All hail the researchers who have spent time and effort in translating an 800-year-old passage from the legend of King Arthur. The manuscript, called ‘the Bristol Merlin,’ was fully translated into English. In addition, researchers also analyzed the handwriting and linguistic style of the manuscript. The passage is dated to between 1250 and 1275, and was penned in northern France: 

[...]Though about an English king, the Arthur myth was told and retold in different ways throughout France. The manuscript is not the first document to contain its particular story, which is called the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. Researchers believe the text was initially written around 1225, which means the Bristol Merlin was a fairly contemporary retelling of the story.

Laura Chuhan Campbell, a scholar in medieval literature with a specialty in Old French Merlin texts at Durham University, told Gizmodo that “the medieval Arthurian legends were a bit like the Marvel Universe, in that they constituted a coherent fictional world that had certain rules and a set of well-known characters who appeared and interacted with each other in multiple different stories … This fragment comes from the second volume, which documents the rise of Merlin as Arthur’s advisor, and Arthur’s turbulent early years as king.”

Image credit: Leah Tether

That’s just bonkers, man. The result of one of Banksy’s infamous art world pranks will now be resold at an auction for between £4 million and £6 million, which is more expensive than its initial sale at a Sotheby’s auction in 2018. The artwork, titled Girl With Balloon, self-destructed after it was sold for more than £1 million. After the artwork was shredded and renamed Love is in the Bin, the buyer still went ahead: 

Reflecting its newfound place in art history, estimates for Love is in the Bin have skyrocketed over the last three years, with the upcoming Sotheby’s sale expected to fetch between £4 million and £6 million. (In the past, Banksy has played down speculation that the auction house was in on it all along.)

Even without his trademark pranks, Banksy’s art has been steadily gaining value at auction, with his NHS-dedicated Game Changer image smashing estimates to bring in £14.4 million back in March. His profile has also risen worldwide, leading him to warn fans about a series of unauthorised shows, which have been criticised for containing replicas of his work.

Most recently, Banksy popped up in a series of British seaside towns, creating anonymous installations for his Great British Spraycation.

Image credit: Sotheby’s

This is definitely pleasing to watch. Neil Bromhall posts short, yet mesmerizing time lapses of plants growing and blooming over multiple days. One of the photographer’s latest uploads on his YouTube channel is a pair of one-minute time lapses showing a sunflower opening over ten days. Just like the other plants featured in his work, Bromhall grew his sunflower in a blackened, windowless studio with a grow light serving as artificial sunlight: 

“Plants require periods of day and night for photosynthesis and to stimulate the flowers and leaves to open,” the photographer tells PetaPixel. “I use heaters or coolers and humidifiers to control the studio condition for humidity and temperature. You basically want to recreate the growing conditions where the plants naturally thrive.”

Lighting-wise, Bromhall uses a studio flash to precisely control his exposure regardless of the time of day it is. The grow light grows the plants while the flash illuminates the photos.

“The grow light has a blind that moves over to blocks the grow light just before I take an exposure with the flash,” Bromhall says. “After the frame is taken the blind rolls back. The exposure interval, grow light with blind, and track or rotating head are controlled by a bespoke made control box.”

Bromhall does research into each of his subjects to understand the exact conditions each plant likes to grow in.

“If they are happy, there is a good chance they will grow,” he says.

Will modern marvels never cease? Trees are now next in line for replacing the glass in our windows! How is that possible, if wood cannot be as transparent as glass? Well, thanks to research done by Junyong Zhu from the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) and colleagues from the University of Maryland and University of Colorado, a transparent wood material has been developed: 

Their findings were published in the Journal of Advanced Functional Materials in their paper, “A Clear, Strong, and Thermally Insulated Transparent Wood for Energy Efficient Windows.”

While glass is the most common material used in window construction it comes with a costly economic and ecological price.

Heat easily transfers through glass, especially single pane, and amounts to higher energy bills when it escapes during cold weather and pours in when it’s warm. Glass production in construction also comes with a heavy carbon footprint. Manufacturing emissions are approximately 25,000 metric tons per year.

