The Muppet Show won 11 Emmys during its initial run from 1976 to 1981. The 120 episodes then aired in syndication for years, and now they are only available on Disney+. But you can see clips anytime, lots of them in a list at Vulture detailing the 25 best episodes of The Muppet Show in chronological order. The show let the Muppets run wild, drew top guest hosts, and gave us memorable characters and skits like Pigs in Space, the Swedish Chef, Statler and Waldorf, and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker. Many of the guest hosts share their remembrances of the show, and one thing they have in common is how they came to see the Muppets as real characters instead of puppets. John Cleese was one such host.

“One of the happiest experiences I’ve ever had in this silly business. It’s about as much fun acting as I’ve had because those Muppets were so real. I have worked with actors who were less responsive. I’ll tell you how believable they are. I had to do a song at one point and I was dreading it, but once I more or less got it right on the third or fourth take, I was so delighted that when the director said cut, I patted Kermit on the head. I thought the sketch with Gonzo was one of the funniest things I ever did. I have to say this, though I shouldn’t, it’s very well performed. The atmosphere on set was very relaxed, everyone was happy. I think that helps the comedy. People are at their best when they’re relaxed and having fun.”

See skits from all 25 episodes in the list at Vulture. -via Digg

A long-running Icelandic game show called Gettu betur (Guess Better) pits teams of students against each other. During Friday's game, when the results were announced, one member of the losing side took issue with the ruling. You don't have to understand Icelandic to follow this. He even makes a spectacle of himself after going off camera!  -via Boing Boing

Couldn't help myself. Draw an iceberg and see how it would actually float in water: https://t.co/HSqRwjVVk7 https://t.co/ziobrmDknV

— Joshua Tauberer (@JoshData) February 19, 2021

Glaciologist and climate scientist Megan Thompson-Munson wants to correct the popular image of icebergs. Yes, 90% of an iceberg is underwater, but they don't float the way you see them in stock photos. Read her explanation at Twitter.

Inspired by that thread, Joshua Tauberer made Iceberger, a web toy in which you can draw your own iceberg. As soon as you're finished, the iceberg will orient itself naturally as physics would dictate. Sure, you can draw a unicorn or any other shape that comes to mind, but it won't float the way you intended, and you'll only see a small fraction above the waterline. Have fun with it! -via Metafilter

Researchers from UNSW Sydney and the South Australian Museum have been studying the rings of ancient New Zealand kauri trees, which can record environmental changes over many thousands of years. They found clues about the last time the earth’s magnetic poles switched, around 42,000 years ago. The environmental effects of the magnetic field thinning to a small fraction of normality would have been cataclysmic not only to the environment, but to people who witnessed it. Solar flares, ionized air, aurora, and electrical storms would have been quite frightening.

The researchers theorise that the dramatic environmental changes may have caused early humans to seek more shelter. This could explain the sudden appearance of cave art around the world roughly 42,000 years ago.

"We think that the sharp increases in UV levels, particularly during solar flares, would suddenly make caves very valuable shelters," says Prof. Cooper. "The common cave art motif of red ochre handprints may signal it was being used as sunscreen, a technique still used today by some groups.

"The amazing images created in the caves during this time have been preserved, while other art out in open areas has since eroded, making it appear that art suddenly starts 42,000 years ago."

While the temporary flipping of the magnetic poles (which lasted 800 years) is called the Laschamps Excursion, the researchers in this study refer to the beginning of the flip 42,000 years ago as the Adams Event, in honor of Douglas Adams, who knew the answer to everything is 42.

"The more we looked at the data, the more everything pointed to 42," says Prof. Turney. "It was uncanny.

"Douglas Adams was clearly on to something, after all."

There are a lot more possibilities about the Adams Event and how it may have shaped human history at Phys Org.

(Image credit: Gabinete de Prensa del Gobierno de Cantabria)

The US government, in setting standards for food quality based on appearance, also shaped our perception of what is acceptable to eat. This does not always line up with reality. But having set the standards, the government then had to deal with food producers who took shortcuts to make food appear better to the consumer. What kind of added food coloring is acceptable or necessary? The first three minutes of this video is about the margarine wars, which you may remember from a previous post. But regulating the color of food goes way beyond that. While food safety is of paramount importance, it might be better for the public to get used to the way food looks before it is converted to Instagram quality in order to attract our eyes at the grocery store. -via Digg

Fossils tell us a lot about extinct animals from millions of years ago, but DNA sequencing can tell us a lot more, especially when the fossils they come from are only tiny fragments of the original animal. But DNA begins to degrade as soon as a creature dies. There is no readable DNA from dinosaurs, despite what Jurassic Park would have you believe. But a discovery of some teeth from steppe mammoths (an elephant that lived before the wooly mammoth) is setting records for readable DNA.

