This year's LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special will feature time travel, as the characters from the final trilogy go back to meet the characters from the original trilogy, plus all the other Star Wars properties. As you'll see in this trailer, we even get a paradox when Solo meets Han. Will Rey make it back to her own timeline in time to celebrate Life day? How could she not? The special will begin streaming on Disney+ on November 17. -via Geeks Are Sexy

If you're fired from your job for fighting with the boss or using drugs, it rarely affects anyone outside the family or workplace. But on a successful TV show, an actor quitting or getting fired means his character must move out of town or more likely, dramatically get killed off. Or the producers may get creative, as in the case above. But there was a very important character who continued on after the actor bowed out.

Who knew that one of the main features of the Doctor was born from a practical production reason instead of an existing mythology? But that's why we still have Doctor Who today. See a pictofacts list of TV characters and the reasons they left their shows at Cracked.

We know from an earlier video that Maple loves music. Here she is, emerging into the sunlight as her buddy Acoustic Trench plays the Beatles hit on kalimba. There's no suspense or even a plot, but it's such a lovely moment that it should be shared. -via a comment at Metafilter

Haines, Alaska, is home to 2,500 people and about 500 eagles who live there year-round. But in November, up to 3,000 bald eagles show up! A geologic anomaly means that the nearby Chilkat River is one of the last places the surface water freezes, so eagles go there to catch salmon that are no longer available elsewhere. The town makes the most of it, hosting birdwatchers year-round and hosting a festival in November.  

One of those locals is Pam Randles, a now-retired high school science teacher and naturalist guide in Haines. Randles began counting the fall eagle migration 20 years ago as part of her teaching curriculum, and can’t quit.

“I watched them for so many years, I just have to go out to look,” she admits. On an overcast afternoon in mid-October, Randles drives her rig roughly 12 miles out to the Chilkoot River on the other of the peninsula, one of three rivers spawning salmon swim up before ending in the Chilkat River. Her binoculars bounce over potholes on the passenger seat.

“The eagles were everywhere, sitting in the trees waiting for the tides to go down so they could get some fish,” Randles recounts later that day. She laughs, describing an opportunist eagle who once snatched a fisherman’s pole with pink on the line. “It’s so cool to see them.”

Read about the yearly bald eagle meeting at Smithsonian.

The results of the election in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, have been announced. The new mayor is Wilbur, the French bulldog. With 13,143 votes, Wilbur has unseated mayor Brynneth Pawltro, who has been in office since 2016. Wilbur defeated two opponents in the vote, but those also-rans will be rewarded with the title of Rabbit Hash Ambassador. Wilbur is ready and eager to assume his duties.

Since 1998, the mayor of Rabbit Hash has been a dog. Rabbit Hash’s canine mayors don’t make legislative decisions for the town, which is owned by the Rabbit Hash Historical Society, but their elections raise money to keep the town’s historic buildings in good condition.

The new mayor already has an official Facebook page in order to update fans on the goings-on in Rabbit Hash. -via reddit

(Image credit: Mayor Wilbur of Rabbit Hash KY)

For the second year in a row, despite many people agreeing, I have been the only one at work to dress up for Halloween pic.twitter.com/0IqXpKwunH

— Melanie Bracewell (@meladoodle) October 30, 2018

Have you ever had a dream that you wore an elaborate Halloween costume to school or work, and found you were the only one who dressed up? The reason you had this anxiety is because it happens a lot. The reason the other people didn't dress up for the occasion is probably because they had this same anxiety. This goes for "crazy hair day" and other promotions as well. If it happens, the best thing to do is have fun anyway and make sure to take pictures.

(Image credit: IKnowForAFactThatYouDontParty)

Don't ever let your anxiety, or the hangups of other people, keep you from being a pig or a carrot on the one day a year when it is totally appropriate to be something ridiculous. We will look forward to your posts about it someday after the trauma wears off. See 44 incidences in which only one person dressed up at Bored Panda.

While the post title seems quite normal for a Cyriak video, that's not what this is. Surrealist animator Cyriak Harris suffered heart attack a few days ago. He related the story at Twitter.

So, I had a heart attack the other day. It was horrible. Don't ever have a heart attack. If you want to know what one feels like, imagine an elephant standing on your chest until the pain spreads up through your jaws like you have toothache in all your teeth at the same time

— cyriak harris (@cyriakharris) November 4, 2020

The hominins who became Neanderthals ventured out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans followed, and settled in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. When Homo sapiens joined them, it's a stretch to think that Neanderthals welcomed them with open arms. Rather than just co-existing, even at arm's length, Nicholas R. Longrich of the University of Bath contends that they were more likely to have been at war for tens of thousands of years. He looks at the general nature of similar species and at the evidence left behind.  

Prehistoric warfare leaves tell-tale signs. A club to the head is an efficient way to kill – clubs are fast, powerful, precise weapons – so prehistoric Homo sapiens frequently show trauma to the skull. So too do Neanderthals.

Another sign of warfare is the parry fracture, a break to the lower arm caused by warding off blows. Neanderthals also show a lot of broken arms. At least one Neanderthal, from Shanidar Cave in Iraq, was impaled by a spear to the chest. Trauma was especially common in young Neanderthal males, as were deaths. Some injuries could have been sustained in hunting, but the patterns match those predicted for a people engaged in intertribal warfare – small-scale but intense, prolonged conflict, wars dominated by guerrilla-style raids and ambushes, with rarer battles.

