The Moon has always been an object of interest for many people, the ancients, the conspiracy theorists, the sci-fi writers, and scientists alike, and it seems that a new mystery arises on its surface. The Moon is rusting, apparently.

If you didn't know already, rust is a reddish-brown compound that forms when iron is exposed to water and oxygen. It's a common reaction as seen on The Red Planet, Mars. According to NASA, the planet rusted long ago when the iron on its surface combined with oxygen and water.

Although the Moon is airless, recent findings indicate the presence of hematite, a form of rust that only occurs with oxygen and water. This has scientists baffled.

The Moon is also constantly exposed to a steam of hydrogen from the solar wind. Hydrogen is a reducing agent that 'donates' its electrons to the materials it is exposed to.

Rusting occurs due to a loss of electrons, so if hypothetically oxygen and water were present on the moon, the hydrogen would cancel out the rusting process.

"It's very puzzling," says planetary scientist Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii at Manoa." "The Moon is a terrible environment for hematite to form in."

After months of investigating this phenomenon, Li and the NASA scientists think that they might have solved this baffling case.

More details about this over at Mashable.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Good diet and exercise is what makes us fit. But this formula is not exclusive to humans; it can be applied to animals, too. This device for chickens is a great example of balance between diet and exercise.

Alison McNeice of the Featherheads Bird Rescue in Hobart, Tasmania, created an amusing chicken enrichment exercise wheel. This merry-go-round of sorts featured hanging cucumbers and ears of corn that rotated in an endless circle, which kept the birds motivated to keep moving in pursuit.

“Here is a chicken exercise wheel that I made last year. Chicken enrichment is important, too!”

Nice!

(Image Credit: Laughing Squid)

The Swedish company known for its furniture of excellent value has now uploaded seven decades’ worth of its catalogs in an online archive that is accessible to anyone. If you’re interested in how furniture designs change over the years or how the company alters or changes the presentation of their catalogs as the years went by, browsing through the archive is now a great option. However, you don’t need a reason to view the catalogs. If you just want to casually browse through hundreds of pages, that’s no problem at all! Check their archive here.

Image via Open Culture

Bill Edgar, a private investigator in Queensland, Australia, offers a special service. For $10,000 (that's $7,318.55 US dollars), he'll quietly attend your funeral. Then he'll stand up and reveal the secrets that you had held onto all of your life. He described one such funeral job to ABC News:

Dressed in tailored pants and vest, Mr Edgar said he was very respectful in the way he carried out his job.

"I actually blend in with the mourners," he said. "I sit with the family and friends. I sit in the middle with everybody."

In the case of his very first client Mr Edgar said he was instructed to interrupt the man's best friend when he was delivering the eulogy.

"I was to tell the best mate to sit down and shut up," he said.

"He knew that he'd [the best mate] been trying to have an affair with his wife.

And if there's someone at your funeral whom you don't want there, he'll eject them.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Bill Edgar

Intergenerational wealth is the best kind of wealth to have, as you only have to be lucky enough to be born into it, while building great wealth from lesser wealth requires luck plus talent, ambition, and effort. Still, there is no shortage of wealthy heirs who are convinced they deserve everything they have. Visual Capitalist compiled a list of the 25 currently wealthiest families in the world, shown in both graphic and chart form.    

The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t stopped the world’s wealthiest families from growing their fortunes. Over the past year, the richest family—the Waltons—grew their wealth by $25 billion, or almost $3 million per hour.

This graphic, using data from Bloomberg, ranks the 25 most wealthy families in the world. The data excludes first-generation wealth and wealth controlled by a single heir, which is why you don’t see Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates on the list. Families whose source of wealth is too diffused or opaque to be valued are also excluded.

What's left is a glimpse into more money than you and I could ever imagine having. For example, while the Koch family lost billions in the oil crash this year, they still came in at #3 and will never worry about making rent. See the list, graphic, and more information here. -via Digg

What you need to know in order to be relieved of the hardships caused by the 3,6,9 manifestation. YOU DON'T WANT TO PASS THIS BY!

Click Here

This charming potato man and his car grace the cover of a 1931 children's book from the Soviet Union. It contains instructions for making people and their accessories from potatoes and other household items.

Pick the right potatoes and wash them well. Cut and hollow them, as shown, with a penknife.

Make arms, legs, necks, tails from matches or from sticks. Twist a paper tube and make a samovar tap and a teapot nose out of it.

Stick potatoes with matches.

Those were the days when children were expected to know how to use a penknife and matches as a matter of course. And lest you think this is indicative of a lack of toys in the Soviet Union, recall that the early Mr. Potato Head sets were just plastic features attached to tacks, and you were supposed to raid the pantry for your own vegetables. See a gallery of images from the book at Puppies and Flowers. -via Everlasting Blort

The perfect Tik Tok exists... pic.twitter.com/D1isi9dZPT

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) September 4, 2020

Here is an astonishing moment from nature, when Donatello meets a swamp kitten. The music only enhances the exceptional video, and it all happens within seven seconds. Nice. Incidentally, if the perfect TikTok actually existed, it wouldn't be so difficult to embed. -via Nag on the Lake

Kids are truly difficult beings to supervise. Take your eyes off of them for a moment, and the next thing you know, they are already in trouble. This was what happened to the family of Abbie Paull. When Paull left her son Reuben unsupervised for a few seconds, she was shocked when she found Reuben with his training toilet stuck around his neck.

