THE CHOICE IS YOURS! You decide which one of these pitches will become a new comic book series in #DCRoundRobin2022. Vote for your favorites in the thread below. 👇

Learn more here: https://t.co/8g6FCpW0GR #DCUniverseInfinite pic.twitter.com/Ro46SzTnSu

— DC (@DCComics) March 29, 2022

While some people are busy deciding who is the best college basketball team, there are always a bunch of alternate tournaments on the internet that have nothing at all to do with basketball. DC Comics launches one today between 16 story ideas featuring their superheroes (with the exception of Batman). Fans can vote on their favorites in each round, and the winner will be a comic published online. You can vote at Twitter or at the DC Universe Infinite forum, which requires membership.

Will Green Lantern defeat Captain Carrot? Do you prefer Suicide Squad to the Justice League? Read a description of each of the 16 contenders in the first round at Gizmodo. The initial response from fans is: why don't they just publish all of them?

Common logic might tell you that the easiest way to get away with a crime is to convince everyone that you are dead and cannot be prosecuted. What could possibly go wrong? A little more thought will show how stupid that idea is. If the police are after you for criminal activity, they've already figured out at least one thing you tried to pull over their eyes. Faking your own death ("pseudocide") might involve killing someone to pass off as your own body, which only makes your crimes that much worse. Then there's the problem of being someone else afterward, which comes with its own set of complications.

But not all such cases follow the same modus operandi. Sometimes the death is not to cover earlier crimes, but for insurance fraud or even just to leave your old life behind- not that those schemes work any better. This video even includes one case you might remember when the fake death was done for criminal investigative purposes.  -via Damn Interesting

✈️ In 1962, US Air Force ejected a live black bear named Yogi out of a bomber plane flying at supersonic speed to test their new ejection seat system. It was the first time a living creature was ejected from a supersonic airplane (the bear survived the ordeal!)

🏥 When YouTuber Will Osman got a $69K hospital bill, he decided to MacGyver his own functional X-Ray machine.

🎂 Love playing Wordle? This Wordle-themed birthday cake hits all of the right boxes!

🏆 If learning is not a competition, then there shouldn't be winners, right? That's what the Cherry Creek School District in Colorado reasoned when they decided to stop recognizing valedictorians. Needless to say, that decision was controversial.

🐵 A naughty young chimp in a zoo threw a rock at a nearby human visitor ... and got instant karma when a momma chimp spanked it with a stick. Whack!

🐓 A rooster stranded by Hurricane Ida in Louisiana found a new home and a job as a mascot at a local Popeye's fast food restaurant.

🍸 How to make a disembodied eyeball for your Zombie Martini Cocktail out of radishes and olives.

🎨 The Tolkien estate has released never seen before Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit artwork by J.R.R. Tolkien. Gorgeous!

🛸 When a mysterious item crashed near their home in Turkey, these elderly couple thought that they were visited by an alien spaceship.

✋ Lastly, mere hours after the slap heard 'round the world, here's the Will Smith Slap Meme Generator.

Want more neat posts? Check out our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Supa Fluffy and Spooky Daily.

A total of five tombs were unearthed by archeologists in the ancient necropolis of Saqqara in Cairo, Egypt. The burials were estimated to be over 4,000 years old, with some dating back to  Egypt’s Old Kingdom (2700 B.C. to 2200 B.C.). Well-decorated walls with hieroglyphs surround the area where the gravesites were discovered. In addition, figurines, pottery, and wooden and limestone coffins were discovered. 

Each tomb held corpses of important people in the palace, such as regional rulers, priests, and senior palace officials, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. 

Image credit: Simon Berger

This “potato” just took a DNA test, and it turns out that it wasn’t a real potato! 

New Zealand couple Colin and Donna Craig Brown’s gigantic vegetable, fondly called “Dug,” was submitted to Guinness World Records to try and get the world’s heaviest potato record. Seven months after their submission, a DNA test revealed the vegetable’s true type. "Sadly the specimen is not a potato and is in fact the tuber of a type of gourd. For this reason we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application," a Guinness World Records spokesperson told the couple via email. 

