More than 520,000 families who are registered with BabyCenter gave birth and named their child so far this year. Although there are still ten weeks left before 2021, BabyCenter has released its statistics for the top baby names of 2020. It's possible that they included announced names for upcoming 2020 births. Sophia is the top name for girls, which is not surprising, since it was also the #1 name in the previous ten years. The number one name for boys was Liam for the second year. While both top ten lists didn't change much, 2020 saw some changes in the lower rankings.   

Baby names are always a mirror of the times. Changes in the 2020 list reflect a year of loss and political divisiveness. Kobe shot up 175% after Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, lost his life in a tragic helicopter accident alongside his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna (up 216%). On the social and political fronts, Kamala (up 104%) and Liberty (up 12%) rose in popularity, while Karen and Chad declined by 13% and 12% respectively.

See the top 100 names for both boys and girls ranked at BabyCenter. -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Victoria Borodinova)

Joana Vasconcelos, a Portuguese textiles artist, created "Flower Power." She wrapped this Fender Stratocaster electric guitar in a knit sheath made of intricate psychedelic designs. The back side, which you can view at Colossal, is even groovier.

This guitar will be auctioned to benefit the British charity The Big Issue.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin commanded two ships, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, on a mission to explore the Arctic and chart the Northwest Passage. They did not return and sent no messages. A year went by, then two, and by 1850, Franklin's wife Lady Jane Franklin was begging for a search party. Meanwhile, a family in Northern Ireland was channeling the ghost of their daughter who died at age three. They asked the ghost of Louisa Coppin, who they called Weesy, what happened to the Franklin expedition.

Weesy responded with flair, filling the room with an Arctic scene that showed two ships amid snowy mountains and narrow channels. When asked if Franklin himself was still alive, Weesy revealed “a round-faced Man [ascending] the Mast and [waving] his hat,” and she answered a query about his exact location with a series of abbreviations that included “P.RI” and “BS.”

The spectral illuminations were only visible to Weesy’s sister Anne, who copied them onto paper and showed her father upon his return from a trip. Coppin wasn’t wholly disbelieving, but he didn’t act on the information immediately. Then, in May 1850, after hearing that Lady Jane was preparing to send a ship to search for her husband, he wrote her a letter detailing Weesy’s appearance.

William Coppin, Weesy's father, shared the information with Lady Jane, who was directing and financing ships to look for the expedition. It wasn't until 1859 that the mystery of what happened to the Franklin expedition was completely solved -and the evidence was found in the place that Weesy's chart had predicted. However, the ghostly influence on the search was not published until a few years after Lady Jane's death, and some questions and discrepancies subsequently turned up. Read the story of the ghost who found Sir John Franklin at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Francis Watt)

Imagine swimming in a pool of pancake syrup! Would you be able to do it? Would it be slower than swimming in water? The guy from the Action Lab went out and bought a bunch of pancake syrup to find out, but instead of a pool with swimmers, he used tubs with mechanical toys. Still, there was a university experiment done with pools and human swimmers, but sadly, they used something twice the viscosity of water but much cheaper and less tasty. However, when he posed the question, I pictured swimming in something as viscous as honey or even molasses, and that's a whole other story, which he addresses toward the end of this video. -via Digg

October is the time to indulge in the scariest of horror films, but which one is the scariest of them all? Yes, that's usually a matter of opinion, but BroadbandChoices did an experiment to see which films raised viewers heart rates the most. If you have a healthy heart and the ability to watch lots of horror, it sounds like it might have been fun.

Our team studied critic's lists and Reddit recommendations to curate 50 of the best horror filmsever made, before subjecting them to our test subjects.

Watching each movie in 5.1 surround sound, our panel of 50 people consumed over 120 hours of the best horror movies, each fitted with a heart rate monitor to measure which movies got their blood pumping the most to find the ultimate horror movie and crown the king of fright night.

By combining average heart rates and the highest spike, they ranked the top 35 scariest horror films, of which I've only seen six. See the results and ranking here.  -via Digg

In the 35 years that people spent diving to the wreckage of the Titanic, no human remains have ever been found or recorded. People are still asking the question of whether or not we may still discover the remains of the people who were onboard the iconic ship. The question has been discussed in an ongoing court battle to block RMS Titanic’s plan to retrieve the ship’s radio equipment, as Daily News details:   

Lawyers for the U.S. government have raised that question in an ongoing court battle to block the planned expedition. They cite archaeologists who say remains could still be there. And they say the company fails to consider the prospect in its dive plan.

“Fifteen hundred people died in that wreck,” said Paul Johnston, curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “You can’t possibly tell me that some human remains aren’t buried deep somewhere where there are no currents.”

