I saw the term "alien zombies" in the title and thought it weird. In a fictional story, there is no need to make aliens into zombies because aliens can be as weird and dangerous as the plot needs them to be without bring the zombie trope into it. But then I read the article, which has a lot of examples of space zombies, many that I've seen. In TV, it's a way of introducing a new concept into a series that already takes place in space. In standalone films, it's a way of explaining how zombies happen: a novel microbe infection from space. But there are practical reasons, too.   

The appeal of putting a zombie in a spaceship for a TV show is easy to see. Zombies are a cool and instantly recognisable monster. Spaceships are a cool and instantly recognisable setting. What’s more, while your production values may vary, zombies on a spaceship is a pretty damn cheap concept to realise on screen. Zombies are just however many extras you can afford with some gory make-up. All you need for a spaceship is some suitably set-dressed corridors and maybe a couple of exterior model shots if you’re feeling swish.

And as with the zombie apocalypse genre as a whole, the audience instantly and instinctively understands “the rules” of a zombie story, allowing you to focus on your characters and the solutions they come up with.

However, there are problems with making a classic zombie movie work in space. Den of Geek takes a look at the concept, how it's been done before, and how it clashes with our expectations of a zombie story.  -via Digg

Kevin Kohler, known on the internet as The Backyard Scientist, thinks that kids these days have become too soft in part because toys have become far less dangerous. They're also so boring! So Kohler gathered his friends and modified the toys to explode or reach dangerously high speeds.

Although Kohler doesn't attach razor blades so the snapping alligator game as the YouTube thumbnail implies, he does give the toy the snapping power of a spring-loaded rat trap. He and his friends also start fires inside a garage, which you should not try at home if you've been hoarding gasoline lately.

-via The Awesomer

Dexter Kruger, at 111 years old (you read that right), is Australia's oldest living man. His advice for a long life? Eat chicken brains! The retired cattle rancher told Australian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview that the weekly poultry delicacy has contributed to his longevity:  

“Chicken brains. You know, chickens have a head. And in there, there’s a brain. And they are delicious little things,” Kruger said. “There’s only one little bite.”

Kruger’s 74-year-old son Greg credits his father’s simple Outback lifestyle for his long life.

Nursing home manger Melanie Calvert said Kruger, who is writing his autobiography, was “probably one of the sharpest residents here.”

“His memory is amazing for a 111-year-old,” Calvert said.

John Taylor, a founder of The Australian Book of Records, confirmed that Kruger had become the oldest-ever Australian man.

The oldest-ever verified Australian was Christina Cook, who died in 2002 aged 114 years and 148 days.

Image via AP News 

The Tropical Race 4 (TR4) is a strain of a fungus that kills banana plants by choking them of water and nutrients. In addition, the Taiwanese pathogen is immune to pesticides. Yikes! Thankfully, the pathogen only affects one type of banana - the Cavendish. However, this particular banana variety makes up almost the entire export market, which accounts for 47 per cent of all global production of the fruit:  

But the Cavendish has no defence against TR4. When Ploetz first encountered the new pathogen, there had been just a handful of suspected infections reported. In 1992, Ploetz received packages containing TR4 from plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. “At the time all we knew was that it was a new pathogen,” he says. “We didn’t know what to expect as far as its broader implications. The more samples we got from these export plantations, the more we began to realise that this was a bigger issue than we had ever anticipated,” he recalls. His prediction proved to be eerily accurate.

In 2013, TR4 was found for the first time in Mozambique. Ploetz thinks it had been carried on the boots and equipment of banana planters from southeast Asia. The pathogen has now travelled to Lebanon, Israel, India, Jordan, Oman, Pakistan and Australia. In 2018, it was found in Myanmar. “Then in southeast Asia,” Ploetz says. “It’s everywhere.”

