By some strange coincidence, NASA has taken a photo of remnants of a star explosion which could be interpreted to look like a skeleton hand. In its wake, the explosion left a pulsar, the magnetic fields of which form a pulsar wind nebula. Because of this phenomenon, the charged particles wrap around the base of the nebula creating the resemblance of a ghostly hand.

NASA explains that the unique shape of the nebula was brought about by the high amount of polarization around MSH 15-52, thus projecting the charged particles outward in a linear fashion, which formed the fingers of the hand, meanwhile, the wrist area had more turbulent regions giving particles an energy boost and forming somewhat of a clump at the bottom.

(Image credit: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./R. Romani et al. (Chandra); NASA/MSFC (IXPE); Infared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DECaPS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt)

October 31st is All Hallow's Eve, or Halloween. However, did you know that, depending on where you are located, people call the night before Halloween by different names? Why October 30th even has alternative names is a question all in itself, but as Mental Floss lists here, it is subject to varying regionalisms. For example, if you were living in Philadelphia or New Jersey, then you might be familiar with the term "Mischief Night" which is what they called October 30th in those parts. The reason for this is that people would go out and about doing some harmless pranking on the night before the official trick-or-treating begins.

Another very intriguing nickname for October 30th is "Cabbage Night" which is unique to New England. The term is used to refer to delinquency, and alludes to something that happened in the 1800s when people still had cabbage farms. Young hooligans would uproot cabbages and throw them at people's houses. It's a bit similar to what Nebraskans called October 30th, "Corn Night", and as you've guessed, it's because some youth would throw ears of corn at people's porches. For the rest of the regional names of the night before Halloween, check it out on Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Tangerine Newt/Unsplash)

Whenever we stroke a cat, they sometimes respond with a soft purr, and so we think the reason why cats purr is because they feel happy or relaxed, or something of the sort. Many researchers thought that cats' purring was caused by voluntary muscle contractions of the larynx, but new studies have shown that it is much closer to snoring than a voluntary response when they feel comfortable or stressed.

Although the researchers do not rule out the possibility that cats purr because of voluntary muscle contractions, they argue that it wasn't the sole cause for the purring. Instead, their research suggests that it was the flow of air that activated the vibrations causing the purring, much like how we snore when our breathing is obstructed. Despite not having fully understood the reasons behind purring, scientists are in consensus about some aspects of purring such as it is used as a signal by kittens so their mothers can locate them, it produces serotonin in cats, it helps in healing wounds, and purring is not merely a response to positive stimulus, but it is also done when cats are stressed.

To learn more about the biomechanics of cats' purring, check out the article on Wired.

(Image credit: Kasya Shahovskaya/Unsplash)

I love US sitcoms as much as the next guy and I've watched some of the most popular ones over the years. But sometimes, you want something fresh, something not mainstream, something that others may not have heard before, or something that has been buried underneath the rubble and left forgotten. One Redditor asked the r/sitcoms subreddit about some obscure sitcoms that they could recommend, and the sitcom fans obliged with over a thousand comments on the thread. Cracked lists the top five most upvoted suggestions.

One of the top suggestions was Police Squad! which featured Leslie Nielsen, whom you might know from the movie Airplane! and later on, the Naked Gun film series which was based on Police Squad. The show was cancelled after six episodes because ABC thought that the visual gags would be more effective on a larger screen size, and that's why the latter film series based on Police Squad's premise was successful. To see the other four sitcoms, check it out on Cracked.

(Video credit: Rich Fenton/Youtube)

Janelle Shane (previously at Neatorama) works with artificial intelligence algorithms, and brings us some amusing experiments at her site AI Weirdness. Her Halloween experiment generated some neat Halloween images, but to get there, the algorithms made things up out of whole cloth, adding wild details that were not in the original data. This only reinforces the warnings we've seen about never trusting AI to tell the truth, or anything near the truth.

Shane took several innocuous, generic pictures and told the AI program Google Bard to describe it, specifically "Please describe this spooky Halloween scene." While there is nothing Halloweeny about the pictures, it spat out a plausible description of something very spooky, using a lot of imaginary details. Then she gave the generated text description to DALL-E3 as a prompt to generate an image. That program also veered widely from the data it was given, adding more Halloween details and deleting others. See what these programs did to totally change the original data because of the words "spooky" and "Halloween" in four images with descriptions (including a potato) at AI Weirdness. 

