Medical science advances with every war. The American Civil War saw surgeons mastering the art of amputation, which saved soldier's lives. Each medical advance meant that more soldiers would survive later wars, though it also meant more would survive with lifelong disabilities. By World War I, doctors could save some men who had their faces blown off, but what about their lives afterward? That called for more medical advances.

The first real plastic surgery was the reconstruction of Walter Yeo's face after he was badly wounded in World War I. Dr. Harold Gillies found Yeo to be a good candidate for a surgical technique he had developed involving skin grafts, but it had never been used for a wounded face covered in scar tissue. It wasn't easy. The technique worked, but Yeo's treatment took years to complete due to infections. We've come a long way since then with, for example, surgical gloves and masks. Gillies improved his grafting technique and was able to repair the faces of many other war veterans with even worse damage. A hundred years later, we've seen quite a few complete face transplants that can restore drastically injured people to a semblance of normal life.

Since ancient history, people have been looking for a magic potion to stimulate their sex lives, whether by boosting one's sex drive, enabling an erection, lowering inhibitions, or in seducing a partner. Fertility aids factored in, too, although until modern medicine came in, it was assumed that plenty of sex would lead to procreation. Classic aphrodisiacs fall into three categories: drugs with actual physical effects of some sort, those with psychological effects, and magic potions that might work due to the placebo effect.

Some aphrodisiacs were associated with animals that appeared to have a good sex life. Some were plants that grew in shapes that resembled genitals, so they obviously had a purpose there. And some just make you feel good or made a potential partner happy to receive them as a gift. Hey, when your partner has a headache, anything that would relieve the pain will make progress. Substances that contained needed nutrients got their reputation as an aphrodisiacs by restoring overall health and therefore sexual ability. And some were just downright dangerous. That said, there are more supposed aphrodisiacs than can be enumerated in anything short of an encyclopedia, but you'll learn about an awful lot of them at Today I Found Out.

In January, we'll get a new film from Bong Joon-ho, who brought us Parasite. In Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a space colonist on a fictional planet who volunteers for the most dangerous and deadly tasks that could easily get him killed. And they do! But every time he dies, they regenerate him so they can use him again. What a wacky slapstick premise! What could possibly go wrong? The story is based on the novel Mickey7, which is not a comedy. Indeed, the beginning of the trailer seems deadly serious, but soon gets ridiculous as the situation spirals out of control.  

The trailer doesn't give too much away. We don't know why Mickey volunteered to be an "expendable," nor how the story turns out. Mickey 17 also stars Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. The film will premiere in South Korea on January 28 and open in the US on January 31.

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 while he was an inmate at a mental asylum in Arles, France. It became the best-known of his many paintings. The turbulence of the sky is often seen as a metaphor for the turbulence in the artist's psyche. But there may be more to it. A new study published in Physics of Fluids sees turbulence in the sky way beyond the 14 eddies and vortices we all notice.

The air flow in the painting is also evident in the paint strokes, which reveal a shimmering effect by the contrast in the amount of light reflected by the various shades of paint, and by the size of the strokes. We cannot say "brush strokes," because Van Gogh made The Starry Night by heaping globs of paint onto the canvas with a knife or his fingers. The physicists who studied these strokes believe that Van Gogh had an intuitive understanding of how fluid dynamics work. Others say, yeah, no, Van Gogh didn't know anything about fluid dynamics, but like many great artists, he had a preternatural talent for observation of the natural world, and he spent a lot of time outdoors. Read about the fluid dynamics that most of us cannot see, but we can feel in The Starry Night at Ars Technica.

The Nikon Small World in Motion Competition is an extension of their Small World Microphotography competition for video and time-lapse photography of microscopic worlds that we can never see with just our eyes. And now we know the winners for 2024.  First place went to Dr. Bruno Vellutini of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics for the video below showing a time-lapse of the embryogenesis of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). You can see the mitotic waves created when its cells divide. Read more about the video at the winner's page.

