You remember the terrifying outbreak of Ebola virus in 2013, but do you recall the Ebola outbreak of 2021? No? That's probably because you were more concerned with COVID-19 by then, but it was also because health care professionals had a plan in place to stop Ebola in its tracks by 2021. While the world was dealing with the massive COVID-19 pandemic, several other epidemics were averted by public health systems and rapid response, and that's worth celebrating. The world has learned a lot about fighting diseases in a population, but it takes political will and government funds to keep those global health initiatives in place and ready to go to work when needed. And kudos to those health care workers who carried out these emergency responses.

This TED-Ed lesson directs you to read more about the efforts to stop epidemics before they get out of control at Resolve to Save Lives. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The live-action version of The Little Mermaid has made $118 Million so far in its opening weekend. It may herald another bump in the popularity of mermaids, joining other periods of mermaid-mania from history, going back thousands of years. In ancient times, it was the allure of the mythological tales of beautiful and magical half-human-half-fish creatures among many terrifying terrifying sea monsters. In the more modern era, it is entertainment, feeding a fantasy of sexy women and the allure of the sea. In 1906, the show Neptune's Daughter debuted at New York's Hippodrome, featuring an 8,000-gallon tank full of underwater dancers, which proved both fascinating and charming to audiences. Mermaid mania got another kick when Champion swimmer Annette Kellerman starred in silent films about mermaids, and brought women's participation in swimming into the modern era. Read about the early entertainment media representations of mermaids at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia)

Hair styles, like clothing, go through trends and fads that sometimes make us look back and say, "What was I thinking?" I've had bangs, mullets, braids, Jheri curls, pixies, and purple hair, but all those pale in comparison to some of the hairstyle fads of history. Some were an attempt at beauty or cutting-edge fashion, while others signified status, either officially or unofficially. Long hair or elaborate 'dos indicated that the person wearing it could employ expert services and had plenty of free time. Short hair or shaved heads made a busy, difficult life more practical for working people, but you could always cut the hassle down by wearing a wig. Some hairstyles seem downright painful, while others were just silly. Weird History takes us on a ride through time by highlighting some of the more memorable or consequential hairstyles of various places and historical eras.  

Norway takes its hot dogs seriously. You can get a great hot dog from restaurants, street vendors, airports, and even gas stations, because Norwegians would expect only the best. Like most European countries, sausages have always been a part of Norway's cuisine, but American hot dogs became extremely popular after World War II, back when anything American was considered chic.

But Norway had advanced the art of the hot dog and Norwegians put their own spin on it. They are often served wrapped in flatbread made of potato flour, and slathered with a wide variety of toppings, including potato salad or shrimp salad. The hot dogs themselves can be made from anything, from traditional pork to crocodile meat to vegan sausage. As the hot dog traveled from the US to Norway, their hot dog traditions have traveled back to America as well. Read how hot dogs became Norway's national snack at Atlas Obscura.  -via Strange Company

In World War II, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops had a series of missions that were kept top secret for decades. They specialized in decoy operations, namely, fooling the Axis powers into thinking they knew what was going on when they didn't. We covered one aspect of the "Ghost Army's" activities, in constructing fake tanks, ships, and artillery to distract from the real troop movements in a previous post. But the Ghost Army involved a lot more.

While the artists in the unit built realistic but fake props for the enemy to see, 288 radio operators carried out communications in both English and in easily-cracked codes. The Germans who intercepted these transmissions sent reconnaissance to find the fake equipment. But that fake equipment would fool nobody without the sound designers who blasted recordings that sounded exactly like thousands of troops were on the way to battle. Some of the troops even impersonated officers to carry out these missions. As we head into Memorial Day, read about some of these decoy operations, the men who participated, and what happened to them after the war, at Find-a-Grave.  -Thanks, WTM!

Every year, the Best Illusion of the Year contest blows our minds. The video above by Matt Pritchard is one of the finalists for 2023. You've seen this kind of illusion before, but this construction is very well done. It was clever to base it on Platform 9¾ from the Harry Potter stories. Is it the best? That's for you to decide. The competition is pretty stiff.