Colin went through the results sent by the organization and discovered that Dug came from a choko, a starchy plant that looks like a wrinkly, green pear. Even when the couple taste-tested the tuber to check if it was a potato, it turns out that chokos have a similar flavor to the root crop. "At least I answered all the questions and don't need to lay awake at 3 in the morning trying to figure out what has gone wrong with Mother Nature," he said.

Image credit: Donna Craig-Brown

Now, this is just so cool. I wonder how long she worked on this one! 

Canadian-based artist Shanell Papp took the art of crochet to another level by creating a life-sized skeleton. The artwork includes both the skeletal framework and the organs inside the human body. Papp referred to a human skeleton she borrowed from a university and some anatomical textbooks to fully render the details in this piece. “I was curious about the human body and I wanted to make a human body. I was interested in medical history and how we attempt to solve everything, but we are fragile. I was interested in medicine and applied to become an x-ray technician, but never attended. I stayed in art school, I wanted to continue learning new skills with my hands and I loved talking about art. Otherwise, I still read many books on medical history, death, and crime. I am interested in knowing about all the things that scare me,” she said in an interview. 

Image credit: Shanell Papp

This series of phones from Samsung has a hidden menu that users can access– all they need is to dial a set of numbers and symbols. The menu is usually for people running diagnostics on a Galaxy phone. It contains tools for determining whether a component in your phone is experiencing problems, including the display, S-Pen, speaker, camera, vibration motor, and more. If you’d like to see if your Samsung phone has one, it’s important to note that the menu is available on devices that have the One UI. It may also appear on older Galaxy phones running TouchWiz. Learn the steps in unlocking the menu here! 

Image credit: Christian Wiediger

Peruvian historian Donato Amado Gonzalez and American archaeologist Brian Bauer concluded in their study that the popular archeological site in Peru has been called the wrong name for a very long time. The Incans who built the city called it Huayna Picchu or simply just Picchu. The paper, published in Ñawpa Pacha: Journal of the Institute of Andean Studies, cited multiple historical sources that refer to Machu Picchu as Huayna Picchu. The name “Machu Picchu” stuck after  American explorer Hiyam Bingham heard from a different guide that the site was called Machu Picchu. "It's true that at the time it was not so well known to people, but there is a lot of concrete evidence suggesting that those who did know it did not call it Machu Picchu," Amado Gonzalez told NPR. 

Image credit: Agnieszka Mordaunt

A Texas teen received his brand new truck after he survived a powerful tornado in his Silverado. The shocking video of the red truck being flipped over by the tornado went viral on March 21. (Credit: Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet)https://t.co/Q7MUeEbD6P pic.twitter.com/uhvwQbdiPO

— WPDE ABC15 (@wpdeabc15) March 27, 2022

You saw the dramatic video last week of a red pickup truck that was thrown about by a tornado in Texas, and drove away from it. Now we know who the driver is, and how he's doing. Sixteen-year-old Riley Leon was going home from a job interview at Whataburger when he encountered the twister. While he was able to drive away, he was not unharmed. Leon's truck was totaled, and he suffered a fracture in his back which may require reconstructive surgery. His family does not have health insurance.

However, others have stepped in to help him out. Chevrolet worked through Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet in Fort Worth to give Leon a 2022 Silverado LT All Star Edition to replace his truck, plus $15,000 to help with expenses. A GoFundMe account raised $42,000 to cover Leon's medical expenses. And to top it all off, Whataburger offered him the job! Read Leon's story at Texas Monthly.

