Way back when Westerns were in vogue, their producers tried every conceivable variation, including the use of an all-dwarfs cast. From 1938.

They made a movie about a theme park on a remote island that has real dinosaurs! And then they made that movie again! And Again! The fifth installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, was released on home video today. Screen Junkies was ready, with an Honest Trailer to help you decide whether to buy it. As they make painfully clear, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is just like all the other Jurassic Park movies, a safe way to sell gazillions of movie tickets, and probably gazillions of DVDs and Blu-rays. Whether you enjoyed the film or not, you'll get a kick out of seeing the evidence gathered in this Honest Trailer.

Both men and women have gone to extraordinary lengths to lose weight, sometimes with no method too bizarre to try, but men alone have had to contend with trying various baldness cures of questionable efficacy. Listverse has compiled a list (naturally) of the top ten quack methods for curing baldness throughout the centuries. Bonus: NOW we know why Julius Caesar wore that laurel wreath.

The Muppets Bert and Ernie have been roommates on Sesame Street for 49 years now, and some have speculated that they are a gay couple. Mark Saltzman has written for stage, screen, and TV, including a 15-year stint at Sesame Street. Bert and Ernie were already an integral part of the Sesame Street cast when Saltzman, who is openly gay, began to write their skits in 1984. He talks about the characters in an interview, in which he admits that his writing for the two was inspired by his relationship with his late partner Arnold Glassman.   

I remember one time that a column from The San Francisco Chronicle, a preschooler in the city turned to mom and asked “are Bert & Ernie lovers?” And that, coming from a preschooler was fun. And that got passed around, and everyone had their chuckle and went back to it. And I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert & Ernie, they were. I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie & I as “Bert & Ernie.”

That interview went viral, and Sesame Workshop responded with a now-deleted Tweet, repeating their official stance on the matter.

As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.

A few hours later, they updated and softened their statement.

Please see our most recent statement regarding Bert and Ernie below. pic.twitter.com/gWTF2k1y83

— Sesame Workshop (@SesameWorkshop) September 18, 2018

So, Bert and Ernie are not sexual because they are puppets on a show meant for preschoolers, but they love each other, because otherwise how could they live together despite driving each other crazy? If they were real people, it would be none of our business. As they are fictional characters, it appears that the exact nature of their relationship lies in the viewers' imagination.  

(Image credit: Flickr user See-ming Lee)

The United States Constitution is a framework for how our government operates. As democracy was an experiment at the time, it was our second attempt at enshrining the basics on paper. The Articles of Confederation, drafted during wartime, proved to be so inadequate that the whole thing was scrapped and replaced during the Constitutional Convention in 1789. It was not a simple task.

1. MAKING THE CONSTITUTION WAS A SWEATY, SMELLY AFFAIR.

The Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 over the course of a humid summer. The windows of Independence Hall were shut to discourage eavesdroppers, and many delegates, who were mostly from out of town, wore and re-wore the same thick woolen garments day after day. Many framers stayed at the same boarding houses and shared rooms that, we can only imagine, reeked with a distinct eau du freedom.

Tidbits like that glimpse into history are fun, but this list also has important information about the formation of the Constitution itself.

11. THE FIRST AMENDMENT WAS ORIGINALLY THIRD.

When the Bill of Rights was drafted, James Madison proposed 19 amendments (the House sent 17 of them to the Senate, which were consolidated into the 12 amendments that went to the states). The first two, however, were not ratified immediately. The first amendment set "out a detailed formula for the number of House members, based on each decennial census," writes Andrew Glass at Politico. "Scholars have calculated that had the amendment, which is still pending, been adopted, today's House would have either 800 or 5000 representatives." (It currently has 435.) The second amendment regulated Congressional compensation. That amendment was not ratified for another 203 years: Originally the second, it became the 27th amendment.

Read all 21 Things You May Not Know About the U.S. Constitution at Mental Floss.

The Cingino Dam in Italy is a 160-foot tall dam with rock walls made with stones that just happen to have salt-crust that Alpine Ibex goats love to lick.

The fact that the dam wall is nearly vertical, with teeny tiny toeholds for climbing, doesn't seem to faze these goats at all!

Neutron stars, formed when dying stars collapse into itself, are small and incredibly dense. About a kilometer below the surface of this type of star, atomic nuclei are squeezed together until they merge into a clump of matter thought to be shaped like blobs, tubes or sheets - which physicists lovingly referred to according to their pasta equivalents: gnocchi, spaghetti and lasagna.

Turns out, this nuclear pasta is incredibly dense: about 100 trillion times the density of water and is incredibly strong - breaking a nuclear pasta would require 10 billion times the force required to crack steel.

