When we first heard about the live-action remake of the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was suddenly a lot of hype, and a lot of criticism for all kinds of reasons: the casting, the CGI dwarfs, the opposing political opinions of its stars, and of course, the usual rants about the wisdom of producing live-action remakes when we already have perfectly good animated classics. When the movie finally opened a couple of months ago, after a year's delay, you didn't hear much. Oh, it made money, but not enough to cover its costs, and Snow White became the biggest box office bomb so far this year. The reviews were mixed, but the bad ones were scathing. Critics liked Rachel Zegler's performance and hated everything else. Since you might not have seen it, Screen Junkies is here to explain what went wrong with Snow White in this Honest Trailer.   

Argentinian developer Max Comperatore built a website that tracks how many people are engaged in common activities round the world. What The Hell Are People Doing uses estimated statistics from a number of sources to calculate global activities. At the top you'll see how many people are being born, how many are dying, and how many people are watching the stats. Underneath is a list of the things they are doing right now. Sleeping is at the top, which makes sense because we all do it for multiple hours every day. Family care and paid work follow, with half the world's population doing one of these three things. Nice to know that 1.34% of the world is in the bathroom right now. While the activities may change up and down the list, at the bottom I see that more people are making love than are making war. There isn't a category for being online, but you can imagine a large part of entertainment, shopping, paid work, and socializing is done online. Watching these numbers change can be mesmerizing. -via Metafilter

Capuchin monkeys have been caught abducting baby howler monkeys — and no one knows exactly why. Scientists are baffled. See the first-time footage: https://t.co/DsmdRbMhOT

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) May 19, 2025

Scientists studying capuchin monkeys in Panama have discovered that they use stone tools to perform certain tasks. That's pretty amazing, but they also discovered a disturbing habit among young male capuchins -stealing babies from another species! Checking years of video, they found that this kidnapping goes back to January of 2022, when a capuchin named Joker took an infant howler monkey and walked around with it for days. Over time, other young males started taking howler monkey infants. These capuchins didn't interact with the babies much, and couldn't feed them, so some of the infants died, while others were abandoned after a few days and retrieved by their mothers.

It's not the first time social "trends" have been found spreading among juvenile male capuchin monkeys. There was a time when these monkeys found it cool to stick their fingers up another monkey's nose, and for a time they played a game of hiding things from each other in their mouths. Maybe the fad of kidnapping howler monkey infants will die out in time. Read about the discovery and the possible motivations behind it at Smithsonian.

Dante Brown's Saab broke down on Interstate 610 in Houston. Instead of calling a tow truck, he called his girlfriend to come and tow the car. She brought her Ford Expedition, but had no towing equipment outside of a single chain. They attached the chain to the rear axle of the Saab, which is the last thing you should do, and set off down the highway. The axle soon broke, and as Brown overcompensated in his steering, the car fishtailed wildly across several lanes! Brown was obviously not in communication with his girlfriend in the SUV, and she appeared to be oblivious to the mayhem going on behind her. Or was she? Some witnesses even reported she was laughing. 

Police eventually caught up with the pair. No tickets were issued for the traffic incident, but Brown was arrested on an outstanding warrant. Next time, call a tow truck.  -via Born in Space

Being an early adopter can come with a price. I once bought a used car that was from the first year of an exciting new model. I eventually realized that this fact explained why it was so cheap- the bugs hadn't been worked out. Around the year 1880, Mark Twain met a man who had built a machine that would set type automatically, replacing the time-consuming job of a compositor, who had to find and set every letter of a printed page. The machine was called the Paige Compositor, which is not a misspelling because it was named for inventor James W. Paige.

The machine resembled something out of The Jetsons, with mechanical arms that did the selecting and typesetting. Twain knew this could revolutionize publishing, and invested substantially in the machine's development. But history tells us that merely replacing a human worker's moves is not as revolutionary as finding a new way to get to the end product. The story of the Paige Compositor also shows us that the people behind a new technology must be evaluated as well as the product.

