The city of Pompeii is an archaeological treasure, as it is gradually dug out from underneath the ashes of Mt. Vesuvius' 79AD eruption. That means looters, people who steal and trade in historical relics, want to get into the city. To guard the site, authorities are using Boston Dynamics' Spot robots. They can patrol all night without rest, watching and recording any activity, aided by drones that can watch from above. Not only are the robots acting as security guards, they are also monitoring the ruins for signs of change or damage so that preservationists can catch problems with the fragile structures before they completely fall apart. It sounds like a good use for these dog-like robots. They could sure scare a thief away! Read more about the project at Gizmodo.
But what if... Mt. Vesuvius were to erupt again? The city is mostly restored to its condition from 2,000 years ago. Imagine if it were buried under lava, ash, and rubble again, only to be excavated again in another 2,000 years. These scientists of the future would find Roman roads, ancient homes and businesses, and robots. And that's the kind of thing that causes us to misunderstand history. -via Nag on the Lake
Neatorama has an extensive archive of stories about dead bodies that were not allowed a peaceful rest. However, there are always more stories about earthly remains exploited for obsession, profit, or entertainment. For example, I had no idea that Charlie Chaplin's corpse was dug up and held for ransom, and that happened in my lifetime! It was only a couple of months after Chaplin's death in December of 1977 that Chaplin's body was disinterred from Corsier-sur-Vevey cemetery in Switzerland. Numerous phone calls to the actor's widow, Oona Chaplin, demanded money that would be equivalent to almost $2 million today. Oona refused to pay the ransom, police investigated, and Chaplin's body was dumped in a field to be found three months later. Read how that story turned out, as well as the cases of the restless corpses of Abraham Lincoln, Alistair Cooke, Eva Peron, and those of quite a few other famous people at DiggingUp1800. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Giramondo1)
😻 Winters can be harsh in Tekirdag, Turkey, so a dentist and cat lover named Şebnem Ilhan decided to build a "cat ladder" so stray kitties can climb into her house for warmth.
🎵 Who sings it better: Led Zeppelin or this rubber chicken?
🦠 Scientists asked participants to rate pictures of people for attractiveness and found something interesting: people infected with "mind-altering" toxoplasmosis are more attractive! So, what's going on? Does the parasite Toxoplasma gondii change facial symmetry by changing endocrine levels, or do attractive people just have a higher chance of contracting the parasite?
Image: Sebnem Ilhan
🏀 Usually, studios pay for billboards to advertise their new releases but HBO decided to do a Euro step. To promote Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, they refurbished a basketball court in Inglewood, south central Los Angeles, and donated $10K to a local school. Now the community can enjoy a game of hoops on a new basketball court. Slam dunk!
🐓 After Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana, a lost rooster showed up at a local Popeye fast food restaurant and the staff there decided to make it into a mascot. I guess that's better than introducing it to the deep fryer in the kitchen!
🚲 Wales found something that works better than ambulances: paramedics on bicycles!
Image: HBO
🍌 This is not a banana, but it is the ultimate in banana dessert. Watch pastry chef Amaury Guichon create an amazingly realistic banana pastry. (Now I'm hungry!)
🏠 Why don't we all live in steel houses? In the late 1940s, steel houses with steel on the outside and the inside was the hot new thing. For a while, it was considered the future of housing ... until it wasn't. Here's the story of the rise and fall of the steel house.
✋ Not tired of the whole Will Smith slap saga yet? Here's the Will Smith, Vladimir Putin and Batman Venn Diagram. Previously: The Wrong Will Smith and Will Smith Slap Meme Generator.
More neat posts over at our new sites: Pop Culturista, Supa Fluffy, Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Laughosaurus, Infinite 1UP and Spooky Daily.
Featured art: No more nasal swabs by indie artist louisros.
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Robots are increasingly taking over the roles and jobs that humans commonly do manually. Now let's get this slime robot inside you to go rooting around and see what it can find.
The Guardian reports that Li Zhang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his research team developed this robot out of polyvinyl alcohol, borax, and neodymium particles. It can be manipulated magnetically to navigate narrow confines of machines or bodies to perform repairs or extract foreign objects.
The magnetic particles are toxic, so Zhang explains that it will be necessary to develop a silica coating for the slime before using it inside human bodies. Adding pigments may make the robot more pleasant to look at.
