America long ago decided it was easier to ship most goods across the country with trucks on highways rather than by rail. Our highways grew larger and people found that when their industry died, they could get a job driving a truck. That last part may be ending, as a startup named Aurora is set to launch its first driverless 18-wheeler by the end of the year. Aurora's experimental trucks are equipped with two full computer systems in case one fails. They use silicon photonics and lidar sensors to keep track of the surroundings. All the hardware and software go through a barrage of testing to see how it copes with weather and unexpected events.

But Aurora is not the only company working on driverless trucks. Kodiak and Gatik are developing these trucks as well, with some differences. Together, these companies have spent hundreds of millions on getting autonomous trucks on the road. While we are still getting used to driverless cars in just a few cities, the goal of putting 40-ton big rigs on interstate highways without drivers might give you pause. These companies believe that their trucks will be safer for the general public than those driven by humans. Read about the impending launch of driverless transfer trucks at Ars Technica.

(Image credit: Aurora)

The Arabian legend of the genie has always fascinated us. The main idea of having a wish granted forces us to come up with our own three wishes, making us focus on what our real priorities in life are. The stories of this trickster character often reveal that the person making the wishes will get what they deserve instead of what they want. The genie can take a wish too literally, or too broadly, or grant it with all the problems that come with it, or mess it up in whatever way he chooses to keep you from getting what you desire. That has given us a thought experiment of sorts, to come up with a way to word a wish perfectly to ensure that the genie cannot trick us out of it or punish us with unintended consequences. We all know the first rule is no wishing for more wishes. This guy finally gets his chance, and he thinks he's ready with the perfect scheme. He's got a lesson coming, and it's that you cannot outsmart a genie. There's a reason the original stories all had the same moral, and it was "don't be greedy."

A little boy on the tube is so worried about his soft-toy lion falling on the floor that he is saying to him 'Hold on tight Sycamore Jones!'

Art by Simon Heath. Words by me. pic.twitter.com/WggtUEr6Yf

— Miranda Keeling (@MirandaKeeling) September 8, 2024

Miranda Keeling has made a habit of observing the people around her and taking delight in the things they say and the everyday vignettes she witnesses. She even wrote of book of these observations. But she continues to share them with everyone in her Tweets. Many of them have inspired illustrations and artworks.

Me (to a little boy beside me in a cafe who is wearing a yellow coat): Nice coat. Little boy: Thank you. It means when night comes I can hide as a star.

Art by Penny Neville Lee. Words by me. pic.twitter.com/bceJYqZBBj

— Miranda Keeling (@MirandaKeeling) September 8, 2024

On Sunday, Keeling shared a multi-part Tweet with 13 of these illustrations she received after posting her observations. We don't know how true-to-life the illustrations are, but they will make you smile. My favorite is the one about Jeremy the rabbit, but I couldn't embed that one to show the whole picture. You can see all 13 of the artworks here. -via Nag on the Lake

'SNL' Adds Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim & Jane Wickline To Cast For Season 50, Promotes Trio As Chloe Troast Departs https://t.co/UjbQK7bUPh

— Deadline (@DEADLINE) September 10, 2024

Saturday Night Live goes into its 50th season later this month. Every year, just ahead of the premiere, we learn which cast members will be returning, and which ones will not. Punkie Johnson will be leaving SNL after four seasons and Molly Kearney after two. Chloe Troast, who joined the show just last year, was not invited to return.

Featured players Marcello Hernandez, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker have been promoted to main cast members.

New to the show this year will be Ashley Padilla from The Groundlings, stand-up comedian and writer Emil Wakim, and TikTok humorist Jane Wickline. In addition, Maya Rudolph has put her sitcom Loot on hiatus temporarily to reprise her portrayal of Kamala Harris from 2020 through the rest of 2024. Read more about the cast changes and what to expect in the new TV season at Deadline. Saturday Night Live's 50th season will premiere on September 28th.

This chandelier is made of spoons, so it's called a "spoondelier." That's only appropriate as a light fixture at the Mississippi Spoon Gallery, a museum in Davenport, Iowa. The name makes sense when you realize it's right near the Mississippi River. Owner Cammie Pohl opened the museum to showcase her collection of more than 10,000 rare and historical spoons that began 35 years ago when her great-grandmother gave her a set of antique spoons. The collection has only grown since the museum opened, as people donate spoons and Pohl travels to collector's conventions to acquire more.

