Have you ever been startled when an electric car snuck up on you while you were walking? That happened to me about ten years ago. I was on a sidewalk, but I immediately thought of what would happen if a cat or a kid were in the road. We are just plain used to loud car engines. So auto manufacturers started adding noises to cars, even though they don't need them to function. But when the sound is superfluous to the vehicle's function, those sounds don't have to mimic a combustion engine. What sounds should a car have to be the safest for pedestrians, cyclists, and animals? Car companies are working with audio engineers and sound designers to perfect the sounds of a quiet car for optimum safety while trying not to annoy everyone who hears them. -via Digg

When someone in this day and age tells you to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," they almost always mean you should work harder to improve your lot. However, the original quote that gave us the phrase can be traced back to 1834, when it was used to mock someone who claimed to have invented the perpetual motion machine. See, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is literally impossible, so the phrase is supposed to refer to an impossible act. The quote has been around so long that people completely misunderstand what it really means.

Another example is the "one bad apple" that you shouldn't judge the rest of the apples by. But the full phrase is "one bad apple spoils the barrel," which is completely opposite of how the phrase is used today. I blame the 1970 song by The Osmonds, where the lyric is "one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch." But that's just my opinion. Read up on the origins and transformations of ten common quotes that people completely misinterpret at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: ABigCat)

Chile is so long that you can visualize it bending to the curvature of the earth. It's so long that if it were placed in Europe, it would reach from the top of Norway down to the north coast of Africa. The country's climate reflects the same orientation, except backwards. At the bottom, it's very close to Antarctica, and in the north you'll find hot desert. There's also a temperate rainforest in the middle, which is where people actually live. Those people speak a version of Spanish that Spanish-speakers from other places can't understand. What makes Chile so different in so many ways?

The short answer is the Andes mountain range. But those mountains, placed where they are, come with a story behind them and a lot of geographical effects that might surprise you. Chile's climate is affected by both the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic. The mountains left cultural effects of their own. And the main population of Chile is boxed in on four sides by mountains, ocean, desert, and cold. Tomas Pueyo explains why Chile is so different in so many ways because of where it is at Uncharted Territories.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Addicted04)

We saw the finalists a couple of months ago, and now the awards are in. The winners of the Comedy Pet Photography Awards have been announced! The overall winner is Sarah Haskell for the image above, titled Not Just For Cats. Or at least that's what Haskell's dog Hector thought, but he didn't make it all the way through. This photo also won in the dog category. The cat category was won by the picture below, titled Cat in a trap like Super Mario by Kenichi Morinaga.



I see a theme developing, but not all the award-winning photos were of self-trapped animals. The People's Choice winner is titled Tarzan by Kazutoshi Ono.



There are plenty more winners in the different categories, plus highly commended photos as well, that you can see in a gallery at the contest site. They do this every year, so never pass up an opportunity to take pictures of your pets, lest you'll catch them doing something funny. -via Digg

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hits theaters this weekend. It is the fourth installment of the Beverly Hills Cop franchise that started in 1984. Eddie Murphy returns as Axel Foley, a Detroit police officer who is transported to a different culture in Los Angeles. So Screen Junkies goes back forty years to the movie that started it all. Warning: revisiting the original may ruin the new movie for you. We won't know until someone actually sees it.

In 1984, Eddie Murphy was already quite popular from Saturday Night Live, his standup act, and a couple of movie roles. Beverly Hills Cop was his first as the solo star, and became the biggest movie of 1984, spending 14 weeks at #1. This video makes us remember why. Beverly Hills Cop made Murphy a superstar. The two sequels, from 1987 and 1994, couldn't hold a candle to the original. While Honest Trailers are usually pretty devastating, the parts they pick on in this one are honestly funny.

Movies can be pretty influential, in more ways than you realize. Movies got us all to be afraid of quicksand, but that was because it was used in many movies. A lot of ideas that seem universal came from a single movie that proved strangely influential.

