There’s a lot of kissing in movies. It’s used as a sign that a relationship between two characters is going to get deeper or more complicated. There’s a certain happiness and anticipation in waiting for two characters in a film to get their heads together and realize that they’re in love. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, however, regardless of how many potential couples were presented, kissing is rarely shown on screen. I know that it’s not really important, but it does make you wonder, right? Well, Polygon’s Joshua Rivera also thought about that, and he investigated. Check out his full piece on the topic here. 

Image via Polygon

Right after the Civil War, the US was in flux in many different ways. The country was expanding westward, the transcontinental railroad was being built, and still the Mississippi River remained the easiest route for shipping goods. Meanwhile, Washington, DC, was becoming crowded and plagued by mosquitos. Wouldn't it make sense to move the nation's capital closer to the geographic center? Specifically, that meant St. Louis, where the North, the South, and the Midwest met.   

“They imagined they would move the real buildings themselves,” says Adam Arenson, a historian at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, and author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. “The image is kind of fantastical but also intriguing.”

The idea of numbering the blocks of the Capitol building for reassembly hundreds of miles away was very much of its time.

“The whole thing is only thinkable in the aftermath of the Civil War, when you have had these kinds of massive logistical innovations and when they’ve moved so many people, but also so much stuff, around on the railroads,” says Walter Johnson, historian at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

While moving the actual buildings seems ridiculous in hindsight, there were practical reasons to move the seat of government. Read about the push to move the US government to St. Louis at Smithsonian.

I didn’t even know that buying or downloading a thousand games was possible, let alone 25,000! Steam was apparently prone to crashing if you owned half of the total games on Steam. For reference, there are currently over 51,000 games on the platform. An update for Steam’s beta client was released to fix a possible crash for owners with a lot of games in their library. If an update like that was released by the developers, that means someone currently owns over 25,000 games and spotted the error: 

Working out how many people this may even have affected is a little tricky. Steam analytics site Steamladder currently lists three people as having passed this threshold. Their public Steam profiles don't show quite as many, however, as it appears this number omits hidden games. SteamDB has its own chart of users who supposedly own over 25,000 games, using the associated badge to keep track, and reckons there's a good few hundred more. According to their SteamDB page, Steam user Sonix apparently owns a staggering 42,061 titles.

Of course, it's also possible that this was just a small issue discovered by Valve's own testing, making Steam more stable for folks with ludicrous library counts. Steam is only getting bigger, with 10,263 games added in 2020 alone. Collector's libraries are only going to increase in size—and while we can debate who actually owns the most games on the platform, collectors can be fairly sure the client won't buckle under the strain anymore.

Image via PC Gamer 

The mother of dragons is now a mother of a new comic book series! Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke has written and developed M.O.M.: Mother of Madness, a three-issue miniseries for Image Comics. M.O.M. follows Maya, a single mother who is a scientist and a superhero, as IGN details: 

"We're always calling mothers superheroes, and I'm like, what if they were? What if they legitimately were superheroes?" Clarke told Entertainment Weekly.

"Maya has had a very hard life, and she finds herself in a place where everything that makes her unique, she hates and is ashamed about. It's only in the discovery of her powers that she finds her true acceptance of who she is."

Clarke assembled an all-female creative team for the project, including illustrator Leila Leiz, contributor Isobel Richardson, and cover artist Jo Ratcliffe. The Game of Thrones actress describes the tone of M.O.M. as "Deadpool-esque" in its humor.

Clarke isn't the only actor jumping into comic books. Keanu Reeves made his comic book writing debut with BRZRKR, a 12 issue limited series at BOOM! Studios.

Image via IGN 

Sadly, Nordstrom is sold out of the Pavé Chair Bag, which was designed by Area X Myreality. It's less of a functional purse (since you can't carry anything in it), and more of an art piece that makes a statement about the person who wears it. But what is that statement?

-via Super Punch

You may have wondered at one time or another just how many surfaces does your cat's butthole touch in your house. It's been a Fark meme since 2004, when someone suggested putting lipstick on the cat to find out. But you don't have to, because this is exactly what Tennessee 6th grader Kaeden Griffin did for a science fair project. He used the family's two cats, neither of which are hairless.

1.  Cats with long and medium hair didn’t make any contact with hard or soft surfaces.

2.  Cats with short hair didn’t make contact with hard surfaces . . . but there were smears of lipstick on soft surfaces like the bed.

