We know that the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago causes massive changes in earth's condition that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Or do we? More recent research leads to a possible second culprit, the Deccan Traps, a system of volcanos now in western India. Their activity a few million years before the asteroid showed up caused massive climate change, carbon dioxide poisoning, and acid rain, which may have been the death knell of the dinosaurs and a lot of other species. If this was the case, then the Chicxulub impact could have been just the cherry on top of the mass extinction event that began earlier. We don't yet know, because dating scarce fossils and geological evidence is hard, especially when you are trying to measure a timeline many millions of years ago, not to mention estimating populations of species based on what we know. Scientists have their opinions, and can argue about it for days. Kurzgesagt explains the Deccan Traps and how it would have impacted life on earth before the asteroid showed up.

Unless your glasses have thick, dark rims, you might want to skip buying sheets or bed covers with a busy pattern. Redditor hexafocal looked for his glasses for three hours before he found them -a task we all know is harder when you aren't wearing your glasses. He posted this image to the subreddit AccidentalCamouflage to show us how hard it was to find them. I had to enlarge the picture twice to find them, and I'm wearing my glasses! This is one reason I keep an older pair around for emergency use. To be fair, hexafocal would have found them faster if he'd remembered that he left them on the bed, then at least he could have felt around with his hands. If you decide to give up the hunt, here they are with the ever helpful red circle. Even then, you might need to put on your glasses to see them. -via Digg

I don't know a lot about figure skating, but 19-year-old Ilia Malinin of Reston, Virginia, is very good. They tell us that it is nigh impossible to jump in the air and spin around four times, but he does it over and over, six times in all in this routine that won him the world championship in figure skating Saturday night in Montreal. On top of that, this routine received the highest score ever in the sport. Malinin comes by his talent honestly, by having two champion skaters as parents and training since he was six. It still stings to see someone born in 2004 becoming the world champion of anything, but that's the way time works. Malinin's performance is only five minutes; the rest of the video is replays and everyone talking about how great it was. -via Digg

The nature of reality is explored in the movie The Matrix, which turns 25 years old this month. Do we really know what reality is, or are we forever doomed to think of reality as only what we experience? It's not a new question, as it was posited in a story related in Plato's Republic. Along with a setup in which peoples' experience is limited, both stories have characters who prefer their limited life to reality because it's more comforting.

Back in 1999, The Matrix seemed far fetched, but in the 25 years since then, we've seen the rise of the world wide web, and then social media, and then smart phones. Each development drew millions more people into the artificial world of the internet, until it that world became our major source of communication, social life, entertainment, news, and for some of us, even employment. There's no doubt that the internet has improved the lives of many millions of people, but it also seems to be replacing the world around us. As the reality of our screens take over our time, is the world of The Matrix slowly creeping up on us? Maybe not so slowly. Read about the question of experience vs. reality and how our modern world resembles The Matrix in an article reposted from The Wall Street Journal. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jamie Zawinski)

Climate change has come to Washington, DC. The National Cherry Blossom Festival opened over the weekend and will run until April 14. However, the blossoms reached their peak on March 17th, the earliest on record, due to warm winter weather. The star of this year's festival is a tree named Stumpy, which has become a viral sensation. This tree has lost most of its branches, and the trunk has become hollowed out, yet it stubbornly blooms every year. This year is Stumpy's last hurrah, as it is one of 140 cherry trees to be cut down and made into mulch for a seawall reconstruction project. The mulch will be used to nourish the remaining trees, and Stumpy's branches will be rooted to produce new trees. When the seawall is completed, 277 new cherry trees will be planted.

Tourists visiting Washington for this year's cherry bloom are paying tribute to Stumpy. Continue reading to see some of them.

In the days of yore, Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. Then in the 19th century, the lake in what would become Kings County in California was drained by agricultural farms as the fertile soil was used to grow nuts, cotton, tomatoes, and safflower. In its place was a small lake that reappeared during rainy times, but most of the acreage went to farmland. Then in 2023, winter storms dumped enough snow and water to resurrect Tulare Lake to more than 100,000 acres of water! Farmers found their fields underwater and orchards drowned. Tourists flocked in, but they couldn't swim in the lake because the water was laden with agricultural chemicals and had irrigation equipment in it.

