Mothers Day is a time for us to reflect on the sacrifices our mothers made to care for us and give us the best life possible. If you really want to reflect on self-sacrifice, let’s talk about spiders. If you were a female spider of the Stegodyphus lineatus species, you started your life out cannibalizing your mother. And if you live long enough, you’ll end your life dissolving your own organs to feed your children. The spider mates, lays eggs, and then eats as many insects as she can to grow as big as she can. But she stops eating at the point she tears open the egg sac to free her progeny. Her life stops as theirs begins.

It isn’t that she’s just not very hungry, though: Her intestines already have begun dissolving. By the time the eggs hatch, she already has a meal for her young, in the form of a thin, clear liquid dribbling out of her mouth. They gather around and lap it up for two weeks, and indeed, they’re absolutely dependent on her for food, as their mouthparts aren’t yet developed enough to take on prey. The dissolving of their mother’s intestines intensifies, and toward the end her other organs, save for the heart (which she kinda needs, thank you very much), go as well, until most of her abdomen is filled with sludge. 

If you think that’s gross, go to Wired and read the rest of the process by which Stegodyphus lineatus gives her all to her children until she is completely gone and they have grown big enough to catch their own insects. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Mor Salomon)

Touch Pianist is a web toy that let’s you play famous piano pieces on your computer keyboard. No musical skill needed! The notes are there in visual form; all you have to do is hit any keys to make them play. It’s a little like Guitar Hero, except the controls don’t matter, you set the tempo, and you can’t “lose.” The only skill you need is to keep the tempo going in a way that makes it sound pleasant to you. The default screen is "Moonlight Sonata," but you can pull down other choices. -via b3ta

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If there are so many stars and planets in the galaxy, and so many galaxies in the universe, why haven’t we found life on, or from, any of them? That’s the Fermi Paradox. There are several possible reasons we haven’t found extraterritorial life, and as Kurzgesagt explains them, some are pretty scary. -via Viral Viral Videos

The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.

There are scores of delicious variations of cooked fillings and pastry out there— both sweet and savory. (Warning: This might make you hungry.)

PIE: A baking dish is lined with a pastry crust that bakes up crispy or flaky. On top of that goes a sweetened fruit filling, a savory meat filling, or, once it’s cooled, a cream or custard filling. Sometimes it’s topped with another layer of crust, and sometimes it isn’t.

COBBLER: A pie without a bottom crust. Instead, sweetened (and often spiced) fruit is placed in a deep dish and topped with large lumps of sweetened biscuit dough. The bottom of the dough sinks into the fruit and absorbs the juices. When baked, the lumps of biscuit dough puff up and can resemble a cobblestone street, which may be how the dish got its name. (Another theory: The pies were originally made in wooden bowls called cobelers.)

(Pandowdy image credit: Flickr user Emily Carlin)

PANDOWDY: Similar to a cobbler, except the lumps of biscuit dough are flattened before they’re placed on top of the fruit. Pandowdys are generally baked in a skillet.

GRUNT: The grunt is assembled like a cobbler but cooked on the stove. Dollops of dumpling batter are placed over the fruit as it simmers in a pot. Then the pot is covered and allowed to cook until the dumplings have steamed to perfection. The dish is said to get its name from the noise the dumplings make when they’re cooking. (They’re called “grunts” in Massachusetts, but in other parts of New England, they’re called “slumps.”)

BIRD’S-NEST PUDDING:

Ekant Veer noticed that the cat treats were going missing, although they were in a closed drawer, and the family never noticed the drawer open. They knew it must be the cat Anfield taking them, but how? So they set up a camera inside the drawer to capture the caper.  

