NASA's Kepler mission team has announced that the space telescope has sent back data indicating the discovery of 1,284 previously undiscovered exoplanets. Kepler is using a new statistical analysis method to sweep an area of space for data instead of having to find one planet at a time. That enabled it to analyze so much data for the biggest planetary announcement yet. Of the 5,000 or so exoplanets we know about, almost half have been discovered by Kepler. But are any of those planets places we might want to visit?

In the newly-validated batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, based on their size. Nine of these orbit in their sun's habitable zone, which is the distance from a star where orbiting planets can have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool. With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group.

"They say not to count our chickens before they're hatched, but that's exactly what these results allow us to do based on probabilities that each egg (candidate) will hatch into a chick (bona fide planet)," said Natalie Batalha, co-author of the paper and the Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “This work will help Kepler reach its full potential by yielding a deeper understanding of the number of stars that harbor potentially habitable, Earth-size planets -- a number that's needed to design future missions to search for habitable environments and living worlds.”  

There’s always the possibility that some of these planets may already be inhabited. The powerful space telescope doesn’t see far enough to determine that -yet. Read more about the new planets and the Kepler mission at NASA. -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: NASA/W. Stenzel)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

1. The ancient philosopher Empedocles believed he was not human, but was a Greek god. To prove this fact to skeptics, he vowed to jump into a volcano and return unscathed. He made good on the first half of his promise, but never followed up on the latter.

2. In 1979, Robert Williams became the first human being killed by a robot when a hydraulic arm slammed into him at a Michigan Ford Motor Company factory.

3. Franz Reichelt, an Austrian tailor and creator of the overcoat parachute tested his invention on February 4, 1912. He jumped from the top of the Eiffel Tower and plummeted 986 feet to his death.

4. Beatriz Robeldo was stabbed to death by her frightened husband when, in an attempt to cure his hiccups, she snuck up on him wearing a carnival mask.

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You’ve probably been told that airline tickets cost so much because of the fuel. That’s not exactly true. The other costs dwarf the price of gas. Wendover Productions breaks down the many factors that make your ticket cost so much more than driving (as long as you don’t drive alone). -via Digg   

We were waiting for it, and it’s finally here- the Honest Trailer for Deadpool. Like the movie, this video contains adult subject matter and NSFW language. And Ryan Reynolds. Yes, he came along to help make the Honest Trailer.

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Here we find out that the plot of Deadpool is pretty standard, but that doesn't matter when your characters and dialogue bring something new. And that it proved once and for all that comic book movies do not need an audience full of children to be a hit. -via Uproxx

First you think, “How does he do this?” and then you think, “How did he even dream this act up?” A street performer plays the drums that are a few feet away from him by throwing the drumsticks, which he is juggling, and then catching them as they bounce back.

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Then notice he is also playing with his feet. And keeping a pretty good beat to the music. Then take a look at his drums- they are attached to some wheeled contraption with more instruments and car horns attached. You have to wonder what else he does in performance. I hope they threw money at him. -via mental_floss

Two million dollars seems like a lot of money to spend on a half-hour of animation. You could probably do an entire season of He-Man for that. But modern prime-time animated shows are a different class altogether. Several factors set The Simpsons, Family Guy, and other popular shows apart from the kids’ series. Read about those factors at Money Inc and you’ll get a greater appreciation for the care that goes into those shows.

Myles McNutt and Daniel Hubbard are bothered by the way actors use coffee cups on TV, particularly large paper coffee cups that are supposedly filled with hot liquid, but obviously aren’t. They’ve put together a supercut of the most grievous instances in recent TV, with commentary about why it’s so bothersome. Real coffee cups are full, heavy, sloshy, and hot, while what we see on TV is empty paper cups that actors constantly sip from -at the wrong angle. They’ve also created the Empty Cup Awards, with more examples at Instagram.

However, everyone has a pet peeve about TV details. A discussion at Metafilter has many of them: women who’ve just given birth acting as if nothing has happened, eyeglasses with obviously flat lenses, boxes that have no weight, and waking up with perfect makeup.

