Three astronauts were supposed to return to earth this week from China’s Tiangong space station, but their homecoming was delayed because a piece of space junk hit the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft they were to use. They will eventually take another spacecraft home, but the incident highlights how crowded space has become. Well, "space" is pretty big, but most human space activity occurs in low-Earth orbit (LEO), which is where satellites operate. There have been discarded objects in orbit since space flight commenced, but it is growing quickly with the proliferation of multiple, sometimes hundreds, of satellites at a time, such as the Starlink system. 

Space stations, spacecraft, and satellites are now equipped to perform avoidance maneuvers, but with an estimated 45,000 pieces of plastic and metal moving at up to 27,000 kilometers per hour, incidences like the damage to Shenzhou 20 will happen more often. There is also the danger of the Kessler syndrome, in which colliding space junk sets off a chain reaction, leading to massive satellite outages and exponentially more space junk. Read about the latest incident and the growing threat of space junk at Scientific American or at the Internet Archive.  -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: xkcd) 

The 1960 film The Time Machine was based on H.G. Wells' 1895 story of the same name. If you were a child when you first saw it, you were so wrapped up in the story that you didn't think about the spectacular effects. If you were an adult, you may have dismissed the effects as old-fashioned, but they were way ahead of their time in 1960. You may be surprised to learn that The Time Machine was made on a shoestring budget, and what effects were pulled off were a result of hard work and clever workarounds. Parts of the story itself were reworked from the original, because in 1960 we had the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over us, adding a terrifying taste of realism to the apocalyptic storyline. 

There were 65 years between the published story and the movie. Now the movie itself is 65 years old, which seems weird for a movie set in the Victorian era about time travel that spans close to a million years. And in case you now want to see the entire movie again, it's available for free at YouTube. 

A good dinner out with friends can be a captivating experience. Choose the right venue for your meal, final or otherwise. Consider some of these restaraunts built out of jails and rounded up by The Takeout.

Among them is the Old Jailhouse of Sanford, Florida. As the name indicates, the restaurant directly markets itself after the former use of the building. Until 1959, it was the local lockup. Now it offers traditional Southern food.

The menu doesn't mention boiled eggs. I think the managers should offer a meal of 50 of them that are free if you can eat them within an hour without throwing up.

Here's a game in which you can compete with your friends (or enemies) and they'll never even know it. Pickaball is an animated digital pinball machine with no flipper controls, so I guess it's really a ball run. Name the balls in the upper right with a comma between each. It starts you out with three balls, but you can add a bunch of names if you like. 

I don't know how the initial rankings are determined, although I'd guess it's random. They change quickly as the balls fall, and the list keeps up with who gets through the finish line in what order. This could be a way of deciding the order of play for a game, or who has to take the trash out, or any number of decisions between a group of people. Or you can play it for fun, to see what weird icon your characters get and to root for one of them to win. Full disclosure: I played with the same three names until I finally won. -via Boing Boing 

A ridiculous premise makes a great story. Swedish engineer and musician Mattias Krantz got a wild hair and decided he was going to teach an octopus how to play the piano. He went to the seafood market and selected a likely student. He named the octopus Takoyaki, which is a snack made of fried octopus, or Tako for short. Krantz set up an aquarium and became friends with Tako, then realized he had no idea what he was doing. How do you teach an octopus to play piano?

It was a matter of getting to know the octopus. Then Krantz had to design a piano that harnessed Tako's abilities and interests. He had to remake the piano over and over as he learned what worked and what didn't, in a process that took six months. For a creature with eight arms, Tako is no Rachmaninoff, or even Victor Borge, but he can play his weird custom instrument and seems to enjoy it. The video is 18 minutes long, but you will fall in love with Tako, and Krantz's learning process is rather amusing (with plenty of F-bombs). -via Metafilter 

The Triftbrücke, or Trift Bridge, is the longest pedestrian suspension bridge in the Swiss Alps. It is 560 feet (170 meters) long, and is 330 feet (100 meters) above the valley at the midpoint. It was first built in 2004 to allow workers to access a hydroelectric power plant. Beforehand, folks just walked across the Trift Glacier, but it has receded. This scary walking bridge turned out to be popular with hikers, though, and then sightseers, so it was rebuilt in 2009 to be more sturdy. It looks like a rope bridge, but it's made of steel cables with an attached wooden floor. Yes, it still sways in the wind. 

Getting to the Trift Bridge is quite an undertaking. You could walk up the mountain, which takes a couple of hours, or you can take a cable car. From there, it's still a 90 minute hike to the bridge. Once across the bridge, what then? You walk back across the bridge, then 90 minutes back to the cable car. But 20,000 people a year consider it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Read about this bridge and see plenty of scary pictures at Kuriositas. 

(Image credit: alessandro valerio) 

The Newburgh Vintage Emporium is a shop in Newburgh, New York filled with wonderful household goods and decorations for every flavor of eccentricity. Misty White Sidell of the New York Times visited to learn about a growing trend in interior decoration: wasp nests.

These paper-like textured nests bring an aspect of wild nature into the controlled world of the home. City dwellers are especially taken with wasp nests, as they provide a sharp contrast to the human-centered world of the urban environment.

Would you like to have one? If a wasp nest isn't available for free in your area, you can purchase one off eBay or Etsy. But be prepared to spend hundreds of dollars for a quality wasp nest.