(Image credit: Scientific American)

Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond has been in the US for years, and is now an American citizen, but still recalls enough about Britain to compare and contrast the two countries. This video is about a grocery shopping trip and some American things that confused him until he got used to them. Why do American cashiers have to stand up all day? Why do Americans refrigerate eggs? (I have a friend with a chicken coop, and only keep eggs in the refrigerator so I remember where they are.) How can you compare the size of milk when the measurements are so different? And then there's the tax thing, which is a surprise to Europeans. Our taxes are added after the sale because each state has a different sales tax rate. Some cities also add another tax. And some states don't tax groceries at all. The video is not as long as it looks; there's a 95-second skippable ad at 2:40.

Who eats more pizza- Americans or Italians? You might guess that the US consumes the most pizza, simply because we have so many people, and you'd be right. But when you take the larger population out of the equation and figure pizza on a per capita basis, the most pizza-obsessed nation is neither the US nor Italy. It's Norway. The average person in Norway eats more than 25 pounds of pizza every year, while in the US, the average is only 23 pounds. Figured that way, the US is second, and Italy comes in fifth.

As you might guess, frozen pizza is particularly popular in Norway, but they also like homemade pizza and pizzerias. Norwegian pizza isn't like the standard American pizza, though, because the toppings reflect a Scandinavian taste. It's possible they could be heavier, too, which would explain the higher consumption in pounds. Read about Norwegian pizzas at Tasting Table. -via Fark

(Image credit: Kjetil Ree)

One thing we've always heard about the United States' national anthem is that it is hard to sing, what with that one high note near the end. We've hear it all our lives, from beautiful performances to versions that are laughably awful. What would Dustin Ballard do with the song? A mashup of course. There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) gave "The Star Spangled Banner" a completely new but familiar tune, setting the words we all know to the tune of "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden. The meter of the lyrics fits pretty well. It might seem a little weird to you, but "the land of the free" would be a whole lot easier to sing this way. And, as one commenter pointed out, if we adopted this version, both the lyrics and the tune would have an American writing credit, instead of relying on an old British drinking song. -via The Awesomer

Orange cats, also called ginger cats, have a reputation as being male, large, very food-motivated, and kind of goofy. Scientists at Kyushu University in Japan and Stanford University, working on a crowdfunded project, have located the gene that causes a cat to be orange. The culprit is a mutation on the ARHGAP36 gene. A missing inhibitor section in that gene causes more activity, and the result is that the cat's melanocytes -cells that control color- are ordered to produce a lighter pigment, meaning orange.

The reason that orange cats are overwhelmingly male is because the ARHGAP36 gene is carried on the X chromosome. Male cats only have one X chromosome, so if a male cat inherits the mutation, it will be orange. Female cats have two X chromosomes, so they must inherit both X chromosomes with the orange mutation to appear orange, as only one such chromosome will likely produce mixed colors, like tortoiseshell or calico. The kicker is that the ARHGAP36 gene also controls other parts of a cat's anatomy, such as the brain and hormone production. The missing inhibitor DNA in a mutated ARHGAP36 gene may explain why orange cats have other similarities that give them the stereotype. Read more about this research at BBC.  -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Mike Lehmann)

Warning: gory animation. Lee Hardcastle (previously at Neatorama) is a claymation animator with a penchant for violence. Where can he go for the inspiration to outdo his previous videos? Video games, of course, since they are the most violent media we come across in our everyday lives. This video recreates scenes from the new game DOOM: The Dark Ages, in which his character Claycat goes all HAM on his demon opponents. But this is claymation, where the mayhem is both scary and silly. You know how it is with clay- give a little kid a Play-Doh figure you've just spent an hour perfecting, and their first instinct is to tear and smash it. If you can handle DOOM, you can handle the stop-motion clay version. If you really like it, see Claycat in previous versions of DOOM here and here.

You really have to admire Hardcastle's work ethis. Doom: The Dark Ages was only released one day before this video was posted. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The space probe Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and is currently 25 billion kilometers (15.6 billion miles) away from earth. The fact that it's still sending signals to earth after 48 years is amazing enough, but a recent communications exchange hints that the probe may be functional for a long time to come.

