The Little White Chapel in Las Vegas is a famous wedding venue for couples who would like to get married legally, quickly, and stylishly. There are many package options, including getting hitched by an Elvis impersonator and using the drive-thru window for couples who are in a hurry.
Food & Wine magazine reports that on April 15 and 16, couples will also have the option of getting married while standing in front of the iconic Oscar Mayer Wienermobile for free. As a promotional gimmick, Oscar Mayer is covering the cost of the wedding itself and providing a "Hotdogger"--an official Wienermobile driver--to officiate at the ceremony.
Algar the Bard is a musician straight out of the Fourteenth Century. He composes and performs adaptations of modern songs with medieval themes and instruments. Past performances include R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man".
For his latest video, Algar is bardrolling us with Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." Nothing about his performance lets us down. Enjoy this chipper approach to the modern classic on the lute-guitar, whistles, and something called an Irish bouzouki. That latter instrument is a modern Irish alteration of a Greek instrument that can be traced back to Byzantine times.
Scientists did an analysis of hair from a 3,600-year-old body unearthed at a burial site on the island on Menorca, off the coast of Spain. The hair showed traces of hallucinogenic drug use. They also found evidence of a storage box for such drugs, elaborately carved with geometric designs. Groovy. So what kinds of hallucinogenic drugs did people use that long ago? The Face gives us four plants available at the time that could be used to produce hallucinogenic effects. The caveat is that these are all poisonous, and could easily be lethal. Yet ancient people used them as medicine and for mind-expanding rituals. You have to wonder how many people died before they got the preparation and dosages right for the effects they were looking for. -via Digg
Given the size of the universe, there is a high likelihood that there would be life on other planets. So why don't we have any evidence of these alien life forms? Well, when your mother complains you don't call her, you remind her that contact and non-contact goes both ways. Life on earth has been around for billions of years, and we've only managed to send machines to the next planet over. Kurzgesagt poses the idea that if life is out there, they may be waiting for us to find them. Our human civilization may be well ahead of any other intelligent life, and space exploration is very difficult, for a whole lot of reasons. Other planets may have even more reasons not to try interstellar travel. The last minute of this video is an ad.
In 1972, the United States signed "the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction," along with 108 other countries. But before that, Cold War experiments were carried out in many cities and rural areas across the US to simulate enemy biological warfare attacks, in order to prepare defenses against such attacks. These used common strains of bacteria that they considered benign (Serratia marcescens, Bacillus globigii, Bacillus subtilis, and Aspergillus fumigatus), plus chemicals used as tracers, also thought to be benign, like fluorescent zinc cadmium sulphide. The tests began in 1949 when bacteria was released in the Pentagon's ventilation system. This program moved to US cities in 1950, and over the next 20 years, the US military carried out 239 experiments in 66 cities in the US and Canada.
The public was never informed of these experiments. It was later learned that the bacteria weren't quite benign. Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii in particular can cause serious infections. A bacterial spray in San Francisco in 1950 led to eleven people being hospitalized and one man died. It was also later determined that zinc cadmium sulphide is a carcinogen. Read about the biological warfare experiments of the Cold War era and what we learned from them at Today I Found Out.
A few days ago, viewers who were listening (and doing their tasks) with Lofi Girl, were a bit surprised when she and her cat disappeared in the middle of an April 10 stream on YouTube. The music still kept playing, but the iconic character was nowhere to be seen. Listeners noticed that some odd clues were left in the empty room. These included a slow zoom on the blinking blue light of a window and a teaser for April 11.
The channel fulfilled its promise when the day rolled in: a new person entered a different room– a purple-themed area. It was a guy getting down to do his work, with his dog climbing on the desk to fall asleep. The stream then revealed the new name: “synthwave radio - beats to chill/game to.”
Listeners can now choose between Synthwave Boy or Lofi Girl for their background music of the day. Note that you don’t need to go to a different channel. They usually stream at the same time, and you can swap between the two characters or streams for the music you would like.
And it looks similar to Earth. Will this be our new home in the future?
Experts have found a planet that shares a lot of characteristics with our planet– from size to orbiting around a star to having a magnetic field. The exoplanet, named YZ Ceti b, contains a magnetic field. This is an exciting discovery as the reason why our planet is habitable is because of its strong magnetic fields. These are responsible for enveloping our atmosphere and stripping away charged particles from that area.
YZ Ceti b orbits a small red dwarf star and can be found 12 light years away from the Earth. The scientists found the exoplanet thanks to repeating radio signals coming from YZ Ceti b. They hypothesize that the signals could be a result of particle interactions between the exoplanet’s magnetic field and the star it orbits around on.
James Cameron's second movie about the planet Pandora made two billion dollars at the box office in no time flat. That's the amount Cameron said it would have to make to break even! Avatar: The Way of Water grossed $2.314 billion by April 9. Now that it's on streaming television, Screen Junkies gives us a rundown on whether it's worth watching or not. And it appears that despite a lot of silliness, if you liked the first Avatar, you'll like the sequel. Oh, that doesn't mean they didn't find a lot to pick about. The movie relies on cliches, stereotypes, outdated slang, and twisted logic. Just like the first one. And you saw the first one, didn't you?