-via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: University of Montana

The khene is an instrument used by some ethnic groups that live in the highlands of Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. It's a reedless mouth organ, so the khene is in the same instrument family as the harmonica.

Pat Fernandez of Pat's Soundhouse is a multi-instrumental musician whose skills include the use of the khene. He begins this original composition for the khene with honks that sound exactly like a car alarm. He then transitions into a melodious song that surrounds the car alarm beat.

-via Laughing Squid

Are the insects of the family Gerridae land animals or marine animals? That may be a silly question, because water walkers, or water striders, are both. They live on the surface of water, walking around like that's not a miracle. And they aren't the only insects that can do it. Moving around on the surface of the water is not something they can learn, they have to be built for it. Springtails not only walk on water, but they jump from the water like it's a solid surface, and sometimes give us a gymnastics demonstration while doing it. 

It's all in the science of fluid dynamics, which these bugs understand better than most humans. Ze Frank doesn't mind to explain it to us, long with his usual poking fun at the critters when they get a little awkward. This video is more educational and SFW than most of his True Facts series.

Journalism has changed a lot in the past 150 years, but one thing is still true today: most people only read the headlines, and the rest stop somewhere along the way. On November 9, 1874, readers were astonished by a full page story in the New York Herald that described a catastrophe at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan. A rhinoceros had broken out of its enclosure and proceeded to destroy other pens, freeing all kinds of animals. The wild beasts moved into city streets, and had killed 49 people and injured hundreds of others!

Panic spread through the city when people read the paper. Schools closed, and people rushed to get their children safely inside. Only when they were hunkered down at home did some finally finish reading the story. The last paragraph revealed that the entire account was fiction, to make a point about zoo safety. That did not go over well. Read about the panic and the fallout that came afterward at Fishwrap. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Shadow Ayush)

If you recall the story of the demon core, you already know how ghastly it is. If you don't, well, you're about to find out. The demon core was a ball of plutonium that killed two scientists, one of them only 24 years old. Despite the name, it wasn't personal; that's just what plutonium does. In the 1940s, nuclear scientists knew how dangerous radioactive materials could be, and that's how the US developed those first nuclear bombs that ended World War II. But despite this knowledge, and the safety protocols around nuclear experimentation (inadequate as they were), these scientists took risks led to their drawn out and agonizing deaths.   

This video from SciShow tells the story in a matter-of-fact way, but focuses specifically on the science underneath the danger. Savannah Geary explains the difference between uranium and plutonium down to the atomic level, and why plutonium is super spicy, meaning dangerous. And yet the research these scientists were doing was dedicated to making it more dangerous. There have been a lot of nuclear accidents since then, but the name demon core still haunts the world of nuclear science. There's a 45-second skippable ad at 8:00. 

Everyone knows that Superman is a refugee from the doomed planet Krypton, raised by earthlings Ma and Pa Kent, who taught him to use his super powers for the benefit of earth. I almost said "truth, justice, and the American way," but we know that was added later. Yeah, Superman is the hero he always was, since that first comic was released in 1938. 

But by the time Action Comics introduced Superman, Jerry Siegel had been working on the character for years. In early versions, he was an unwilling victim of a mad scientist who gave him strange and varied powers. The earliest version had him using those powers in a malicious way. The character went through several iterations, once as a time traveler, as Siegel collaborated with artists he knew before Superman had a name and a backstory. You can learn about those unpublished early versions of the Man of Steel in a 45-minute podcast at The Comics Code, or read a succinct account of the highlights at Boing Boing. 

You may have heard about elective surgery some people have to lengthen their legs in order to be taller. That's the kind of story that makes it into the news. But medical intervention to lengthen bones is not new, and it's sometimes necessary for health. If one leg is longer than the other, that can lead to other bones being misaligned, or a curved backbone. And lots of pain. This video doesn't go into the ethics of elective leg-lengthening surgery, but rather gives us a tutorial on how it's done. 

Leg lengthening relies on the way our bones heal by themselves when broken. The real trick is to keep the bone perfectly straight and healing properly. Developments in this kind of surgery over the past century have made it possible for more people to finally have aligned legs to walk on. This TED-Ed lesson from Jason Shih Hoellwarth tells the story in all its gory detail. 

Are you a member of a band of adventurers that would like to level up quickly and are willing to take risks? I know the perfect dungeon you can go to grind up some experience points.*

Live Science reports that scientists have discovered an enormous spider colony in a sulfuric cave on the border between Greece and Albania. The dense web covering the interior of the cave stretches across about 106 square meters, which is approximately the surface area of skin of 73 humans if the skin is removed from those bodies.

-via Daddy Warpig | Photo: Urak et al., Subterranean Biology

*The loot is probably poor, though--aside from what's left behind by previous adventurers.

Well wasn’t this just a great way to wake up this morning. Went looking for my brand new chainsaw that I left on front porch last night. Never gonna find that thing again. This means war! pic.twitter.com/rPfXXVysLu

— BowTiedBroke (@BowTiedBroke) November 6, 2025

X user BowTiedBroke shared security camera footage of a bear stealing a brand new $500 unattended chainsaw from his home during the night.

Why does a bear need a chainsaw? Well, he can probably sell it on eBay. But in the Tennessee woods, a chainsaw could also be practically useful.

UPDATE: BowTiedBroke provides updates. He retrieved the chainsaw from the mouth of the bear's den.