Dr. Vellutini wins a $5,000 prize for his efforts, internet virality, and bragging rights among his peers. See the full videos of all five winners at the competition gallery, and see the honorable mentions, too. The stories behind each are poresented with the videos. -via Gizmodo

The United State Constitutional Convention met in September of 1787 to approve the final draft of the US Constitution. They sent the document to the Confederation Congress in New York City, who also approved it, on September 28, 1787. Secretary of Congress Charles Thomson ordered 100 copies printed, and he signed 13 of them to send to the 13 states to be ratified. Only eight of those 13 signed copies are known to still exist, and seven of them are in public hands. The eighth could be yours.

That copy was discovered in 2022 when Hayes Farm, a plantation in North Carolina, was being cleared out for sale. The farm was once owned by the state's governor, and the Constitution was found in an old file cabinet, where it had sat for more than 200 years. The document is in excellent condition, and is going up for auction on September 28, exactly 237 years after Congress approved it. Brunk Auctions of Asheville, North Carolina, has already accepted an opening bid of one million dollars. The final price could be astronomical. Read about this document and how you can have it at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Brunk Auctions)

"Weird Al" Yankovic has been writing and performing parody songs since he was in high school, and was once a regular on the syndicated radio show Dr. Demento. His first single was "My Bologna," a parody of "My Sharona" in 1979. Since then, he's been stealing the thunder of pop artists by making their songs into comedy, but they all love it. In those 45 years, he's had a string of songs that you can't help but think of every time you hear the hit song it was made from. And your kids think you are just being silly by singing the wrong lyrics.  

YouTuber boogiehead took ten songs and show us the original and then the "Weird Al" parody to remind us how funny they are and to show us how well he recreated the tune with his own comedic lyrics. You can see how the production values of his videos improved exponentially with a bit of notoriety. -via Laughing Squid

We recognize Saturn by its magnificent rings, but other planets have smaller and less visible rings, and earth may have had them, too, at one time. Three scientists from Monash University in Australia just published a study explaining how. They studied impact craters from the Ordovician period, around 466 million years ago. Mapping where the earth's tectonic plates would have been at the time, they found that all these craters were within 30 degrees of the equator, while most of earth's dry land was further away. They believe a large asteroid came close to the earth, and was pulverized when it hit the atmosphere. The debris formed rings around the planet that lasted for millions of years, but fell to earth gradually and caused those Ordovician craters.

This theory would also explain the ice age called the Hirnantian Icehouse, which happened near the end of the Ordovician period and was the coldest earth has been in half a billion years. It was a mass extinction event that saw the disappearance of 85% of the earth's marine species. A shadow caused by rings of debris in space would have kept sunlight from reaching the surface. Read a further explanation of these findings in a press release from Monash University. -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Grebenkov)

We were once afraid of bacteria, but then we found out that there are beneficial bacteria that battle harmful bacteria. In fact, we carry around plenty of bacteria that help our digestive systems work, which we call the human biome. And when we developed antibiotics, we no longer had to be so afraid of even harmful bacteria. But viruses are different, and we have no medicines to kill them, just vaccines to prevent their diseases. A lot of science later, we know there are tons of viruses that won't harm us, because they specialize in harming bacteria. Now we know that human bodies are teeming with viruses all the time, which is called the human virome. Like the biome, these colonies of viruses are crucial to our survival. Kurzgesagt explains how your virome works by performing several functions that make our immune system and other systems work the way they should.

The A.V. Club is beginning a series on "women of action" in movies, and the first subject is Sarah Conner, as portrayed by Linda Hamilton. When you think of her as an action hero, you think of that moment we first saw the character in the 1991 movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day and marveled at the muscles she'd developed since The Terminator. She'd also become a fearless tactician and a weapons expert. But Caroline Siede argues that she was just as much of an action figure in the original 1984 film. It's in the first film that we see her transform from an everyday woman negotiating the dangers of modern life to a critical part of a time-travel loop, and having to fight her way through it.

Sarah Conner was more than just an action hero. She was a badass, but also had flaws, fears, and a personality that made her a more rounded and relatable character than the male characters around her. And we can't forget that she was not the main character in either movie, just the most memorable. Read a look into the character of Sarah Conner at the A.V. Club.

Sarah Andersen once illustrated how the cat distribution system works. But there are plenty of variations.

