For decades, people thought that avocados with their huge seeds were spread across Central and South America by giant sloths that went extinct 10,000 years ago. That made sense, because avocados have very large pits, and it would take a huge animal to ingest them and poop out intact pits to grow further away from the parent tree. But it turns out there is no study, no data, and no evidence to support that. It was just an idea someone had that seemed to make sense. We reported it, and so did Sci Show. But now Hank Green explains where that "fact" came from and why it ain't necessarily so. It turns out that avocados didn't always have such huge seeds, and the reason they do may have more to do with human avocado fans than with giant sloths. Score one for mythbusting, and an example why there is always a need for fact checking and further research.

Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, has always loved cars, and one of his favorites was his 1978 Lotus Éclat, painted mint green and stuck with Kermit eyes on the headlights (although they didn't stay there long as it was illegal to have them while driving).

Car-mit, as some have called it, became Henson's reminder of the difficulty he had convincing US networks to buy into The Muppet Show, despite the Muppets' success in children's programming. It wasn't until Lord Lew Grade, a British media mogul, called Jim Henson up and offered to launch his show in England.

A few years later, Lord Grade was phoning up Lotus and telling them to use a special paint for Car-mit so that it would match Kermit's green. Of course, that was too big of an ask, so they just painted it a mint green instead, which was just as rare. Later on, one of the techs for The Muppet Show suggested adding Kermit pupils on the headlights.

At one point, the Éclat was stolen and used in a bank robbery, although with its distinctive features, the police were able to quickly apprehend the criminals and return it to Henson. However, he had to sell the car due to the difficulty of driving it on British roads and issues with clearance.

It was replaced with a VW Rabbit.

(Image credit: The Jim Henson Company)

When the United Way of Greater Cleveland organized Balloonfest in 1986, it was a time of celebration as the event earned Cleveland a Guinness World Record by releasing 1.5 million balloons into the atmosphere. It had also been used as an opener for the subsequent fundraising activity which urged teenagers and children to participate in volunteering activities.

Reports about the event in 1986 generally reported all the minute details they could gather during the event and even included some marginal events that occurred as a result of the balloons. These mishaps happened on the side though, the overall tone for Balloonfest indicated that it was a success.

Years later, in 2011, the same newspaper that reported on the event, The Plain Dealer, wrote a piece celebrating the 25th anniversary of the event, which included some details about it.

Again, they mentioned some of the unexpected consequences that the event caused such as balloons falling on beaches, lakes, and people's properties. But this time, the tone was more negative, though it never used the words "tragic", "tragedy", "disaster", or "failure". The same was true for the 30th anniversary story from The Plain Dealer.

However, in 2018, The Atlantic produced a short documentary titled "The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of '86", which Chris Quinn, an editor for The Plain Dealer, speculates might have been the beginning of Balloonfest '86 being thought of as a "disaster".

So, to settle things once and for all, Quinn looks at all the mishaps that happened on the periphery of Balloonfest '86, and defends the initial reporting made on the event, reflecting its success and the general positive attitude people had about it.

(Image credit: fennelmac2611/Reddit)

The 'returning soldier effect' is the phenomenon which indicates more male births supposedly occur during and immediately after wars.

Research by Brian MacMahon and Thomas F. Pugh looked into the demographic data in the United States between 1945 and 1947, particularly the sex ratio of live-births, and they observed an increase in this figure, taking note that more boys had been born.

Kanazawa Satoshi also looked into the birth records of Britain after World War I. He found the same trend of having more male births directly following the war. So, the idea of the 'returning soldier effect' originated from all these observations and research. However, why this was the case is something that wasn't particularly explored.

Kanazawa had proposed that the reason for this difference in sex ratio of live births may have something to do with the soldiers who survived the wars. He posited that it was because of the physical features of the surviving soldiers, i.e. being bigger and taller, that gave rise to this phenomenon.

However, research into the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War had recorded the reverse effect. William H. James explained this outcome by saying that the stress experienced by pregnant women was the reason for the decline of male births. Plus, there's no definitive evidence pointing to physical features as the primary factor determining the sex of babies.

