If you'd like to try something a little different for your next getaway weekend or vacation, maybe you should stay in some place that out of this world! Check out accommodations that will take you to outer space in one way or another: maybe a bedroom with a skylight and a working telescope, or sleep in a replica NASA space capsule, or you can indulge your fantasies about living in a science fiction universe! For example, you can inhabit the worlds of Star Wars at Twelve Parsecs in Florida.

For a fully immersive Star Wars experience, look no further than this nine-bedroom galactic detour. Guests can enjoy themed rooms that capture the spirit of the Millennium Falcon, Hoth, or Cloud City. Best of all, you’re just 15 minutes from Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Walt Disney World.

Besides, it couldn't possibly be as expensive as staying at Disney's Galactic Starcruiser at Galaxy's Edge. Read about eight space-themed travel accommodations at Mental Floss.

TikTok user spacecaptainz should prepare his pet rat for a life of fame and fortune. With his tiny harmonica, this rat can entertain millions, drawing in ticket and MP3 sales. All he needs is a bass as accompaniment.

-via Nag on the Lake

Art Blocks is taking the NFT market by storm! The collection has generated a whopping $403 million in trading volume so far since it was launched in November 2020. That’s a lot of money. True to its trading worth, a single Art Blocks NFT was sold for $3.3 million worth of cryptocurrency. What’s up with the artworks in this collection to warrant this huge amount of hype and money? Decrypt has the details: 

An NFT is a blockchain-verified deed of ownership to a unique digital item, whether it’s an image, video file, or something else entirely. Art Blocks is a generative art collection that spans a wide array of different drops by varying artists—some are flat images or interactive 3D compositions—but they’re all united by a similar origin story: every final, one-of-a-kind image is generated by the Ethereum blockchain.

The artist creates an algorithm or script and deploys it on Ethereum, experimenting with compositional elements to develop the project’s unique style before locking the code. During the minting process, the final image is generated from the script via the hash string or “seed” provided by the token

Each resulting image is different and created on the spot, sight unseen by the buyer, but there are consistent elements and repeating motifs that join them all into a cohesive project.

It’s a marriage of traditional art aesthetics and blockchain

data that yields something that is undeniably crypto-native. The look and feel of each drop varies widely across the different Art Blocks projects, but some have been celebrated and hailed as fine art—and they’re selling for similarly towering prices, accordingly.

Image credit: Art Blocks

Books have been around for centuries, printed and written in different languages around the world. Only a small number actually get an English translation -- whether it’s because of the work’s popularity or other factors. If you’re curious to find out the books that are most translated, Preply has compiled a list of the most translated books by country and presented the data in a cool infographic: 

the most translated book in the world? It’s The Little Prince, which has been translated to more than 380 different languages! Following after that is The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. These are both considered classics that have had many decades to accumulate translations.

Preply excluded from these numbers religious texts that couldn’t be easily attributed to a single author or country.

Image credit: Preply 

Damn, should I start selling some pixel art NFTs too? Benyamin Ahmed has managed to sell pixelated doodles to thousands of crypto enthusiasts. The 12-year-old is now sitting on nearly $400,000 in Ethereum cryptocurrency after his NFT collection sold out overnight! He has sold over 3,350 NFTs from his collection called ‘Weird Whales,’ as Futurism details: 

But that ethereality hasn’t stopped buyers. CNBC reports that the Weird Whales all sold out in nine hours. Ahmed, who spent $300 on the entire project, raked up 80 ether on those initial sales. That’s worth about $250,000 as of this article’s publication. Since that initial sale in July, Ahmed has collected another 30 ether — about $94,000 — in royalties when some of his buyers decided to sell their whales to someone else.

By the end of the month, CNBC projects that he’ll have over $400,000 in Ethereum — and Ahmed says he doesn’t plan to cash out.

“I plan to keep all my ether and not convert it to fiat money,” Ahmed told CNBC. “It might be early proof that, in the future, maybe everyone doesn’t [need] a bank account and just has an ether address and a wallet.”

Image credit: Imran and Benyamin Ahmed via CNBC

I can't find any concrete information about them, but internet rumor says that a notary's office in St. Petersburg, Russia has three chairs that look like huge cans of caviar or sardines. They look both expensive and comfortable.

There have always been natural disasters, some larger than others, some that we haven't quite figured out, and some that happened so long ago that most of us are not even familiar with them. But then civilization came along, and humans have added quite a few more disasters with our constant resource extraction, manufacturing, and shipping. And the disasters just got more bizarre.

In this list of weird disasters, you'll find some that longtime Neatoramanauts know, one, two, three, four, and five. And there are more you've probably never heard of that you can read about, and find links for more information, in a list of pictofacts at Cracked.

Plants, fungi, and even animals sometimes develop fluorescence for one reason or another. We're also familiar with animals who are genetically engineered to glow under a black light. But science has apparently not yet looked for all the biological structures that may fluoresce when the opportunity arises. A team of researchers went out after dark looking through the tropical forests of northern Vietnam (which sounds like quite an adventure in itself) with a black light, and were surprised to find wasps nests that glowed green!

The team initially set out to discover unknown fluorescent insects in tropical rainforests, so they'd come equipped with UV LED torches. "We were not searching for wasp nests in particular," Schöllhorn said. "To our knowledge, this phenomenon has not been observed in the past, neither by scientific researchers nor by any photographers."

When exposed to white light, the nest cocoon caps appear bright white. Their verdant fluorescence begins to appear under normal daylight, and at night under a UV torch, the bright green glow of the nests can be seen up to 65 feet (20 meters) away, the authors wrote in their report, published Tuesday (Aug. 24) in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

The wasps were of the genus Polistes, so the scientists checked out other species of the same genus from France and the Amazon rainforest. Those wasp nests also glowed under a UV light, although with slightly different colors and intensities. The next question is why the wasps evolved to build fluorescent nests. They certainly didn't do it waiting for someone to come along with a blacklight! There are quite a few possibilities, which you can read about at Live Science. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Bernd Schöllhorn and Serge Berthier)

For the last ten years, Mattel has released an annual Barbie Career of the Year doll (with the exception of 2017). Recently, the 2021 career was announced to be a music producer. Barbie dolls and their careers have come a long way since she was purely a fashion model in the 1950s and '60s, and Barbie as a professional long precedes the Career of the Year line. While there have been numerous astronaut Barbies, more recent iterations are tech and business related, with a spate of political Barbies, too, in the last few years. Ada Palmer takes us through the history of the professional Barbie as a marketing tool that reflects our evolving culture.

So, what does the Career of the Year sequence show us about Barbie as a mark of centrist feminism? A few things. One is that women-in-tech is definitely a thing, far more in the minds of the organizers than women-in-STEM, since we haven’t seen biologist Barbie or epidemiologist Barbie showcased, only several iterations of tech Barbies, including software and hardware. It also shows through things like entrepreneur Barbie and architect Barbie that sometimes they look a lot at research, especially about income and what are high-paying careers, and think it’s important that Barbie encourage girls to go into high-paid professions not just exciting ones (beloved-yet-underpaid careers like teacher and nurse have been frequent Barbie careers but not showcase ones).  They also sometimes run into challenges in communication, i.e. ‘entrepeneur’ is a very important concept but very difficult to communicate in a doll via clothing and accessories, as is true of many careers.

Palmer gives us a review of each Barbie in the series, as well as a look back at previous professions, at Ex Urb. -via Metafilter

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 阿蘇元気の森【公式】 (@asofarmland)

Watch this cute video clip of Papa Beaver named Mumu-Chan slowly waddle back to his family while carrying a large carrot and an unwieldly head of cabbage (that fell out of his hands a couple of times).

Just like a guy, he thinks that he can make it all in one go ... without any need for a grocery bag!

From Supa Fluffy, here's Cute Papa Beaver Clumsily Carries Carrot and Cabbage Back to His Family

Sometimes, when you have two problems, they cancel each other out. This is not an endorsement of the Molotov cocktail solution by Jason from The Good Place. It is unusual for two problems to eliminate each other, but surfer Shannon Ainslie experienced just that.

Ainslie writes in The Guardian about a surfing trip in South Africa. A Great White Shark bit him in the hand and dragged him under. Then a different shark tried to bite him:

Under the water, another shark swiped for my head and my shoulders, but missed, because the other had got me first.

That second shark ended up saving my life. Perhaps startled by the competition, the first shark lost its grip on me. I thought I was dreaming; everything seemed to slow down. I started to feel pain and the next thing I knew I was staring a shark straight in the face. I think the shark was confused because it stared back at me for a few moments as if in awe. Its mouth was wide open; I could see a huge set of teeth and a dark black eye. It bolted past me and I felt a shove from behind – it must have brushed along my back, but thankfully it had not bitten me. After it passed, I swam to the surface as fast as I could.

