🐳 How much does a blue whale eat every day? If you guessed "a lot," you'd be right: a new study revealed that a blue whale eats between 10 to 20 tons of food a day, or about 20 to 50 million calories. To put that into perspective, that's the equivalent of about 80,000 Big Macs. Every. Single. Day. (Image above: Duke University Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab)

🚂 Instead of turning it into scrap metal, a retired train in Tokyo's Miyazakidai Station is reimagined as a shared office space that you can rent. And while the interior is not exactly the same, the train has all the vibes of the train featured in Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away.

🎬 Talking 'bout Studio Ghibli, this guy created a fantastic replica of Howl's Moving Castle using trash and junk items.

🎃 Understanding semiotics using pumpkin spice as an example. At the end, I still don't understand semiotics, but now I'm thirsty for pumpkin spice latte.

📷 Winning photos of the Close-up Photographer of the Year 2021 include this super cute Rat in Tyre Hub shown above. (Image: Ezra Boulton/CUPOTY03)

❤️ Paul Rudd is named Sexiest Man Alive, and his wife basically said, "sure, dear." Rudd said, "I'm going to lean into it hard. I'm going to own this. I'm getting business cards made."

Let's end with two fun and uplifting stories:

🐶 Good boi: Dog saved more than 100 koalas during brushfires in Australia

😻 You may love your Amazon delivery packages, but this cat loves the delivery drivers.

More neat stories over at our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista and Supa Fluffy. Thank you for checking them out!

Introducing rocks, it's just rockshttps://t.co/Gh0jgjMDNe pic.twitter.com/2Vi4Iarsw8

— Neal Agarwal (@nealagarwal) November 3, 2021

Neal Agarwal made us a web toy that's relaxing and frustrating at the same time. Just go and stack some rocks. It's nothing but rocks, and you can stack them. Unless you can't. Because they have no straight edges, and they tend to fall. At the same time, there are no rules to follow, and the sounds of the ocean are quite soothing. I found out something by accident- since there are no rules, no scoring, and no finish line, you don't have to stack them all vertically. This is the best I have done so far.

Agarwal offers other web toys if you want to do some exploring.  -via Metafilter

I don't know why this little boy is blue and his mother is purple, but it really doesn't matter as his mom makes curry for dinner and explains how variety is the spice of life. Eventually we see how the curry is a metaphor for the earth. Everyone is different and they like different things, but it takes all those things to make the world go around. This pleasant and colorful animated short was made by an international team of directors at the French animation school Gobelins for their graduation project. You can read the story behind the film at the school's website. -via The Kid Should See This

The USSR had quite a few notable "firsts" in the space race. They were the first to put a satellite into space in 1957 and the first to put a man into orbit in 1961. By 1967, they were ready to be the first country to stage a docking maneuver in orbit. The plan was to launch two spacecraft, Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2, line them up in orbit, and have two of the cosmonauts swap capsules via spacewalk.

But there were problems with the spacecraft. The launch was rushed in order to have it occur during the Soviet Union's 50th anniversary celebrations. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was to pilot Soyuz 1, and he knew the spacecraft had at least 203 structural problems, any of which could be catastrophic. The only person in the USSR who had the power to cancel the launch was Leonid Brezhnev. But who would tell him? Komarov enlisted his best friend, backup pilot, and national hero Yuri Gagarin to get word to the Soviet leader. Gagarin approached everyone he could, but the only help he got was from a spy who was punished for even suggesting telling Brezhnev such a thing.

Soyuz 1 launched on April 23, 1967. The Soviet Union achieved another first with the mission: the first man to die in space. Vladimir Komarov and his capsule became a fireball as it plunged to earth. He had known it would happen, but if he had backed out of the launch, Yuri Gagarin would have taken his place. Read what happened to Soyuz 1 at Amusing Planet. The account, and one picture, may be disturbing.

Manfred Steiner grew up in Austria and attended medical school there before immigrating to the United States. He went on to become America's leading clinical hematologist while acquiring a second doctorate in biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Steiner eventually taught hematology at the medical schools of Brown University and the University of North Carolina.

As he approached retirement in his seventies, he contemplated following an old dream. As a young medical student, he had been fascinated by quantum physics, but had been unable to devote time to it. In retirement, Steiner was able to return to the passion of his youth. NPR reports that, at the ripe age of 89, Steiner has successfully defended his dissertation titled "Corrections to the Geometrical Interpretation of Bosonization." He now plans to publish that dissertation and continue his research.

