1896. An 18-second film was released and was shown commercially to the public. The aforementioned film depicts the final scene of the stage musical The Widow Jones, where two characters share a kiss. While the kiss in the film may just have been two seconds long, it was enough to “[bring] down the house every time” it was shown. But why so much commotion over just a 2-second kiss? It was because this was the first time a kiss was filmed and shown to the public.

… this short film marked a thrilling shift in what movies could do, and what audiences could expect from the fledgling new medium.

More details about this over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Even in the pitch darkness, mosquitoes still remain as a worthy adversary, as they can still home towards their target unhindered. What’s more, when they do land on their target, they do so without alarming the target. The only time you know that a mosquito has landed on you is when it has already bitten you, and by that time, it’s already gone. Silent but deadly, indeed. But how do they navigate in the dark, and how do they land quietly?

They manage this thanks to mechanosensing, which is a responsivity to mechanical stimuli that allows them to sense obstacles without using their eyes. Unlike bats, which navigate by means of a biological sonar system, mosquitoes use a combination of their wings, antennae, and airflow.

According to the team, mosquitoes fly by beating their elongated wings very rapidly, producing fast jets of air that provide lift. If these jets encounter an obstacle, these airflow patterns change shape, which can be detected by an array of receptors at the base of the mosquito's antennae called the Johnston’s organ. This allows the insect to build a picture of its surroundings using "aerodynamic imaging," allowing it to map where the ground and other obstacles are located.

Fascinated by the considerable feats of the mosquito, an international team of scientists imitated this tiny insect’s sensory mechanism and used this concept on drones. The result?

The team found that the quadcopter could detect surfaces at a sufficient distance to avoid the ground or walls with little or no data processing, In addition, the new system is said to be lightweight, power-efficient, and scalable.

This new obstacle avoidance system is not only limited to drones, as it can also be applied to larger aerial vehicles, like helicopters.

More about this over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: Chiba University/Structure and Motion Laboratory/ RVC)

Despite lacking the technology available to us today, one might be surprised at how the people from the distant past managed to preserve their food and how effective their methods are. In fact, some of these methods were so effective that their remaining food “may still be consumable today, or at least used to create a modern dish or drink.”

It’s a problem that every society, from the dawn of humanity, has faced: How to save food for figurative rainy days — away from microbes, insects and other critters eager to spoil it. Over the years, archaeologists have found evidence for a variety of techniques. Some, like drying and fermenting, remain common today. Others are bygone practices, such as burying butter in peat bogs. Though low-tech, the ancient ways were effective — clearly, as some of the products have survived millennia.

Check out the article over at Discover to know more details about the methods of the ancient people.

(Image Credit: Nordic Food Lab/University of Copenhagen)

What makes an anus "important"? How about one that can eat and breath as well as expel waste. An anus with teeth. One that can cast a net of organs outward for defense, and also clean the ocean floor. The sea cucumber is pretty much a digestive tract with a bit of an animal wrapped around it. Maybe you could describe all animals that way, but this animal is pretty rudimentary, while the digestive tract is a marvel. -via The Kid Should See This

Ranveig Bjørklid Levinsen of Gråsten, Denmark, has a fence and two bulldogs. The bulldogs, named Winston and Bogart, love to watch what's going on beyond the fence, so the family fashioned holes the dogs can look through.

“We are living close to a walking path, so many people pass by every day, and the dogs are just so curious,” the owner explained. “To prevent them from skipping the fence, we made the holes, but even if it was funny to see them from the other side, I just thought it would look even [funnier] if we painted something,” she revealed how the paintings appeared on the fence.

“You know, like in amusement parks where you can have your photo taken in these kind of holes,” Levinsen elaborated on where she got the idea from. The woman settled on a crown and a jester hat. Although it was Ranveig who came up with the idea, the actual paintings were done by her daughter.

Pictures of Bogart and his mother Winston (really) have gone viral in Denmark and beyond. Read more about these delightful dogs and their imaginative family -and see more pictures- at Bored Panda.

Youtuber This is Bailey Writes:

Golden Retriever and Baby Bunnies 22 days old Sleep Together [Cuteness Overload]. See how a cute dog named Bailey sleeps with his little rabbit friends! We hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to hit that subscribe button for new videos.

