(Image credit: Shannon May)

Your local grocery store is a psychological minefield, where even the bananas are ripe with mystery.

1. SOUTHPAWS HAVE AN INVISIBLE ADVANTAGE

You’ve probably seen that stores keep go-to items—produce, meats, dairy—on the perimeter. But did you notice that most of them are set up to make your lap run counterclockwise? “Ninety percent of us are right-handed, so we buy more when it’s counterclockwise. It puts us closer to the shelf,” says Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy. Places that do this see sales climb 7 percent. You’ll also often find the dairy section in the back left corner: Because dairy is likely on your list, stores make sure you take the longest route to get there. In fairness, it’s also a more convenient place to put a fridge.

2. EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE

Futility Closet gives us a crime scene and a logic puzzle to solve it. Five children go into a candy store, and one of them steals a box of candy. Let's assume that none of them have chocolate on their faces, and the stolen box is not in their possession at the moment. Each of the five children gives a statement of three sentences.

Ivan:

1. I didn’t take the box of candy.
2. I have never stolen anything.
3. Dennis did it.

Sylvia:

4. I didn’t take the box of candy.
5. I’m rich and I can buy my own candy.
6. Linda knows who the crook is.

Ernie:

7. I didn’t take the box of candy.
8. I didn’t know Linda until this year.
9. Dennis did it.

Dennis:

10. I didn’t take the box of candy.
11. Linda did it.
12. Ivan is lying when he says I stole the candy.

Linda:

13. I didn’t take the box of candy.
14. Sylvia is guilty.
15. Ernie can vouch for me, because he has known me since I was a baby eight years ago.

Okay, the clue is that each child told the truth in two sentences and lied in one sentence. Who stole the candy? Don't let the fact that there are 15 sentences deter you; it's not that difficult when you get into it. When you come to an answer or give up, see the explanation at Futility Closet. -via Boing Boing

That kind of behavior could very well be misunderstood, but we get the point. Besides, you should never pass up an opportunity for delicious homemade dahi vadas. This is the newest comic from Lunarbaboon.

Harvey Washington Wiley of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry was concerned about the unrestricted contents of food that Americans were buying. So when he sent out a call for volunteers, 12 young men, mostly poorly-paid clerks, answered the call. They must have been hungry, because they didn't run for the hills as soon as they found out what kind of six-month experiment they'd signed up for.

Wiley’s staff would put borax in their butter, milk, or coffee. Formaldehyde would lurk in their meats, copper sulfate and saltpeter in their fruit pies. Wiley would begin at low doses and then ratchet up the amount until one or more of the men complained of debilitating symptoms, like vomiting or dizziness. Those people would then be excused from the program until they felt well enough to resume. In the event a subject died or became seriously ill, he would waive the right to pursue legal remedy against the government.

The year was 1902. With funding and consent from Congress, Wiley was about to embark on an experiment he dubbed the “hygienic table trials,” but it was the Washington news media that came up with the nickname that would stick: They called his volunteers "the Poison Squad."

The results of those experiments led to the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906. The experiments lasted for five years, although the squad of volunteers changed. Read what those young men went through in the name of science and safety at mental_floss.

Movie fans and fans of a particular franchise love to dig out trivia behind the movies they love, and science fiction is full of it. When you go back to the pre-internet era, you are very likely to find lots of obscure information that even fans don't already know.  

These sound like the product of a brainstorming session where the most obscure fact about movies everyone has seen were thrown out, possibly with a prize at stake. Check out all 15 trivial facts about science fiction movies. -via TVOM

Redditor parsect runs a metal-detecting service. As a new daycare center was about to open, he was asked to check the bark-chip playground mulch for anything that might be dangerous to children. He found quite a bit, as you see. What have we learned here? Never trust a construction crew to clean up all their mess, and get your kids vaccinated for tetanus.  

The comments at reddit became a mini-AMA where parsect answered questions about his work. While he does find occasional jewelry, the weirdest thing was a stash of gellignite. He even showed us pictures. 

Firefighters in Nanticoke City, Pennsylvania, were called to a home last week over a report there was a dog on the roof. A husky inside the second floor had managed to open a window, popped out the screen, and went outside on the slanted porch roof. His owner was not at home. A firefighter climbed to the roof and got the dog back inside, then closed the window. But that wasn't the end of the story. 

About an hour later, firefighters received another public assist call to same location for the dog on the roof. The dog apparently wanted to be back outside again and reopened the window and let himself out again.

That's one determined pooch! So they got the ladder out again and a firefighter once again got the dog back inside. This time, they made sure the window was secure. -Thanks, John Farrier!

