Not before she managed to break her own record, of course! Ayanna Williams beat her previous Guinness World Record of 18 ft and 10.9 inches before sawing her nails off with an electric rotary tool. The official measurement of her nails was 24 feet and Williams shared that she has been growing her nails for about 28 or 29 years, as People details:  

"I have mixed emotions about my babies going," she said about her nails, revealing she's been growing them for "about 28 [or] 29 years."

Williams continued, "I'm so, so ready for a new life. I know I'm going to miss them, but it's just about that time – it's time for them to go. I'm just about tired of them so it's time for them to go."

"With or without my nails, I will still be the queen. My nails don't make me, I make my nails!" she stated.

She also revealed her decision to cut her nails stemmed from difficulty doing daily tasks.

"With my movements, I have to be very, very careful. So usually in my mind, I'm already preparing for the next step that I have to do to make sure that I don't hurt myself with my nails - or break them," Williams revealed. "I'm excited about cutting my nails because I'm looking forward to new beginnings."

Image via People 

After their longest shutdown ever, Disneyland in California will open to the public (California residents only) on April 30. That will pave the way for the grand opening of their new theme park within the park, Avengers Campus, on June 4.

At Avengers Campus, guests of all ages can find their powers as they take an active role alongside some of their favorite Super Heroes, with a chance to live out their own heroic story. Whether that be slinging webs with Spider-Man, trying out inventive new foods, experiencing heroic encounters, and even teaming up with the Avengers and their allies, all recruits are invited to join in on the action.

“Avengers Campus will be a place where fans and guests can finally step into the universe they love, and stand alongside some of their favorite heroes,” said Dave Bushore, vice president of Franchise Creative & Marketing for Marvel Studios. “The optimism inherent in Avengers Campus captures the diversity, power and teamwork these extraordinary characters possess, and now they come together to unite people from all over the world under one guiding principle: We are stronger together.”

Get a rundown on what Avengers Campus will offer at Marvel. Reservations will be necessary, as the number of guests will be limited this summer. -via Mashable

There are few frontiers left in the world these days, but the vast oceans are enticing when you want to get away from it all. Some would like to get away from it all forever. These are the proponents of "seasteading," or living on the ocean, close to nature and away from laws, taxes, and mortgages.  

The first attempts at open-ocean habitation were obvious larks. In 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s brother, Leicester, declared that a bamboo raft, little bigger than an oversized parking space, was a sovereign nation, New Atlantis. One record shows that the “country,” which floated off the coast of Jamaica, had six founding citizens: Hemingway’s family plus a public relations specialist and his assistant. When the raft sank in a storm a few years later, no one seemed to be on board. In 1967, an engineer built a platform the size of a basketball court off the coast of Italy, added a restaurant and souvenir shack, and called it the Republic of Rose Island. The Italian government deemed it a tourist trap designed to evade the local tax laws and destroyed the structure the next year. (This story was the inspiration for Rose Island, a recent Netflix comedy.)

A retired British army major named Roy Bates proved more successful. In late 1966, he climbed aboard an old antiaircraft platform 11 kilometers off the coast of England, declaring it the Principality of Sealand and his family its royalty. Despite efforts by the British government to reclaim its property—and a few attempted coups by rivals—the Bates family still claims the platform, which supports a 10-room compound. As of 2019, its sole occupant was a full-time hired guard. Bates’s son, Michael, now the reigning monarch, lives in the more convenient country of England, where he runs a fishing fleet.

There are recurring problems in building an ocean utopia: international laws mean that a truly free community will have to be fairly far away from land, building a platform to live on is very expensive, and getting supplies will be difficult. Chad Elwartowski has been chasing the dream of living on the ocean with a community of like-minded individuals for years, which has involved spinning off corporations, becoming a fugitive from Thailand, and settling in Panama for now. Read his story, and more on the seasteading movement, at Hakai magazine. -via Damn Interesting

Neuralink, a tech startup owned by Elon Musk, is working on a wireless brain-machine interface to give paralyzed people some control over their environment. They've reached an important milestone in the quest.

Today we are pleased to reveal the Link’s capability to enable a macaque monkey, named Pager, to move a cursor on a computer screen with neural activity using a 1,024 electrode fully-implanted neural recording and data transmission device, termed the N1 Link. We have implanted the Link in the hand and arm areas of the motor cortex, a part of the brain that is involved in planning and executing movements. We placed Links bilaterally: one in the left motor cortex (which controls movements of the right side of the body) and another in the right motor cortex (which controls the left side of the body).