Transparent wood is created when wood from the fast-growing, low-density balsa tree is treated to a room temperature, oxidizing bath that bleaches it of nearly all visibility. The wood is then penetrated with a synthetic polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), creating a product that is virtually transparent.

Image credit: USDA Forest Service

(Nathan Olsen)

How do you know that the cantina that you're working in is a rough place? It's not that some guy gets his arm chopped off. It's that everyone treats it like a normal event and not a major crime.

It was stressful enough that even Doikk Na'ts, a Dorenian Beshniquel player in the Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, slips and calls his elegant instrument from a more civilized age a "space clarinet."

-via Super Punch

Janelle Shane works with artificial intelligence algorithms, and when she sees something weird or funny, she tells us about it on her blog AI Weirdness. For the third year in a row, she is challenging her readers to produce art for October, or as the algorithm calls it, "Botober." You can see art inspired by Shane's AI-generated prompts in previous years here. 

This year, five different algorithms have produced lists of art prompts that should inspire you to create something really strange in the categories of animals, Halloween, more Halloween, more animals, and landscapes. Check them all out, and when you've done your part, post your contributions to social media and tag them with #botober.

Here's something that will surely lift your spirits! Listen to "Ordinary Day" joyously performed by Alan Doyle and the Shallaway Youth Choir.

Ordinary Day is a song that reminds us about the power of positivity and the beauty of overcoming life's biggest obstacles. As we look for our new normal, we’re grateful for kids and youth and the example of resilience they continue to show us every day.

-via Nag on the Lake

What happens when the software Cyriak Harris uses to animate his disturbing ideas decides to crash? Well, he's not going to let that stop him! In this video, Cyriak uses meatspace tools to construct his own animation machine, complete with his signature style of movement and general weirdness.

A Canadian friend of mine learned Polish from her parents. She traveled to Ukraine and was surprised to find she could understand people speaking Russian. Another friend from New York said he could understand people in the Netherlands easier than he could people in Tennessee. And my daughter spent years learning French, but then picked up Spanish in about a month. Languages flow into each other, but sometimes they grow apart. So what really defines a language as distinct from a dialect? And how different must a dialect be before it is considered another language? The answer may surprise you, but when you think about it, you won't be surprised.

You forgot that the Dungeons & Dragons game starts in two hours and you're the gamemaster. Sure, you could just toss some goblins at the players, but if you're going to have a village encounter in the countryside or even make a map, you'll need some placenames. VillageBot is here to help.

There are at least 18,804 village names in England. VillageBot will spit them out to you in helpful lists like this one:

That will do in a pinch. Now you can focus on pretending to have a plot for your players to ignore.

-via Nag on the Lake

"Won't someone think of the children?" Apparently, when some people think of children, it's to protect them from the real world, even at an age when we should be preparing them for it. When a child has developed the skills to read general circulation books, there's really no controlling what they will read, and many parents are just glad they are reading at all. But time and again, people try to limit what students are exposed to in school libraries and reading lists. Books by Judy Blume have been a particular target over the years.

2. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

There's something about books depicting the real young adult experience that upsets people—which perhaps explains why so many Judy Blume books get challenged or banned. In the ‘90s, five Blume books were on the most frequently banned list: Forever, Blubber, Deenie, Tiger Eyes, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Published in the 1970s, Are You There God explores the challenges of growing into yourself as a young girl, and it's often challenged, mainly because it talks about puberty and teenage sexuality. In 1982, the Fond du Lac school district in Wisconsin challenged the novel for being “sexually offensive and amoral.” In fact, Blume even wrote about how she donated three copies to her children’s school, but “the male principal decided that the book was inappropriate because of the discussion of menstruation”—you know, something every teenage girl deals with. (Although it's arguably better than when Forever was banned for depicting “disobedience to parents.”)

The reasons for banning other books are even weirder, from the word "sweat" to a possible connection to other books by a completely different author. Read the stories of eleven of those books at Mental Floss.

Sometimes you see an opportunity to make a statement or a visual pun and you just can't help yourself, right? Well, we don't condone vandalism, but sometimes we can appreciate it. Even so, most of these images gleaned from the subreddit Mildly Vandalized are harmless. Some could even be called "street art" or "enhancements." Some just correct spelling or grammar on a sign that asking for it, and others are just captions added with a Post-it Note or something.    



