Aquarium enthusiast Carly Thompson created a Star Wars-inspired tank using an AT-AT (All Terrain Armored Transport) aquarium decoration gifted to her by her brother. Thompson, in a stroke of creativity, designed the tank to envision a reality where the AT-AT was broken and abandoned, where its remains are sunk below the water: 

[...]“I knew that I wanted it to look as natural as possible,” Thompson tells My Modern Met. “I recalled the map Kashyyk in the video game Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order. That and the Moon of Endor from the Star Wars movies were my inspiration for this tank.”

It took Thompson around three days to design and put together the fish tank. She used a common aquarium wood called cholla to create the tall, burly tree trunks. She then used java moss and a three-leaf seed to create the mossy jungle appearance. Once the aquarium was finished, all that was left to do was decide on which fish will live inside the underwater world.

“The marine life that I chose to put into this tank was a very difficult decision,” Thompson reveals. “I wanted neon tetras because I felt the bright blue and red colors would not only represent a lightsaber appearance, but they would also give a good pop of color.” However, Thompson ended up falling in love with ember tetras and decided to put them in the tank instead. “Their fiery red color and the overall natural behavior of these fish are what made me want them. I purchased five of them at my local pet store and stocked my tank,” she says. “These fish were so curious and active in the tank.”

Image credit: Carly Thompson 

A couple of months ago, student pilot Brian Parsley did his solo cross country flight, a required step in getting his license. About 12 miles short of his destination, his engine sputtered out. What to do? While he is obviously stressed, he did not panic and just did what had to be done. Parsley managed an emergency landing on a stretch of grass. He explained more of what happened in a further video.   -via Digg

The Print Shop Club will transport you back to 1984, when you first discovered what marvelous things you can do with a computer! Broderbund's program called The Print Shop allowed us to design signs, banners, and even our own greeting cards on our Apple II home computers, and that was quite exciting. Except this version doesn't feed our banners to our dot-matrix printer loaded with fanfold paper, but converts our creations to .pdfs for sharing ...or even printing, if you choose to do so.

Once you try it out, you'll also remember what a pain that all was, and realize that the value of this throwback, while nostalgic, is also to show our kids what we went through to become the computer whizzes that we are today. Melody and April Ayres-Griffiths created this application to pay tribute to David Balsam and Martin Kahn, who created The Print Shop and exposed a generation of children (and adults) to the wonders of computing. -via Metafilter

This beautifully-animated short by Michael Dockery is set in an apocalyptic future in which humans are gone, but the tech we left behind is still being used... by the tech we left behind. You may read into it what you want. I recommend watching it in a larger format.  -via Nag on the Lake

That's what Entrepreneur magazine is calling them, although it's unclear if the designers of the athletes' beds in Tokyo have that as a goal. More precisely, the cardboard beds not designed to withstand the weight of two people, especially two people in motion:

The organizers have stated that they are perfectly designed to support the weight of a single person, but that they cannot or should not be jumped on, as they can break.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: IOC Media

My level 6 cleric has all of the right equipment for the job, but I doubt my spells will work as well. There are some limitations to making Dungeons & Dragons real. Nonetheless, with the help of a friend, Tony Ho Tran went camping as Zaddy, his halfling bard character. Tran's first task was to acquire all of the items on Zaddy's inventory:

In his Explorer’s Pack, according to the D&D player’s manual, Zaddy carries the following:

A backpack

A bedroll

A mess kit

A tinderbox

Ten torches

Ten days’ worth of rations

A waterskin

50 feet of hempen rope

I already had some of these things: a backpack, a bedroll, and a wineskin I got as a souvenir from a trip to Spain. Through the magic of fate (read: Facebook Marketplace), I acquired a Boy Scouts mess kit, a survival tinderbox, and 50 feet of cotton rope. I also created ten torches by combining free paint stirrers from Home Depot with a few ripped-up T-shirts.

Once Tran and his friend and companion, Tanner, set up a crude survival shelter, they walked about the campground seeking out quests:

Once finished, I donned my equipment and we set out. In D&D, players accept quests given by NPCs (non-playable characters). I figured we could do the same by soliciting quests from strangers in the park.

To our surprise, folks didn’t immediately call the cops on us when we approached. In fact, we ended up completing quests and getting rewards like real D&D characters. Our quest-givers included:

A group of students from the University of Iowa. Their quest: for us to drink a shooter of Fireball. Their reward: two hard seltzers.

A lovely older couple traveling around the Midwest. Their quest: for me to play them a song on the ukulele. Their reward: a handful of Dove dark chocolates.

A young couple with excitable dogs. Their quest: for me to play them a song on my ukulele (I was afraid everyone else would want this, too, but luckily they didn’t). Their reward: a can of light beer.

It was an experience of a lifetime, but, unfortunately, did not result in enough experience points to result in leveling up.

