In October of 1998, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch in which guest host Lucy Lawless played Stevie Nicks as the proprietor of a casual Tex-Mex restaurant in Arizona. It was a weird random setup, a one-time bit that was never reprised. For many it was forgotten, but in the hyper-communicative era of the internet, we learn that it resonated with a lot of people, even decades later.

“I tell you what: I didn’t really realize it had a life of its own,” Lawless tells me.

Honestly? It’s pretty wild that it does. “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup” wasn’t prescient. It didn’t put its finger on the pulse of 1998, or anticipate the ways in which pop culture would shift in the years to come. It didn’t point toward some broader universal truth, or teach us something about ourselves.

It just … started, and was weird for two and a half minutes. But it was really weird for those two and a half minutes, blithely absurd and blissfully silly in a way that cuts through the clutter and nestles itself into your gray matter. We can’t always explain why something sticks in our brains; sometimes, it just works. And for a lot of people, “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup”—something that probably shouldn’t have worked for anybody—just worked.

Fans of the sketch are delighted to find that they are not alone, and Lucy Lawless herself is tickled that people remember a thing she herself had forgotten. Read how “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup” came about and found an afterlife of its own at the Ringer.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dan Evans)

Artist Chet Phillips (previously at Neatorama) has created a series of illustrations that portray fictional creatures from pop culture as vintage scientific field studies. Click to the right on the picture above to see more of the collection he calls Unnatural History. It's as if a science artist wanted to show us accurate flying monkeys, xenomorphs, or gremlins in the days before photography (or CGI, for that matter)! Prints of these are available at Etsy, in case you see your favorite fictional character. -via Laughing Squid

Now that’s a way to celebrate your recovery! I’m not sure if it’s actually recommended, but the nursing home staff let Jennie Stejna celebrate her recovery from COVID-19 with a Bud Light. After all, the 103-year-old went through something so painful and dire, she deserves a cold one after successfully beating the sickness! 

image screenshot via The Huffington Post

It seems pretty natural now, to ease the symptoms of a cold or flu with hot lemonade, spiked with some honey and/or whiskey. It hydrates the body, provides vitamin C, and soothes a sore throat, but it doesn't cure anything. However, the reason we enjoy hot lemonade when we feel sick goes back to the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic and the power of advertising.  

The telegram first arrived at Sunkist’s sales office in Los Angeles: The East Coast needed lemons. The arrival of cheaper, Sicilian imports had been slowed by the war, and America’s new go-to citrus, the orange, had suffered a poor growing season. Demand for the little-used lemon was high and supplies were low. In Boston, wholesale prices had more than doubled in a month. Meanwhile in California, leafy lemon trees, finally recovered from the sweltering 1917 season, were heavy with fruit.

Countless home remedies emerged as Americans grappled with the disease, some placebo, some actual poison. From the pantry came the promise of health in the guise of red onions or black coffee or watered-down molasses or brandy with asafetida, a pungent spice common in Indian cooking. But only the lemon had the advertising know-how of Don Francisco and Lord & Thomas behind it.

The campaign advertising lemons never claimed it cured the flu, but they knew what to say to lead people to think so, even to the point of sucking lemons directly. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.  

(Image credit: André Karwath)

If you know someone whose love for spreadsheets is to the 65536th power, then you might consider giving this mug to them. Costing only £7.99 (around $9.99), The I Love Spreadsheets Mug by Firebox pays its respects to “the World’s ugliest but smartest interface.” It also features artwork which was made using an actual spreadsheet, which is not only cool, but also meta!

… though according to the calculations on my spreadsheet, you’ll pay a bit more for it if you need it shipped to the U.S. from the U.K., which is where Firebox is based.

(Image Credit: Firebox/ Technabob)

It is said that the average human plays host to approximately 100 trillion microbes, many of which are considered to be good and beneficial for the body. For example, the microbes that reside in our gut help us in digesting our food, while those on our skin and tongue can defend against pathogens. Now, a new part of the human body — the nose, specifically — has been found to be rich with these good microbes. The microbes that reside in this said body part could help guard the body against chronic sinus inflammation or even allergies.

