Disney's latest effort in the Disneyland ride genre is Jungle Cruise, still in some theaters and, of course, on Disney+. The film has made millions of dollars, but performed below expectations. It has yet to break even. This Honest Trailer explains why- the source material is thin, the plot is formulaic, and everything about Jungle Cruise is borrowed from other films that did it better. However, its two hours is filled with puns and dad jokes, which cements its connection with the theme park ride, so it works as a kids movie.
I know what you're thinking: it's one more job that robots are taking away from humans. But consider that this robot's job requires access to humans. So when the robopocalypse happens, it will be necessary to keep at least a few of us around to provide employment for the EMMA. This robot, developed by the Singaporean startup company AiTreat, can customize a massage to reflect the needs of each client. CNN reports:
Using sensors and 3D vision to measure muscle stiffness, EMMA (which stands for "Expert Manipulative Massage Automation") identifies pressure points and delivers massages to patients to help offer pain relief and relaxation.
AiTreat CEO Albert Zhang describes a future dominated by these robots:
With soft-touch treatment modules warmed to a temperature of 38 to 40 degrees Celsius (100 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit), patients lying on the table might not even notice the difference between EMMA and a real-life masseuse -- but Zhang doesn't want robots to replace masseuses. Instead, he says that they can help by taking away the back-breaking work massage therapists do every day, and enable them to "focus on the 10% highly skilled part," which can increase their productivity and income while reducing the cost for patients.
-via Dornob | Photo: AiTreat
This cabinet of mysterious origin, now housed in the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, is a miniature apothecary's workshop and collection of natural curiosities. It's a masterpiece of woodworking, as it contains perfectly fitted spaces and an almost countless number of drawers, many of them with secret openings. Scholars don't know who made it, but they do know that it was made for a wealthy physician who wanted a place to display scientific samples.
-via Messy Nessy Chic | Photo: Rijks Museum
Neatorama readers know plenty about Thomas Edison, but what do you know about Thomas Edison, Jr.? His life turned out completely different from his father's. As you might guess, the inventor, being a very busy man, did not have much time for his son, either in nurturing a relationship or in guiding him to follow his father's footsteps. And since the older Edison was a very famous man, Junior had the added burden of high expectations without the necessary training or talent.
To mask his sensitivity and deep insecurities, Thomas Jr. took a cue from his father and turned to bravado and self-aggrandizing, and also alcohol. In New York, he soaked up the attention of journalists and reporters and made them believe that he'd be the next best American inventor, even claiming to have fashioned a light bulb better than that of his dad. The man who simply did not have his father's brains (in science) soon got involved with shady enterprises selling all kinds of snake oil products because having a guy carrying the Edison name be the head of your company sure sounded like a good idea at the time. The Thomas A. Edison, Jr. Chemical Co. sold "Wizard Ink" tablets that not only capitalized on Thomas Senior's "Wizard" moniker but were also nothing more than a mediocre writing tool with questionable testing methods behind it.
But mediocre inventions were nothing new, not even back then, and few people beside Wizard Edison batted an eye over Junior's "just add some water" ink. It wasn't until the release of the Magno-Electric Vitalizer invention in 1904 that things really started turning bad for the young Edison. Jumping on the "Woah, electromagnetism!" bandwagon, his company claimed to have invented a machine that could cure everything from paralysis, kidney disease, deafness, and menstrual cramps. Heck, they even claimed that the device could literally make a person smarter.
Read about Thomas Edison, Jr. and how his business ventures turned out at Cracked.
The animated TV series Futurama only aired until 2013, but so many things that happened in it could be set in 2021. It only makes sense, because the show was set in the future and made jokes about how the world changed since the early 2000s. Yet many of those jokes were so precient that you might even believe it really was from the future. However, Futurama writers were just following bubbling trends to their ultimate, if ridiculous, conclusions. -via Digg
All we know about dinosaurs is what we can see in their fossils. And we haven't yet found a fossil showing dinosaurs having sex in the last moments of their lives. But they must have mated, since they reproduced. Still, it's difficult to imagine, what with those armored plates and horns and thagomizers and... well, it might have been like that old joke, "How do porcupines have sex? Very carefully!" Anyway, while scientists don't know much about dinosaur sex, they have figured out a few parts of it.
Thanks largely to the discovery of once-controversial feathered fossils from China in the 1990s, we now know that birds are the only living relative of dinosaurs -- specifically, therapods, part of the same family as T. rex and Velociraptor.
"You go back 20 or 30 years, and you still have scientists saying birds aren't dinosaurs, but now we have so much more evidence that they are. So you can look at the behavior of birds and work out how some of these dinosaurs behaved," Lomax said.
Case in point is a type of scratching that male ground-nesting birds do to signal they are strong and good nest builders. It's part of behavior called lekking, when males, typically in groups, competitively dance and perform other courtship rituals to attract the attention of females.