When TR4 hits, the destruction is near-total. “It looks like somebody’s gone to the plantation with a herbicide,” [Randy] Ploetz says. “There are big areas that no longer have any plants at all.” The fungus, which can live undetected in the soil for decades, enters banana plants through their roots and spreads to the water- and nutrient-conducting tissue within, eventually starving the plant of nourishment. Two to nine months after being infected, the plant – hollowed out from the inside – collapses in on itself. The soil it grew in, now riddled with the fungus, is useless for growing bananas.

Image via Unsplash 

Paranormal researcher Deborah Hatswell has gotten her hands on some mysterious footage from a remote-operated vehicle 830 meters below sea level. The video shows a large set of bones and a massive intact spinal column. Hatswell believed that there could be an unusual explanation behind the existence of the bones. In order to find some answers to the skeleton’s possible origins, she posted the video to YouTube: 

She told the Daily Star: ‘The dimensions of the skeleton on the video does not fit with the usual size for any sea life in the area. I checked out living sea mammals and came up short of 30 metres. I had a look at the usual suspects – whales, oarfish and sea snakes.’

Deborah points out that Oarfish – the longest living bony fish – are only thought to grow up to 8 metres in length, while she claims that the features on the skeleton’s vertebrae don’t match up to what you’d expect to find in the remains of a whale.

Image via Unilad 

Why would you even pick up a jellyfish in the first place? I’m surprised this person came out unharmed, too! Popular TikTok user alexa_reed2 posted a video of himself prodding, picking up, and worse - licking a blue ‘jellyfish’ that was laying on the beach. The not-so-fun addition to this episode is that Alexa picked up  a Portuguese Man o' War (or Bluebottle), one of the most dangerous creatures in the ocean: 

Portuguese Man o' Wars are actually siphonophores, not a single animal but made up of a colony of organisms working together, though closely related to jellyfish. Known for their intensely painful stings that leave welts in unfortunate swimmers that are caught by their tentacles, these "floating terrors" frequent the beaches of Australia and are responsible for up to 10,000 stings to humans per year. There have even been reported cases of Bluebottle stings resulting in death, particularly in vulnerable people. 

Surfers and ocean swimmers are well-versed in the danger these creatures represent, but it appears many people – including this TikToker – can't identify them when they wash up on the beach.  

Another TikToker by the name of mndiaye_97 did a fantastic round-up of why the Man o' War should be kept at extreme distances, in case you don’t believe us. Check out the video, which went viral shortly after the original post, below. 

Luckily, Alexa appears to have come off unscathed. However, the video does provide a couple of important learning points. Firstly, if you are traveling abroad and wish to enjoy the wildlife, try to learn the common and potentially dangerous ones so you can steer well clear of them. Secondly, and most importantly, never pick up (and please, please don’t lick) any wildlife you may find. Native plants and animals should be admired from a safe distance, so they can be there for years to come. And who knows, staying far away might just save your life.

Image via IFLS 

Who knew that simple photographs of water could be so beautiful? Through Michal Pelka’s images, the beauty of the ocean can be seen through the stunning pictures of waves in different oceans. At first glance, it doesn’t even seem to look like real water! The Dutch photographer is able to showcase the ocean through light and motion: 

Pelka took up photography at age 16, but it was not until he was living in Western Australia that he began to shoot in open water. As a surfer, he possesses a lot of the skills necessary to read conditions and choose his moments with respect to the motion of the waves.

Now living back in the Netherlands, the North Sea has been Pelka's playground since the pandemic disrupted his chasing waves abroad. He says the cold waters—while not necessarily known for surfing big waves—can still surprise you. “Being in the ocean for me is a means to disconnect from day-to-day reality and at the same time connect with nature and feel in tune with the rhythm of the ocean,” he tells My Modern Met. “The ocean and waves have something timeless and disarming in them; it’s that feeling that I try to capture in my images.”

Image via My Modern Met 

So, we ordered 51 trays of plants to install on our shed's new green roof.

We just got a phone call from the company.

They are delivering 510 square meters.