The study is “an important gateway” to recognizing bacteria’s protective qualities in a new part of the body, says Maria Marco, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved with the work. “There’s been some work done in the past, but this is the first study that goes in depth.”

[...]

Of the 30 most common types of microbes the team discovered, one group stood out: antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory bacteria called Lactobacillus…

[...]

Under a microscope, the researchers could also see tiny, hairlike appendages called fimbriae that anchor the bacteria to the nose’s inner surface. ... the microbes may also use the hairs to bind to receptors on skin cells inside the nose, prompting the cells to close like a trap door. With fewer cells open, allergens and harmful bacteria have a harder time getting inside them.

More details about this study over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: De Boeck et al., Cell Reports/ Science Magazine)

🇹🇷Bu akşam saat 20.30 civarı Trabzon, Artvin, Rize, Ardahan, Erzurum, Muş başta olmak üzere birçok ilde görülen #meteor 'un şu ana kadar çekilen en net görüntüsü pic.twitter.com/gbzHqgSitP

— Corona Güncel (@Coronabilgi) May 27, 2020

At around 8:30 PM (local time) on May 27, residents of northern Turkey spotted a “ball of light” quickly descending in the sky. Suddenly, the fireball exploded in the air with a loud sound. The fireball was spotted across different cities and provinces.

It's an amazing sight, filmed from multiple angles, clearly showing that the object exploded at a significant altitude. It's not yet confirmed that the object was a meteor, but news outlet Hürriyet reports that meteorologists have assessed it as what we'd expect from a "meteor shower".

In addition, this behaviour is extremely consistent with space rocks that have the misfortune to enter Earth's atmosphere. That's because most meteors that reach our planet's atmosphere don't actually make it to the ground; not intact, at any rate.

ScienceAlert compiles various clips of the fireball. Check them out over at the site.

(Image Credit: @Coronabilgi/ Twitter)

Bees need pollen for food. In doing so, they also pollinate the plants, which help the plants in creating seeds and thereby in reproduction. This is the symbiotic relationship between bees and plants, which is further explored in this study published in the American Journal of Botany. Apparently, some pollen have evolved to attach themselves into traveling bumblebees.

Using a highly detailed electron scanning microscope, the research team could observe the microscopic surface of the spiny pollen, which otherwise looks like yellow dust to the naked eye.

"We observed this native pollen from the Rockies has optimally spaced spines that allow it to easily attach to a pollinator, such as a bumblebee," said Austin Lynn, a recent graduate with a doctorate in biology from the Division of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science. "When we compared that with the average lawn dandelion, which does not need pollen to reproduce, we saw that the pollen on the lawn dandelion has a shorter distance between these spines, making it harder to attach to traveling pollinators. Therefore, we show this wild dandelion pollen has evolved over many generations to create an optimal shape for attaching to pollinators."

More details of this study over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: University of Missouri/ EurekAlert)

Despite being over two decades old, Super Mario 64 continues to amaze animators today. One such feature in this classic game is Mario’s ability to jump three consecutive times, with each succeeding jump being higher than the previous one. The animation here was so great that it has been carried over on to succeeding Mario games with only minor tweaks. But what makes this animation great? New Frame Plus closely examines what’s up with this amazing animation and shares his insights in this short video.

(Video Credit: New Frame Plus/ YouTube)

During the spiritualist movement of the 19th century, Russian aristocrat Helena Blavatsky drew a following with her philosophy and apparent supernatural abilities, and in 1875 set up an organization called the Theosophical Society in New York.

Theosophy had tens of thousands of adherents, ranging from serious devotees to celebrity dabblers like Thomas Edison. Blavatsky argued that every major religion contained some element of truth, and she made that argument in books that were based on her invented travels to Tibet and that liberally stole from earlier occult works. For today, all you need to know about is her idea of a World Teacher, a supposed being from a higher plane of existence that routinely takes human form to guide the development of our species. Blavatsky speculated that our Teacher previously popped down in guises that included Confucius, Plato, Seneca, and Jesus, and in 1909 the Theosophical Society claimed to have found Jesus 2.0.