(Image credit Nanticoke City Fire Department via Facebook)

King Ranch is the largest ranch in Texas, at 1,289 square miles. That's bigger than Rhode Island. In the 1940s, owner Richard M. Kleberg, a US congressman, approached Buick designer and executive Harley Earl about a vehicle he could use on the ranch. What they came up with was the El Kineño, a custom-designed 1949 Buick convertible with every outlandish feature you can imagine. The car had two spare tires, six shotgun sheaths, its own winch, a two-way radio, and a beefed-up suspension and cooling system. It even had a seat perched on the front fender for a cowboy to rope cattle from! Strangely, it did not have a longhorn hood ornament, but did have a hood ornament in the shape of the ranch's brand. Read how the King Ranch El Kineño came about, and see the pictures, at Just a Car Guy. -via Everlasting Blort

In 1957, Alfred Hitchcock spoke to interviewer Collin Edwards for Pacifica Radio about his upcoming movie, tentatively titled From Amongst The Dead, which the next year turned out to be Vertigo. Subjects covered include dead bodies and humor, as you might expect.

(YouTube link)

That radio interview finally gets a proper animation that evokes the way we still see Hitchcock: clever, macabre, and funny all at the same time. -via Boing Boing

Russian cosplayer Irina Ushenina goes by the name Rei-Doll. She has costumes for a variety of characters from all fictional genres, although you can tell she's particularly fond of Batman characters, as she portrays the Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy.

However, she also does characters from Disney, manga, science fiction, and more. See a selection of Rei-Doll's impressive cosplay portraits at TVOM.  

Police in Conway, Arkansas, pulled over a car last Friday night because the brake light was out and it was going very slow. Inside was Blayk Puckett, who is a magician and a student at Central Arkansas University. He was driving home from the library, and said he was driving slow because he had a brake light out. Then the cops learned Puckett was a magician. And a juggler! After all, his license plates said "JUGGLER."

(YouTube link)

The police didn't really think Puckett was drinking after they talked to him, but they enjoyed how he took the opportunity to drive the point home. Puckett posted the video taken by the cop at Facebook.

Update: Central Arkansas University sported this sign after the video went viral.

Hi. @WolverineMovie @20thcenturyfox pic.twitter.com/dr95Zx1Nmg

— Hugh Jackman (@RealHughJackman) March 7, 2017

Watch Hugh Jackman at work on the movie Logan. It's hard to keep a microphone on an action scene, so this was one that needed a voice re-recorded in post-production. He's acting the whole scene all over again! That's another reason he keeps getting the juicy roles. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Screen Junkies takes a deep dive into the Pacific Ocean for an Honest Trailer about Disney's latest animated film Moana. While Moana was hailed as a big step forward for Disney movies, you can't help but see how every part of it resembles something that came before.  

(YouTube link)

Oh yeah, there's a rundown of "honest lyrics" for the songs, too. They also have observations on Moana that you'd have never considered, but you're sure to get a laugh out of them now. -via Tastefully Offensive

Mohammad Sayed was injured in Afghanistan when he was a young child, and became a paraplegic. His mother had died, his father left him, and he spent seven years in a hospital. Sayed earned money by fixing other patient's cell phones. In 2009, he came to the U.S. and is now an American citizen. Sayed studied engineering, developed several devices for wheelchair users, and started his own company. Now at 19, Sayed has has created a comic book superhero: Wheelchair Man!

I thought: "This is the greatest country, how is it possible that they have no wheelchair superhero?"

Well, I wasn't going to wait for Marvel to do it. I want to celebrate the powers and abilities that wheelchair users have, so I started to create a superhero called Wheelchair Man based on my own real-life story.

I write the stories and then I have an artist, Arielle Epstein, who is very talented, draw the images.

Wheelchair Man is a teenager, he's an immigrant and he's a Muslim. He's against hatred and he wants to end violence and make this world a better place. One of his main superpowers is that he can make criminals see the consequence of a crime before they have even committed it.

My plan is to develop a comic book series to inspire people with disabilities. There will be four other original superheroes - Wheelchair Woman, Wheelchair Girl, Wheelchair Boy and Captain Afghanistan - and all of them will be based on the real lives of wheelchair users from developing countries.

You can read the story of Sayed and his alter-ego Wheelchair Man at BBC News. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Mohammad Sayed/Arielle Epstein)

MIT developed a system to control robots with electroencephalogram signals. The robot is tasked to sort objects, while the subject wearing an EEG cap watches. The robot is looking for an error-related potential (ErrP) signal that a human brain emits when the person sees the robot about to commit an error. That's why the robot appears to make a selection and then pause to see if it's correct before dropping the object in a basket.

(YouTube link)

While the robot itself is not all that impressive, the interface between the brain and the action is almost supernatural. That an EEG can actually sort these kinds of messages is amazing. Read about the experiment in the original MIT paper. -via Laughing Squid