The clues come from some incredibly old DNA extracted from a trio of molars uncovered in northeastern Siberia. The oldest is nicknamed the Krestovka mammoth, dated to about 1.2 million years ago. The other two molars are nicknamed the Adycha and Chukochya mammoths, dated to 1 million and 500,000 to 800,000 years old, respectively. The fact that the researchers were able to extract and analyze the DNA from these fossils at all is a landmark. Up until now, the oldest look at ancient genes came from an Ice Age horse that lived over 560,000 years ago. The new mammoth samples double that, taking the title for the oldest DNA yet recovered from fossil remains. “We had to deal with DNA that was significantly more degraded compared to the horse,” says Swedish Museum of Natural History paleogeneticist Love Dalén, an author of the new study.

At any rate, the extracted DNA from the step mammoths revealed some surprising findings, such as their long hair (which makes the illustration above obsolete) and their relationship to other mammoths. Read about the mammoth findings and the feat of extracting million-year-old DNA at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Dmitry Bogdanov)

Venice is one of the world’s premiere places to be for Carnival, the two-week period leading up to Lent. The city goes all out with elaborate costumes, entertainment, and celebrations for the thousands of tourists want to experience a one-of-a-kind Carnival. But this year is different. Italy was hit pretty hard by the coronavirus last year, and no one wants to see a repeat of that.   

The Venetian Carnival in the time of COVID is decidedly different, not least because all public celebrations have been cancelled and are instead being streamed online. Restaurants are closed at 6 p.m. and the city must button up at 10 p.m. by law due to a nationwide curfew thanks to the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Normally, Carnival is a time when many Venetians head out of town due to the influx of tourists, but with travel between Italian regions prohibited and tourism from abroad at a standstill, Carnival this year is very local indeed and for some Venetians, it is the first time in years they have not skipped town. On the last Sunday of the Carnival season, St. Mark’s Square was full of locals. “It’s so odd to only hear Italian being spoken here,” a masked Venetian woman dressed as a courtesan told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know if I like it this way. It just doesn’t seem like Carnival.”

It is a rare privilege to see Venetians celebrate this year’s Carnival alone due to COVID restrictions, and one that—as amazing as it is—no one really wants to see ever happen again. “Of course we can’t deny how magical it is to see Venice like this without the usual onslaught of foreign tourists,” a shop owner who sells hand-pressed paper off St. Mark’s Square told The Daily Beast. “But once in a lifetime is enough.”

Read how the city dealt with restrictions and a lack of tourists this year at The Daily Beast.  -via Digg

While this looping animation by Lord Victor Haegelin shows half a dozen Leonardo DiCaprio movies, it’s far from all of them. He’s acted in 30 feature films! However, you should be able to name all of these, despite the cool but vertigo-inducing transitions. -via Digg

The playground staple known as the giant stride rose in popularity with playgrounds themselves around the turn of the 20th century. It was simply a sturdy pole with a wheel on top, from which hung ropes or chains for children to grab and ride. It was called the giant stride because the centripetal force of the circle allowed a child to take giant strides in their steps.   

It was the most thrilling thing that had ever existed on a playground, before or since. In the words of Canadian history writer Anita May Draper, “those who’ve taken a spin on this ride agree it’s the most exciting one of all.” Denver Post columnist Jack Kisling once eulogized the apparatus as “mad fun.” When Iowa’s Quad-City Times canvassed its older readers for memories of the thing in 1991, they received a torrent of positive mail, with one woman even citing it as evidence that growing up during the Great Depression was “more fun.”

But it came at a ghastly cost: cracked skulls, shattered limbs, horrific lacerations and dead or permanently maimed children. In an age of radium toothpaste, lead-paint baby toys and decorating Christmas trees with asbestos, even this pleasure was deemed too dangerous for the world’s children. This is the forgotten story of the giant stride, the most notorious piece of playground equipment in history.

The effort to remove giant strides from playgrounds began in the 1920s, but the structures lingered on for decades here and there. Read about the hazardous giant stride at the National Post. -via Fark

(Image source: Library of Congress)

There are many kinds of walls, and even among those built on a country estate, designs vary according to their purpose. One rather ingenious wall design is the ha-ha, possibly called that because that’s what people said when they saw how it worked. From the grounds of well-kept estate, it was barely visible, and what you saw was not only minimal, but aesthetically pleasing. What you didn’t see was a barrier that kept animals out of the yard.  