I think we all need videos like this right now. I know I do. :>

Sifakas are the leaping lemurs you've seen before. They can travel upright on two legs, but they don't really walk, they "pogo," which is jumping to the side. Yeah, it seems easier to walk or run on two legs, but what do I know? I can't leap from tree-to-tree the way they do. -via Laughing Squid

William Golding wrote the novel Lord of the Flies in 1951. In it, a group of middle-school-age boys became stranded on an island without adult supervision, and their community descends into chaos. In 1966, here in the real world, Captain Peter Warner was sailing by a small uninhabited island named ‘Ata. At least it was supposed to be uninhabited.

But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”

The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku‘alofa. “I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. “Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”   

The boys' story was quite different than the one in Lord of the Flies. You can read it at The Guardian. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Miyasige Tosikazu)

While the rest of us congratulate ourselves for walking one mile or climbing a flight of stairs without being winded, there are people who run 100 miles just for fun. Well, that and a sense of accomplishment. The Hellbender 100 is an ultramarathon in North Carolina that not only spans 100 miles, but also incorporates five climbs of 3,000 feet or more. Brendan Leonard takes us along as he runs that race.   

Somewhere around mile 62, around 2:30 in the morning, I realized I hadn’t seen another light in about an hour: no other runners, no houses, no car headlights, nothing besides the little headlamp bubble of light in front of me. I had kept my headlamp dimmed to conserve the battery, just chugging along through the forest, jogging with my trekking poles in my hands. The entire trail had been covered in fallen leaves for miles, and it occurred to me a few times that I could be totally lost, but every time I started to worry, another little orange course-marker flag would pop up. I was totally alone and would continue to be unless I sat down for an hour and waited for another runner to show up. 

It was dead quiet—no wind, no sounds besides my feet shuffling through the wet leaves and my breathing. If an animal had stepped on a stick 80 feet away, I would have heard it. I had been moving for 22 hours, and I felt OK, aside from my soaking-wet feet and the beginnings of the fatigue that sets in when you’ve been going that long. I started thinking about the completely dark, dead-quiet forest and being totally alone. For a half-second, my brain flashed to an idea, completely out of nowhere: this was a horror-movie scene, and a crazed killer with an ax or another implement of destruction would come rushing at me from the dark forest, totally surprising me because my headlamp was so dim.

It won't take you near as long to read about the 100 miles as it took Leonard to run it, at Outside Online. -via Digg

(Image credit: Brendan Leonard)

In the days before mixed martial arts, boxers and wrestlers rarely went at it with each other (a notable exception was pankration in the ancient Olympics). When a match like this happened, it was  publicity stunt, and usually done for a laugh. But Muhammad Ali once found himself up against a wrestler who was dead serious about defeating the Greatest of All Time.  

The genesis of what has come to be known as “one of the most embarrassing moments” of  Muhammad Ali’s storied career began around 1975 when Ali met the president of the Japanese Amateur Wrestling Association, Ichiro Yada, at a party. It’s reported that during a brief conversation with Yada, Ali boastfully exclaimed: “Isn’t there any Oriental fighter who will challenge me? I’ll give him one million dollars if he wins.”

Whether this was a genuine challenge by Ali or simply some of his famous trash-talk isn’t clear, but we know that Yada interpreted it as the former and the quote was reported as such by the Japanese media. This brought it to the attention of Japanese pro wrestler Antonio Inoki, who decided to take the boxer up on his offer. Not only that, but Inoki somehow managed to convince investors to pony up some $6 million to sweeten the deal for Ali, who accepted the offer to fight in March the following year, with the match itself being arranged to take place on June 26th.

From this point on the details leading up to the fight get a little harder to confirm. For starters, although the eventual fight that took place between Inoki and Ali was genuine, it’s contested whether Ali’s camp knew this from the start. You see, at this point Inoki was already pretty famous in Japan for arranging similar fights with other famous fighters, pitting their skills against his own unique brand of wrestling, dubbed “strong style”. These matches were clearly fixed and often ended in a spectacularly theatrical way. For example, in one match against a karate expert, Inoki won by powerbombing his opponent to the ground and knocking them out with a leg drop, a la Hulk Hogan. In another, the match was declared a draw when both combatants inexplicably fell out of the ring at the exact same time.

Ali was surprised and a little concerned when he saw how Inoki was training for the fight. The result was a fight called “15 rounds of pure slapstick” that drew crowds on two continents. Read how that all went down at Today I Found Out. 

