When French metal band Eons of Decay needed a video for their song "The Perfect Storm," they enlisted the talents of Fabrice Mathieu, who has delighted us with his film mashups for years. Mathieu turned to popular science fiction, dystopian, and disaster movies and used clips from more than 50 of them to illustrate how awful a perfect storm could be. Things go from bad to worse as we see war, wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, urban overcrowding, sandstorms, economic collapse, floods, asteroids, and the general mayhem that you would expect from armageddon. If you enjoy such mashups but you don't care for heavy metal, you should watch with the sound off to wallow in the utter destruction that Hollywood offers us, and tell yourself "It's just a movie..." In case you you don't recognize the clips, there's a list of the movies used at the YouTube page, under "more."  -Thanks Fabrice!

You may have seen a blurb or a passing headline about a musician who was still composing and playing music with his brain after his death. These stories are referring to experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, who died in 2021. Lucier gave his full cooperation to the experiment, which is more of an art installation entitled Revivification. But it's a stretch to say the installation includes Lucier's brain. The musician's brain is not a part of it.

What they did was to collect white cells from blood that Lucier has donated prior to his death, and comb through those to find stem cells. Stem cells can be stimulated to form many different tissues and organs. Lucier's living stem cells were prodded into forming a cerebral organoid, or a clump of brain tissue. The organoid is hooked up to a set of twenty brass plates and mallets, and the electrical activity causes the mallets to strike the plates. But is this music from Alvin Lucier after his death, or something else entirely? An article at Futurism explains this experimental art installation, but does not tell us whether the sounds of Revivification resemble music at all, or whether that music is good. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Stephen Malagodi/Non Event)

How many legs must a robot have to navigate over various obstacles in the terrain? Or does it really matter? Maybe the type of feet matter more than the number of legs. Or maybe the size of those feet are key. The Brick Experiment Channel built five different types of walking machines out of LEGO blocks and pieces, and then subjected each of them to seven different obstacles to see which design worked best. None of them had an easy time. Well, one did, but I won't tell you which one because this is a competition on video, and you may get really invested in your favorite walker robot. I will go as far as to express sympathy for the "simple 2-legged walker" because that little guy has no talent for walking whatsoever and no clue going into an obstacle. Yes, it's okay to laugh at a machine that doesn't work properly.

If you'd like to know more about these five walkers, you can see how they were built in this video. -via Metafilter

We've read about amazing dogs who can smell cancer and other human conditions, and now we know at least one person who can sniff out diagnoses like diabetes and Parkinson's disease. Joy Milne, 75-year-old Scottish woman, always knew that she had an extraordinarily sensitive sense of smell, which runs in her family. She could smell a change in her husband's scent years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. In a test, Milne was challenged with t-shirts worn by Parkinson's patients and by healthy controls. She only missed one, when she identified a control as a Parkinson's patient, but that volunteer was diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months later!  

Milne is now working with researchers to help isolate the substance that causes the smell that tells her of Parkinson's. Read about Milne's unusual talents that may lead to a diagnostic breakthrough at My Modern Met. -via Damn Interesting

There are certain species that can walk on the surface of water. Don't try this at home, because humans and most animals are far too heavy to even attempt it. But these insects have found their ecological niche because there are other species that don't have the same talents, and they can be eaten. These water walkers each use their own different method for moving about on the surface of water: walking, rowing, jumping, surfing, and even a sort of jet propulsion. They've developed these techniques and even specialized body parts to harness the science of fluid dynamics, meaning surface tension and capillary action, to out-maneuver whatever it is they want to eat. Yeah, there's plenty of science here to interest you, but this is also a True Facts video, so you get Ze Frank cracking jokes and making fun of these talented little creatures. There's a 65-second skippable ad at 4:56.

English is a weird language. It has evolved over centuries while also incorporating words from other languages until it's become fertile ground producing tons of puns. You'd think someone would try to do something about that. Well, they have. There's been a movement for hundreds of years to make English words easier by spelling them the way they are pronounced. Proponents say this would make spelling more consistent across the board, and we might even be able to drop a few of the 26 letters of the alphabet. But it doesn't really work that way.

“I attrybute my suksess in life to mi devoshun to spelyng.”      –Josh Billings

When you spell words as they are pronounced, you find that it's honestly a chore to read them. And they look funny. While serious linguists were just trying to make reading and writing easier, simplified spelling made the writer seem undereducated, to say the least. Quite a few humorists jumped onto the simplified spelling bandwagon as a means of comedy, including Mark Twain. Read about the comedy backlash to the simplified spelling movement and the giggles they produced at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Cbaile19)

The What If? series from Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) seeks to give serious answers to ridiculous theoretical questions. The most common question they receive, over and over, is "What would happen if the sun went out?" This is also a common question outside of the series, too. What they are actually asking is how long would it be before we all froze to death. The answer varies, because humans know how to keep warm up to a point. But we would lose our light, our food supplies, and pretty soon our orbit. Since those scenarios have been addressed all around the internet, Munroe and Reich decided to look at the bright side, as if there is one. The lack of a sun would actually solve some problems we have here on earth. Not that any of that makes up for freezing to death, but here you are anyway with a list of benefits from the sun ceasing to burn.

If you knew nothing about the invention of Graham crackers, you might assume that they were invented by someone named Graham- and you'd be right. Sylvester Graham was born in 1794, the youngest of 17 children. He was sickly all of his life, and had an idea that white bread, with its refined flour, extra ingredients, and preservatives, was not good for one's health. And so Graham developed a cracker that used only simple ingredients, including whole wheat bran. This Graham cracker didn't even have any sweeteners in it. It was part of a healthy living regimen that became known as the Graham Diet.