The company, RMS Titanic Inc., wants to exhibit the ship’s Marconi wireless telegraph machine. It broadcast the sinking ocean liner’s distress calls and helped save about 700 people in lifeboats.

Retrieving the equipment would require an unmanned submersible to slip through a skylight or cut into a heavily corroded roof on the ship’s deck. A suction dredge would remove loose silt, while manipulator arms could cut electrical cords.

RMS Titanic Inc. says human remains likely would’ve been noticed after roughly 200 dives.

“It’s not like taking a shovel to Gettysburg,” said David Gallo, an oceanographer and company adviser. “And there’s an unwritten rule that, should we see human remains, we turn off the cameras and decide what to do next.”

Image via Daily News 

What were you doing when you were twelve years old? Maybe not looking for fossils, right? Pretty sure I was just trying to survive school when I was that young. This 12-year-old boy, however, has already made a  significant scientific discovery. Aspiring paleontologist Nathan Hrushkin and his father, Dion, discovered the partially exposed bones at Horseshoe Canyon in Canada, as Fox News details:

The Royal Tyrrell Museum sent a team of experts to the conservation site, who uncovered between 30 and 50 bones from the canyon’s wall.

“All of the bones collected belong to a single specimen, a juvenile hadrosaur approximately three or four years old,” the Nature Conservancy said, in the statement. “While hadrosaurs are the most common fossils found in Alberta’s Badlands, this particular specimen is noteworthy because few juvenile skeletons have been recovered and also because of its location in the strata, or the rock formation.”

“My dad and I have been visiting this property for a couple of years, hoping to find a dinosaur fossil, and we’ve seen lots of little bone fragments,” said aspiring paleontologist Nathan Hrushkin, in the statement. “This year I was exploring higher up the canyon and found about four bones. We sent pictures and to the Royal Tyrrell Museum and François, the paleontologist who replied, was able to identify one of the bones as a humerus from the photos so we knew we’d found something this time.”

Image via Fox News 

Finally, Screen Junkies gives us an Honest Trailer for a movie I've seen! I enjoyed Jordan Peele's 2019 horror film Us because it is just plain scary on the surface, but also keeps the audience guessing all the way to the end. This Honest Trailer gives away more plot points than it should, but certainly not all of them. Yes, it uses devices that have been used before, and yes, it requires suspension of disbelief, but neither of those things negate the horror or the artfulness of Us.

Even if dogs and humans can’t understand each other verbally, there are other ways where they can form great relationships and bonds. Yes, if you’ve got yourself a furry companion, you can read their body language to know what they’re feeling! From the position and movement of their tails, to their facial expressions, to their posture, The Spruce Pets gives us some tips on what our canine friends are feeling or thinking when they move their bodies a certain way. Check the full piece here! 

Image via Wikimedia Commons

We read stories about how humans have upset the balance of nature for our own ends, from hunting some species to extinction to fighting invasive species with other invasive species. Often it takes way too long to realize the harm, and sometimes it's too late. When America set up national parks in wilderness areas, the unintended consequences of so many tourists visiting bear territory were tragic. In 1967, two girls were killed by grizzly bears in Glacier National Park. What would we do about that? Biologist Gairdner Moment had an idea, which he wrote about in a 1969 essay called “Bears: The Need for a New Sanity in Wildlife Conservation.” His solution was to kill all the grizzly bears.  

At the parks, he was horrified to see that so many naive tourists were victims of popular bear propaganda, like Smokey Bear (“he looks the very embodiment of sturdy dependability”). Rather than focus on re-educating park goers or discouraging practices that attract the bears, Moment argued that humans are not morally obligated to protect the grizzly bear—or any other animal. As he confidently stated, “any zoologist could draw up a list of animal(s) […] we would be better off without: the common rat, the fire ant, certain species of sharks, the tse-tse fly.”

Moment’s alarmist statements quickly gained press and popularity, and were republished in mass-market periodicals. He would go on to publish several more essays defending this argument.

While other scientists objected, the parks took measures that made the bears more dangerous. Read about Dr. Moment and his war against grizzlies at Jstor Daily.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Jean-Pierre Lavoie)

One of the more active posts on AskReddit today poses the question "What is the fastest you have ever seen a new co-worker get fired?" It's filled with stories that will make you laugh, then question the whole of humanity.

Four or so hours. When I was 18 I got a job at a grocery store, along with three others. We all started training together. On the first day we were training in the evening, and one girl asked to go home, she said her head hurt. They said fine, she clocked out, went to grab a grocery cart and started filling it with beer and liquor. The store manager walked over, and asked her if she was having a party. She said yes. Didn't even try to come up with an excuse. Just, "yeah, I am, so I needed to leave early on my first day." basically. He fired her. -houseat261turnerlane

We imagine the party was to celebrate her new job, like the guy who missed the first three days of work because he parents treated him to an Orlando trip as a reward for finally getting a job -which he was immediately fired from. But there are many reasons someone got fired on their first day, not all of them funny.  

