMPED down!

Click on the embedded video to see what happened next.

Even if you're not a physicist, chances are that you're familiar with Erwin Schrödinger's cat.

In his famous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, a cat inside a box is both dead and alive until the box is opened, and illustrates (just one of the) paradoxical things about quantum mechanics.

But what if instead of one cat, there are two cats?

Find out what happens in this article by Davide Castelvecchi over at Nature.

Praying mantises normally eat other insects, but they aren't picky. They've been seen eating spiders, birds, frogs, and mice, but now a science paper details the first-ever observance of a praying mantis catching and eating fish. Lots of fish.

Observations of this 2.2-inch-long male mantis (Hierodula tenuidentata) were made in a private roof garden in Karnataka, India. The garden may be artificial, but the researchers say it’s a very close approximation of mantises’ natural habitat, featuring wasps, butterflies, spiders, and several planters. The team observed the mantis as it hunted and devoured the guppies, also known as rainbow fish, in a pond, which it did for five days in a row. In total, the mantis ate nine fish, at a minimum rate of two per day.

This is just one mantis, but it shows how adaptable and intelligent they can be. Read all about the pescetarian mantis at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Rajesh Puttaswamaiah)  

"I don't know what you're doing, Dad, but I wanna do it, too!"

Eli Clark was exercising by doing lunges across the living room, and his great Dane Luca did his best to join in. He didn't quite understand what moves were involved, but gosh darn it, he did his best! That's a good dog. Luca now has his own Instagram account. -via Tastefully Offensive 

Terry Laurmen of Green Bay, Wisconsin, is 75 years old. He volunteers at Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary, where he enjoys brushing the cats. They love it too! The shelter, which specializes in caring for disabled, ill, and elderly cats, is a comfy place, so Laurmen often falls asleep with the cats.

"They all know him, when he walks through the door they run over to him because they know he has the special brush and the special treats. They all pile on top of him and rub all over him and just love him," sanctuary owner Elizabeth told the BBC.

But grooming 20-30 cats can get exhausting, and the other volunteers began snapping shots of Terry taking his daily siestas with his furry friends.

The pictures, posted at Facebook, went viral. When the shelter attached a fundraising link, they raised more than $40,000 in donations! They also have more volunteers because of the publicity. So what's next?

"People have been requesting we make a calendar with Terry and the cats on it!" Elizabeth says.

"I asked him if he would be comfortable with something like that - and he said he'd do anything to raise money for them."

Read more about Cat Grandpa at BBC. -via Fark

When redditor Monkeygruven posted this picture of some family friends ready for trick-or-treat, others bemoaned that the kids didn't pick their own costumes, nor did they know who they were portraying. Maybe it was more like this.

Mom: Do you want to wear a scary costume or a princess costume?
Girl: I don't know!
Mom: You can be both! You can be a queen who got her head cut off!
Girl: Yeah, let's do that!
Boy: I want to have my head cut off!
Mom: How about you be the king that murdered her?
Boy: Well, okay. But how will people know I did it?
Mom: Let me tell you a scary story, a true story...

That said, the costumes are awesome. -via reddit

Military parades are usually a stuffy kind of affair featuring tanks and things like that, but not in Chile! In their annual military parade in Santiago, the Chilean military featured uniformed officers carrying a bunch of puppies that will be trained to be police dogs.

Ever since we managed to put men on the moon, we've been looking for other places for people to go. Then bigger and better telescopes led us to exoplanets, those outside our solar system. Somewhere along the way, we switched from thinking of pure exploration to colonizing other planets. But our bodies were built for Earth. Even if we find an exoplanet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, liquid water, and tolerable temperatures, would we be able to live with a different level of gravity?

If its gravity is too strong our blood will be pulled down into our legs, our bones might break, and we could even be pinned helplessly to the ground.

Finding the gravitational limit of the human body is something that’s better done before we land on a massive new planet. Now, in a paper published on the pre-print server arXiv, three physicists, claim that the maximum gravitational field humans could survive long-term is four-and-a-half times the gravity on Earth.  

Read how they figured that out at Discover magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech)

A hundred years ago, in the autumn of 1918, the Great War was dragging on, so Philadelphia threw a parade to raise morale and sell war bonds called "Liberty Loans." The parade highlighted any available soldiers and sailors, plus the many homefront organizations supporting them. The spectacle would end with a concert conducted by John Philip Souza himself.  

When the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade stepped off on September 28, some 200,000 people jammed Broad Street, cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles. Floats showcased the latest addition to America’s arsenal – floating biplanes built in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. Brassy tunes filled the air along a route where spectators were crushed together like sardines in a can. Each time the music stopped, bond salesmen singled out war widows in the crowd, a move designed to evoke sympathy and ensure that Philadelphia met its Liberty Loan quota.

But aggressive Liberty Loan hawkers were far from the greatest threat that day. Lurking among the multitudes was an invisible peril known as influenza—and it loves crowds. Philadelphians were exposed en masse to a lethal contagion widely called “Spanish Flu,” a misnomer created earlier in 1918 when the first published reports of a mysterious epidemic emerged from a wire service in Madrid.

Within a couple of days, the hospitals started filling up and people were dying. The entire city was shut down. Read how Philadelphia (and other American cities) reacted to the Spanish flu at Smithsonian.

According to the neighbors, one woman would get on her motorcycle and go riding late at night, although she had no idea because she was sleepwalking. Others cook meals, preach sermons, and commit murder while sleeping. It's estimated that 30 percent of us sleepwalk at one time or another, but we really don't know because we sleep through it.

Although it’s thought to be triggered by stress, anxiety, and alcohol, it is totally unknown why we do it. Are we simply on auto-pilot? Trying to fulfill our fantasies? Or perhaps something stranger…

Science hasn’t always provided satisfactory answers to the many questions raised around sleepwalking. Throughout history, the mysteries of somnambulance have lead many to come up with their own theories—drawing on spirituality, pseudo-science, and folklore—with sleepwalkers seeming to exist somewhere between this world and another.

Read a short history of sleepwalking that covers famous cases, scientific research, and pop culture, at Vice.

Diane can't ignore anymore the leak coming from the ceiling above the family diner…

A beautiful and strong animation about climate change and human behaviours.

Director : AV-RON Maya, COMINOTTI Mylène, COUDERT Marion, DANO Sixtine

Production year : 2018

Let's find out, neuroscientists Gul Dolen of Johns Hopkins University and Eric Edsinger of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, said.

And find out they did:

The researchers knew from previous tests that an octopus would normally stay far, far away from a second octopus that was confined to a small cage inside the first one's tank. But an octopus on MDMA would get up-close and personal with the new neighbor.

"They spent significantly more time in the side of the tank, the chamber, that had the other octopus in it," says Dolen.

What's more, without the drug, any octopus that approached the stranger at all would remain very reserved, perhaps only reaching out one arm to tentatively touch the other animal's cage.

"After MDMA, they were essentially hugging," says Dolen, who explains that the octopuses were "really just much more relaxed in posture, and using a lot more of their body to interact with the other octopus."

Nell Greenfieldboyce of NPR has the story.

Photo: Tom Kleindinst/Marine Biological Laboratory

Now you can enjoy your breakfast with happy little toasts every morning! Better yet, this Bob Ross Toaster will burn a portrait of the famous painter onto the bread.