If you'd like to spend a few minutes or a week exploring the universe, check out NASA's Eyes. The website has a menu of interactive places to go and missions to follow. In the solar system, you can look at each planet individually and pull up information about that planet, or change the plane of orbits, zoom in and out, or pick a story from the left side to open. You can take a closer look at earth, or explore exoplanets in the same interactive manner. You can even land on Mars along with the Mars Perseverence rover mission.

From any point in your journey, you can suddenly switch gears and try something else. Every step of the way, you'll be able to access information about what you are looking at. It would take months to explore all the information made available to use in these apps. Pull up the menu to begin here.  -via Boing Boing

Robots can be scary, robot spiders are always scary, and they fly now. The University of Tokyo's robotics department has developed a terrifying and impressive robot that walks on four extended legs and flies, too. They call it SPIDAR, which is a tortured acronym for "SPherIcally vectorable and Distributed rotors assisted Air-ground amphibious quadruped Robot." It probably doesn't work any better in Japanese. The word "amphibious" usually means maneuvering in both land and water, but in this case they apparently mean both land and air. The challenge of this robot was to make it powerful enough to walk and fly while keeping the weight low enough for air travel. SPIDAR uses 16 thrusters to fly, and to assist the small servo motors used for walking. This is a prototype that's not all that efficient, and it's extremely loud. But it accomplished its purpose, and will no doubt be refined to make it actually threatening.

Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story "The Black Cat" was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in August of 1843. It concerns a man who abuses his one-eyed black cat, and in so doing manages to kill his wife. He tries to cover up the murder by hiding her body in the wall of the cellar, closing up the wall before the police arrive. But the cat manages to get revenge. You can read the entire story online.

"The Black Cat" is fiction, but Poe took inspiration from real events. It just so happened that the year before, a sensational story about a woman's remains found plastered into a cellar wall was syndicated in newspapers across the the country. Poe's account expands upon the crime, and adds the twist of the cat, but the bones of the story are there in a real life report from Connecticut. Tales immediately grew up around the true crime, and were even published, many of which have since been debunked. Read what we know and what has never been discovered about the case that inspired Poe's terrifying tale at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Byam Shaw)

The chess piece above is the bishop. Some sets have a cleft in the bishop and others don't. The classic Staunton chess set has the cleft. Redditor BroodyDoggo asked what it is for in the AnarchyChess subreddit. The answers they got were priceless.

Keep doritos in them for a midgame snack. A rook can be used to hold very small amount of salsa.
insert a coin there to power up your bishop
To use as a whistle when the opponent breaks rules
It's for holding the card you can apply to a bishop for bonusses
It's obviously the mouth
If you want to give your date (the chess term for "opponent") your number/note after a sexy match.
It’s a scar from a previous game
Aerodynamics, for when the bishop “Whooshes” across the board
Bottle opener

But the real answer is that it is made to resemble a Catholic bishop's mitre, a headress which has a front and back separated by a cleft. That's when we found out that more people than you'd suspect had never associated the bishop in a chess set with the church hierarchy. As a practical matter, the cleft makes it easier to distinguish the bishop from a pawn.

However, if we go further back into chess history, we find that the piece only became known as the bishop when the game spread to European cultures in the Middle Ages, and it got its name because it looked like a mitre to people familiar with bishops. Before that, it was the elephant, and indeed is still called the elephant in many countries. The Middle Eastern chess sets of the time were highly stylized, and the elephant was not a recognizable shape to Europeans. In some countries, this piece is called the camel. Now you know.

(Image credit: MichaelMaggs)

Flaco, the escaped Central Park Zoo Eurasian eagle-owl, with a rat shortly after catching it this past weekend.

* Long exposure night-time photo taken under ambient light with a telephoto lens. Only a small dark silhouette to the naked eye!#birds #birdwatching #nature #birdcpp pic.twitter.com/7Ug1aZUK1u

— David Lei (@davidlei) February 14, 2023

On February 2, a Eurasian eagle owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan after someone cut into his wire enclosure. The owl was spotted and tracked by zoo staff, but every time they got close, he flew away. Over the next two weeks, Flaco was seen and photographed numerous times but refused to be approached. He has become the most elusive celebrity in the city, but doesn't mind the paparazzi as long as they don't get close enough to touch.

However, Flaco had been at the zoo since 2010, arriving at less than a year old, and zoo officials worried that he wouldn't be able to fend for himself.   

