The world's nuclear waste facilities are buried underground and pretty well documented. But what about thousands of years from now, when it will still be radioactive, but there's a good possibility that our languages and cultures will have completely changed, and our present documentation is inaccessible? How will we warn future civilizations away from such dangerous sites? That question was posed to a group of scientists in the 1990s, and their brainstormed ideas were imaginative and often quite weird. Could artificial intelligence do any better? Janelle Shane (previously at Neatorama) trained a neural network on the question by feeding it the human-generated ideas. The ideas that the algorithm came back with were quite bonkers. They range from those that would more likely attract people,

A series of very-large-scale sculptures of robots, which would be visually striking and memorable from a distance.

to the unlikely,

A massive device that would alter the flow of time and gravity in the vicinity.

to the terrifying.

A large cluster of enormous worms growing from a rocky surface, extruding bubbling fluid, and emitting audible chittering noises.

Read more of the suggestions generated by artificial intelligence at AI Weirdness. -via Metafilter

You may have been this artwork by Nikkolas Smith before on the 'net, but now it's a permanent part of the Downtown Disney shopping district at Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. It depicts the late Chadwick Boseman dressed as the superhero Black Panther sharing the Wakanda salute with a child in a hospital gown and Black Panther mask.  

“This one is special. My King Chad tribute is now on a wall on display at Downtown Disney,” he wrote. “It is a full circle moment for me: my final two projects as a Disney Imagineer last summer were working on the children’s hospital project and the Avengers Campus.”

The child in the mural is wearing a hospital gown, to honor the late “Black Panther” star who visited children with cancer at St. Jude campus, while waging a private battle with the disease. The installation is titled “King Chad.”

Read more about the artwork at Variety. -via reddit

Pictured: Resurrectionists breaking at least one rule.

We've posted plenty of accounts of grave robbers, body-snatchers, and resurrectionists, but never a guide on how to do it ...not that we would ever encourage or even condone such activities. However, before the rise of postmortem donations, medical schools needed cadavers for anatomy class, and a profession arose to provide those corpses. A list of dos and don't from that profession can be interesting, edifying, or a complete turn off. You decide. Here's a sample.

3. Never Take The Burial Clothes

This is perhaps the most important of all body snatching rules. Fail to follow this one, and you could expect to be punished accordingly. Your crime would quickly escalate from a misdemeanor to a felony.

I’ve written a post highlighting the main punishments that body snatchers received if they were caught and you can read it here, but, by stripping the cadaver of all it’s ‘property’, that is a burial shroud, jewelry if any, plus anything that was removable, you could then only be accused of stealing a dead body.

And a dead body didn’t belong to anyone.

Read the rest of the explanation of that rule plus four other helpful hints for grave robbers at Digging Up 1800. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Hablot Knight Browne)

Over the past 30 years, we've marveled at how astronomers can detect and collect data on exoplanets outside of our solar system. But all the exoplanets found so far have been in our Milky Way galaxy. That is, until data detected by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2012 was analyzed and interpreted.

Now Rosanne Di Stefano at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics along with several colleagues, say they have found a candidate planet in the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy some 23 million light years from Earth near the constellation of Ursa Major. This alien world, christened M51-ULS-1b, is probably slightly smaller than Saturn and orbits a binary system at a distance of perhaps ten times Earth’s distance from the Sun.

The observation was possible because of a special set of conditions. The planet’s host binary system consists of a neutron star or black hole which is devouring a massive nearby star at a huge rate. The infall of stardust releases huge amounts of energy, making this system one of brightest sources of X-rays in the entire Whirlpool Galaxy. Indeed, its X-ray luminosity is roughly a million times brighter than the entire output of the Sun at all wavelengths.

Now wait a minute. This exoplanet is 23 million light years away, so what they discovered is that there was a planet there 23 million years ago. In astronomic terms, it may as well be today, since we couldn't have detected it any earlier because X-rays travel at the same speed as visible light. At any rate, a binary system with a black hole eating a star is pretty darn neat, and the story of how astronomers detected this planet amid all that data is pretty neat, too. Read that story at Discover magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

As part of their continuing series on job secrets, Mental Floss talked to a couple of astronauts about what that important and glamorous job is really like. Mike Massimino, former NASA astronaut and professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, and Garrett Reisman, former NASA astronaut and the director of space operations at SpaceX's headquarters tell us about getting the job, training for the job, and some of the things you might expect when you are an astronaut.

Even in a place as tight as a space station, astronauts still manage to misplace their belongings. Thanks to the lack of gravity, anything they let go of immediately drifts away, which can cause problems when they’re not paying attention. Massimino recalls one incident that happened to his crewmate Mike Good: "He had his grandfather’s watch with him, and he comes up to me and goes, 'Mass, I can’t find the watch.' We’re looking all over the place and I stop after a minute and go, 'Mike, it’s inside here somewhere.'"

