A guy in China is testing the explosive power of different levels of firecrackers by placing them under a cooking pot and igniting them. He starts with the least powerful firecracker he has, which is still enough to lift the pot off the ground. As they increasingly get bigger, the pot flies to amazing heights. Do not try this at home! It appears quite dangerous, although if you're not in China, you probably can't get this variety of firecrackers.

He's purportedly testing the firecrackers, but I'm most impressed with the pot. How heavy is that thing? What is it made of? It goes to ridiculous heights before showing even the slightest dent. Up until the last explosion, it's only slightly damaged by falling, not from the fireworks. Yeah, that last one was a doozy, and the only one that made him walk any distance to retrieve the pot. -via Laughing Squid 

Here's a creepy and salacious love story that surely would have gone viral on the internet, if it hadn't happened in 1911. A pretty young woman named Marie Bondi developed a crush on the local undertaker. Leonardo Grasso was married, however, so how was she to get his attention discreetly? Her solution was to dress as a man and apply for a job as the undertaker's assistant. She not only got the job, but Grasso's attention, as he became close with his assistant "Mike." 

Shielded by the disguise, the two weren't particularly discreet. The affair was uncovered when a client caught the couple displaying affection right there in the funeral home in a room with a row of coffins. Mrs. Grasso had "Mike" arrested for masquerading as a man, which was apparently against the law at the time. As a result, Bondi went back to dressing as a woman, but that didn't stop her affair with Grasso. Read how all these shenanigans played out at Strange Company. 

The 61st Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition received more than 60,000 entries from 117 countries this year. The record number of entries has been winnowed down to the top 100 photos, which will all be a part of the annual exhibit at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, UK. The top winners will be announced on October 14. The museum exhibit will run from October 17 through July 12 of next year. 

Some of the top 100 images have been released for our enjoyment, six of them in the collection above. My favorite is the last one, featuring bats leaving a historical ruin. Photographer Sitaram Raul sat in total darkness in Banda, Maharashtra, India, aiming his camera at where he thought the bats might appear. He got pooped on, but also got some great pictures. Read the stories behind these photos and more, 16 in all, at BBC.  -via Damn Interesting 

Healthy ecosystems maintain a delicate balance of resources, plants, and animals. Remove one part of the food chain, and you get cascading effects that throw the balance off, and it could take many years to fix it even if we recognize the problem and can do something about it. Bringing in an invasive species can have the same devastating effect on a fragile ecosystem- just ask Australians about their rabbits and cane toads. That scenario is playing out now in the savannas of Kenya. The arrival of the big-headed ant (Pheidole megacephala) some twenty years ago has changed the diet of the lions who live there- they are eating more water buffalo and fewer zebras. It's a chain reaction that involves several other species along the way, and as the story is still playing out, we don't know how it will end, or how other species will be affected. I'm pulling for the lions, in any case.

Way back when, people could gauge the passage of time by seeing how far a candle burned down. This has nothing to do with that- it has to do with the flicker of the flame. Candlemakers spent hundreds or even thousands of years getting rid of the flicker because it was annoying in your only light source. Now we are trying to engineer LED candles to mimic the flicker because people like it. So now wax candles are mostly flicker-free, but you can bring it back by tying three candles together.

By measuring the flicker of such candles with modern high-tech instruments, we've determined that candles flicker at 9.9 Hz, which is roughly one tenth of a second. With a lot of measuring equipment and an awful lot of candles, one could build a clock out of such knowledge. Read how this was determined at Tim's Blog. 

This project is an entry into HackaDay's One Hertz Challenge, in which entrants design a device that measures time in 1 Hz (one second) increments. If you are so inclined, you can read 116 entries so far.  -via Metafilter

The question is: how many sequels can a franchise have before it runs out of steam? The answer: not this many. Jurassic World Rebirth is the seventh movie in the Jurassic Park franchise. It made a ton of money, but at this point, going to a Jurassic movie is a habit. The 1993 movie Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a book by Michael  Crichton, was a wonderfully fresh idea, but you'd think by now this fictional world would have learned its lesson about dinosaurs. But no, they make the same mistakes over and over. What's different about Jurassic World Rebirth is that the dinos are mutants. You get the idea that they want to avoid the fate of the first movie in which we learned over the subsequent 30 years that dinosaurs didn't look like that. Not that it makes any difference to the audience; the plot is the same. Screen Junkies has fun tearing Jurassic World Rebirth apart. 