Expensify, a San Francisco fintech startup, thought of a way to attract their employees back to the office after the pandemic has finally subsided in many parts of the world. But as with many other office workers who got a taste of what life felt like working from home or doing remote work, Expensify's employees didn't really find the cocktail lounge alluring enough to trade in the benefits of working from home. The company soon realized that not even a free office bar and lounge was enough and they eventually had to shut it down.

Many other companies have tried to get their employees back to working at the office, even to the point where they had to force them, to which the workers responded by simply quitting. And, although there are merits to employees working at the office especially in terms of creativity and collaboration, the quality of life perks that remote work or working from home gives just outweighs much of that in people's minds.

Of course, this is more prevalent in tech industries as geographical distance doesn't hinder productivity and workers can simply communicate online when they need to collaborate with each other. There are others however, who don't have the luxury of simply quitting their jobs, and so they are forced to go back to the office. But, if companies can reduce the disadvantages of going to the office versus working from home, then perhaps many employees would be okay with going to work again.

(Image credit: Stanislav Ivanitskiy/Unsplash)

Here on Neatorama, we have shared what plant screams sound like, as well as what solar eclipses sound like. In keeping with the season, we will be sharing what the most frightening animal in the world sounds like. The first thing that we have to ask ourselves is, what is the most frightening animal in the world? Depending on the criteria you use, it could be different for different people. Some may be afraid of lions, bears, hyenas, or rattlesnakes.

In this podcast on Scientific American, Karen Hopkin speaks with Liana Zanette, a professor of biology at Western University in Ontario, about this particular subject. Liana's team has been researching the ecology of fear for the past two decades, and the criteria that they use to identify which is the most frightening animal in the world is in terms of the predator-prey interactions. So, she and her team set up an experiment to study how animals responded to audio cues.

This short video clip shows a sample of what their study had found:

Their experiment included three different sounds: one from a lion growling, one with a bird chirping, and one where people were talking. And they discovered that animals were more likely to flee from humans than from lions. We humans fear wild animals because they can kill us. But, human beings have also killed animals, and at far greater rates than even the most terrifying wild beasts in the wilderness.

(Image credit: Iván Díaz/Unsplash)

AI has come a long way. They have become so good that writers have elected to sue OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, over copyright infringement of pirated copies of their works, which were used to, essentially, train ChatGPT. Not only that, but AI can now also write essays, articles, academic papers, dissertations, and even novels in a span of week or less. Of course, what makes a piece of work riveting or encapsulating is the mark or nuances that an author brings into it. It's the personality of the writer that comes out and brings the story to life, which I would say that not all AI can do. However, they do most other things pretty well. If they can capture the human essence of literary works, then that's just about checkmate isn't it?

To that end, The Walrus requested an AI chatbot to write a short story in the style of Margaret Atwood and later on, Margaret Atwood herself looked at it to see how it fared. She wrote this article herself about generative AI and whether we should be worried if they will soon replace us. Her verdict at the end is quite befitting.

(Image credit: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Collision, Wikimedia Commons, CC by 2.0)

Elephants are gentle giants. They are peaceful by nature, and won't attack unless they themselves feel attacked. But throughout the years in sub-Saharan Africa, elephants have struggled. Not only threatened by poachers but also by the ballooning population of humans whose farmlands encroach on the natural habitats of elephants. Thus, food sources have steadily decreased and the elephants have no other choice but to raid people's farms to scavenge for food. It's a problem that Dominique Gonçalves and a team of zoologists and ecologists are addressing.

At the moment, the issue is how to keep the elephants from crossing over the neighbors' fence and ransacking their crops. To begin with, many subsistence farmers in that region do not have the resources to put up expensive wire fences to keep large animals away. This led to instances when conflicts between elephants and humans arose. In one case, five farmers were trampled by elephants while they were out on the field harvesting crops.

After years of researching, Gonçalves' team found a very simple solution: bees. It turns out that the elephants are scared of bees, as much as we would be if we were being swarmed by aggressive buzzing bees. They lined fences along areas where elephants usually crossed toward the croplands. On some of the fences, they hung up beehives filled with one of the most aggressive bee species, the African bee. And they found that this reduced instances of elephants crossing over. For details on the rest of the study, check it out on Nautilus.

