Bugs and glitches are inevitable in games, and the FIFA games aren’t an exception. In some FIFA games,...

The ball flies off into orbit, limbs twist and turn to form Lovecraftian nightmares, and the AI creates mysterious giant goalkeepers who spread through the game like a virus.

But of all the many bugs that the FIFA games have had, this bug of this year’s FIFA game may just be the most remarkable.

The ball hovers at top of the goal, just under where the crossbar and post meet, neither passing across the line or moving away from it. The goalkeeper flaps about underneath, trying and failing to grab the ball. One of the defenders trots over for a closer look, but doesn't lift a finger to help. Eventually the player-controlled player comes storming in, and there's a brief FIFA physics moment before the ball decides to fall, and it drops over the goal line, seemingly oblivious to the chaos it has caused.

My favourite part of this clip is the commentary - poor Derek Rae seems locked in a loop, rinsing his various lines of dialogue used to describe a shot that hits the bar. It's amazing.

See the clip of the glitch over here.

(Image Credit: u/BuschLatte/ Reddit/ Eurogamer)

The first nest of murder hornets in the U.S. has been discovered in Washington state. These hornets are a threat to the native honeybees, so scientists and state officials are working together to wipe the harmful insects. The state’s Agriculture Department used dental floss to tie tracking devices to the giant hornets, as AP News detailed: 

“Ladies and gentlemen, we did it,” agency spokeswoman Karla Salp said at a virtual briefing. Bad weather delayed plans Friday to destroy the nest found in Blaine, a city north of Seattle.

The nest is about the size of a basketball and contains an estimated 100 to 200 hornets, according to scientists, who suspected it was in the area ever since the invasive insects began appearing late last year.

Image via AP News 

James Buggy of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, was at a low point of his life in 1917. His wife had died in childbirth, and he was left to raise his baby daughter Eleanor alone. Now that the girl was three years old, she needed a mother, and he was lonely. That's when he met 23-year-old Annie Compolo, who returned his attentions and doted on Eleanor. They were soon married.

Four weeks later, James would realize that he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

Annie, it seemed, had a fiery temper, and while quarrels among newlyweds are not uncommon, James had decided that he didn't want any disruptions in the peaceful Edgewood home he had fought so hard to maintain. His first wife, Kathryn, had been a kind and gentle woman who rarely, if ever, raised her voice. James himself was known among his friends and co-workers as a kind-hearted fellow, the sort of man who had always put his faith and his family above everything else in his life. He had attended St. Edward's Catholic School as a youth and was an active member of his church. He was proud of his community and never passed up an opportunity to volunteer for a good cause. So when he heard through the grapevine that the former Miss Compolo had been less than faithful as a married woman, a terrible argument ensued. James put his foot down. On the night of Sunday, February 25, he told Annie, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted her out of the house by the time he returned home from work the following day.

On Monday afternoon, James returned to his home at 825 West Independence Street and found that his wife was gone. But, much to his alarm, so was his young daughter.

One has to wonder why James made no arrangements for his daughter to be looked after when he ordered his wife gone before he returned. But anyway, you can tell at this point of the story that no good would come of the child's disappearance. Read the strange story of the Buggy family at Pennsylvania Oddities. -via Strange Company

Steroids have legitimate medical uses, but they are well-known as an enhancement technique for bodybuilders, athletes, and everyday people who believe they will look better by using them. To understand steroid use, it is necessary to look at their history and chemical makeup, how they are used today, and the many side effects that could come with non-medical use.

But why is it so bad to use these drugs? To begin with, people who misuse steroids often use dosages that are 10 to 100 times higher than the doses which are usually prescribed for medical conditions. As side-effects are usually dosage-dependent that makes things even worse.

Long-term effects include kidney problem up to kidney failure, liver damage and tumors, enlarged heart, high blood pressure and changes in blood cholesterol all of which increase the risk of stroke and heart attack – even in young people. And if that wasn’t bad enough, also the risk of blood clots increases. In men, sperm counts also decrease, they go bald, develop breasts, have an increased risk of prostate cancer, and, of course, then there are the balls.

So let’s look at your balls shall we?

And there we get to the real reason you want to read about steroids, which is addressed at Today I Found Out. The effects of steroids on women are also addressed.


For a more humorous and less fact-filled look at the subject, see the previous article Bodybuilders Have Tiny Testes.

A man named Ivan Smirnov has created a computer model that could predict a student’s educational outcome by analyzing his/her tweet. Through the use of mathematical textual analysis that takes into account the student’s vocabulary, the model is able to identify if a student is a high or a low academic achiever, and it bases its prediction from that.

