On September 21, at around 6PM, a 37-year-old man from Wythenshawe, named Wesley Hamnett, finished an incredible feat of travelling 230 miles in six days on a bike. But he did not ride on a grown man’s bike, but on the bike of a little kid — his daughter’s pink bike. Why did he do all of that, you ask? For charity, of course!

So far, he's raised an incredible £6,000 - including offline donations - and all the money he has raised will go to a selection of charities, including Macmillan, Christie Hospital, British Heart Foundation and his local hospital in Wythenshawe.

[...]

He explains: "The main reason is that my grandparents all passed away, the last one was last year - my grandad Fred.

"That was a bit of a sad time really, knowing that I'd not got any grandparents left. So I thought, 'I want to do something significant,' you know, to raise money for the people that have helped them all through our lives."

Sharing the details of his plans on Twitter, Wes said that if he could get 1000 retweets on his post, he would do it on his daughter's bike, rather than his own - and so he did, which must have looked unusual to say the least.

Hamnett tells his story over at LADBible.

Wow!

(Image Credit: Enda Burke/ LADBible)

One of the most difficult challenges when it comes to writing is making your readers laugh. If visual comedy is already difficult to achieve, just imagine if you only have words as your medium to make your audience giggle and laugh, not to mention that you also have to persuade your readers to immerse themselves into the world where your story is happening. Sure, there are simple ways to make your audience laugh, such as using funny names for characters or places, but those are not going to last long. So how do you make your readers laugh without resorting to that? In his piece over at QDT, Erik Deckers gives us four tools that could prove useful to us when writing humor. These are: the iceberg theory, surprise, relatability, and exaggeration.

Head over at the site to learn more.

(Image Credit: Peggy_Marco/ Pixabay)

The world's nuclear waste facilities are buried underground and pretty well documented. But what about thousands of years from now, when it will still be radioactive, but there's a good possibility that our languages and cultures will have completely changed, and our present documentation is inaccessible? How will we warn future civilizations away from such dangerous sites? That question was posed to a group of scientists in the 1990s, and their brainstormed ideas were imaginative and often quite weird. Could artificial intelligence do any better? Janelle Shane (previously at Neatorama) trained a neural network on the question by feeding it the human-generated ideas. The ideas that the algorithm came back with were quite bonkers. They range from those that would more likely attract people,

A series of very-large-scale sculptures of robots, which would be visually striking and memorable from a distance.

to the unlikely,

A massive device that would alter the flow of time and gravity in the vicinity.

to the terrifying.

A large cluster of enormous worms growing from a rocky surface, extruding bubbling fluid, and emitting audible chittering noises.

Read more of the suggestions generated by artificial intelligence at AI Weirdness. -via Metafilter

Find my cat in this photo. from r/aww

It's a challenge from redditor plizzaslayer111. If you tried and then want to give up and see the cat, first go to the post and double click on the picture to make it huge. Then it will be clear. -via Digg

via GIPHY

In the Bible, Jonah was swallowed up by a big fish because he tried to avoid God's command to go to Ninevah. He was ejected alive three days later. In 1910, a similar story appeared in Australian newspapers.

    One of the employees at the Bega whaleries (reports the Sydney Sun) is recovering from a mixed attack of fright, hysterics and fainting. He was engaged cutting up a whale a day or two ago, and when he had cleaved away the flesh from one side of the stomach he saw what appeared to be the fully dressed body of a young lady lying inside.

    At first he thought she was dead, and he was considering the advisability of going off to report to the police when the young lady rubbed her eyes and sat up. The whaler fell off the whale. But the young lady was not even a ghost.
    – The Bendigo Independent, November 18, 1910

Oh yeah, you better believe there is more to the story, which ranges from a perfectly reasonable explanation to "That can't be true!" You can read the rest of the newspaper account at Second Glance History. -via Strange Company

I had never heard of the allassonic effect before, have you? Wikipedia explains.

The hot chocolate effect, also known as the allassonic effect, is a phenomenon of wave mechanics first documented in 1982 by Frank Crawford, where the pitch heard from tapping a cup of hot liquid rises after the addition of a soluble powder.[1][2] It was first observed in the making of hot chocolate or instant coffee, but also occurs in other situations such as adding salt to supersaturated hot water or cold beer. Recent research has found many more substances which create the effect, even in initially non-supersaturated liquids.[3]

It can be observed by pouring hot milk into a mug, stirring in chocolate powder, and tapping the bottom of the mug with a spoon while the milk is still in motion. The pitch of the taps will increase progressively with no relation to the speed or force of tapping. Subsequent stirring of the same solution (without adding more chocolate powder) will gradually decrease the pitch again, followed by another increase. This process can be repeated a number of times, until equilibrium has been reached.[4] Upon initial stirring, entrained gas bubbles reduce the speed of sound in the liquid, lowering the frequency. As the bubbles clear, sound travels faster in the liquid and the frequency increases.

