You've seen quite a few time-lapse videos of plants sprouting and growing, and it's always delightful. Here we have a compilation of all kinds of different plants reaching for the sunshine, set to the tune of "Growing Up is Just a Trap" performed by Martin Carlberg featuring Annica Svensson. The music makes it exceedingly pleasant. -via Laughing Squid

The end of World War II played out during the summer of 1945, 75 years ago now. Several different dates are commemorated: VE Day (May 8), VJ Day (August 14), and the formal ceremony of surrender staged on September 2, among others. That final ritual was staged by General MacArthur for the cameras and the history books. No detail would be overlooked.   

The September 2, 1945, ceremony aboard the 45,000-ton battleship USS Missouri was a logistical nightmare for MacArthur’s staff and the ship’s crew. Men scrubbed the warship white-glove spotless. Hard-boiled combat leaders played the role of exasperated headmasters, fretting over the appearance, placement, and proper behavior of thousands of marines and sailors scheduled to be in attendance. The operation involved hundreds of documents, dignitaries, and delegates, not to mention the precise coordination of four U.S. destroyers deployed as water taxis for shuttling VIPs to the Missouri. On top of that, America’s fighting forces had to attend to the needs of 225 news correspondents and 75 photographers.

Read how the US pulled out all the stops for the photo op that documented Japan's surrender at Air & Space magazine.

(Image credit: National Archives)

Watch a Gundam bust a move to a medley of Michael Jackson songs in this super smooth stop-motion video. What dance is he doing? The Robot, of course! Or, more straightforwardly, here's a robot imitating a dancer who used to dance like a robot, created by animator Moouyo. -via reddit

Japanese Twitter user YagyouNEKO is an anime fan and a cat daddy. He also makes costumes for his two very patient cats, who are great models! Many of the costumes are from Studio Ghibli films, which you will probably recognize.

 

See a ranked list of the best YagyouNEKO cat costumes at Bored Panda, and follow his ongoing projects at Twitter.

Chadwick Boseman portrayed iconic historical figures like Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and Thurgood Marshall in movies, but was most familiar to audiences as King T'Challah, aka the Black Panther. Marvel Entertainment released this moving tribute to Boseman, who died Friday at age 43 after a four-year battle with cancer. -via Uproxx

Over thousands of years, Stonehenge has been used as a temple, a memorial, a burial ground, and plenty of other things. It may also have been an amphitheater of sorts. New research shows that acoustics of the original structure are such that sound produced inside the stone circle was amplified people inside, and barely audible to anyone outside the circle. A team of researchers reconstructed what is believed to be the original structure of the monument at 1/12 scale and put it inside an acoustic chamber.  

Despite many gaps between stones, sounds briefly lingered inside Stonehenge Lego, the team found. Reverberation time, a measure of the time it takes sound to decay by 60 decibels, averaged about 0.6 seconds inside the model for mid-frequency sounds. That effect would have boosted the ability to hear voices and enhanced sounds of drums or other musical instruments, Cox says. For comparison, reverberation time reaches about 0.4 seconds in a living room, around two seconds in a large concert hall and roughly eight seconds in a large cathedral.

Stonehenge Lego did not project sounds into the surrounding area or boost the quality of sounds coming from external speakers. And sounds did not echo in the scale model. Inner groups of simulated stones obscured and scattered sounds reflected off the outer sarsen circle, blocking echo formation.

Read more about the experiment at ScienceNews.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Acoustics Research Centre/Univ. of Salford)

You may have heard at one time or another that dogs are colorblind. It's more complicated than that; they see colors, but not all the same colors we see. It's the same with cats, and there's a reason for it.  

From a physiology standpoint, the unique view comes down to types of light receptors in the eye itself. “Because dogs and cats are predators, they don’t have to be able to tell the difference between some similar shades,” Houpt explains. “As primates, we have to know whether that persimmon is ripe or not. We’re better at color discrimination in order to find the correct foods.” In other words, a grey rabbit is just as tasty as a brown one.

When it comes to clarity, humans also have an advantage over our domesticated pals. If a dog can make out an object from 20 feet away, a human can see it from 60 feet. The difference is even more pronounced for cats—what a cat can see from 20 feet, a human can see from 100 or even 200 feet out. Our pets aren’t built to process crystal clear images of the world around them.

But that doesn't necessarily handicap a dog or cat. They excel in other senses, and even other facets of their vision. Read about the differences between our vision and our pets' vision at Popular Science. -via Digg

(Image credit: Stan Horaczek)

Gargoyles are stone waterspouts that direct water away from the roofs of large buildings such as cathedrals. They were often intricately carved into the forms of animals, real or legendary, as symbols. On cathedrals, these were often symbolic of the seven deadly sins.

Barcelona Cathedral has this marvellous goat gargoyle. Like many of the animals featured here it had a duality of nature in the eyes of medieval Christians. On one side they were thought to be Christ-like because of their ability to find food on steep mountainsides and nourish themselves from almost nothing (the Feeding of the Five Thousand springs immediately to mind as a parallel). On the other hand they were seen as venal creatures and were often perceived to be a symbol of lust – yet another one of those seven deadly sins. Plus, of course, which animal would you most naturally associate with Satan?

But gargoyles also took the forms of chimeras, dragons, and other fantastical creatures that served as a warning to those who saw them. And yes, medieval gargoyles were also carved in the forms of people, often those who were being punished for their sins. See a roundup of gargoyles and their meanings at Kuriositas.

(Image credit: Flickr user Son of Groucho)

While you're grocery shopping after a long day of work, and you think about what's for dinner, suddenly the smell of rotisserie chicken hits you. That whole cooked bird is cheaper than a raw one, and will save you a lot of cooking time. And they're pretty tasty, too! Yeah, it might seem like the easy way out, but it saves you time and money, and you can't produce the same dish at home without a rotisserie oven.  

