In the hit HBO series The Last of Us, the world is devastated by the parasitic Cordyceps fungus, which infected flour and has mutated to turn humans into zombies. The genus Cordyceps really does turn its host into zombies, but only attacks insects. Does that means we are safe from fungus in our pancakes? Well, yes and no.  

There are many funguses (or fungi for Latin readers) that will infect crops of wheat or other grains. Some can make people very sick, either from the fungus itself or from the toxins that the fungus produces. The most familiar of these is ergot, which infects rye and may have produced hallucinations that contributed to a outbreak of "witchcraft" in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

Wheat producers go to great lengths to fight fungus in our food, but there is always a chance that dry flour contains some fungus. The good news is that it is destroyed when that flour is cooked. The bad news is that fungus can still infect food after it is cooked. Read the real story of fungal infections in flour at The Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

An ancient city at the mouth of a mighty river was the recipient of untold wealth due to the shipping trade, but changing conditions along the coastline left it sunken under water. This is the story of the lost Egyptian city of Thonis, also called Heracleion. Once thought to be a myth, it was found exactly where it always was, except underwater in the Mediterranean Sea. The stories of Heracleion involve both real people (Cleopatra) and mythological characters (Helen of Troy), but no trace of the city was seen for a thousand years. Heracleion's ruins are filled with expensive artifacts, leading experts to believe the disappearance of the city was relatively sudden, or else those treasures would have been moved. The upshot is that you can build flimsy structures or sturdy stone structures, but if your foundation is on the sandy coastline, you're at the mercy of the sea. New Orleans, are you taking notes? -via Digg

PS: Don't let the video title "Filthy Secrets" deter you from watching. There's nothing filthy in the video.

Located on the west shore of Hudson Bay, about 140 km (87 mi) away from the Manitoba-Nunavut border, the town of Churchill, Canada. It is a small town home to only about 850 people. Interestingly, the place also has more or less the same number of polar bears. That's a 1:1 ratio if you ask me. While the bears live on the frozen bay to hunt seals during winter, they move inland once the ice melts in July. And then they'd return to the shore by the end of November to wait for the bay to freeze once more. Because Churchill is in the middle of the so-called "polar bear highway," the town has earned the nickname the "Polar Bear Capital of the World." The town even has a company that offers polar bear tours.

But how do the people manage to live peacefully with the polar bears? The answer is through the polar bear holding facility, or as it is colloquially known, the "polar bear jail." Like a real jail, the place is used to "imprison" bears reported to approach humans. They're still dangerous animals, after all.

As they "serve time" in the holding facility, the animals are only given water, so they won't associate humans with food. Their "sentence" doesn't take long, however. Most bears only stay in the facility for 30 days or until the bay freezes. Immediately, they are released and free to hunt seals again.

Atlas Obscura tells more of this bear-y interesting story over at their website.

(Image Credit: Marko Dimitrijevic/ Flickr via Atlas Obscura)

Over a hundred years ago, an amusement park was constructed on Coney Island in New York City. The park was named Luna Park, and it opened in 1903. As the place became popular, other builders borrowed the name. Today, there are multiple Luna Parks around the world. Some of them are defunct, while some of them still operate.

The first Luna Park ceased operations in 1944. However, another one was opened in Coney Island in 2010, just across the street from the original site.

One of the most notable Luna Parks out there is the one in Melbourne, Australia. The said park opened way back in 1912, but it still operates to this day, making it the oldest operational Luna Park. It is also home to one of the oldest wooden rollercoasters in the world.

Artist Daniel Agdag references the wooden rollercoaster in Melbourne Luna Park in this piece called "Lattice." It is a massive ten-foot work made from vellum trace paper and cardboard. And yes, it is structurally sound. The project, a commission from the New York City Department of Education and NYC School Construction Authority Public Art for Public Schools, took two years to make. The truss section alone, which consists of some "897,560 individual hand-cut cardboard members," took him 8 months. Just thinking about how he made this intricate work makes my head hurt.

Agdag documented his process of the work through a series of pictures, which he shared on Instagram.

(Image Credit: Etienne Frossard/ Daniel Agdag via Colossal)

The newer generation would probably not recognize this piece of technology. Or maybe they would recognize it as "the save icon."

Despite its antiquity, the floppy disk is still essential to some. These are people with small businesses that found upgrading their equipment too expensive.

Mark Necaise from Mississippi is one such case. He creates custom embroidery on jackets and vests using a second-hand Japanese machine. Sadly, he has to get his hands on floppy disks as it is the only way to transfer designs from his computer to the machine. When he went down to his last four floppy disks, Necaise began to worry. Thankfully, he decided to buy a floppy-to-USB emulator. Never again would he worry about floppy disk shortage.