Valerie Grant, on the other hand, explains that the changing hormone levels of women during wars might have pushed them to adopt more dominant roles thus resulting in a relative increase in male births.

Is it even possible to predict whether a baby will be a boy or girl by looking at the environmental, physical, or social factors? I think it could just have been a coincidence that more baby boys were born after the wars, and that it was equally probable that either a boy or girl would have been born.

(Image credit: soldiersmediacenter/Wikimedia Commons)

Each culture has its own superstitious beliefs, although there seems to be a few common superstitions which can be found in different cultures.

One such superstition which is also found in Turkish culture is that of the broken mirror. Many cultures believe this to be a sign of bad luck, but Turkish people have their own nuance to the notion. They believe that broken mirrors are caused by the evil eye, and when one encounters a broken glass or mirror, the energy must be dispelled immediately, otherwise, the person who encountered it will experience seven years of bad luck.

Talking about the evil eye (nazar in Turkish), this seems to be the source of all the negative energy, and so Turkish people use these eye-shaped blue and white amulets, shown above, like lucky charms that help dispel the evil eye.

Another common thing that Turkish superstitions have with other cultures' superstitions may be knocking on wood, which is something that one does to prevent certain bad events, especially those they speak out, from happening. It's also a way of protecting their hopeful plans from being disrupted by the evil eye. Further, Turkish people pinch their ear lobe, knock on wood three times, and then say "Aman nazar değmesin" which means, "May the evil eye not be cast".

They also have this interesting belief about ringing in your ears. Turkish people believe that, depending on which ear you experience ringing, it would mean different things. Ringing in the left ear means that somebody is talking about you behind your back. Meanwhile, ringing in the right means the opposite. I wonder if there are instances when one experiences ringing in both ears, and how Turkish people would react to that.

To learn about the other Turkish superstitions, check out this article from Hurriyet Daily News.

(Image credit: Tom Podmore/Unsplash)

Modern technology has allowed us to exponentially increase production, transportation, construction, and urbanization. But some of the conveniences of modern life can hardly be considered recent or novel inventions or innovations. In fact, some of the things we enjoy today can trace their origins to ancient Greece.

These modern inventions may not have been as sophisticated back when they existed in ancient Greece, but the ideas or concepts behind them are similar. We just have the benefit of more than two thousand years of accumulated human knowledge, development, and process improvements.

As listed by Historic Mysteries, these five "modern" inventions are the odometer, the shower, the alarm clock, the vending machine, and automatic doors. I can see how the first three can have rudimentary prototypes made from materials available at that time, but how could vending machines and automatic doors have existed in a time when there wasn't any need for them?

It's actually all about perspective. We might take automatic doors for granted these days, but back when temple doors were so large and heavy, it would make sense why automatic doors could be useful to ancient Greeks. The one who thought of it was Heron of Alexandria, whose schematics showed that the automatic doors were designed to use steam power. Alas, it didn't have a sensor to detect the presence of humans.

How about the vending machine? Well, based on the description, it's more of a mix between a vending machine and a water dispenser, since it had a coin slot which allows one to get water after putting a coin in. Quite a neat business venture if you were to ask me, especially when getting water probably involved pulling a bucket from a well, or something to that effect.

(Image credit: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)

Many considered Howard Hughes as an eccentric billionaire but a very influential figure in various fields like film, aviation, and during his latter years, real estate and entertainment, especially with how he helped transform Las Vegas into the luxurious, cosmopolitan city that it is today.

The story goes that one night on Thanksgiving weekend of 1966, he had been driven to the Desert Inn, where he stayed for a few weeks before Moe Dalitz, the owner of the Desert Inn at the time, had to ask Hughes to vacate the penthouse to make room for the expected influx of New Year's Eve guests.

Instead of leaving, Hughes started negotiating to buy the hotel, and was able to purchase the property for $13 million, $6.2 million in cash and $7 million in loans. Hughes then proceeded to stay in that room for the next four years without ever leaving.

Due to suffering from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mania for secrecy, and germophobia, he had the windows taped shut, and instructed the staff regarding the number of tissues they needed to use whenever they carried stuff in and out of his suite.