— Molly Quell (@MollyQuell) May 18, 2021

In the Netherlands, it's not unusual to build a garden on one's roof. Ready to install a green roof, Molly Quell ordered some plants, and a load of gravel to provide it with drainage. The delivery was more like a truckload -a BIG truck that couldn't make it all the way to their house. This was all Onno's fault.

Breaking News: Onno doesn't work for the company who we purchased the green roof from. Onno works for their distributor.

No one likes Onno.

— Molly Quell (@MollyQuell) May 18, 2021

Well, the plants were a screwup, but the gravel they wanted was behind the plants on the truck, so they had to be unloaded. The story gets even funnier from there, with quite a bit of swearing in Dutch. You can read the whole story at Twitter or at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

Have you ever wondered why the French word "souvenir" was adopted into English? It came home with soldiers returning from World War I, and often referred to trench art. See, while soldiers in the Great War faced harrowing danger and deprivation, they also did a lot of waiting. Some of them filled their downtime, in which no entertainment was possible, fashioning useful and/or beautiful items from spent artillery shells and other battlefield scrap. You can imagine these items became highly collectible in the years afterward.

From the winter of 1914 to the spring of 1918, millions of Allied and Central Powers soldiers hunkered down within an estimated 35,000 miles of zigzagging trenches, from the Belgian city of Nieuwpoort on the North Sea to “Kilometre Zero” at the Alsatian-Swiss border. When these soldiers weren’t being exposed to mustard gas, sent into suicidal battles in the deadly no-man’s land between the opposing front lines, or struggling with the dysentery, typhoid fever, lice, trench mouth, and trench foot that were endemic to life in the trenches, they made art. Naturally, the vases, ashtrays, and other decorative objects they fashioned from spent brass artillery shells and other detritus of war were dubbed trench art.

It’s an inspiring story—we love it when the human spirit triumphs in the face of adversity—but if you’re picturing doughty doughboys painstakingly tapping out intricate designs on empty artillery shells while bullets whistle overhead, your imagination has gotten the better of you. In fact, only a fraction of the trench art produced during what was then called the Great War and what we now know as World War I was made by soldiers in the trenches, and of that fraction, the first wave of Great War trench art was mostly the handiwork of infantrymen who wore the uniforms of France and Belgium rather than the U.S. of A.

Scott Vezeau, antique dealer and trench art expert, explains the history of trench art and
how it was made. He also gives us the ins and outs of identifying and collecting trench art and "trench art style" items at Collectors Weekly.

Websites are always asking you to agree to their terms and conditions, which usually means agreeing to let the site collect data from you and sell it. Of course, all that is buried in the small print that may take all day to read, so many websites just plain ask you to agree now or go away. Or sign up for their newsletter. Or agree to various things as a default, if you don't actively opt out. The tricks some websites use to get your agreement can be pretty sneaky. Jonathan Plackett created a game out of those tricks, called Terms & Conditions Apply. Can you get through all 29 pop-up windows without accepting terms and conditions, cookies, or notifications? Yeah, some are easy, while others can be maddening. Try the game and let us know how you did. Difficulty: there are time limits on at least some of them. I did not do as well as I'd hoped, but it was fun trying. -via Metafilter

Seventy-four years ago, Lois Lew showed the world how to use the first electric Chinese typewriter. Here’s her remarkable story. https://t.co/0NELmCI5yP

— Fast Company (@FastCompany) May 17, 2021

In the 1940s, Kao Chung-chin invented a typewriter that would produce 5,400 Chinese characters, plus letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks. To use the machine, the typist had to depress four of the 36 keys at once, which meant memorizing four-digit codes for the needed characters. IBM manufactured the machine, which was demonstrated in a 1947 film. The young woman who typed on the machine made it look easy. How did she do it? And who was she, anyway? Tom Mullaney spent years trying to find her, and after he did, spent years getting an interview. Lois Lew is now 95 years old, and has a fascinating story. She arrived in the US for an arranged marriage as an undereducated 16-year-old. Read the story of how Lew became the star of IBM's campaign to sell the Chinese typewriter at Fast Company. -via Damn Interesting

The self-claimed creator of Bitcoin has surfaced and filed a lawsuit against 16 software developers. Australian computer scientist Craig Wright filed a suit against these developers to secure 111,000 units of the leading cryptocurrency accounts. Wright claimed through his suit that he is the Bitcoin creator under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, as the Dechained details: 

He went further in his claims at his second lawsuit in London alleging that he had lost access to his encrypted keys after his home network was hacked in February 2020.