The video above shows you how to do it, but I'm not sure if that's instant coffee or he's putting cocoa into hot water just to demonstrate. Yuk. Now I am craving a nice cup of cocoa with real milk, sugar, a touch of vanilla, and cocoa powder. -via TYWKIWDBI

What do people who live in the Canadian Arctic Circle eat? You might think of the traditional Inuit meat-based diet, but that was destroyed by regulation and the establishment of permanent settlements. Food is imported from lower latitudes, but it is very expensive and rarely fresh. However, in the past couple of decades, greenhouses have sprung up on the Northwest Territories, even inside the Arctic Circle. Ray Solotki is executive director of the Inuvik Community Greenhouse, https://www.inuvikgreenhouse.com/ 120 miles inside the Arctic Circle, and she stays busy all summer.

“We don’t really have a cold problem like a lot of people think we do,” says Solotki. “We have a heat problem, because of the sunlight.” 24 hours of summer daylight keeps the greenhouse balmy, while accelerating vegetable growth. Crops grow so speedily here that in early July, three weeks into harvesting, Solotki merrily reported collecting over 220 pounds of food. The North’s midnight sun makes greenhouse gardening surprisingly productive, with everything from leafy greens, squash, tomatoes, and beds of flowers soaking up the extra light.

This greenhouse has operated since it was built in a converted hockey arena in 1998. Since then, greenhouses have sprung up in many very northern towns. Read about greenhouse gardening in the Arctic at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Inuvik Community Greenhouse)

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The Valentine's Puzzle Pie, baked. Like most puzzles, a few pieces of this one have gone missing (In this case, lost in the oven when they fell off the edge of the pie! ) but I'm still kinda smitten with it. Hope you're all having a love-ly day. ❤️🍒. #chocolate #cherry #pie #baking #pastrylife #bakemyday #bakedgoods #torontobakery #bakerslife #bakersgonnabake #baker #fromscratch #huffposttaste #f52grams #thebakefeed #thekitchn #food52 #imsomartha #marthabakes #tastingtable #feedfeed @thefeedfeed #gloobyfood #jigsaw #puzzle #piecrust #valentines

A post shared by Helen Nugent (@batterednbaked) on Feb 14, 2018 at 1:54pm PST

Helen Nugent taught herself the arcane arts of piecraft. As you can see from her Instagram feed, she has thoroughly mastered them. From her home kitchen in Toronto, she weaves the most elaborately tasty and beautiful pies you've ever seen. Nugent now passes on her knowledge in a newly-published grimoire titled Pie Style: Stunning Designs and Flavorful Fillings You Can Make at Home.

Matt Brockman played trumpet in a duet with himself. It's a medley of all kinds of theme songs you know and love. I suggest that you listen without watching to see how many of these tunes you can name, and then watch with the video playing behind him to reveal them all. -via Digg

As part of their continuing series on job secrets, Mental Floss talked to a couple of astronauts about what that important and glamorous job is really like. Mike Massimino, former NASA astronaut and professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, and Garrett Reisman, former NASA astronaut and the director of space operations at SpaceX's headquarters tell us about getting the job, training for the job, and some of the things you might expect when you are an astronaut.

Even in a place as tight as a space station, astronauts still manage to misplace their belongings. Thanks to the lack of gravity, anything they let go of immediately drifts away, which can cause problems when they’re not paying attention. Massimino recalls one incident that happened to his crewmate Mike Good: "He had his grandfather’s watch with him, and he comes up to me and goes, 'Mass, I can’t find the watch.' We’re looking all over the place and I stop after a minute and go, 'Mike, it’s inside here somewhere.'"

They eventually found it trapped inside the airlock. The air filter is another common place where lost items end up: Without gravity interfering, the air flow will carry any floating objects there. "One thing we would say is, 'If you can’t find something, just wait,'" Massimino says. "You'd wake up in the morning and look at the filter and see like aspirin and a piece of Velcro or something, because everything eventually would get there."

Read the rest of the 11 secrets of the profession of astronaut at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center)

Over the past 30 years, we've marveled at how astronomers can detect and collect data on exoplanets outside of our solar system. But all the exoplanets found so far have been in our Milky Way galaxy. That is, until data detected by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2012 was analyzed and interpreted.

