Life is tough for world leaders. You can be good at your job and respected by your constituents, and the internet will still find a way to make you look ridiculous. In this case, Justin Trudeau gave a press conference in which he explained the benefits of face masks by saying it prevented you from “speaking moistly.”

“(A mask) protects others more than it protects you, because it prevents you from breathing or speaking moistly on them,” said Trudeau. He quickly followed up by saying: “what a terrible image,” after he realized the visceral reaction people have to that word.

The turn of phrase was odd enough that it became in instant meme. Brock Tyler Auto-Tuned it into a viral song that’s a guaranteed ear worm. If you are averse to Auto-Tuned politicians, Adam Carter made a nice acoustic version. Good luck getting this tune out of your head. -via Metafilter

The iconic composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is making select musicals from his extensive works available to watch on YouTube each Friday for the next seven weeks.

Tthe initiative, dubbed “The Shows Must Go On!,” was announced in the video below last week, and the virtual series premiered with  the Donny Osmond-led 1999 film adaptation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Future lineups will be announced in “due course,” reports Tim Dams for Variety.

Each full show will begin streaming on YouTube at 2 p.m. EST & remain accessible—free of charge—for the next 48 hours.

The museum was founded in 1884 by Augustus Pitt Rivers - a follower of Darwinism & a collector to outrank all others. The organization of around 50,000 items has remained based on the unusual science of "typology" invented by Rivers - as in they are arranged into "types" of things.

You'll find instruments, weapons, clothing – anything you can think of – displayed side by side from different cultures & times. 

It’s the place with the notorious shrunken heads that inspired a scene in Harry Potter; a place where you can find Yorkshire funeral biscuits next to Chinese burial headdresses. You start to realize, this is not your average collection.

Take a Virtual Tour presented by V21 ArtSpace by Clicking Here.

Read more about the museum on Messy Nessy Chic.

Photo Credit: Top to Bottom & Left to Right: “Pitt Rivers Museum” is copyright (c) 2010 Andrew Sides and made available under a Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) License, “The Pitt Rivers Museum” is copyright (c) 2015 Michael Brace and made available under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) License

Shortages of coronavirus tests & related supplies have left some of the U.S.A.'s most vulnerable people at risk, so when the news came out a tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for Covid-19, people had some questions.

A Wired report released Sunday helped explain how & why this happened.

After several big cats started wheezing & neglecting meals at the end of March Bronx Zoo veterinarians were worried, & ran lots of tests with no result. And while it wasn't originally thought to be the cause, with so many cases of Covid-19 in the population around the zoo, they ran a test just in case.

The veterinary diagnosticians involved are quick to point out that the tests for the tiger were developed specifically in their labs to use on animals, so Nadia was not given a test meant for a human. And while it’s an unexpected development, the tiger’s infection is relevant for scientists trying to understand Covid-19. “Since the beginning, we’ve known that this is a disease that started off in animals and spilled over to people,” says Casey Barton Behravesh, the director of the One Health office for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. “It'll be important for people working on human health and animal health issues to exchange information.”

Read more on Wired Magazine

Tiger Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Perhaps one of the most common things that people do right now, now that we are stuck at home, is play video games. If you are one of those who do that right now, then you might be at the receiving end of the benefits of video games on your brain.

Researchers found experienced gamers have faster information processing abilities and can allocate more cognitive power to individual visual stimuli. Playing video games can cause long-term changes in the brain and lead to improvements in temporal visual selective attention.

More about this over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: QuentinLGH/ Pixabay)

Colonizing Mars and other planets has been a thing in science fiction for quite some time now. But before we do this, we should secure first and foremost the production of essential stuff, like organic compounds, which are too expensive to ship from our planet.

University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) chemists have a plan for that.

For the past eight years, the researchers have been working on a hybrid system combining bacteria and nanowires that can capture the energy of sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into building blocks for organic molecules. Nanowires are thin silicon wires about one-hundredth the width of a human hair, used as electronic components, and also as sensors and solar cells.

The biohybrid, which pulls CO2 from the atmosphere, can also be implemented here on Earth, which makes it a promising candidate in battling climate change.

More details about this over at ScienceDaily.

(Image Credit: ESA/MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA/ Wikimedia Commons)

Aside from the plot and the dialog, one of the things that greatly help films in keeping the audience's eyes on the big screen are camera tricks. Camera angles, for example, greatly affect how the audience perceives the characters. Color wash, on the other hand, heavily enhances the emotion portrayed on the scene.

Check out the various tricks used in Hollywood films over at Cracked. For now, here’s some of them.

(Image Credit: Cracked)

Last night, Saturday Night Live brought us back to our roots. Our old heroes, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, continue their lives after their heroic days were over. Leo, Mikey, Don, and Raph, must deal with adult challenges, such as employment, personal finance, health, and relationships. Not all problems can be solved with a kick to the face.

