In 1992, Pepsi-Cola was in a war with Coca-Cola over the Philippine soda market, and Pepsi was losing badly. So they launched a sweepstakes in which people would collect bottle caps with numbers. The winning number would be worth varying amounts of money, up to a million pesos (worth $68,000 today). Number Fever, as it was called, boosted Pepsi sales as people collected bottle caps with numbers. The winning number was announced on May 25. Marily So tells how her husband located a bottle cap with the winning number, 349, and saw that it was worth a million pesos. There was rejoicing, but the couple did not know that Pepsi had printed 600,000 bottle caps with number 349 on them.

Similar scenes were playing out across the country. A bus driver had three 1 million-peso 349s. A mother of 12 whose children went through 10 bottles of Pepsi a day had won 35 million pesos. Winners raced to the iron gates of Pepsi’s bottling factory in Quezon City, just northeast of Manila, to claim their prizes. As the crowd grew, a secretary dialed the marketing director, Rosemarie Vera. “There seems to be many 349 crowns in circulation among people I know,” the secretary said, according to an account in the Philippine Daily Enquirer. At 10 p.m., someone from the company telephoned the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry and said a mistake had been made.

Within a year, a violent consumer uprising would be under way, with riots and grenade attacks leaving dozens injured and five dead.

Read the full story of the soda pop promotion that went oh-so-wrong at Bloomberg Businessweek.  -via Damn Interesting

Fox Benwell has a postal cat! His cat Linnet waits by the door for the mail to be delivered. Watch as she enthusiastically receives a package, checks to see if anyone is watching, and then steals upstairs to put it in her stash. See more of Linnet at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort

It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of other planets where humans could live was considered a fantasy. Now we have lots of data coming in from exoplanets, those outside our solar system, and they come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors. Could they support life? The common theory is that only planets in which water would be in liquid form are suitable for us to live in, and these fall into the "habitable zone." Our solar system has three such planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Since we can't live on Mars and Venus as they are, you can see that habitability actually depends on many factors.    

The idea of a habitable zone is a bit squishy, because having liquid water depends on a laundry list of other things, including the existence of an atmosphere, what’s in it, and more. But it’s a useful concept as long as you don’t look at it too closely†.

So technically, three planets orbit the Sun in its habitable zone. But how many could you fit in there?

At some number you’d hit a limit. The finite region of space means planets would get too close together. They’d interact gravitationally, and celestial hijinks would ensue: They’d create chaos, and some planet or planets would have their orbit messed up, dropping them into the Sun or ejecting them from the system entirely.

Scientists have crunched the numbers to find out how many planets could be in a system's habitable zone. It depends on the size and heat of the star, and a few other factors. But the answer will have you imagining a system where people could send mail to their relatives on the next planet over. Read how it might work at Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt/IPAC)

If you want to get really away from it all, keep the rest of the world at bay, and have plenty of space to spread out, you might be interested in a property for sale near Fairdale, North Dakota. The brutalist architecture envelopes an interior steampunk aesthetic. 

Unique opportunity to own a bit of Cold War history!  Located in Fairdale ND, this Walsh County Sprint Missile site offers a nostalgic Cold War experience.  Site needs some repair, but could provide that extra privacy, security and protection when needed.  The site is surrounded by dual fences and sits on 3 parcels totaling 49.48 acres. There is a cement entry building, a command bunker, and 14 sprint launch tubes.  Current owner utilizes portable power and water tanks. Power is available nearby and a well could be drilled for water requirements.  Property will be offered as one total unit.

From the outside, the facility looks like a 20th-century Stonehenge. Before you purchase, you should read some of its history at Atlas Obscura. Then see lots of pictures at the auction listing. The missile silos will be auctioned off on August 11.

(Image credit: Pifer's)

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Possibly one of the best swims of my career! Check out the full swim here. What can you do without spilling a drop?! #gotmilk #ad Check out the #gotmilkchallenge on Tik Tok! [Link in bio]

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US Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky demonstrates perfect body control as she swims the length of a pool while balancing a glass of chocolate milk on her head. Without the glass, it would look like an easy lap. It is only with this additional challenge that we can understand what she has managed to achieve through decades of effort.

-via Born in Space

The problem with making a satirical movie is that if you are at all subtle, the satire can be completely missed. And so it was with the 1997 film Starship Troopers. It was supposed to be a sendup of overly militaristic speculative fiction, but ended up way too close to what it was supposed to satirize. It fulfilled the audience's desire for space aliens, sex, and carnage so well that they didn't care what the aim was. Or was it a case that the movie was just so bad that director Paul Verhoeven came up with the excuse that it was a satire after the fact? In any case, you can see from this Honest Trailer how the audience might have been confused. Sure, the plot, characters, and themes were over-the-top, but so were many other steroid-laden movies of the time. The lesson to take from Starship Troopers is that if you are going to make a satire of a movie genre, do like Mel Brooks or the Zucker brothers and put some laughs into it.

We've read plenty of horror stories from nature about animal parasites infecting other animals and causing them to behave in ways that benefit the parasite. Funguses can do that, too. The parasitic fungus Massospora will infect a male cicada and then cause it to flirt like a female cicada. When a male cicada approaches, the fungus spreads to a new, healthy host.

“Essentially, the cicadas are luring others into becoming infected because their healthy counterparts are interested in mating,” said Brian Lovett, study co-author and post-doctoral researcher with the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design. “The bioactive compounds may manipulate the insect to stay awake and continue to transmit the pathogen for longer.”

These actions persist amid a disturbing display of B-horror movie proportions: Massospora spores gnaw away at a cicada’s genitals, butt and abdomen, replacing them with fungal spores. Then they “wear away like an eraser on a pencil,” Lovett said.