Pager was already pretty good at Pong, but now he can play without a joystick! Read more about the research at the company's website. -via Geekologie

Due to popular demand, many food manufacturers would like to offer their products with natural food coloring instead of synthetic colors. However, the pallete has so far been incomplete as there are no purely blue foods in nature. But a new ways to color foods blue has been found, strangely, in red cabbage.  

“Blue colors are really quite rare in nature – a lot of them are really reds and purples,” said Pamela Denish, a graduate student working with Professor Justin Siegel at the UC Davis Department of Chemistry and Innovation Institute for Food and Health.

Having the right blue color is also important for mixing other colors, such as green. If the blue isn’t right, it will produce muddy, brown colors when mixed, Siegel said.

Red cabbage extracts are widely used as a source of natural food colorings, especially reds and purples. These dyes are called anthocyanins. For about a decade, a team led by scientists at the Mars Advanced Research Institute and Mars Wrigley Science and Technology, in collaboration with the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health; The Ohio State University; Nagoya University, Japan; the University of Avignon, France; and SISSA University, Italy, have been working on isolating a blue anthocyanin from red cabbage. But the natural blue coloring is present only in tiny amounts.

The breakthrough came when researchers found an enzyme -among the billions available- that would turn the small amount of anthocyanin blue in red cabbage into a relatively large amount, making mass production possible. Read about the research at UC Davis. Just think, soon we'll be able to eat Superman ice cream and know that it's all natural! -via Real Clear Science

(Image credit: Amada44)

Do you see Sigmund Freud in this image? The boatman forms his right eye and the woman's hair his left eye.

This fantastic portrait from a fever dream is by Ukrainian artist Oleg Shupliak. He offers up reverent and mysterious images of great artists, thinkers, and writers.

I'm especially taken with Shupliak's portraits of artists inspired by the styles of those artists. You can see so much of Starry Night in this depiction of Van Gogh.

It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen has announced the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. pic.twitter.com/XOIDQqlFPn

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 9, 2021

The British royal family has announced that Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, passed away this morning. Philip was 99, only two months from achieving his 100th birthday. His wife of 73 years, Queen Elizabeth II, has a habit of congratulating her subjects with a personal letter on their 100th birthday. In discussing the prince's death, reddit poet Poem_for_your_sprog said:

She looked at the message
she'd crafted and penned -
A letter to Philip
that she'd never send.

-via reddit

When you have kids and can't go places, you need to get creative about having fun at home. Steve Wilkins and his sons Tyler and Dylan harnessed the family treadmill for some auto racing. They tilted the back end of the treadmill and loaded it up with 100 Hot Wheels cars! Switch on the treadmill, and watch what happens. Wilkins provides the exciting play-by-play narration as we find out which car will survive the longest. They've recorded a whole series of these races. -via Laughing Squid

Kalimullah Khan was inspired by a crossbred rose bush. https://t.co/p13MXaX5Pb

— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) April 7, 2021

Kalimullah Khan grew up on his family's mango farm in Malihabad, in northern India. When he was 15, a rose bush inspired him to learn the art of grafting, and of course that would involve mango trees. His first grafted tree was destroyed by floods, but he never gave up. Now 80 years old, Khan is proud to show off his magnum opus.   

Over the years, Khan fine-tuned the art of cutting off a branch from one tree, slicing notched angles into it, and then attaching the orphaned cutting to a new, hybrid tree. In 1987, he started grafting cuttings of different varieties onto a 100-year-old mango tree. He collected samples from across the country to add, seeking out rare varieties. Khan says the tree now grows more than 300 types of mangoes. He calls it Al Muquaraar, or The Resolute.

The tree has become a tourist attraction, and Khan will let visitors sample the fruit. He also cultivates new varieties of mangos. Read his story at Atlas Obscura.

You've read about Miniatur Wunderland, the place in Hamburg with the world's largest model railway. Recently, they set up a train to cruise by 2,840 water glasses, playing classical tunes as it passes by. The trip lasted six minutes, and set a world record! The rest of the video is a look at how they did it. -via Digg

A monitor lizard in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand crawled out of a canal and strolled into a 7-Eleven. Although interested in the small grocery selection, he mostly made a mess and left without paying. Narumpa Tangsin, the customer who recorded this video, described the startling experience:

He said, "I only stopped at the shop to buy some food and then saw the huge monitor lizard inside. I wanted to buy a drink but the animal was too close to the drinks aisle."

