We all know what a living language is- those are the ones we use. But languages eventually die out when people don't use them. The death of a language is a gradual process that goes from a lack of native speakers to no speakers to eventually an untranslatable mystery. We think of Latin as the epitome of a "dead" language because no one raises their children to speak Latin as their first language. Yet a lot of people can speak and understand it, and it is used in certain ways in religion and science, unlike, say, Sanskrit.

Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovski (previously at Neatorama) takes us through the process of language death. Languages can be classified as dormant, dead, or extinct depending on where they are in the death process. However, these terms are not mutually exclusive, nor do they signal that a language is doomed. Well, except maybe the extinct label does. What can really blow your mind is realizing that we don't have that many examples of an extinct language because they are extinct, but you can bet your bottom dollar that there are a bunch of them we'll never know about. -via Laughing Squid

You may have never heard of the medical procedure called osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis (OOKP), possibly because doctors call it tooth-in-eye surgery. Or maybe because your doctor has never proposed transplanting one of your teeth into your eye. This surgery has been done for decades in Australia and has a good track record for restoring sight for certain patients who suffer from corneal blindness and have a functioning retina.

Surgeons remove a patient's canine (eye tooth) and cut it into a rectangle and drill a hole in it to house a telescopic lens. Then they attach it to the patient's inner cheek for a few months to grow tissue around it. Then they implant the tooth in the patient's eyeball! The bio-device works because tooth enamel is so hard, and because transplants from the patient's own body aren't rejected. Three Canadians have recently become the first in that country to try OOKP. Read how this bizarre but established transplant technique works at CBC.  -via Boing Boing

(Unrelated image credit: Reese Brown)

Often when you hear about a cryptid, like Bigfoot or the chupacabra or a jackalope, it's a story that's been around so long that people cannot pinpoint when the legend started. But the urban legend of the Fresno Nightcrawlers not only has an exact start date, but it's relatively recent and there is video footage! This cryptid had the advantage of the internet, which quickly adopted it after the original 2007 video went viral. A Fresno Nightcrawler looks like a pair of legs that walk around by themselves. In most fan art, there's a head attached, but the video it is based on is so blurry you have to use your imagination. Luckily, that's what so many people on the 'net are good at.

Is the Fresno Nightcrawler a hoax, a strange technical artifact, or something real that we just don't understand? Dr. Emily Zarka of Monstrum (previously at Neatorama) takes a good look at the video that made the Fresno Nightcrawler a thing.

Hollywood or someone has tried over and over to make interactive movies a thing, starting way back in the 1960s. Later on, the idea was to marry the concepts of movies and video games, which had to be a winner because kids loved video games. There are quite a few ways to do this, each being expensive and risky and a lot of work, but everyone who made the attempt was sure their interactive movie would be the breakthrough that changed cinema forever. What could possibly go wrong?

The 1995 film project Mr. Payback: An Interactive Movie was launched amid high hopes. It was aimed at kids and teens, who already played video games. It was rude and crude and even had some bankable talent involved. The plot was designed to channel the audience's baser instincts and lust for revenge. And it was a terrific flop. I'm sure you can imagine some reasons why it didn't work, but there were a lot of valid reasons. Eventually, movie producers realized that people didn't like having to share their plot options with a crowd of strangers when they could have total control of their games at home. Read about the disaster that was Mr. Payback at Mental Floss.

Camels have been called "the ships of the desert" because they are so good at negotiating hot, dry, sandy territory. Every part of their bodies is optimized for such a journey, but it took a long time to develop all those specialized features. Who better to explain those body parts than Ze Frank? As part of his True Facts series, he goes over a camel's body piece by piece to show us how weird they are, and how they are perfect for living in, and carrying people through, the desert. For example, it's handy to have tough pads  to protect your body in areas where it comes in contact with the earth. Camels have them on their feet, their knees, and even their chests so they can sit down on hot sand. But it's their internal physiology that's really weird, from their red blood cells to their sinuses that are all optimized for desert survival. This video doesn't make me want to live in the desert any more than I already did, but it works for camels. There's a 70-second ad at 5:10.

Do you remember when movie theaters used to have double features? Two movie for the price of one! Which, of course, wasn't really the case, since double features were so common we didn't know what the proper price for one movie should be. Usually, the double feature paired an expensive Hollywood production (an A-movie) with a B-movie, which was made on a budget of less than $100,000, which could be as low as $10,000. People sometimes fumed about having to sit through the B-movie first in order to see the film they really came for. Or if the B-movie played last, they only stayed because they felt they needed to get their money's worth. Or the double features might even be two B-movies, because the teenagers making out in a dark theater or a drive in didn't care.

But the double feature wasn't just a marketing stunt that stuck around. It was a scheme to keep Hollywood studios in business, and theater owners didn't have a choice. It was only when antitrust laws were enacted and enforced that the double features went the way of the dodo. Whether you enjoyed them or not, you'll want to learn about how the double feature worked at JSTOR Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Warner Bros./Toho)

Luna is described as a "unique-looking dog." That's quite an understatement! Luna has huge ears that stand straight up, and markings that make her nose look like a pig's snout. Her mouth is outlined in black, which just highlights how crooked her smile is. Her skull deformities are the result of distemper when she was a puppy, which she was very lucky to have survived. Distemper has a mortality rate of 50% in adult dogs, and 80% in puppies. Luna's color markings also accentuate her differences. There's really no explaining those ears! But Luna gets along fine, and has a great life with her human Danni, who is the daughter of Luna's original rescuer. Luna's bubbly personality -and her amusingly odd voice- endear her to everyone she meets. You can follow Luna and her adventures with Danni and with her new canine sibling Milo at Instagram.