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We know cats are liquid, because they take the shape of their container. Anfield managed to snag the cat treats by oozing into the furniture without ever opening the drawer. He escaped the same way. -via Tastefully Offensive

You might be surprised to find out how many carnivores love an occasional juicy, sweet  watermelon. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised -because we love them, too! Alligators, crocodiles, big cats, hippos- they all have their unique style in eating. And does it really matter which one is ranked “best” when we get to see videos of them all eating watermelons? No, just enjoy them at The Concourse. -via Everlasting Blort

Remember Kevin Blandford, the guy who had Not a Single Second of Fun in Puerto Rico? After his photo shoot of a vacation without his wife went viral, the ad agency that promotes Puerto Rico tourism offered him an all-expenses-paid trip back to the island so he could bring his wife and baby daughter!

And this time around, he had a wonderful time. That included retaking the same photos in the same places with his family. Blandford even made sure he took the same shirts for the photos. See the whole gallery at Imgur.  -via reddit

We’ve always assumed -or have been told- that city streetcars faded away because people preferred to drive their own cars. We know from a previous post that the powerful auto industry encouraged people to prefer cars, and the story of the streetcar system is likewise more complicated than it seems on the surface. Electrified streetcars flourished in the 1880s, and cost a nickel to ride.   

Running streetcars was a very profitable business. Cities expanded, and people who found themselves living too far from work to walk depended on them. (Some real-estate developers built nearby suburbs around streetcar lines.) Over time, the businessmen who ran the streetcars, called "traction magnates," consolidated ownership of multiple lines, establishing powerful, oftentimes corrupt monopolies in many cities.

Eventually, many of them contracted with city governments for the explicit right to operate as a monopoly in that city. In exchange, they agreed to all sorts of conditions. "Eager to receive guarantees on their large up-front investments, streetcar operators agreed to contract provisions that held fares constant at five cents and mandated that rail line owners maintain the pavement around their tracks," writes Stephen Smith at Market Urbanism.

Unforeseen circumstances combined to make streetcars impossible to maintain, although if the companies hadn’t been so corrupt, accommodations might have been made for them. Read the whole story at Vox.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Grand Rapids Historical Commission)

Have you figured your way around in the fantasy world of Game of Thrones yet? This might make it easier: MongoLife made a Google Maps version of Westeros. You can zoom into the pictures at Etsy and see where travelers go and where the action takes place in the show. He sold out the maps he had, but is busy making more. -via Uproxx

Brotherhood Workshop gives us a LEGO vignette from Lord of the Rings that doesn’t quite follow the original script.

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Legolas and Gimli have a classic bromance. At least, that's the way Legolas sees it.

Short and sweet, with a punchline that is ever-so-satisfying. -via Geeks Are Sexy  

Teen girl movies have so many things that stick in your mind from those formative years: cluelessness, embarrassment, cattiness, failure, triumph, friends, romance, trying to find yourself, trying to fit in, and most of all, lessons learned. Real life doesn’t wrap up so nicely at the end, but the movies helped us work out that we weren’t the only ones going through those struggles.

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In honor of the 20th anniversary of the movie Clueless, Robert Jones put together a supercut of teen girls in movies over the past twenty years set to “Kids In America” by The Muffs. Surely you’ll recognize a bunch of them. -Thanks, Robert!

A snorkeler reported seeing human remains at the bottom of the Colorado River near Cienega Springs. The La Paz County (Arizona) Sheriff’s Department responded and the Buckskin Fire Department sent a diver down to investigate. The diver, a firefighter named Foerstner, took a camera with him to record the evidence.

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What he found were two skeletons, alright, but not human remains. The fake skeletons were sitting in lawn chairs having a relaxing time at the bottom of the river. The sign on one skeleton’s lap leads us to believe the tableau is a reference to the Weekend at Bernie’s movies. -via Arbroath   

Tommy Dunne was working as a welder when a friend hired him to make weapons for Braveheart. Nearly two decades later, as weapons master for Game of Thrones, he designs the show’s blades and bows, guiding them from sketches into the actors’ hands. He and a team of four artisans create hundreds of weapons per season, equipping everyone from the soldiers of Westeros and the men of the Night's Watch to the Khaleesi’s Dothraki warriors and the Wildings beyond the Wall. We asked him to share the tricks of his trade.