Voyager 1's backup thrusters have not been used since 2004, when a malfunction occurred and NASA considered them defunct. They were okay with that at the time, since the probe had already long outlasted its life expectancy. But lately Voyager's primary thrusters have been degrading due to a buildup of residue. Without thrusters, the probe wouldn't be able to orient its antenna toward earth, and communication would be lost. Could NASA engineers activate the long-unused backup thrusters? They also had to activate the thruster's heaters that had been deactivated to save energy. The mission was frustrating, as each message to Voyager takes 23 hours to get there, and another 23 hours to hear back. But once again, Voyage 1 surprised us. They don't build them like they used to.  -via Slashdot

(Image credit: NASA/JPL)

Bitsy the cat was born with nine lives, six legs and one loving heart. Now, Christine Koltun says the one-year-old cat is well on her way to having a new lease on life.

A fun story from me today: https://t.co/8L32lpmKJq

— Aaron Sousa ✍️📻 (@JournoSousa) May 15, 2025

Furget Me Not, a rescue organization in Edmonton, Alberta, got a report of a stray cat that had six legs. They picked up Bitsy and saw that indeed, the cat had two front legs and four back legs. Veterinarians determined that Bitsy had absorbed a littermate as a fetus, and had two extra legs plus an extra pelvis. One of the cat's original main legs was non-functional as well. They decided that Bitsy would have a better quality of life without the non-functional legs. Surgeons at the Windermere Veterinary Hospital removed three of the cat's legs in a two-hour surgical procedure. She is now recovering at the home of one of the vet techs. Read about Bitsy and her extra legs at CBC. -via Metafilter

You have to wonder if there's something about Edmonton, since this is the second time a six-legged cat has been helped in that city.

Warning: this video contains spoilers for a 42-year-old movie. Yoda's final scene in Return of the Jedi was quite emotional for Star Wars fans. You  might look at it a bit differently now that the scene has been given the Bad Lip Reading treatment and has been turned into a musical number. Yoda is merely getting ready for bedtime, and he sings a song, completely against Luke's preference. This is totally nonsensical, but its goofiness is the entire point. How hard can it be to put words into a Muppet's mouth? You may be reminded of a toddler doing everything he can to avoid going to sleep.

Lest the memories of the original scene make you sad, the editing has been changed a bit here, leaving Yoda just fine at the end, although there's obviously a screw loose. The reference at the end reminds us of this Bad Lip Reading song from nine years ago. -via Laughing Squid

Eighty years after the end of World War II, we are still learning its stories. In the summer of 1941, Germany invaded the USSR, until then its ally. The Soviets reached out to the Allies for help. They needed supplies, which Britain agreed to ship, and even the US, still uninvolved in the war, lent support. These supplies were deployed in convoys of ships traveling through the Arctic Ocean to Murmansk and Archangel. The route was extremely dangerous, not only because of the Arctic cold, but because the Germans were keeping an eye out for them from occupied Norway.

In December of 1942, the A-class destroyer HMS Achates was assigned as one of six escort ships for a convoy of 14 merchant ships bound for Murmansk. They were attacked by a German flotilla, and the Achates began blowing smoke on the water to mask the convoy. The German ship Admiral Hipper unloaded its guns on the Achates, the only ship visible. Despite staggering damage, the Achates continued blowing smoke, while two other escort ships emerged from the mist and beat back the German ships.

In what would become known as the Battle of the Barents Sea, the Achates lost 111 of her crew of 193, and the ship sank. But the convoy they were protecting made it to Murmansk, thanks to the smokescreen and the other escort ships. Read about that battle, and about the convoys of  "the worst journey in the world" at Military History Now. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: National Maritime Museum)

A month ago, we brought you the The Daily Life of a Shrimp, a very full day featuring automata by Italian artist Amedeo Capelli. Now we get to see another slice of crustacean life as the shrimp gets an invitation to a picnic! Of course, he has to prepare something delicious to take first. I don't think it's going to be shrimp cocktail.

Capelli explains that he's in his "shrimp's era" right now because he enjoys making them, and his followers like them as well. In an interview at Instagram, he explains what makes his hard-working and hard-playing shrimp so charming (in Italian with English subtitles). They are industrious and frenetic, which is cute in itself, but their popularity mainly comes down to the fact that any human activity is funny when a shrimp does it. There are quite a few of his shrimp automata available at Etsy. -via Boing Boing