The museum boasts the world's largest collection of souvenir spoons from all over, including several World's Fairs. There are also commemorative spoons from events like coronations and political movements, and every spoon has a story behind it. The gallery also has a spoon club for collectors. It's a must-see if you are ever near Davenport, Iowa. -via Boing Boing 

(Image credit: MissSpoonGal)

He was Darth Vader, Mufasa, King Jaffe Joffer, the voice of CNN, and a host of other characters. James Earl Jones' accomplishments included two Emmys, two Tonys, a Grammy award, and an honorary Oscar, making him one of the rare EGOTs, but he also had a slew of other awards and honors.

Jones was born in Mississippi and moved to Michigan as a child. He developed a stutter so bad that he refused to talk all the way through elementary school. After military service and graduating college with a drama degree, Jones became known for his Shakespearean roles on Broadway. The leap to movies came with a role in Dr. Strangelove in 1964, but he really broke through when he reprised his Broadway role as Jack Jefferson in the movie The Great White Hope in 1970. Jones had already been on TV on the soap operas Guiding Light and As The World Turns, and on Sesame Street. Jones was asked to dub over the voice of David Prowse in the 1977 film Star Wars, and became the voice of Darth Vader forever after. He portrayed Alex Haley in Roots, Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian, and King Jaffe Joffer in Coming to America, a role that, along with Madge Sinclair, inspired the look and sound of Mufasa and his mate Sarabi in The Lion King. IMDb lists 190 screen credits for James Earl Jones.

Jones died today at his home in Pawling, New York. He was 93.

During the Cold War in the mid-20th century, the US had all kinds of offbeat science and engineering projects happening on the glaciers of Greenland. One of the strangest was a proposed plan to isolate nuclear waste by leaving capsules of the material on top of a glacier, and letting it melt its way through the ice. The idea was that the waste would self-bury and only emerge thousands of years later when it wasn't so dangerous. That project never got off the ground because there were plenty of answers to "what could possibly go wrong?" Other experimental projects were actually accomplished, such as a hovercraft that could hop over ice crevasses and a snowmobile that could carry cargo and was powered by an airplane propeller. Another idea was a subway rail system under the ice to transport nuclear missiles. There was even a full camp built underneath the ice that lasted a few years.

Ultimately, the big infrastructure projects were abandoned because glaciers move. You can't maintain a railroad when the walls move several feet a year. Plus, ice tends to melt when the temperature rises, and even the mightiest military in the world cannot control the weather. Read about the weirdest military projects carried out on Greenland's glaciers at Undark.  -via Ars Technica

(Image credit: US Army)

Glacial lakes are found everywhere glaciers are found. The water is held in place by dams of glacial ice or by rocky deposits that the glacier itself put in place. With the earth's temperatures rising, these natural dams are more likely to fail. The ice becomes thinner while the amount of water rises until the dam gives way. The floods this causes are larger and more violent than floods caused by excess rain or snow because they dump an enormous amount of water in a short time. There are 15 million people around the world living in the danger zone below these glacial lakes, and thousands have been killed by the outburst floods in the past few years. Their force can inundate towns with water, rocks, and ice for many miles downstream.

Juneau, Alaska, is in the flood plain of the Mendenhall Glacier, but had never experienced an outburst flood before 2011. Now they happen several times a year. The latest flood in August sent 14 billion gallons of water to Juneau, flooding homes that were so far from the Mendenhall River that the residents never expected to be flooded. Read about the new phenomenon of glacial lake outburst floods at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: The National Guard)

Foreverland Farm in Ohio takes in abused, disabled, and abandoned farm animals to give them the care they need. One of their critters is a goat named Champion who was born with only three legs and was rejected by his mother and by the rest of the herd. He was hand-reared and then made his way to the farm, where he could be properly cared for. But he was still lonely. After Champion had surgery for his remaining rear leg, the farm dog Gamora decided he needed to be protected and nursed back to health, so she became his mother figure. Champion recovered indeed, but the relationship between these two best friends remains. You can follow the adventures of Champion and Gamora at Instagram. Be warned that it's full of sad background stories for all kinds of rescued animals.  

You might think that birthdays would be distributed along the calendar fairly randomly, but we know human beings don't operate in a random way. There are more babies born on September 9th than any other day of the year. The next most common birthdays are September 19th and September 12th. The rest of the top ten birthdays are also in September, between the 9th and the 20th. February 29th is the least common birth date, for obvious reasons.

Why are these the most common dates? Count back 38 weeks to the conception date for these folks, and it seems obvious: holidays, parties, alcohol, and it's nice to snuggle close to your partner on a cold night. But there may be other reasons, according to scientists, having to do with the changing seasons and temperatures affecting fertility. Mental Floss goes over those for us.

We also know that more babies in the US are born on Tuesday than any other day of the week. This is also not random. Doctors like to golf on Wednesdays.  

