Brothers Matt Hicks (left) and Chris Hicks (right) became dads and uncles on the same day in the same hospital in Kenosha, Wisconsin with the assistance of the same doctor. The Associated Press reports:
Chris and Courtney Hicks arrived for a scheduled cesarean section Friday at Aurora Medical Center and found out Chris' younger brother Matt and his fiancee, Allie Osheim, were already at the hospital, awaiting their newborn's arrival.
Chris and Courtney's daughter, Kadence, arrived first and was followed just hours later by Matt and Allie's baby, James.
Chewbacca has taken time out of his very busy filming schedule to host an educational video series with the University of Michigan's College of Engineering. In Chillin' with Chewie, our famous Wookiee interviews scientists at the college about their analyses of Star Wars technology. In this video, he learns about the physics of lightsabers. In other videos, Chewbacca investigates carbonite, holograms, ship thrusters, and droids.
Chewie speaks in Shyriiwook, which the scientists appear to understand. But for the rest of us, the videos are helpfully subtitled in English.
The good people of Twitter are having fun lately with the hashtag #ExplainAFilmPlotBadly. To participate, all you have to do is describe a movie that you've seen. Anyone with a twisted sense of humor will understand which one you're talking about.
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens will awaken upon us tomorrow! For 38 years, this ongoing story has warmed the child-like heart in you. Celebrate the occasion and its life-transforming message by buying toys. You can play with them!
But that would be a terrible idea. You must preserve them mint on card inside their original packaging. And make sure that the packaging itself isn't damaged! I recommend using a custom shadow box display case. And, in order to make sure that the box does not suffer deterioration due to exposure to ultraviolet light, make sure that it, like you, is not exposed to natural sunlight. Your mother's basement will fulfill that role perfectly.
Then play with that toy--with only your eyes, of course! This Saturday Night Live commercial has the right idea.
In his natural state, man is not encumbered by social constraints that induce constipation. He, uh, responds to his bodily needs when told by his body. He does not need medicine to regulate his bowels. He might need a natural lubricant to keep them flowing, though. This is the premise behind Nujol, a medicine available in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s.
Nujol is literally made of petroleum. It's a lubricant, like the kind you might put in your car engine. Appropriately, it was a product of the Standard Oil Company. You can read more about it at Weird Universe.
Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies in Gatlinburg, Tennessee houses several stingrays. A stingray pregnancy usually lasts a year, after which the mama gives birth to live young known as "pups."
The staff at the aquarium routinely performs sonograms on pregnant stingrays. They noticed that one pup was overdue to be born, but wasn't leaving his mother. So they performed a cesarean section surgery to remove him. WBIR reports (auto-start video):
She didn't give birth with the rest of the rays. They estimated that she was 6 to 8 weeks overdue, and that both lives in danger.
With an ultrasound, the staff determined that the baby was alive and well (and amazing video released by the aquarium shows the little sting ray swimming around in utero!)
They decided to perform a c-section to save both the baby and the mother, and the risky procedure was a success! They believe this is the first time that a cownose stingray has been successfuly delivered by c-section.
Both mother and baby are alive and well. They're now swimming around the stingray tank without complications.
Maria Nina Vaclavek, a Czech fashion designer, made these blocky shoes while she was a student at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. They're a modern-looking design, but Vaclavek's inspiration was actually the earliest shoes worn by humans. In 2014, she told Dezeen that she wrapped leather around a form, as Stone Age humans did when they invented shoes:
"The caveman hunted down an animal, skinned it and wrapped the leather – still raw and warm – around his foot where he tightened it with bast," she continued. "The leather adapts the shape of the user's foot. I found this technology very interesting and decided to work with it further."
Adapting this method, Vaclavek wrapped a piece of wet vegetable-tanned leather around a platform and a shoemaker's last. When it dried, the leather became rigid and formed the solid shape of the shoes.
If you want to survive, you must immediately take off your socks and pee on them. No, right now!
As we've noted in the past, urine can be used to fuel tiny electrical generators called microbial fuel cells. This can be useful in an emergency when you don't have a battery handy, but you did drink way too much coffee before the crisis began.
Now researchers at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK have put that design concept into practical use. They've developed socks that, when soaked in human urine, provide electricity. Simply walking around in the urine-soaked socks provides the necessary pumping action. After two minutes of walking, the very smelly user has enough electricity to juice up a radio transmitter. The New Scientist explains how it works:
Aiming to make a self-sufficient, wearable device that works anywhere without additional power, the team created a manual foot pump inspired by how fish use involuntary muscles to circulate blood around their bodies.
