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.

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A cat walked into the deli-cat-tessen and admired the items on display at the meat counter. The clerk, who may be the butcher as well, went into his sales spiel and gave the cat a better look at a variety of offerings until the cat indicated what he most wanted. The cat probably thought he'd get away with not paying, but the deli got a viral video out of it.

In the latest "pictofacts" post at Cracked, people contributed the design features of everyday products that bother them the most. Some have perfectly reasonable explanations, like the beeps that seems extraneous but help visually-impaired people, and Pringles, which are packaged for shipping and storage, not eating out of the can. The mouse that can't be used while you charge it bothers me, yet I understand that you shouldn't use a device while recharging. But as an old person whose kid lost the remote, this one really bothers me.

My TV isn't a Samsung, and the buttons do have faint labels, but I must keep a flashlight near the TV to see them. See the rest of the pet peeves about product design at Cracked.

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Black holes are pretty cool to study, not cool to get close to, but did you know that black holes spin? You never thought about it before, but since everything else in space spins, it makes sense. What's really cool is that we could theoretically harness this energy. In reality, we are nowhere near having the capability of approaching a black hole, much less surviving such an adventure. From that point, this video from Kurzgesagt takes the theoretical possibilities to the next level by explaining how to make the biggest bomb in the universe. We know the science, but we are far from being able to do it ...at the present time. -via reddit 

Every once in a while, you come across a painting that creeps you out. Maybe it's because of the grim subject matter, or maybe it's because there's a face that seems to look right through you. It would be easy to become obsessed with such a painting, and if something bad then happens, you can connect the mishap with the painting, and you've got the beginning of an urban legend! These tales grow over time, until they are downright horrifying. Take the case of the painting above, titled The Dead Mother by Edvard Munch.  

The painting is inspired from the death of the artist's own mother, on account of Tuberculosis, when he was just 5-years-old. Aside from the fact that the painting is said to make people eerily uncomfortable, it has also been said that the eyes of the little girl follow you around and that you can hear Mother's sheets rustle.   

Read nine other such stories, all of them accompanied by variably disturbing paintings, at Flipboard.  -via Nag on the Lake

The steamship Fort St. George ferried fresh water and passengers from New York to Bermuda beginning in 1921. A cat named Minnie decided the ship was a good place to live. The ship's crew did not return the affection.

Minnie, the black-and-white cat of the Fort St. George, loved her home at sea, but she was also prone to flirting with the tom cats on Pier 95 in New York and at Hamilton Dock in Bermuda. In her years of service as the ship’s dedicated mouser, she was ejected from the ship at least 15 times. Not because she wasn’t loyal to her shipmates or good at catching rats, but because she gave birth to too many kittens.

Every time the sailors sent her packing with her kittens, she’d return as soon as her little ones were old enough to care for themselves.

One time a sailor reportedly took her all the way to Broadway and 72nd Street and bade her what he thought was a final farewell in front of the old Sherman Square Hotel. But when the ship entered Hamilton Harbor in Bermuda a few days later, Minnie miraculously appeared on deck. (My theory is that she hitched a ride to Bermuda on the sister ship, the Fort Victoria.)

You can read more about the Fort St. George and New York's Pier 95 at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

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In this segment from the BBC Earth series Natural World, Dr. Marta Manser studies the language meerkats use to communicate with each other. Yes, she's scaring them with a fake jackal. Sir David Attenborough makes it sound wonderfully dramatic. -via Tastefully Offensive

Malaysian artist Eddie Putera creates wonderfully-detailed miniature dioramas of all kinds. And he's only been doing it for three years! Some of the scenes are from his childhood memory, and he also does custom-made dioramas to his customer's specifications. Others are completely fictional.

He even recreates crashing waves! See a roundup of Putera's work, including closeups of the fine details, at Bored Panda. See more of Putera's work at Instagram.

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We posted about the TinyKittens birth watch webcam a couple of weeks ago, in which three feral cats awaited their litters of kittens. Black cat Ramona gave birth first, and now has four kittens. Rula, the other black cat, had three. Chloe, the ginger cat, just gets bigger every day.The cats have three private nest boxes to select from, plenty of toys, food, and even a TV to watch, but sometimes they crave each other's company. Here we see Ramona and her four kittens making a big fuss over Chloe earlier today. Is Ramona comforting Chloe? Is she trying to warn her what she's in for? Or is she just climbing on Chloe to get away from all those kittens? In a new video just posted, we see that they've settled down bit, and it appears that Ramona is comforting Chloe as her labor pains strengthen.

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Check out the live webcam to follow Chloe's labor and imminent birth. The livestream will continue until all the kittens are adopted.

How long can you hold your breath? The Bajau people of Indonesia are sometimes called "Sea Nomads," because they spend so much time in the ocean, hunting the sea creatures they live on. Bajau divers can spend up to 13 minutes underwater without scuba equipment! Melissa Ilardo, an American at the University of Copenhagen, went to Indonesia to find out what made Bajau divers so good at staying underwater.  

She took genetic samples and did ultrasound scans, which showed that Bajau had spleens about 50 percent larger than the Saluan.

Spleens are important in diving -- and are also enlarged in some seals -- because they release more oxygen into the blood when the body is under stress, or a person is holding their breath underwater.

Spleens were larger in the Balau people whether they were regular divers or not, and further analysis of their DNA revealed why.

Among the 25 genes that differed from other populations was one that regulates a thyroid hormone that controls spleen size. Read more about Ilardo's work at Yahoo. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Flickr user Austronesian Expeditions)

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There's a royal wedding coming up, as Prince Harry will marry American actress Meghan Markle on May 19, and today Queen Elizabeth II turns 92 years old. Happy Birthday, Your Majesty! In honor of the occasion, we celebrate British culture with a compilation video from Great Big Story, in which we will learn about about swan uppers, beadles, jellied eels, the Queen's stand-in, the world's best taxi drivers, and the history of the British obsession with tea. The eels are last, so you can stop there if you're squeamish. I did.