This terrifying structure is part of an irrigation system used in the Valais region of Switzerland since the 15th century. Some bisses are still in use, while others are designated as historic landmarks. It's a way to get water from the Alpine mountaintops to the dry valley farms that need it.   

Despite being surrounded by some of Switzerland's wettest mountains, the sun-scorched, glacier-carved region receives just 500mm of rainfall a year, presenting a unique engineering challenge for irrigation. Cue gravity-defying bisses, designed to divert glacial meltwater from mountain streams to parched pastures and vineyards at lower elevations. To this day, 200 of them totalling 1,800km in length supply water to 80% of the Valais' irrigated land.

Measuring between 0.5m to 2m in breadth, the most primitive of Valais bisses were hewn out of rock. Others, like the 500-year-old Bisse des Sarrasins in the district of Sierre in central Valais, were hollowed from tree trunks. But the true marvels of bisse engineering were the "hanging channels", designed to guide water from far-off glaciers around gorges and overhangs in the region's wildest corners.

Now imagine the labor and the danger involved in building these in the 15th century. Read about the Swiss bisses at BBC Travel.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Rilaak)

Yes, it's the ultimate dream job because it's all about nature's perfect food: the taco. Food & Wine magazine reports that the spice company McCormick is seeking applicants for its open position of Director of Taco Relations. It's fairly demanding and, sadly, requires more than just eating tacos:

In the role's official description, McCormick explains that applicants will be expected to work up to 20 hours a week for up to four months including attending virtual meetings and occasionally traveling to both the McCormick headquarters and "other taco locations in the U.S." Responsibilities include things like keeping tabs on taco trends by scouring social media and talking with chefs, developing content for McCormick's social channels, and consulting "on inspirational and approachable taco recipes incorporating McCormick's Taco Seasoning" by working with the McCormick Kitchens team.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: MaxPixel

I’ll leave the judging to you. Art, to some extent, is subjective. Julia Ducournau’s Titane won the Palme d’Or (the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize). The film follows a young woman who survives a car crash when she was a kid, and that instance changes her perspective on cars until adulthood. Then she gets impregnated by a car. Personally, watching the trailer lets me know this film is artsy, yes, but at this point I’m just confused. She was even lactating black oil at one point! Thankfully, I’m not the only one. Hell, even the most educated art critics are divided about the film.  

image screenshot: UniFrance / Julia Ducourneau

If only we could actually attempt this experiment, right? It’d be fun, I believe. Dr. James O’Donoghue created an animation showing how fast an object can fall on different planets. The planetary scientist demonstrated what would happen if an object fell on the Sun, Earth, Ceres, Jupiter, the Moon, and Pluto: 

The animation shows a ball dropping from 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) to the surface of each object, assuming no air resistance. You can compare, for example, that it takes 2.7 seconds for a ball to drop that distance on the Sun, while it takes 14.3 seconds Earth.

"This should give an idea for the pull you would feel on each object," O'Donoghue said.

But what about the pull of gravity on the big planets vs. Earth? Interestingly enough, it takes and 13.8 seconds for the ball to drop on Saturn, and 15 seconds on Uranus.

"It might be surprising to see large planets have a pull comparable to smaller ones at the surface," O'Donoghue explains on YouTube.

"For example Uranus pulls the ball down slower than at Earth! Why? Because the low average density of Uranus puts the surface far away from the majority of the mass. Similarly, Mars is nearly twice the mass of Mercury, but you can see the surface gravity is actually the same… this indicates that Mercury is much denser than Mars."

Ceres comes in at the pokiest place to play ball, with a ball dropping 1 km (0.6 miles) in 84.3 seconds.

Local origami artist Joseph Wu has been commissioned to decorate different projects with his paper creations. From installations and advertisement campaigns, Wu is also known on the international origami scene. The Vancouver-based artist initially made origami when he was three years old, and continued his passion even while completing his studies at the University of British Columbia. When he lost his job during the early 2000s, he turned to his lifelong passion as the new source of income: 

His original designs vary from quaint and seemingly simplistic objects, like a feather or a ball, to the incredibly complex—a white rhinoceros, a life-sized tree, or the 44-foot-long Japanese dragon he created for a theatre project last year. To explain his creative process, Wu references Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink which delves into the idea of subconscious cognition. “Gladwell explains how we can very, very quickly process things that might take a long time if we were to sit down and think about it,” Wu says. It is in this way he processes his origami. “I do the research I need, come up with the parameters I want for my design, and then in the span of about a minute, the design just appears in my head.” At that point, he knows that he can take a flat piece of paper sitting in front of him and form it into the finished object. Typically, it takes between 10 and 20 revisions before he’s fully happy with the piece.

