Frank N. Meyer had a passion for plants, and a passion for walking, which took him on treks across entire nations. He found his niche when the USDA's Office of Seed and Plant Introduction sent him to China to find plants that might prove to be good crops or at least valuable food imports for the US.

Meyer arrived in Shanghai in 1905 with the enthusiasm of a man at the peak of his life. He was employed by a rising nation and given a high-stakes assignment. And most meaningfully, he would be able to walk day after day, much of it alone, in search of new plants. He assembled a small team including a translator, a few porters, and a guard, and set off.

For the next decade, Meyer had adventures that seemed too outlandish to believe if he hadn’t documented every detail. He was regularly attacked, threatened, and robbed. He stared down angry bears, tigers, and wolves. People who had never seen a white man accused him of being the devil, and guest houses often shut their doors in his face. During one extremely cold night in October of 1905, he stayed in a guest house where a French man had written on the wall, “Hotel of 1,000 bedbugs.” Meyer had to choose whether to sleep in a freezing room or light a fire that would awaken and invigorate the bugs. He lit the fire.

Meyer sent back important plants such as soybeans and the famous Meyer lemon that was named for the horticulturist. While his work was a great benefit to America, Meyers paid a great personal price for his assignment. Read about the life and times of Frank Meyer at Munchies.  -via Digg

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It's been quite some time since we've seen a "True Facts" video from Ze Frank -years, in fact. He's back with an introduction to the frogfish, a tropical relative of the anglerfish. The frogfish is not only ugly, it comes in a variety of ugliness. You'd better believe that Ze Frank has plenty to say about that ugliness. They're kind of clumsy, too. -via Tastefully Offensive

Today is World Penguin Day! Just ask Benedict Cumberbatch. He should just say "woggin." It's a good time to learn some things about penguins. For example, I knew that emperor penguins were the largest species, but I never thought about what a four-foot bird would be like up close. That's almost to my shoulder! So, in the picture above, piper Gilbert Kerr is about eight feet tell, or else that bird is some other penguin species. There are plenty of other things to learn about penguins, like

5. Fossils place the earliest penguin relative at some 60 million years ago, meaning an ancestor of the birds we see today survived the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

6. Penguins ingest a lot of seawater while hunting for fish, but a special gland behind their eyes—the supraorbital gland—filters out the saltwater from their blood stream. Penguins excrete it through their beaks, or by sneezing.

See more facts about penguins at Mental Floss.

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Michael William Hunter was impressed with "The Hamilton Polka" and came up with the idea of doing the opposite -a song about Weird Al, set to the tune of "Alexander Hamilton." It's the story of Yankovic's life, and it works really well. Enjoy his song "Alfred Matthew Yankovic." -via Metafilter
 

Mitchel Wu has a lot of toys. They are the subjects in his photographs, placed in unexpected settings in unexpected combinations that show us another side to life as a pop culture icon toy. See Kermit and Scooter swimming in a salad! See Woody battle a vacuum cleaner! See stormtroopers on the Planet of the Apes! The funniest are when franchises cross over, like Shaggy and Scooby meeting a dinosaur.

See more of Wu's work in a roundup at Geeks Are Sexy and at Wu's Instagram gallery.

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With Avengers: Infinity War coming out this weekend, Screen Junkies looked back in their records to see if there are any Marvel movies they haven't done an Honest Trailer for yet, and The Incredible Hulk drew the short stick. It was ten years ago that we met this incarnation of the Hulk, back when Bruce Banner was played by Ed Norton -remember that? A lot has changed since then. True Marvel fans won't be surprised by anything in this Honest Trailer, but they may enjoy a nostalgic look back that reminds us of how many movies we've watched since The Incredible Hulk.  

A human bone dagger (top) and a cassowary bone dagger (bottom). Image: Hood Museum of Art/Dartmouth College, Dominy NJ et al. Royal Society Open Science, 2018.

Forget your puny pocket knives - the people of Papua New Guinea know that if you want your friends and foes to take you seriously, you need a bone dagger.