He continued, "They're dangerous animals, especially when they're angry, so I stayed back and recorded it on my phone. I guess that shops have everything, even for lizards."

-via Marilyn Bellamy

Once upon a time, we had to find the majority of a skeleton to figure out what ancient people were like. Now we can isolate the genes in a small bone fragment or tooth and find out all kinds of things about them. Two studies have just been published about the genes of the oldest modern humans yet found in Europe, those of three people in Bulgaria and another in Czechia, all who lived about 45,000 years ago.  

“Interestingly, these earliest Europeans that we find in the Bacho Kiro Cave did not contribute substantially to later West Eurasians,” says Mateja Hajdinjak, of the Francis Crick Institute (London), co-author of the study published this week in Nature. “These groups got largely replaced in Western Eurasia by subsequent migrations of people. But they are closely related to the human groups that gave rise to later East Eurasians and Americans—including present-day populations.”

“It’s just really cool that fossils of three individuals in Bulgaria left behind DNA, and can trace their descendants to different parts of the world than we’d expect, in ancient and living East Asians and Native peoples of the Americas,” adds Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, who wasn’t involved in the genetic research.

The genome study also shows that a thick branch on the Bacho Kiro humans’ family tree belongs to the Neanderthals. The individuals carry 3 to 3.8 percent Neanderthal DNA in their genes, which suggests more than a one-off mating far back in their family history. In fact, the genomes show that these European humans had Neanderthal ancestors just six or fewer generations back.

The skull from Czechia also has a substantial amount of Neanderthal DNA. Read more about the findings at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Tsenka Tsanova, MPI-EVA Leipzig)

Throughout history, conspiracy theories have divided friends and families. In this day and age when information travels fast, these can now spread at a much faster pace. And in this time of social media, like-minded people can easily build communities and organizations. In other words, conspiracy theories…

… are dividing more and more families. Children and parents are having a difficult time communicating because they have different understandings of basic facts. The problem is frustrating for everyone involved…

Anyone can be led to believing in a conspiracy theory. Caddie Alford, an assistant professor in the Department of English in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, cites the example of Valerie Gilbert, a Harvard-educated writer who believes in the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Gilbert writes about the theory on her Facebook page and communicates with many followers of QAnon… Gilbert’s sister was worried about her and tried to talk to her about her beliefs. After being confronted, Gilbert cut off all ties with her family. Her relationship to the QAnon community was important and something she valued. 

“To Gilbert, that seemed condescending and outside the scope of their relationship,” Alford said. “It also just struck Gilbert as odd because she feels she is currently living her best, most enlightened life.”

What draws people into believing in conspiracy theories? Alford states that it is not the theory that draws people, but the sense of community.

So how should we talk to people who believe in one?

Alford suggests conversations around conspiracy theories should be aimed at understanding rather than arguing. She claims that with any belief, there is a kernel of truth. A person should ask probing questions and try to better understand the beliefs. People are likely to argue and become defensive when someone takes a position against their beliefs. They are more likely to answer a question where the aim is to understand.

(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)

Mice have been the number one go-to subjects of researchers when it comes to scientific experiments. However, when it comes to studies about mental illnesses, the lab mice are often sidelined, and it seems that we missed something really crucial in doing this.

A new study… shows there are important links between human and mouse minds in how they function -- and malfunction. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis devised a rigorous approach to study how hallucinations are produced in the brain, providing a promising entry point to the development of much-needed new therapies for schizophrenia.

The study, published April 2 in the journal Science, lays out a way to probe the biological roots of a defining symptom of psychosis: hallucinations. The researchers trained people and mice to complete a computer-based task that induced them to hear imaginary sounds. By analyzing performance of the task, the researchers were able to objectively measure hallucination-like events in people and mice. This innovative approach allowed them to study the neural circuits underlying hallucinations, opening up mental symptoms to the kind of scientific studies that have been so fruitful for diseases of other parts of the body.

Learn more about this study over at Science Daily.

(Image Credit: Aaron Logan/ Wikimedia Commons)

The rocket that you’re seeing in this one-and-a-half minute time lapse video (which condensed about 15 minutes) is the Russian Soyuz-FG Rocket, launched in November 2018 to bring supplies to the International Space Station. On the ground here on Earth, this rocket is a towering figure, with a height of over 40 meters. But from a view above our planet, the rocket looks really tiny.

Compared to the vastness of the universe, our creations look really miniscule. But to us, our creations are great and significant.

(Image Credit: APOD Videos/ YouTube)