It is apparent that Homo sapiens eventually won the war, although Homo neanderthalis left traces in our DNA. Read the argument for the long-running battle between early humans at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Charles R. Knight)

Jennifer George loves to watch the wildlife in her Southern California backyard, and there's nothing to draw a variety of critters like a nice drink of clean water. She set up a fountain and a camera in order to catch what goes on when she's not watching. Everyone came- predator and prey, birds, reptiles, and mammals!  You can see many more fountain clips at George's Instagram page, including a bobcat that only comes at night. -via Digg

Children learn to communicate at an astonishing rate when they are young and interacting with family members. They become fluent quickly, even if they are exposed to several different languages. But does that innate drive to communicate depend completely on exposure? That's a question that has always puzzled us, although it was approached differently in the past. The ingrained idea in ancient times was that humans have a "natural" language, and proposed experiments aimed at finding out which language that is, which would obviously indicate that language's superiority.  

The earliest such account comes from Herodotus, who described a supposed experiment by Psamtik I (who ruled Egypt from 664-610 BCE). Psamtik is said to have placed two newborns in the care of a shepherd with instructions to raise the children in isolation, with goats to provide milk as needed and no exposure to human speech. The goal was to determine whether the Egyptians or the Phrygians were the “eldest of all men” by observing whether these isolated children grew to speak the Egyptian or Phrygian language. According to legend, when the children were brought before Psamtik, they held out their hands and cried “becos”, the Phrygian word for bread. This was taken as evidence that the Phyrgians, rather than the Egyptians, were the oldest people. It is unlikely that these events unfolded exactly as described by Herodotus, but it does show that our fascination with the origins of language dates back thousands of years.

Such experiments are quite unethical, as confirmed by cases of children who were discovered to have been raised in abusive isolation situations. These children have profound language difficulties, but due to neglect, they have a host of other problems as well. However, there was a case in Nicaragua where children were cared for but raised in language-deficient circumstances, and they managed to build their own language. Read about that astonishing scenario and more at Today I Found Out.

(Unrelated image credit: Yılmaz Kilim)

President Woodrow Wilson went to France for the Paris Peace Conference, in which the Allies set up the terms for the end of World War I. He was the first US president to visit Europe while in office, which seems strange today for a couple of reasons: first, all modern American presidents visit Europe while in office, and second, Europe currently doesn't allow Americans to visit at all because there's a pandemic. There was also a pandemic in 1919, and soon after the conference began, Wilson fell ill with the flu.    

Behind closed doors at the Hôtel du Prince Murat, the situation was grave. The president lay in bed, wracked with coughing fits, diarrhea, and high fever, while his staff tried to make sense of his delirious rantings. As chief usher Irwin Hoover recalled, they simply couldn’t convince Wilson that the hotel was not, as he insisted, teeming with French spies.

“About this time he also acquired a peculiar notion he was personally responsible for all the property in the furnished place he was occupying,” Hoover said. (Apparently, Smithsonian reports, Wilson thought some furniture had gone missing, though it hadn’t moved at all.) “Coming from the President, whom we all knew so well, these were very funny things, and we could but surmise that something queer was happening in his mind.”

The president's true condition was kept secret from the public. Wilson eventually rejoined the Peace Conference, but his ineffectiveness there had lasting consequences for the rest of the 20th century. Was is because of his illness? Read about President Woodrow Wilson's personal experience with the flu pandemic at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Library of Congress)

The 2004 movie National Treasure made no sense whatsoever, but it was an action film that starred Nicolas Cage. As Screen Junkies points out, it also checks off all the necessary formula points for a blockbuster hit, so it didn't have to make sense. Now, if you really liked National Treasure, you could pretend that it was a satire of action movies that pretended to be deep, but if you were honest about it, you'd just say it was fun ride.

The Allies were using jellied gasoline as an incendiary weapon at the beginning of World War II, but a shortage of the necessary ingredient latex drove the search for a substitute. That's when napalm was developed. We tend to associate napalm with the Vietnam War, but the fearsome fuel that stuck to whatever it touched was also used in World War II and the Korean War.

In 1942, Louis Fieser and his team became the first to develop such an alternative—a synthetic powdery compound, which when mixed with gasoline turns into an extremely sticky and inflammable substance. They named it napalm, from the words “naphthenic acid” and “palmitic acid”, the two chief constituents of the agent.

Napalm was first tested on a football field near the Harvard Business School. Later tests were carried out at Jefferson Proving Ground on derelict farm buildings. But more extensive testing was needed in order to determine the effectiveness of the weapon against German and Japanese cities.

To do that, the military built an entire village in the Utah desert, filled with creepily authentic reproductions of German and Japanese houses. Read about the testing village and the destruction it enabled at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: US Army)

It's long been a given among Star Wars fans that stormtroopers have terrible aim. This is, of course, necessary to keep the main protagonists alive, but over all these decades it's become altogether ridiculous. Obi-Wan said, "Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise," but he said a lot of things that weren't so. Even The Mandalorian got into the spirit with a scene that brings the trope into the Star Wars canon. Auralnauts took that scene and others and obliterated the fourth wall to explore how self-aware stormtroopers really are. Contains NSFW language. -via Geekologie

We've reached the point where Christmas season begins as soon as Halloween is over. There are three houses on my drive home with holiday lights up already. In fact, I spent Halloween evening watching a Hallmark Christmas movie (and now I feel as if I have seen them all). If you want some help getting into the Christmas spirit, you could pull up a movie from Christmases past, using a handy list from Esquire. It's a very arguable list; some of them are just horrible, others appear to be ranked by how much "Christmas" is included in the film. However, you probably will agree that the top fifteen or so deserve to be there. Otherwise, you might find a movie you've never seen and be intrigued enough to try it out- quite a few have trailers posted. Check them all out here.  -via Digg