In the footage filmed by Abbie, she asks her son how it happened, but unfortunately, he doesn’t appear to respond with anything but giggles.

In the footage, Reuben’s father can be heard asking if the seat is clean, to which the mom thankfully responds yes.

Apparently unable to simply remove the seat, the dad grabbed a saw and started cutting (with the blade pointed away from Reuben’s face). While Reuben had some trouble looking up and away from the saw, his father was able to cut the seat apart and free Reuben without any injury.

Whew!

(Image Credit: SWNS/ Fox News)

Registering to be a bone marrow donor means that someday you might possibly be called upon to save the life of someone you don't know, who would otherwise die without your genetic match. Sarah Lazarus registered in 2016. The call came in 2020, after she'd been self-isolating in Los Angeles for months. The proposed recipient was dying of cancer and the procedure had to be soon. However, complication arose that prevented her from donating the necessary blood plasma through apheresis in southern California. the only alternative was for her to board a plane during a pandemic and donate in Boise, Idaho.    

How do you make a call about your personal risk tolerance when it’s also a choice about the course of a stranger’s cancer treatment? If the pandemic had taught us all a valuable lesson about the interconnectedness of our fates, I was now being beaten over the head with it. Stuck without enough facts to make an informed decision, I thought about my dad’s old hospital room in Baltimore, the airlock separating his ward from the rest of the building because any mundane microbe could kill the patients on the other side. I imagined a somber-looking doctor walking through those doors to give my vulnerable recipient the news.

“I’m afraid there’s been a change of plans,” he would say, removing his glasses. “It seems your donor is a pussy-ass bitch.”

I called Heather back and told her to arrange my donation in Boise.

Read the story of Lazarus' donation, along with a thoughtful essay on weighing risk for oneself and others, at Crooked. Although she cannot know the identity of her recipient, she includes a view of the process from her father, which will make you go all verklempt.  -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Waldszenen)

Poetry on the highway? Yes, in the form of senryū, a Japanese variant of haiku referring to humans and human nature. A collection of artists are erecting signs all over the US containing such poems. They resemble regular road signs, but have a thoughtful message in poetry. Have you seen these where you live?



See all the signs with locations, including coordinates, at Roadside Senryū. -via Boing Boing

Smartphones have capabilities that replaced an entire store full of electronic equipment, but who knew that they might someday replace the standard breathalyzer? In addition to multimedia equipment and everyday tools, there's also an accelerometer in there.  

No matter how well you think you’re walking when you’re intoxicated—especially if you compare yourself to your friend in the gutter—subtle and not-so-subtle changes in your gait could betray your alcohol level. And if you’re carrying a smartphone, its onboard accelerometer can pick up those changes. In fact, scientists from University of Pittsburgh just published research showing that, in the lab at least, they can use smartphone motion data to detect if a subject is intoxicated, with an average accuracy of 93 percent. It sounds like fun and games—getting people loaded and watching them stumble around for science—but the work could have some serious utility.

While this use of technology may raise some legal and ethical questions, it may also have useful applications for treating problem drinking. Read about the experiment and what it could mean at Wired.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Carol VanHook)

You've been wearing a mask anytime you go out, right? You probably encounter other people who are wearing masks, some of which are cooler than yours. You've also seen people in public not wearing masks, so is it really worth the hassle? Yes. Minute Physics crunched the numbers for us and explain how masks are actually more effective than you might think. Of course, there are plenty of variables, which they go over at the end of the video, and there's a lot more information in this essay by Aatish Bhatia. Oh yeah, and don't forget to wash your hands. -via reddit

Now we know where Sam-I-Am found green eggs to go with his ham -from a cassowary! Cassowary eggs come in several shades of green and blue-green, and this cassowary hen is quite proud of her lime-tinted eggs. I wouldn't get too close, as cassowaries are known to be aggressive and fairly dangerous, and a mother guarding her eggs is not to be trifled with. However, according to Wikipedia, cassowaries that have been raised by humans are semi-docile, and have been used as poultry. -via TYWKIWDBI

We went from tiny houses to tiny offices. Are tiny offices the next trend? With the current situation, many of us are working at home. That situation is difficult at times, and takes a lot out of you. Sometimes, the couch isn’t enough for work. Design studio Dutch Invertuals created compact office spaces designed to be in public spaces so people don’t have to stay at home. The office spaces, called Tiny Offices, are designed for someone’s personal office space, as Travel and Leisure detailed: 

The office, the design firm wrote on its site, is “your own compact space in which you can dream, perform and create freely. It takes you away from the domain of ‘the others’ as needed and offers you not only a view of calming nature but also the spiritual space for insight into wherever you are doing.”

The Tiny Offices, made out of corrugated aluminum and wood, were designed to be placed where users could "freely dream, perform and create,” Dezeen reported. And these aren’t just some dream design. The Tiny Offices are already installed in two of Droomparken's holiday parks in the Netherlands.

Measuring in at six square meters (64 square feet), the offices are ideal for one person to sit and find a bit of tranquility in an otherwise chaotic world. The offices come with wooden doors and a large window so users will never feel claustrophobic. Each one comes with a daybed as a place to relax, as well as a desk area and acrylic walls so you can write ideas directly on them. If you’re interested in a tiny office you’ll have to visit the Netherlands to see it. However, the company says they may be working on new office spaces in the future.

Image via Travel and Leisure