-via My Modern Met | Photo: Nick Dentamaro/Brown University

The Right Honourable Jacinda Ardena, who serves as the Queen's Prime Minister of New Zealand, has weighty responsibilities as the head of a national government.

She is also a mother of Neve, a three-year old girl.

NBC News reports that on Monday, Ms. Ardena was delivering a national address through livestream about the state of the coronavirus pandemic in her country and her government's response to it. It was past Neve's bedtime, but she was having none of that. During the livestream, Neve interrupted the Prime Minister not once, but twice in an effort to overthrow the tyrannical shackles of the bedtime mandate.

During the second rebellion, Neve protested that her mother, like all politicians, is too long-winded when at the (virtual) podium. Ms. Ardena's mother, then visiting Premier House, the official residence of the Prime Minister, returned Neve to her bed.

-via Marilyn Bellamy

🦆 The 50th New York City Marathon this past Sunday had 33,000 humans and one duck participants. Meet Wrinkle the Duck, the viral Tiktok star who ran the NYC marathon in a stylish red webbed footwear.

🏠 This woman found hidden stairs under her patio that led to a secret room under her house.

🐂 150 bison are coming straight towards your car and there's no where for you to go. What do you do? Film the stampede, of course.

🎬 Forget the Matrix, enter the Keanuverse instead! How many Keanu Reeves movies do you recognize in this supercut?

🕹️ Best IKEA hack ever: Fan created Donkey Kong shelf using IKEA Lustigt Wall Shelf.

😴 The best time to go to bed for your health, according to science.

🤣 This last one is a funny one: Taking three boys to school is like The Three Stooges IRL.

More neat stories over at our new network of sites: Supa Fluffy, Homes & Hues, Pop Culturista, Pictojam and Laughosaurus.

Image: @seducktive/Tiktok

In 1920, Harvard University was the site of a process so scandalous that it wasn't made public until records were revealed in 2002. At the time it happened, the school considered the scandal to be the students' behavior, but in the 21st century we know the real scandal was the university's response and the cover up of their actions.

It began when a Harvard student suddenly dropped out, went home to his parents, and committed suicide. It came out that he was having an affair with an older man. Letters he left behind named other students at Harvard who were also homosexual. School officials wanted to keep the matter quiet, in order to preserve the school's reputation, and besides, one of the named students was the son of a former congressman. But they wanted those students out.

The results of the "Secret Court," as it was actually called, were that eight students were expelled for no stated reason, and they were given negative recommendations if they applied to another school. One committed suicide soon afterward, and another a few years later. Read about Harvard's Secret Court of 1920 at Messy Nessy Chic.

Most modern humans have at least one chin. Some of us are blessed with multiple chins. But only one actually has a solid bone structure behind it. Why?

Cosmos reports on a recent article published by Robert Franciscus in the Journal of Anatomy looking at evolutionary history of chins. One popular theory among physical anthropologists has been chins provide support to chewing as humans age and eat harder foods. But Franciscus and his colleagues found that longitudinal studies of bone growth in chins did not support this hypothesis.

What they propose instead is that human chins became prominent when early humans had higher levels of testosterone, which impacts bone growth, especially in the skull. As humans' aggressive behavior and testosterone levels dropped off, hormonal changes caused this large bone in the front of the human face to become sharper and angular--a chin.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Andrex99

Mountains are a literary metaphor for something that is eternal and immovable, but that's not always so in the real world. Mountains are subject to both gravity and entropy. The village of Brienz/Brinzauls in Switzerland is itself moving downhill as the ground shifts underneath, but the mountain above the village is falling apart, sending boulders rolling into the valley. How do these people live with the danger? The highway that runs across the foot of the mountain is in even more danger from falling rocks, but Swiss engineering is on it. No, they cannot stop the rocks, but they can make the road safer. Tom Scott has the story.  

By the way, if you listen to the geologist while reading the subtitles, you'll hear Swiss as a fairly close relative of English.

Traveling trash can visits Ireland from Myrtle Beach (3,500+ miles)… We received an email yesterday from a man in Ireland who found one of our bins. Click here to read the full email exchange! https://t.co/83mtGAMrUv pic.twitter.com/TgOrtR2fG7

— City of Myrtle Beach (@MyrtleBeachGov) November 8, 2021

A recycling barrel washed up on the shore in Mulranny, County Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland. Keith McGreal saw it on his local beach and took a closer look. The stickers on the bin clearly showed that it belonged to the city of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina! That's a distance of 5500 kilometers, or 3500 miles. McGreal sent a message to Myrtle Beach via the city's website, telling of the find.