Flaco's many fans were very heartened this past weekend to see that Flaco procured a rat, which indicates that he is learning to hunt and might be able to survive on his own.

Shortly before Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl caught a rat, he was playing shallow right field—on the Heckscher Fields of Central Park on Saturday night. What a thrill to see Flaco adapt so quickly to living in the wild! pic.twitter.com/Gnrlc0vGHM

— Manhattan Bird Alert (@BirdCentralPark) February 12, 2023

The Twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert is keeping up with Flaco's daily adventures, and also gives us plenty of other city birds to watch. You can also see many pictures of Flaco under his Twitter hashtag.

In grade school, we learned that living things are made up of cells, which are powered by mitochondria, and that plants cells have a cell wall. We learned to label those things, and the next year we learned it all over again, which was pretty much all the biology we got before high school. Unless you were lucky and had a couple of days of sex education.  

But cells are way more complex than that. The way a cell does its job involves proteins that form amino acids that form structures, machines, and messenger compounds that are more complex than most of us could ever imagine. To make that into something understandable, Kurzgesagt uses language as a metaphor for the basic inner workings of a cell. From an alphabet of 26 letters comes the works of Shakespeare, although building those works requires some amazing things to happen. -via Digg

The image above is of Thomas Edison looking at an x-ray image of the hand of his employee Clarence Madison Dally, taken in 1896. It was just a year earlier that Wilhelm Roentgen had announced his discovery of x-rays, and the world was going crazy over them. Edison had followed Roentgen's research, and was particularly interested in using such radiation to develop a fluorescent lamp. He enlisted Dally, a talented glassblower in his company, to work on the project.

Dally enthusiastically experimented with x-rays toward developing a working fluorescent lamp, directing the rays onto his hand until it began to stiffen. So he switched to his other hand. Scientists had speculated on the unknown effects of x-ray radiation on the human body, but had no data at the time. Dally's physical problems grew worse over time, with horrific effects. His ultimate demise was so painful and gruesome that it put Edison off the idea of fluorescent lamps forever. Read the sad story of Clarence Madison Dally at Amusing Planet.

(Image source: Wellcome Collection)

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel was a book published in France in 1565 with no text. It contains 120 woodcut illustrations with no artist mentioned. The "author" is Richard Breton, who only wrote a preface and did not create the illustrations. The artist is unknown to this day. YouTuber hochelaga refers to these illustrations as "demon doodles." The grotesque drawings remind us of what middle school students draw when they are bored in class. In this video, we learn some of the hypothetical inspirations for the fantasy creatures in the amusing illustrations. We'd never figure out on our own that at least some of these are akin to political cartoons, because we'd have to be medieval scholars to know what was going on at the time. The narrator doesn't know the meaning behind all of them, but the ones he tells us about are fascinating. -via Metafilter

There have been not one but two scientific papers that describe scans of a man's nether regions that show haunting faces in places where they shouldn't be. A case study published in 1996 concerned a 45-year-old Welshman who was referred for an undescended testicle. The description reads, "the left side of the scrotum seemed to be occupied by a screaming ghost-like apparition."

Another case from 2011 revealed a face in a painfully-inflamed scrotum belonging to a 45-year-old Canadian man. The face looks as if it were also experiencing pain. You can see those faces in the provided links. Neither article notes the reaction of the patient, but we can imagine they were disturbed by the images.

Both are, of course, cases of pareidolia, or the tendency to see faces in odd places. This phenomenon is explained in detail at Cracked, which gave them a reason to talk about haunted scrotums.  

As US troops sailed off for Europe during World War II, their families back home were eager to send letters and packages, but delivering that mail was difficult, and by the beginning of 1945, there were six airplane hangars full of mail in England, millions of pieces that were waiting to be sorted, including Christmas packages that were delayed by the Battle of the Bulge. By then, the packages were being eaten by rats. Other nations had similar backups of mail that had been in limbo for up to two years. The US responded by sending in the the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.

The Six Triple Eight, as they were called, were 800 members of the Women's Army Corps, who had volunteered years earlier and had been performing support work. They became the first Black women ever sent overseas by the US military. The battalion was led by 26-year-old Major Charity Edna Adams, shown being served in the image above. They worked 24 hours a day and sorted, censored, repackaged, and distributed that mail in three months, and were then sent to newly-liberated France to do the same.

