Text can tell stories, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and will provoke emotions in a way text cannot. You may recall how photographs and video from Vietnam turned the tide of public opinion against the war. Photographs from the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and ‘60s served the same purpose.

Photographs of the civil rights struggle helped galvanize those outside the South against legalized discrimination, exposing them to the indignities African American citizens suffered under a system of state-backed racism. Some have argued that the most enduring photographs of the movement downplayed the autonomy of black people to make change and shape their own future, portraying them as weak victims who needed white people to save them. However, many images also documented the strength and courage of peaceful protests, showing unwavering black communities united towards a common goal.

Many of the most iconic images of the era were taken by photographers working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), though other organizations, like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), also utilized photographers as part of their mission to eradicate racial inequality. As Leslie Kelen points out in the 2011 book This Light of Ours about photographers of the civil-rights era, individuals documenting the movement “did not then and do not now see themselves primarily as photographers but as ‘activists’ or ‘organizers’ with cameras.” Kelen writes that SNCC “was uniquely farsighted in its usage of photographers and photographs. Soon after its 1960 founding in Raleigh, North Carolina, this student-led organization invited photographers to be an integral part of their communications effort.” For most of these photographers, involvement with various social-justice causes has continued throughout their lives.

Collectors Weekly spoke to Civil Rights photographers LeRoy Henderson, Matt Herron, Bob Adelman, and others about their experiences during those turbulent times, and how images are a powerful tool for social change. 

(Image credit: Lilbrary of Congress)

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Oh look, we have a new puppy in the house! An adult cat, voiced by Ze Frank, explains what a dog is to a young kitten in this Friskies ad. The cat has a poor opinion of dogs, although this puppy is adorable. This is the latest of the “Dear Kitten” series, which we first showed you in June. You can see several other episodes of the series at Tastefully Offensive.

Young Kevin Arnold and his family entertained us from 1988 to 1993 in the hit show The Wonder Years. Over twenty years later, it’s now available on DVD. In honor of the occasion, mental_floss has collected some trivia about the show you might be interested in.

4. FRED SAVAGE WAS THE OBVIOUS CHOICE FOR KEVIN.

Casting kids is never an easy task. To help them in finding their lead actor, Marlens and Black interviewed five casting directors for recommendations. All five of them suggested Fred Savage, who at that point was best known for his role in The Princess Bride. “By the time we actually settled on a casting director, we had already resolved that we should see Fred,” Marlens told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988. “Knowing nothing about him, we arranged to screen some unedited footage of a film he was making at the time, Vice Versa … [We saw] a marvelous actor with a natural quality, which essentially means he has no quality at all except being a kid. It sounds funny, but it’s a rare thing to find in a child actor. It’s the same thing we looked for and discovered in Josh Saviano and Danica McKellar.”

9. DANICA MCKELLAR’S TOUGHEST COMPETITION WAS HER SISTER.

When it came down to casting the role of dream girl Winnie Cooper, there were two final contenders: Danica McKellar and her sister, Crystal. “It was practically a tossup,” casting director Mary Buck told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. After choosing Danica for the role, Crystal was hired for the recurring role of Becky Slater, Winnie’s one-time rival for Kevin’s affections.

There’s a lot more, including the changes that had to be made before the series was put on DVD. Read all 28 things at mental_floss.

The Nobel committee has announced the winner of the Physics Prize. Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California Santa Barbara will share the prize for their invention of blue LEDs. Blue LEDs are both brighter and more efficient than LEDs of other colors, but were more difficult to develop.

The Nobel committee noted that a LED bulb can be nearly 19 times as efficient as a traditional lightbulb as well as lasting 100 times as long. It said that the technology could be “revolutionary” as around one-fourth of global electricity consumption is for lighting, and also noted that LED bulbs can be powered by solar panels, making electric lighting feasible for the 1.5 billion people who aren’t connected to a power grid.

The development of blue LEDs was a complicated process, but you’ll find a compact explanation at Geeks Are Sexy.

Geography professor and artist Stentor Danielson created a series of beautiful fantasy maps that render real cities in the style of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth maps. They are for sale through Danielson’s Etsy store Mapsburgh. Select from Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, and Cleveland. However, if your city isn’t among those, he offers to make you a custom fantasy map!

-via Laughing Squid

A pair of kestrels found a great place to raise of family: in an apartment window box! The flowers had to wait as the chicks grew. Redditor timtimr posted a series of photographs his lucky neighbors took while watching from the inside of the window as the mother fed and tended her chicks. He said this is in “suburban Lisbon, Portugal,” but it looks pretty urban to me.



The first picture in the album is the father, the rest show the mother kestrel. The chicks appear to “sprout” from the potting soil! The apartment residents added a safety net underneath the box as the chicks grew.  

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You’ve seen movies where a cop commandeers a car from a innocent bystander to chase a bad guy, haven’t you? We all have. Here it happens in real life, in Kirov, Russia. An officer on foot witnesses a reckless driver, and jumps into the car recording this dash cam footage and yells “Step on it!” or the Russian equivalent. I wondered what kind of car they were in, and whether it could keep up with the speeding perpetrator. Then when you get a good look at the perp’s car, you realize that wasn’t too much of a concern. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

To be honest, when I saw this headline, I tried to think of teachers on TV and came up blank. Mr Kotter! Well, there’s one, but apparently I haven’t been watching enough TV. But maybe you have, and you might want to argue about how your favorites were ranked among the 25 TV teachers in this list from Warming Glow. Yeah, I watched Walter White, but how much time did he spend in the classroom over the course of Breaking Bad? Just enough to know a student named Jesse Pinkman.