If you were to do a Google search for Null Island, you’d find it has a website, a Wikipedia entry, a Twitter account, and plenty of maps. That’s pretty impressive -for a place that doesn’t exist. Null Island is a nickname for the spot on the earth where the prime meridian crosses the equator. Its coordinates are 0°N 0°E, meaning it has a longitude of 0 and a latitude of 0. The fictional island was invented by digital cartographers, who map the earth with precise latitude and longitude coordinates. But errors happen.

Unfortunately, due to human typos, messy data, or even glitches in the geocoder itself, the geocoding process doesn’t always run so smoothly. Misspelled street names, non-existent building numbers, and other quirks can create invalid addresses that can confuse a geocoder so that the output becomes “0,0”. While this output indicates that an error occurred, since “0,0” is in fact a location on the Earth’s surface according to the coordinate system, the feature will be mapped there, as nonsensical as the location may be. We end up with an island of misfit data.  

So Null Island ends up as a global version of Joyce Taylor’s Kansas farm, a default location that geographers become rather familiar with. Those who work with geographic information systems know what it means to have your information sent off to Null Island. But just because the island is fictional, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Read about Null Island at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Ian Cairns)

あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛（にんじんきらい） #あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛ #ニャー　#さだかや

A photo posted by 伽椰子と俊雄のほのぼの親子日記 (@kayakowithtoshio) on Mar 24, 2016 at 3:40am PDT

Sadako vs. Kayako is a new horror film that features the main horror characters from the movies The Grudge and The Ring. Sort of like when Hollywood gave us Alien vs. Predator, except this is from Japan. Anyway, the distributor gave the ghost character Kayako Saeki from The Grudge her own Instagram account to promote the new flick. See her in everyday activities with her sidekick Toshio in all their creepy glory.

あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛（せっかくいい天気なのに） #小学生男子　#ゲーム大好き #目わるくなるよ #あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛あ゛ #ニャー　#さだかや

A photo posted by 伽椰子と俊雄のほのぼの親子日記 (@kayakowithtoshio) on May 7, 2016 at 12:16am PDT

-via Pleated-Jeans

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

What happens where in your head? The answers to this simple question are pouring in. Study after study, using modern imaging techniques, points out what happens specifically where in the brain. If all of these studies are correct, we now know what earlier generations only thought they knew about what to think about where thinking happens.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, researchers analyzed measurements—the size and location of bumps on people’s heads—to infer what specific functions were located precisely where inside the skull. This branch of research came to be called “phrenology.” Though now thought to be mostly based on guesswork, almost all of it wrong, phrenology at least made use of some hard data.

The new techniques—most prominently fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emissions Tomography) scanning—produce much harder data, of a different kind, and with vastly more detail, than the old head-bump measurements. This wealth of data, much of it in the form of strangely beautiful pictures from a small number (typically about ten) of brains, is inspiring confidence in thousands of researchers. Their happy confidence is the basis of our new insights into what happens where inside our heads.

Here are a very few highlights from the many recent studies of the brain. They tell us the specific locations in the brain of: reading; writing; arithmetic; creativity; persistence; self-reflection; empathy and forgiveness; guilt and embarrassment; neuroticism, extraversion, and self-consciousness; racism; ethical decision-making; self-reflection; moral judgment; honesty and dishonesty; happiness and sadness; disgust; aesthetic preference for paintings; aesthetic judgment of beauty; and sense of humor.

Brain images from the study “Cortical Localization of Reading in Normal Children: An fMRI Language Study.”

Reading
“Cortical Localization of Reading in Normal Children: An fMRI Language Study,” W.D. Gaillard, M. Pugliese, C.B. Grandin, S.H. Braniecki, P. Kondapaneni, K. Hunter, B. Xu, J.R. Petrella, L. Balsamo and G. Basso, Neurology, vol. 57, no. 1, 2001, pp. 47–54. The researchers, who are variously at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC; at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland; and at Université de Louvain in Belgium, report:

Fielding McGehee and his wife Rebecca Moore are studying Jim Jones’ sermons for clues to what really happened when 900 members of the People’s Temple committed suicide in their commune in Guyana in 1978. They are working their way through a thousand tapes that the FBI recovered in Jonestown. The couple have been compiling an archive of anything to do with the tragedy ever since it happened. Moore’s two sisters were members of the temple.

