I managed to totally miss The Fifth Element when it came out in 1997. Years later, I finally heard of it and found out it was a French science fiction film with so much sexual innuendo it couldn't help but be a global hit. It looks like somewhat of a comedy, too. As Wikipedia explains, director Luc Besson began with the viewpoint of the target audience and worked on the movie for a long time.
Besson started writing the story that became The Fifth Element when he was 16 years old; he was 38 when the film opened in cinemas.
Now Screen Junkies tells the truth in an Honest Trailer for The Fifth Element.
Scottish Star Wars fans are circulating a petition to have a statue of "one of Scotland's best" actors, Ewan McGregor, in his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi installed at the peak of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the country. The statue would not only be a tribute to the actor, but would also draw Star Wars fans from all over the world. The petition says, in part,
"A statue of Obi-Wan Kenobi would be rather fitting, given the mountain's nickname, the volcanic past and its the highest ground of Ewan McGregor's home county. He would literally have 'the high ground,' watching over all of Scotland. It's poetic in a way."
When it comes to petitions started by Star Wars fans, this is one whose intentions seem most admirable. McGregor is often praised as an actor and he often shares his love of his home country. Fictional characters have previously earned statues in relevant locations, like the one-ton Captain America statue in his fictional home town of Brooklyn, New York.
Thousands of years from now, archaeologists will unearth statues and not know that some are historical figures, some are fictional characters, and some are fictional characters portrayed by real people. That this proposed statue is more of an homage to McGregor than to Kenobi might never occur to them. Read more about the petition at Comicbook.com. -via Mental Floss
The city of Manaus, on the Amazon River in Brazil, was once the epicenter of the rubber industry, because it was in that area that rubber trees grew. As the city's population increased, people began to build houses out on the river, connected by wooden planks. This became the Floating City, where eventually 11,000 people lived in 2,000 houses, supported by quite a few floating businesses.
“The poor people who wanted to remain close to downtown began to realize that living in a floating city was much more interesting for them than living in more distant areas,” says Leno Barata, a historian who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Floating City, in Portuguese. “And living on the river also had other advantages, such as not paying rent or city taxes.”
Initially there were only a handful of disconnected floating houses. But the number rapidly increased after World War II, following a temporary return of the Rubber Boom. With the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, the United States and the Allied Forces were cut off from their rubber supply and turned to Brazil for help. As a result, tens of thousands of Brazilians, mostly from the poor Northeast region, were sent to the Amazon region to relaunch the rubber industry. When the war ended, many of these “rubber soldiers,” as they became known, ended up in Manaus.
The Floating City became a tourism draw, offering lower prices for goods and illicit pleasures. Some people found it charming, and compared it to Venice. Others considered it a slum. The people who lived there called it home, and have fond memories of the neighborhood, which was dismantled in the 1960s. Read about the rise and fall of the Floating City of Manaus at Atlas Obscura.
If there’s one thing that’s truly infinite in this world, it’s the 40-day trial version of WinRAR, as it doesn’t end. Because of this, most people no longer see the need to buy WinRAR, but there may be a few who did, and I think that they're the best people in the world.
Zeltini, a design studio in Latvia, offers the Z-Triton. This tricycle camper can transport and sleep two people. Solar cells on the roof provide power for camping needs, such as lighting and a fan.
DJ Cummerbund is back with a mega-mashup featuring the music of Ram Jam, Oingo Boingo, Chumbawamba, Randy "Macho Man" Savage, Lead Belly, The Beatles, Soundgarden, Michael Jackson, and Tom Jones, along with assorted video clips. The result is really weird, but oh-so enjoyable. -via Laughing Squid
Because some bacteria develop immunity or some sort of resistance against antibiotics after a few generations, it has been the dream of scientists to discover or create an antibiotic that is extremely effective against these bacteria, while being immune to resistance, and safe for humans as well. An antibiotic compound of such a caliber has just been discovered.
A team of Princeton researchers reported today in the journal Cell that they have found a compound, SCH-79797, that can simultaneously puncture bacterial walls and destroy folate within their cells -- while being immune to antibiotic resistance.
[...]
The greatest weakness of antibiotics is that bacteria evolve quickly to resist them, but the Princeton team found that even with extraordinary effort, they were unable to generate any resistance to this compound…
More details about this amazing antibiotic over at ScienceDaily.
What did McDonald’s look like 30 to 40 years ago? Old photos of the said fast food company have been posted on the Nostalgia subreddit by people from both the US and the UK, giving us a glimpse of how it looked like from the past.
One user reminded us all of the burger-shaped stools the chain used to have as well as chairs shaped like packets of fries.
"I completely forgot about this," commented someone.
