The first manned space flight by a private company began on Sunday when the SpaceX Crew Dragon lifted off with four astronauts bound for the ISS. The astronauts are Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi, plus a very special little fella, The Child that we call Baby Yoda.  

The Baby Yoda plush had a very important role to play during the flight: he was acting as the “zero-gravity indicator,” an object that is brought on board to determine when a microgravity environment has been reached.

See a video of Baby Yoda floating in microgravity, plus a related clip from The Mandalorian at Geeks Are Sexy.

You might not ever get the opportunity to take jetpack lessons, so Tom Scott went through the experience to show us what it's like. Gravity Industries won't let you go off on your own in the first lesson, which is honestly a good call. Just don't aim those jet engines at your feet!

Verona, Italy, is the setting for Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet. In normal times, the city welcomes flocks of tourists who come to soak up the romantic atmosphere and visit the famous balcony to imagine Romeo declaring his love for Juliet. People also write letters to Juliet, 50,000 or so a year. These letters end up at a small archive called the Juliet Club, which is not as well publicized as the balcony, but still welcomes visitors. A group of volunteers answer the letters, with the help of crowdsourcing.  

Through a doorway under a sign for The Juliet Club and up a flight of stairs, the Secretaries of Juliet work out of a room filled with boxes and boxes of letters, the vast majority of which are handwritten and sent via post. Secretaries respond on official Club di Giulietta stationery and sign off as “Secretary of Juliet.” Anyone can drop in for a day to read and reply to letters as Juliet’s Secretary. Upon arrival, you’ll be led to the workroom and given a box of letters in the language of your choice to sort through until you find one that you want to respond to.

Reading through these notes is a veritable portrait of love in the world. There are letters about school-girl crushes and heartbreaking divorces, long-lost loves, indecision about staying or leaving, pregnancy, marriage, death, and everything in between. The tradition of answering them began in the 1930s when the keeper of Juliet’s tomb began collecting the letters left by visitors, and felt so moved by some of then, he decided to start responding.

Read about the Juliet Club and how it works at Messy Nessy Chic.

Even though this is an ad, the Ghanian Coffin Dancers have the same message as always:

Wear a mask... or dance with us!

They have teamed up with Afrisocks to promote mask wearing, specifically masks that match your cool socks! They feature patterns named after Ghanian slang terms.

Boga: A Ghanian living abroad. 

Dumsor: A persistent, irregular, and unpredictable electric power outage.

Tro-tro: Privately owned minibus taxis.

No Wahala: No trouble.

You can order the masks, or matching masks and socks, here.  -via Digg

New Zealand's organization Forest & Bird takes their Bird of the Year (Te Manu Rongonui o Te Tau) competition seriously. When voter fraud was detected in the online poll to crown the winner, the organizers went to work immediately. In just two hours, 1500 votes for the the little spotted kiwi (kiwi pukupuku) came from the same email address.

The illegitimate votes briefly pushed the kiwi pukupuku to the top of the preferred bird leaderboard, but the votes have since been removed from the competition.  

“It's lucky we spotted this little kiwi trying to sneak in an extra 1500 votes under the cover of darkness!” says Laura Keown spokesperson for Bird of the Year.  

Emma Rawson, campaign manager for the little spotted kiwi disavowed the fraudulent rush of votes, saying, "Voter fraud is not the kiwi way." After the votes were counted (and discounted), the critically endangered kākāpō emerged as the winner. Still, they are all good birds. -via Mashable

(Image credit: Flickr user Jake Osborne)

When we are introduced to a character in a movie or TV show, we assume that the character is supposed to be exactly who he is. It is only later that we learn what process the character went through to become the finished product we see. It's difficult to imagine the woman from The Ring as anything but crawling around with her face covered by hair.   

Even before the movies, it's hard to see how anyone would interpret Gollum as a giant. The picture I got from the books was that he was short, emaciated, and terribly gross, even more so than the Andy Serkis version. See what other well-known characters were like in their formative stages at Cracked.

On July 29, 1981, 750 million people tuned in to watch Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, marry a 20-year-old commoner named Diana Spencer. That's more than ever witnessed a previous royal wedding, or any other since. It was an event like no other, lavish and public and oh-so-expensive, and no detail was too small to be covered in the press. However, some of those details carried an ominous tone, as if to foreshadow the unhappiness that would come later.

The two were first introduced in 1977, when Charles—then dating Diana’s older sister, Lady Sarah—attended a party at the Spencer family’s Althorp estate. But as royal biographer Penny Junor tells History Extra, the prince only started viewing Diana as a potential girlfriend in the summer of 1980, when the pair crossed paths through a mutual friend. The 19-year-old nursery teacher’s assistant expressed sympathy for the loss of Charles’ great-uncle, who’d been assassinated by the Irish Republican Army the year prior, and in doing so, “really touched a nerve in Charles,” according to Junor. “[S]he said just the right thing to him, at the right moment, and he was moved by her.”

Under pressure to settle down after years of playing the field (including with on-again, off-again lover Camilla), the prince invited Diana to spend a weekend at his family’s holiday estate, Balmoral. During this “audition,” in the words of Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller, Charles’ relatives deemed the demure yet lively young woman an ideal candidate for marriage. Of both impeachable lineage and character, she was, most importantly to the royal family, a virgin “with malleable qualities necessary for a future queen,” writes Miller.

The two barely knew each other, but Diana checked off all the boxes for the role of future queen and mother to royalty. Read about the wedding of the century at Smithsonian.