Everyone is used to NASA counting down the seconds before a space flight, as is tradition. But there's no real reason to do it like that, outside of the drama. The idea came from a 1926 German silent film. Yeah, they counted down to liftoff with intertitles. German rocket scientists like Werner von Braun were impressed, and did the same with their rockets, and then brought the idea to NASA. Now it's just what we do. We know that rabbits eat carrots because of Bugs Bunny, except rabbits don't normally eat carrots. Bugs only chomped on a carrot as a reference to another film, but since Bugs Bunny cartoons are in color, they ended up as more influential.

You might be surprised at some of the other stories about something small from a movie that became a part of our culture as explained at Cracked. Video clips of each movie are included.

When you were much younger, all kinds of adventure movies had a scene in which the protagonist or someone close to the protagonist fell into quicksand and had to be rescued before they slipped completely under and immediately drowned. Yeah, those movies still have those scenes, but new movies, not so much. Sinking in quicksand was an easy way for filmmakers to establish dangers lurking around every corner, get rid of minor characters, and give the hero something heroic to do. It happened so often on screen that it became a cliché, and that's why it's rarely used now. The fact that we learned that quicksand is not nearly as common nor dangerous as we were led to believe may have had something to do with it as well. But quicksand is a real thing, and it can kill you if conditions are just right. Weird History explains the difference between the movie version and real life, and how we can avoid dying in quicksand ourselves.   

That headline might sound like a game of Mad Libs or even Cards Against Humanity, but it happened. Benjamin Franklin was known as a really good swimmer who could do tricks in the water. The Founding Father was on a boat on the Thames near Chelsea, accompanied by a man who boasted about Franklin's talents. Franklin was not shy, and it took only a little encouragement for him to strip down and demonstrate his abilities in the Thames. He swam alongside the boat, showing off for about three miles. His movements were akin to what we would later call water ballet, and is now known as synchronized swimming.    

It was an impressive feat because few people actually knew how to swim at the time. Ancient people up through the Roman era were swimmers, but during the Dark Ages, it was seen as sinful, both because of the pleasure it brought and because of the exposure of one's body. Franklin was quite an advocate for bringing back the custom of swimming. Read about the incident, and about Franklin's athletic abilities at LitHub.

By the way, before you get an unwanted image in your head, this happened in 1726, when Franklin was 19 years old. -via Nag on the Lake

This video contains NSFW language. There is so much documentation about the struggle for the American colonies to separate from British rule, but for some reason we focus on one quip in a letter from John Adams to his wife about celebrating independence with "bonfires and illuminations." This custom quickly settled into fireworks, because if there's anything Americans love, it's blowing things up.

Roger Horton is back to get honest with us about the Fourth of July, which was supposed to be the Second of July. We tend to just ignore that, as we do the fact that many of the things our country was founded on were compromises that made no one happy, but got the document out that started the Revolutionary War. The way we celebrate today has little to do with the actual events that gave us the holiday, but at least we have a good time. Still, be careful out there.  

George Frandsen has been collecting coprolites since he was 14. Those are fossilized turds, or dinosaur poop. It's a subject that may not appeal to everyone, but we've learned a lot about dinosaurs by the things they left behind, so to speak. Frandsen has the world's largest coprolite collection, despite giving them away regularly to museums. In 2014, Frandsen launched the Poozeum as a virtual and traveling exhibit, hosted by various museums around the country. But as of May, the Poozeum has a permanent home in Williams, Arizona. The displays include the largest dino coprolite ever found, so big it got its own name, Barnum. There's also a statue of a T. rex on the toilet, reminiscent of Rodin's sculpture The Thinker, which has become the Poozeum's most iconic image.



You could say the Poozeum is a crappy museum, but that's kind of the point. The museum doesn't smell; after all, these are fossils that are millions of years old. They also have a gift shop where you can buy all kinds of poop-related souvenirs. The Poozeum is open every day except Monday, and admission is free. Be sure to check it out the next time you are in Arizona. -via Boing Boing

In the latest episode of Ze Frank's True Facts series, he learn about five very strange species of eel. There are more than a thousand species of eel, so you probably haven't seen anywhere near most of them. Still, all eels are fish, but not like other fish. or example, the ribbon eel is born male -all of them. But you can't reproduce like that, so some turn into females as they mature. Moray eels have a second set of jaws like a xenomorph, and some can hunt prey on land. The pelican eel is called that because of its terrifying mouth. American eels and European eels don't even have sex organs until late in life, when they grow a pair (literally), and meet up to have an orgy in the ocean, right before they die. But those facts are just a tiny taste of the weird things you will learn about eels. Expect double entendres, snide remarks, and juvenile humor, as always. This video has a 70-second skippable ad at 6:23.

