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.

We were amazed at the tiny but expansive apartment that engineer Xing Zhilei of Xing's World built for different sized pets. He didn't stop there. The challenges get bigger, and he keeps building. Now he has a working miniature subway train for his cats! 

The subway is quite large, although not large enough for human comfort, as you can see from the clips of the family working on it. It travels smoothly at a safe speed, has doors with motion sensors that automatically open, and even a working escalator. Notice both the train and the station have doors, aligned so the cats cannot get underneath the train. You have to wonder how long the rail line is- around the house, with one stop maybe? The cats, who are used to unique new experiences, were quite game to take a ride. See more miniature pet sized projects at the YouTube channel.  -via Boing Boing 

Everyone knows the song, but no one knows the lyrics. The supernatural sitcom Bewitched debuted in 1964 with an animated opening sequence by Hanna-Barbera and a jazzy theme song by composer Jack Keller. Keller collaborated with lyricist Howard Greenfield, but the words Greenfield wrote for the song were dropped in favor of an orchestral arrangement. Bewitched was the second-highest rated TV show in its first year, and the producers of the show thought about using a lyrical version for the second season, but that would have cost money. You have to pay singers, and they already had the orchestra version.  

Greenfield got his day, however, when singers outside of TV recorded the song, such as Steve Lawrence and Peggy Lee. The lyrical version could have become a hit if either of them had ever released it as a single. Read the lyrics and the story behind the Bewitched theme song at Cracked. 

Blahaj wakes up in the middle of the night because he's hungry, and his snacks are all gone. What to do? Waffle House is open 24/7, so he gathers his toys and goes for a waffle. But he's there at 3 AM for the "bad time," and you know what that means. Or maybe you don't. The exact time varies by location, but that's when the bars must legally close, and patrons who don't want to go home gravitate to the only business still open. And that's when the real action starts. 

After watching this charming animation by Atoga, I checked to see if AI was involved, so I clicked "more." Apparently he used Creative Commons images from a great variety of sources, and credited them all! He animated them with Blender software, and created the music himself.  In case you are wondering why the shark is named Blahaj, here's your answer.  -via Metafilter 

In 2016, two cemeteries that were being excavated in France gave up human remains from between 4300 and 4150 BCE. That puts them in the Neolithic era, toward the end of the Stone Age. Some of the mass graves showed evidence of overkill- crushed bones, smashed skulls, and completely missing limbs. Other graves showed no signs of such brutality. These two sites are the oldest European cemeteries that show such destruction during mass killings or desecration shortly afterward, which must be a sign of war.  

New technology allows archaeologists to learn more from these bones. Studying the isotopes in the remains can give us a clue as to where these people were from and where they had traveled. The bones that were smashed were of people that did not live in the local area, determined by coparing the isotopes of those who were buried one at a time. A new study offers a couple of scenarios of what might have happened to them more than 6,000 years ago. Read about the recent discoveries at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Fanny Chenal, INRAP) 

What do the words woodchuck, cockroach, hangnail, and catty corner have in common? They are examples of folk etymology. You might think that these words have some origin story that has to do with the meaning of their segments, but no. They are all derived from non-English languages, and got renamed because of the way the original words sounded instead of having any common meaning. Groundhog, which is the same animal as a woodchuck, really is derived from ground and hog. Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) explains what happened to create these English words and plenty of other examples. It's just a matter of "I can't pronounce your name, so I will call you something that sounds close that I can pronounce." Folk etymology occurs in other languages, too. That's how we ended up with a Mexican city named after a cow horn without an interesting story behind it. 

Russia's far east, an area that Americans call Siberia (although the traditional Siberia is bigger), is a vast area with very few people. How few? Fewer than eight million people. Compare that to London, the small dot on the left, which has more than eight million. New York City also has more than eight million people in the city limits (23 million in the combined metro statistical area). 

Siberia's reputation in the West is that of Stalin's exiles, when millions of people were sent to the far east for political or genocidal reasons. Most of them either died or left when they got the chance. But the far east has been losing people steadily even in the 21st century.   

I once flew over east Russia, and although it took forever, I never saw any evidence of a city or manmade infrastructure. The landscape, however, is both majestic and frightening. Why is there so much empty land in this area? Yes, it's cold, but there are many other reasons, both geographical and historical, laid out in a post at Brilliant Maps. -via Nag on the Lake 

I once asked a talented friend if she could teach me to sing. She determined that I have a problem changing smoothly from the lower register to the soprano or falsetto register. Maybe I should have tried yodeling, which involves rapidly moving from one to the other, but it didn't matter as I can't carry a tune anyway and she gave up on me.  

Yodeling has a long tradition in Switzerland, where a yodel can be heard from one Alpine mountaintop to another. Great Big Story went to the Alps to talk to people about yodeling. In this video we learn of its origins, continued popularity, and the nuts and bolts of how to yodel from Melanie of the famous Swiss band Oesch die Dritten. They also take us to Jodlerfest Altstätten, a yodeling festival that draws world-class yodelers. It was difficult, but our host finally found some yodelers and fans who speak English. -via Laughing Squid