During the first year of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army lost more troops from smallpox than from battle. The disease swept through communities every few years, causing illness, death, and dread panic that made it difficult to organize Americans for war. Bringing soldiers together from far-flung villages was a dangerous prospect under those circumstances. General George Washington was immune to the disease, having survived it as a teenager, and he wrestled with the notion of conferring such immunity on his men. The procedure in those days was frightening, and few trusted it.

While Washington was acquainted with a technique for protecting people against smallpox, he would not then use it, partly because it was deemed illegal by the Continental Congress and colonial legislatures, and partly because many physicians believed the technique did more to spread the disease than to halt its progress.

The technique, called “variolation,” was a form of inoculation in which pus from an infected person was inserted under the skin of an uninfected one; that gave the inoculee a mild case of the disease and, after the passing of a period of high communicability, lifetime immunity. But although championed by such scientific heroes as Benjamin Franklin, and undergone willingly by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other leaders, variolation was castigated as unsafe for the community because the patient had to be isolated for a week prior to the inoculation and two weeks or more after it. Congress had forbidden military doctors to administer it and forbidden army officers to take variolation or have their subordinates do it, on pain of being cashiered.

Washington lobbied to change the law, but got nowhere. As the winter of 1776-77 dragged on, the general realized that the only way to protect his men would be to take matters into his own hands. How like him. Read the story of what happened at The Daily Beast, in an excerpt from Tom Shachtman’s book Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment.

(Image credit: Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast)

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How do you make a parkour video when you can’t actually do those stunts? Make it a live action stop-motion video! These guys battle it out in a different dimension, one that works with gravity instead of against it. I bet they hauled around a big ladder to do this. -via Boing Boing

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In this video, we see professors from the University of Alabama read their reviews on the website Rate My Professors. It takes a thick skin to even peek at anonymous reviews from students. College teachers are human, too, so it’s pretty awkward to see them reading negative reviews. However, if you can’t construct a proper sentence or you admit to cheating in class, they’re not going to put much stock in your opinion of anything. But they like the chili peppers, which signify that a teacher is “hot.” -via Viral Viral Videos

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Here’s a dance battle with a difference! The Lindy hoppers on the left show off their street dance moves, and the street dancers on the right give their best shot at swing dance. You have to give both teams credit for stepping out of their normal genre, although both have a tendency to revert to familiar steps at times. Overall, I’d give more style points to the street dancers in the crossover. Then about halfway through the video, both teams go back to the music and dance style they do best, which is not as funny, but is much more impressive. A good time was had by all. This happened at the Montreal Swing Riot 2014 competition in July. -via Daily Picks and Flicks   

Geraldine “Jerrie” Mock died last Tuesday at her home in Quincy, Florida. If the name doesn’t sound familiar to you, it’s because she did not receive the lasting fame she should have for the stunt she pulled in 1964. Mock undertook the goal that eluded Amelia Earhart in 1937: she was the first woman to fly around the world solo.

When she took off on March 19, 1964, from Columbus, Ohio, Ms. Mock was a 38-year-old homemaker and recreational pilot who had logged a meager 750 hours of flight time. She returned there on April 17 — 29 days, 11 hours and 59 minutes later — after a 23,000-mile journey over the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea and the Pacific, with stops in the Azores, Casablanca, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok and Honolulu, among other places.

She was stalled by high winds in Bermuda and battled rough weather between Casablanca and Bone, Algeria. She navigated 1,300 miles over the Pacific from Guam to tiny Wake Island, three miles in diameter, without the benefit of ground signals. Between Bangkok and Manila, she flew over embattled Vietnam.

“Somewhere not far away a war was being fought,” she wrote later, “but from the sky above, all looked peaceful.”

Ms. Mock was given the Gold Medal Award from the FAA, which she received from President Lyndon Johnson in a White House ceremony. She was not excited about making speeches or personal appearances. However, she made the public speaking rounds to repay her sponsors, which included appearances on TV.

“You left your husband alone for 29 days,” the actor Orson Bean, a panelist on the quiz show “To Tell the Truth,” said to her when she appeared as a guest. “What did he do? I mean, who cleaned the house and all?”

You can read more about Jerrie Mock at the New York Times. Ms. Mock was 88.  

(Image credit: National Air and Space Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution)

Did you hear about the planet that’s entirely populated by robots? Of course you have, you’ve read about them right here at Neatorama. It would be nice to go visit them sometime. And they have, indeed, done a very good job. This comic is from Tree Lobsters. -via Bad Astronomy

The medical drama Grey’s Anatomy is into its 11th season now, and for much of that run it's been a ratings hit, especially among the 18-49 year old demographic. In ten years, a show will pick up a lot of fans, and a lot of backstage trivia. This mega-list of trivia covers everything from how the characters were cast to what’s in the fake blood and guts. Here’s a sample:

1. Shonda Rhimes was obsessed with watching surgical shows on the Discovery Channel.

2. But her idea for Grey’s Anatomy really started to develop after a doctor told her how hard it is to shave her legs in a hospital shower.

29. Pompeo got pregnant while filming Season 6, but instead of making Meredith pregnant as well, the writers had the character give part of her liver to her estranged father, Thatcher (Jeff Perry), so that Pompeo could be confined to bed rest to hide her pregnant belly under sheets.

39. All the medical storylines are found in medical journals that the writers read or from stories that viewers send in that they find interesting.

Read the rest of the 51 things about Grey’s Anatomy at Buzzfeed.