(Image credit: redcharlie/Unsplash)

Jesters were the medieval equivalent of comedians, and they are typically depicted wearing a cap with bells on it. But as with comedians of today, the jesters of history have always spoken their minds whether it put their life in danger or not. These days, comedians generally don't have to fear for their lives by telling jokes that may offend or insult the sensibilities of others. But back in the day, jesters could be sentenced to death for saying offensive things. Although, most of them were directed at kings and queens.

One of the earliest records of a jester challenging royalty was in 7th century BC, in China, when he said some innocuous remark about the emperor's dog, and the emperor shot an arrow at him. Thankfully, the arrow did not hit its mark, and he unapologetically doubled down on his jokes which made the emperor laugh, and he was spared. That was not the only instance of jesters literally toying with death. In this short clip from TED-Ed, we get to look at a brief history of jesters who spoke truth to power, sometimes with extreme consequences. -via Aeon

(Video credit: TED-Ed/Youtube)

Last year, redditor /u/Commander_Peanuts carved this monstrous jack-o'-lantern that doesn't light up, but also doesn't need to. I can't seriously believe that anyone would consider venturing into the Underdark where a beholder, such as this one, lives, without coming prepared with naturally or magically granted darkvision. And when the beholder's antimagic abilities cancel out your magical darkvision, be grateful. You don't want to see what's coming next.

-via Randy Angle

Dianna Cowern became famous on the internet as The Physics Girl. Her YouTube channel is filled with entertaining and informative videos about science, which is fitting for a physics graduate from MIT and a past winner of the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

About a year ago, Cowern came down with a brutal case of COVID that has turned into Long COVID. She's been bedbound since January, but that hasn't stopped her heroic husband Kyle from making her a costume. Cowern is the Wicked Witch of the East from the original The Wizard of Oz, whom Dorothy brutally murdered and then robbed upon her arrival in Oz.

I've always considered boarding a plane through a sky bridge as a nice perk, even a luxury, because there have been too many times I've had to go upstairs, then downstairs, then board a bus, then up more stairs to the plane, because I buy cheap flights to tiny airports. There was more than once I recall hiking a half-mile across the tarmac, dragging all my luggage and children (although not in the US). But the skybridge and the stairs aren't the only ways to get on a plane. Tom Scott introduces us to alternate transportation available at some airports where you ride a vehicle that reminds us of the mechanized cherry pickers they use inside big box stores. Too bad you have to fly somewhere to take a spin in these things.

(Image credit: beta_bunny)

This little girl looks very regal, and there's no doubt who she is. But if you can't tell right away, the dogs in the back are an obvious clue. On trick-or-treat night, you'll see plenty of princesses and superheroes along with witches and vampires. But people who put their imaginations to work and come up with the perfect homemade costume deserve extra candy. That goes double when you are fulfilling a weird request that your child has been dreaming of.

(Image credit: Beautiful_Ad8439)

This young man wanted to be Michael Myers from the Halloween movies, but he also wanted to be a hot dog. His parents made it happen, and he is... Oscar Myers! Extra points for the name. Now, check out this meteorologist on assignment.

(Image credit: Call-Me-Risley)

He might be Jim Cantore, or any of the poor weather folk who have to go stand out in a storm so that the rest of us will believe it's really happening. The hair, the tie, and the newspaper are all stiffened and stuck, since there doesn't seem to be any wind blowing at all! Check out 50 creative kids' Halloween costumes at Bored Panda.

Andy Rothwell made a video using his extensive collection of toys, set to the song "Shorty's Ark" by Matt Sweeney and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. The toys themselves illustrate the lyrics. There are so many of these figures that I thought he must have a 3D printer, but these are M.U.S.C.L.E. toys from 1986. M.U.S.C.L.E. stands for Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere. They were only sold in the US in 1986 and '87, although they were also popular in Japan. The Hard Knockin’ Rockin’ Ring Wrestling Arena was an accessory you could get for them. Rothwell made LEGO bleachers for the spectators, mechanized to show their excitement during a boxing event. I had never heard of these toys nefore I saw this video, but if you are a certain age, they may be a beloved part of your childhood. Or if you still have them, they may be a beloved part of your present!