On February 29, the residents of Kurri Kurri, New South Wales, Australia welcomed the luminaries of the world to Mulletfest--an annual celebration of the world's most prestigious hairstyle.

The contest includes age group brackets, as well as an overall best mullet. The cultivator of this mullet is considered the grand champion and ruler of the mullet people until they gather again in Kurri Kurri. You can see photos of these beautiful people at the Daily Mail.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: CGTN

Is pineapple on a pizza a valid choice or an abomination? The "validity" of a pizza topping means different things to different people, so Mel magazine consulted fifteen experts: three Italian chefs, three food historians, three food writers and/or critics, three flavor chemists, and three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Really. Many of those experts qualified their answers first by saying people should eat whatever they want on a pizza, and then went ahead to give their honest opinion. You can't get any more scientific than that. Find out what they said and how the scales of those opinions tipped at Mel magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Janine)

47 years after she lost it in Maine, Debra McKenna is reunited with her late husband's class ring. But now, she's trying to figure out how it ended up in a forest in Finland. Listen to her speak with @caroloffcbc. Read more, here: https://t.co/jno1GDYHI9 pic.twitter.com/5HiIz7zR0T

— As It Happens (@cbcasithappens) February 18, 2020

When Debra Mckenna of Brunswick, Maine, was in high school, her boyfriend Shawn gave her his class ring before he headed off to college in 1973. She lost it soon afterward. But Shawn and Debra got married, had three children, and stayed together until Shawn died in 2017.

The ring was forgotten until last month when a sheet metal worker in Finland contacted the Morse High School Alumni Association. He wanted to locate the ring’s owner.

According to a Jan. 17 Finnish newspaper story, Marko Saarinen was using a metal detector in a forested city park in Kaarina, a small town in southwest Finland, when he found it.

With the school's name, year, and the owner's initials, it wasn't hard to pinpoint who the ring belonged to. McKenna got it back 47 years after it was lost! How the ring went from Maine to Finland remains a mystery. Read the whole story at the Bangor Daily News. -via Strange Company

Remember Lundy, the puppy who can’t walk, and Herman the pigeon? Thanks to Walkin’ Pets, a charity specializing in animal mobility, Lundy is now slowly learning to walk through a customized wheelchair.

The Mia Foundation, based in Rochester, N.Y., introduced the world this month to the friendship between Lundy, a chihuahua puppy unable to use his back legs properly enough to walk, and Herman, a pigeon unable to fly.

[...]

Mia Foundation officials said they didn't know wheelchairs existed for dogs as small as 2-pound Lundy, but they received just such a wheelchair this week from Walkin' Pets.

Wholesome!

(Video Credit: WMUR-TV/ YouTube)

What were once chairs and tables brimming with people have now become cold steel and empty tables. What were once tourist spots have now become desolate and lifeless. This is the city of Venice now, after the flood in November and the recent outbreak of the coronavirus.

According to Associazione Venezia Albergatori, an association of local hotel owners, 50 percent of reservations in Venice have been canceled in the last week. “The situation is dramatic for the industry,” said Vittorio Bonacini, the chairman.

Mr. Bonacini estimates that since November, Venetian tourism, worth 3 billion euro or about $3.3 billion, “has probably lost 800 million euro.” Since the outbreak began on Feb. 21, he said, Venice hotels have lost almost 70 percent of their international visitors.

Once plagued by overtourism, Venice is now ghastly empty.

More information about this over The New York Times.

(Image Credit: Renata Brito/Associated Press)

A supermassive black hole has punched a crater the size of 15 Milky Way galaxies into the universe hundreds and millions of light-years away. As of now, it is the biggest known explosion in our universe, and scientists state that they have never seen anything like this before.

"In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," lead author Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC said in a press release Thursday. "A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas."

[...]

Researchers believe the origin of the explosion is a supermassive black hole in a large galaxy at the center of the Ophiuchus cluster. While black holes are known for dragging material inwards, they can also blast material and energy outwards.

More details about this explosive news over at CBS News.

(Video Credit: Chandra X-ray Observatory/ YouTube)

You might have seen this in some video game players today. When looking up, players push the opposite direction — they press down in their controllers. They configure the setting of the game and invert Y axis. The question is, what difference does this make? And why do some players bother to do it?

It turns out there is very little research in this area, which is a surprise considering two billion people play games on a regular basis – and as I have discovered on social media, many of them are extremely invested in this issue. However, two of the academics I spoke to about inversion were happy to speculate on what might be happening – and both allowed for one very straightforward possibility: it’s habitual.

A lot of people who invert the Y axis do so because the games they started playing had that control set-up as the default option. This is especially true of older gamers – in the 1980s and early 1990s, flight sims were a hugely popular genre, and of course, the controls would be inverted to match an aircraft yoke or joystick.

Habitual use is not the only possibility when it comes to interpreting this type of behavior. Spatial perception and interpretation of the information seen on the screen could also be a possibility.

Check out The Guardian for more details about this topic.

Do you invert the y-axis when you play?

(Image Credit: quakeboy/ Pixabay)

It is thanks to science and technology that our way of life is constantly improving. Every day, new, tougher, and more durable devices are being made. But sometimes, old devices and equipment can still compete with the new ones, and sometimes even surpass them in certain aspects, such as these World War I helmets.