Well, that's a relief. Read more about Griffin's experiment at WRAT. -via Metafilter

Four Picasso paintings are a subject of a new multidisciplinary project to prevent degradation through environmental control. The four artworks were made from new mercerised cotton canvases, oil paints based on drying oils such as linseed and sunflower, and animal glue which was used to coat the canvases. After being exposed to identical conditions, staff from the Museu Picasso in Barcelona questioned why one of the works, Hombre sentado (Seated man), deteriorated faster than the other Picasso artworks: 

Picasso used a canvas with a tighter weave for Hombre sentado, coating it with a thicker ground layer of animal glue, researchers found. Both factors meant larger internal stresses formed when the paintings were exposed to fluctuating humidity, while chemical reactions between certain pigments and binding media sparked chemical reactions that caused paints to degrade. As a result, the paints gradually cracked when stresses built, Francesca Izzo, a conservation and heritage scientist at Ca’ Foscari, tells The Art Newspaper.

In the past, conservators have relied mainly on chemical analysis to determine how some materials lead to deterioration. Combining such studies with those of more tangible signs of mechanical damage offers a more rounded picture, allowing conservators to take more informed conservation decisions. “As a conservator-restorer I was finding it difficult to define a conservation strategy: the chemical perspective was not enough, so I started looking for a complementary perspective,” Fuster-López says. The team's discoveries, she hopes, will aid other conservators. “It is our responsibility to supply them with the right tools and understanding of materials.”

Image via the Art Newspaper 

Just a few days ago, our world witnessed history, as the Ingenuity helicopter took off from Martian soil and hovered for about 30 seconds before coming back down on the ground. To some, this may not mean much, but for scientists, this event is a scientific breakthrough, for many reasons.

There are several technological challenges to conducting a helicopter flight on another world. First, and most significantly, helicopters need an atmosphere to fly.

The blades, or "rotors" of a helicopter must spin fast enough to generate a force called "lift." But lift can only be generated in the presence of some kind of atmosphere. While Mars does have an atmosphere, it's much, much thinner than Earth's — about 100 times thinner, in fact.

Flying Ingenuity in Mars' atmosphere is therefore the equivalent of flying a helicopter on Earth at a height of 100,000 feet. For reference, commercial aircraft fly between 30,000-40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface and the highest we’ve ever been in a helicopter on Earth is 42,000 feet.

More about this over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: NASA TV)

We associate living in a cave with, well, cavemen from many thousands of years ago. We also know of modern cave dwellers who built homes in existing caves here and there as projects that spanned many years. But the village of Langenstein, near Germany's Harz Mountains, is a completely different story. There, in 1855, ten caves were completely carved out from solid sandstone to make living spaces! Wealthy landowner August Wilhelm Rimpau hired workers who traveled there with their families, but had no place to house them.

“That’s when the local council came across the soft sandstone ridge formation on the outskirts of town. Because they knew about the earlier cave dwellings, the idea emerged of letting the workers reside in caves,” says Scholle. Soon after, the rocks were numbered—one to 10—with chalk, and a lottery was held to determine which families would get a spot. “And then each family got started with carving a home out of solid rock,” he says.

The migrant workers arrived in Langenstein from near and far, says Scholle. In exchange for a little over a month’s salary, they were granted the right to reside in the homes they built for as long as they lived.

“The workers spent all day on the fields, and in the evening they worked on their homes,” he says. On average, each family took a year and a half to complete their dwellings. In the early stages, they slept under makeshift roofs at the entrance. “The sooner you constructed your house, the sooner you were out of the cold.”

Five of the ten cave homes still exist, and are protected as historic sites in Langenstein. See more of them at Atlas Obscura.

Paris is altering its road system to encourage mass transit, bicycles, and pedestrians and discourage car travel. However, this means that unintended problems will emerge during the process. YouTuber The Tim Traveller explains what happens at one intersection.

There is a crossroads in Paris where all four exits have 'No Entry' signs. This is possibly the Frenchest thing ever to have happened. I went to investigate.

So you could go there, but never leave. While the signage has been updated to solve the problem, I realize that I would have to learn an entirely new system of traffic signs if I were to ever drive in Europe. That's probably not going to happen. I like mass transit. -via reddit

Why would a 94-meter (310-foot) yacht try to squeeze through urban canals? It's because Dutch shipyard Feadship, the boat's manufacturer, is quite far from the North Sea. This is a newly-built yacht, called Project 817, although it will be christened Viva when it goes to sea. The journey took around four days for this ship, which was designed with the canals in mind. It couldn't have been a centimeter larger than it is.