A Theosophist in India spotted a 14-year-old boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti and declared him to be the prophesized Teacher. Krishnamurti was taken in by the Society and educated, but things didn't turn out the way Madam Blavatsky had predicted. Read that story in all the colorful prose you'd expect from Cracked.

(Image credit: The Library of Congress)

Will Disney ever run out of ways to monetize the Star Wars universe? No. Next up, a competition series centered around everything Star Wars. That's cause for celebration among Disney and Lucasfilm executives, and fans too young to recall the original trilogy in theaters. Or on videotape.

That’s because on June 3, Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge will finally be released to the world. Hosted by Ahmed Best (aka Jar Jar Binks himself), the show is very much like the kids’ game shows many of us grew up with: Double Dare, Endurance, Guts, etc. Except this time, it’s all Star Wars.

Strangely, this game show will not air exclusively on Disney+, but will be available online to all. And it's good to see Best given a chance to play a different Star Wars character. Read more at io9.

In a very young star system called AB Aurigae, which about 520 light-years away, astronomers have spotted what seems to be evidence of a planet being born. They reported this finding in the journal Astronomy & Physics over a week ago. The recently released images show a massive disc of gas and dust, which has a twist that could be an indication of a new planet forming.

AB Aurigae was observed a few years ago through the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile. Those images showed two long spirals of gas close to the star, spurring scientists to follow up with the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (also in Chile). This telescope is armed with an instrument called SPHERE, which can view faint light reflected by small dust grains and emissions originating from the star system’s inner disc.

SPHERE’s images confirmed the presence of the spirals, and also showed the twist indicating that the spiral arms are connected. It is these spirals that let other gas and dust moving through the young star system accrete onto the planet-to-be, which slowly grows into something fully formed and mature.

Breathtaking.

(Image Credit: ESO/Boccaletti et al./ Technology Review)

It is pretty easy nowadays to know what type of personality you have, as a lot of type-based personality tests, such as the Myers-Briggs, DISC, and Enneagram, can be found readily available online. Despite being popular, however, these personality types unfortunately do not meet the standards of “good” science.

First, from a psychological perspective, there is no such thing as a personality "type." That's not how personality is conceptualized nor how it works; it's a gross oversimplification. Personality is influenced by situations, context, unresolved trauma, and many other factors.

In his article over at Psychology Today, Benjamin Hardy states the risk of taking these type-based personality tests.

Type-based personality tests are not scientific. But they may encourage people to have a fixed mindset about themselves because rather than explaining personality, they give people a sense of identity in the form of a "type" or "category." Once people have made something an aspect of their identity, they can become blind or mindless to all the times when the label is false. They can also defend it because their identity is sacred to them. Rather than considering who their "future self" is and striving for growth, a person can justify mediocre performance by saying, "I'm a [fill in the blank]."

Read more about Hardy’s article over at the site.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

We all have our respective convictions — beliefs that we strongly hold on to. Because we firmly hold on to these beliefs, we only entertain and process information that strengthens our said beliefs, but we fail to process information that contradicts them. While scientists have understood this phenomenon for a time, they did not yet understand the underlying mechanisms behind this phenomenon.

In this study published in Nature Communications, researchers try to understand the neural processes that help explain confirmation bias.

Lead author, Ph.D. candidate Max Rollwage (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Ageing Research) said: "We were interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms causing people to ignore information that contradicts their beliefs, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. For example, climate change sceptics might ignore scientific evidence that indicates the existence of global warming.

See the study over at MedicalXpress.

(Image Credit: webandi/ Pixabay)

I've started doing yoga for 8 months. My backache is gone. So I recommend some easy poses for artists/everyone who gets backache pic.twitter.com/zE0iE0ODE4

— 🦁 n a i r 🐍 FF7R楽しい (@mindcreator) January 22, 2017

Most of us are probably spending time as couch potatoes and living a sedentary lifestyle at home. You might be spending most of your time just hunched on your chair while doing your work or communicating with your pals online, a position which causes backache. This Twitter post from over two years ago might be of help to you. In this post, Twitter user @mindcreator recommends these easy poses for those who suffer from backache.

Well, what do you think?

Via 9GAG

(Image Credit: @mindcreator/ Twitter)