Remember the first time you heard one of your favorite rock songs converted to elevator music by Muzak? You might feel the same way when you hear "Bodies" by Drowning Pool converted to a kid's sing-along. But this isn't being played in kindergartens across the country- it's the latest abomination from Dustin Ballard, the insane genius behind the YouTube account There I Ruined It. -via Laughing Squid 

See also: Animals Sing Drowning Pool

Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) presents a seriously true crime story. Some of the details are a little distracting. In all honesty, you have to feel for the writers who must create pseudonyms for police procedurals that run for twenty years or more- it must be hard to come up with names that don't either repeat or sound completely ridiculous. Beckett-King revealed that his own alias is an anagram: "King Abelard Caketits."

Good news: I have gathered a bunch of photos of naval ship cats in tiny hammocks. Here are sailors of the HMS Hermione in 1941 surrounding their sleeping cat, Convoy. pic.twitter.com/X1iAaezxk5

— Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) July 2, 2021

Ever since boats became big enough to carry people and their food supplies, there have been cats aboard, mainly to control rodents, but also to boost morale during long voyages. When a crew get attached to a cat, they want to treat their mascot right. During World War II, that meant they should have a hammock to sleep in, just like the sailors. Molly Hodgdon presents a collection of images from that era of ship's cats in their custom-made hammocks. There's no word on whether the cats had to sleep in shifts like the sailors. We can assume they were treated much better than that. See nine such pampered ship's cats at Twitter. -via Everlasting Blort

Bonus: Hodgdon also has a thread of old paintings featuring people spoon-feeding cats.

When you think about alcoholic drinks named after a person, you probably first think of Tom Collins. While that origin story is interesting, Tom Collins wasn't a real person. But plenty of whiskeys, wines, and cocktails took their names from real people, and the stories may surprise you.

Many bartenders argue mixology is a science, and in the case of the Dubonnet, a French aperitif, they’d be right. It's said that chemist Joseph Dubonnet was looking for a palatable way to deliver doses of quinine (found in the cinchona tree) to French Foreign Legionnaires in North Africa in order to fight malaria. But writing in the book Just the Tonic, authors Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt speculate that it’s more likely that he was simply in search for a medicinal tonic in general, not specifically anti-malarial. Either way, in 1846 he came up with the perfect concoction: a blend of fortified wine, herbs, spices, and just the right amount of quinine.

Read the stories of six other alcoholic drinks and the real people behind them at Mental Floss.

The remains of a young man who died in Latvia 5,000 years ago was unearthed in 1875. Scientists have revisited this specimen, called RV 2039, and a few others from the same archaeological dig in order to sequence their genes more than 140 years later, and found quite a surprise among the bacteria that remained in his teeth. It was a very old strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that caused the plague we call Black Death.  

While three of the individuals were clear of disease, they found traces of Y. pestis in the RV 2039 specimen, who was a 20 to 30-year-old man.

The researchers reconstructed the bacterium's genome and compared it to 41 ancient and modern Y. pestis strains.

They found the man had been infected with a strain that was part of a lineage that first emerged around 7,000 years ago, making it the oldest-known strain of Y. pestis.

The ancient strain of Y. pests was not carried by fleas, and wasn't particularly deadly or contagious. But it may well have killed RV 2039, and now it gives scientists a step in the disease's evolution. Read about the discovery and what it means at ABC Science. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Dominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin)

Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, which was released in 2002, includes a scene in which Merry and Pippin, who are Hobbits, meet the Ents. In a recent television interview, actor Billy Boyd, who played Pippin, revealed that an early version of the script included both Hobbits getting naked. Screen Rant reports:

Here’s the thing. There was almost nudity in the movies,” said Boyd. “[Screenwriter] Philippa Boyens…she wrote a scene, because we’d been doing some kind of gags and winding people up…[and] she said, ‘Oh, it’s a new scene we’re filming next week, with the Ents. When Merry and Pippin are up Treebeard, he gets afraid and shakes his branches, which makes you guys fall, and as you hit all the branches on the way down, by the time you hit the ground, you’re naked. And Merry turns to Pippin and says, ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ And Pippin says, ‘Hold me, Merry.’

Emphasis added. This certainly would have spiced up the movie.

Strictly speaking, I think that it was a nude scene. The Ents weren't wearing clothes, were they?