Bone daggers are often carved with decorative patterns and used for hunting, fighting and for ceremonial purposes, as well as to signify social status - and even though most are made from the thigh bones of cassowary birds, the Sepik tribesmen of Papua New Guinea know that the best are made from human bones. And not just from any humans. "Human bone daggers have to be sourced from a really important person," said study author Nathaniel Dominy to LiveScience, "You can't just take the bone of any ordinary person. It has to be your father or someone who was respected in the community."

Now, science has discovered the technical reason why human bones make for better bone daggers. Dominy wrote in a paper published in Royal Society Open Science:

"We found that human and cassowary bones have similar material properties and that the geometry of human bone daggers results in higher moments of inertia and a greater resistance to bending.

"Data from finite-element models corroborated the superior mechanical performance of human bone daggers, revealing greater resistance to larger loads with fewer failed elements."

All in all, human bone daggers are twice as strong as cassowary daggers.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is an interactive closeup of Saturn's rings. The image was taken by the Cassini probe in 2017. Now it's been sonified with harp sounds, with the pitch of each ring determined by its shade -the lighter rings have higher pitches. You can pluck the rings with your mouse, either individually with a click or drag your cursor across for a lovely sound. If you have a touch screen, you can try playing it like a piano keyboard. Or just toggle the automatic mode to watch the spacecraft play on its own. You can also shift to a minor key if you like. -via Metafilter

Dr. Joy Reidenberg has a unique job -she collects whale organs for research. That means that she has to be ready whenever a whale carcass is available, and she must move fast, because authorities do not want whale remains to stay on the beach for any length of time. In 1987, she was informed of a beached whale in New Jersey, but she only had an hour to get there before it would be hauled off.   

There are many factors to consider once Reidenberg receives permission to dissect. Enough daylight to examine the specimen is one. Whale dissection is not an ideal night-time activity, but it can be done in the dark, with guts and all. Low tide and a potential storm are two other factors. It’s quite difficult working on a beached whale in knee-deep water while it’s raining. Will the whale lie belly up or down? Will there be construction equipment to move the heavy parts? Will it explode when opened due to gas build-up? These are the questions she grapples with. She could face all of these obstacles, some, or none at all. In the case of the Atlantic City sperm whale, there was one obstacle she didn’t factor in.

A police officer stopped her for speeding. Flustered, she stepped out of the vehicle in her white medical coat and complied with his instructions. He checked the back seat. “His face just turned ashen white, it was really weird,” says Reidenberg. A few moments before, she had heard on the radio that a body chopped to smithereens was discovered in plastic bags. Her rental car was filled with scalpels, hand knives, gloves, wood saws, and an array of gardening tools—equipment one would need to commit such butchery. The plastic bags in the back seat certainly did not help. She explained her situation and he decided to escort her to the stranded whale. Partly, just in case he was wrong.

That particular episode was worth the trouble, as she retrieved the whale's larynx and refuted earlier research about whale speech. You'll find out a lot more about the ins and outs of Reidenberg's work and whale dissection as a whole at Atlas Obscura. The article contains pictures of dead whales, but they are not grisly.   

(Image courtesy of Dr. Joy Reidenberg)

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Springtime in Nepal means that snow and ice are melting in certain elevations of the Himalayas, and the runoff will not be stopped by mere roads, even the infamously dangerous Besisahar-Chamé Road. The cascading water can take out what few guardrails there are. Meanwhile, people have places they gotta be, so a driver powers on through the treacherous path while a passenger films. Grab your armrests for this sequence. -via Laughing Squid  

There have been 18 movies so far in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the 19th, Avengers: Infinity War, opening this weekend. It marks the tenth anniversary of the MCU, which began with Iron Man in 2008, and will be the second sequel to the 2012 film The Avengers. That film featured what is considered to be the biggest Marvel set piece ever, the Battle of New York.