Still, from inside that room, he conducted all his business, having his public liaison Robert A. Maheu to handle all the affairs needed outside. After buying the Desert Inn, he also bought the Sands, the Frontier, and the unfinished Landmark. He also bought residential lots, the North Las Vegas airport, and all the land surrounding McCarran International Airport, along with several casinos operated by Summa Corp.

Hughes had larger-than-life aspirations for Vegas which included a high-speed train and turning the city into a metropolis with clean air and clean water in the middle of the desert. Despite this, he was carried out of his room at the Desert Inn on a stretcher and flown to the Bahamas in 1970. He never returned to Las Vegas, and died in 1976.

After his death, his company Summa Corp. focused on developing the master-planned community of Summerlin from all the land that Hughes had bought in Nevada. Development had started in 1988 and it finished by the end of 1990 with the first residential village, park, and school.

(Image credit: Acme Newspictures/Wikimedia Commons)

In a hereditary monarchy, you were ruled by a "rightwise born" king or queen, and no illness, disability, or incompetence could change that. Certainly death could, but not always for the better. Take the case of the Tudor monarchs of 16th century England. The line of succession was drastically altered by illnesses and injuries that medical science could not ease, and so was the behavior of those monarchs.

Henry VII expected his firstborn son Arthur to inherit the crown. At age 15, Arthur was married to Katherine of Aragorn, but the couple soon fell ill of what was called "English sweating sickness." Historians are still not sure what English sweating sickness really was. Arthur died of the illness, leaving his younger brother Henry as the only royal heir. Katherine survived to marry her brother-in-law Henry, who became Henry VIII.   

But Henry VIII suffered from other medical problems, as did Katherine, and their offspring, many of whom died before or shortly after birth, leading to a whole nation being jerked around in the quest for a royal heir. Read about ten medical problems that shaped the history of the Tudor dynasty at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Lucas de Heere)

Randall Munroe, best known for his webcomic xkcd, received a question for his "What if?" series. The question from Hunter Freyer was "What if you ignored all the rules of car racing and had a contest which was simply to get a human being around a track 200 times as fast as possible, what strategy would win?"

This would be much more fun for a creative, scientific mind to answer if there wasn't a caveat that the driver had to survive. In that case, the answer is pretty easy- we can use a number of acceleration methods. The possible speed of each is limited by what the human body can withstand, and Munroe explains why. But what's the fun in that? Let's speed up, theoretically. There are ways to go faster than any auto race has ever seen, completing 200 laps in an hour, but they involve great danger and possibly obliteration for the driver. Once Munroe drops the idea of a surviving driver, we can go exponentially faster, and he is glad to explain how we would do that.

“Oops, we’ve accidentally built a particle accelerator.”

-via Damn Interesting

On December 11th, NASA engineers deployed their NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, testing a new system designed to send video information by lasers from great distances. The distance was 19 million miles, which is how far the asteroid-hunting space probe Psyche is now. A video was beamed to earth and intercepted successfully, proving the technology has the chops to relay videos throughout our solar system.

The video displayed test patterns, space data, and a video of a cat named Taters chasing a laser light. NASA engineers love a cute cat video as much as the rest of us, and the laser light was an appropriate touch. Taters belongs to a NASA employee, and now he's a famous contributor to our space exploration program, and may have been intercepted by any aliens moving through our solar system. Read more about the communications experiment and see the video at Gizmodo.

Dhritiman Mukherjee is the wildlife photographer who caught this rare sight on film. Getting very close to a gharial crocodile while carrying a hundred of his babies is quite an extraordinary feat in itself as the male crocodile can be very protective of its young and will become aggressive if threatened.

The gharial is one of the endangered crocodilian species native to India and Nepal. As of 2017, the IUCN estimates about 650 adult gharials left in the world, although its population trend indicates an increasing number, most likely due to conservation efforts. Just this year, Fort Worth Zoo reported four new gharial babies.

Generally, crocodiles will carry their young in their mouths, however, since the gharial's snout is too narrow, the hatchlings ride on their father's back instead. The gharial, of which Mukherjee had taken a photo, apparently mated with around 7 to 8 females, which explains why he has 100 babies on his back.

