You know Lupita Nyong’o from her roles in 12 Years a Slave, The Force Awakens, and most prominently in Black Panther. Her next project is producing a film based on the book Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. Noah is the South African standup comic who took over as host of The Daily Show when Jon Stewart retired. Nyong’o will also have a starring role.   

The movie has a lot to with apartheid as it was viewed in South Africa and will be seeing her take on the role of Patricia Nombuyiselo, the mother of Trevor Noah and one of the strongest women that’s ever been detailed in a book or a movie. The story goes that Trevor was born of a white man and a black woman, which was serious crime in South Africa when he was born. As apartheid didn’t end until 1990-91 and Noah was born in 1984, this created a lot of potential problems for Patricia and her son. Added to that was the fact that Noah’s stepfather was very abusive, which only made matters worse.

That may sound thoroughly depressing, but listen to how Noah relates the story in his standup routine. Read more about the upcoming Born a Crime at TVOM.

(Image  credit: The Daily Show)

Most Emo kids are misunderstood by their parents, who see Emo as nothing but a moody phase they're going through, but Emo Dad feels their angst and totally gets what they're going through- because he's going through the same thing himself.

His approach to parenting is clearly "if you can't cheer them up then join them in their sulk", but for some strange reason his Emo son doesn't dig having an Emo Dad to share his guyliner with- go figure!

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Emo Dad is a sweet and silly animated series created by Benny & Rafi Fine of Fine Brothers Entertainment and animated by Two Animators! LLP, and if you like the first season you can start watching season 2 here.

Norway won 39 medals at the PyeongChang Olympics, more than any other country: 14 gold, 14 silver, 11 bronze. In fact, they set a new record for the most medals won at a Winter Games. Norway's medal count was followed by Germany, Canada, and the United States. Consider also that Norway only sent 109 athletes to South Korea, while the US sent 242. The Norwegians are proud but also trying to remain humble with their success. Tore Ovrebo, the director of elite sports with Norway's Olympic program, was asked what made the Norwegian athletes so special.   

Ovrebo went out of his way to explain he didn’t want to come across as giving anyone, lest the United States, any advice. “I am not a tiny gorilla beating my chest telling you what to do because it’s not my position,” he says. “We do it this way, others do it another way.” He also admits Norway is blessed with many advantages for Winter Olympics dominance, like snow, a history of excellence in sports like biathlon and cross-country skiing, and free health care, which helps keep young athletic talent in good shape.

But a distinctly Norweigan rule for their youth sports may strike a particular chord with many Americans. (This one included: I’m a youth sports parent, and wrote a TIME cover story on the booming kid sports industry last summer).

Ovrebo says that in Norway, organized youth sports teams cannot keep score until they are 13. “We want to leave the kids alone,” says Ovrebo. “We want them to play. We want them to develop, and be focused on social skills. They learn a lot from sports. They learn a lot from playing. They learn a lot from not being anxious. They learn a lot from not being counted. They learn a lot from not being judged. And they feel better. And they tend to stay on for longer.”

Read more about Norway's Olympic success at Time.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Trainholic) 

People who have no home and nowhere to turn often end up in makeshift camps on public land near city centers. One of the more common ways municipal governments deal with those camps is to raid them and drive the residents away. "Cleaning up" a homeless camp makes the area look better, but it doesn't solve the problem. The evicted individuals are still homeless and even worse off than before, and their numbers are simply shifted to other areas. However, Las Vegas is trying something different: the homeless camp on Foremaster Lane will not only be allowed to continue existing, but the city is fortifying it with essential services.   

As part of a broader strategy to address its growing homelessness problem, the city is building an open-air courtyard where homeless people can legally camp. The courtyard would include bathrooms, structures for shade, storage, and sleeping mats, according to reports. Some social services are already operating in the area, but the city plans to bring even more, from essentials like showers to housing, employment, and mental health services.

“It is a service center,” Thomas-Gibson says. “One of the services might be that you need someplace to be overnight, but the intention is that homeless individuals get connected to the services that can help break the barriers to ending their homelessness.”

The Las Vegas scheme follows a similar project in San Antonio that is showing promise. Read about the “Corridor of Hope” at Next City. 