See Also: Previous True Facts videos.

Woolly mammoths died out around 12,000 years ago, except for a couple of populations that were stranded by rising seawater on St. Paul Island and Wrangel Island off Siberia. These small herds flourished for much longer, thanks to plenty of vegetation and no predators. The Wrangel Island mammoths became very much inbred, and they died out around 4,000 years ago, the last of the woolly mammoths.

The assumption was that the Wrangel Island mammoths died from genetic diseases due to inbreeding. One specimen's genome showed multiple disabilities, but is that what killed the last mammoths? A new study released this week suggests not. Scientists analyzed the DNA of 14 Wrangel Island mammoths and compared their DNA to seven mainland mammoths that lived much earlier. While some anomalies were found, they weren't enough to cause extinction. Mutations can arise in a limited population, but those are often eliminated when the affected animal doesn't breed. The scientists conducting the study say that the Wrangel Island mammoths were doing just fine breeding within their small population. When they suddenly disappeared, it must have been from an environmental disaster or a disease. Read about this research that throws a new light on the extinction of the woolly mammoth at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Lou.gruber)

LeBron James and Bronny James become the first father and son duo to be in the NBA at the same time.

Now they are teammates on the Lakers! pic.twitter.com/dITQ4WQ9RA

— NBA (@NBA) June 27, 2024

On Thursday, Bronny James of the USC Trojans made history when he was drafted into the NBA. He was pick #55 (out of 58), and went to the Los Angeles Lakers. That means he and his father, LeBron James, will be teammates. It is the first time that a father and son have played in the NBA at the same time, much less on the same team. That's because athletic careers usually do not last that long. LeBron James has been in the NBA for 21 years. Within minutes, everyone on Twitter came up with the same joke.    

Savannah James, LeBron's wife, took the jokes in stride. But the real punch line came from Grok, the Twitter chatbot available to premium members. The AI program summarizes news and trends on Twitter to present to users. Due to overwhelming "evidence," it took the story seriously.

Those who know have been telling us that artificial intelligence can have a sense of humor, but it appears that AI has a long way to go in detecting when people are telling a joke. -via Uproxx

This falcon head is a pretty good work of taxidermy, except it isn't. It's not just a simple recretion, either. Look closely, and you'll see this is a construction of found objects, specifically non-recyclable trash, placed in just the right position to make something totally different at just the right angle. This is the work of Thomas Deininger, whose work highlights environmental concerns. The intricate assemblage shows us the massive variety of trash we produce, but also shows us the wildlife it affects. The falcon head was made quite some time ago, but after an accident trashed it, the buyer came back and Deininger repaired and reworked it into this masterpiece. Let's see another one of his illusions.

The ruby-throated hummingbird is part of an exhibit of Deininger's works called Apocalyptic Ornithology at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Coconut Grove, Florida. See more of Deininger's art at Instagram.  -via Everlasting Blort

The first human flight in a hot air balloon was. in 1783. The development of a parachute seems to have followed soon after. It makes sense that if a balloon will descend slowly because of the air inside, even when it's no longer hot, a similar piece of fabric can slow a falling person. However, the first parachutes were not all fabric, but were made of fabric stretched over a frame to keep its shape, like an umbrella.

Robert Cocking was a British artist, and a big fan of hot air balloons. He was in Paris in 1797 to watch André-Jacques Garnerin demonstrate a parachute that brought him to the ground after he released the hot air balloon it was attached to. Cocking wanted to do that, and spent years designing his own parachute. It was also supported with struts like an umbrella, but the fabric was cone-shaped to hold more air. It was honestly a good idea, but was not as thoroughly tested as it should have been before Cocking tried it out in 1837, at 5,000 feet above the ground with a crowd watching. Read what happened the day Robert Cocking became the first death attributed to a parachute at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company