-via Dave Barry | Image: New Line Cinema

This is the GyroJogger. The first hands free way to watch your shows while on a run. pic.twitter.com/6v2kvIJaZT

— Unnecessary Inventions (@mattyxb) July 1, 2021

Matt Benedetto, the genius behind Unnecessary Inventions, calls his new device the GyroJogger. This 3D printed head-mounted bracket solves the challenge of watching videos while running. The heads-up display provides a gyroscopically-mounted holder for a cellphone while ensuring that the user is still looking up and forwards.

Beaches in South California might look beautiful at first glance, but a dull landscape full of mud covers the  continental shelf a few miles beyond these beaches. The culprits behind the wasteland are cows, according to paleontologist Susan Kidwell. Kidwell and fellow researcher Adam Tomašových stumbled on a lost ecosystem that is absent from the mud-coated shelf today:

Kidwell and Tomašových were perplexed by the stark difference between the shelf’s past and present ecosystem. In a 2017 study, they dated nearly 200 of the fossilized brachiopod shells to reconstruct the demise of these filter-feeders. They predicted this ancient ecosystem gradually declined over thousands of years as California’s sea levels fluctuated. However, the shells told a different story. The population of brachiopods had thrived on the shelf for some 4,000 years before suddenly crashing 150 years ago. “We were completely blown away when we got the results,” Kidwell says. “They survived into the present day only to disappear.”

Then the lightbulb went off for Kidwell. “The only thing it could have been was cows,” she says. According to her research, the arrival of livestock with Spanish missionaries in the 1770s represented the biggest change to Southern California’s coastal ecosystem prior to urbanization. Left to roam free, cattle and horse populations exploded like microbes across a petri dish. By the mid-19th century, the legions of livestock were compacting the soil as they overgrazed native vegetation. Coupled with a general lack of knowledge about soil conservation and Southern California’s semi-arid climate, where dry periods are punctuated by heavy rains that maximize runoff, the conditions led to what Kidwell calls a “perfect storm” for enormous amounts of sediment washing into the ocean.

Image credit:docentjoyce, CC BY 2.0/flickr

Meet the golden snub-nosed monkey, a now endangered species home to the mountainous forests of southwester China. Sadly, only 15,000 of the species remain. Thanks to deforestation and hunters taking their pelts for profits, their population has dwindled over the last 40 years. These monkeys exhibit unique characteristics:

Among primates, golden snub-nosed monkeys exhibit some of the most unique behavioral characteristics. They are known to make 18 varying kinds of vocalizations, from joy and amazement to warnings and alarm. And females have even been known to nurse the young of others.

Moreover, their endangerment threatens a delicate ecosystem — their diet and resulting seed dispersal revitalizes the very forests where they live.

Now, experts estimate only 8,000 to 15,000 remain in the wild. Learn more about these remarkable creatures.

Image credit: Flickr/su neko

White Motorcycle Concepts’ new WMC250EV (now that’s quite a mouthful) is now giving other speedy motorcycles a run for their money. The new hydraulically hub-steered electric motorcycle is claimed to be capable of more than 250 mph (402 km/h). The motorcycle has been specifically designed around Rob White, who has worked on numerous Formula One, Le Mans Prototype, V8 supercar and World Endurance Championship race teams over the last 25-odd years:

Going super fast ends up being much more about aerodynamics than horsepower; the air becomes a ferocious adversary as you move past two or three times highway speed. Motorcycles are aerodynamically ugly without big, streamlined fairings, chiefly because of the big, funny-shaped human on the back.

The WMC250EV has been specifically designed around its rider, none other than Rob White himself. The team laser-scanned White's leather-and-helmet-clad body in an extreme racing crouch, and designed the bike's bodywork such that it matches his personal contours almost to the millimeter.

It's also got a big freakin' hole in it. We've seen plenty of Venturi tunnels on high-end hypercars, but this is the first time we've seen something so extreme attempted on a motorcycle. The entire bike is designed around a cavernous carbon tunnel that punches a huge hole in the bike's frontal aerodynamic profile right where a headlight would normally sit.

