I haven't watched the new Barbie film yet, and so I wouldn't know exactly what the hype is all about, and why it's polarizing people. I can only venture a guess as to the social or cultural impact of the film, but perhaps the fact that it stars an ensemble cast, directed by an Academy Award-nominated female director, and it's about the ubiquitous doll Barbie, may explain why all the hype.

However, maybe there's more to it than what meets the eye as Vox explains in this video why Jaws and Barbie were such blockbusters.

(Video credit: Vox)

I remember watching an episode of The Graham Norton Show which featured the two hosts of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, along with Joan Rivers, and there was a bit in that episode wherein they were talking about the worst car in the world, which they refused to say while the show was being taped since they were promoting the new DVD that Top Gear had released, in which they mentioned what they thought was the worst car in the world at that time. Owen Bellwood of Jalopnik shares his thoughts on what the ugliest car in the world is. What do you think of it?

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Scrolling through this collection of weird, eerily creepy, and at times, downright morbid, medical photos from the US National Library of Medicine, I cannot but wonder how or why these photos ever existed. And surprisingly, they possess 17 million more of these items in their collection. Some of these photos include a portrait of a man whose heart has been pierced by an arrow (only drawn over, no worries!), a chopped hand with an illustration of the different parts of a wrist, and what looks like a double-headed sheep.

The photo above is probably one of the more benign items in their collection, showing the different nurse uniforms representing a nation or region. Check out more of this odd collection on Flashbak. - via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Helene Fuld Health Foundation)

After having moved to a different country and then moving back home, I have learned a few things when it comes to traveling. I observed many people go about their trips with just one suitcase or even a small backpack, and I used to wonder how could they have packed all their essentials in just a tiny piece of luggage? Are they prepared enough to go on their trip? However, I have learned that packing light is the best way to travel and enjoy your trip.

But even so, you still have to know what are the essentials that you must always bring no matter where you go. Apart from your travel documents or money or your phone, of course, what is essential might be different for different people. In my case, I always make sure to bring a towel, as I have learned that not all places will provide you with towels for humans. On Huff Post, several travel experts chimed in and shared what their one thing is. What's your one thing?

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Making delicious fried chicken takes some skill and knowledge to do just right. If I were to deep fry some chicken, they won't come out the way they advertise in restaurants. If I could cook fried chicken the way they do them in fast food chains or even your local deli, then I could save a lot of gas driving to the nearest drive through, or I would not have to spend money to have food delivered. Plus, I can have them hot and fresh.

Now, even if I were to learn how to fry chicken the way they do them in restaurants, I reckon that it will be a whole different ball game if you were to make fried chicken for a big group of people like when you have friends and family over. Furthermore, you have to make sure that the taste is absolutely perfect so that it would be palatable to anyone. Thankfully, Wendy McCrory, owner of Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken, shares on Taste of Home how to fry chicken for a crowd.

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Take a gander to see if you know which city it is. If I were to think about it, it's obviously not going to be places like New York where I imagine real estate prices are skyrocketing. Perhaps, not San Francisco either, where the presence of Silicon Valley would most likely push prices up as well. So, that would probably leave us with somewhere in the midwest or the south right?

Redfin, a real-estate site, conducted a study to see which city Americans are eyeing to move to, and apparently, it's one of the most popular vacation destinations in the US. Sean Cudahy from Reader's Digest shares with us what the study showed as well as the top ten cities that homebuyers were interested to relocate to, as well as the reasons why they were choosing from among the list.

To pinpoint which cities were getting the most attention from potential homebuyers, Redfin’s analysts sifted through 2 million web searches between April 2023 and June 2023. The company homed in on members who viewed at least 10 for-sale houses, including at least one outside their current metropolitan area. In other words, it tried to focus on people who seemed to show serious interest in relocating to an entirely new place.

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One of the most difficult things to do when interacting with others and communicating is to find the right words to say and the proper way to say them. There are times when, even though you have the right intentions, but say certain things in a certain way, it would still tick people off. One particular scenario that we might often encounter is when we know that what we are saying is factually correct, and yet, by not saying it with tact, we would leave the person listening in a bad mood.

John Bowe, a contributor for CNBC and a public speaking expert, lists nine phrases which he says would make anyone saying them have 'better etiquette skills' than most.

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You might have noticed while you're traveling that there are some posts or fences that have purple paint on them, and you might have wondered what those meant. Is it just a sign of unfinished paint work or is there some kind of deep, hidden meaning behind it? Or perhaps, it's a secret message between two people. Well, it's none of those things. Reader's Digest gives us a quick explanation to what these purple-painted fences are all about.