-via You Bent My Wookie

Vickie Jones was a talented singer who is perhaps most famous for being arrested for impersonating Aretha Franklin. During the day, Jones sang with her church choir, and at night she sang under her assumed name in seedy bars for money, because she was a single mother with four children to support. And she was good at it. Jones was a fan of Aretha Franklin, and covered some of Franklin’s hit songs in her nightclub act. One night, James Brown impersonator Lavell Hardy heard Jones sing and was impressed by how much she sounded like Aretha.

Hardy later approached Jones and told her that he was slated to tour with the actual Aretha Franklin in Florida, and that he wanted to book Jones as an opening act in the shows. Jones initially refused Hardy’s offer, not because she didn’t believe him, but rather because she quite literally didn’t have enough money for bus fair to get to Florida. However, after Hardy explained that Jones would be paid $1,000 (about $8,000 today) for a stretch of six nights of performing with the Queen of Soul, she took out a loan with a local money lender for the price of a bus ticket.

When Jones arrived in Florida without a penny to her name, however, Hardy explained he’d been lying and that she wouldn’t be opening for Franklin at all, but would be pretending to be her. An irate Jones told Hardy that she’d do no such thing… The problem was she was now stuck in Florida without money to get home. At this point, beyond dangling the promise of a lot of money if she went along with it, Hardy also allegedly told her that he’d kill her and toss her body in the ocean if she refused to comply with his request.

Driving a hard bargain, Jones accepted his offer, and Hardy subsequently went about approaching a number of small Florida club owners claiming to represent Franklin. These owners were understandably unconvinced that the very young Hardy represented THE Aretha Franklin, with some going so far to laugh in his face.

However, some were convinced to pay for an Aretha Franklin show, and Hardy made plenty of money- which he did not share with Jones. Neither did he allow her out of his sight unless she was locked in her hotel room. Read about the travails of the Aretha Franklin clone Vickie Jones at Today I Found Out.

This is Barnard 33, also known as the Horsehead Nebula. It is a large body of interstellar dust clouds sculpted through time by stellar winds and radiation.

A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the above gorgeously detailed image was taken in 2013 in infrared light by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in honor of the 23rd anniversary of Hubble's launch.

After millions of years, however, the Horsehead Nebula will slowly change in shape and eventually be destroyed by a high energy starlight.

So while it’s still around, let’s appreciate this magnificent sculpture that’s unlike any other.

(Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

This guy scooped up a jar of pond water to see what would grow in it. He ended up seeing some amazing things, and we are thankful he had a microscope to help him show us. If you're interested, he did a second video to follow up on his new pets.



-via Digg

To stay busy and creative, UK wedding photographer Chris Wallace staged and shot a wedding of LEGO minifigs! Besides photos of the ceremony itseld, he included many of the staged and edited poses that couples request, like the couple floating through the air and one where the rain falls around them.

See a collection of images from the wedding shoot at PetaPixel. -via Boing Boing

They say that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. But if you don’t want to go through all the gastric juices there, maybe you’ll reconsider your route and take this expressway instead.

Image via Engrish.com

April 11, 1970. At 2:13 PM, EST, three astronauts, namely commander James “Jim” Lovell, command module pilot John “Jack” Swigert, and lunar module pilot Fred Haise, took off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Their destination: the Moon. Everything was going fine (or at least, it seemed), when, fifty-six hours after the launch, something went wrong.

The crew, who had just finished a television broadcast from aboard the command module, nicknamed Odyssey, noticed a slight drop in cabin pressure. Swigert went to see what was going on and check on the service module's oxygen tanks.

The crew heard a loud bang coming from outside and Swigert uttered the famous line: "Okay Houston, we've had a problem here."

After the bang, everything quickly went downhill.

The tank explosion was so intense that it blasted off a chunk of the service module. As a result of this explosion, power and oxygen quickly started to drop and, all of a sudden, things were a matter of life or death.

With this happening, the astronauts, as well as the NASA ground crew below, immediately realized that there’s no chance for them to go to the Moon — they had to go back. But getting them back would prove to be really difficult.

Thanks to the efforts of both the astronauts and the ground team, the three people were able to come back in one piece.

This event went down in history as NASA’s “successful failure”. While the mission to go to the Moon clearly failed, the mission to bring these astronauts home clearly didn't.

Learn more about this significant event in space history over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: NASA/ Wikimedia Commons)

Easter is a religious holiday, but like other holidays, the secular side of the celebration is full of traditions handed down and evolved from pagan rituals, in this case, celebrating the arrival of spring. Among those customs is the appearance of skeletal horse.

In East Lancashire, a long time ago, the streets were plagued by a kind of hobby-horse made from the skull of a dead horse, with bottle-bottoms for eyes and nails for teeth. The contraption was worn over the head and had a lever to snap its jaws. This ‘horse’ (which resembles the Welsh Mari Lywd) was nicknamed Old Ball, after the common name for a carthorse. Sackcloth or cow-skin hid the operator, who would snap the monster’s jaws to make women scream and terrify their children. Several people suffered defensive injuries to their hands.

Read about a bunch of old, odd, and sometimes violent Easter customs at Folklore Thursday. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: R. fiend)