Small embroidery businesses are not the only ones using floppy disks. Cargo airlines, such as one in Tbilisi, Georgia, still use floppy disks to update systems of old airplanes.

It would seem that, even after floppy disk production was discontinued, this "antique" technology still remains relevant today. Lori Emerson, the founder of Media Archaeology Lab and a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, believes that the floppy disk will never die when "there are people in the world who are still busy finding and fixing up and maintaining phonograph players from 1910."

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

The lockdowns of 2020 have taken away face-to-face interactions in our lives. (Thankfully, it's no longer the case.) At that time, we had many ways to cope with it. Some of us picked up an old hobby, while others tried learning something new. And there were people, like artist Aki Inomata, who decided to take a breath, sit down or lie down and appreciate the simple things in life, like the lovely view of the blue sky.

From her observation, Inomata realized that no two days were alike. The patterns in the sky are never the same. This realization brought the idea of recording the sky from the previous day and rendering them in a glass of water through 3D printing. Clouds on the glass, meanwhile, are made from milk, so it is safe to drink.

As 3D-printing a liquid into a liquid is quite the endeavor, Inomata asked for help from technologists from the Digital Hollywood University Graduate School of Japan, and they experimented for 2 years.

"Thinking of Yesterday's Sky" is still an ongoing project. See more images at Spoon & Tamago.

(Image Credit: Aki Inomata via Spoon & Tamago)

You go to YouTube, and you'll see people talking about ChatGPT. You go to Facebook, and you'll see posts about the very same chatbot. From memes to YouTubers creating content about it, ChatGPT has, indeed, become viral on the internet. ChatGPT even has a subreddit with 476k members.

However, the people at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, are scratching their heads about the virality of their recent product.

John Schulman, the company cofounder, expected that ChatGPT would gain a following. He wasn't expecting it would "reach this level of mainstream popularity."

Company CEO Sam Altman even described the software as a "terrible product."

OpenAI's policy researcher, however, may be correct in his observation. "We work on these models so much, we forget how surprising they can be for the outside world sometimes," he said. My guess is since they were the ones who developed the chatbot, they are no longer amazed by its capabilities. Meanwhile, we, who are not always exposed to advanced AI like this, find ChatGPT awesome.

Despite ChatGPT's popularity, OpenAI keeps an eye on how people use the program to prevent unpleasant safety issues.

(Image Credit: ChatGPT)

Scientists in this new study may have finally found how lemon juice prevents the formation of kidney stones, and it challenges the conventional wisdom about how the juice works against the disease.

People have already known for a long time that lemon juice can prevent kidney stones from forming. They thought it was because of the citric acid present. However, drinking pure lemon juice has its own consequences, too. For one, patients will have a hard time drinking a cup of that sour juice. That and lemon juice can also eat away teeth.

And so, scientists looked for alternatives that could prevent kidney stones, and they found the alternatives to be medicinal plants like ginseng and dandelion.

The medicinal plants stated above apparently have nanoparticles that slow down the formation of calcium oxalate crystals.

When the team found out that these same nanoparticles were also present in lemon juice, they fed lemon juice nanoparticles to rats (which also ingested a substance that could cause kidney stone growth). The team found that these particles softened the stones and made them less sticky.

The team hopes that their study about these lemon nanoparticles could be used in treating people with kidney stones in the near future.

(Image Credit: L. Zhang et al./ Nano Letters 2023 via ScienceNews)

Deep in the Norwegian forest, a hungry four-legged animal weighing 400-550 kg explores the area. As it finds its food, the animal happily eats. And then, it eats more. Little does it know that by doing so, it is changing everything in its surroundings.

We know that we humans are the main contributors to global warming and climate change. However, human activity is not the only reason for global warming. Animal activity can be, too.

Ecologists currently think that moose may be responsible for additional carbon emissions, and they have good reasons for thinking so. Gunnar Austrheim, an ecologist at NTNU University Museum, states that a "grown moose can eat 50 kg of biomass each during summer." These animals like to eat young deciduous saplings, which could be a possible source of carbon storage if they fully matured.

Ecologists acknowledge that by eating deciduous plants, moose do the forest industry a favor. In doing so, competition and biodiversity in the land are reduced, and only coniferous trees like pine and spruce remain. Coincidentally, the forest industry prefers these coniferous trees. However, ecologists say this might not be good for the environment.

Thankfully, moose in Norway are heavily managed, so their carbon emissions are maintained. In fact, there is a "stronger management for moose than for most livestock in the country."