That's some pretty sophisticated chicanery for a fungus. You might think the fungus couldn't be too smart, or they would infect a species that didn't lay dormant for 17 years, but Massospora has adapted to that, too, which you can read about at WVU Today. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Angie Macias/WVU)

When I hear the word "herpes," I automatically think "the gift that keeps on giving." But maybe I should switch that to "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." People with latent herpes hiding in their cells may have some advantages in their immune system. In our world of modern medicine, it's most certainly not worth contracting a case, but research into how our bodies harness the virus might someday lead to replicating the good effects without the bad. -Thanks, SnowMan!

If you want to know if a person prefers to eat veggies or meat, then you might consider analyzing his hair. This study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that chemical traces of proteins from food can be found in hair strands.

"This information can be used to quantify dietary trends in ways that surveys cannot capture," says distinguished professor Jim Ehleringer, of the U's School of Biological Sciences. "We would like to see the health community begin to assess dietary patterns using hair isotope surveys, especially across different economic groups within the US."

More details about this hair-splitting study over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: RyanMcGuire/ Pixabay)

Traveling great distances while not spending much time has been man’s dream ever since the distant past. As time goes by, transportation vehicles evolve and become much faster than before, allowing us to spend less time on travel and more time on things that matter more. And it would seem that we will go much much faster in the near future. How fast? Faster than sound itself.

The private spaceflight company Virgin Galactic and Rolls-Royce have teamed up to create a supersonic jet for high-speed passenger flights.  

The Spaceship Company (TSC), Virgin Galactic's aerospace-system manufacturing arm that builds the company's SpaceShipTwo space planes, is now working to develop a high-speed commercial aircraft capable of flying at Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound.

[On Aug. 3], TSC announced the completion of a mission concept review and unveiled the initial design concept for a high-speed aircraft. They also announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding with Rolls-Royce to collaborate in design and development for the craft. 

More details about this exciting news over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: Virgin Galactic/ Space.com)

When we hear the word “parasite”, what comes into our minds are organisms that take advantage of their hosts and make them suffer. But while some of these parasites do cause harm to other organisms and creatures, this fact is only true for 4% of known parasites. The other parasites, meanwhile, play major ecological roles. And so, in reality, while there are some parasites that are known to be dangerous and should be eradicated, there are also some parasites which are to be protected.

About a dozen leading parasite ecologists, including University of Washington's Chelsea Wood, published a paper Aug. 1 in the journal Biological Conservation, which lays out an ambitious global conservation plan for parasites.

"Parasites are an incredibly diverse group of species, but as a society, we do not recognize this biological diversity as valuable," said Wood, an assistant professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. "The point of this paper is to emphasize that we are losing parasites and the functions they serve without even recognizing it."

More details about this over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: CDC/ Wikimedia Commons)

Everything has an ending. Even our grand universe, despite looking majestic and eternal, will end some day. But how will our universe end? That’s what theoretical astrophysicist Katie Mack writes about in her book titled The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). In the book, Mack enumerates some possibilities of how our universe will end. 

But far from being depressing, Mack’s account mixes a sense of reverence for the wonders of physics with an irreverent sense of humor and a disarming dose of candor.

Some potential finales are violent: If the universe’s expansion were to reverse, the cosmos collapsing inward in a Big Crunch, extremely energetic swells of radiation would ignite the surfaces of stars, exploding them. Another version of the end is quieter but no less terrifying: The universe’s expansion could continue forever. That end, Mack writes, “like immortality, only sounds good until you really think about it.” Endless expansion would beget a state known as “heat death”...

Perhaps more merciful than the purgatory of heat death is the possibility of a Big Rip, in which the universe’s expansion accelerates faster and faster, until stars and planets are torn apart, molecules are shredded and the very fabric of space is ripped apart.

Learn more about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI/ Wikimedia Commons)

Quezon City, Philippines — A man named Dino Rivera went outside of his house to buy something from the nearby store. On his way, however, he saw something that doesn’t seem to belong in the area. That something was an ostrich, and it was running fast towards the other side of the street.

Not much is known about the said flightless bird, but it is assumed that somehow, it broke free from the place where it was kept.

That, or someone played Jumanji.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Dino Rivera/ GMA News/ Facebook)

Dr. Quentin J. Lee is principal of Childersburg High School in Alabama, and is doing his best to promote and enforce new safety rules as school opens for the fall to the tune of "Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer. If it takes a catchy song to explain social distancing, mask wearing, and hand washing, he's game to do it. He pulled it off well! -via reddit

Dr. Lee's previous video about COVID-19 is pretty good, too.

The area known as Alabama Hills is not in Alabama, and there aren't many hills, either. There you'll find a crop of rounded rock formations that proved to be quite useful. It's where you can place antagonists on different levels, hide them from each other, stage an ambush, shoot from safety, and convince whoever sees it that these rocks exist where you say they do.

These strange rock formations are versatile actors, having played Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Mexico, Spain, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and China—not to mention distant planets, alternate dimensions, and fantasy realms. It would be impossible to list all the screen legends that have shared scenes with these majestic bowed rock arches and potato-shaped stones, but they include Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn, Clint Eastwood, Lucille Ball, Cary Grant, Cesar Romero, Natalie Wood, and Russell Crowe.

As of 2019, it’s been 100 years since the earliest confirmed filming in the area.

With a history like that, it's no wonder there's a film festival nearby, with tours to the rocks themselves. Read about Alabama Hills and its cinematic history at Atlas Obscura. And then keep your eye out for them during your next movie night.

(Image credit: Tyler Malone)