Scientists at the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary were just trying to boost production of Russian sturgeon, using hi-tech reproduction technology and an American sperm donor fish, and ended up with a fish that isn't supposed to exist. This story brings to mind two pertinent quotes from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should," and "Life, uh, finds a way." Researcher Attila Mozsár described the experiment.

Russian sturgeons (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii) are critically endangered and also economically important: They're the source of much of the world's caviar. These fish can grow to more than 7 feet long (2.1 meters), living on a diet of molluscs and crustaceans. American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) filter-feed off of zooplankton in the waters of the Mississippi River drainage basin, where water from the Mississippi and its tributaries drain into. They, too, are large, growing up to 8.5 feet (2.5 m) long. Like the sturgeon, the have a slow rate of growth and development puts them at risk of overfishing. They've also lost habitat to dams in the Mississippi drainage, according to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. The two species last shared a common ancestor 184 million years ago, according to the Times.

Nevertheless, they were able to breed —— much to the surprise of Mozsár and his colleagues. The researchers were trying to breed Russian sturgeon in captivity through a process called gynogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. In gynogenesis, a sperm triggers an egg's development but fails to fuse to the egg's nucleus. That means its DNA is not part of the resulting offspring, which develop solely from maternal DNA. The researchers were using American paddlefish sperm for the process, but something unexpected happened. The sperm and egg fused, resulting in offspring with both sturgeon and paddlefish genes.

The picture here shows a sturgeon on top, then three of the hybrid offspring below it, all looking quite different from each other. About 100 of these hybrids, which the scientists call sturddlefish, now live at the institute, and it is not clear whether they can reproduce on their own. Read about the  creatures at LiveScience. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jenő Káldy et al/CC BY 4.0)

What’s the next great thing after watching mukbang vlogs? Watching cats eat huge amounts of food. Watch how these cats react into seeing and eating a large tiger shrimp for the first time. 

Some people don’t really pay attention to how a meal was cooked, let alone to how that particular meal was discovered. Did you know that the flat iron steak began as an experiment? It was a result of an experiment in a meat science laboratory in 2001, as The Hustle details: 

In 1998, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association — the industry’ largest trade group — gave a pair of meat scientists $1.5m in grant money and a seemingly impossible mandate: Find a new cut of meat that centuries of professional butchers had missed.

Three years later, the world was introduced to the flat iron steak.

In its first several years of life, the flat iron steak — a very thin, very tender cut from beneath the shoulder blade of the cow — topped 92m pounds per year in sales, about as much as the porterhouse and the T-bone steak combined.

Back then, it was rare to see a new steak enter the market. The flat iron became a proof-of-concept for the industry — and it left the beef titans craving more new cuts.

image via The Hustle

You won’t have to switch on a video conferencing platform, as Facebook Messenger adds a new feature that many probably are waiting for: the ability to screen share within the app.

Right now, you can share your screen (or pictures from your camera roll, or your Instagram feed, or whatever you’d like) with up to eight people in group chats or up to 16 people in Messenger Rooms. However, Facebook says it’s working on expanding the feature for up to 50 people in Rooms. The update is available on both Android and iOS.

To share your screen, first make sure you have the latest version of Messenger installed. Then, during a call, swipe up from the bottom of your screen to reveal the call options. Then just click “share your screen,” “start sharing,” and then “start broadcast” (presumably Facebook is giving you that many warnings so you don’t start sharing anything by mistake). After that you can navigate as you like on your phone, or return to the call to stop the broadcast.

It also seems that Facebook has the advantage here, as of many video chat services such as Skype and Zoom, Messenger works with the least issues on iOS and Android devices.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: The Verge)

It turns out that yes, you can print a house. Watch as a computer-controlled printer on a huge (10 meter square) scaffold squirts concrete in a precise pattern to construct a two-story house in Antwerp, Belgium.  

Kamp C, the provincial Center for Sustainability and Innovation in Construction, printed the first house in Europe. This is the first printed two story building worldwide. The house has a floor surface of ninety square meters and was printed with the largest 3D concrete printer in Europe.

The printer only did the basic structure, while craftsmen installed windows and did the finishing work. This house is a prototype, but someday they might take this show on the road. -via Geekologie

The game Operation debuted in 1965, and so generations of kids have tried to remove a patient's funny bone, spare ribs, or butterflies from the stomach. If you screwed up, an electric buzzer and a red nose pointed out your failure. The tasks are not at all realistic ....or are they? Real surgeons love the game, and many of them receive an edition for medical school graduation. Some were inspired by it, or used it for practice for their future profession. Dr. Anthony Rossi of Sloan Kettering said,

I actually played Operation a lot as a kid — I was obsessed with it. From an early age I knew I wanted to be a doctor, and I loved that game because of the precision that you needed. It’s also the rare game where both winning and losing was fun — even hitting the buzzer was fun. I’m left-handed, so I’d play the game left-handed and then I’d try it right-handed just to see how good I was. I love that game so much I recently bought it for my nephews and told them to try it with their dominant hand, and then their non-dominant hand.  

Rossi and two other surgeons are quite familiar with Operation, and take us through the various organs included in the game, explain how it builds fine motor skills, and describe what happens when you "touch the sides" in real-life surgery, at Mel magazine.

(Image credit: PaRappa 276)

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)