We now know that whole grains and fewer preservatives are healthier overall. But physical health wasn't Graham's main concern. He was a Presbyterian minister who believed that alcohol was ruination, and food that contained meat, fat, or spices promoted lustful thoughts and sexual perversion. Only a simple, bland diet would put the proper limits on such desires. These beliefs didn't appeal to the general public, and indeed, Graham crackers only became a sensation when Nabisco started putting honey in them. Read about Sylvester Graham and his quest for better morals and better health at All That's Interesting. -Thanks, WTM!

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Western movie Tombstone came out in 1993 and therefore never got an Honest Trailer until now. With the passing of Val Kilmer a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people are thinking about his portrayal of Doc Holliday in the movie, so it seems fitting that Tombstone can finally get an Honest Trailer.

There have been plenty of movies that told the story of Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral, including one of that exact title, because it's an exciting Old West tale that happens to be true. But Tombstone stands out among those movies for assembling a large cast of talented and attractive actors, moments that are less serious and even lean toward comedy, and for its historical accuracy, which is, of course, relative to other productions. Screen Junkies can't find much to criticize Tombstone for, but they do manage to shoehorn some jokes into this Honest Trailer.

Last month, we brought you a video about murderers who had been featured on television for something besides murder. That was not exactly a complete list. It's happened in the movies, too, when those involved in the production only found out much later that they'd been working with a murderer. Sometimes the murder came after the movie job, and sometimes they'd already committed the crime and just hadn't been caught yet. This happened to the cast of The Exorcist, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Felon. Plus there are two cases of a murderer on a TV series that didn't show up in the earlier video. One is about a Jeopardy! winner who went on to kill his wife, and the last case is a real mind blower- the murders happened to produce content for the television show! That complicated story and four others are all explained in a list at Cracked.

This shrimp is a go-getter! Watch him do all the things you wish you had time to do in a day -in only a minute. He gets up early so he can get his exercise, sports, and gaming in before he even fixes breakfast and then goes to work making other creative things. Afterward, downtime is party time with his shrimp friends! It's a full day, for sure, so I bet he doesn't get up quite so early the next morning.

This series of shrimp activities are all automata made by  Amedeo Capelli of Stoccafisso design (previously at Neatorama). Shrimp are far from the only thing he animates in wood, but he has quite a few of the little crustaceans in his collection of clever and whimsical automata. And they do all the things! Some of these shrimp (and other automata) are available at his Etsy shop. -via Geeks Are Sexy

We love medieval doodles, from meticulously illuminated manuscripts to ink paw prints, but especially the humorous images of rabbits and snails doing things you won't find in nature. You have to wonder about the circumstances that led to these bizarre drawings. Now we have the story of how one particular volume came to be emblazoned with such creatures plus the spitting image of Yoda.

The Smithfield Decretals is a copy of the Decretales of Pope Gregory IX. It was published in the 1230s in French, with wide blank margins that were meant for scholars to add their own notes. That's not what happened, though. Someone in England got the copy some time before 1340, and knowing that books are better with illustrations, hired artists to add pictures to the margins. It's possible that the owner could not read French, and maybe hoped the artists could. But the artists either couldn't read French, either, or they didn't care about the dry papal correspondence in the text. They just went with what they knew was funny, and that included giant hares and snails and scenes of gruesome violence. Read more about the Smithfield Decretals at Open Culture. -via Nag on the Lake

The RMS Titanic sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912, 115 years ago today. There were 2,240 people aboard, but only 705 were rescued alive when the RMS Carpathia responded to the distress call. Later on, the CS Mackay-Bennett was dispatched to recover the dead, and that ship picked up 306 of the deceased, many of whom were buried at sea. That left more than 1200 bodies unaccounted for.

Some of those missing bodies sank to the bottom of the ocean, but others floated for days and were found hundreds of miles away. Some were identified, others were too decomposed. The last known body to be retrieved for burial on land was finally laid to rest almost two months after the sinking of the Titanic. However, those that were buried without identification were given markers, and some were identified by DNA a hundred years later. Read the grim story of the Titanic victims who weren't retrieved in a timely manner at Smithsonian.

When we say a person has a big mouth, it means they talk too much or spill secrets they shouldn't. But some people really have mouths that are larger than normal. You can't tell that Marie Pearl Zellmer Robinson has a big mouth just by looking at her- until she opens it was wide as she can. The woman from Ketchikan, Alaska, has been named the world record holder for the biggest mouth gape (female), meaning the distance from top to bottom when her mouth is all the way open. The official measurement is 2.98 inches (7.59 centimeters). That doesn't tell you much, but look at all the things she can put in her mouth! A whole orange. A ten-patty burger. A metal can.

Robinson has known her mouth is superlative since she was a kid and her siblings challenged her to fit things in her mouth, but she only recently learned that Guinness World Records had a record for women with large mouth gapes. When she saw what the record was, she knew she had already beaten it. -via Boing Boing

The Easter Bunny is a symbolic holiday character that doesn't make a lot of sense. What does a bunny rabbit and colored eggs have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? Nothing, actually. We often assume that the Christian holiday just incorporated older pagan traditions for a spring holiday the same way that Saturnalia was repurposed for Christmas and Samhain gave us a date for All Saint's Day. Indeed, eggs are a symbol of rebirth and renewal, and rabbits are everywhere in the spring.

Only it turns out that the traditions associated with spring celebrations mainly concern hares, which are a different animal altogether even though they are related. And their connections with ancient pagan mythology? You might be surprised to learn the Easter bunny myth is certainly mythological, but it's not all that ancient. That bunny that brings colored eggs for Easter is more a fairy tale than an ancient tradition. Read about the real origins of the Easter bunny at Mental Floss.