Every word has its own rating (a kind of IQ). Scientific and cultural topics, English words, and words and posts that are longer in length rank highly and serve as indicators of good academic performance. An abundance of emojis, words or whole phrases written in capital letters, and vocabulary related to horoscopes, driving, and military service indicate lower grades in school. At the same time, posts can be quite short--even tweets are quite informative. The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), and an article detailing the study's results was published in EPJ Data Science.

[...]

By 'predict', the researcher does not refer to future forecasting, but rather the correlation between the calculated results and the real scores students earned on the PISA exam, as well as their USE scores (which are publicly available online in aggregated form--i.e., average scores per school). In the preliminary phase, the model learned how to predict the PISA data. In the final model, the calculations were checked against the USE results of high school graduates and university entrants.

Head over at EurekAlert to know more details about the study.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: I.Smirnov/ EurekAlert)

At first glance, mole rats look like puny creatures because of their appearance as well as their poor eyesight. But don’t let their appearance deceive you; these rodents can be a force to be reckoned with, at least to their enemies at their own size, which are other mole rats.

New research suggests there’s brute power in those numbers: Like ants or termites, the mole-rats go to battle with rival colonies to conquer their lands. 

Wild naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) will invade nearby colonies to expand their territory, sometimes abducting pups to incorporate them into their own ranks, researchers report September 28 in the Journal of Zoology. This behavior may put smaller, less cohesive colonies at a disadvantage, potentially supporting the evolution of bigger colonies.

Researchers stumbled across this phenomenon by accident while monitoring naked mole-rat colonies in Kenya’s Meru National Park.

The phrase “quantity has a quality of its own” is, indeed, true to some extent.

More details about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Roman Klementschitz/ Wikimedia Commons)

Pet the dogs. Start a fire. Observe or hunt down some animals. Go fishing. Tend to your wounds. Distribute the food you have accordingly to yourself and your dogs, to ensure that no one will starve. These are some of the things that you have to do in order to survive in the Alaskan wilderness.

The Red Lantern is a survival game developed by Timberline Studios and was recently released in the Nintendo Switch. As a survival game, your goal is to survive in the wilderness, and prevent your dogs from dying.

When people saw the announcement trailer last year, some were turned off because of the scene where one of your sled dogs presumably died from a bear attack. 

But there are some options to keep your dogs alive in the game, and one of them is by turning off dog deaths in the settings.

“Though The Red Lantern contains roguelike elements and poor decisions can result in unfortunate consequences for your sled team, an optional toggle can disable death for your dogs,” Can You Pet the Dog? tweeted.

People in the tweet comments are pretty excited to see an option like this, which makes the stakes pretty clear. Things might not go right, but it won’t send you over the edge if seeing dogs die is something that upsets you. Plenty of folks reacted with relief, noting that they weren’t originally going to play the game because of it — but now they might be able to give it a go.

Yay!

(Image Credit: Can You Pet The Dog?/ Twitter)

As we get older, we realize that we don’t need that many friends. We just need a handful of friends who we know will stick with us through thick and thin. These behaviors were once thought to be unique to us humans. As it turns out, they weren’t. Scientists have discovered that some animals, such as chimpanzees, have these traits as well.

The work is described in the journal Science and is authored by a team of psychologists and primatologists, including current and former researchers from the Harvard Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

The study draws on 78,000 hours of observations, made between 1995 and 2016, which looked at the social interactions of 21 male chimpanzees between the ages of 15 and 58 years old in the Kibale National Park in Uganda. It shows what's believed to be the first evidence of nonhuman animals actively selecting who they socialize with during aging.

Learn more details about this study over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: Ikiwaner/ Wikimedia Commons)

One of the most common skin conditions in the world is acne, and it is the most common skin condition in the United States, affecting over 50 million people in the country annually. The skin disease, which is linked to excess oil production and bacterial inflammation, usually starts in puberty, and affects adolescents and young adults across the world.

A new paper published in the journal Nature Communications tells of a discovery that could be used in the future in developing new acne therapies. The findings involve a protein called GATA6.

Learn more about this study over at MedicalXpress.

Sweet.

(Image Credit: Kjerstin_Michaela/ Pixabay)

The collection chamber of the machine can only hold so much, after all. The OSIRIS-REx’s collection chamber can no longer close all the way, leading to some of the material it collected from asteroid Bennu to float away into space. MIT Technology Review explains the reason why the spacecraft collected too much: 

Over the last few days, the onboard cameras revealed that the collection chamber was losing particles that were floating into space. “A substantial amount of the sample is seen floating away,” mission lead Dante Lauretta said Friday. As it turned out, the sample collection attempt picked up too much material—possibly up to two kilograms, the upper limit of what OSIRIS-REx was designed to collect. About 400 grams seems visible from the cameras. The collection lid has failed to close properly and remains wedged open by pieces that are up to three centimeters in size, creating a centimeter-wide gap for material to escape.