Our modern lives have been shaped by technological breakthroughs and scientific discoveries that make our lives better. Often, the "making life better" part comes a long time before the "whoops- that's actually very dangerous" part. The automobile changed family life forever, as the large sedans of the past could haul all the kids at once! They could even be comfortably rocked to sleep in a baby hammock suspended across the back seat! The ad touts how this would keep your baby safe in the car, meaning something like safe from rolling down the window and jumping out. However, in the event of a collision, it could easily become a slingshot.

But the car hammock is just one of many products that went to market without someone trying to imagine what could possibly go wrong. Read about five of those dangerous items especially designed for babies, or rather, especially designed for the convenience of parents to the detriment of the child, at Cracked.

Street Art Utopia brings to our attention cement mixer trucks painted to resemble matryoshka--Russian nesting dolls. This particular one is in Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

In my mind, matryoshka are a traditional Russian handicraft. But according to a page maintained by the Russian Studies program at Macalester College, they date back to only 1892.

As you may have gathered from the recent Honest Trailer, Nickel Boys is one of the lesser-hyped nominees for a Best Picture Oscar. The story is fictionalized, but is based on the true horrors of the Dozier School For Boys, earlier called the Florida Industrial School for Boys. The reform school opened in 1900 and operated until 2011. At first, juveniles were sentenced to the school for real crimes, but as time wore on, they could be sent there for truancy or general misbehavior.

What went unknown for almost of the school's history is the cemetery behind the school's garbage dump that held unmarked graves of the boys who died there, many of them undocumented. There are survivors around still who can tell you about the harsh physical punishments for minor infractions that included beatings, isolation, starvation, and sexual abuse. In 1996, 31 metal crosses were installed in the cemetery, but a later investigation and exhumation showed that that was far too few to represent the juveniles who died there. Read about the real school behind The Nickel Boys at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: State of Florida)

The annual Oscars will be bestowed this coming Sunday, March 2, to deserving films as selected by the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And every year, Screen Junkies runs a mega-Honest Trailer for all the nominees for Best Picture. Why? Because these are the prestige films that the majority of us didn't see, including Screen Junkies, which means these movies don't already have Honest Trailers. This small group of online producers had to sit down and watch all ten movies to get this video prepared in time for the awards, so you don't have to. But if you're like me and saw exactly none of the ten contenders for the top award, this Honest Trailer, however abbreviated for each movie, might serve as a guide to which of them you might want to check out after the awards, win or lose. Check out the full list of nominations here.

Chris Terrill, despite being 73 years old, is quite an athlete. He has completed more than 50 marathons, and was registered for last year's Brighton Marathon in his native England. But then Terrill suffered an injury and got a hip replacement. Since he was already registered to run and raise money for wounded veterans, he decided to run the marathon anyway, on crutches. Terrill completed that marathon in six hours, 11 minutes and 11 seconds. That's quite an accomplishment, especially since he was on crutches. When people mentioned his feat may be a world record, he was astonished.

"If I'd known there was a record to be beaten, I'd have gone faster," he said.

Terrill had even stopped to take selfies with his fans along the way! Since it wasn't an official attempt, the Guinness officials had to verify Terrill's feat by the race records, which took a year. Read about this iron man and his record at BBC. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Royal Navy and Royal Marines Charity)

You've hear about "illegal" LEGO techniques or joins or methods. The LEGO company has no power of law over what you do with the LEGO pieces you have bought and paid for, so the term "illegal" should be taken with a grain of salt. But the company does have its own rules for users to follow. These rules are codified building techniques that try to ensure that whatever you build will be sturdy enough to stay built and won't warp or break the bricks you used to make it. I think some of these rules might be for safety's sake, too. Beyond that, this video gives us a glimpse into the world of the LEGO company and how they produce so many building pieces of so many different kinds, resulting in glorious sets designed for every type of fandom. It's a little over seven minutes long; the rest is an ad.


 

The Hubble telescope has been taking images of the Andromeda galaxy for years, and now that work has paid off in the form of the we have the largest galactic mosaic of all-time. The project is called PHAT: the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury, and the result is a map of that entire galaxy, made from more than 600 images stitched together, comprising 2.5+ billion pixels. That's the big picture, so to speak. But Hubble takes images in X-ray, ultraviolet, and near infrared, too, so this image contains way more information than just what the Andromeda galaxy looks like.

The full image shows us 200 million or so individual stars in the Andromeda galaxy. It is the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way, and is actually moving closer to us. But it's still more than 2.5 million light years away, and won't collide with our galaxy for another few billion years. Read about the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury mosaic and zoom in on some images that tell us about those 200 million stars, at Big Think.  

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

The best art will be relatable to many people, and will touch your emotions. That's exactly what the kinetic sculpture Eternal Frustration does- it pushes our emotional buttons. All of us have spent way too much of our precious time trying to find the end of transparent tape on a roll. Box tape is even worse than cellophane tape. The process is like Sisyphus rolling a stone up hill, knowing that the task is futile in the long run. If you are lucky enough to find the end, you find that getting your fingernail under a corner isn't the end of your problems, because the tape will split just to spite you.

The sculpture is from Italian designer Amedeo Capelli of Stoccafisso design (previously at Neatorama), who knows how to get a rise out of the viewer. Some of his more whimsical and pleasant automata are available at his Etsy shop.

-via Boing Boing