(Image Credit: Endre Grüner Ofstad via EurekAlert)

To people who have never eaten fermented meat, the traditional Inughuit dish kiviaq may seem disgusting and possibly dangerous. But the people of northern Greenland have perfected the process of making kiviaq over thousands of years, and enjoy the flavorful fermented bird meat. The fact that kiviaq has been publicized as a disgusting food is a sore spot for the Inughuit, and the tendency for younger generations to prefer imported food supplies means that traditional preparation methods are in danger of dying out. Kiviaq is made by

 ...packing 300 to 500 whole dovekies—beaks, feathers, and all—into the hollowed-out carcass of a seal, snitching it up and sealing it with fat, then burying it under rocks for a few months to ferment. Once it’s dug up and opened, people skin and eat the birds one at a time.

This method of fermenting came about because dovekies (also known as little auks) are seasonal. In late spring, millions of birds come to Greenland to nest. They are so thick you can catch them by swinging a net through the air. This bounty of edible game had to be preserved for leaner times, so kiviaq was developed to meet that need. Read about the traditional art of making kiviaq and the people who want to preserve the dish at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: AWeith)

There are ten movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards this Sunday. But you have probably seen two or maybe three of them at most. It's possible you haven't even heard of most of them! Screen Junkies knows that, and so every year they compile an Honest Trailer to let us in on  what all the fuss is about for the ten nominated films. They haven't done Honest Trailers for any of these movies except for Elvis, because, uh, no one requested them (they tell us Avatar 2 is being edited now). Best Picture nominees are expensive art films that are "good," by most metrics, but we, the audience, mainly watch movies so we can escape the real world and feel good for a couple of hours. But you might get to know at least one film in this video that you'd like to see in its entirety.

This Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present its 95th annual awards to the movies of the previous year. While Hollywood is excited, the nationwide ratings for the Oscar awards show have been declining for years now. The show is too long, scheduled for four hours but often running five, so even avid movie fans tend to skip watching it live.  

The problem is that the producers are working with obsolete concepts of drawing a television audience: keep them tuned in, and keep them waiting. In the 20th century, the audience had no choice. If you wanted to see how many awards your favorite movie won, you had to sit through production numbers, technical awards, and stand-up routines. With the internet, you can get notifications for the parts you really care for. Yet movie fans all have different parts they care about.

The Ringer proposes a plan to bring viewers back to the Oscar ceremony by breaking the telecast into three parts aimed at different kinds of movie fans. It sounds ingenious. On its face, the plan appears to be sacrificing a captive four-hour audience, but those viewers are already gone. It could bring back many of those viewers, albeit for shorter segments. The reasoning behind each part of the new plan is explained in detail, and it might just work. The sad part is that this plan is not only too late for the ceremony coming up March 12, but also that it was not proposed by the Academy itself. -via Digg

💧 If the gentle sound of trickling water is supposed to lull you into sleep, then the gushing water from this bed-and-waterfall combo in a New York City apartment will definitely slam you into slumber. Just don't fall off the side!

🦈 We can't believe this masterpiece didn't win the 2023 Federal Duck Stamp Art Contest. Travesty!

🎬 How many of these 100 Greatest Action Movie One-Liners do you remember?

🐶 I get tired just looking at Nori the Italian greyhound AKA the world's most energetic dog zooming around the house. Oh, and those teeth!

🪁 It turns out, you can fly a kite indoors. There's even an actual competition for it.

🍖 When he's not fighting Foo, Dave Grohl fights hunger by bringing his giant smoker and barbecuing to feed 500 homeless people in Los Angeles. What a great guy!

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You can often tell where someone is from by the way they pronounce the letter "r." Bostonians and the British don't pronounce it at all when it's in a word, but sometimes tack one on the end of a word when you least expect it. But some linguists say that under some circumstances, "r" can be a vowel. That theory won't change our spelling, and probably won't change any pronunciation. We won't soon be seeing bird spelled "brd," even though we do see it spelled "birb" quite a bit these days. The series Storied from PBS explains the different ways different languages and cultures use "r" and how it could be considered a vowel, under the strange standards of linguistics. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Illness and disease were once inescapable parts of life before germ theory, antibiotics, and vaccines. People did what they could to avoid diseases, but sometimes just had to work around them. That affected clothing and fashion styles. When just enough men discovered that wearing a codpiece protected their junk while undergoing the useless syphilis treatments of the 16th century, the look caught on with the general public. But their hair still fell out, which led to powdered wigs, which had an upside in that they attracted lice away from the rest of their bodies. Are you keeping up?

Tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox were not easy subjects to talk about, but they were all too common once upon a time. Read about five bygone fashion trends that were instigated by people either trying to prevent these diseases or trying to live with them, whether their fashion followers knew it or not, at Cracked.

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)