Many places around the world use defunct salt mines for storage. We posted about one in Kansas some years ago. In the UK, there's a salt mine storage facility that's being filled up as the mine continues! See, this mine is so big that underground chambers are emptied and used to store not only historical records, but actual historical items that may one day be displayed in a museum, while mining is still going on somewhat down the line, so to speak. The salt itself makes up the walls of the facility, and also causes it to have much lower humidity than above-ground storage or other kinds of underground holes, which is crucial for preserving precious materials. Tom Scott, who can talk his way into any place, takes us on a tour of this underground storage facility and finds out what they'll tell us and what they won't about the treasures stored there for posterity.  

A large ship full of passengers sets sail from England to the Unites States in April, but halfway there runs into an iceberg and sinks, causing the death of hundreds of passengers because there weren't enough lifeboats. You might think this is the Titanic in 1912, but it was the Titan, a fictional ship in the 1898 novel called Futility (later republished as Futility: or, the Wreck of the Titan) by Morgan Robertson. The story was about more than just the shipwreck, but when the Titanic sank 14 years later, the novel seemed suddenly like a chilling premonition. The list of eerie similarities goes on and on.

Was Robertson a prophet? No, but he had ten years of experience as a sailor, and kept up with shipping news. As it turns out, he wasn't the only one who wrote about ocean liner disasters of the time, which only makes us wonder why ship designers and those who created maritime procedures couldn't see it coming. Read about Morgan Robertson and how he came up with a fantastic story that came true, at Mental Floss.

This discovery was a great gift for archaeologists! A stone covered with Pictish geometric carvings was discovered in Aberlemno, Scotland. The 5.5-foot-long (1.7 meters) object was estimated to have been designed about 1,500 years ago by the Picts, which were the Indigenous people of the region. The meaning of the symbols remains unclear, but the best guess for now is that they are “a naming system representing Pictish names," according to Gordon Noble, the excavation leader and a professor of archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. 

Image credit: University of Aberdeen

While we all have our subjective opinions on what is the messiest or most disgusting part of an airplane, we can all agree that some trash cans in an aircraft are just gross. Matador Network’s Morgane Croissant  shared her opinion on this topic, stating that she would bet money “that every single person who has ever used an airplane bathroom trash can in the economy [class] has done so with absolute revulsion.”

The bathroom trash cans in this flight class have a manually operated flap, which forces people to actually touch the equipment with their clean hands– who would voluntarily do that, anyway? Imagine the dirt and bacteria there! Croissant further points out that airplane companies can actually fix this issue, by having as few touch surfaces as possible. “Airplane toilet lids should open and close on their own at every use, the toilets should flush automatically, the tap and the soap dispenser should be motion-activated, and airplane bathroom trash cans should not require that passengers put their hands halfway down the hatch,” she wrote. 

Image credit: Alexander Schimmeck

Photographer Alex ten Napel is known for his portraits, especially his focus on avian subjects. His Chickens, Hens, and Roosters series involves showing off the elegance and charisma of these feathered animals. Ten Napel was hit with the inspiration of incorporating animals into his work in 2014 while he was eating breakfast in France. A chicken wandered to him, and that’s when he had an epiphany. “Because we were, in a matter of speaking, on the same level, I saw her in a different perspective and noticed different aspects,” he told My Modern Met. “She was sociable, funny, touching, and curious. She was so human! At the same period, I was looking for a new subject to photograph. I had made many portrait series and had the idea that I had to change course. So why not portray hens and roosters?”

Learn more about his work here!

Image credit:  Alex ten Napel

A Viking settlement was established in Greenland 1,000 years ago. However, this group of people, who thrived for centuries, suddenly vanished in the 15th century. There was no evidence that was obtained from their area that could answer experts as to how and why their society collapsed. However, now, thanks to a team of scientists from Brown University, new evidence has arisen about the possible explanation behind the unsolved mystery. 

Boyang Zhao and his associates aimed to learn about the possible effect of climate change on the Viking settlement.  “From the climate change perspective, there are not actually many reconstructions from this area, so we wanted to revisit this spot in order to provide more detailed and updated records of climate history from this region and see if there's any connection between climate change and the demise of the Vikings,” Zhao explained. Learn more about the study here! 

Image credit: wikimedia commons