Marvel has been in a slump the last couple of years, producing more and more TV shows and movies with diminishing returns. Yeah, that's relative. The Marvels was a box-office bomb because it only made $200 million, since the budget was so much higher. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was also a disappointment. Who is going to save Marvel? Why, Deadpool, of course!
In the first teaser trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds takes on the challenge of saving the MCU single-handedly, although we know from the title that he will have some help. This will be the third Deadpool movie and the 34th in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But didn't Wolverine die in the 2017 movie Logan? Yes, but this story takes place before that, so he is not being resurrected from the dead. Marvel did not need "saving" back then, but it's a superhero movie, let's not let details get in the way of a good time. The trailer itself is irreverent, salacious, and self-aware. Will the R-rated superhero series save Marvel? We will find out when Deadpool & Wolverine opens on July 26. -via Fark
In 2014, three Japanese physicists received the Nobel Prize in Physics: Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura for their invention of the blue LEDs. But the story behind it is probably one that the ordinary person wouldn't know, even though it's because of their invention that we get to enjoy many technological advancements that make our lives more convenient.
The story began in the late 1980s when many technology companies and semiconductor manufacturers were in a race to create the blue LED. For decades, only red and green LEDs were available, and that's because creating the blue LED was much more technically challenging, requiring a lot of trial and error. It needed somebody who had the guts to take risks.
Enter Shuji Nakamura, who was an engineer at Nichia Corporation, in a time when the company was almost at its lowest point. His coworkers and bosses were haranguing him for a lack of results in his research, and so he submitted a proposal to the then-president Nobuo Ogawa, that led him on the journey to unlocking the secrets of blue LED.
The first phase of this journey brought him to Florida, where he worked on an MOCVD, a machine used to grow crystalline layers, an important component in producing LEDs. After spending a year tinkering with a non-functional MOCVD, he returned to Japan and ordered a fully-functional MOCVD for Nichia.
With that in his arsenal, he spent about a year and a half working on making gallium nitride crystals suitable for LEDs. At the time, the consensus among LED manufacturers and scientists was that zinc selenide was the more plausible path toward the blue LED, so Nakamura went against the grain and tried to make the less popular gallium nitride work.
This is where Akasaki and Amano come in, who have been researching on the matter before Nakamura entered the picture. There were three problems that these scientists tried solving to make gallium nitride viable for blue LED production, and for the first two problems, Nakamura took the lead from Akasaki and Amano, adding a few tweaks to improve on their initial results.
The third problem became a difficult obstacle for Akasaki and Amano, but Nakamura's innovative thinking helped him break through and solve the problem. In 1992, Nakamura showed Nichia's chairman the very first functional blue LED. The company announced it to the world, catching everybody by surprise, and this resulted in double and later, triple the profits for Nichia.
But as with many inventions, their inventors don't always get compensated properly. Nakamura later quit Nichia and migrated to the US. Legal battles were fought along the way, and Nakamura still has a tense relationship with Nichia to this day.
At the moment, Nakamura is currently working at the University of California Santa Barbara, and making progress on the next generation of LEDs, paving the way for technologies like augmented and virtual reality, and even a solution to COVID-19.
For the full details of the science behind the making of blue LEDs, you may watch Veritasium's video above. - via Laughing Squid
(Video credit: Veritasium/Youtube)
Our computers and mobile devices have become completely essential to our everyday lives that we spend, on average, 6.5 hours a day looking at a screen, a little over a quarter of our day.
Kristin Blain, a researcher from Smartick, wanted to find out which countries spent the most time in front of their screens on any given day. So, using data from Data Reportal, she looked at the data of about 40 countries, and compared their average screen time. With design from Iryna Osipchuk, they laid out the data on the map above.
Based on the data, South Africa led the pack of 40 with amount of time spent on their screens at an average of 9 hours and 38 minutes per day. Closely following their heels is Brazil with 9 hours and 32 minutes per day. In third place is the Philippines with 9 hours and 14 minutes per day.
They attributed this internet usage statistic to mainly internet penetration and adoption in these countries despite still not having widespread accessibility to high-speed internet connections. For the Philippines, the researcher mentioned a lack of censorship and an increase in the cost of living as significant factors to this high screen time.
Taking a look at screen times segmented by devices i.e. desktop computers and mobile devices, we still see these three countries claiming the top spots, but there are other countries who made it onto the respective lists. For example, Russia is second in internet usage via computers. Meanwhile, Thailand and Indonesia secured spots 3 and 5 on top internet usage via mobiles.
It's possible that infrastructures and availability of devices coupled with the strength of internet connectivity, whether by wired or wireless connections, contributed to these numbers.
The US, on the other hand, has mostly been in the mid-range, while countries like China and Japan spent the least amount of time on their screens which might have something to do with productivity, work ethic, and perceptions on the use of these devices and the internet. - via Digg
(Image credit: Smartick)
Collectors' items are worth a fortune because of their rarity, and vintage toys have risen in resale value these days due to nostalgia fueled by some new movies slated to come out in the near future.