-via Super Punch

Imagine trying to figure out a calendar from scratch, in which one could keep track of the days of the year, year after year. It's such a difficult project that what really happened was that every few hundred years we figured out what the problems with the existing calendar were and started over again to correct them. Today we use the Gregorian calendar, which takes into account that a year is 365.25 days and 11.5 minutes long. Before that, there was the Julian calendar, which didn't account for those 11.5 minutes, and before that it was the Roman calendar that didn't have much consistency from year to year at all.   

The Julian Calendar itself was created by Julius Caesar in 46 BC in order to fix the inherent errors of a lunisolar calendar, which the Roman calendar was. The Roman calendar consisted of 12 months for a total of 355 days, which is approximately 10 days shorter than the solar year. In order to catch up with the sun, the Roman calendar added either 22 or 23 days to every alternate year, the same way we add leap days every four years. As a result, Roman years alternated between 355, 377 and 378 days.

To make matter worse, the leap days (also known as the intercalary period) were not added in a regular and systematic manner, but was determined by the Pontifex maximus, the high priest of the College of Pontiffs. Often the Pontifex would abuse his power and lengthen a year when his political allies was in office, and reduce it when his opponents were in power. The net effect of this was that the average Roman citizen often did not have a clue what date the current day was.

The Julian calendar offered some consistency, but it wasn't an easy transition. Read about the shenanigans involved with changing a calendar at Amusing Planet.

The food manufacturing company Kraft has partnered with ice-cream maker Van Leeuwen, and the partnership of the two has produced a rather interesting ice cream flavor: macaroni and cheese. I know that cheese ice cream exists, but mac and cheese ice cream is unheard of.

The ice cream was made available on July 14th at Leeuwen’s website, as well as in scoop shops in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston. The ice cream will be sold until supplies run out.

I wonder what the ice cream will taste like.

(Image Credit: Van Leeuwen/ Technabob)

Shark films like Jaws have changed our perceptions about the open waters and sharks. Today, we see sharks as dangerous creatures that we should be fearful of, thanks to the over 100 shark films that portrayed them as such. This irrational fear that comes from these films have affected shark conservation efforts negatively.

In a world-first study, conservation psychology researchers, UniSA's Dr Briana Le Busque and Associate Professor Carla Litchfield have evaluated how sharks are portrayed in movies, finding that 96 per cent of shark films are overtly portraying sharks as a threat to humans.

Dr Le Busque says sensationalised depictions of sharks in popular media can unfairly influence how people perceive sharks and harm conservation efforts.

[...]

"Sharks are at much greater risk of harm from humans, than humans from sharks, with global shark populations in rapid decline, and many species at risk of extinction.

"Exacerbating a fear of sharks that's disproportionate to their actual threat, damages conservation efforts, often influencing people to support potentially harmful mitigation strategies.

Le Busque states that the research is one “important step” in debunking shark myths.

(Image Credit: PIRO4D/ Pixabay)

A person’s body begins sending “death signals” after the person suffers from a heart attack. These said signals cause heart cells to die, a phenomenon that makes heart disease the leading cause of death in the world. For decades, scientists have been attempting to prevent these death signals from being communicated. Scientists have found an answer, and they have found it in the unlikeliest of places — venom from a funnel-web spider, one of the deadliest species in the world.

So far the experimental medicine has only been lab-tested.

[...]

The team has successfully used a protein from spider venom on beating human heart cells that were exposed to heart-attack stresses.

"The Hi1a protein from spider venom blocks acid-sensing ion channels in the heart, so the death message is blocked, cell death is reduced, and we see improved heart cell survival,"...

What a breakthrough!

(Image Credit: Tirin/ Wikimedia Commons)

Twitter user Tricky-D had a stepson who brought a girl inside his room the night before. The stepdad hadn’t seen the girl yet, but he knew that it was a girl because of the noises that came out from his stepson’s room. The problem is: how will his stepson smuggle his overnight guest out of his room and out of the house, now that the whole family is awake? Tricky-D watched the whole thing unfold in front of his eyes, while giving occasional updates to his followers on Twitter.

When some of his followers suggested that he might intervene and help Stepson with his escape, Tricky-D had this to say:

“I see all ya comments about help the kid out… He’s a 18yo grown ass man. We live and die by our choices”

Was the stepson able to smuggle his girl out of the house without anyone knowing (except his stepdad, of course)? Find out what happened over at Awkward.

(Image Credit: Tricky-D/ Awkward)

Antibodies and white blood cells usually take the stage when the talks are about bacterial invasions inside the body. However, they are not the only players that help in combating bacteria. John MacMicking, an immunologist, says that “all cells are endowed with some ability to combat infection.” This cell in particular has an interesting ability: it produces soap-like substance that helps dissolve bacteria.

In humans, these run-of-the-mill cellular defenses have often been overlooked, MacMicking says, even though they are part of “an ancient and primordial defense system” and could inform the development of treatments for new infections. 