They eventually found it trapped inside the airlock. The air filter is another common place where lost items end up: Without gravity interfering, the air flow will carry any floating objects there. "One thing we would say is, 'If you can’t find something, just wait,'" Massimino says. "You'd wake up in the morning and look at the filter and see like aspirin and a piece of Velcro or something, because everything eventually would get there."

Read the rest of the 11 secrets of the profession of astronaut at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center)

Matt Brockman played trumpet in a duet with himself. It's a medley of all kinds of theme songs you know and love. I suggest that you listen without watching to see how many of these tunes you can name, and then watch with the video playing behind him to reveal them all. -via Digg

Midori Naka was a popular stage actress in Japan. She and her troupe were in Hiroshima in August of 1945 when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Naka was less than a mile from the blast. She survived the explosion, but died 18 days later and was the first person ever whose cause of death was listed as radiation poisoning. Specimens of her tissues were taken during the autopsy, as Japanese, and later American, scientists wanted to understand what the new weapons could do to a human being. These specimens are now in the possession of Hiroshima University’s Research Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine.

It might seem obvious that Naka’s remains would be in Hiroshima, and in an institution devoted to understanding and treating radiation sickness. But those two glass jars arrived there only by a strange and circuitous route, after having spent decades abroad along with thousands of other body parts, wet specimens, and autopsy materials from the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a unique collection that existed in a medical and political gray area. Like the relics of saints, these body parts took on a strange afterlife: They resonated with invisible power, and their significance changed over time as they were moved through different locations and contexts. Irreplaceable and beyond value, they were coveted, fought over, held up as a singular archive of a world-changing event, and then, gradually, mostly forgotten.

The remains of atomic bomb victims were useful to study, but they were also human remains that had a spiritual tie to their families and to Japan. Read the story of the body parts taken from the first atomic bomb victims at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Delphine Lee for Atlas Obscura)

Teachers will occasionally ask students to share something about themselves with the class, often in the mode of telling a "fun fact" or maybe in the game "two truths and a lie." The thing about students is that they are young, and sometimes more honest than they should be. Redditor Kriss0509 asked teachers to share those kinds of stories, and the answers will make you laugh or cringe or both.   

My first year, as an earnest and ideological teacher in a very rough underserved area, I got all the students in a circle on the first day to talk about what we’d done that summer. I pointed to a student who’d been engaged w me before class and said, “what did you do this summer that could inspire us?” His answer: “I did the last 2 months of a sentence for stealing a car.”

Um. I hadn’t expected that. So I pointed to another student and said, “OK! That’s great! Let’s talk about what you did this summer!”

That student said, “YES. I had such a good summer. I went to camp and...[laughing] lemme stop lying. I did the last 2 months of a sentence with that guy cause I stole that car w him.”

-markfromhtx

Not a teacher, but on the first day of 9th grade we had to form a circle and say one thing about ourselves that we thought was unique. When it was this dudes turn (lets call him mike) Mike stands up and says in a really serious tone goes '' My mom and dad grow weed''

His house got raided the next day and his dad got arrested smh

-RatedRSoopastar

Read the entire reddit thread here, or you can find a ranked list of the 30 best answers at Bored Panda. 

(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user Howard County Library System)

YouTuber Likeonions remixed Star Wars (now known as A New Hope) as a 1960s-style television intro. Specifically, the introduction to the series Mission Impossible. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to watch and enjoy the video before it self-destructs. -via Geeks Are Sexy

High school student Gracie Cunningham recently went viral with a TikTok video asking about math: how does one define math, is it real, and what is it good for? While some derided her video, mathematicians admit those are profound questions that they themselves struggle with. Is math a science, a part of science, or something on a completely different plane? The comic above illustrates, but does not answer, this conundrum. There are different schools of thought about the nature of math- some consider it a natural thing that we have discovered, while others say it was invented.

Some scholars feel very strongly that mathematical truths are “out there,” waiting to be discovered—a position known as Platonism. It takes its name from the ancient Greek thinker Plato, who imagined that mathematical truths inhabit a world of their own—not a physical world, but rather a non-physical realm of unchanging perfection; a realm that exists outside of space and time. Roger Penrose, the renowned British mathematical physicist, is a staunch Platonist. In The Emperor’s New Mind, he wrote that there appears “to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided towards some external truth—a truth which has a reality of its own...”

Many mathematicians seem to support this view. The things they’ve discovered over the centuries—that there is no highest prime number; that the square root of two is an irrational number; that the number pi, when expressed as a decimal, goes on forever—seem to be eternal truths, independent of the minds that found them. If we were to one day encounter intelligent aliens from another galaxy, they would not share our language or culture, but, the Platonist would argue, they might very well have made these same mathematical discoveries.