Scientists from Duke University have revealed that World War I helmets perform remarkably well against shock waves compared to their modern high-tech counterparts.

One helmet, the French Adrian design, even performed better than a modern design in terms of protection from overhead blasts, according to the Duke biomedical engineers' research.

"While we found that all helmets provided a substantial amount of protection against blast, we were surprised to find that the 100-year-old helmets performed just as well as modern ones," said Joost Op 't Eynde, a biomedical engineering doctoral student and first author of the study, in a statement. "Indeed, some historical helmets performed better in some respects."

Check out more details about this over at Fox News.

(Image Credit: Joost Op 't Eynde, Duke University)

A new musical remix from Pogo (Nick Bertke) gives us the pleasure of revisiting the 1993 movie Mrs. Doubfire and the genius that was Robin Williams. -via Geeks Are Sexy

People think the Pacific Northwest is a beautiful and peaceful place to live, but make no mistake some areas are just baaad. Did you know that we have goats holding people hostage? No kidding! This criminal might be the Greatest Of All Time! 

ICYMI: We had some pawsitivly adorable audience members from K-9 Country Inn Service Dogs during last weeks Relaxed Performance of #sfBillyElliot. Our Next Relaxed Performance is #sfNeverending on October 2nd. https://t.co/xaBwx65W8J pic.twitter.com/otyNjm5pUS

— Stratford Festival (@stratfest) August 15, 2019

About a dozen soon-to-be service dogs attended an August performance of Billy Elliot: The Musical. Apparently, attending a musical was a part of their training on how to behave when they’re with their owners in the theatre.

The dogs… silently sat and watched the musical, which took place at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada.

[...]

The event was part of a two-year training program by K-9 Country Inn Working Service Dogs according to head trainer Laura MacKenzie.

She told CNN that the future service dogs have been touring zoos, subways and crowded fairs to get them used to the unfamiliar lights and sounds, rapid movements and busy crowds they might encounter with their handler.

MacKenzie says that they were “pleasantly surprised” that all of their dogs were great — no one made a noise, and everyone did their jobs very well.

Salute!

(Image Credit: Stratford Festival/ Twitter)

For a long time, archaeologists had the idea that the world's first cities were structured on the Mesopotamian model: centralized governments with powerful rulers supervising thousands of working class people and slaves. But more recent discoveries have unearthed large cities elsewhere that were more spread out and egalitarian. One of these is a settlement in Ukraine that dates back around 6,000 years, called Nebelivka after the present day village there.  

Over six years of fieldwork since 2009, the researchers have excavated and mapped Nebelivka structures located over more than a square kilometer. Aerial photos, satellite images and geomagnetic data, supplemented by excavations of 88 test pits, identified 1,445 residential houses and 24 communal structures dubbed assembly houses. Residential houses, some intact and most in ashes after having burned, were grouped into 153 neighborhoods, a majority containing three to seven houses. Neighborhoods, in turn, formed 14 quarters, each with one or more assembly houses situated in an open area.

During about 200 years of occupation, Nebelivka served as both a dwelling site and, oddly enough, a kind of cemetery for incinerated houses, Gaydarska says. About two-thirds of Nebelivka houses had been deliberately burned at different times, creating mounds of charred debris across the site. Sediment and pollen excavated in and around Nebelivka display no signs of wildfire, a clue that the houses were intentionally set aflame.

Why would this community deliberately burn down houses at different times? The experts have their various theories; my first thought was bedbugs. Experts disagree over whether Nebelivka was populated year-round or was a gathering spot for trade or protection. Read about Nebelivka and other ancient cities like it at ScienceNews. -via Metafilter  

(Image credit: Nebelivka Project/M. Nebbia)

Josef Stalin had high hopes for the census taken in the Soviet Union in 1937. Eleven years after the last census, it was sure to give him fodder to brag about the growing and prosperous empire he ruled.

But the results were opposite, and more in tune with the real issues of the Soviet society and the cost of Stalin’s leadership. The census revealed that only 7 million more citizens were added to the country, far less than the projected growth rate—the result of alarmingly high deaths caused by the famine of 1932-34, the World War and the almost ritualistic, politically-driven purges carried out by Stalin against any person and community he disagreed with. Stalin was also surprised when more than half of the population declared themselves to be religious. After a decade of anti-religious persecution, he had hoped that there would be more atheists.

So how did Stalin react? You guessed it- he arrested the census takers and statisticians, and executed some of them. But the failings of the 1937 census went far beyond unexpected results. Read about its poor planning and execution (ahem) and how Stalin changed things for the 1939 census at Amusing Planet.

Henk Verhoeff, a woodworker from New Zealand, makes mind-bending pieces of furniture that appear to emerge from cartoon worlds. They're all completely solid, intact, and functional even though they appear to be collapsing from the fabric of reality becoming unraveled.

The recent coronavirus has made hundreds of thousands of people worried, anxious, and uncertain of what to do next to combat the virus. Thankfully, there are thoughtful scientists across the globe who give details about the aforementioned virus, and tips on how to fight it.

This comic for kids is based on NPR’s education reporter Cory Turner’s interview with experts about what kids might want to know about the new virus.

Check out the full comic over at the site.

(Image Credit: NPR)