(Image credit: Lasvegaslover)

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Unless your history teacher was a real history buff or they had an affinity for the dark side of life your high school and college history courses probably left out most of the creepy bits.

They probably spoke about the Salem witch trials but chose not to touch on the fact that witch trials date back to the Middle Ages and beyond- and that animals were sometimes put on trial for witchcraft too.

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History teachers may touch on the reign of Pope Gregory IX during the 13th century, and mention how he's the guy behind the Papal Inquisition, but they won't tell you how Gregory declared cats part of devil worship- and had them exterminated by the hundreds.

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And even though history teachers will speak of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo they hardly ever discuss the defeat Napoleon suffered eight years prior- at the paws of a horde of rabbits he was hunting.  

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See 25 Insanely Creepy Historical Facts They Never Taught You In School here

We've posted quite a bit about fecal transplants, but it's been a while. Since then, the procedure has become the "magic bullet," so to speak, in the battle against C. diff, a dangerous antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria. C. diff is opportunistic, and tends to take up residence in a patient who has already used antibiotics to kill off other harmful bacteria -and killed off beneficial bacteria as well.  

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In this video, Dr. Mark Smith explains how and why fecal transplants work. Science writer Ed Yong tries to keep a straight face amid Smith's potty humor. The upshot is that when we overdo modern techniques, such as antibiotics, we often provoke new and unforeseen problems with it. The solution can be to go back to ancient traditional remedies and let nature do her work. -via Digg

Blowout by Dungeon Crate

There's a feeling you get when you're staring into the maw of a giant creature that wants to devour you whole, and it's the same feeling that makes your gut churn when you have to jump a chasm or avoid a deadly trap with an 18 and above on a d20- the "oh s#$t" feeling. It's the feeling of knowing your character's virtual life may be going to hell and it all depends on the roll of the dice- and they love to crit fail at the most inopportune times. So maybe you'd better invest in some adult diapers before your next D&D session!

Show the world how RPGs make you feel like a kid again with this Blowout t-shirt by Dungeon Crate, it's sure to make your fellow gamers pee their pants with laughter!

Visit Dungeon Crate's Facebook fan page, official website and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more delightfully geeky designs:

View more designs by Dungeon Crate | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

The following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

If a recipe called for you to blanch some almonds, would you know how to do it? Cookbooks are full of techniques that are a mystery to most of us, even if their names sound familiar.

Heat and Serve

There are many different ways to cook food, and each method affects food differently. Most techniques can be broken down into two categories: wet and dry – but it’s not quite as straightforward as you’d think.

Wet cooking involves the use of water or water-based liquid. This includes wine, broth, stock, milk, vinegar-whatever you like, as long as it’s water-based. Wet techniques (also called moist techniques) include boiling, blanching, poaching, steaming, and stewing. The temperatures involved in all of these techniques are actually pretty low-because boiling water doesn’t get any hotter than 212° F.

Dry-cooking techniques include baking, broiling, frying, sautéing, and you might be surprised to learn, deep-frying. Reason: Though oil is a liquid, it’s not water-based and its use is therefore considered a dry cooking technique. Dry cooking involves cooking at temperatures of 270° F and above. It is these hotter temperatures that allow dry cooking to brown food-which cannot be done with wet technique.

Wet Cooking Techniques

Here's a ghost story you may be quite familiar with. This time, it has a happy ending. Our greatest enemy is not those who compete with us. It's not our deadlines. It's not even failure, but it's the fear of failure. Grant Snider knows that fear, the specter that cripples creativity. Rather than give in to it, he harnesses it to enable him to "chase the luminous."

This comic from Grant Snider at Incidental Comics was inspired by the essay "Notes on Failure" by Joyce Carol Oates. You can order a poster of it, or any of his comics, through his shop.  

March Madness is coming, but Lent Madness has already started! Every year since 2010, Forward Movement has staged a Lent Madness Tournament where 32 contestants from the Catholic Calendar of Saints duke it out for the Golden Halo. Matchups are posted one at a time, and readers vote for the winner. Guest bloggers give their case for each saint, in case you know nothing about them. The 2018 bracket is here, showing the grand regions as Biblical, Monastics & Martyrs, Mostly Modern, and Miscellaneous.