The converse view is empiricism, in which scientists deal with things they can observe. This school of thought regards the idea that "a realm that exists outside of space and time" borders on religion and has no place in science. However, they know that math is useful for scientific observations. And there is disagreement about whether our math would be understood by alien civilizations. Read about the complexity of defining math at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Randall Munroe at xkcd)

A small but ornately-styled wooden church 80 kilometers from Kyiv is the unlikely home of a museum dedicated to the history of the Soviet space program. Visitors are often surprised when they enter to find they are in Ukraine's Museum of Space Exploration instead of a church. When I first heard about it, I thought it was a genius idea for preserving the old church architecture by finding a new use and a new sponsor for the building. But the reason the museum is there is much more complicated. The church was never actually abandoned, although the museum exhibits have been there since 1979. Journalist Sébastien Gobert explains.  

The building is a physical manifestation of the Soviets’ attempt to eliminate religion and replace it with space dreams. For now, it looks like the building will remain a museum. Today, the museum’s uncertain future reflects the religious tensions in the country, sparked by the Ukrainian Othodox Church’s split from the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, one of the biggest schisms in Christian history.

As Gobert explains: “Local church authorities have struggled to have [the museum] back as a church. It has become even more complicated because of the Ukrainian church’s feud: the church used to be claimed by the Moscow patriarchate. Now it is claimed by the newly established church of Ukraine. The Moscow patriarchate local priest kind of gave up on his claim provided it does not go to the church of Ukraine. ‘Better a museum than schismatics’, father Feodossiy said.”

Take a look inside the Museum of Space Exploration at The Calvert Journal. -via Nag on the Lake

Justin Pinkney and Doron Adler have been working on a project called Toonify, which can turn a photographic face into a cartoon character. It's not yet perfected, but the story behind how they did it is kinda neat. The normal way to train an algorithm to do this would involve a large dataset of portraits and their corresponding cartoon characters. Since that does not exist (yet), they had to start from scratch and create such a dataset.

First, Doron Adler trained a StyleGAN model—the same tech behind This Person Does Not Exist, a site which randomly spits out photorealistic people that, as the name implies, are entirely computer generated—on Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks characters so it could recognize features are quintessentially cartoony. The model then automatically selected fake people from the This Person Does Not Exist universe and augmented them with those cartoon features. But StyleGAN globbed all the styles from computer generates images, cartoons, and photographs together equally, which meant that the same person might have tufts of realistic hair, CGI meatball cheeks, and eerily flat hand-drawn eyes.

This is where Justin Pinkney came in with his model, which they blended with Adler’s.

Pinkney developed a “layer-swapping” process to parse out the desirable characteristics from each image: the cartoon half affects only the structure of the resulting toonified face, while the human half contributes the lighting and other high-resolution details.

There's a lot more to it, of course. Is there an app where I can make my own face into a cartoon? Yes, but you can't do it (yet). First, the program doesn't use your face. It will select a computer-generated photorealistic face from the This Person Does Not Exist library that looks like you -and the program is pretty good at that, although it takes some time. Second, when they launched the online app, so many people invested the necessary time to try it that they couldn't afford the bandwidth bill, so they took it down. Adler and Pinkney hope to work out the kinks and make it available to the rest of us soon. Read the story at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Justin Pinkney and Doron Adler)

Now that autumn is here, you may wonder how trick-or treating can work in the era of social distancing. Matt Thompson figured out a way to deliver candy to costumed children without getting close to them- with a zip line! He recruited friends and neighbors to dress up their kids to demonstrate how it will work in this video. We assume that these people will be wearing face masks when everyone is out trick-or-treating. -via Laughing Squid

When Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, the Americas were not a sparsely-populated wilderness ready to be exploited. However, by the time serious colonial settlement began, a majority of the native people had succumbed to diseases the Europeans introduced, which made them easier to conquer. A plague called cocoliztli wiped out 80% of the Aztecs in the 16th century, opening the door for Spanish rule. Aztec authors wrote about the effects of the infectious disease that destroyed their defenses against invaders. Some of these accounts still survive. A writer thought to be Don Mateo Sánchez said,

On the first day of August [of 1576] the great sickness began here in Techamachalco. It was really strong; there was no resisting. At the end of August began the processions because of the sickness. They finished on the ninth day. Because of it, many people died, young men and women, those who were old men and women, or children… When the month of October began, thirty people had been buried. In just two or three days they would die… They lost their senses. They thought of just anything and would die.

Read about the epidemics of colonial Mexico and the accounts left by the Aztecs at Jstor Daily.  -via Digg

The guys at Dip Your Car tried an experiment in which they painted a car lime green, then added five coats of black thermochromic paint. Thermochromic means it loses color with the application of heat. After the paint dried, they threw buckets of hot water on the car to see what would happen. Skip ahead to 5:15 to watch the fun. Then if you're interested, you can go back to the beginning to get a thorough explanation. It's fun to watch, but they really should have shown what engine heat does to the appearance. One suspects that they used a non-running car for the experiment. Would the air temperature have an affect? If so, the car would be green on sunny summer days and black at night or in winter or rain. Also, before you consider this for your car, keep in mind that the thermochromic effect is not all that durable over time. -via Boing Boing