Instead of muscle, the pump uses flexible silicone tubes, which wrap under the heels and connect to bendy MFCs near the ankles. Each step taken squeezes and releases the tubes to pump the urine around.
When people in Indonesia want to watch television programs from the United States, their top pick is the 1989 cartoon The Karate Kid. In Argentina, it's The Simpsons. Romanians prefer Game of Thrones and South Africans want Modern Family.
The entertainment magazine Vulture looked through the TV ratings for 18 countries to find what are the 10 most popular shows of American origin in each. You can find the entire list here. Some, particularly Indonesia, are quite surprising.
Tens of millions of Christmas Island Red Crabs (Gecarcoidea natalis) migrate across Christmas Island in the south Pacific Ocean. Although they live in the forests on the island, they must go to the sea to breed. To help them cross safely, the people of Christmas Island take a variety of precautions, such as closing roads occasionally. In recent years, they've really stepped up their game by building underpasses and bridges to guide the crabs and move them safely along. The Daily Telegraph reports:
More than 20 kilometres of plastic barriers are in place to direct the crabs away from the island’s roads and into 31 crab underpasses - as will as a five metre-high crab bridge crossing one of the areas busiest roads, which has apparently become something of a tourist attraction in its own right.
These pathways also make it easier to see the crabs in large numbers, so they've become popular tourist attractions:
“Sydney can have its Harbour Bridge and San Francisco its Golden Gate Bridge," says Linda Cash of the Christmas Island Tourism Association, "but it’s our crab bridge which is currently wooing tourists from all over the globe.”
It was an unusual form of mummification. It ended in 1949, but 14 of the bodies preserved this way prior to then are still out in the open and remarkably well-preserved. Ian Lloyd Neubauer, a journalist with the BBC, journeyed into the remote Aseki District of Papua New Guinea to learn more about the practice. He talked to a local man named Dickson:
Most of what’s known about the mummies is based on hearsay, exaggeration or flights of the imagination. Even the locals I spoke to – Dickson, a pastor named Loland and a schoolteacher named Nimas – seemed to offer different stories about the ritual’s past.
The first documented report on the smoked corpses was by British explorer Charles Higginson in 1907 – seven years prior to the start of WWI. Yet according to Dickson, the mummying practice began during WWI, when the Anga attacked the first group of missionaries to arrive in Aseki. His great-grandfather, one of the corpses we saw under the cliff, was shot dead by the missionaries in self-defence.
Dickson said the event sparked a series of payback killings that came to an end when the missionaries gifted the natives salt, with which they began embalming their dead. The practice only lasted for a generation, he added, since a second round of missionaries successfully converted the Anga to Christianity.
Loland and Nimas confirmed that the smoke corpse ritual ended in 1949, when missionaries took firm root in Aseki. But unlike Dickson, Loland and Nimas said mummification had been practiced by the Anga for centuries. The bodies were not cured using salt, they explained, but smoked over months in a “spirit haus”. They were then covered in red clay to maintain their structural integrity and placed in shrines in the jungle.
Sean Fallon of Fashionably Geek refers to these hairstyles "unicorn braids." That's a great name! Shelley Gregory of Square Salon in Las Vegas is responsible for giving these women enchanted braids look like they emerged from fairy tales.
Windspeed says that the designs should be completely safe in many planes, from wide-body jetliners to executive transports. The bubble is made with the same material as supersonic fighter jet canopies, so it's safe against air hazards at lower speeds, such as bird strikes.
Star Wars fans in Sydney, Australia gathered for a huge party to celebrate the release of Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Darth Vader (or a cosplayer--it can be hard to tell) attended in a suit perfect for local conquest. The national flag forms his cape and breastplate. He's eschewed a lightsaber for a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age: a boomerang. You can see more photos of the cosplayers in Sydney at BuzzFeed.
P.S. What kind of beer is attached to Lord Vader's utility belt? I can't make out the logo.
Hokusai (c.1760-1849) was a famous artist in the Edo period of Japan. Among other works, he created extraordinarily vivid woodblock prints of the sea, most famously The Great Wave off Kanagawa (below).
These prints are so expressive that they almost seem to leap off the paper. So they've inspired Alena Akhmadulina, a Russian fashion designer, to produce a line of dresses that look like Hokusai's prints. You can see more at Rocket News 24.