The women of the Six Triple Eight came home after the war and were mostly ignored. The six surviving members are now over a hundred years old. But their deeds began to be recognized in the 21st century with a monument at Fort Leavenworth, a Congressional Gold Medal, and a documentary. Read about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion and their adventures in Europe in their own words at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: United States Army Signal Corps)

How many things can possibly go wrong with a movie? You might be surprised. In the pantheon of "movies that are so bad, they're good," The Room reigns supreme, but that's principally because of Tommy Wiseau's self-casting as the lead. In the case of the 2011 movie Love on a Leash, there are so many aspects of filmmaking that went wrong that the finished product is a full-blown train wreck. Yes, it's a bad film, and you don't want to spend an hour and a half watching it, but you do want to spend 20 minutes learning about what went on to cause this disaster to happen.

Love on a Leash is about a guy who is a dog during the day and a man at night, who falls in love with a woman who takes him home. Does that make sense? Good, because nothing else in the movie does.

The guys from Bloodbath TV break down everything wrong with Love on a Leash from the flawed and somewhat disturbing premise to the confusing editing to the incomprehensible symbolism to the soundtrack (or lack thereof). You have to wonder if the director was completely oblivious to the movie's problems, or just blew them off because it would be too much trouble to fix anything. Love on a Leash might be a wreck, but this critique is interesting and quite funny. -via Metafilter

The first trailer for the DC movie The Flash dropped during the Super Bowl broadcast. The film finished production in 2021, but was was delayed because of lead actor Ezra Miller's year of bad behavior, and is now scheduled for a summer release. The Flash is all about time travel, and explores the commonly-discussed paradox of meeting your past self, which happens to the Flash's alter ego Barry Allen. Also the paradox of changing the past big time and ruining everything, which is the main plot. But the real hook in this trailer is the return of Michael Keaton as Batman. I am not making this up. In fact, there are two Batmans, the other played by Ben Affleck, as well as two Flashes. And, of course, a whole bunch of other superheroes and supervillains. The Flash will arrive in theaters on June 16.

My yard borders on a flowing body of water that's named a creek, but it's bigger than many that are named rivers. The name goes back a couple hundred years, and no one is bothered by it. But sometimes the definition of a geographical feature is important. The 1995 movie The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain had to do with a strict definition of what a "mountain" is, which enraged the residents of a Welsh village because they were proud of their mountain. The moral of the story is that strict definitions can make a mountain out of a molehill, so to speak. Throw in the different definitions of "mountain" in different parts of the world, and it becomes clear that no one definition will do. Many agencies have definitions that are pretty broad and have the word "or" several times.

This distinction can be silly, or it can have serious political implications, such as the difference between a lake and a sea. Both are bodies of water surrounded by land, but in the case of the Caspian Sea, the distinction makes a big difference in how the sea's jurisdiction is divided between the five countries that surround it. Read about the difficulties of these definitions and the controversies surrounding them at Today I Found Out.

Super Bowl Sunday is peculiar American holiday that celebrates the confluence of an advertising showcase, a concert, a smörgåsbord of snack foods, and a football game. Since you can select the aspects of the celebration that appeal to you, there's something for everyone. To get you into the proper mood, how about reliving some Super Bowl productions of the past? No, not sports replays, but the many skits dealing with the Super Bowl from Saturday Night Live.

The website If it's hip, it's here collected the 15 best SNL skits dedicated to the Super Bowl and posted them together for your entertainment. They range from a 1982 sketch featuring Eddie Murphy and the late John Madden to a fake ad aired just last week with Pedro Pascal. Since there was no SNL last night, it will not only get you in the right frame of mind for the game, but also give Saturday Night Live fans their weekly fix. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Penna_23)

Making threats is never good, but if you are going to, you may as well be creative about it. People are more likely to listen (or read) and remember when you do. You don't really want to hurt someone, but you want them to know how you feel. And it might even go viral. That's where the subreddit Rare Threats comes in, to archive the wittiness people employ when they are angry and have a minute to think about it.

(Image credit: kylie-420)

You might have heard this one elsewhere. Several commenters attributed it to Klinger in the TV series M*A*S*H, and one recalled it from the children's book The Lightning Queen (published in 2015). But I will always remember it as a Johnny Carson staple, when he did his Carnac the Magnificent bit. See 40 of these imaginative but unserious threats posted online at Bored Panda. But my advice is, don't make threats.