See 37 such public "enhancements" that will make you smile at Buzzfeed.

We know the outlines of the story of television. In the early 20th century, great minds across the globe, like Scotsman John Logie Baird, German Paul Nipkow, and American Philo T. Farnsworth were trying to combine motion pictures and radio broadcasts, with varying success. Which technology was best had to be decided before anyone would invest in a vast infrastructure of broadcasting networks, content, and receivers, and then selling to idea to the public. These competing systems were put on hold for World War II, and then Farnsworth's electronic television system emerged victorious. But let's back up to 1939, when a British boy's magazine printed an article about "television." The British were proponents of John Logie Baird's mechanical television system, and the history the medium was still short. When no one had a receiver, they turned to "television theaters."

Northern holiday crowds at Blackpool and Morecambe in July, 1934, were the first to test the pleasures of real television theatres in which reproductions of events happening up to 20 miles away were projected on the screen. A slight last-minute hitch prevented Morecambe's Television Theatre opening on the day planned, so for a short while the Blackpool venture, located inconspicuously near the Central Pier, stood unchallenged as the only place in Britain where the public could enter a darkened room and see a televised moving picture on the screen.

The inventor of the apparatus used at Morecambe was Mr. F. Cockcroft Taylor.

Actors and actresses who were willing to permit themselves to be televised in 1934, had, in the studio, to make-up like cannibals in full war paint. First they had to paint their faces dead white, then thick blue lines were put down the sides of their noses to bring that part of the face out properly. Their eyelids had to be painted mauve, their lips blue, and their eyebrows were made enormously big and heavy, like George Robey's. The rest of their faces were left dead white.

By 1939, things had improved somewhat. Read a contemporary account of early television in Britain at Malcolm's Musings: Strange but True. -via Strange Company

See also: TV's Father: Philo T. Farnsworth and Nazi TV.

French navy officer Jérôme Chardon knew how dangerous it is to travel between New Zealand and Alaska. An individual who dares to do that has to face ferocious storms formed in the Pacific Ocean. And so he was surprised to hear on the radio a story of a bar-tailed godwit doing just that — migrating successfully between the two places — and being unscathed at the end of its 14,000-kilometer journey. “Can learning how these birds navigate help coastal communities to avoid disaster?” he thought to himself.

Last January, a team from France’s National Museum of Natural History decided to test Chardon’s idea, five years after he thought of it.

Researchers with the new Kivi Kuaka project, led by Frédéric Jiguet, an ornithologist at NMNH, equipped 56 birds of five species with cutting-edge animal tracking technology. The French navy ferried the team to remote atolls and islands in French Polynesia, where the scientists attached tags using ICARUS tracking technology. These tags transmit the birds’ locations to the International Space Station, which bounces the data back to scientists on Earth who can then follow the birds as they forage, migrate, and rest—all the while waiting to see how the birds respond to natural disasters.

The Kivi Kuaka project is focusing on birds’ ability to hear infrasound, the low-frequency sound inaudible to humans ­that the researchers believe is the most likely signal birds would use to sense storms and tsunamis. Infrasound has myriad sources, from lightning strikes and jet engines to the songlike vocalizations of rhinoceroses. Even the Earth itself generates a continuous infrasonic hum. Though rarely measured, it is known that tsunamis generate infrasound, too, and that these sound waves travel faster than the tsunami wave, offering a potential window to detect a tsunami before it hits.

If ever we do learn more about the birds’ ability to hear these sounds inaudible to humans, and how they respond to such sounds, then it would greatly help us indeed.

More about this over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: Frédéric Jiguet / MNHN-Kivi Kuaka)

2D Beat ‘Em Up games have become less popular. Over the years, the genre has been overshadowed by hack and slash games. But it seems that we’re going to see a rebirth of the beat em up genre. This new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, Shredder’s Revenge, is set to release some time next year, and it looks and feels like it came from the 90s, but much cleaner.

Check out the trailer!

(Image Credit: IGN via YouTube)