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I watched a video on Youtube once of a panel in a conference, and as a final question to the panel, they were asked what they would want to have written on their headstones when they die. One of them jokingly said, "I told you I was sick", which garnered a laugh from the crowd. The other one had a more thoughtful remark on how he would want to be remembered by those he left behind. Either way, headstone inscriptions try to summarize in a short statement the kind of life that the deceased had lived. And it's not limited to just the run-of-the-mill epitaphs we often read, which are not bad in and of themselves, but sometimes even the inscriptions can be a way for the deceased to express their personalities one last time. Like the one of Merv Griffin above, which is said he often joked that he wanted to have inscribed on his tombstone. 

Mental Floss has collected these 11 very creative inscriptions that will surely make you rethink about what you would want to have written on your headstone when the time comes.

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When you think about urban landscapes, what first comes to mind would probably be the cities of New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, or Barcelona. But over the course of history, different groups of people have also constructed cities underground. For whatever reason they built these cities, they are quite intricate and the design suggests that as many as tens of thousands used to live in them. Austin Harvey, from All That's Interesting, shows us 11 underground cities that would leave anyone bewildered as to how they were made and why.

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Going to university these days isn't as difficult as it was back when they had only begun. There weren't a lot of places where universities could be found and most people who wanted to go to university had to travel far and wide, leaving their families and relatives to pursue higher education, unlike today wherein we have all sorts of transportation systems that make it possible even to study abroad. During the medieval days of universities, such luxuries were nowhere to be found. And so, we can only surmise how it must have felt for students and their families back then. A few letters survive from that time, and Elena Rossi, who is a PhD student researching about medieval women in university networks, gives us a few insights into what medieval students' relationships with their families were like.

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On the day of her mother's funeral, Brisbane jounalist Amelia Oberhardt saw a photo that she had never seen before. It was a photo of her mom holding a baby with a young man standing beside her. What shocked her at that moment was that the baby was not Amelia and the young man was not Amelia's dad. Her friend, who helped organize the photos for the slideshow, thought that the photo was of Amelia's parents and her as a baby. When everybody else saw the photo, they were equally shocked.

"We both sort of at that moment, turned around and stared into the eyes of all the family and friends - their jaws were on the floor," Oberhardt told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations podcast. "Everyone was quite rattled by the photo and I could tell straight away, it wasn't meant to be there."

That day sparked a 12-year search for answers for Oberhardt about her mother's past. What had driven her mum to the alcohol addiction that killed her at just 56? And who was the man and the child in the photo?

Amelia's quest led her to a point in Australia's past that affected not only her mother but thousands of other women as well. Nikita Lee Fletcher of Mamamia takes us to that history and the truth that Amelia had uncovered in this surprising sequence of events that all began with the mysterious photo at her mother's funeral.

(Image credit: Amelia Oberhardt)

My grandmother is 85 years old and has had moderate dementia for the past 13 years. We have grown used to her repetitive anecdotes or those moments of cognitive fuzziness that she experiences from time to time, and we just roll with it. But it may seem quite cumbersome for someone to be telling the same story multiple times. Of course, for some, that may be intentional. While others may already be struggling from those same bouts of forgetfulness that we inevitably suffer as we grow older. Oliver Pritchett puts those concerns to rest as he has invented the solution for it: an app called Borenomore. This he shared on The Oldie:

Its database holds hundreds of your best anecdotes. By means of sophisticated voice-recognition technology, each anecdote can be identified by a trigger word or phrase, such as my dear old granny or donkey’s years ago or my headmaster or complete fiasco – and of course a great mate, my first car, a prank, the war and rather a funny thing actually.

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What do women find attractive in a man? Seems like the perennial question whenever you turn to a TV show like The Bachelorette where 25 to 30 men compete to see who among them would win the heart and the hand, if it gets down to that, of the lady of the show. In relation to this question, The Hustle wanted to figure out whether the job titles of contestants on the show had anything to do with their success rates, and this is what they found in their investigation.

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Scientists have discovered why the fungus Candida auris refuses to be removed once it has attached itself onto a surface. The difficulty of getting rid of it has been the primary cause of outbreaks since there were cases reported of infections in 2012, and it has continued on its rampage, quickly moving from one location to the next. One can only imagine the amount of persistence this fungus must have to repudiate the ones trying to eradicate it.

Darian Santana, a microbiologist at the University of Michigan Medical School, along with his colleagues have found the reason for the tenacity of this fungus to keep holding on for dear life no matter where it finds itself perched.

Most fungi make adhesive proteins that rely on hydrophobic interactions to glom onto surfaces. Think oil and water, says Teresa O’Meara, a microbiologist and geneticist in whose lab Santana works. Oil droplets congregate with other oil droplets, while water is attracted to water. Similarly, hydrophobic fungal proteins attach themselves to hydrophobic, or water-repellent, surfaces.

However, despite having the same mechanisms present in their structure, C. auris has another method of sticking to surfaces. And to find out what that is, check out Tina Hesman Saey's article on Science News.

(Image credit: Shawn Lockhart/Wikimedia Commons)