(Image credit: James Petts)

Sports teams love to have a costumed character on the sidelines, entertaining the crowd and cheering on the team. Stanford University does not have an official sports mascot. Their team name is Cardinal, referring to the color and not the bird. But the school's band has a mascot, the Stanford Tree, shown above. The character is so ridiculous that the entire school claims him/her, although not officially. You can't have a list of "worst mascots" without the Stanford Tree. But it's only one of many mascots that may draw attention for all the wrong reasons. The New Orleans Pelicans basketball team has two mascots, and both made the list. One is, not surprisingly, a pelican, and here is the other.

Just ran into the Pelicans King Cake Baby at @RousesMarkets! Nice to see @lindseypelicans as well. #PelicansKCB pic.twitter.com/4vlnifZN41

— Hank Allen (@HankAllenWX) January 27, 2016

See a list of 12 fear-inducing or just plain ridiculous sports mascots at Cracked.

(Top image credit: Daniel Hartwig)

Science fiction is full of time travelers, because going to another era is a wonderful opportunity for adventure. Some stories try to make it plausible, which is difficult and technical and often boring for an audience. Why not just skip all those details and get where (or when) you are going so the adventure can commence? That requires shortcuts in the writing, and a suspension of disbelief among the audience. Giant Freakin Robot just goes to the heart of the matter and calls these methods "time travel for the lazy," as if the characters have anything to do with it. But when you are sitting in the audience, it does appear that these travelers are either too smart to bother explaining it to us, or too dumb to realize they've just lucked into time travel. They go over ten methods that make time travel easy in movies. They've been used over and over, because it really doesn't matter how it happens as long as the story is good. We know time travel is impossible, so why quibble about the technical details? A phone booth is just as good as an accelerometer bending the space-time continuum when it's on the big screen. -via Laughing Squid

How fast can a person on a bicycle go without the aid of a motor? You might be surprised and terrified to learn. In 1962, French cyclist José Meiffret pedaled down the Autobahn at 127 miles per hour, or 204 km/h. He had been working to break the 200 km/h barrier for years. How he did it was the real story.

Meiffret loved competitive cycling, but he wasn't successful at distance races. Then he tried motor-paced racing. See, when I said "without the aid of a motor," I meant a motor on the bicycle. In motor-paced racing, the cyclist rides in the slipstream behind a motorcycle or a car equipped with a wind screen on the back to avoid air resistance. This means staying within 18 inches of the vehicle without touching it. The driver has to avoid any bumps or sudden movement. Any variation from those parameters would mean disaster, and the sport had plenty of those. It's even more dangerous when several cyclists are racing at the same time. Meiffret himself was injured badly in 1952 and suffered five skull fractures at once. Quite a few racers died.

For his record-breaking ride, Meiffret used a ridiculously-geared bike you can see above, specially designed for breaking records. He had a communication system set up with his team. But the race itself was a real nail-biter for the man whose life was on the line. The record Meiffret set that day would stand for 34 years, because there are still people doing this. Read about Meiffret's accomplishment at Amusing Planet.

Warning: this video may not be appropriate for sensitive souls, and is not recommended for pregnant women. It's about postmortem fetal expulsion, or coffin birth. That's when a pregnant woman dies, and her body still manages to expel the fetus. In the modern era, if a woman dies during labor or in the final stages of pregnancy, the baby will be delivered by cesarian section and may survive. If the fetus dies along with the mother, which is inevitable when the pregnancy is not far enough along, modern embalming procedures will prevent coffin birth. The only time it might happen these days is when a deceased pregnant woman's body is not discovered for some time. Before modern medicine, it was a rare but horrifying event we only know about from a few documented accounts from morticians and some ancient exhumed graves with evidence. So all in all, it's not something you should be worried about, but a grim reality from the past. If you desire, you can read more about coffin birth here.    

How can you meet a potential partner if you don't go to church or bars, and you've become disenchanted with online dating? The grocery store has emerged as an alternative meeting place. After all, everyone needs groceries. In Spain, the supermarket chain Mercadona had become ground zero for such meetups. The craze was sparked by a TikTok video, and others followed, directing lonely people to shop between 7 and 8 PM, and place a pineapple upside down in your cart. Then go to the wine section and see if anyone responds. What could possibly go wrong?

The trend is causing chaos in some Mercadona locations, with police responding to unruly crowds. At one store, a man dressed as a pineapple brought his bachelor party to the grocery. Employees, tired of returning pineapples to the produce department, have been seen hiding the fruit before seven o'clock. Read up on the viral trend and its real-world consequences at BBC. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Laoficina24)