(Image credit: Dhritiman Mukherjee)

Touted as the first fully autonomous restaurant in the world, CaliExpress by Flippy will soon be launching in Pasadena, California. Although other restaurants may have had robot helpers or AI working along with the staff, at CaliExpress, all the essential processes from ordering to cooking will be handled by machines.

It's not 100% foolproof which is why there will still be a crew of human staff working at the burger bar next to the kitchen, but the size of the crew is much smaller and their purpose, merely to clean up any mistakes that Flippy makes.

As the promotional video shows, the robot hand slides across different sections of the kitchen to flip some burger patties, fry some fries, and place them on the side to keep warm, although the last part shows a man putting the fries in the box and bringing them to customers.

I'm not sure whether this will actually be good for business, for consumers, and most especially, for the labor force, but it might be a start of a more widespread AI revolution, and I don't really know how to feel about that.

For now, at least, the technology is not sophisticated enough to completely eliminate the need for humans in the fast food service industry. But if this proof of concept succeeds, that may be the trajectory we're heading.

(Video credit: Miso Robotics/Youtube)

Automatons or mechanical dolls have been around since the 16th century, with the oldest functional automaton being kept at the Smithsonian. If other accounts are to be believed, much older automatons have existed as far back as the ancient Greeks. But there are only a few surviving operational automatons today, and those include Pierre Jaquet-Droz's three automatons.

Constructed around the late 1760s and early 1770s, these automatons are considered by some to be one of the earliest computers with their capability to be programmed. Jaquet-Droz's automatons are intricate works of engineering containing 6,000 movable parts that enable the dolls to blink their eyes, hold a pen, and write or draw on paper.

Jaquet-Droz's automatons include "The Writer", "The Draughtsman", and "The Musician" named after their respective functions. Both "The Writer" and "The Draughtsman" are built on similar parts, with "The Writer" having more versatility as its program allows it to write any 40 letters in any combination, making it customizable.

"The Draughtsman", on the other hand, can only draw four different images, which makes more sense as drawing requires more technical skill than writing. However, the level at which "The Draughtsman" draws is beyond making basic shapes or lines. Out of the four drawings, perhaps the portrait of Louis XV may be the most complex one it can do.

Finally, "The Musician" can make real music by tapping the keys of a custom-built organ with two sticks. All three of the automatons are currently being held at the Muse d'Art et d'Histoire at Neuchtel in Switzerland.

(Image credit: Link2Universe)

Titled "When We All Have Pocket Telephones", this Daily Mirror comic strip was drawn by the artist William Kerridge Haselden and envisioned a world where "pocket telephones" as he called them dominated every aspect of our lives. True enough that has been the case for our world today.

However, no matter how prophetic it might look, the artist wasn't exactly keen on how such "pocket telephones" would look like as a few of the illustrations only hinted at a telephone ringing in somebody's coat or inside pocket. The others depicted what looks like the receiver end of a handset telephone.

This wasn't the first time cellphones had been imagined as people had already been talking about a 'pocket phone' as early as 1906, with Charles E. Alden claiming that he had created a device considered a precursor to the cellphone. However, it wasn't until 1973, when the first ever cellphone will actually reach the market, with Motorola's DynaTAC 8000X.

Who knows? We already have talking robots and self-driving cars, so perhaps, teleportation and long-distance space travel, ones that go beyond our galaxy, may become possible in the next 50 years? I just hope I'll still be alive to witness it.

(Image credit: W. K. Haselden)

It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's Superman dressed up as other popular characters, as shown in the series of illustrations created by Los Angeles-based artist Mike Mitchell.

Taking the original Superman illustration from the Superman #6 comic, Mitchell redraws the man of steel as other characters like Mickey Mouse, Wonder Woman, Mr. Spock, and others which just goes to show the versatility of the red-caped wonder.

He also created a gif showing all the variations of Superman on his Instagram, where he also posts his other artwork. Apart from this, he also sells some of his art as prints and toys on his personal website. -via Moss and Fog

(Image credit: Mike Mitchell)