These days, commissioned work such as installations and advertisement campaigns keep him busy. A recurring job with Canadian Business magazine has him creating origami out of money for each issue (“When I’m done a piece, I just unfold it and spend it,” he says). Thus far, his favourite ad campaign was for Stolichnaya vodka, for which he made a series of origami animals and butterflies. When he travelled to New York one summer to attend an origami convention, the ads were all over the city. “Telephone booths, billboards, subway entrances, all with my origami on it—it was totally unexpected.”

Image credit: Joseph Wu.

The kitchen may be the heart of the home, but it has always represented a lot of work. The last century or so has given us a continuous race to make that work easier with modern gadgets designed to cook and clean. Since the dawn of the computer age, the idea of a kitchen computer has been tried over and over, with little success. The first one was offered in 1969.

As depicted in this colorful advertisement, the sleek, enormous Honeywell Kitchen Computer would have commanded attention in any kitchen. But it did not actually cook dinner. Rather, its functions included storing recipes, meal planning, and balancing the family checkbook. Though marketed towards housewives, it was very impractical. The advertising campaign’s tagline “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute!” sought to hide that the Honeywell Kitchen Computer was merely a complicated digital recipe-card box and a calculator.

The department store Neiman Marcus sold the Honeywell Kitchen Computer as a luxury item, pricing it at a kingly $10,600 (around $78,000 today). Buying the computer made little economic sense for the target audience, and required a 2-week coding course on how to properly use the 16 buttons on the front panel. There’s no evidence that anybody actually purchased one.

That was only the first of a series of ideas to get computers into the modern kitchen. But what could a computer actually do in the kitchen that wouldn't take up valuable room and cost more than it's worth? In the end, the solution turned out to be pretty simple. We have a few computerized systems that run through the whole house, for things like energy consumption and security, but getting a computer to help in the kitchen is as easy as making that computer small and portable. My daughter cooks with a recipe displayed on a computer screen while music plays ...on her iPhone. Read a short history of kitchen computers at Atlas Obscura.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time..." could be the beginning of every one of the 20 stories in this list. If you think back, you can probably recall a few huge mistakes in movies, TV, advertising, music, video games, and the like, when someone's great idea was actually executed before the target audience turned it down in spectacular fashion. And there are some that may have flown under your radar, like the time that Stephen King's horror story Carrie was turned into a Broadway musical.

Murder stories have a pretty good track record on Broadway—Sweeney Todd, Little Shop of Horrors, etc.—but the 1988 musical adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie bucked the trend. The creative team did include some musical theater heavyweights: Michael Gore, composer of 1980’s Fame, and Debbie Allen, choreographer of the Fame TV series (Allen also appeared in both the film and the show). Alas, their razzle-dazzle ’80s style clashed with all the carnage, and critics’ reviews were their own kind of bloodbath—The New York Times went so far as to compare the production to the Hindenburg disaster. Carrie closed after just five performances.

Almost thirty years after it closed on Broadway, the musical Carrie found a kind of revival in high school theater productions, where you might still be able to catch a glimpse of the carnage. Hear a song from the musical, and read 19 other stories of pop culture gone wrong at Mental Floss.  

This looks like the kind of tropical fish you'd see in someone's salt water aquarium, except this fish is 3.5 feet long and weighs 100 pounds! It is an opah, found washed up on the beach in Seaside, Oregon. The fish was already dead, but was found before the birds could help themselves to it.

Keith Chandler, the general manager of Seaside Aquarium, told CNN that an opah on the Oregon coast is "uncommon to find" and he also added that the fish was "in such great shape."

"They're pretty cool fish, and we don't normally see them on the shore," said Chandler. "It was pretty exciting for locals."

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), little is known about the species since they live deep in the ocean. The species is usually found in temperate and tropical waters.