But those who held out hope that Tulare was back to stay had their visions dashed this year. As fast as Tulare grew, it has once again shrunk to almost nothing. Read about disappearance, reappearance, and second disappearance of Tulare Lake at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image: USGS/the Guardian)

This July, thousands of young, healthy athletes from all over the world will converge on Paris for the Summer Games, and the City of Love is getting ready to welcome them. Olympic organizers have ordered 300,000 condoms for 2024, to be distributed free to the athletes in the Olympic Village. We've come a long way from pretending that hookups didn't happen among the participating athletes. After all, back when the modern Olympics began in 1896, women didn't compete at all. But even before the free condom distributions began, on-site pharmacies stocked plenty of them at the Olympics for those who wanted them.

The first Olympic condom giveaway was in Calgary, Alberta, for the Winter Games in 1988. Organizers stocked 6,000 of them. The number has been raised exponentially since then. In 1992, they came in the colors of the Olympics rings at Albertville, France. There have been attempts to charge money for them, and vending machine have been tried over the years, but it's just easier to hand them out free.  The 300,000 condoms for the 2024 games isn't even the record number, either. Read up on the history of condom giveaways at the Olympics at Mental Floss.

It's March Madness time, when college sports outshine everything else, so how about an Honest Ad for the NCAA? This video puts the sponsor message at the beginning, so you can skip to 1:12 to see the skit. Then Roger Horton does his thing exposing the seedy underbelly of the exploitation of the student athlete. The NCAA is the NPAA here, for obvious reasons. The controversy about "amateur athletes" in the Olympics was that some countries followed the rules while others didn't, and we eventually had to change the rules to make the competition more fair. For college athletics, the problem is that everyone in the business makes oodles of money, from coaches to administrators to TV networks to bookies to scalpers to hotels, everyone except for the college players who actually do the work to make the system worth watching. For them, college sports is like an unpaid internship, where their future is a gamble and they might or might not have time to actually earn a degree. This video contains NSFW language.

Almost 150 years after the fact, future neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard his father talk about the shopkeeper in his hometown of Djúpivogur, Iceland, who was a Black man named Hans Jónatan. Jónatan wasn't born in Iceland, but he settled there, married, became a valued member of the community, and fathered descendants who still lived nearby. Later biographies pieced together the story of Hans Jonathan, who was born into slavery in the Caribbean, was brought to Denmark, walked away from his enslaver and joined the Danish Navy, became a war hero, and then had to fight for his freedom in court more than once. After losing the final court battle in 1802, he simply disappeared. There was also the story of a teenager named Hans Jónatan, who arrived in Djúpivogur on a merchant ship in 1802, and who spoke Danish and played the violin. He was also ready to settle down, and worked at the local general store and trading station, which he later ran.

The story of Hans Jonathan is quite compelling in itself, but there was a new chapter in the 21st century, when Kári Stefánsson, now a neurologist, began a vast DNA study in Iceland to investigate the genetic markers of multiple sclerosis. Since Iceland is quite genetically homogenous, mutations would stand out from the crowd better than with other populations. But the study also yielded intriguing information from Hans Jónatan's 788 verified living descendants. By studying the DNA of these descendants, Stefánsson's team was able to reconstruct large parts of not only Jónatan's genome, but that of his mother as well -two centuries after they lived, with no trace of their own DNA. Read the intriguing story of Hans Jonathan and his legacy in Iceland at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to it in podcast form. -via Strange Company

Warning: do not watch this video while you are enjoying a meal, because you won't be enjoying it so much. Sam O'Nella Academy (previously at Neatorama) runs down several dishes that are considered delicacies in various places or at various times in the past, but aren't allowed to be imported to the US or are else a really bad idea for one reason or another. Some have to be prepared just so or they are dangerous, others are infringing on species that we should be protecting, and some are just contrary to what we expect to eat. These include casu martzu, shark fin soup, ackee, bird's nest soup, and ortolan. The ones you've heard of may make you curious about the ones you haven't, or maybe you dread learning about them. This video contains a little NSFW language and some gross drawings.