WMC has tested this bike, Rob included, at the Horiba MIRA facility near Hinckley, and says the concept reduces drag by an enormous 69 percent compared against "the world leading motorcycle," with a drag coefficient of just 0.118. That's absolutely nuts. Even the mighty SSC Tuatara, currently the world's fastest production car at 282.9 mph (455.3 km/h), can only manage a drag coefficient of 0.279.

Image credit: White Motorcycle Concepts

Voice actor Jay Britton was heartbroken when he heard about the unofficial update to The Witcher 3. The game modder who released the said update, nikich340, apparently trained an AI algorithm to speak new lines of dialogue for the main character of the game (Geralt) and in the voice of his original voice actor, Doug Cockle.

“Yes, AI might be able to replace things but should it?” asked Britton on his tweet. “Replacing actors with AI is not only a legal minefield but an utterly souless choice.”

Some game studios are already embracing voice AI technology. At Obsidian, for instance, algorithmic dialogue doesn’t make the final cut. Instead, the studio uses it to listen to dialogue out loud before taking up an actor’s time, according to Input, not unlike how storyboarding helps set up visual shots.

But the decision to build out an entirely new game mod and use AI to churn out new lines in a real actor’s voice is a notable step further, and it will be interesting to see whether the practice makes its way into mainstream use.

Personally, I believe that there should always be some kind of human touch in this type of work. But what are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: lincerta/ Pixabay)

Located only about 130 light years away is the white dwarf star named ZTF J1901+1458. The star may be only slightly larger than the size of our Moon, but its mass is heavier than the Sun (about 1.35 times), making it the most massive white dwarf star ever discovered. And that’s not all. The said star also seems to be a very special case.

Its dense and mass place it right on the verge of the Chandrasekhar limit - the maximum mass a white dwarf can be before it becomes so unstable that it blows up in a spectacular supernova.

"We caught this very interesting object that wasn't quite massive enough to explode," said theoretical astrophysicist Ilaria Caiazzo of Caltech. "We are truly probing how massive a white dwarf can be."

Up to the Chandrasekhar limit, around 1.4 solar masses, something called electron degeneracy pressure keeps the white dwarf from collapsing further under its own gravity. At a certain pressure level, electrons are stripped from their atomic nuclei - and, because identical electrons can't occupy the same space, these electrons supply the outward pressure that keeps the star from collapsing.

More about this intriguing star over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Giuseppe Parisi)

The 1940s was a rough time for China. It is said that during that decade, over 30 million cases of malaria were reported every year in the country. A lot of people probably died during this time.

The 1950s saw a determined China, however. During these years, health authorities provided preventive antimalarial medicines for the people in order to prevent the spread of malaria, while those who caught the disease were given treatment. This was the start of China’s quest to eliminate malaria in their country.

By the end of 1990, the number of malaria cases in China had plummeted to 117 000, and deaths were reduced by 95%. With support from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, beginning in 2003, China stepped up training, staffing, laboratory equipment, medicines and mosquito control, an effort that led to a further reduction in cases; within 10 years, the number of cases had fallen to about 5000 annually.

In 2020, after reporting 4 consecutive years of zero indigenous cases, China applied for an official WHO certification of malaria elimination. Members of the independent Malaria Elimination Certification Panel travelled to China in May 2021 to verify the country’s malaria-free status as well as its programme to prevent re-establishment of the disease.

The World Health Organization has recently awarded China the malaria-free certification. After 70 years of blood, sweat, and tears, China has finally rid itself of malaria.

Find out more about this exciting news over at the World Health Organization.

(Image Credit: NIAID/ Wikimedia Commons)

Talk about giving your all for journalism! At a track meet in China, a student cameraman from Datong University ran alongside the 100-meter sprint to get the perfect video.

Despite holding the camera rig (which reportedly weighed over 8.8lbs/4kg), not being appropriately dressed for a sprint, and continually looking over his shoulder, the videographer was apparently able to keep pace with the runners, maintain the gap, and cross the finish line first.

You may think you've seen this happen before, as it was the point of a humorous old Powerade ad. -via Bits and Pieces

You don’t need to really know the context of this snippet from the end of the webseries Critical Role’s second campaign. Just watch as voice actor and the campaign’s current dungeon master, Matthew Mercer, scare the living shit out of his fellow DnD players with his voice. Before you claim that's an edit, it’s not, he actually performed it live. It’s just amazing that he did it without any post-processing help at all!