The Seaside Aquarium took the opah and plan to dissect it to learn more about the species. -via Fark

With the 2020 Olympics beginning this weekend in Tokyo, all eyes are on the elite athletes of the world. From gymnastics to weightlifting, from the 100-meter dash to equestrian events, the eyes of the world will be on the amazing feats of the human body. How in the world did we ever develop such abilities? You might say, practice and more practice, but looking back into the evolution of human abilities, we find that such skills came along before we were ever Homo sapiens. Archaeologist Anna Goldfield explains what we know about how those abilities came about. Walking upright made us into runners, but it's hardly the only athletic skill we have that differs from other animals.

While the bottom half of our body has evolved away from an arboreal lifestyle, our upper body still retains traits that we inherited from tree-dwellers. Our glenohumeral joint, the ball-and-socket connection between our upper arm and scapula, allows us to swing our arms around in a full rotation. This is a very different type of mobility from that of quadruped animals that don’t swing in trees—a dog or cat’s front legs, for example, primarily swing back and forth and couldn’t perform a butterfly swim stroke. We, on the other hand, can.

Our rotatable shoulder joint also allows us to throw overhand. The ability to throw accurately and forcefully appears to have originated at least 2 million years ago, with our ancestors Homo erectus. Recent research has also shown that Neanderthals might have thrown spears to hunt at a distance. The few known examples of Neanderthal spears were long thought to be used only for thrusting and close-in killing of prey, in part because when researchers tried to throw replicas, they didn’t go far.

Recently, however, researchers put replicas into the hands of trained javelin throwers and were stunned to see the spears fly much farther and faster—more than 65 feet.

Read how evolution got us running, jumping, grasping, and playing ball at Sapiens magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Naoki Nakashima)

Why do we call a software glitch a "bug"? You've got to call it something, and you may as well ask where the word "glitch" came from. Still, language origin stories are often interesting, and the idea of an insect causing problems in our computers makes sense. Insects love small, protected places to hide, and they reap all kinds of destruction from our point of view. It's also a handy excuse for human error.

According to the most often-repeated origin story, in 1947 technicians working on the Harvard Mk II or Aiken Relay Calculator – an early computer built by the US Navy – encountered an electrical fault, and upon opening the mechanism discovered that a moth had had flown into the computer and shorted out one of its electrical relays. Thus the first computer bug was quite literally a bug, and the name stuck.

But while this incident does indeed seemed to have occured, it is almost certainly not the origin of the term, as the use of “bug” to mean an error or glitch predates the event by nearly a century.

The first recorded use of “bug” in this context comes from American inventor Thomas Edison, who in a March 3, 1878 letter to Western Union President William Orton wrote: “You were partly correct. I did find a “bug” in my apparatus, but it was not in the telephone proper. It was of the genus “callbellum”. The insect appears to find conditions for its existence in all call apparatus of telephones.”

The genus "callbellum" does not exist, and turned out to be Edison telling a joke. But don't take that as Edison coining "bug" for a technology glitch. Edison was in the habit of taking other people's ideas. Read the story of how we came to see "bugs" in the system at Today I Found Out. 

(Image credit: Naval Surface Warfare Center)

While the international Olympic Summer Games are getting started in Tokyo this weekend, Fairbanks, Alaska, is hosting the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, as they have every year since 1961 ...except for 2020. The return of the games this year is particularly exciting. People of all ages will compete in feats of strength and skill that harken back to a traditional way of life such as the ear pull, blanket toss, fish cutting, knuckle hop, greased pole walk, four-man carry, Alaskan high kick, and the Indian stick pull.    

In 1961, two commercial airline pilots, Bill English and Tom Richards, Sr., who flew for the now-defunct Wien Air Alaska, were flying back and forth to some of the state’s outlying communities. During these visits, they watched Alaska Natives perform dances and other physical activities, such as the blanket toss, an event where 30 or more people hold a blanket made of hides and toss one person in the air. The goal is to remain balanced and land on one's feet. (The event stems from the Iñupiaq, an indigenous group from northern Alaska, who would use a blanket to toss a hunter in the air as a way to see over the horizon during hunts.)

“They [English and Richards] had a true appreciation for what they were witnessing and knew that these activities were something that people in the rest of the state should see for themselves to get a better understanding of the value of traditions happening outside Alaska's big cities,” says Gina Kalloch, chairwoman of the WEIO board who is Koyukon Athabascan.

Read about some of the WEIO events and how they descended from traditional indigenous culture at Smithsonian. The 2021 competitions are going on now through Saturday.   