Documented history goes back a lot further than science. We have written chronicles of dates when people were surprised that the sky grew black and the sun didn't shine. Oh yeah, they knew weather, but some dark days couldn't be explained by storms. In October of 1762, the skies over Detroit turned black and a sulfurous rain fell that was black even when it hit the ground. There was no industrial pollution back then, so what was it? We don't know to this day. One day in 1857, the skies over Baghdad turned black for a short time, then red, with red sand falling over the town. In 1938, skies over Siberia turned black. No rain this time, but accounts from that day tell us that radio signals could not get in or out in the region.  

Many historical accounts of daytime darkness can be explained now as solar eclipses or volcanic clouds. But those weren't the explanation for any of the eight mysterious dark days on this list. A couple can be explained by rare weather phenomena, but most have no definitive cause to this day. Read about eight incidents of daytime darkness at Mental Floss. 

I saw the latest update video on Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot and found it a bit underwhelming. We've followed Atlas for years, and he's learned how to tidy up around the factory. Meanwhile, we've been watching robots in a kickboxing tournament. So I skipped it. This particular video is about a collaboration between Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute, which is profoundly interesting if you own a factory, or if you work at a Toyota factory and could be replaced by a robot, but not so much to the general public. 

But apparently I wasn't the only one who found it a bit ho-hum. YouTuber dhant122 saw that what the video lacked was an inner monologue, or an exterior monologue, for that matter. So he fixed it. Now Atlas is the factory worker facing constant drudgery that's made worse by his nemesis Tom, who is quite the work bully. -via Laughing Squid 

In 1938, airplanes were still a novelty to most Americans, the Great Depression was still in full swing, and President Roosevelt was watching events in Europe that would lead to another war. Although it would be years before America joined in, he knew the US had to be ready. Roosevelt asked for 10,000 airplanes; congress approved only half as many. But within a couple of years, it seemed inevitable that the US Army Air Corps would need exponentially more. The government enlisted the Ford automotive company to make airplane parts, but when Ford executives saw how slowly airplanes were built, they went all in on making them entirely. After all, they were famous for churning out cars fast on an assembly line. Planes, however, would need a bigger line.   

In 1941, Ford built the Willow Run plant in Detroit to build B-24 Liberators. At the time, it was the largest factory in the world, with an assembly line over a mile long. They also built a runway to test the planes. With thousands of workers at a time, the plant produced a B-24 every 63 minutes, 248 of them in one month! Read how the Willow Run plant helped to win World War II at Jalopnik.  

If you only watch the first five minutes of this video from Kurzgesagt, you might start to think that we should all be taking some form of amphetamine all the time. What could be better than taking a drug that helps us focus, be more productive, and deal with the mind-numbing drudgery and boredom of the modern world? Those qualities are exactly why so many people take some form of speed, both legally and illegally. Amphetamines have legitimate medical uses, like getting kids with ADHD through school. They have fueled armies in war. But there are enormous costs associated with such drugs. If we were all using them, we wouldn't be able to get along with each other, and they eventually lead to disability and death. Besides that, productivity shouldn't be the biggest goal in our lives, because society is about more than winners and losers. The video is 9:45; the rest is ads. 

If you were raised eating instant mashed potatoes, you might think that is what mashed potatoes are supposed to taste like. But once you've had freshly-mashed potatoes with some butter and cream and a little salt, it's hard to go back to the dehydrated stuff. Midcentury cooks relied on instant mashed potatoes (IMP) because they were fast and easy and didn't spoil. And to be honest, those were reasons why IMP was invented. 