The claims which are aggressively disputed against the Britain-based scientist were brought against developers of the four networks – Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin Core (BTC), and Bitcoin Cash ABC (ABC). 

Craig Wright has accused the developers in the recent lawsuit of a breach in the discharge of their duties to act in the interests of the creator and legitimate owner of the most popular digital asset. The case, however, was waved off by one defendant as “bogus” is currently being investigated by the police in a bid to fish out the unknown hackers.

Image via the Dechained

A good surprise, right? Shark hunters in South Africa have discovered a population of a fish species that was believed to be extinct. Known as the ancient ‘four-legged fossil fish,’ these coelacanths were alive and well off the coast of Madagascar. So how did the hunters find them? Because they were chasing sharks for their fins, oil, and other lucrative parts,  their deep-sea nets were able to reach the area where the coelacanths gathered: 

The species, which dates back 420 million years, was thought to have been extinct until 1938, when the first living coelacanth in recent memory was discovered off the South African Coast, Mongabay News reported. Scientists were shocked to find a member of the "Latimeria chalumnae" species still alive, with its eight fins, a specific spotting pattern on the scales and huge bodies.

A recent study in the SA Journal of Science indicated that the coelacanths might face a new threat to survival with the uptick in shark hunting, which began booming in the 1980s.

"The jarifa gillnets used to catch sharks are a relatively new and more deadly innovation as they are large and can be set in deep water," the researchers noted in their paper.

They fear that the coelacanths are now at risk for "exploitation," particularly in Madagascar.

Image via the News Week 

A new study shows that military commander Napoléon Bonaparte may have died because of his cologne. Because the cologne contained so much alcohol, it might have made him smell great and protected him from diseases, but it was unable to stop him from overdosing due to the long-time exposure to the perfume. Ancient Origins has more details:  

There has long been speculation about the true cause of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death on the island of St. Helena on May 5, 1821. As we mark the 200th anniversary of this event, a biochemist from De Montfort University in Leicester (United Kingdom) believes he has finally solved the mystery of what killed one of history’s most recognized figures.

It was his love of cologne that killed him, asserts Parvez Haris, a professor of biomedical science at De Montfort’s School of Allied Health Sciences . According to Dr. Haris, Napoleon slowly poisoned himself to death over a number of years, by heavily and continuously using a type of men’s cologne that contained potentially toxic ingredients.

(via All That’s Interesting) 

Image via All That’s Interesting 

This is endearing. Forget the hardcore racing gamers screaming as they fail to turn in time -- let’s all appreciate this 93-year-old Japanese man gushing as he happily drives his old car in a racing game simulation. Our racing grandpa worked with cars for decades, and the car he drives in the game is an old Mazda Savana RX-7, the same vehicle he once drove over 30 years ago: 

While our new favorite granddad appears to be playing 2017’s Gran Turismo Sport, there really is only one way forward for future video entries: his grandson needs to gift the man Mario Kart 8: Deluxe. C’mon.

Give the desperate people what they want: an elderly, retired professional driver squaring off against a bunch of pre-teens on rainbow-colored roads alongside Mario, Toad, Bowser, and Princess Peach. It’s the best-selling racing game of all time, after all.

Honestly, given recent trends in the real-life car industry, we’re far more comfortable watching people drive within virtual worlds than in reality. Not convinced? Consider this: is a 93-year-old former professional driver any more unreliable than Tesla’s “self-driving” vehicles, which seem to have a habit of crashing into many, many things... including cop cars? 

Image via Input