Urban explorer triangleofmass discovered a McDonald’s that was stuck in the 1980s. The YouTuber explored the abandoned McDonald’s, showcasing the aesthetic choices prevalent during its time. From the odd baby pink and blue color scheme (that is strikingly the opposite of the monochromatic and earthly colors restaurants employ these days) to the tiled walls and the bistro-style dining chairs, the fast food area looked like a retro diner instead of a fast food place: 

In terms of wall art, what you'll find are highly saturated nature scenes surrounded by a teal border. They are, of course, housed in a baby pink frame.

Lastly, you're going to want to see the computers. If you grew up in the '80s or '90s, they will bring you right back to those decades with their bulky, cream-colored exteriors.

You might be surprised to learn that this particular McDonald's location only closed down in 2007. However, according to YouTube commenter Dale Gibson, the location was last remodeled in 1986 to accommodate for salads being added to the menu.

Gibson adds that, according to the asset stickers in Triangle of Mass's video, it would appear that the McDonald's was abandoned because the sales volume was too low. Also, it would seem that the owner was not able to sell the store to another buyer.



Image credit: Triangle Of Mass /YouTube 

Ever wondered why dogs loved licking people, even if they’re not their owners? While licking people is often seen as a sign of affection, there are some instances when other reasons come into play. Sydney Bartson Queen, a senior manager of the behavioral sciences team at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), explained that the meaning of a dog lick can depend on how the licks are offered: 

"Some small kisses at the mouth are sometimes appeasement behaviors, like the way some small puppies lick at the mouths of adult dogs," the ASPCA manager added.

Dr. Mary Burch, a certified applied animal behaviorist who is the director of the American Kennel Club (AKC)'s Family Dog program, says: "Licking can be a sign of affection. It might also give a dog a feeling of security and comfort, just as the dog had when licked by its mother in the litter."

Queen added that licks can also be a way for dogs to gather more information, such as small licks near the mouth. "The licking helps the scents get up to the dog's vomeronasal organ)."

Dogs may also offer a lick or two in order to appease the person so that they can be left alone. This tends to happen when a person puts their face too close to the dog's face before they are comfortable, Queen told Newsweek.

"Some dogs are even unintentionally taught to give kisses as a way to maybe create space between them and a person.

"A dog learns that you can get a person's face further away from them by licking it when the person moves away after receiving their "kisses," she explained.

Image credit: Honest Paws (Unsplash)

Don’t worry, this story did not end with murder and despair. A group of school boys in 1965 stole a traditional whaling boat and recklessly set off for Fiji, without any navigational assistance or naval expertise. After a violent storm ripped the sails from the mast of the boat, they drifted aimlessly for over a week, and then ending up in a volcanic island, as the boys, now grownups, tell CBS News: 

For over a week their crippled boat drifted aimlessly. 17-year-old Sione Fataua, the oldest of the group, told us they were convinced they'd die.

Sione Fataua: No food, no water. We was just drifting around by the wind. And after eight days we saw the island. 

It was a volcanic island, jutting out from the sea. As the boat neared, a wave sent it crashing into the rocky shoreline, leaving it in pieces. The exhausted teenagers struggled ashore. 

Mano Totau: The only thing we do, grabbing each other together and say a prayer, "thank you, God."

The schoolboys later discovered they'd drifted a hundred miles from where they'd set off and had landed on the island of 'Ata—on maps, nothing more than an uninhabited speck.

It was a story so remarkable that later an Australian television crew brought the teenagers back to 'Ata to re-enact their experience. In the film, Sione, Mano and their friends show how they survived.

"The Castaways" film: They were able to salvage an oar and a piece of wire, and with this they set out to catch what they hoped would be their first meal in 8 days.

They demonstrate how they ate the fish they caught raw and quenched their thirst by raiding the nests of seabirds—drinking their blood and their raw eggs. 

Check out the full transcript of their interview, and the full tale of their survival here! 

Image credit: Jacob Buller (Unsplash)

One of the bonuses from last year's lockdown is that we now get Honest Trailers for movies that are still in theaters. The drawback is that this trailer for Black Widow surely has some spoilers, but not so much that you wouldn't still want to see the entire film. Screen Junkies' major criticism is that this Marvel film has a formulaic plot and stereotypical characters, as if that's a real surprise. Nothing could have prevented this movie from being a big hit.