Cuttlefish love shrimp. In fact, when given a choice whether to eat crab and shrimp multiple times in the day, they would always choose shrimp. What’s more, these cuttlefish would rather wait for their beloved food if they knew it was coming. These are the two things that the team led by the University of Cambridge, found out.

This ability to anticipate their favorite food is an indication of the cephalopod's complex brain and cognitive abilities.

[...]

… when the cuttlefish knew they were getting shrimp for dinner, they wouldn't eat many crabs during the day, but when they couldn't anticipate their preferred meal, they filled up on crab.

More details about this interesting study over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: Jarek Tuszyński/ CC-BY-SA-3.0 & GDFL/ Wikimedia Commons)

Israeli designer Yaara Nusboim has created a set of dolls to help children with therapy through play. Alma Dolls are handcrafted by the designer herself. The dolls are a collaboration between Nusboim and child psychologists, and represent particular emotions. Plain magazine has more details: 

Their shapes, weight and textures differ according to the feeling they symbolize, helping the child interpret a range of emotions during therapy, and giving the therapist clues to the child’s mental and emotional state. “The dolls are meant to facilitate a child’s connection to his inner world, and to improve and heal his condition,” the designer says. She hopes that the Alma Dolls can be internationally marketed to reach other children in need.

image via Plain magazine

Jafar the snake is shedding his skin, which makes a melodious popping sound as the skin sloughs off. It's quite pleasant, actually.

What is truly horrifying is the entire Instagram channel of Jafar's human, @pacinthesink. Having a pet snake is kind of cool.

Having pet cobras is bizarre. And, if I understand the videos correctly, @pacinthesink allows his/her cobras to roam the house uncaged. This is something that I would not do, but I am, I suppose, a timid soul.

-via Twisted Sifter

A new world record for a single firework was set Saturday in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

At 7:56 p.m., fireworks expert Tim Borden successfully captured the world record for the largest single firework when the 2,797-pound behemoth illuminated the crowd during the Night Extravaganza at the annual Steamboat Springs Winter Carnival.

The 62-inch shell was launched from a 26-foot long mortar from atop Howelsen Hill, reaching nearly a mile in the air when it detonated, putting on quite the show!

This was Borden's second attempt at the world record, but the shell he constructed a year ago exploded inside the mortar. That's a video we would also like to see. -via Gizmodo

Update: I got my wish. Here is the video of the failed attempt, but it is from quite a distance. -Thanks, smittypap!

When you see that a movie is "based on a true story," that could mean it's an attempt at a faithful retelling with some dramatic license, or it could mean the true story was a one-sentence concept that the writers took off from. Unless you do some research, you won't know how close the movie comes to the original. Dr. Stephanie Starling did that research for quite a few recent movies. The movies above are graphed scene by scene, with blue indicating true, red indicating false, and the lighter colors used for varying levels of accuracy. As you can see, Selma was a theatrical recreation of what could have been a documentary, while The Imitation Game was almost all fictionalized. At Information is Beautiful, 18 movies are presented in interactive graphs, in which you can click on a scene and see a comparison of the movie scene to the real event. You can also vary the pedantry of the graphs, from "flexible" to "nothing but the truth." I just went through the graph for Bohemian Rhapsody and now feel like I've seen the movie. -via Digg

A hard-working sheepdog finds an ingenious way to stop a drought. That's a good dog. This short film by Omeleto alternates between funny, sad, tense, and joyful. Meanwhile, we find out where clouds come from.

February 4, 1993. A few hours just before dawn, a pale silvery light about as bright as the full moon, 5km in diameter, was seen across Europe, “starting at southern France through Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland and finally [disappearing] in the early sunlight in Byelorussia.” Unfortunately, it was cloudy that day, so there were not that many ground witnesses. Nevertheless, there were some who reported seeing a momentary flash of that light.

The spotlight came from a large reflector that was launched into orbit by the Russian Federal Space Agency, some three months earlier from Baikonur Cosmodrome. Called Znamya, which means “banner” or “flag” in Russian, the satellite was an experiment to study the feasibility of using space mirrors to illuminate the nightside of the planet using the sun’s rays, pretty much the same “way a schoolchild playing with a hand mirror learns to reflect a spot of light from a bright window into the crannies of his room,” as The New York Times explained in a 1993 article.

Learn more about the Znamya space mirror over at the Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Amusing Planet)

Regarding our "people will make a competition out of anything" category, you are invited to enter the second annual Competitive Winter Picnicking event from Shadow Traffic. This year's picnic will be on March first at Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. While we don't know if that date will be "wintery" with snow and ice, it is expected to at least be muddy. Which will only make it more fun for extreme competition-type people.

Our judges will be scoring the categories of Richest Picnic Meal, Tastiest Picnic Drink, Funnest Picnic Game and Tightest Thematic Team. That last one will be judged on costumes, props, puns/references and overall synergy. Cash prizes will be awarded. Judges are bribeable.

-via Boing Boing

At the Oosterscheldekering storm surge barrier in the south Netherlands, the winds are always blowing. It's a good place to stage a bicycle race that is centered around those difficult headwinds, namely the Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships (Nederlands Kampioenschap Tegenwindfietsen). When Tom Scott heard there was a storm coming in just as the cyclists were gathering for the annual race, he caught the first plane in order to witness the mayhem of bicycles against 120-kph winds. The winner this past weekend was Max de Jong, who also won last year.