They don't make 'em the way they used to. You can say that about about a lot of things. A cathode-ray television set from the 1960s will not accept an HDMI cable, and it's too heavy to move, but darn it, it still works, while a flat screen TV falls apart if you touch it wrong. But that's just my personal experience. In the case of satellites, the first one ever was Sputnik 1, launched on October 4, 1957. It relayed radio signals for three weeks until its battery ran down, and fell to earth in 1958. But it served its intended purpose, and wasn't expected to last long. In the years that followed, both the US and USSR launched multiple satellites and discovered how useful they are for a wide variety of applications beyond showing up rival nations.
On May 6, 1965, the Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1 was inserted into orbit. This satellite, a 3-feet, 8-inch metal ball, is still in orbit and still carrying out its original job 58 years later! The LCS's mission is to serve as a reference point to calibrate ground-based instruments. Its ace-in-the-hole is that it needs no power source at all, so there are no batteries to run down. Solar-powered satellites are used now, but that technology was not available in miniaturized form in 1965. It's still amazing that the LCS stays in its orbit perfectly even after all these years, and so still works as a reference target. The LCS1 is expected to outlive us all. Read about the world's oldest functioning satellite at Amusing Planet.
When two kitten advocates love each other very much, they end up volunteering to rescue them. They might also end up getting married.
Hannah Shaw, also known as Kitten Lady, recently married her longtime love Andrew Marttila with an animal themed wedding. The ceremony was outdoors at Farm Animal Refuge in San Diego. When they announced the wedding on Instagram, their friends speculated on how odd it would be to see them in fancy clothing. They cleaned up quite well, and it was a lovely ceremony, officiated by a veterinarian.
The bride and groom were chill about what could go wrong when farm animals are incorporated into a wedding, and so any deviation from the script was considered just more of the fun. A pig served as the ring bearer. Instead of the traditional bouquet toss, they had a watermelon toss, which the pigs quite enjoyed. The centerpieces were fed to the animals after the wedding. But the big moment was when Hannah presented Andrew with a very special gift basket filled with calico kittens! A good time was had by all.
And in case you are wondering, the father of the bride was there, and in fact sang a song at the reception, which you can see in the next-to last image in this gallery.
Breez Harley has a toddler son named Lander who has long hair. But the front has been getting shorter! Has someone been cutting the child's hair? Her boyfriend denied it was him. The boy doesn't normally interact with anyone else without his parents around. But he's definitely been sporting bangs lately, and his hair seems to get a little shorter day by day. He's starting to look like he's got a mullet, although the front is quite uneven. Has Lander been playing with scissors? Or is it something more sinister? They finally figured out what was happening, but you won't guess the real story.
A body farm is a research facility where scientists study dead bodies in a controlled environment. It may sound gruesome, but this is crucial research in archaeology, crime investigation, and environmental studies. Hayley Mickleburgh is a forensic archaeologist studying buried bodies to determine who they were and how they died. Her current research is in mass graves, because that information can be very important to determine what happened after wars are fought.
In an interview at Vice, Mickleburgh explains what a body farm is, the importance of her work, and some of the things she does. For example, she investigates how bacteria from the environment interacts with the bacteria from one or more decomposing bodies to determine how long they've been buried, what killed them, and who they are. Even the soil covering a grave can be evidence of a crime. She also talks about the people who volunteer their bodies for this work after they die, and why she's willing to do the same. -via Damn Interesting
Engineer and YouTuber The Q builds many novel and remarkably high-performing machines, most often with bicycles. Recently, we featured his bike tires made out of tennis balls. Those might work well in an off-road environment where punctures are likely.
So might these wheels, which are square. Or, more precisely, these are treads that rotate around a square frame. Inspired by the polyhedral tires in low-resolution video game graphics, he made this tread-bike that is surprisingly functional. I'm especially impressed with how The Q was able to transfer power from the bike pedals to the tread gears on the back wheel.
You can imagine Tom Scott going to Japan with a long list of things he'd like to try so he can show us what we're missing. Hideyasu Ito bought a leaf blower just because it was on sale. He didn't even need to blow leaves. But it was there later on when he thought about building a hovercraft, not for profit or for clicks, but just to see if he could do it. So Ito kept at it, improving his hovercraft through several iterations at his Micro Hovercraft Laboratory founded just for this kind of project. His latest versions look like a bicycle mounted on a pontoon boat. It's a steerable bouncy castle, sort of. Cool toy, bro! And he was nice enough to let Tom try it out.
Tom noted at YouTube that this is his last video from Japan. Any guesses on where he might go next?
Toilets are connected to vent pipes, which connect with outside air. These allow for gravity to work properly in flushing a toilet and they keep swamp gasses out of your house. They can also be an emergency source of air. In 1982, William O. Holmes patented a hose device that would allow you to snake the hose through the toilet trap and breathe the air from the vent pipe.
Why would you ever want to do that? It's an emergency device in the event of a fire. Toilet air could be smelly, but the concentrations of noxious gasses are pretty low, and it beats being disabled by smoke inhalation. Still, it seems that the better alternative would be to leave the building entirely. I suppose this invention was targeted at large buildings where people may be trapped from escape, and the fire is less deadly than the smoke where you happen to be. -via Nag on the Lake