Now Rosanne Di Stefano at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics along with several colleagues, say they have found a candidate planet in the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy some 23 million light years from Earth near the constellation of Ursa Major. This alien world, christened M51-ULS-1b, is probably slightly smaller than Saturn and orbits a binary system at a distance of perhaps ten times Earth’s distance from the Sun.

The observation was possible because of a special set of conditions. The planet’s host binary system consists of a neutron star or black hole which is devouring a massive nearby star at a huge rate. The infall of stardust releases huge amounts of energy, making this system one of brightest sources of X-rays in the entire Whirlpool Galaxy. Indeed, its X-ray luminosity is roughly a million times brighter than the entire output of the Sun at all wavelengths.

Now wait a minute. This exoplanet is 23 million light years away, so what they discovered is that there was a planet there 23 million years ago. In astronomic terms, it may as well be today, since we couldn't have detected it any earlier because X-rays travel at the same speed as visible light. At any rate, a binary system with a black hole eating a star is pretty darn neat, and the story of how astronomers detected this planet amid all that data is pretty neat, too. Read that story at Discover magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

Pictured: Resurrectionists breaking at least one rule.

We've posted plenty of accounts of grave robbers, body-snatchers, and resurrectionists, but never a guide on how to do it ...not that we would ever encourage or even condone such activities. However, before the rise of postmortem donations, medical schools needed cadavers for anatomy class, and a profession arose to provide those corpses. A list of dos and don't from that profession can be interesting, edifying, or a complete turn off. You decide. Here's a sample.

3. Never Take The Burial Clothes

This is perhaps the most important of all body snatching rules. Fail to follow this one, and you could expect to be punished accordingly. Your crime would quickly escalate from a misdemeanor to a felony.

I’ve written a post highlighting the main punishments that body snatchers received if they were caught and you can read it here, but, by stripping the cadaver of all it’s ‘property’, that is a burial shroud, jewelry if any, plus anything that was removable, you could then only be accused of stealing a dead body.

And a dead body didn’t belong to anyone.

Read the rest of the explanation of that rule plus four other helpful hints for grave robbers at Digging Up 1800. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Hablot Knight Browne)

YouTube user TrainDozer imagines a different type of Star Trek show: a sitcom. Adapting the theme song for Family Matters, one of the iconic sitcoms of 90s, he introduces Data, the titular character of a comedic and wholesome story of an android trying to become a human. Data lives on a ship with a family of good-natured humans and a Klingon.

-via reddit

You may have been this artwork by Nikkolas Smith before on the 'net, but now it's a permanent part of the Downtown Disney shopping district at Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. It depicts the late Chadwick Boseman dressed as the superhero Black Panther sharing the Wakanda salute with a child in a hospital gown and Black Panther mask.  

“This one is special. My King Chad tribute is now on a wall on display at Downtown Disney,” he wrote. “It is a full circle moment for me: my final two projects as a Disney Imagineer last summer were working on the children’s hospital project and the Avengers Campus.”

The child in the mural is wearing a hospital gown, to honor the late “Black Panther” star who visited children with cancer at St. Jude campus, while waging a private battle with the disease. The installation is titled “King Chad.”

Read more about the artwork at Variety. -via reddit

Teachers will occasionally ask students to share something about themselves with the class, often in the mode of telling a "fun fact" or maybe in the game "two truths and a lie." The thing about students is that they are young, and sometimes more honest than they should be. Redditor Kriss0509 asked teachers to share those kinds of stories, and the answers will make you laugh or cringe or both.   

My first year, as an earnest and ideological teacher in a very rough underserved area, I got all the students in a circle on the first day to talk about what we’d done that summer. I pointed to a student who’d been engaged w me before class and said, “what did you do this summer that could inspire us?” His answer: “I did the last 2 months of a sentence for stealing a car.”

Um. I hadn’t expected that. So I pointed to another student and said, “OK! That’s great! Let’s talk about what you did this summer!”

That student said, “YES. I had such a good summer. I went to camp and...[laughing] lemme stop lying. I did the last 2 months of a sentence with that guy cause I stole that car w him.”

-markfromhtx

Not a teacher, but on the first day of 9th grade we had to form a circle and say one thing about ourselves that we thought was unique. When it was this dudes turn (lets call him mike) Mike stands up and says in a really serious tone goes '' My mom and dad grow weed''

His house got raided the next day and his dad got arrested smh

-RatedRSoopastar

Read the entire reddit thread here, or you can find a ranked list of the 30 best answers at Bored Panda. 

(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user Howard County Library System)