The Egyptian game called senet probably wasn't the first board game, but it's pretty old. It was first developed around 5,000 years ago, and became extremely popular. A view from the side, as in the image of Nefertiti above, makes it looks like chess, but senet was played more like backgammon, with a roll of the dice to determine how far you moved your pieces.

There is no evidence that senet was anything other than a form of entertainment at the time of its invention. But by about 4300 years ago, Egyptian tomb art began to depict the tomb’s dead inhabitant playing senet against living friends and relatives. Texts from the time suggest the game had begun to be seen as a conduit through which the dead could communicate with the living.

Over the next millennium, Egyptian texts came to describe the game as reflecting the movement of the soul through the Egyptian realm of the dead—called Duat—and toward the afterlife. And by about 3300 years ago, the game board itself had changed. In place of three simple vertical lines on square 28 of early senet boards, for example, some now had three hieroglyphic birds that Egyptians used to symbolize the soul. The board retained this symbolism for another 800 years, until the game fell out of fashion.

Read about the rise and fall of senet, and the changes in the game that showed its link to the afterlife, at Science magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: The Yorck Project)

Brian Carroll of Macomb Township, Michigan loves selling cars. When he was laid off last year, he found a way to stay in that business from the other side of the transaction. He'll buy a car for you, completing all of the paperwork and interactions at car dealerships. Just tell him what you want and he'll deliver a new car to you. The Detroit Free Press explains how his new business works:

Then a guy called wanting a car. Carroll said he didn’t work at the dealership anymore. And the buyer said he didn’t care. Carroll decided then he would go solo. Not as the usual car “broker,” who tends to charge a direct fee to shoppers, but as a car “concierge” who planned to charge customers $0. He would work on commission.

After all, he figured, fewer people have time to go to dealerships and people like the idea of enhanced personal service. He would ride a trend of changing consumer expectations in the automotive industry, not by choice but by necessity. All by word of mouth.

Very busy people can appreciate it:

Ferndale Fire Sgt. Miles Bracali had his 2020 Chevy Silverado delivered to the firehouse.

“For somebody like me who works 24-hour shifts and has an active lifestyle outside the job, with young kids active in sports and school, I don’t always have a day to look at vehicles or another day to sign paperwork,” said Bracali, 50, of Waterford. “I start at 8 a.m. and I get off work at 8 a.m. If we’re running fire calls or medical calls all night, I’m not going to want to sit in dealerships. I want to go home and go to bed.”

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo of Sgt. Bracali by Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press

The first thing I searched for this morning was the the Golden Raspberry Awards. See, the awards for the worst movies of the year, affectionally called the Razzies, are always bestowed the night before the Academy Awards. But not this year. For only the second time in its 40-year history, the Razzies are running late. However, the nominations have finally been announced.

Three films were nominated for eight Razzies: Cats, Rambo: Last Blood, and A Madea Family Funeral. All three are up for Worst Picture. Tyler Perry is nominated for four acting awards: two nominations for Worst Supporting Actor, one for Worst Actress, and another for Worst Screen Combo... all for the same movie. John Travolta received one Worst Actor nomination for two movies. Joker made the list, nominated as a contender in the Worst Reckless Disregard for Human Life and Public Property award. That is the only Razzie appearance of a movie also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

There is one category an actor might want to be nominated for- the Razzie Redeemer Award, which is bestowed on an actor for "Becoming a respected artist after having been nominated for a Razzie." The list for 2020 includes Jennifer Lopez, Eddie Murphy, Keanu Reeves, Adam Sandler, and Will Smith.      

The Razzies will be televised for the first time this year, but there is no indication of when that will be. You can watch the nomination announcement video, or just read the full list, with a chart of the movies' performances, at Wikipedia.

In 1977, the space probes Voyager I and II were launched, and they are still moving away from us, now beyond the bounds of the Solar System. Considering the chance that the probes may be found by interstellar life forms, they were each equipped with a "golden record" containing sounds and data that may be deciphered somewhere, sometime. That assignment fell to the project's creative director, Ann Druyan, and eminent astrophysicist Carl Sagan. The two colleagues fell in love while discussing the record by phone, and were married from 1981 until Sagan's death in 1996. That story is cute enough, and then there's this:

But the evidence of their love has taken on a life of its own. Not long after that serendipitous phone call, Druyan had an idea for the record: They could measure the electrical impulses of a human brain and nervous system, turn it into sound, and put it on the record. Then maybe, 1,000 million years from now, some alien civilization might be able to turn that data back into thoughts. So, just a few days after she and Sagan declared their love for each other, Druyan went to Bellevue Hospital in New York City and meditated while the sounds of her brain and body were recorded. According to Druyan, part of what she was thinking during that meditation was about "the wonder of love, of being in love."

The record of that data is still making its way through the cosmos. Read the entire story at NPR. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: NASA)

We all have stories from work that we swore we'd never tell anyone, and then 20, 30, or 40 years later, the beans are spilled. By then, who will remember, much less punish us? James Dator spent a few years working in movie theaters, both in Australia and the US. Now that time has passed, he discloses a few adventures from his younger days, like the time he left a woman alone in a theater all day, the time he almost killed a movie star, and the time he had to break up a sex act during a screening of The Passion of the Christ, among other memories. Read them all at SB Nation. -via Digg