He'd never had a cat before, and didn't really want one, but she volunteered to foster a cat for the New York City rescue Flatbush Cats (previously at Neatorama). The first cat they were assigned was a mother cat that came with three kittens. Fostering cats for a rescue organization is a wonderful thing to do, but it often ends in failure. "Failure" in this case means that they don't manage to be a temporary family because they have to keep the cats. That's why organizations are always on the lookout for more volunteer foster parents. In this case, two of the kittens, Viola and Mandolin, are now permanent pets, and their non-cat dad is now a cat person. Viola and Mandolin are very much loved, as you can see at their Instagram gallery. 

After more than 20 years, the International Space Station (ISS) will be retired in 2030. What will take its place? China already has a space station in orbit, and you've probably heard of NASA's Lunar Gateway, a space station that will orbit the moon as part of the Artemis missions. But there are plans for many other space stations in the pipeline, some with launch dates coming up relatively soon. Four of them are big, public projects from NASA, Russia's Roscosmos, India's ISR, and China's CNSA. There are also quite a few space station projects from private companies that are dedicating billions of dollars to getting their branch offices in space. These private companies include Vast, Axiom Space, Gravitics, Blue Origin, Sierra Space, Voyager Space, and Airbus. My guess is that Airbus is the only one you've heard of. Some of these projects are collaborations between companies or between companies and public agencies, while others are working on grants from NASA. Russia and China are collaborating on a project for both a lunar space station and a moon base. Read about ten of these upcoming space station projects at Freethink. -via Big Think

(Image credit: NASA/Alberto Bertolin)

Every year, Forest & Bird in New Zealand hosts the Bird of the Year (Te Manu Rongonui o Te Tau) competition to draw attention to the country's many and varied birds, particularly those that are endangered. Last year, the organization celebrated its 100th anniversary by crowning the Bird of the Century. However, a campaign by talk show host John Oliver pushed the number of votes to seven times the normal number, and left a bad taste in the mouths of kiwis. In 2021, the winner was not even a bird. In 2020, the competition became a global scandal when it was racked by voter fraud.

The 2024 competition has been concluded, and no voting scandal has been reported this year. The winner, backed by several New Zealand groups, is the hoiho, a rare, yellow-eyed penguin that also won in 2019 when it became the contest's first seabird winner. The endangered hoiho has experienced a steep drop in population over the 15 years, and there are only 168 pairs of hoiho left. Read about this endangered penguin at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Kimberley Collins)

Skyscrapers with curved glass look really cool, but they can hide a dangerous feature- solar convergence, also known as the solar death ray. Any kid who ever tried to start a fire with a magnifying glass understands that bending the sun's rays into one spot magnifies the heat. This famously happened with two skyscrapers, Vdara Hotel & Spa in Las Vegas, and the skyscraper at 20 Fenchurch Street in London. Both have concave glass that converge sunbeams into deadly spots that vary depending on the position of the sun. The confounding part of the story is that both buildings were designed by the same architect, Rafael Viñoly. You can label the first building as a screwup, but designing a second building with the same problem should be a criminal offense. Yet Viñoly defended his design, at one point even claiming that when the Fenchurch Street building was erected, no one knew London would have more sunny days in the future. This video is only eight minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Digg

Mri photo of my brain yes this is real
byu/brooklynlikestories ininterestingasfuck

Redditor brooklynlikestories shared a scan of her brain. She explained that she had a series of strokes before she was born. Doctors thought she would be never be able to walk or talk, and might even require a breathing tube. But, as one commenter put it, patients don't always read the text book. She has epilepsy, but otherwise lives a normal life. When people asked about her deficits, she says she isn't good at math and has bad eyesight, but that describes most of the world.

This is an example of neuroplasticity, a brain's capacity for rewiring itself as needed after an injury. Neurons make new connections and move functions from the damaged area to another part of the brain. It can happen at any age, but is more likely when the brain is young and still developing. In the comments, people shared dozens of stories of babies with brain damage who went on to graduate college because their brains compensated for the early injury. Several redditors also shared their own MRI scans that showed missing pieces. Continue reading to see them.