During the first stage of the operation, Viva was moved from the Kaag Island shipyard to Lake Braassemermeer, where it was fitted with pontoons to raise it up, thus ensuring it wasn't too deep to maneuver through the canals.

Tug boats were then attached to the pontoons on either side of the superyacht, which was also wrapped with protective foil, in order to guide the vessel through the water with precision.

By this point, it was ready to be pushed and pulled along the canals, making its way across a small bridge in the tiny village of Woubrugge, as well as Alphen aan den Rijn, a town in the west of Holland, before reaching the Dutch city Gouda, located south of Amsterdam, a few days later.

Feadship will be able to make even bigger ships in the future, as they are building a new factory near the sea, which they should have done in the first place. Read about the painstaking journey and see more pictures at CNN. -via Digg

PhD candidate Matthew Harkness is now exploring the question of what if our body could actually recycle plastic with his Biorecycling Machine. The machine isn’t something big or complicated, it is based on an open-source blueprint of a 3D-printed tattoo machine that he downloaded from GitHub. The concept is that getting a plastic-ink tattoo, your body becomes the recycling machine. Scary, right? Well, the project is merely speculative: 

The catch? This approach only works with a certain type of bioplastic, which is generally considered safe for the human body. Petroleum-based plastics, such as the bags that fill our oceans, need not apply.

The project is speculative, meant to prod us to rethink our values. It’s not meant to become an actual commercial product. As Harkness explains over email, his intent was to “interrogate the . . . ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ campaign introduced in the 1970s. Central to this campaign was placing responsibility for recycling plastics onto consumers and in the Biorecycling Machine project, this concept is taken to the extreme.”

Image via the Fast Company

Damn, imagine going to the ocean to have fun or to relax and then you spot a huge snake emerging from it! That’s terrifying. Wildlife photographer Rachelle Mackintosh was able to capture an image of an olive sea snake that seemed to appear from nowhere and swam on the surface for a couple of seconds, did a full lift out of the water, then splashed down and disappeared. Giant Freakin Robot has more details: 

The olive sea snake is both large and venomous. They grow in length of up to six feet and have a painful bite that has proven fatal on more than one occasion. It is the most common sea snake along the northern coast of Australia (the snake and spider haven) but is not known as aggressive creatures. Mackintosh explained that researchers said the snake could have been trying to escape danger from the predatory shark. The snake also could have been simply inspecting its surroundings or upon seeing Mackintosh and company, engaging in playful behavior. Well, what’s playful to snakes may not be too playful to humans.

Image via Giant Freakin Robot

Cerberus is known in Greek mythology as this terrifying dog that guards the Underworld, one that you would not describe as a “good boy.” But what if Cerberus was not that scary? What if it is cute, like these three-headed Shiba Inu toys made by the Japanese company Qualia? I’d pet Cerberus if this was the case.

Borrowing their name from the mythical three-headed creature known as Cerberus (aka Kerberos), the Shibaberos collectible figures come in five different styles – one where the three heads are horizontal, one where they’re vertically-stacked, a wacky pyramid configuration, one that’s standing, and another that looks like the afterimage of a Shiba Inu shaking its head from side to side. They’re all equally weird and silly.

(Image Credit: Qualia/ Technabob/ Toy-People)

Expect a lot of lucky cats in this temple and hopefully, more luck!  Meet Gotokuji Temple, located in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo. The temple is believed to be the birthplace of the maneki-neko (‘luck inviting cat figurine’). You know, the lucky cat figurines that feature a cat sitting up and raising either their right or left paw. Live Japan has more details: 

Temple legend states that during the early 17th century, Ii Naotaka (then the second lord of the Omi-Hikone Domain) escaped from being caught in a sudden thunderstorm after having been invited inside the temple by a cat that lived there. To show his gratitude to the cat, Naotaka decided to dedicate the temple to the Ii clan. After Naotaka passed away, the temple was renamed to Gotokuji, from his posthumous Buddhist name “Kyushoin-den Gotokuten ei-daikoji.”

The cat that created that opportunity for the temple to grow into a respectable and important place was deified as “Fortune-Inviting Kannon.” The cat was later said to bring good fortune, being called “shou-fuku byou-ji” or “maneki-neko.” Gotokuji Temple has been filled with lucky cat figurines donated by worshippers ever since.

Image via Live Japan