Certainly improving the appearance of what has been called a "magnetic turd" could make it easier for future times when the use of it inside human bodies becomes permissible and, later, mandatory
-via David Burge
Here’s an open-world game for the people who aren’t into Elden Ring’s engaging yet difficult gameplay! Sable, developed by Shedworks and published by Raw Fury for the PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S in September 2021, is a relaxing game that focuses more on the story and exploration. A bonus feature of this game is that there is no combat, so for those who want to explore without the hassle of fighting enemies, Sable might be up your alley.
Learn more about the game here!
Image credit: Shedworks
It’s easy to dream or fantasize about moving civilizations to new planets that aren’t like Earth. Take, for example, Elon Musk, who wants to have a metropolis a million earthlings strong on Mars by mid-century, complete with everything from factories to breweries.
Here’s the thing though: Mars can easily kill a person. This means we have to develop the technology necessary to combat Mars’ challenging atmosphere and environment. If we just send people to Mars with the basic gear, they would die of radiation poisoning or cancer. At worse, they would likely freeze to death on their first night because the temperatures on the red planet can reach Antarctic levels. We haven’t even talked about its atmosphere!
Mars has a very low atmospheric pressure. This means that it would cause a person’s blood to literally boil, regardless of the outside temperature. Yikes. Aside from that, the atmosphere, which is made up of mostly carbon dioxide will not allow humans to breathe. So while we can dream of living on other planets, such as Mars, we have to take some precautions for our survival.
Image credit: Planet Volumes
Gee, thanks a lot Nintendo!
The Super Mario 64 Complete Clear Guide is an officially-licensed guidebook released in 1996. Now a rare item [and a very expensive one to purchase should you find one], the book has a high-quality scan uploaded on the Internet Archive by a Nintendo fan at Comfort Food Video Games. Fans and enthusiasts get to see the book and be awed at the information included in the guide, from tips and tricks, to trivia about its development process, to incredible dioramas of the game's maps.
Unfortunately, the Archive received a copyright infringement notice from Nintendo of America's lawyers, so it took the guide down. So we can no longer access the cool guidebook unless you pay hundreds of dollars to grab one physically– when you find one.
Image credit: via Techspot
An ultra-rare Koenigsegg One:1 was abandoned and then found by automotive YouTuber Effspot in Dubai. This luxury car is worth around six million dollars– that’s a lot of money! It makes us wonder what happened to the owner to actually leave such an expensive car without any regard for its worth. It turns out that this is a common occurrence in the city. There are several massive scrapyards in the Middle Eastern city where you can easily spot hundreds of supercars and luxury automobiles rotting under the scorching sunlight. This is crazy!
Image credit: Effspot
A giant bird greets people at the Tampa International Airport in Florida. This 21-foot flamingo sculpture, created by Matthew Mazzotta, is called “Home.”
According to the artist, the flamingo is one of the most iconic animals in Florida. “Even though its popularity and image graces innumerable pieces of memorabilia that claim to be from Florida, for years this beautiful bird has been thought to be non-native,” Mazzota explained. The giant interactive sculpture is meant to be interacted with, touched, and photographed. Its size is meant to place the focus on the animal, reminding people that they share the same home with it.
Image credit: Tampa International Airport
Remember that unique ad that introduced us to the Squatty Potty? It's a stool that brings your feet up to a squatting position on the toilet in order to help you poop more naturally. Now the company brings us the Squatty Potty Pillow in order to sooth you, reassure you, and help you release your pent-up emotions in a more natural way, as in "relieving your emotional constipation." Believe it or not, it's a pillow shaped like the Squatty Potty. Only at the end of the ad do we find out why they made this ad, but people are already asking when it will be available to purchase. That seems to happen every April first, no matter how stupid the product is. -via Geeks Are Sexy
In 1929, rumors went around about a diet in which Hollywood stars lost a pound a day for 18 days. Women who wanted to look like a movie star were avid to get the details for months before the actual diet was published by entertainment columnist Louella Parsons. Every meal for the 18 days was spelled out, but they contained little food, even less nutrition, and almost every meal required grapefruit. Every day started with a breakfast of grapefruit, melba toast, and coffee. It worked for Ethel Barrymore, who was desperate to lose the weight her studio demanded for a movie role. Be that as it may, the diet's 500-600 calories a day was neither healthy nor sustainable for the many women and a some men who followed it. Actress Marietta Milner was on the diet when she contracted tuberculosis and died. Lesser-known women were passing out and even dying from the restrictive regimen. Read about the rise and fall of the 18-day diet at Mel magazine.