"You don't tell me what to do, you're a woman." To his trainer. Lasted until management came in that morning and heard about it.  -VerbableNouns

And some stories are gold because they are told so well.

Not sure if it counts as being fired, but a guy in our basic training threatened a drill sergeant with a bayonet. No idea what happened after he went to the hospital, but I didn't see him again. -shroom2021

You can read all the tales of a new job cut extremely short at reddit.

(Image credit: Flickr user m01229)

The internet has been arguing about the pronunciation of GIF (graphics interchange format) for years. Honestly, does it really matter? I have never had the word come up in conversation using voice, only in text. But the debate leads us to another, broader topic: who gets to decide how a word should be pronounced? The person who coined the word may have a strong opinion, but the word will be pronounced the way most people actually say it. And what causes people to pronounce a word a certain way? Tom Scott has some thoughts on the matter.

Peru is famous for its Nazca Lines, the giant geoglyphs drawn on the ground, some only visible from high above. A new image has been discovered, that of a cat relaxing on the side of a hill, that has been dated to between 200 to 100 BCE. The hill is actually an observation point for the Nazca Lines, so how did they just now discover it?

The drawing, which was laid down nearly 2,000 years ago, was badly faded, which explains why it eluded detection for so long. The feline figure “was barely visible” and “about to disappear” on account of its location on a fairly steep slope and due to the effects of natural erosion, the Ministry of Culture said. Recent restoration work brought the cat into full view.

The geoglyph shows the cat in profile, with its head turned toward the viewer. The feline figure stretches 121 feet long (37 meters), and the lines of the drawing measure between 12 to 16 inches (30 to 40 cm) thick. They were made by removing the top layer of rocks and exposing the bright bedrock beneath.

Now, that's a cat doodle! Read about the "new" Peruvian cat at Gizmodo.

The 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was so different from Raiders of the Lost Ark that it almost turned fans off the character, which made the return-to-form Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade look all the better. We understood Nazis, and the guys who fought them were the good guys. It's not so clear in The Temple of Doom. Mel magazine asked archaeologists from all over for their opinions on the character.  

Larry Coben, archaeologist and founder/executive director of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative: Indiana Jones isn’t really an archeologist except in name. He doesn’t excavate in any of the movies, he doesn’t do surveys — he’s a treasure hunter, and archaeologists aren’t treasure hunters. The only thing I think I can say is that a lot of archaeologists would like to punch Nazis too, but that’s really the only similarity.

That said, it’s a great adventure story and Indiana Jones is fun. It’s inspired people to get interested in archaeology — I would say that Indiana Jones has inspired a whole generation of people to be archaeologists. Archaeologists always say that it’s awful and it’s terrible and it is all those things. But I suspect there would be far less public interest in archaeology and far less funding for archaeology if not for the interest that he attracted. Saying that might get me in trouble with some of my colleagues, but I think it’s true.

The other archaeologists agreed that Indiana Jones isn't at all like a real archeologist, and The Temple of Doom had even more problems than the other films (the fourth one is mostly ignored). Read what they have to say, especially archaeologists who know India and explain the many things the movie got wrong.

Because of the pandemic, the 80th Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual conference was held online. The conference software they were using was just slightly too strict when it comes to banned words, as experts’ messages were being censored by the software. Take for example what happened to Tyrannosaurus rex expert Thomas R. Holtz Jr. He was typing “Hell Creek Formation,” the rock unit in Montana where the remains of North America’s last giant dinosaurs have been found, but was surprised to see four asterisks replace the ‘hell’ in ‘Hell Creek Formation.’ The New York Times has more details: 

Puzzled, he described the issue on Twitter. Colleagues chimed in with other words that had been rejected by the software system set up to filter out profanities: knob, pubis, penetrate and stream, among others.

“Most funny to us was the censorship of ‘bone,’ which, after all, are the main thing we work with,” Mr. Holtz said.

Jessica Theodor, president of the society, said participants kept finding other words that triggered the asterisks and alerted the society’s leaders, who then relayed the information to Convey Services. The company quickly removed the words as it learned about them.

Paleontologists began having fun with the system.

They typed in random words to see which ones would result in asterisks. One created a meme that compared their efforts with those of the velociraptors in the film “Jurassic Park” that threw themselves against an electric fence to find weak spots.

“A couple of us chuckled and started calling Hell Creek ‘Heck Creek,’” said Stephanie K. Drumheller, a lecturer and paleontologist at the University of Tennessee.

Image via The New York Times