The ten finalists for the Best Illusion of the Year Contest have been selected by a panel of experts. Take a look at all ten of them. You can vote for your favorite, or rather, you are invited to rate each illusion on a scale from one to five stars, like a product review. The top three will be determined by these ratings. If history is any indicator, we will find out who will win the 2023 competition some time in the last three months of this year. -via Boing Boing

Be sure to check out some of the past winners, too.

The oldest recorded joke we've found so far was common enough that it was recorded twice on ancient Sumerian tablets, going back 4,000 years. It's a real knee-slapper.

a dog walks into a bar, but he doesn’t see anything. And so he asks: shall I open one?

Yeah, I don't get it, either. I guess you had to be there. Or maybe jokes were invented before humor was. Some of the world's greatest minds have been working on this one. Has it been correctly translated? What was the context in the Sumerian culture? Can the "walks into a bar" structure really be that old? The joke has been interpreted several different ways, because language and cultural context was way different 4,000 years ago, but it's not something experts agree on. The joke possibly depends on assumptions that ancient Sumerians would have lived with, but we don't. Then again, maybe it really wasn't that funny back then, either. It was recorded in collections of proverbs and advice, although it really doesn't work in that context, either. Read the various explanations for the dog joke at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Applejuice)

Matt Wilson of Perry Township, Indiana, has made it a habit over the years to prank his son into embarrassment when he gets off the bus on the last day of school each year. For Liam's last day in eighth grade, Wilson went all out. He arranged for his band, Union Suit Rally, to perform the Alice Cooper song "School's Out" as the bus pulled onto their street. It was a challenge to outdo last year's stunt, in which he greeted the bus wearing Speedos, flippers, and a snorkel mask.

Liam, however, is less embarrassed now than in previous years. He's now finished with eighth grade, and will no longer ride the bus next year when he's in high school. He also probably knows it's pretty cool to have an involved dad who's in a band. I would have loved coming home to such a concert. -via Fark

The image above looks as if it could be an advertisement for the contest, but this tasty spread is from contestant Keiron George of the United Kingdom, the winner of the Food Stylist category of the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year competition. The overall winner is Jon Enoch for the photo below, titled The Candy Man.



The Candy Man, which also won the Street Food category,  is part of a series taken in Mumbai. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners plus honorable mentions in each category are presented in a gallery here. Want to see more winning food photography from all over the world? Take a look at some of the winning photographs and meet the photographers behind them at Design Milk. See the all finalists in the many categories, such as Food for Sale, Wedding Food, Moments of Joy, Innovation, Bring Home the Harvest, categories for younger photographers, and even videos, in this gallery. -via Nag on the Lake

Advances in robotics have given us robots that act so real they are creepy. But how good are they, really? Could a consumer-grade robot ever fool anyone? No, but they can impress us in their own way. Zac Alsop got the idea to pit a computerized companion dog against real dogs in a competition, so he splurged on a Unitree Go1 robotic dog, although not the most expensive model. Even the bottom-line model is quite expensive. This robot is remote-controlled but also AI-enabled.

Anyway, Zac enlisted a dog trainer, a robot expert, and a dance instructor on his way to entering his "dog" in a canine freestyle (dancing) competition. But what starts out promising to be an epic experiment quickly turns into a comedy of errors, as Zac's failures along the way are rather funny and make the video what it is. He encounters a steep learning curve in "training" his robot and getting it into the competition. After all that, it really doesn't matter whether he wins or not, since nobody is taking him the least bit seriously.   

The development of processed cold cereal made breakfast a lot easier for Americans on the go, and gave us plenty of late-night snacks, too. Grain extrusion can put your morning corn and oats into pretty much any shape you can imagine. But while most of us just read the box while eating, some physicists pondered the properties of those shapes and came up with ways to explain physics to us by using breakfast cereal as an example we can understand. Or if we don't, at least other physicists can.