Within a few weeks, Moore and McGehee filed their first FOIA request with the CIA, seeking any information about Peoples Temple. Initially, they were blown off: A rep asked why they’d believe the agency knew anything. “Give me a break,” McGehee told the rep. “You have 900 Americans who’ve renounced the U.S. very publicly, went to a Third World country with a socialist society, and took millions of dollars with them.” Common sense broke the agency’s poker face. “He said, ‘Well, I guess when you put it that way.’”

Thus began the largest collection of documents relating to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. As the CIA and FBI finished their investigation over the next few years, they began releasing documents, essentially straight to McGehee and Moore’s mailbox. McGehee estimates they’ve filed nearly 300 FOIA requests, in addition to multiple lawsuits—one of which remains active—to build the collection they maintain as the Jonestown Institute. It includes census records from the Peoples Temple, sermons, letters, critical writings by concerned relatives, government documents tracking the organization, and yes, all those tapes.

McGehee says there’s enough material to keep him busy the rest of his life, and then some. Read about McGehee and Moore’s work at The Kernel. And read the information they’ve put online at Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple. 

For at least ten years now, a duck has made her nest in the inner courtyard of Glover Elementary School in Milton, Massachusetts. When the ducklings hatch, the students eagerly watch for her to decide that it’s time to lead them to water, which means they must pass through the building to get outside. This year's event was captured on video.

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The mother duck led her ducklings to the nearby pond last Wednesday.

More than 500 students sat cross-legged in the hallway and on the playground for the annual duck walk. Many of their faces lit up when the mother and her 10 newly hatched ducklings waddled by. The entire episode was documented on video.

Principal Sheila Kukstis said in an interview that the walk is a tradition for the elder duck, as well.

“The mother knows where she’s going because she’s done it before,” she said.

The kindergarten-through-fifth-grade students monitor the family through the spring and summer. -via Atlas Obscura

This Rube Goldberg-esque marble run is both soothing and astounding. Regular marbles are used in conjunction with magnetic metal balls in an intricate series of balanced relays.

(YouTube link)

Can you imagine how much testing went into creating this? The creator, Kaplamino, normally works with dominos. Although it appears to be one sequence, that would have taken up a lot of room. I’m still impressed, even if they weren’t all recorded at the same time. -via reddit 

How many people has Iron Man killed in the the six movies he’s appeared in so far? We don’t know, because this supercut from Mr. Sunday Movies only covers the first five. But it’s a lot.

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The count on the right is humans; robot kills are on the left. This video contains clips from Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Iron Man 3, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. The kill count from Captain America: Civil War will have to come from someone who’s seen it. -via Gamma Squad

You are probably familiar with the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. It is a formation made of hexagonal basalt columns produced by ancient volcanic activity. Imagine an entire island made that way, and you have Staffa, off the coast of Scotland. That’s where you’ll find Fingal’s Cave, a sea cave constructed of hexagonal basalt columns.

Its hundreds of columns made of basalt took shape 60 million years ago, due to a massive lava flow. The process of solidification and cooling of the lava has led to the hexagonal shape of the columns.

Because of cave’s size and its proximity to the ocean, every sound leads to an echo similar to those created in cathedrals. This phenomenon only amplifies the beauty and the mystery of Fingal’s Cave.

Consequently, it is no wonder that the popularity of this natural sightseeing objective has gradually increased over the centuries. Even though Jules Verne or Queen Victoria have visited the cave, it was not until 1829 that it became known worldwide. Inspired by the unique echoes of the cave, Felix Mendelssohn – a romantic composer, wrote the “Fingal’s Cave overture”.

Learn more about Fingal’s Cave and see plenty of pictures at Unusual Places. -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Ian Paterson)