Often, nonimmune cells rely on a warning from their professional counterparts to combat infections. Upon detecting outsiders, specialized immune cells release an alarm signal called interferon gamma. That signal rouses other cells, including epithelial cells that line the throat and intestines and are often targeted by pathogens, to action.

More about this over at Science News.

(Image Credit: NIAID/ Wikimedia Commons)

In one way, this is the story of a highly respected physician, Dr. Jim Lee, who treated AIDS patients in the early '80s when other doctors wanted nothing to do with the "gay epidemic." He was a star among his patients, and became well-known in Los Angeles. In another way, this is the story of a unique drug. In 1996, Serostim was approved to treat the wasting away that plagued AIDS patients towards the end of their lives, at a cost of $75,000 a year, although its maker Serono Labs eventually lowered the price somewhat. Serostim is essentially human growth hormone (HGH), which is very popular among body builders and people who believe it may extend their lives, but cannot be prescribed for those conditions.

But for Serono, the timing of the drug’s introduction was inauspicious. Effective combinations of antiretroviral drugs designed to combat AIDS had just been approved, leading to massive decreases in deaths from the virus. Serostim’s “use as an HIV drug was limited by the fact that wasting is a really late-stage manifestation of AIDS,” says Ng, the immunologist. Advances in other therapies soon meant that the symptom Serostim was meant to treat rarely presented.

In response, Serono launched a marketing blitz. In 1997, it trained sales representatives to broadly “redefine AIDS wasting,” developing an unapproved device to measure “body cell mass” so that more HIV patients would qualify for Serostim. In 2001, federal prosecutors filed a suit against Serono on charges of filing false claims, or illegally promoting the sale of a medication. The firm pled guilty to charges related to bringing a group of American doctors on an all-expenses-paid trip to Cannes, France, in exchange for prescribing Serostim. The suit was settled in April 2005; Serono was ordered to pay more than $700 million. Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in Boston, told The New York Times that 85 percent of all Serostim prescriptions were unnecessary.

There were still ways to sell Serostim, even to those who wanted it for off-label purposes, which involved cash-strapped AIDS patients, insurance companies, and Dr. Jim Lee. You can read (or listen to) that story at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting

Trends in television were easier to define when there were only three networks. If a show became a hit, suddenly there were other shows just like it, and a simple formula could be run into the ground before the audience demanded something different. In comedy, the 1950s were the age of the suburban nuclear family sitcom. The '70s had more workplace comedies and families dealing with modern issues. In between, TV comedy in the 1960s was dominated by hillbillies, from The Andy Griffith Show to The Beverly Hillbillies to Hee Haw. Comedies that poked fun at a fictional rural South were a total escape from the real world.

When the newscasts were full of footage from My Lai and Saigon, from Selma and Birmingham, Americans looked for laughs in Hooterville. They sought them in Cornfield County, Pixley, and Mayberry. These were fictional rural places full of carefree, unencumbered country folks. There was no racial strife in these burgs because everyone was white. In these worlds, the sheriff didn’t carry a gun, a man could join the Marines and never talk about the war in Vietnam, and nobody even thought about the War on Poverty.

“Rural America was like true America: simpler, without all the problems of big city life, technology, the Russians, and that kind of stuff,” says TV historian and former executive Tim Brooks.

CBS did not invent the idea of using the South as a foil for modern life, but the shows it aired streamlined the concept for television. The combination of old stereotypes and mass media created an alternative "South" that combined all of rural America into a single land of silliness, simplicity, and safety. And it put an exaggerated idea of the white working class at the center of everything.

"Hillbilly TV" flourished until it was suddenly purged in 1971. But it never really went away completely. Read about the rise and fall of rural comedy from the perspective of its producers at The Bitter Southerner. -via Metafilter

P.T. Barnum famously said, "There's a sucker born every minute." Or maybe he never said that. Or if he did, we don't know whether he came up with it himself or got it from someone else. There's a lot of things we don't know know for sure about Barnum, as he was in the business of making things up. So we don't know whether or not there is any truth in the tale of the cherry-colored cat.  

According to this tale, one day Barnum received a letter from a Connecticut farmer who claimed to possess a genuine cherry-colored cat. The farmer asked Barnum if he would be interested in purchasing the cat, explaining that his cat would beat any of the other odd critters Barnum had on display at his museum.

Barnum contacted the farmer and said he’d gladly purchase the cat for his museum if the cat were truly cherry-colored. The farm agreed to ship the cat to Barnum for $300 (other articles say Barnum paid $25, $50, or $200.)

A few days later a crate arrived at the museum. When Barnum opened it, he found a an ordinary-looking jet-black cat inside. In response to Barnum’s angry letter, the farmer responded with a note: Dear Mr. Barnum, did you never see a black cherry? We have loads of them born in Connecticut. There’s a sucker born every minute.”

The kicker is that, instead of getting upset, Barnum took this trick and ran with it. Read the rest of the story at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company