Mirror compiles some of the nostalgic photos from the subreddit over at their site. Check them out and have a blast from the past.
A restaurant in Taiwan named Eatpire has released what may perhaps be considered as one of the weirdest burgers in the world — Bubble Milk Tea Burger. The bubble tea can be seen spilling on the top of the patty covered in what seems to be mustard sauce. There also seems to be bubble milk tea on the bottom of the patty, alongside the onions and the tomatoes.
Does it taste good? Unfortunately, it doesn’t say. But what are your thoughts about this one?
The science of anthropology is chock-full of theories that have become common knowledge, but at the same time, science is all about questioning and researching what we think we know. The prevailing theory about why men are on average taller than women is explained by natural selection: men who are taller are more successful in competition with other men, including competition in mating, and therefore more likely to pass their genes on. Biological anthropologist Holly Dunsworth tells us that could be an example of circular thinking. What if it's not all about men?
“We need to have more if we’re going to advance the sexual selection hypothesis for why men are taller than women,” she said. In fact, we could turn the narrative on its head: “Maybe dominance and competition are consequences of those size differences rather than the cause,” she said.
Dunsworth found a more direct explanation when she dug into the literature on bone biology and development, focusing in particular on how those relate to hormones. That’s when it became clear to her that “women are shorter than men because most of them have ovaries.”
June 9 is "Bill & Ted Day" (because it's 6/9, ya know). That's why the first glimpse of the new movie Bill & Ted Face the Music has been released in trailer form. The now-middle-aged slackers confront the fact that they still haven't written the song to unite the world, and come up with a scheme to fulfill their destiny. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter look every bit their age, but strangely still have that same attitude they embodied in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey three decades ago. Fans don't care, they are just happy to have more of the characters. Bill & Ted Face the Music opens on August 21. -via Geeks Are Sexy
When a scientist is restricted to his home, he will find something interesting to study. An entomologist is lucky in that respect, since insects are everywhere. Dr. Adrian Smith took at look at the globular springtails (which are technically not insects) that gathered on his garbage can. These bugs are spring-loaded, and can jump and spin in enormous arcs relative to their size. I had never even heard of a globular springtail before, but I will be keeping my eye out for them now. I hear they have a super-weird sex life, too. -via Digg
Taking medicine into space hasn't been a big concern up to now, as even the longest human flights (to the moon) only took a few days. But a trip to Mars is expected to take three years, and that's just getting there. You can't just come home when you're sick, or wait for the next shuttle of supplies. Astronauts on a Mars mission could need any number of medications. However, every extra ounce of supplies taken comes at a cost, so figuring out which medicines are most likely to be needed is the subject of serious research. But the medicines most likely to be needed is just one factor. Drugs can affect the body differently in microgravity. And they'll need to stay stable.
Longer missions bring more variables to how drugs work differently in space, including expiring faster. “Typically what we purchase and what is approved by the FDA or the equivalent European organizations has a 24 month shelf life,” Wotring said. Unfortunately, it takes about 36 months to get to Mars, which could be a major issue. It’s not like astronauts can get a new shipment of Vicodin.
“The stability of medications as a result of the spaceflight environment is largely unknown,” Bayuse said. “There has been some evidence that suggests that some medications may degrade [in space] before the listed manufacturer expiration date. Unfortunately, there have been some issues highlighted with those studies, such as not having ground controls to compare the results to, confounding variables and limited sample sizes hindering the reproducibility of the results.”
“Currently we do not have enough data to fully characterize what those results mean or how the care of our astronauts may need to be adjusted, if at all,” she added.
Scientists are busy gathering the data they'll need to stock an efficient, workable pharmacy for a Mars mission. Some experts tell about their research on drugs in space at Ars Technica.
10 years ago, Santa Fe, New Mexico personality Forrest Fenn buried a chest with $1 million worth of gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. As clues, he publicly offered a map and a poem. That was all that some 350,000 treasure hunters had to go on.
Now Fenn reports that one adventurer has found the treasure. The Santa Fe New Mexican reports:
“It’s true,” Fenn told The New Mexican in a phone call Sunday, adding that the finder of his chest located the valuable goods “a few days ago.”
Fenn wouldn’t say where the treasure was found or who found it.
“The guy who found it does not want his name mentioned. He’s from back East,” he said, adding that it was confirmed from a photograph the man sent him.
The Icknield Way my be the oldest road (or footpath) in England. It was there before the concept of opening land, and people have been traveling on it for thousands of years. So it should be worth saving, right? But what if it cut through your land? Surely you want to have some control over who walked through your property. And that's the conundrum Tom Scott explains here- the tension between the rights of people to travel the same paths they always have and the people who bought up that land and would just as soon have those historic walkways erased from maps.