Gav and Dan are looking further afield to find weird things they can present to us in super slow-motion. Since they have a gun that will accurately shoot three-quarter-inch steel ball bearings, why not shoot it at a Newton's cradle, which has ball bearings that are only slightly larger?
The first slow-motion shooting begins at 2:53, but the result is so interesting that they try it in different ways to further explore the phenomenon, like using a hand gun. That's much more difficult for accuracy, but the mishaps are still worth watching. By the time the video is over, you'll have a newfound appreciation for ball bearings. And for Dan's marksmanship.
-via Digg
🐼 Meet Qi Zai, the world's only Qinling or brown panda in captivity. He's one of about 100 brown pandas in the world, so he's not only cute - he's quite rare, too!
🚀 All eyes are on NASA's fancy new James Webb telescope, but while you weren't looking good ol' Hubble Space Telescope spotted the farthest star ever seen: Earendel, which is now 28 billion light-years away.
"A large portion of downtown Indianapolis remained evacuated. Report are sketchy at this point but we do know that apparently there are terrorists holed up in the downtown part of our city with nuclear devices."
💣 Fortunately, that wasn't real: the fake newscast was part of a 1986 training video developed by the Nuclear Security Administration, the federal agency that's responsible to avoid nuclear catastrophes in the United States. The video was part of "Mighty Derringer," a multi-agency exercise in which a large city was devastated by a nuclear blast.
🕹️ Atari's 1970 prototype of "Home Pong" sold for $270K.
Image: He Xin
🍔 Great food, terrible service sounds like a bad Yelp review, but it's actually the motto of Karen's Diner in Sydney, Australia. The retro 50s themed restaurant features rude waitresses who expect you to go full Karen at them.
🤔 Can a piece of furniture be creepy and absolutely gorgeous at the same time?
🎸 Got a bad experience at a local business? Most of us would just grumble but not Layne Barton. When he got a bad experience at his local Western Dental & Orthodontics clinic, he rocked his protest: he set up his amp on the sidewalk in front of the dental clinic and shredded his guitar.
🖥️ My favorite link of the day: Clinton Jones challenged his fellow artists from around the world to design CG art on the theme "Infinite Journeys" and 2,448 of them answered the call. Jones featured the Top 100 3D renders in this fantastic clip. Don't miss this one!
✋ Have we reached peak Will Smith news yet? If you're tired of hearing celebs give their take on the infamous Oscar slap, consider what people who just happen to share the same name as the actor must be feeling. They're the wrong Will Smith, and they're taking abuse online.
See also: Will Smith Slap Meme Generator
🐦 When Hannah Bourne-Taylor found an abandoned baby finch, she not only nursed it back to health but also let it nest in her hair for 3 months.
More neat posts? We've got you covered with our new sites: Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Homes & Hues, Pictojam, Infinite 1UP, Supa Fluffy and Spooky Daily. Check 'em out!
Image: Clinton Jones/YouTube
Featured art: Live Long and Pizza by indie artist Get Sousa.
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Larry Lawton had quite a career in jewelry heists that netted millions dollars in the 1980s and '90s. But he was finally caught, and served ten years in prison. Now he explains the importance of the getaway car. Lawton knows a lot about getaway cars, which are crucial to his former occupation, and not at all like what you see in movies. In the movies, the car stands out so we can follow it. In real life, that's the opposite of what you want. Lawton explains how he would select a getaway car and made it as untraceable as possible. No high-speed chase necessary, if everything goes as planned.
Those tips didn't help a bit when Lawton was arrested in 1996, when nothing went as planned. He ended up driving as fast as he could in a rental car with blood on the seats and a bullet hole in the window. It's an exciting story that you can read at The Drive. -via Damn Interesting
We've long loved looking and laughing at other people's cats on the internet, but since the rise of smartphones, the supply has grown exponentially. When you see a cat doing something really weird, you no longer have to run and get a camera only to find that the moment has passed; you just aim the phone that you are already holding. The strangest ones end up on the Twitter account cats being weird little guys. That's one you might want to start following.
Bored Panda skimmed that account for the weirdest pictures and presents 50 of them in a ranked list. Some are cute as a button, some are goofy enough to make you laugh, and quite a few will make you wonder what strange set of circumstances led to this moment. Whatever happened, we are glad that they did.
