Rian Johnson, the director for the film Knives Out, explains in an interview for Vanity Fair that Apple forbids filmmakers from letting villainous characters use iPhones on screen. So if you see a character using an iPhone, that means that that character is not one of the bad guys.

The Verge says that Apple has long carefully controlled how its products appear on screen:

There have long been rumors about Apple’s control over how its products are shown in TV shows and movies. According to MacRumors, the company says that its products should only be used “in the best light, in a manner or context that reflects favorably on the Apple products and on Apple Inc.” It’s especially difficult when Apple is the one bankrolling a production. Last year, The New York Times reported that Apple was concerned with how its devices were depicted in content made for its own streaming service.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This control seems to go back a long way. Check out this Wired article from way back in 2002, which pointed out that all the good guys in 24 use Macs, and all the bad guys use Windows PCs. By that logic, I guess the fact that everyone in Succession seems to use Samsung products makes them chaotic neutral?

-via Ace of Spades HQ

Here's a myth/rumor/urban legend I hadn't heard before, possibly because I spend so much time on the internet I've developed a radar for BS. The "factoid" contained in the headline has been making the rounds, and a closer look at it reveals not so much junk science, but downright fake news. What is true is that if you look hard enough, you can often find some living cells in a woman's body that contain male DNA, meaning a Y chromosome.  

To begin with, back in 2012 a study titled, Male Microchimerism, noted that after dissecting a number of deceased women’s brains, 63% of the brains (37 out of 59) had male microchimerism present. While it was touted by many a media source that this was a huge discovery, in fact, it has long been known that a large percentage of women eventually carry living male cell lines in their bodies. For example, a study in 1969, published in The Lancet, showed that 70% (21 of 30) pregnant women, 19 of whom were pregnant with boys and 2 others having previously had boys, were found to have male microchimerism.

From there countless other studies have shown the same thing, including some animal studies that showed some of these cell lines are able to cross the blood-brain barrier in mice. What made this particular 2012 study interesting was simply that it was the first to show these cell lines could cross the blood-brain barrier in humans too.

So it appears that being pregnant with a male child can leave cells with male chromosomes behind. There are a few cases where this happens in a woman who has never been pregnant, but those women had older brothers, so they could have received a few male cells from their mother's microchimerism before birth. The real question is how those studies became fodder for the idea that women retain male cells from having sex. Today I Found Out ran that story down to its source, and determined the exact assumptions that led to the urban legend.

(Image credit: Nissim Benvenisty)

A dark ale made from crickets will be making its way into Shibuya this March. The ale will be made from farm-raised bugs, kept in optimal conditions until harvesting. The crickets are roasted and added to the brew. The resulting ale has a bitter and savoury taste with a caramel-like undertone. In addition, the aroma will remind the drinker of coffee, as SoraNews24 details: 

Ishikawa Prefecture’s Tono Brewery has teamed up with insect food production firm Antcicada, headed by self-proclaimed cockroach lover (or “katsaridaphile” for you Scrabble players) Yuta Shinohara.

Antcicada has already developed cricket soy sauce and cricket ramen, and now with Tono’s help is set to release Cricket Dark Ale.

From Sunday 15 March to Wednesday 18 March, Antcicada will be serving glasses of this bold new ale at a pop-up stand in Shibuya Parco. In addition to the beer, specially selected insect snacks will also be served and merch such as T-shirts can be purchased.

What makes this cricket beer unique and quite possibly a world-first is that the crickets used are fed the lees (leftover sediment from brewing) of previous batches of Cricket Dark Ale, creating an efficient cycle of waste-reduction which can only bring out more of the inherent flavor and aroma of the drink.

image via SoraNews24

Because of the essential roles that they play when it comes to the breakdown of nutrients and the conversion of these nutrients into energy-rich molecules (a process called aerobic respiration), it is often said in high school biology that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

It is because of this aerobic respiration that all animals need to breathe. At least, that’s what scientists thought, until they discovered this creature who does not have mitochondria and other genes required to facilitate aerobic respiration.

