Australian photographer Danny Huynh has an amazing hobby. He builds remote control animatronics based on pop culture characters. They are works of art, but the real magic takes off when they move!



Sadly, Huynh's creations are not for sale. Continue reading to see more.

The new MCU film Black Widow opens in theaters this weekend. This post has nothing to do with the Avengers, but the movie opening is a good excuse to learn something about the real black widow spider. As with many of the earth's creatures, our common knowledge about them turns out to be less than true.

Black widows earned their name because scientists witnessed the females eat their mates after copulation. But research has shown that in a related species, redback spiders, females only cannibalize their mates about two percent of the time, so experts suspect that American black widows have similar rates of cannibalism in the wild.

The widows’ cannibalistic behavior was first observed in the lab, where males had nowhere to run away from their larger, hungrier counterparts. But in the spiders’ natural habitats, males have the opportunity to make an escape.

Male black widows also have strategies to avoid riskier sexual encounters in the first place; for instance, research suggests they can tell whether or not a female is hungry by her pheromones, so they can avoid potential mates who seem a bit peckish.

Learn more about the black widow spider at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Ken Thomas)

The Slinky is an amazing toy. It's just a metal spring, but you can do so many things with it! The guy from Action Lab shows us how weird slinkys are when you drop them vertically, thanks to slow-motion video. Someone in the comments compared the slinky's behavior to a Loony Tunes character, recreated in the real world where physics is a thing. -via Digg

It's a mistake to think that if you have enough money, you can travel anywhere. Quite a few places are forbidden, some to outsiders, others to any human beings at all. The reasons are varied. Some locations don't want visitors because they hold precious treasures, fragile artifacts, or delicate ecosystems. Others are dangerous due to volcanoes, radiation, or animals. The rest are top secret for one reason or another. The Island of Surtsey is both volcanic and a delicate ecosystem.

In the 1960s, an undersea volcanic eruption created a brand-new island off the coast of Iceland. It’s not every day that scientists get to study an island from the moment it emerges, so they decided to make the most of the opportunity. The island, named Surtsey, has become a case study for how ecosystems develop without any interference from humans. (Other than the ideally noninterventionist scientists who study the island, that is.) Some of the lifeforms that have found their way to Surtsey include molds, fungi, at least 89 bird species, and, supposedly, one plucky tomato plant.

In 1969, an Icelandic scientist named Ágúst Bjarnason was asked to make a trip to Surtsey to identify a mysterious plant, which he identified as a tomato. Bjarnason looked into the situation a bit further; as he later recalled, “Someone had done their business … and this beautiful tomato plant … had grown out of the feces.”

Read about seventeen other places you can cross off your vacation list at Mental Floss. The list is also available as a video. Strangely, North Sentinal Island is not among them.

(Image credit: Bruce McAdam)

As we've said before, people will take any activity at all and make a competition out of it. Joey Chesnut won the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest (again) this past weekend by downing 76 dogs- a new record. Competitive eating has been in the news for about three decades now, but it was also a thing around the turn of the previous century, which grew out of Fat Men's Clubs (FMCs), fraternal organizations in which men could be proud of their girth and socialize with each other. And, of course, eat.

FMCs did not invent eating contests — like most modern social phenomena, the history of competitive eating reaches into mythology — but they certainly popularized them in American culture. When the Manhattan FMC held an all-you-can-eat contest at their East Third Street clubhouse in 1909, several reporters were present to watch Frank Dotzler, a 380-pound alderman, devour 275 oysters, 8 pounds of steak, 12 rolls, 11 cups of coffee and 3 pies. He won $50 and eternal glory.

The considerable media attention enjoyed by these clubs says a lot about the era in which they prospered. “In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” Laura Doan wrote in an engrossing article about Texas FMCs, “attitudes about fat bodies were remarkably different than they are now … As fat men’s clubs were at their peak, people positively associated men of a larger size with wealth and affability.”