With this increase in demand, '90s toys have seen a bit of resurgence, and you might want to dig through your toy stashes in the attic to see if you've got some of the most valuable '90s toys. Based on The Toy Zone's research, here are some '90s toys that are worth a fortune today:
Out of all the '90s Nintendo video games, Mario Kart 64 has a current value of $21,812.56 beating out some classics like Kid Dracula, the 1993 Game Boy spinoff of Castlevania, selling at $20,400, and The Flintstones: Treasure of Madrock for the SNES, with a current value of $19,999.
Pokémon cards are also worth a lot, with some going as high as six figures, and Logan Paul's Pikachu Illustrator topping the list, selling at $6 million. If you have the 1st Edition Shadowless Charizard card, however, it can fetch you up to $420,000 on the auction market. Sitting in third place is the Wizards of the Coast Presentation Galaxy Star holo Blastoise card, currently at $350,000.
Due to the recent critical success of the Barbie movie, some vintage Barbie dolls are also fetching quite a good price, but none as high as the De Beers 40th Anniversary Barbie from 1999, which is selling at $85,000. The rest of the Barbie collection are priced at $1,200 or less, which might still be a good deal.
The ones above are the most expensive from the list but The Toy Zone also included electronic consoles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures, and vintage blasters, although not as lucrative save for the Scratch the Cat (AFA 80) TMNT action figure, whose resale value is currently at $10,000. - via Digg
(Image credit: Senad Palic/Unsplash)
Skylab was the United States' first space station, and so far the only space station completely controlled by the US alone. The station was launched in 1973, housed astronauts on three missions, and crash landed across Australia in 1979. Slylab's purpose was to establish the feasibility of a space station and conduct experiments on living in space for extended periods of time. The third crewed mission launched on November 16, 1973, with astronauts Gerald P. Carr, Edward Gibson, and William R. Pogue.
The Skylab 4 crew spent 84 days on the space station, and were tasked with operations that basically had them working around the clock. Their 12-week mission was also longer than any NASA mission at that time. In January of 1974, the crew informed NASA that they were taking a day off. They turned communications off, and there was nothing NASA could do about it. Was it mutiny? It was only one day, and it led to NASA reconsidering how it treated its astronauts. Read about the one-day strike on Skylab at Smithsonian. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: NASA)
Last week, The Beatles won a Grammy award more than 50 years after the band broke up. The award was for Best Music Video, for the song "I'm Only Sleeping," from their 1966 album Revolver (although it was initially on the album Yesterday and Today in the US and Canada, and differed slightly from the UK single). The song, about John Lennon's sleep habits, is notable for a guitar sequence that was recorded backwards.
The music video was created by artist Em Cooper to coincide with the release of the remastered Revolver. Cooper uses an extremely labor-intensive method in work, stop-motion animation on oil paintings. For this video, she painted and then photographed around 1300 oil paintings. Some were painted, photographed, then altered for the next shot, but many were started fresh for a new frame or sequence. The project took months of work, but it paid off well with a Grammy. -via Everlasting Blort
If you think that headline is nonsensical, the original headline of the news story is "Huge goanna winched by crane to safety from Torrumbarry Weir by Goulburn-Murray Water workers." Yes, it's from Australia. A goanna is any of around 70 species of lizard found in Australia. The name came from iguana, which is an unrelated South American lizard. A weir is a short dam that doesn't hold back all the water, but keeps the river above it at a deeper level. The story involves an almost 5-foot goanna who wandered onto a weir, which is not safe. Waterworks employees rescued the goanna by lowering a log by crane down to where the animal sat. The lizard eventually moved into the log, it being the only thing familiar to him. Then they raised the log up with a winch, with the goanna holding on for dear life.
Once the goanna was safe on the riverbank, the workers gave him a large snack of carp, which he finished before wandering off. All's well that ends well, right? While that's where the news story ends, in our imaginations we can see the goanna telling his goanna friends about his epic adventure in which he flies through the air on a log. They don't believe him, but then the part about getting a bucket of carp handed to him gets their attention. The next day, waterworks employees arrive to find three goannas have climbed onto the weir. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Goulburn-Murray Water)
Before the Panama Canal was built, ship captains dreaded passing around the southern tip of South America to go from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, or vice versa. The Drake Passage is the spot where the Antarctic Peninsula comes closest to Chile and Argentina, and the sea here can be terrifyingly turbulent. See, air currents travel west to east, and in the Drake Passage, there's no land mass to slow the wind as it travels completely around the world around Antarctica. Ocean currents also travel east, and the Drake Passage is a chokepoint where a lot of water tries to squeeze through a relatively small opening 600 miles wide and 6,000 feet deep. The deceptively calm surface is very different from the rapidly-moving deeper current until conditions change. Waves can be 50 feet high during storms, tossing boats around like so much flotsam. It has been estimated that more than 10,000 sailors have lost their lives in the Drake Passage.