The animal is a salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola, and it is a member of the phylum Cnidaria, which also contains jellyfish and sea anemones. The international team of researchers published a study with their results on Monday in the journal PNAS.

“Our discovery shows that aerobic respiration, one of the most important metabolic pathways, is not ubiquitous among animals,” the authors wrote in the study.

Study senior author Dorothée Huchon said in an email that the discovery of an animal that could not undergo aerobic respiration was pure luck, as she had set out to sequence mitochondria across Myxozoa, the class of parasites to which H. salminicola belongs.

Check out Vice.com to know more about this study.

Life here on Earth is truly diverse.

(Image Credit: Stephen D. Atkinson)

Have you ever bought shoes online that you never got to use because it wasn’t the shoes you were looking for? Here’s a game-changing trick for you that can help you visualise if the shoes you’re eyeing are the one that complement your clothes. While this trick doesn’t really work for checking if the shoes are the right size, at least it can help online shoppers in another way.  The trick, shared by Megan Papas, will only cost you a small print-out of yourself, as Mirror UK details: 

Megan prints out a photo of her side profile, wearing the outfit she wants the shoes to go with.

The then cuts around her body and snips off her feet, so she can line the end of her legs up with the picture of the shoe on the computer.

She also laminates the photo so she can use it again and again, without it getting bent or destroyed.

Her trick means that she always has an idea of what shoes are going to look like with her clothes before she buys them.

image via Mirror UK

It was another beautiful day, and Cheryl Ramsay from Prince Edward Island, Canada, decided to clean her house. Upon cleaning, she decided to leave the bedroom window open so that some of the cool fresh air can come in the house. Unfortunately, she forgot about this little detail and went on through her day. It wasn’t until the police called her husband that she was reminded of the window that she left open. The police called to inform the husband “that a Husky is chilling on the roof.”

“Her name is Nala and she is 17 months old,” Cheryl introduced her family’s dog to Bored Panda. “She is loving and very smart. I would describe her personality as playful, jealous, needy… She does not like being left alone. She is like a person and a goldfish, one second she wants out, then in, out, and in.”

Just before receiving the unexpected call, Cheryl was at the gas station and her husband Paul was running an errand for work. “He could not believe the police officer when he was being told about the situation,” she said.

But the man did get to see it with his own eyes. “Right before Paul got home, there was the police officer and some bystanders standing around and Nala just jumped back into the window.”

I love how he just stood there staring at the camera.

(Image Credit: Cheryl Ramsay/ Facebook)

When Beethoven consulted the Italian violinist Felix Radicati in 1806 about violin fingering for his “Razumovsky” Quartets, Opus No. 59, Radicati was not able to help himself, and he rudely asked Beethoven if he really considers these pieces to be music. Beethoven replied, “Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!”

Twenty-one years later, in 1827, Beethoven died, but, true to his reply to Radicati, his music, his legacy, still lives on to this day.

In the 250 years since his birth, Beethoven’s music has served myth-making agendas both personal and political, cultural and commercial, noble and nefarious.

Learn more about Beethoven’s music over at The Conversation.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Is the acronym “GIF”, which stands for “Graphics Interchange Format”, pronounced as “gif” or as “jif”? That has been the age-old debate for years. But perhaps the correct answer is, the latter pronunciation (soft g pronunciation) is for a peanut butter brand, and the former (hard g pronunciation) for “animated looping images.”

In an effort to sell their Jif Peanut Butter, J.M Smucker Company teams up with GIF host Giphy, who hosted a series of Jif-themed GIFs.

Meanwhile, Jif is selling a limited-edition 40-ounce jar of peanut butter on Amazon with a special double-sided label that clears up the whole debate. Or at least makes the hard G folks feel a little better.

That right there is five dollars of peanut butter in a 10-dollar jar. It’s too bad Amazon doesn’t support animated GIFs in its product listings. Fret not, Jif has a spinning jar over at the campaign’s website.