1. INSPIRATION COMES FROM HISTORY

“I look at different periods and different eras—Egyptian, monolithic,” Dunne says. His crossbows, longbows, composite bows, and ballistas are all modeled on real weapons. "We handmade a catapult for the Unsullied this year, which is quite a large item, and quite powerful," he says. "It’s two tons of oak, nine foot length by ten foot height, with wheels. We have a couple of ballistas, which again are of historical reference." He uses the web for research, of course, but relies heavily on his own library to get the scales just right.

2. MATERIALS, MEANWHILE, ARE MODERN

"Normally, we make a hero weapon, which is a little more presentable camera-wise—steel blade, brass crossguard, wooden handle, brass pommel, all that," Dunne says. "Obviously, we don’t fight with steel." Since actors can’t fight with actual steel swords, Dunne uses aircraft aluminum, which is strong but flexible. He also uses bamboo for training blades and rubber for weapons for extras or if the scene involves animals or stunts. "If the actor did fall or had to jump down quickly, there would be no injuries," he says. "We wouldn’t fight too much with rubber, unless there were stunts." The shields tend to be plastic—except the Unsullieds’. They get aluminum. "It varies in what we need," Dunne says. "We try to keep the shields strong, durable, lightweight, but flexible to a certain degree. We have to make sure they’ll withstand smashing together, but also, if someone falls over onto a shield, that they’re malleable and [the actor] won’t take as much of a hit."

Arrows, meanwhile, are basically the real thing.

Cheryl Treadway was at home Monday with her youngest child and her boyfriend Ethan Nickerson. Nickerson took Treadway’s cell phone and went with her to pick up her two older children. He had a knife and threatened violence. Treadway was able to borrow her phone back just long enough to send an order to Pizza Hut with their online ordering app.  

Highlands County Sheriff's Office investigators say at 3:40 p.m. on Monday, May 4th, an online pizza order, for a small hand-tossed classic pizza with pepperoni, was received by the Pizza Hut in Avon Park. Under the comments section there was a message asking them to send help and call 911 as the customer was being held hostage.

Pizza Hut employees recognized the order as being from a frequent customer. But, the comments were out of the ordinary so they called the Highlands County Sheriff's Office to investigate the situation.

“We've never seen that before,” the restaurant's manager, Candy Hamilton, said. “I've been here 28 years and never, never seen nothing like that come through."

Highlands County deputies went to the address and escorted Treadway and her youngest child out. They negotiated with Nickerson for about twenty minutes before he surrendered peacefully. Lieutenant Curtis Ludden, who negotiated with Nickerson, spoke with WFLA.

“I don't know if I ever would have thought of it. I mean it's just something that she did so naturally. The boyfriend never knew about it until he saw us coming around the corner,” Ludden said.
 

Nickerson was arrested, and the victims are safe. -via Digg

The relatively new New Orleans Krewe of Chewbacchus has sci-fi events outside of Carnival season, too. For Star Wars day on Monday, they staged a parade. This one was called Shoeboxus.

Often the landscape of Mardi Gras is dotted with larger parades helmed by the moneyed and reigned over by the famous; they are slick, professional affairs, with strict rules and big fees.  Shoeboxus brings spectators back to their elementary school days when celebrating Mardi Gras meant making your own miniaturized float á la an empty shoebox, a bit of paint and paste, and lots and lots of beads.

“Part of the ethos of Chewbacchus is to both celebrate and mock the things we love. It's this earnest love of science fiction but we also know that we're a bunch of silly nerds and we do this crazy, homemade parade,” says co-founder Ryan Ballard. “We don't take it seriously whatsoever.”

There were larger vehicles bringing up the rear, like tricycles, but altogether, the Shoeboxus parade with small but showy. You can read more about it and see plenty of pictures at Atlas Obscura. A good time was had by all.

(Image credit: April Siese)