Have you ever heard of the Cheerios Effect? The derivatives of position named snap, crackle, and pop? That time physicists compared the compression properties of Cocoa Puffs vs. Rice Krispies? Cereal has been a toy for physics experiments for some time. You can read about four ways cereal has advanced the science and the teaching of physics at Cracked.
(Image credit: Armando Olivo Martín del Campo)

We had Conan the Barbarian in 1982, and Conan the Destroyer in 1984, so does anyone want a third Conan movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger? It can be done, thanks to deepfake technology. The Buff Dudes did it, using a version of Arnold's face from different eras to show Conan as an aged king and in the younger flashback scenes. In this story, Conan is defending his throne from all, or at least some, of those kids he spawned when he was younger. They call this a "concept trailer," although it does a better job at making us want to watch the full movie than most trailers. It's more like the early scenes of a film, just setting up the conflict. Alas, it's not a full movie but a fan film. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how the video was made.



Yeah, this was put together by an astonishingly small crew, but it took them six months. Now we will wait for Schwarzenegger's reaction. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Have you ever wanted to observe an exploding star, but you don't have a telescope? In the 21st century, you don't have to own a telescope to watch it happen.

Just a few days ago, a type II supernova was discovered in the Messier 101 galaxy, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy (shown above). This supernova has been named SN 2023ixf. In case you are wondering, it is 21 million light-years away, and poses no threat to earth. This is the closest supernova to be observed in the past five years, and the second closest in the past ten years.

Supernova #SN2023ixf in Messier 101, as imaged on a small 115mm refractor in an Indiana backyard.

Direct comparison before the supernova (May 16) and after (May 20), where it's already a brilliant white object dominating this galaxy. #Astrophotography https://t.co/xUNn4r41sa pic.twitter.com/b9oH6vLHcH

— Paul Macklin (@MathCancer) May 22, 2023

The collapse of this giant star will be livestreamed, thanks to The Virtual Telescope Project. The livestream begins at 6:30 PM Eastern Time (22:30 UTC) on May 25  Friday May 26 at YouTube. The project is using 14-inch and 17-inch telescopes in Ceccano, Italy. It will presumably be available to replay after the livestream. It seems a bit strange to call it a livestream, as this explosion happened 21 million years ago- but we are just now receiving the visuals here on earth. If you happen to have a telescope, and live in the Northern Hemisphere, you should be able to find SN 2023ixf in the Ursa Major constellation, in the handle of the Big Dipper. The supernova will be visible for a few more months. -via Metafilter 

Update: The livestream has been delayed by high winds, and will commence on Friday evening at 6:30 PM Eastern Time.

(Image credit: European Space Agency & NASA)

If you recall the sitcom Gilligan's Island, you know that the castaways stranded on a remote island had an awful lot of visitors from the outside world, but those visitors always managed to get away and leave the main cast behind. That was also the fate of Philip Ashton, who was just a teenager when his fishing boat was hijacked by pirates in 1722. He was forced into piracy, then escaped, only to find himself alone on Roatan, a then-uninhabited island off the coast of Honduras. He had no gear, no tools, and no hope for rescue. Over the next couple of years, Ashton was joined twice by other castaways, and once a ship approached, but instead of a rescue, they shot at him!

Ashton finally made it back to civilization, and a book was written about his experience. However, few readers believed it was a true story. Instead, they considered his account a knockoff of another book that had been published just a few years earlier- Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Read the real story of castaway Philip Ashton at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Jonathan Palombo)

They call this a maze, but in places it resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption, and other parts may remind you of the American Ninja Warrior course. More than anything, this looks like a colorful classic Nintendo game maze. This little guy seems to have fun exploring the ins and outs of this new world as he makes his way through it and back to his normal but luxurious home. He should be used to it; his human partner in crime Mister Hamster makes these kinds of things all the time. You get the idea he only adopted his hamsters as an excuse to buy lots of plastic toys and build huge labyrinths for him. Everyone's got a hobby.

Near the beginning of the video, the hamster puts his hands on what might be a glass cover for this maze. I can see how that would be necessary, but it is the cleanest glass I have ever seen, with no reflections visible anywhere in the video.  -via Boing Boing