The Wobble Dog 9003i is a machine specifically designed to test the wobbliness of hot dogs, which YouTuber Atomic Shrimp considers to be their most important feature. If the idea of wobbly hot dogs makes you giggle inside just a little, you’ll want to see them in action. This video is an excerpt edited from a much longer video in which our host studies canned hot dogs. -via Kottke

Star City, Russia, is home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. Under Soviet rule, the existence of the town was a state secret. It is still a closed city, with unauthorized visitors prohibited, but people come and go in support of the country’s space program. In April, the coronavirus found its way into the city, and into the space center. Dr. Natalya Lebedeva headed the ambulance service for Star City’s medical clinic. The paramedics she supervised were among the first known victims of the virus, which is understandable as they come into close contact with sick people, but the authorities were looking for someone to blame for the outbreak. Lebedeva herself fell ill, and was hospitalized.  

Her illness wasn’t severe. “Her temperature was a little over 37 degrees,” or 98.6 Fahrenheit, and “her lungs were affected only to a small degree,” her friend Antropova said.

During several calls from the ward, Lebedeva repeatedly said that she was being blamed for being the source of the outbreak, a friend said. “She called me and said … ‘I am going to be jailed. It’s the end for me.’”

“I said … ‘How were you supposed to have prevented this, how? How? Come on. What are you, God?’” the friend recalled.

But Lebedeva was in tears. She said she had been contacted by investigators from the police.

Lebedava did not survive the outbreak, but she didn’t die of COVID. Read the account of Star City’s ambulance service director in a special report at Reuters.   -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flicker user Samantha Cristoforetti)

Catherine Prowse made the animated short Nobody is Normal for the charity Childline. It emphasizes that no matter how weird you feel, you aren't the only one. We adults know that, but we aren't always good at relaying the concept to young people. Beside all that, the animation is adorably goofy. -via Laughing Squid

You don't really have to be a picky eater to fall into the trap of eating the same meals more often than you should. I can tell you from experience that working at a desk job, living alone, and generally being too busy to think about your diet can lead to easy but monotonous meals. The simplest form of nutrition is to eat a variety of different foods, but how bad can a monotonous series of meals really be? That depends on what's in the things you eat every day. Lifehacker offers a short guide to judging the nutritional value of what you eat, and tips for breaking out of the habit of eating the same thing every day.

You turn to your partner and ask "What are you thinking?" and they say, "Nothing." It's the set up for many a joke, but sometimes it's true, and people who cannot ever stop thinking can't wrap their heads around it. Sadly, there are people who suffer from Auto-Activation Deficit (AAD) who not only go through blank periods, but cannot restart the process of thinking on their own.

One day, a lively and successful businessman was bitten by a wasp, triggering an unexpected encephalopathy of the brain. Afterwards, he was a changed man, doing almost nothing all day and expressing little interest in anyone else. But this apathy could be swiftly reversed with even the tiniest stimulation from another human being – offering a newspaper or challenging him to a game of bridge, for example. It's as if the man could react, but not act.

Cases similar to this one have been documented in the medical literature. There was a patient who at one point laid on his bed for thirty minutes with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. When asked what he was doing, he matter-of-factly responded, "I am waiting for a light". Another person spent 45 minutes standing with his hands on a lawn mower, frozen and unable to move. But when prompted by his son to cut the grass, he immediately sprang into action. A man referred to as Mr. M in a case report required external prodding for all of his daily activities, even eating. On one occasion he almost got burned by staying too long in the shower until he was told to turn the water off.

Read about Auto-Activation Deficit at Real Clear Science. -via Damn Interesting

(Image source: Pixabay)

Science fiction stretches our minds and imaginations by presenting the possibility of new worlds full of very different beings and fantastic technology. Some stories are wondrous and hopeful, while others are terrifying and make us glad to be where we are instead. What kinds of these stories do you like best? We often see plots, twists, and tropes used over and over, mainly because they thrill us and make us want to revisit these worlds. Sure, they often require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but we've become accustomed to that in order to be entertained.

Here are the sci-fi tropes that have stuck around because they work, whether it’s making first contact with an alien species, using a food replicator, or hearing a spaceship go “kaboom!” We’ve also included a few tired, often bigoted tropes that should be jettisoned into the farthest reaches of space.

Check out the list at io9 and see if you agree. There are plenty of video examples to keep you entertained.

It's hard for British department store John Lewis to top their previous Christmas ads for grabbing at your heartstrings, but this year's entry is sweet. Eight different artists contributed their varying styles for an ad that benefits two UK charities. -via Mashable

It took Disney until 2009 to make a movie about a Black princess, but history is full of notable women of royal African ancestry or marriage who left a mark on society. They just aren't as well-known as they should be. Take Nigerian princess Omo-Oba Adenrele Ademola of Abeokuta.   

Princess of Nigeria! Princess of nursing! There’s so much to love about Ademola, but her achievements as a healthcare worker especially resonate in 2020. She was the daughter of Alake of Abeokuta, a king of southern Nigeria, which meant that she had to juggle her role as princess abroad –and nursing school student – when she moved to London at 22-years-old.

She became a significant figure in nursing at at St Saviour’s ward at Guy’s Hospital in London and “a glowing role model for the empire”. The British government commissioned a documentary film on her entitled ‘Nurse Ademola’ in the 1940s, but the footage is now considered as a lost film. Throughout their research, The National Archives notes that “five variations of her name have been encountered, even on official records, confusing her presence in the archives, possibly even with others who shared her surname. Such challenges are rife when examining black populations and represent a larger issue: the failure to consider black people/black histories a priority. Contemporarily, the lives of black people were considered ‘second-class’ and therefore detail and accuracy in records were deemed unnecessary”. The research continues.

Messy Messy Chic introduces us to eight Black princesses with fascinating stories, including an American who lived the story of Coming to America.