Image via MIT Technology Review

Oreo created a doomsday vault in Norway to house its cookies just in case something terrible happens to the world. Cookies aren’t something you’d put into a vault for safekeeping, but the company isn’t taking any chances. It’s also a great marketing stunt, as people will talk about Oreo cookies, regardless of how ridiculous the Oreo doomsday vault sounds, as Input Magazine details: 

In a video about the Global Oreo Vault project, the company says it was inspired by a tweet from a fan on October 3rd asking if the asteroid strikes, "I wonder who will save the Oreos?" It then sprung into action, working with one of the same architects who designed the seed vault. Except instead of having two years to design the vault as he did with that one, in this case, he had just thirty days before the asteroid reaches us to get the Oreos safely stashed in permafrost.

"As an added precaution, the Oreo packs are wrapped in mylar, which can withstand temperatures from -80 degrees to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and is impervious to chemical reactions, moisture and air, keeping the cookies fresh and protected for years to come," Oreo said

Image via Input Magazine

Listen, sometimes we want to drown our sorrows in alcohol, and that’s understandable. Maybe we’d like to pour out a cold one every other week, to destress or to relax. But what happens when you drink alcohol every night? Some people associate their long life to the glass of alcohol they drank each night, like the oldest living woman in Great Britain. Grace Jones attributed her long life to the glass of whiskey she drank each night. But is it the same for everybody? Check the List’s full piece to know more! 

Image via the List 

The Maya were not only good in astronomy and in architecture. They were also good at filtering water. The secret to their filtration system? Zeolite and quartz. These minerals are so effective in removing contaminants in water that they are still used water filtration systems to this day.

"What's interesting is this system would still be effective today, and the Maya discovered it more than 2,000 years ago," said anthropologist Kenneth Barnett Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati.

[...]

"The apparent zeolite filtration system at Tikal's Corriental reservoir is the oldest known example of water purification in the Western Hemisphere," the authors wrote, "and the oldest known use of zeolite for decontaminating drinking water in the world."

The ability to have clean water was of deep importance to the Maya, and of great concern, particularly to Tikal. The city's only water source was 10 reservoirs. Given the large population, and the highly variable climate that went through periods of seasonal drought, their drinking water was prone to contamination from both microbes and cinnabar, or mercury sulfide, a pigment the Maya used heavily.

Now that’s truly amazing.

Know more details about this story over at Science Alert.

(Image Credit: Daniel Schwen/ Wikimedia Commons)

Tombstones commonly contain the name of the deceased and their birth and death dates. If you've ever looked through different stones in a cemetery, you've probably noticed all kinds of symbols that are added for decoration. Some are obvious: tombstones for children are engraved with angels or lambs, and crosses, stars, and crescents denote the deceased's religious faith. But there are manny symbols that aren't so easily interpreted, like the broken chain seen above.

Medieval wisdom once held that a golden chain kept the soul in the body. In death, the chain is broken and the soul is freed. If the chain is unbroken and if it features the letters FLT (for Friendship, Love, and Truth), it probably means the deceased belonged to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization that seeks to promote charitable causes and offer aid.

The symbols in this list mostly say "it could mean" and "it could also mean" because, while there is traditional symbolism passed down over the years, many tombstones have symbols because those who paid for the stone just liked them. Read the entire list at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user Carl Wykoff)

Talavera Maldonado began building an ornate mansion in Salamanca, Spain, in 1493, but didn't live to see it completed, which wasn't until 1517. Its facade is covered with 300 scallop shells, the symbol of the Order of Santiago.

An enduring legend of Casa de las Conchas is that there is a gold coin (or an ounce of gold, according to some sources) hidden underneath each shell. Another widespread legend is that the family that owned the building hid their jewels under one of these shells that adorn the façade, documenting the amount hidden but not the shell where it was located, and whoever wants to find the treasure must provide the amount stipulated as a guarantee in advance. If they find the treasure, they can take it and get their contribution back, otherwise they lose the money left in pledge.

The shells are the most unique feature of Casa de las Conchas, but it also sports intricate grillwork and filigree, coats of arms, and gargoyles. Read about the mansion and see plenty of pictures at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jose Luis Cernadas Iglesias)