-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Hermanus Backpackers

Charter Group Birdcams in Israel gives us a glimpse into barn owl nests as they raise their young. Sometimes there is real drama. See, barn owl parents leave the nest during the day and return at night. In the above video, from June 8, a pigeon enters a nest with seven owlets of various sizes. The pigeon decides to stay, regardless of the other residents. She even lays an egg! But then the parents come home, bringing rodents for the kids, and do not take well to the home intruder.

In a second video, taken June 29, a couple of pigeons invade another owl's nest with four nestlings, but these are larger owlets who defend their home even before mama gets back.



In the third video of this trilogy, recorded on July 5, the pigeons tried setting up shop in an owl's nest in which the owlets have fledged, but they still consider this box their home. They will defend it.



Despite the violence, the pigeons appear to be ultimately successful in this last attempt to take over an owl's nest, as the owlets are old enough to leave the nest for good. Persistence pays off, but at some cost. -via Nag on the Lake

Update: A pigeon egg successfully hatched today.

Tom Breihan is in the middle a long series of music reviews for Stereogum. To be specific, he is reviewing every song that was #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart since 1958. You can see them all here. This week, he is up to December of 1989, in which "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel was #1 for two weeks. Breihan doesn't hold back.

I hate “We Didn’t Start The Fire” so much. I hate it with my whole being, my entire soul. I hear that nattering keyboard riff and those hyperactive bongos and “Harry Truman Doris Day,” and I become a different being. My blood becomes lava. My teeth become knives. In seconds, I could reduce a rhinoceros to ashen bone with the sheer acidity of my stomach bile. As a song, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” is a cursed and godforsaken work of torment, a towering abomination. Its sheer musical unpleasantness is, in its own way, almost impressive. If Billy Joel had actually set out to create eardrum-stabbing experimental hell-music, he couldn’t have done any better.

Okay, now tell us what you really think. I always considered “We Didn’t Start The Fire” to be a so-so song with a catchy chorus and nonsensical lyrics. To be honest, I had no great expectations for a Billy Joel song by 1989. But Breihan explains his hatred for the song, and then adds a few videos of cultural references and parodies spun from “We Didn’t Start The Fire” at Stereogum.  -via Metafilter

Archaeologists from Petrozavodsk State University in Russia have discovered a burial site of an ‘amber man’ who was painted with ocher, a red pigment used to mark a grave so it wouldn’t be disturbed. In addition to the distinctive paint job, the man, who was estimated to be from the Copper Age, was also buried with more than 100 pieces of jewelry. The man must have been rich when he was alive! Artnet has more details:  

The man buried in the chamber was almost certainly of high social standing, and may have been a trader himself from the Eastern Baltic States.

The objects included pendants, discs, and amber buttons “arranged in rows face down” and sewn onto a covering made of leather and placed over the body. Another two tiers of amber buttons were found along the edges of the small grave.

The flint chips found are likely from tools placed over the body and “are clearly so-called votive items—offerings apparently symbolizing whole knives and arrowheads,” researchers said in their paper.

The unique aspect of this particular burial, they said, is that it is an individual grave. Other burials dating to the Mesolithic era and found in the forest belt of Europe are large cemeteries.

Burials with such a large number of jewels were previously unheard of in this area of Karelia, nor have they been uncovered in nearby northwestern regions.

Image credit: Petrozavodsk State University

If you’re planning to take some awesome photos in the upcoming fall, this tool might be of help to you! An interactive fall foliage prediction map shows the peak periods when leaves will be at their most colorful in each region. The Smoky Mountains portal designed the fall foliage prediction map for tourists: 

The visual planning guide allows users to click through one week at a time, starting from August 30 to November 15, and shows the change in foliage across the United States, from “No Change” with leaves still green and all the way to “Past Peak” when leaves begin to fall.

The company uses a model that ingests a multitude of data sources including historical precipitation, NOAA precipitation forecasts, elevation, actual temperatures, temperature forecasts, and average daylight exposure to develop a baseline fall date for each county in the continental United States. Next, the model consumes hundreds-of-thousands of additional data points from a variety of government and non-government sources and layers this data over its own historical data from past years and, finally, with a high degree of accuracy, the algorithm produces nearly 50,000 date outputs indicating the progression of fall for every county in a graphical presentation that is easy to digest.

Image credit: Smoky Mountains