Commercial ships now go through the Panama Canal, but ships regularly take tourists to the Antarctic Peninsula through the Drake Passage. This route is shorter than those of ships traveling from ocean to ocean. We have modern boats that are built for the conditions, and voyages can be scheduled around the weather forecast. The biggest danger these days is seasickness, because ship captains take the Drake Passage very seriously. Read about the Drake Passage and why it's so dangerous at CNN. -via Damn Interesting
We've seen people juggle in real life, but we've seen it done in cartoons a lot more. Which is more impressive? I've always admired people who could juggle because I could never stay with it long enough to succeed, but I know how hard it is. But in animated scenes, you see amazing feats and beautiful patterns that could never be done in the real world. Jasper Juggles took a deep dive into juggling in animation, and brings us hundreds of examples, from the ridiculously poor attempts to the sublime, in different kinds of animated cartoons, video games, and virtual reality. We who don't juggle rarely notice whether the depiction is realistic or not. The accuracy of animated juggling varies by the method used to create it, whether it's simple drawing, layered animation, rotoscoping, stop motion, or computer-controlled physics. He started this project to call out unrealistic juggling in cartoons, but came to admire the artistry of a good-looking or interesting sequence even if it could never be accomplished in real life. Jasper is collecting more examples of animated juggling all the time, and has made his research available in a spreadsheet plus a growing archive in a gallery of YouTube shorts. -via Metafilter
The world's oldest artworks that are familiar to a great number of people are the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux in France. They are thought to be around 17,000 years old. But examples of art have been found that go much further back. The problem with pinpointing the oldest art is the definition of art itself. Deliberate marking patterns in objects that have survived many thousands of years could have a practical purpose, or they could be a form of decoration or communication, either of which could be thought of as art. Archaeologists consider early art to be markings as a symbol representing something else. The problem is how we interpret what was symbolic and what had a practical use.
The question arose with the discovery of a toe bone from a giant deer found in a German cave. The bone has deliberate parallel and perpendicular markings, which appear to be an attempt at artistic expression. However, the bone was dated to 51,000 years ago, before Homo sapiens moved into Europe. The residents of the cave were known to be Neanderthals. It's not the first Neanderthal art discovered, but it does push the timeline back.
There is other evidence that art predates modern man all over the world, including some markings attributed to Homo erectus. But are they art? The problem is interpreting the meaning of these markings. We may never know for sure what those ancient marks were really for. Read about where we are in determining how old art is at LiveScience. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: John Strike for Live Science)
— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) February 8, 2024
Liv Swearingen is a singer, YouTuber, and social media star known for her light-hearted online content. But in this apparently now-deleted TikTok video, Swearingen gets serious about an issue near to her heart and no doubt stemming from personal experience: blonde jokes.
As a genre, blonde jokes assume that golden-haired women are dumb. In this video, Swearingen forcefully and persuasively argues that blonde women are, in fact, quite intelligent and denigrating their intellect is morally debasing.
A word to the wise: although I can understand how it would be tempting, if your last name is Bond, do NOT name your son James. But people still do it, and that spells trouble any time your son encounters the police, particularly that one time he neglects to carry an official ID. Hear the stories of several men who learned the hard way that cops do not find it funny that you were named after a fictional British super spy, even when it's the truth.
You can imagine these poor guys have trouble any time they tell anyone their last name, and that's the subject of the award-winning documentary The Other Fellow. Australian filmmaker Matthew Bauer tracked down men from all over the world who share the name James Bond and found out how that name affected their lives for better and for worse. You can see more clips at the film's website, and catch the full documentary on several streaming services. -via Laughing Squid
Organizers of the 2024 Summer Games have unveiled the medals that will be awarded to winning Olympic athletes in Paris. They will be able to literally take a piece of Paris home with them. The gold, silver, and bronze medals will feature an iron hexagon at the center made from metal salvaged from the Eiffel Tower during its 20th century renovations. Any time metal was replaced in the tower, the original iron was saved for posterity. The medals were designed by French jeweler Chaumet.
The iron hexagons are inlaid with a claw setting, resembling the setting of a precious stone. The outer part of the medals have a starburst pattern to indicate radiance. The reverse will have the image of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. The medals for the Paralympics, which take place after the Olympic games, will feature the same design on the front, but the reverse has a view of the Eiffel tower as seen looking up from underneath. Get a closer look at the medals at CNN. The Paris Olympics will run from July 26 to August 11, 2024.
What's most important in a pop tune? "It's got a good beat; I can dance to it." So is it any wonder that Van Halen can dance to the groove of "Love Machine" by The Miracles while performing their own song "Unchained"? The latest mashup from Bill McClintock doesn't just have one group singing over the other's music; both the music and vocals are full integrated, and it works. This is as much a dance video as it is a music video. And those stage costumes! There's also a short guest appearance by Ozzy Osbourne as we hear Jake E. Lee's solo from "Bark at the Moon." McClintock calls this song "Unchained Love Machine" by Van Miracles.
This video of an origin unknown to me shows a bicyclist proceeding quite lawfully through the bike lane on a two-lane road. A driver turns left in front of him, forcing the cyclist to veer off onto the driveway.
The man needed an airbag. Such things actually exist and are technologically improving. But with only a second available, he could not shop for one and improvised with a balloon display conveniently placed a few yards away.
Hey, if it's stupid but it works then it's not so stupid.
-via Born in Space