Read about the rise of Fat Men's Clubs and their gastronomic achievements at Inside Hook. -via Digg 

People shooting off fireworks in Toledo, OH turned their neighborhood into a war zone when their performative patriotism (or just stupidity), turned their neighborhood into a war zone after the U-Haul truck they rented exploded with the fireworks inside. pic.twitter.com/EQguCzpZWY

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 5, 2021

A block party in Toledo, Ohio, was the scene of a major fireworks mishap Sunday night. A group of teens were seen throwing some kind of incendiary devices into a U-Haul truck filled with fireworks. The truck exploded, and ignited a stack of fireworks that had already been unloaded. Four people were injured. A longer video shows that the explosions went on for several more minutes (linked video contains NSFW language). -via Fark

We had martial arts films before The Karate Kid came out in 1984, but they were mostly considered to be B-movies. The saga of Daniel-san and Mr. Miyagi changed all that. Karate schools sprung up everywhere, martial arts actors Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan became mainstream stars, and there were several Karate Kid sequels, remakes, and even a streaming series that follows the young characters as adults. But how real is the karate of The Karate Kid?

Den of Geek consulted Dr. Hermann Bayer, an expert authority on Okinawan Karate and the author of the upcoming book Analysis of Genuine Karate―Misconceptions, Origin, Development, and True Purpose. Dr. Bayer remembers firsthand how The Karate Kid stimulated the Karate boom in the mid-eighties because he was a practicing Karateka then. But as a martial scholar, he’s pragmatic about his opinions.

“First and foremost, we have to bear in mind that we are talking about a movie, not about a documentation or a piece of research,” says Bayer. “This means that we need to concede that fascinating viewers by something pretty, amazing, or spectacular to look at is more important than authenticity.”

Read and find out how authentic "wax on, wax off" is, and more importantly, how the karate styles give meaning to the characters in the original The Karate Kid.

Let's take a tour of Ocado's automated grocery warehouse in London. The point of this video from Tom Scott is to make us think about how networks of robots may be many individual robots, or one robot made up of a colony of parts, like a Portuguese man o' war. Yeah, but what we are really seeing is the future of humanity, where the robots have taken over the grocery business and eliminated not only shopping, but grocery workers. Still, considering how many cars are in the parking lot, it appears that robots still need a lot of supervision.

Any time you hear the term "monkey glands" in some old movie, you can be sure it's a reference to Dr. Serge Voronoff, whose work became famous in the 1920s. The Russian-born French surgeon was a pioneer in transplanting organs- although the organs he was transplanting were animal testicles, or parts of them, into human scrotums. It wasn't in order to replace a man's gonads, but to "rejuvenate" them.  

The first official transplant of a monkey gland into a human body was performed on June 12, 1920. Three years later, Voronoff’s work was applauded by more than 700 scientists at the International Congress of Surgeons in London. The transplantation of living cells, tissues or organs from one species to another had become a experimental trend in the field of medicine as early as the end of the 19th century. Around this time, Voronoff had been studying the effects of castration in Egypt, which would later inform his work on rejuvenating treatments. By 1920, he was conducting his first transplants between chimpanzees and humans. For a brief time, he was using the testicles of executed criminals to transplant into his wealthy clients, but when the demand eventually became too great, he had to open a monkey farm breeding facility on the Italian Riviera. During his career, Voronoff also performed testicular transplants on more than 500 goats, rams and bulls, claiming the results showed that implanting organs extracted from young specimens into older animals had a revitalising effect on the latter. He proceeded to convince himself (the world’s elite) that he had discovered a method to slow down the process of ageing.

Thousands of men trusted Voronoff enough to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have monkey glands added to their bodies. This enabled Voronoff to expand his experiments to woman. Read about the monkey gland doctor at Messy Nessy Chic.

What makes humans different from our evolutionary cousins, the great apes? Walking upright and big brains are the top differences. When we think of the evolution of mankind, those two things are often regarded as happening together, but it wasn't quite so. Paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva explains that walking upright came first, not because we were smart, but because the trees we lived in died out.

“March of Progress” was an illustration done by a Russian artist, Rudolph Zallinger, in a 1965 Time-Life book called Early Man. It’s this beautiful foldout that shows ancient apes down on all fours, and it has them slowly rising up to modern humans. At the time, with the fossils we had, you could create a narrative like that. But in the last half century we’ve made so many amazing discoveries that show the human family tree is much more diverse. The pace of evolutionary change is quite different and it turns out that upright walking is the earliest of these evolutionary changes. The earliest bipeds on the ground were evolving from things that were upright to begin with in trees. Really all that happened was an ecological change. These hominins were living in environments that had fewer and fewer trees. To continue to get from point A to point B to get your fruit and other food resources, you already are pre-adapted for an upright posture and moving on two legs. In that case, bipedalism wouldn’t be a new locomotion, it’d be an old locomotion. It was just in a new setting on the ground, rather than in trees.