(Photo: Casey Reed/Penn State University/Wikimedia Commons)

The Italian Ministry of Culture tweeted the excavation of a strange stone urn at the site of the former Teatro Cressoni in the town of Como. Inside the vessel are hundreds of 5th century gold coins - all in mint condition!

It only takes a second of inattentiveness for the unthinkable to happen. Though honestly, all this stuff can happen just as well if you are looking right at your children. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Alaska-based artist Ryota Kajita took some amazing photos of natural ice formations in the waters of Fairbanks, Alaska. The alien-like structures are formed as rivers and lakes freeze from the surface down, trapping bubbles that formed in the water.

Check out Kaijta's series Ice Formations over at his website - via Brain Pickings

Above: Frozen Bubbles#2, Ice Formations (all images by the artist)

Frozen Bubbles#26, Ice Formations

Frozen Bubbles #27, Ice Formations

Gold has been valued for its rarity and beauty since antiquity, and regarded highly for its stability. It does not corrode like other metals. That led to the logical assumption that ingesting gold could imbue the human body with its anti-corrosiveness, and stop the aging process.  

According to Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen’s book Quackery, gold-drinking evolved from curiosity to downright fervor during the medieval era, when an alchemist figured out how to dissolve solid gold into a liquid. Aurum potabile (sometimes known as aurum potable), as drinkable gold was known around the 16th century, was advertised as a cure-all for everything from epilepsy to mania.

Gold-imbued recipes made their way into chemistry manuals by the likes of French medical professionals Jean Beguin and Christophe Glaser, and even the short-lived Portuguese Pope John XXI. In 1578, he wrote a laborious recipe for a gold-laced, youth-preserving water. It involved taking gold, silver, iron, copper, iron, steel, and lead filings, then placing that mixture “in the urine of a virgin child on the first day,” then white wine, fennel juice, egg whites, in a nursing woman’s milk, in red wine, then again in egg whites, in that order, for the following six days.

In a sense, it worked, because the alternative to aging is early death. Read about the trend of drinking gold and some of its more prominent victims at Atlas Obscura.

The years 1793 and 1794 during the French Revolution were known as the "Reign of Terror." During that time, there were over 16,000 official executions by beheading using the guillotine.

And in a macabre way, fashion and style followed the events of the day, and guillotine earrings became all the rage.

From Cult of Weird:

Barbaric or not, people loved the guillotine. When the Reign of Terror began taking heads on an average of 46 per day, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the terrifying instrument of swift death became part of everyday life. It was the subject of art, music, and fashion.

“It was depicted, recounted, and bandied about by popular songs with their series of refrains on ‘the widow,’ ‘the national razor,’ ‘the patriotic haircut,’ ‘the sword of equality,’ and ‘the altar of the nation,'” says Murat. “People no longer referred to ‘being guillotined’ but spoke of ‘sticking your head through the cat-flap,’ ‘poking through the window,’ or ‘sneezing into the basket.'”

“Like tricolor skirts and nosegays, or jewelry set with chunks from the Bastille,” Jane Merrill and Chris Filstrup write in I Love Those Earrings, “the guillotines testified to a person’s daring (unmistakably they were symbols of castration) and being on the winning side.”

( Photo: @hannahtraining )

A new study led by Dr Marcus Smith of the University of Chichester showed that drumming could help children diagnosed with autism learn in school:

Preliminary results showed:

A vast improvement in movement control while playing the drums, including dexterity, rhythm, timing.

Movement control was also enhanced while performing daily tasks outside the school environment, including an improved ability to concentrate during homework.

A range of positive changes in behaviour within school environment, which were observed and reported by teachers, such as improved concentration and enhanced communication with peers and adults.

The study was actually a continuation of research done by a group of researchers which include Clem Burke, the drummer of band Blondie.

(Photo: University of Chichester)

Some people like to dress up when they travel, and other people like to dress for comfort. German artist Menja Stevenson, on the other hand, decided to coordinate her clothes with her mode of transportation.

For her 2008 art project "Bustour," Stevenson decided to wear clothes made from the same fabric as the bus seats to see if anyone noticed:

“I couldn’t believe that many people didn’t realise the connection seeing me and the seats together,” Stevenson says. “Did they think that it was sheer coincidence? Some curious people at least talked to me, and a very few laughed, but most passengers would look shyly at me and quickly look the other way again.”

It may look like a scribble on a rock, but according to archaeologists, it's the earliest known drawing created by man:

Dating back some 73,000 years, the mysterious picture consists of three lines intersected by six angled lines, like a more complicated version of the hashtag (#).

The picture was unearthed at Blombos Cave, a site about 300 kilometers east of Cape Town. The cave was frequented by humans as early as 100,000 years ago and is packed with evidence of tool-making and symbolic designs.