It will always be pronounced “G.I.F” to me.

Well, what are your thoughts?

(Image Credit: Giphy)

Brett happens to know a couple of aerospace engineers, and asked them about propelling yourself through space with a fart. Both Nate and Dan took the question completely seriously, and had a rather involved group text discussion on the many variables in the scenario. First they mused on how different flatulence would be in space compared to earth's air pressure and the restrictions of a space diet. The question of force was tabled because there is a limit to what the human body can do, and pivoted to how fast can you travel that one meter distance. Once the parameters were set, they went to work.

Thirteen minutes is a long time, but this is SCIENCE! However, astronaut Chris Hadfield addressed this years ago, and said it was pointless. Maybe that's because he was wearing pants at the time, and the original question assumes that the farting person is naked. Fart propulsion has been used for the plot of a movie, but as you might assume, it was a comedy. See the entire discussion at Imgur. And may the Force be with you.

-via Metafilter

French street artist Invader created an interpretation of the Mona Lisa using the tiles from a Rubik’s cube. Invader’s interpretation was sold for 480,200 euros ($520,680) at a modern art auction in Paris, leagues beyond the work’s presale estimated amout of 150,000 euros. Reuters has more details: 

The Rubik Mona Lisa was created in 2005 and is the first in Invader’s “Rubikcubism” series, in which he recreates well-known Old Master works.

Invader, who defines himself as an UFA, an Unidentified Free Artist, wears a mask and insists on his face being pixilated for his rare appearances on camera.

He has a large following of fans who use a Smartphone app, “Flash Invaders”, to snap pictures of his mosaics if they’re authentically his, rack up points and compete with other players.

image via Reuters

Pastry chef Claire Saffitz tests her wits in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen as she attempts to make gourmet Butterfingers. Yes, that’s the taffy-like chocolate treat we know and love. The process of trying to recreate them is meticulous and tedious. Watch as Saffitz tries to figure out the correct ratio of ingredients (and the ingredients themselves) in order to create a perfect recreation of Butterfingers. 

Hey, a scientific breakthrough and adorable baby kitties in one video! Ahem. There are not enough cheetahs in the world to ensure their survival as a species, but breeding cheetahs in captivity has always been a challenge. Some are already overbred, while others do not make good mothers for one reason or another. The biologists at The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) have been working on the problem, and now we have two cheetah cubs to show for it. They are the product of IVF and surrogacy, meaning they are the genetic product of two cheetahs and were gestated and birthed by a third, all in different locations. The two cubs were born at the Columbus Zoo on February 19. Read more about the experiment at Smithsonian.

What can you get from a vending machine in Japan? A better question would be what can't you get from a vending machine in Japan.

The nation that made the world's products available automatically now introduces a vending machine for soiled babies on the go. Sora News 24 reports that a beverage and a paper company are teaming up to offer diapers 24/7 at roadside stops.

Each diaper costs $1. As a father, I can tell you that when you're completely out of diapers, a fresh one is worth a whole lot more than $1.

Photo: Livedoor

Larry Tesler passed away last week at the age of 74. In case you didn’t know him, he is the one behind the commands “cut”, “copy”, and “paste” — commands that we still use in our computers to this day.

He was part of the golden age of research at Xerox PARC, which bit by bit, transformed the computer from a black box mainframe programmed by esoteric codes into a device that anyone could quickly learn through their own intuition.

He was also the one who created the idea of “user friendliness”, a term that we often hear when it comes to systems and softwares.

Know more about Tesler’s life, such as his first breakthrough and career path, over at Fast Company.

(Image Credit: Yahoo! Blog/ Wikimedia Commons)

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells, And pretty maids all in a row.

Flowers have an amazing range of appearances. The one called Calceolaria uniflora is also called the flower-doll plant, and you can see why. This plant is native to South America, and thrives in high altitudes with cooler temperatures. See more stunning examples of the flower-doll plant at Cantinho with an English translation here.   -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Thomas Mathis)