Someone on the town's staff replied and joked that one employee had already volunteered to travel to Ireland to fetch the wayward barrel, but apparently that request will not be honored. They asked that McGreal go ahead and recycle the bin on his side of the Atlantic.

No one knows when the bin started its journey to Ireland, but the barnacles it collected along the way indicate that it has been quite some time. -via Boing Boing

Ray Chen, a master violist, was recently performing Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony in Benaroya Hall. During his solo, the E-string on Chen’s violin snapped.

He doesn’t stop playing, though. First, he signals the conductor that he has a problem. Then, in a smooth motion, at a good break in the music, he swaps instruments with the concertmaster (which, I gather, is a title for the first violinist). The concertmaster then swaps with the second chair next to him, who swaps with the fourth chair. Meanwhile, Chen is powering up with his borrowed instrument.

-via Twisted Sifter

Artisans in Japan have been using lathes to shape wood since the 9th century. Originally pulled by hand, they became pedal-powered in the 1890s, and now are spun by motors. These lathes are what artisans called kojin use to make traditional kokeshi dolls out of well-dried wood. The dolls are durable and sparsely decorated, lending themselves to imaginative play. The Tohoku region of Japan is responsible for the popularity of kokeshi dolls, as they sold them to tourists who came to ski in Tohoku in the mid-19th century. Manami Okazaki fell in love with kokeshi when she visited her mother's family in Tohoku, and has written two books about the dolls. The latest is Japanese Kokeshi Dolls: The Woodcraft and Culture of Japan’s Iconic Dolls. Okazaki gives us a look at how kokeshi dolls charmed those who bought them.    

It didn't hurt that kokeshi were also undeniably cute, defined more precisely by Okazaki as a type of “subdued” cute known as shibu kawaii. “Kawaii, the culture of cuteness, is probably the dominant pop-cultural aesthetic at the moment,” Okazaki tells me. “My bankcard has Hello Kitty on it. You see buses in the shapes of bears or pandas, airplanes in the shapes of dogs. It’s endless. But shibu kawaii is a kind of cute that’s cute in a way that isn’t—a retro or old-school cute.”

In other words, a level of cute that won’t give you diabetes. “I wrote a book on kawaii culture,” Okazaki says. “I spoke with designers from gaming companies whose work is 100-percent maximum cute. They told me that if you really want to see the roots of kawaii, you should check out kokeshi.”

Kokeshi has also been credited (or blamed, depending on how you look at these things) as the template for the mix of uniformity and variation found in everything from Be@rbrick toys to Pokemon. That may seem like a stretch if you are wondering what a kokeshi doll could possibly have in common with Pikachu or Bulbasaur, but the similarities have less to do with the decorations on the forms than the utility of the forms themselves as armatures for myriad variations.

Okazaki tells us more about the history, the craftsmanship, and the appeal of kokeshi dolls at Collectors Weekly.

We've seen animals wander onto the playing field during televised football and baseball games quite a bit, but they are usually dogs or cats or an occasional escaped mascot. You don't expect to see a wild animal invading a game, especially in a packed stadium. When Arizona State played the University of Southern California in Tempe on Saturday, broadcasters were surprised to see a fox on the field! The fox seemed surprised, too, and tried to escape by jumping into the stands.

It was a novel situation for all involved. The crowd, of course, was amused but also concerned with the safety of the fox. If it were a dog or cat, they would try to grab the animal, but it was hands-off all around in the case of a fox. After another trip through the playing field, the fox made its escape, to thunderous applause.

You might wonder why a wild fox would ever approach a crowded stadium. Wild animals have been forced into the proximity of humans by encroaching cities and loss of both habitat and prey, and they've adapted by taking our trash for food. A fox does what a fox gotta do. -via Digg

The town of Casey is near where interstate 70 crosses the Illinois-Indiana border. It has a population of only 2,404 people, but the town has plenty to brag about- like multiple Guinness World records for large items. They have the world's largest wind chimes, rocking chair, knitting needles, mailbox, clogs, pitchfork, and more. The town holds eleven world records as of now, and that draws people off the interstate to come see them.



In most small towns that put themselves on the map, so to speak, there is usually one person behind the attractions. In Casey, that would be local business owner Jim Bolin. He built the wind chimes as the first "big thing" for Casey, and then just kept on creating everyday items on a scale that's larger than life. In addition to the record-holders, the town has quite a few other enormous objects to show off. Read about Casey and its big things at Mental Floss.