The tournament is now down to the Saintly 16 round. Keep up with the matchups at the tournament blog. A new matchup will be presented on Monday.  -via Metafilter

Popular Canadian DIY and engineering YouTuber AvE is deep into explaining the work of a fixed displacement oil pump when his young daughter comes into the shop. The two minutes starting at 4:30 are cute enough to melt the coldest heart as he kisses her booboo ("ouch ouch") and explains what he's doing.

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Yeah, you're welcome to watch all ten minutes of engineering if you like. Those who follow his channel says AvE makes anything interesting and easy to follow. -via reddit

Superheroes often have bizarre and mysterious origin stories that involve freak accidents, alien rays or latent mutated genes that allow the character to manifest super powers.

These origin stories can take a single issue or an entire story arc to explain, but the crafty artists as Pop Chart Lab were able to reduce the origin story of 36 Marvel superheroes to just a few minimalist panels each.

Marvel Origins: A Sequential Compendium is an infographic like none you've seen before, and while it's wordless save for the name of each character there's plenty of POW! BANG! ZOOM! in each powerful panel!

-Via Mental Floss

In 1945, the American Feline Society bestowed the title of "King of All Cats" to a Persian cat belonging to Arthur Newman. Puffy had a peculiar talent for hypnotizing people, always for benign purposes, after which they felt relaxed and even relieved of headaches. By then, Puffy was credited with hypnotizing over 300 people. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer:    

It was one night last fall that Puffy, then a kitten, first demonstrated his powers. "He was sitting on the end of a night club bar," Newman recalls, his voice becoming hushed, "and a couple of girls came up to pet him. I didn't pay much attention until one of the girls nudged me and whispered, "Look at my friend!'

"Well, sir, that girl was simply out on her feet. It wasn't from drinking, either. I'm something of a hypnotist myself and I quickly realized that she was in a real hypnotic trance, brought on by Puffy's staring into her eyes."

Newman, who had bought Puffy in a pet shop for purposes of demonstrating that people should relax like cats, immediately started training him to stare even more fixedly, with such success that Puffy now can stare Newman down any time.

No one these days is astonished that staring into a cat's eyes can bring relaxation, but Puffy was a sensation. Puffy was honored with articles in several newspapers of the time, and may have been the original therapy cat. Read more about Puffy at Strange Company.

Foxes and whales are two creatures that are extremely unlikely to ever meet, but foxes do love to eat fish so they might go wandering down to the shore to satisfy their curiosity and search for an easy meal.

Since foxes are used to life in the forest this oceanside environment might throw them for a loop, but in the end it's the fox's curiosity that got him into trouble and it's his curiosity that will save him.

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Fox And The Whale is a slow moving but beautiful "independently produced and self-financed Animated short film" by Robin Joseph and Kim Leow from Patch Of Orange studio, an animated tribute to curiosity and nature's magical ways.

Once upon a time, a terrible disease called kakke ravaged the aristocracy in Japan. A patient could recover, or could die of the disease. No one could figure out what caused it, or why it was mostly restricted to the upper class. They tried herbal medicines and other traditional cures, and doctors even recommended that suffers get out of Edo (Tokyo) because the city was killing them. And that actually helped in a lot of cases. But what was killing people was their expensive diet of mainly white polished rice. It turned out that kakke was not a communicable disease, but a nutritional deficiency.

Gleaming white rice was a status symbol—it was expensive and laborious to husk, hull, polish, and wash. In Japan, the poor ate brown rice, or other carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes or barley. The rich ate polished white rice, often to the exclusion of other foods.

This was a problem. Removing the outer layers of a grain of rice also removes one vital nutrient: thiamine, or vitamin B-1. Without thiamine, animals and humans develop kakke, now known in English as beriberi. But for too long, the cause of the condition remained unknown.

Things got worse. In the late 19th century, machines were developed to hull and polish rice, and the Japanese navy began serving it to sailors, since it had less weight and could be stored longer than brown rice. Dr. Takaki Kanehiro stepped in to find out what was causing the illness, and what could be done about it. Read the story of his efforts at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Wellcome Collection)