Scientists have uncovered a fossil of a mammal that lived in Madagascar 66 million years ago that is unlike any other mammal ever known. It is a gondwanatherian, from the time when all the continents of the Southern Hemisphere were united, and has been named Adalatherium hui, a combination of words in two languages that means "crazy beast." How weird was it?

For instance, Adalatherium had more holes on its face than any known mammal, Krause said in a press call Tuesday. These holes, called foramina, created pathways for blood vessels and nerves, leading to an incredibly sensitive snout that was covered in whiskers. It also had a large hole at the top of the snout that can't be compared to any known mammal that ever lived or is currently living.

Its teeth can't be compared with anything else either. They're structured in a strange way that can't be explained. Krause said its back teeth "are from outer space."

The animal's backbone contained more vertebrae than any known mammal from the Mesozoic era. And it must have walked in a strange way, because the front half of the animal doesn't match the back half. And one of its back legs was bowed.

That's pretty weird. But there's more, which you can read at CNN. -via Strange Company

Despite being a game that’s almost 20 years old, and was originally made for the GameBoy Advance, Ace Attorney still stands out today from other visual novel games. But what makes this visual novel game series stand out from its contemporaries? What did Capcom do right? New Frame Plus answers these things on his video.

(Video Credit: New Frame Plus/ YouTube)

It’s not surprising that a person will be pit against cheaters when playing a PC shooting game, such as Call of Duty or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). Some of the usual hacking or cheating tools that a cheater uses are the aimbot, which makes your target automatically lock onto an opponent’s head, and the wallhack, which reveals every player on the map, no matter where they are.

Aimbots and wallhacks are the most common forms of cheating in online shooters, allowing people who are new to a game or simply at a lower skill level to get a huge advantage over other players. Some cheats are the obvious type, where a player is flying around a map at an impossible speed or firing a gun faster than anyone else. Others, like wallhacks, are far less obvious, and often go undetected in games for weeks or even months.

Thankfully, PC game developers are not silent about this, and are constantly battling against cheaters and communities that create and sell cheats for their games.

Infinity Ward is matching suspected Call of Duty: Warzone cheaters against each other in a virtual battle of whose wallhacks and aimbots are more sophisticated. More than 70,000 cheaters have already been banned, and Infinity Ward says it has a “zero tolerance for cheaters.” Respawn Entertainment, the maker of Apex Legends, has also been struggling with cheaters and hackers recently. After banning more than 350,000 cheaters a year ago, hackers have figured out how to bypass hardware ID bans from the Easy Anti-Cheat software that Apex Legends utilizes.

More about this story over at The Verge.

(Image Credit: The Verge)

Raising a child has always been a very difficult responsibility for parents. I can’t imagine how hard it was for parents in the ancient times. Thankfully, it’s a bit easier now thanks to the huge number of books and materials about parenting. But not all tips will do us nor our kids good, like these ones from the 1800s, which Mental Floss compiles.

In the 19th century, it was common practice to quiet a fussy or sick child with "medicines" like Stickney & Poor’s Paregoric Syrup—a substance that not only contained more than a tenth of a gram of opium per ounce, but that was almost 50 percent alcohol! No wonder it was able to deliver on its promise of calming children down. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only toxic remedy that parents embraced in the days of yore: Kids were regularly made to ingest turpentine in order to rid themselves of tapeworms, while mercury was believed to be a cure for dysentery or edema.

Check out the other bad parenting tips over at this video.

(Video Credit: Mental Floss/ YouTube)

I believe that, at one time in our lives, we were able to come across a philosophical paper or article that’s pretty technical and really difficult to understand that it made us scratch our heads in confusion. Thankfully, we have other ways to learn about philosophy and that is by having someone explain a philosophical joke to you. Not only do you learn philosophy, you also learn a new joke for you to tell your friends!

Big Think gives us five philosophical jokes as well as the philosophy behind them. Here’s one from the five.

Thales walks into a coffee shop and orders a cup. He takes a sip and immediately spits it out in disgust, he looks up at the barista and shouts, "What is this, water?"

Thales is commonly referred to as "The First Philosopher" because he is the earliest philosopher whose name we know…

His best-known idea is his metaphysics; he argued that water was the basis of all other substances. No matter how unaquatic something might seem to be (think of dry dust or fire) Thales argued that as it comes from water, and it remains water at the most fundamental level despite its changing traits.

Check out the other philosophical jokes over at the site.

(Image Credit: morhamedufmg/ Pixabay)