Every year, schools in China must administer jump-rope tests for kids. If students want to be eligible for scholarships, they have to score well. Failing to get a top score can mean a future of academic and, consequently, career mediocrity. Because the stakes are so high, some parents hire special tutors to coach their kids jump-rope skills.

The Wall Street Journal (paywall link) describes the testing standards. First graders must skip 17 times a minute. That goes up with age. At the fourth grade, boys must skip 99 times a minute and girls 103 times. Moving slowly or tripping a single time can result in a very low grade. This is why parents are willing to pay professional coaches as much as $50 an hour to train their children to be top competitors. These coaches have studied the body mechanics of jump-rope carefully and can spot minor errors that throw kids off of their full athletic potential.

-via Super Punch | Photo: Pixabay

Quick: what's your favorite burger topping? If you answer Marshmallow fluff, then chances are you've eaten at Tony's Lunch in Girardville, Pennsylvania. On the menu is the Fluff Screamer, a hamburger topped with marshmallow fluff.

(Image: Erik/Atlas Obscura)

Find that and other neat stories over at our new Picto sites:

Wind, shopping carts and Star Wars music combine to give you a short but epic Attack of the Shopping Carts video clip.

Ivy is a dog with short spine syndrome that looks like a cross between a dog and a frog.

Free Guy movie posters feature some of our favorite video game box covers.

Just say no to three-point turns in your tight driveway - use this car rotating platform instead!

Sony PlayStation 5 is still out of stock, but you can get the next best thing: Nike PS5 shoes.

Some really smart engineers figured out how to make a gear shaped like a ball. Behold the Abenics spherical gear!

The darkest of nights ain't a match for the world's brightest flashlight from Hacksmith.

For more neat stuff, check out our new science site Pictojam, cute animal site Supa Fluffy and wonderful home gadgets Homes & Hues.

Well, sort of. The worldwide gaming industry has been in the mainstream for quite a while. Different games have exploded in popularity and sales, such as Epic Games’ Fortnite, Mihoyo’s Genshin Impact, and the indie hit Among Us by Innersloth. According to Accenture, the worldwide gaming industry is worth over $300 billion! 

Games are products themselves and they are used as advertising spaces for different brands. The fashion industry has seen the potential of promotion in big video games-- with some big brands like Balenciaga partnering up with Fortnite. Gucci has also partnered with cult games like Tennis Clash, The Sims, Genies, Roblox, Pokémon Go, and Animal Crossing to create items available for digital avatars to wear. 

While the cosmetic items we see in games are a fun little way for us to customize our avatars, it is undeniable that they are also used as advertisements for different brands. No surprise there. 

Image credit: Epic Games 

The new movie version of Frank Herbert's Dune is set to hit theaters on October 22, so it seemed to be a good time for Screen Junkies to revisit the first attempt at turning the sprawling 1965 sci-novel into a film. The 1984 David Lynch version was critically panned and turned out to be a box office failure. However, the disappointment stuck in the consciousness of Gen X so well that another film was inevitable. Anyway, here's a critique pointing out what was wrong with the first Dune so we can be on the lookout for whether it will be fixed this time. Maybe they'll do it justice this time around. Stay tuned, in another month or two we'll have an Honest Trailer for the new Dune.

PS: If you aren't familiar with Alan Smithee, read this.

In 2000, a gamer known as rsln released his Super Metroid Speed Guide and FAQ. Take a look through the whole thing, or even just the disclaimer blurb above, and see if you can figure out what makes it unique. You don't have to know anything about the game, or any game, to see what it is.

Every year or two I remember what’s probably the most scarily/stunningly impressive linguistic feat I’ve ever seen. Every time, I think I must be mistaken, then I read the thing, and I just shake my head in disbelief. It’s been twenty years. Let me tell you about it.

— Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) September 24, 2021

You can try to figure it out for yourself, or you can follow the Twitter thread, or you can continue reading to find out what makes this document special.

I have a well-rounded appreciation for art, especially that which is inspired by past events. The arc of history bends toward justice, taut against the thin confines of social expectations.

And so I am perplexed as to why some women in Italy think that this newly unveiled statue by Emanuele Stifano does not do justice to the subject, which is the 1857 poem "The Gleaner of Sapri." That poem, by Luigi Mercantini, honored the revolutionary Carlo Pisacane and his companions, who launched a failed expedition to overthrow the Kingdom of Naples.

We can only surmise, as the sculptor did, that what is pictured above is what those brave men fought and died for. The maiden beckons us to walk behind her and follow her. Who could not accept such a call to adventure?

The Guardian reports that Italian politician Laura Boldrini and her colleagues claim that the gleaner has been sexualized. The sculptor denies the allegation, claiming that he originally planned to render the subject nude. Stifano was determined not to waste too much time debating critics "who absolutely only want to see depravity."

-via Super Punch | Photo: Italia 2 TV

Smart bear! A hilarious video of a bear who turned on a lost GoPro was discovered by a hiker in Wyoming. Once the hiker was able to scan the device’s SD card, he was treated to unique footage. 

The majority of the video is just the bear trying to eat the GoPro, with the animal trying to gnaw on the device for a little while. The footage is both cute and funny at the same time. It’s surprising that the abandoned GoPro not only survived the snow, but also the bear who was looking for its next snack. Check the footage above to see more of the bear’s shenanigans with technology!

A pair of limited-edition sunglasses is now for sale for a whopping $495. What’s special about this eyewear? Well, clothing brand and material science company Pangaia created a pair of sunglasses that is made from carbon dioxide. 

With the help of Twelve, a startup that turns greenhouse gas emissions into the chemical building blocks for new materials, Pangaia used their technology to create polycarbonate lenses. The company used Twelve’s “CO2Made” chemicals instead of fossil fuels. The sunglasses are luxurious, elegant, and lightweight. These design choices were implemented to show how valuable and transformative the eyewear is. 

Image credit: Pangaia

A group of graffiti artists banded together to turn Chicago Skyway’s Southern viaducts into wonderful artworks. The dirty, rusted support columns that feature pockmarked walls and glass-strewn sidewalks are now colorful walls filled with different graffiti art. 

The Meeting of Styles, a traveling, international gathering of graffiti artists along with other artists from Colorado, Texas, and California took up the challenge of painting different murals in Chicago Skyway. Even though the artists involved in the project produced various art pieces, a similar style has emerged from the multiple works. According to Krase, one of the painters, “it’s just a matter of coincidence. We didn’t plan that. It’s just our own styles happen to be cohesive.”

Image credit: Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago

A team of music historians, musicologists, composers, and computer scientists worked together to finish Beethoven’s unfinished 10th symphony. The said symphony has been puzzled over by Beethoven fans and musicologists. 

When Ludwig von Beethoven died in 1827, he only left some musical sketches of the unfinished piece. He was unable to finish the work due to deteriorating health. The team used artificial intelligence to teach a machine both Beethoven’s entire body of work and his creative process in order to reconstruct and finish the musician’s 10th symphony. 

To learn more about the process of reconstructing and finishing Beethoven’s unfinished musical piece, check the full piece here. 

Image credit: Circe Denyer / CC 1.0 Universal

Vintage Halloween pictures are often quite unsettling, because the costumes are creepily unprofessional and the lack of color makes them even creepier. It's as if these clowns wanted to inspire laughter, but ended up terrifying the crap out of us. But this isn't a vintage picture.  

Photographer Tara Mapes does beautiful full color portraits, but her heart is in the creepy side of the art. Every fall she stages a photo shoot for halloween to bring out the horrors associated with the holiday. Check out last year's portrait gallery, and a photo shoot at an abandoned asylum.

This year, Mapes went to the cornfield and brought some clowns. What could be more terrifying than that? Oh, you'll find out, when you check out the rest of the gallery for Halloween 2021.

If you want to run a railway, you've got to train people to control the tracks, so that trains can get where they need to go without crashing into each other, or snarling up traffic for hours at a time. In Germany, these signal operators are trained at the Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld in Darmstadt. The facility has a model train that may not be the biggest or prettiest in the world, but it is probably the most accurate, because it is used to teach rail traffic control.

However, not every train station in Germany uses the same controls. The Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld model train can be controlled by mechanical switches, which can be a hundred years old, or by electronic switching from the mid-20th century, or by computerized systems that only the wealthier cities have. If you want to be a railway signal operator in Germany, you'll have to learn all the systems. Tom Scott shows us how it's done.

The guy who goes by Backyard Racing has a large back yard and plenty of time on his hands. He spent four months and $9,000 building an enormous Hot Wheels track. Why? So he could strap a camera to some wheels and share a POV video with us! We soar through every corner of the property, including a leap through the air, a couple of underwater sequences, and loop-the-loops.

The effect of watching this is akin to going on a roller coaster ride without waiting in line or tossing your cookies. Keep your eyes on the tracks going around the turns and you'll know what I mean.

It's photography award seasons, so there are a LOT of fantastic images from various photography competitions that you shouldn't miss.

We've compiled the winners and shortlisted entries of many of these photography competitions across the new Picto sites - from funny animals of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards to the breathtaking aerial shots of the Drone Photo Awards to the majestic celestial objects galaxies away in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Award.

Above is "Time for School" by Chee Kee Teo, featuring an otter momma taking a baby otter back and fro for a swimming lesson - view more finalists of the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

More beautiful, interesting, and intriguing images of 2021 photo competitions below:

"The Golden Ring" by Shuchang Dong - view more Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021.

"Pink-Footed Geese Meeting the Winter" by Terje Kolaas - view more Drone Photo Awards 2021

"Der Clan kuschelt" ("The clan cuddles") by Josef Schwarz - view more CEWE Photo Awards 2021

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A green turtle, surrounded by glass fish, Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia by Aimee Jan - view more 2021 Ocean Photography Awards

"Blocked" by Alejandro Prieto - view more Bird Photographer of the Year 2021

"The Great Swim" by Buddhilini de Soyzaj - view more 2021 Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Bright, saturated flowers are the central point of Sophia Ahamed’s new series. The clusters of flowers in vibrant shades of red and pink are behind the expanses of cloudy, blue-ish violet skies. The striking difference between the vibrant flowers and the subdued, faded background is designed to skew perceptions of fiction and reality. Ahamed further explains her work to Colossal. “We associate color with how we perceive the world around us, memories, and emotion,” she says, “Often at times, these elements can act as well as a gentle escape into something more soothing.”

See more of her work here! 

Image credit: Sophia Ahamed