Walking upright put our ancestors into quite a vulnerable position, but it was only later that proto-humans developed large and flexible brains to deal with the situation. Meanwhile, we had to be adaptable and use the environment we had by becoming cooperative and omnivorous. Read how that came about in a fascinating interview with DeSilva at Nautilus.  -via Damn Interesting

Waiting until the last minute is okay, when your team works like a well-oiled clock. While these guys did a wonderful job making this video, I have a few thoughts from experience. There are cups on the floor in the kitchen, but no dishes in the living room? And those cups have no liquid in them? Do these people always use disposable dishes? The only shoes on the floor are in a bedroom? I've never seen a laundry room so free of clothing, and I've never seen anyone vacuum a floor that's already so clean. The lack of dishes with food and liquid is the most nonsensical thing about this scenario- yes, more so than the three vacuum leaners. -Thanks, gwdMaine!

When you think about alcoholic drinks named after a person, you probably first think of Tom Collins. While that origin story is interesting, Tom Collins wasn't a real person. But plenty of whiskeys, wines, and cocktails took their names from real people, and the stories may surprise you.

Many bartenders argue mixology is a science, and in the case of the Dubonnet, a French aperitif, they’d be right. It's said that chemist Joseph Dubonnet was looking for a palatable way to deliver doses of quinine (found in the cinchona tree) to French Foreign Legionnaires in North Africa in order to fight malaria. But writing in the book Just the Tonic, authors Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt speculate that it’s more likely that he was simply in search for a medicinal tonic in general, not specifically anti-malarial. Either way, in 1846 he came up with the perfect concoction: a blend of fortified wine, herbs, spices, and just the right amount of quinine.

Read the stories of six other alcoholic drinks and the real people behind them at Mental Floss.

Good news: I have gathered a bunch of photos of naval ship cats in tiny hammocks. Here are sailors of the HMS Hermione in 1941 surrounding their sleeping cat, Convoy. pic.twitter.com/X1iAaezxk5

— Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) July 2, 2021

Ever since boats became big enough to carry people and their food supplies, there have been cats aboard, mainly to control rodents, but also to boost morale during long voyages. When a crew get attached to a cat, they want to treat their mascot right. During World War II, that meant they should have a hammock to sleep in, just like the sailors. Molly Hodgdon presents a collection of images from that era of ship's cats in their custom-made hammocks. There's no word on whether the cats had to sleep in shifts like the sailors. We can assume they were treated much better than that. See nine such pampered ship's cats at Twitter. -via Everlasting Blort

Bonus: Hodgdon also has a thread of old paintings featuring people spoon-feeding cats.

Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) presents a seriously true crime story. Some of the details are a little distracting. In all honesty, you have to feel for the writers who must create pseudonyms for police procedurals that run for twenty years or more- it must be hard to come up with names that don't either repeat or sound completely ridiculous. Beckett-King revealed that his own alias is an anagram: "King Abelard Caketits."

The remains of a young man who died in Latvia 5,000 years ago was unearthed in 1875. Scientists have revisited this specimen, called RV 2039, and a few others from the same archaeological dig in order to sequence their genes more than 140 years later, and found quite a surprise among the bacteria that remained in his teeth. It was a very old strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that caused the plague we call Black Death.  

While three of the individuals were clear of disease, they found traces of Y. pestis in the RV 2039 specimen, who was a 20 to 30-year-old man.

The researchers reconstructed the bacterium's genome and compared it to 41 ancient and modern Y. pestis strains.

They found the man had been infected with a strain that was part of a lineage that first emerged around 7,000 years ago, making it the oldest-known strain of Y. pestis.

The ancient strain of Y. pests was not carried by fleas, and wasn't particularly deadly or contagious. But it may well have killed RV 2039, and now it gives scientists a step in the disease's evolution. Read about the discovery and what it means at ABC Science. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Dominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin)