If the lengthy explanation of the different factors that affect skin color bore you, how about listening to Bill Nye the Science Guy? Watch as he explains how ultraviolet light and geographical location affect the color of skin.

image screenshot via TikTok

In the 19th century, tuberculosis was rampant. The disease attacked the lungs, and could ravage the body for years. TB was incurable at the time; patients either recovered or didn't. The only treatment was clean, dry, mountain air and pleasant surroundings. Sanitariums sprung up around the western US, and Colorado Springs was perfectly suited for tuberculosis patients due to its altitude, sunshine, moderate temperatures, and wide open spaces. The town began to lure TB patients soon after it was founded in 1871.

Tens of thousands of people went to Colorado Springs every year drawn by the lure of tuberculosis treatment. Once they checked into a sanatorium, patients were subjected to a range of bizarre treatment, such as forced feeding, mandatory bed rest, hypnotism, sunbathing and sleeping outside. The routine was torturous.

Each patient was forced to eat twice as much they wanted. A typical diet consisted of three large meals supplemented by raw eggs and several glasses of milk throughout the day. Some patients were fed laxatives to keep all that food moving. The idea was to rebuild the frail bodies of the patients wrecked by the disease. It was not uncommon for those who spent long months at the sanatorium to gain between 25 to 50 pounds.

Fresh air was considered the most vital of treatments, and for this purpose, nearly all sanatoriums had well-ventilated sleeping huts built in the style of teepees.

Those sleeping huts grew by the thousands, and some of them are still around. Read about Colorado Springs and the tuberculosis sufferers who fell in love with it at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum)

The title of this point-and-click game is, I believe, a pun on the term six feet under, because there are actually a dozen cats involved. Anyway, the premise of Six Cats Under is that you are a cat lady who has died. As a ghost, you try to free all your cats from the apartment, but you don't have enough strength to open the door. You must manipulate what you can to get the cats to free themselves. This is not easy, and you might drive yourself crazy clicking on everything in the home. But give it a shot, because it's fun as well as maddening. It might be easier as a group project. If you become seriously stuck and want to give up, here's a play through video that will reveal all.  - via Metafilter

If you love the taste of KFC chicken nuggets, but regret that they come from chickens, maybe you'll want to eventually try some nuggets that are 3D printed, or to be precise, "bio-printed." KFC is taking the plunge, in collaboration with a Russian company called 3D Bioprinting Solutions. From the KFC press release:

KFC is taking the next step in its innovative concept of creating a "restaurant of the future" by launching the development of innovative 3D bioprinting technology to create chicken meat in cooperation with the 3D Bioprinting Solutions research laboratory. The idea of ​​crafting the “meat of the future” arose among partners in response to the growing popularity of a healthy lifestyle and nutrition, the annual increase in demand for alternatives to traditional meat and the need to develop more environmentally friendly methods of food production. The project aims to create the world's first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets. They will be as close as possible in both taste and appearance to the original KFC product, while being more environmentally friendly to produce than ordinary meat. Receiving a final product for testing is already planned for the fall of 2020 in Moscow.

3D Bioprinting Solutions is developing additive bioprinting technology using chicken cells and plant material, allowing it to reproduce the taste and texture of chicken meat almost without involving animals in the process. KFC will provide its partner with all of the necessary ingredients, such as breading and spices, to achieve the signature KFC taste. At the moment, there are no other methods available on the market that could allow the creation of such complex products from animal cells.

You probably won't be able to travel to Russia to try them out yourself, unless you are already there, but if all goes well, 3D printed nuggets could become part of the menu of the future. I think I'll just have a salad. -via Boing Boing

The small village of Linby in England had no strategic value in World War II, but it ended up on the radio as a Luftwaffe bombing target. Or did it? It made for a good story, and maybe that's all it is. Tom Scott discusses the accuracy of historical accounts and whether it really matters in the long run. -via reddit

Hugs can have significant health benefits according to studies. As a hug stimulates touch receptors under the skin, it helps in lowering our anxiety hormones and reducing our stress levels. American author and therapist Virginia Satir said once that “we need four hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth”.

If you want a unique hugging experience, then cow cuddling might be the good therapeutic trend for you.

Learn more about cow cuddling and how the cows react to people hugging them over at BBC Reel.

(Image Credit: Matt Dworzanczyk/ BBC Reel)

It was the late 1980s, and the business of mobile cinema was flourishing in the humble West African country of Ghana. With a diesel generator, a projector, and a VCR loaded in the truck, these portable video clubs traveled across the rural areas of the country where there were no theaters or electricity, and brought the cinema experience there. With the advent of mobile cinemas came also the hand-painted movie posters which the mobile cinemas used to advertise the movie that they were screening.

To attract viewers, the video clubs needed to advertise their offerings. But they did not have the original movie posters, or the means to print alternatives -- the country's military rulers had even restricted the import of printing presses.

So they made their own, commissioning local artists to hand-paint them on used flour sacks. They were large, usually 40 to 50 inches in width, and 55 to 70 inches in height.

The posters have since made ripples in the art world, with early originals commanding high prices from collectors.

The demand for hand-painted movie posters started dying out in the mid-2000s, but the demand suddenly grew again in 2015.

More details about this over at CNN.

(Image Credit: Brian Chankin/ CNN)

Beetles are one of the strongest animals in our planet, with some beetle species capable of lifting objects that are over 1,100 times heavier than their body weight (which is comparable to an average human being lifting a 70-ton object!). This makes beetles a promising asset to scientists, as it can wear a camera backpack with ease, and that’s just what the scientists did: they put cameras on two different types of beetles, and both survived in the end. But what were these cameras for?

Find out over at Cosmos Magazine.

(Image Credit: Iyer et al., Sci. Robot. 5, eabb0839/ Cosmos)

In 2018, astronomers were alerted by a strange phenomenon detected by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Super-Novae (ASSASN). A supermassive black hole, which belonged in the class called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), shone 40 times brighter than usual. When they were alerted by the ASSASN, the astronomers quickly pointed their telescopes toward the AGN. Here, things got really mind-boggling.

While observing the AGN in X-ray, optical and ultraviolet light, scientists watched in surprise as the light faded, its brightness dropping by a factor of 10,000 until it was no longer detectable at all. Scientists have never seen a burnout that drastic happen so quickly.

[...]

But that wasn’t the end. Within a few months the light had been rekindled, firing back up almost to its original luminosity, which has also never been seen before.

[...]

“This seems to be the first time we’ve ever seen a corona first of all disappear, but then also rebuild itself, and we’re watching this in real-time,” says Kara. “This will be really important to understanding how a black hole’s corona is heated and powered in the first place.”

While the team may have some speculations on the event, they still couldn’t explain the phenomenon fully, which makes this all the more mysterious.

This just goes to show how much we still don’t know about our universe.

(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ New Atlas)

Warning: this video might tug at your heartstrings! Then again, any dog video is adorable and can make people happy, just like this one. Watch as Liam Thompson teaches his labradoodle a new trick he can use when he’s sad. 

New England, U.S. — Chipmunks were welcomed with plenty of acorns last fall. In fact, there were so many that the rodents couldn’t stash them all for the winter, which meant that, according to small mammal biologist Shevenell Webb, there were still many acorns on the ground waiting for them in the spring. So the chipmunks had lots of food in the spring while they got busy breeding. And when this summer came, these cute creatures became a nuisance to people in the region, “darting to and fro, digging holes in gardens, and tunneling under lawns.”

...They can destroy lawns and gardens with their burrowing, and can even get into homes, Webb said.

“We can’t grow a tulip without them digging it up,” Steven Parren, wildlife program diversity manager for the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, said of the chipmunks in his yard. “They don’t even pause.”

People needn’t get too alarmed over an overpopulation. Small mammal populations tend to explode, then crash and burn.

Such is life near the bottom of the food chain, where food supply ebbs and flows and chipmunks are easy prey for owls, hawks, snakes, foxes and raccoons. Even if their lives aren’t cut short, individual chipmunks tend to live only for three years, Webb said.

(Image Credit: Richardfabi/ AndiW/ Wikimedia Commons)

With its positive impact on the bones, the muscles, the brain, and a person’s weight management, exercise is one of the healthiest activities that you can do. And not only does it offer improvement on the body, as regular exercise also lowers the risk of developing deadly diseases, such as cancer. 

According to a literature review of an international group of exercise oncologists last fall, exercise lowers the risk of developing different types of cancer by 10 to 25 percent. But they weren’t sure as to how exercise can lower the risk of developing the disease.

There are plenty of theories involving things like hormone levels, blood sugar, chronic inflammation, and oxidative stress, but no one has put all the pieces together.

Now, a new theory has been proposed by a group led by Peter Biro of Deakin University in Australia. The opinion piece can be found in the journal Trends in Science.

Biro and his colleagues propose a new theory in which the link between exercise and cancer is explained by what they call “energetic capacity.” In short, fit people are able to ramp up and sustain high levels of energy consumption, which gives them the ability to mount a more robust immune response when cancer cells attack and also helps them to withstand the energy-sapping effects of tumors that do get a foothold.

More details about this over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: Fotorech/ Pixabay)

Well, for starters, Comic-Con is free this year. That’s already a big sigh of relief for those who wanted to attend or view the panels and other events at the famed convention, however, with the pandemic, the convention is also going digital. So expect a lot of bookshelves and figurines in the background, and a lot of Zoom conferences, as Cracked details: 

Instead Of Panels, They'll Have A Bunch Of Zoom Calls (And That's An Improvement)

Although it may not feel that way when you're swimming through a dense sea of people dressed as Deadpool and Harley Quinn, not every single comic book fan in the world gets to attend Comic-Con every year. In fact, only a small minority do. For the rest of us, the way to keep up with all those panels and announcements from home has always been to hit F5 on a text feed hurriedly written by someone at the con and then trawl YouTube for shaky phone videos before they get deleted.

image via Cracked

Well, wouldn't you? It's a very Instagrammable moment!

These hikers at the Chipinque Ecological Park in San Pedro Garza García, Mexico saw a black bear on the trail. It approached, sniffed, and pawed at them. At the 0:30 mark, she appears to get a picture of herself posing with the bear.

Which filter should she use?

On July 20, Saturn will be bright and visible all night long. Saturn will be well-positioned and shining brightly for the next few months. If you’re interested, go grab a telescope and try to look for the planet in the night sky! Forbes’ Jamie Carter details why there are specific times and positions to best see certain planets. Check out his full piece here, and equip yourself with more knowledge before trying to look for Saturn!

image via Forbes