In those early days, before mechanical lawn mowers, sheep and cattle were often allowed to graze on the ground to keep the grassland trimmed. A ha-ha was typically constructed between the estate's gardens and grounds to prevent grazing animals from crossing over to the manicured lawn and gardens adjoining the house, while generating a continuous vista of the garden and landscape beyond. Unlike an ordinary trench, which may turn into a moat or become overgrown with vegetation, a ha-ha keeps the estate ground in an impeccable state by allowing livestock to graze right up to the stonewall.

Find out how a ha-ha works, and see examples of its use at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Tim Dawson)

A manned mission to Mars entails plenty of challenges that don’t pertain to a trip to, say, the moon. How will we sustain astronauts for years at a time, both physically and mentally? It takes a lot of creativity to figure out these things, so NASA is holding a contest to produce innovative ideas for feeding astronauts during a deep space mission.

The Deep Space Food Challenge will identify food production technologies that can:

    Help fill food gaps for a three-year round-trip mission with no resupply

    Feed a crew of four (4) astronauts

    Improve the accessibility of food on Earth, in particular, via production directly in urban centers and in remote and harsh environments

    Achieve the greatest amount of food output with minimal inputs and minimal waste

    Create a variety of palatable, nutritious, and safe foods that requires little processing time for crew members

Yes, there’s money involved. NASA has budgeted $500,000 to split among the top 20 teams. Get an overview of the program at Popular Mechanics. To take part, you must sign up for the Deep Space Food Challenge by May 28.  -via Digg

Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez/public domain

The serial killers you know are those you either remember or have seen a movie about: Richard Ramirez, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. There were others, most of them operating between the late 1960s and the turn of the century. Then the era of serial killers petered out. Why?  

Criminal justice expert Peter Vronksy, whose new book American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years looks to answer just that question, says that more than 80 percent of known American serial killers operated between 1970 and 1999. “It’s an era that was coined as the ‘golden age of serial murder‘ by Harold Schechter, who was a crime historian,” Vronsky tells Rolling Stone. The reason behind this is manyfold — encompassing everything from sociological changes, to biology, to technology, to linguistics.

Over the course of his work, which began in 1979, Vronsky has deduced that serial killers generally develop the personality and compulsion befitting a killer when they’re young — by the time they’re 14, they’re basically fully formed; they generally start killing in their late twenties. As such, he looked back at what was happening in the world when murderers like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy were growing up, and discovered a link: They were all born during wartime. “In cases like, for example, the BTK killer [Dennis Rader], Richard Cottingham [the Torso Killer], their fathers were returning war veterans with PTSD, which [was not a diagnosable illness until] the Eighties,” he says. In short: These children who were already predisposed to violence were raised in potentially violent, likely broken homes.

Intriguing, but not the entire explanation. Not everyone in that situation turned out to be a serial killer. Society has changed in other ways, and the news media also contributed by focusing on sensational stories colored by the public’s perception of the crimes, the perpetrators, and the victims. Frankly, I’ve written too many articles about historical serial killers to believe the late 20th century was truly an anomaly. Read about the ‘golden age of serial murder‘ and the reasons behind it at Rolling Stone.  -via Damn Interesting

The other day I had a brain cramp and Googled “Hawaiian Disney movie” and the results all came back as Moana. Which isn’t set in Hawaii. How can we possibly forget Lilo & Stitch? I, uh, just forgot the name for a minute. The movie is fairly recent, if you consider 19 years ago “recent,” as I do. Lilo & Stitch was a sweet family movie featuring a charmingly disgusting space alien that causes chaos everywhere. I loved it. The movie’s weirdness made it a hit. Still, Screen Junkies are able to pick it apart without ruining a bit of the charm in this Honest Trailer.   

There’s nothing as relatable as a Star Wars analogy to explain something totally unrelated. Randall Munroe goes back to the original Star Wars movie (now called A New Hope) to show how the newfangled COVID-19 vaccines work, at xkcd.

The various parts of the analogy are broken down at Explain xkcd. You’ll learn even more in the discussion at Metafilter.

(ImageCredit: Randall Munroe/xkcd/CC BY-NC 2.5)

The game City Guesser has the same premise of GeoGuessr in that you are to guess where in the world you are. But City Guesser gives you clues in the form of video instead of a still picture. I tried the US only version, and was presented with quite a few towns that I’d never been to. The best strategy in that case is to look for clues like street signs, area codes, and native plants. They aren’t all big cities, either. But it’s a lot of fun! It’s not a competitive game, and I don’t think you are judged on how long you let the video play. The answer key tells you how many miles off you are, which is embarrassing when it’s thousands of miles, but if I got within 100 miles, I considered that a win. I did a lot better after I realized the map you use to guess has a zoom feature! Try it out yourself- you may become addicted to City Guesser.

When you feel you’re pretty good at the game, you can step up to versions at the bottom of the main page that limit your movement and your time, or even a multiplayer version.   -via Kottke