Dinosaurs engaged in similar mating behavior, according to fossilized "scrapes" left behind in 100 million-year-old rocks in the prehistoric Dakota Sandstone of western Colorado. One site revealed more than 60 distinct scrapes in a single area of up to 164 feet (50 meters) long and 49 feet (15 meters) wide.
People have been using farts to tell jokes, insult others, play one-upmanship, and entertain crowds for as long as there have been people. Neatorama has built a reputation for fart coverage, so a list of the world's most memorable farts is catnip to us! These farts are presented in chronological order, which gives us a kind of history of flatulence, but there are more modern stories because the internet operates without the kind of filter our mothers tried to instill in us. But fart humor goes way back. One butt bomb started a war!
In Egypt in 570 BCE, a fart changed everything. King Apries had angered his people and was worried about a mutiny, sending one of his best generals, Amasis, to calm things down. However, the mutineers decided Amasis would be king instead, and he was into it. When Apries sent a messenger to bring Amasis back, Amasis farted and instructed the messenger to take that back to the king. This led to a battle, a defeat, and a new farting bottom on the throne.
The list of 20 memorable farts at Mental Floss actually has more than 20 fart stories, with links in case you don't believe them.
The Takeout takes Halloween candy very seriously, so they've compiled a seven-week deep dive into the top Halloween treats. Each week, a different facet of the top ten candies will be ranked and explained, and the data will lead to the ultimate ranking before Halloween, so that you can purchase the very best candies for trick-or-treaters. Or yourself. America's top ten most popular Halloween candies are:
Skittles
Reese’s Cups
Starburst
M&Ms
Hershey’s Miniatures (Hershey, Mr. Goodbar, Krackel)
Twix
Snickers
Sour Patch Kids
Tootsie Pops
Jolly Ranchers
In week one, they ranked the candies by their wrappers, which, you must admit, are part of the experience. In week two, they ranked them by the nostalgia factor. Check back on Friday for the third ranking. Of course, we all know who will win in the overall competition: Reece's Cups. There can be no doubt.
Now this is a surprise! Pottery, glass, and nails were discovered by archaeologists at the site of an inn and tavern in Florence, Alabama. The team from the University of Alabama’s Office of Archaeological Research excavated the site, now called Pope’s Tavern Museum, and unearthed artifacts dated to the 1830s, and some are even estimated to predate Alabama’s admission as an official state in 1819:
During the Civil War, Union and Confederate forces occupied Florence at different times. Both sides used Pope’s Tavern as a hospital and command center, notes Florence-Lauderdale Tourism on its website.
Today, the museum houses a number of Civil War artifacts, including a rare Kennedy long rifle and a Confederate colonel’s uniform. Staff are currently preparing for an exhibition exploring slavery and cotton in the Florence area. Among the topics set to be covered is the role enslaved workers played in constructing some of the area’s significant buildings, including Wesleyan Hall at what’s now the University of North Alabama.
Excavations at the site began with measurement of the yard in May. Then, technicians scanned the ground for anomalies and used the data to determine where to dig test pits. In addition to the pottery and other small items, archaeologists found the remains of a brick structure that may have been a hearth, privy or outbuilding, reports the Associated Press (AP). Murphy says they’re conducting a microscopic analysis of the building materials.
Image credit: Jimmy Wayne via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
That’s nice. In order to keep troop counts a secret from enemies, ancient Chinese generals employed a mathematical technique that is very much alive in today’s modern mathematics. The ‘math trick’ involved the generals dividing their troops into different sections and rows until they had enough information to determine the total number of their soldiers without explicitly counting. In modern terms, this trick is now known as the Chinese remainder theorem:
The theorem allows you to find an unknown number if you know its remainders when it’s divided by certain numbers that are “pairwise coprime,” meaning they do not have any prime factors in common. Sun Tzu never proved this formally, but later the Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata developed a process for solving any given instance of the theorem.
“The Chinese remainder theorem gives you an actual recipe for making a number,”said Daniel Litt of the University of Georgia.
To learn more about the theorem, check Quanta Magazine’s full piece here!
Image credit: wikimedia commons
The famous tourist destination and architectural marvel has a twin, and it’s not in Rome! The Amphitheater of El Jem is the largest and most well-preserved Roman structure in Africa. Located in the modern-day city of El Djem, Tunisia, the structure was designed to seat 35,000 people. The massive theater was modeled after the Roman Colosseum, as Open Culture details:
Although the small city of El Jem hardly features on tours of the classical past, it was, in the time of the Amphitheater’s construction, a prominent site of struggle for control over the Empire. The year 238 “was particularly tumultuous,” Atlas Obscura explains, due to a “revolt by the population of Thysdrus (El Jem), who opposed the enormous taxation amounts being levied by the Emperor Maximinus’s local procurator.” A riot of 50,000 people led to the ascension of Gordian I, who ruled for 21 days during the “Year of the Six Emperors,” when “in just one year, six different people were proclaimed Emperors of Rome.”
From such fraught beginnings, the massive stone structure of the El Jem Amphitheater went on to serve as a fortress during invasions of Vandals and Arabs in the 5th-7th centuries. A thousand years after the Islamic conquest, El Jem became a fortress during the Revolutions of Tunis. Later centuries saw the amphitheater used for saltpetre manufacture, grain storage, and market stalls.
Image credit: wikimedia commons
You’ve heard of transparent wood, now get ready for transparent solar panels! Engineers from the University of Michigan and other institutions developed a solar panel that has an estimated lifespan of 30 years! In addition to the device’s long life, it’s also transparent and highly efficient. According to the researchers, the solar panel could be used to create entire spaces by itself:
Currently, the most efficient solar panels are made from silicon, but the material isn’t transparent. Two types of materials are used in solar cells known as “non-fullerene acceptors” and “fullerene acceptors.” The former is more robust but less efficient than the latter.
A typical solar cell created using non-fullerene acceptors can achieve an efficiency of 18 percent, near that of a silicon cell. However, they don’t last as long. In experiments, researchers on the project showed that without using methods to protect the material in the panel that converts sunlight to electricity, efficiency declined to less than 40 percent of the initial value within 12 weeks when exposed to the sun.
Engineers studied the degradation in the unprotected solar cell and discovered where they could improve the design. The improvements included blocking UV light by adding a zinc oxide layer to the sun-facing side of the glass. They also integrated a thinner zinc oxide layer adjacent to the region of the cell that absorbs light but also had to add a layer of material called IC-SAM made from carbon to prevent the zinc oxide from breaking down the light absorber. Finally, another layer was added consisting of a fullerene shaped like a soccer ball to protect the light absorber.
Image credit: Slash Gear
Oumuamua has been the subject of debate for astronomers for years. The cigar-shaped celestial object showed up in our sky in 2017, and was classified as an asteroid. However, some of its inexplicable properties are a source of discourse concerning its true classification. Some consider it to be an alien craft of some sort, while some hold ground that the Oumuamua is an asteroid:
Now, there's a new chapter in the saga of this mysterious 650-foot-long tube-shaped object. Earlier this year, researchers at Arizona State University published a new study claiming to "resolve" the mystery surrounding 'Oumuamua (pronounced "oh moo ah moo ah").
Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the researchers stated in a pair of papers that 'Oumuamua was likely a nitrogen ice ball, perhaps from a planet like Pluto yet in another solar system — not an artificially made light-sail spacecraft, comet, or interstellar ball of dust, as some researchers have previously suggested. Nitrogen, the primary component of Earth's atmosphere, occurs primarily as a gas on our home planet; yet in very cold conditions, it can freeze and become solid or liquid. The frigid surface of Pluto, for instance, contains a substantial amount of nitrogen ice.
'Oumuamua's characteristics, the Arizona State University researchers argued, suggested the strange object bore similarities to the surface of Pluto.
"This research is exciting in that we've probably resolved the mystery of what 'Oumuamua is and we can reasonably identify it as a chunk of an 'exo-Pluto,' a Pluto-like planet in another solar system," said Steven Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and an author of the new study, in March 2021. "Until now, we've had no way to know if other solar systems have Pluto-like planets, but now we have seen a chunk of one pass by Earth."
Image credit: Getty Images/Aunt_Spray
Whether a Jeopardy! question is difficult or not all depends on whether you know the answer. If you know a bit of trivia that the three contestants on TV at the time don't know, that makes you a champion, right? Esquire gives us a second chance to outdo those contestants.
Below, we’ve rounded up 20 Jeopardy questions that fall in a rare and ignominious category called “triple stumpers”—a.k.a., legendarily hard questions. A triple stumper is a clue for which no correct response is given by any player. That can mean a few things: either some or all of the players buzz in incorrectly, or no one buzzes in at all.
Be warned that each answer is printed right below the question, so you should control your scrolling to avoid spoilers. I got about half of them, but whether I would be faster than the next contestant is unlikely. See all 20 questions here, and don't miss the video in which three intellectual contestants prove they know nothing about football. -via Digg
Mike Judge made a pilot for a show called Monsignor Martinez (Las Dias Y Los Noches de Monsignor Martinez) and it's only 20 years later that we get to see it. Well, at least the live-action version. The animated version is a recurring bit in the show King of the Hill. Monsignor Martinez is a Catholic priest who kills drug smugglers. Yeah, it's an action series. I would watch this religiously! -via reddit