Imagine one day you see your roommate, and his face looks like a demon or something out of Star Trek. That was the experience of Victor Sharrah when he began to suffer from a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia. Other people with the condition may see faces with features in the wrong places, weird textures, or other distortions, but only on actual faces they encounter. Pictures of faces appear normal to them, which allowed an artist to recreate what Sharrah sees in the images above. Prosopometamorphopsia is so rare that only around 100 cases have been identified since 1904. However, it is probable that people who suffer from it do not seek help for fear that they will be diagnosed with schizophrenia or other mental illness. Yet the problem in perceiving faces seems to be the only symptom. Scientists don't know what causes it, but the effects are often temporary, and if not, there are ways to treat it. Farrah is able to see faces as normal with the help of color-shifting glasses. Read more about prosopometamorphopsia at Smithsonian.

(Image credit:  A. Mello et al.)

Jeremie Carrier demonstrates a "15 note poly tempo pendulum." He describes it as "an amazing sweep of the rythmic subdivision spectrum!" I didn't understand those words, either, but I'll try to explain.

What he did was record himself 15 times, each time playing a steady beat of one note, but each recording is of a different note and a different beat. The tempos vary by only two beats per minute from one video to the next. Then all the videos were edited together. What we get is a beat that becomes more discordant, but then several of the notes will play a tune of sorts, then veer off from each other, and another set of notes will then stand out as if they were playing a tune. It's no symphony, but it gets more interesting as it goes. Carrier rang a bell to show us where a new "movement" begins. At five minutes and five seconds, all the notes and beats line up again as they were in the beginning. Cool.

As I listened, this started to sound familiar. The very first post I ever published at Neatorama was for a geometric music generator called the Whitney Music Box that produced this same effect.

-via Laughing Squid

You know about The Year Without a Summer, when the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora caused crops to fail around the world in 1816. People couldn't afford to feed their beasts of burden, and that threw a damper into transportation, which relied on horses. But necessity is the mother of invention, and a young German named Karl von Drais invented a machine to make walking faster and easier. His device that he called the laufmaschine (running machine) consisted of two wheels connected by a frame with a saddle. The rider pushed off the ground with his feet, and propelled himself further and faster than was possible by just walking. Von Drais patented his invention in France as the vélocipède. In England, the invention was called a draisine, or a hobby-horse. It wasn't long before other engineers found a way to propel the running machine without running, leading to the modern concept of a bicycle. But without a volcanic explosion, we might never have have had them. Read about the laufmaschine at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Wilhelm Siegrist)

Zoos in Japan train their employees for the possibility that one of the animals might escape. They can't use real animals for these training sessions, so they improvise with employees in costume. We've previously shown you escape drills featuring a zebra, a gorilla, a rhinoceros, and a bear. Recently, the zookeepers at the Tobu Zoo practiced capturing an escaped white tiger. The scenario was that an earthquake had broken the glass of the enclosure, freeing the tiger. The drill was apparently successful, and the "tiger" was defeated by a tranquilizer gun. It's not clear whether the tranquilizer was real, but if so, the employee probably got the rest of the day off.

While it's always good to know the protocol in advance, an actual escape would confront zookeepers with an animal that is much stronger, faster, and more bitey than any human could hope to portray. The actual white tiger makes a cameo appearance in this video, from behind glass. -via Boing Boing

In 1907, Georges Méliès illustrated how the sun and the moon fell in love and came together to create an eclipse in his movie The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon. Ever since then, both solar and lunar eclipses have played a role in cinema, often as an explanation for something magical or as a portent of coming doom. It make plenty of sense, as an eclipse is a natural phenomena that feels unnatural because they are so rare and the effects are bizarre. The sun is blotted out, or the moon changes shape, and residents of earth are left confused. The symbolism is clear when the powerful sun is defeated by the lesser moon, which should be a warning to those in power on earth.

While the alignment in the heavens is a significant element for any fictional story, an eclipse is also an excellent visual for a movie. One production in 1961 even delayed shooting so that the cameras could capture a real eclipse that was part of the story (shown above). Read about how eclipses have been used in movies at Atlas Obscura.

(Image source: YouTube)