When The Avengers premiered in 2012, there was nothing like "The Battle of New York," a nonstop, 30-minute finale fight between the super squad and an intergalactic battalion of Chitauri warriors, led by Thor's nefarious half-brother, Loki. Today, even with two Avengers sequels in the can, and a summer tentpole season that stretches from February to December, there's still nothing like The Battle of New York. After an hour-and-a-half of costumed group therapy, the kind of character-drama bedrock that risks losing the coveted popcorn-munching, action-junkie demographic, The Avengers crescendos without apprehension. Through BOOMS and ZAPS and POWS, the sequence -- part Independence Day, part Lord of the Rings, peppered with disaster-thriller vignettes, and bound with a New Yawk-movie spine -- exalts the heroes all while paying respect to the regular Joes on the ground. Scholars swore that comic-book moviemaking peaked with Christopher Nolan's lauded vision for The Dark Knight, yet here was an alternative, propulsive, prismatic, and thoughtful.

For a deep look into how the battle was filmed, Thrillist talked to a large contingent of professionals who worked on The Avengers: the writers, producer, director, illustrator, visual effects people, location manager, editors, and even the music composer about what went into making the Battle of New York for The Avengers. Any Marvel fan will be impressed with their efforts.   

When we first heard of hand transplants, it raised the question of how organ transplants could be justified when they aren't necessary to save a patient's life. We've come a long way since then, with limb and face transplants to improve the quality of life. When the first penis transplants were done, doctors knew that such experimental surgery would be an important achievement in caring for those wounded in war. And in March, the first American veteran received a penis transplant during a 14-hour operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The surgery was successful, and the penis is expected to achieve normal function within a few months. Researchers a the hospital developed a new technique to facilitate such reconstruction.      

One of the challenges from this type of injury is that transplants typically require patients to take strong anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives. Those drugs pose a risk, which must be balanced against the benefit of surgery that is designed to improve quality of life but is not essential to health.

To address that, doctors at Hopkins have developed a method to minimize the drugs required for these patients. That involves infusing some blood cells from the donor, to prime the recipient's immune system to recognize the foreign tissue as "self." Doctors at Hopkins say they can then treat the patient with a single anti-rejection drug rather than the usual cocktail of three.

Unlike previous penis transplants, this surgery included the scrotum and some tissue from the lower abdomen, in order to reconstruct a large wound. The patient was injured by an improvised explosive device. He also lost his legs below the knee as a result of the IED attack.

Read more about the transplant at NPR. -via Digg

(Image credit: Johns Hopkins Medicine)

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Lee Ridley is a standup comic who doesn't speak. He has cerebral palsy and performs under the name Lost Voice Guy, even though he apparently never had one. Ridley's disability-themed routine is delivered by a synthetic voice machine. The machine itself, called a Lightwriter, is the focus for some of his jokes as he performed on Britain's Got Talent. -via Boing Boing
 

The vaudeville stage welcomed plenty of animal acts, but Don the Talking Dog was the tops in his time. Don was a well-known performer in his native Germany, where he displayed his ability to speak several German words. The dog show evoked curiosity in the US, and there was plenty of hype when Don finally crossed the Atlantic in 1912. Newspapers followed his every move, and crowds formed everywhere he performed.

With a vocabulary that ultimately reached eight words—all in German—Don had garnered attention in the United States as early as 1910, with breathless newspaper reports from Europe. According to some accounts, his first word was haben(“have” in English), followed by “Don,” kuchen(“cake”), and hunger (same word in English and German).

Theoretically, this allowed him to form the useful sentence: Don hunger, have cake—although most accounts say he typically spoke just one word at a time, and only when prompted by questions. He later added ja and nein (“yes” and “no”), as well as ruhe (“quiet” or “rest”) and “Haberland” (the name of his owner).

Don stayed in the US for two years, during which time he was treated as royalty, and made plenty of money, both from shows and from endorsing Milk-Bone dog biscuits. Scientists were interested in Don, too, and you can read about their conclusions at Smithsonian.

If you want to be good at skateboarding, you have to put in lots of practice. To survive lots of practice, you need to become good at falling. That involves tucking your head so that any body part besides the skull hits first. Also, curling your body into a ball will make you more likely to roll instead of splat. Na-Kel Smith has perfected the art of falling, no doubt with lots of practice. He is an ace skater, so he also harnesses his sense of momentum, gravity, and direction to not only minimize the pain of falling, but to recover on his feet. You can see more of Smith's skateboarding skills at Digg.