That was hundreds of years ago, when the Andean communities of South America took the liquid out of potatoes to make them last forever, or at least during hard times. Those freeze-dried taters called chuño were also crucial for an army on the move as the Incan Empire expanded. They didn't taste like much, but they filled a warrior's stomach and weren't too heavy to carry. The US Army developed IMP for World War II for the same reasons. And that was the beginning of the consumer market for IMP, although they had to be improved before veterans would touch them. 

Once you start thinking about instant mashed potatoes, you realize that a lot of modern life has followed the same path. Take something good and "improve" it by making it more convenient, and in the process, it loses the qualities that made us like it in the first place. Read about instant mashed potatoes and the ways they mirror modern society at Duck Soup. -via Nag on the Lake 

Some people leave the impression that they either have a death wish, or will do anything for an adrenaline fix. In this case, it's Norwegian athlete Brage Vestavik on a bike. This gnarly line in British Columbia is obviously designed for maximum terror. The first thing Vestavik does is fall off of it, but somehow doesn't break every bone in his body. He just gets back up and tries it again. We don't know if that was immediate, or if it took a couple of weeks to build up the courage to try again. It would have taken me years, or never, but I wouldn't have attempted this in the first place. Be warned that he is wearing the camera and you may experience vertigo and spill your drink, so put it down before takeoff. Afterward, you can go see pictures of Vestavik and friends building this line. -via the Awesomer 

Remember when the news went wild about the number of incidents in which orcas attacked yachts? Cases have emerged of a different kind of orca-human interaction, this one much more benign. A new study details stories of killer whales sharing prey with humans. There have been at least 34 such incidences documented since 2015, most from the crews of research vessels. Orcas will deliver a piece of flesh, or a whole animal such as a seal, to a boat and wait around to see what humans will do with it. After a while, they will either retrieve the food or else swim off and leave it.  

Of course, we don't know why they do it. There's no way (yet) to determine whether this behavior is altruistic, nefarious, or just a bit of fun. The orcas may be trying to make friends, or they could be studying our behavior, or they may feel sorry for research vessels taking on so little food compared to fishing boats. Then again, they could be trying to bait us into the water. The yacht-bashing behavior was attributed to orcas imitating each other's behavior and playing a game. This, too, could be a game for them, but we don't know what outcome they are looking for. Read more about the phenomenon of orcas sharing their catch at The Canadian Press. -via TYWKIWDBI 

(Image source: Wikipedia) 

Sometimes a crazy idea is just what you need. Vita and Mauro take in foster cats, often cats with special needs. Sebastian came to them as a kitten through the Little Lion Foundation. He had an old injury that left him walking all wrong, so wrong that he wore holes in his skin. They thought he would have to have his leg amputated, but veterinary care, therapy, and patience did a lot for Sebastian. When keeping his leg was assured, Sebastian started his swimming lessons and learned to dog paddle (the backstroke would be asking too much of him). Surprisingly, the kitten took to water sports better than you would expect. Swimming allowed Sebastian to get a lot of exercise and leg movement without having to bear weight on his paws, and that kind of therapy paid off big time. You can keep up with Sebastian and Vita and Mauro's other foster cats at Instagram.

The post title sounds like science fiction meets Captain Obvious, but this is real. Brain implants, or brain-computer interfaces, can help disabled people move prosthetic limbs with their intentions, and paralyzed people without speech can speak through a computer by intending to speak. But with improved technology, we find that the parts of the brain that are used to attempt speech are very close to the parts of the brain that produce our inner dialogue, meaning our thoughts. How would someone using this technology to communicate maintain the privacy of their own thoughts? The interfaces we have now are not good at reading inner thoughts, but they will get better, and the ethical issues need to be addressed now.  

One way to separate the intention to speak from one's inner dialogue would be to improve the technology, and researchers are working on that. Another way that is already being tried is to use a "password" that the user would think of before activating intentional communication. You can see how this might have its own problems- it's akin to telling someone to not think about an elephant. Read about the attempts to assure privacy as well as communication for those using brain-computer interfaces at Ars Technica. As you would guess, the comments are full of worst case scenarios.