At Costco, the wholesale supermarket chain founded in 1983 with 785 locations in the United States, rotisserie chickens have been widely reported to be a “loss leader” at $4.99 each; they’re sold for less than they cost, but they are there to lure you into the store, so you can buy other goods (at a profit to the company) while you’re shopping. (Representatives at Costco declined to comment for this article.) At many other supermarkets selling cut-rate rotisserie birds, the same strategy has been in place for decades. A spokesperson for Kroger, a supermarket chain with nearly 3,000 stateside locations, says that their rotisserie chicken program began in the 1980s: “Hot rotisserie chickens are a prepared food mainstay for many households,” she added.

Even restaurant chefs have a soft spot for the supermarket entrée. King Phojanakong, chef-owner of Kuma Inn on New York City’s Lower East Side, remembers that rotisserie chicken was an imperative whenever his family shopped at Costco growing up. Now, he goes with his kids.

“I cook a pot of rice, there’s salad, and that’s dinner,” he says. “The next day, we make a fried rice, and everybody loves it.”

You might wonder how the grocery store rotisserie chicken began and how it varies from place to place, which you can read about at Taste magazine.  -via Nag on the Lake

Earlier this summer, planes spent a lot of time on the ground when everyone canceled their vacation and business trips. That led to some shenanigans among flight crews. Flight attendant Lindsey O'Brien proved that she could close four overhead bins with her feet. Not only did she do that while supporting her body weight with her arms, she was doing in in a skirt and high heels!

"I used to do yoga and I was a cheerleader growing up so my core is pretty strong and I had to see if I could do it,” O’Brien told the outlet after her friend “wanted to try the move.”

-via Dave Barry

Want to see where lightning is striking right now? Check out the Real Time Lightning Map. Zoom in on activity or check your local area. Here's how it works: 

"Blitzortung.org" is a lightning detection network for locating electromagnetic discharges in the atmosphere (lightning discharges) with VLF receivers based on the time of arrival (TOA) and time of group arrival (TOGA) method. We are a community of station operators who send their data to the computing servers, programmers who develop and/or implement algorithms for locating and visualizing of sferic positions, and people who assist in any way to keep the system running. There is no restriction on membership. All people who keep the network in operation are volunteers. There are no fees, terms and conditions, and no contracts. If a station stops pooling its data, the server stops providing the access to the raw data for the user of that station.

There's more, mostly unintelligible to those not versed in meteorology or electronics. But the map is tres cool, and you might want to bookmark it to pull up the next time you have a thunderstorm approaching. -via Metafilter

Hollywood sometimes produces movie remakes because they think they can squeeze a few more dollars out of an existing property, but usually they happen because someone thinks they can do a better job the second time around. And often, they are right. In fact, many of the films on this list are classics that you probably didn't even know had an earlier version. It might have been a good story with a poor production, or was just hopelessly outdated, or wasn't a big hit for one reason or another. In the case of The Maltese Falcon, the earlier movie was never even shown in theaters.

Believe it or not, it's entirely possible that the most iconic film noir Hollywood ever produced exists only because Warner Bros. couldn't re-release their original version of The Maltese Falcon. The 1931 adaptation of Dashiell Hammet's story, featuring famed detective Sam Spade, was made just before the Hays Code severely disrupted the industry's ability to show racier elements. When the studio couldn't re-release it because it failed to pass the censors, the studio attempted to make an incredibly forgettable comedic version of the story, then smartened up and hired John Huston to make his directorial debut with the now-legendary film featuring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and not nearly as much sexual innuendo as the first.

Read about a bunch of remakes that vastly improved upon their predecessors at Mental Floss.

In the 1960s and '70s, Pizza Hut expanded across the country and the world, in their distinctive buildings each with an oddly-shaped roof and trapezoidal windows. In the 21st century, the franchise moved away from those red-roofed huts and into more modern spaces as new locations opened and others moved. The buildings with the unique roofs remained, and were sold. Now you can see all kinds of businesses that were obviously once Pizza Huts, but are now dentist offices, clinics, bars, restaurants, offices, and even homes and churches! See a roundup of the different type of recycled Pizza Hut buildings at Digg, and even more in the subreddit FormerPizzaHuts.

(Image source: fleeeb)

Kool-Aid was invented by Edwin Perkins in 1927. That's the short version, but the story of how and why he did it and what happened to his product over the years is much more involved. Perkins was the son of a grocer, and he grew up selling, promoting, improving, and even inventing new products. If he saw a problem, he was impelled to fix it.   

Before it was developed by Perkins in 1927, Kool-Aid was preceded by a fruit-based liquid called Fruit Smack. It was a liquid concentrate available in a few different flavors. Corked and sold in four ounce glass bottles, the product tended to leak or break during transit. Despite Perkins’ intentions of enabling families to use the concentrate to make pitchers of the beverage for a very low cost, he was confronted with a bit of a supply chain problem. Fruit Smack was a hit with the Perkins’ customers, but its fragility created the need for something more economical, easier to transport and preferably in powdered form.

See, if there had been plastic packaging 100 years ago, we might have never enjoyed a glass of Kool-Aid. Kool-Aid started out with six flavors, and grew to 74 flavors -although they were never all available at the same time. Read everything you need to know about Kool-Aid at Tedium.

(Image credit: Flickr user clotho98)

The Tower of London has been home to ravens for hundreds of years. Legend has it that if the ravens ever vacate the tower, the kingdom will fall. Accounts of the origin of the legend vary. It was just last year that we posted about ravenmaster Chris Skaife successfully breeding a new raven in the tower. But this is 2020.  

Summer visitor numbers would usually exceed 15,000 but because of the coronavirus pandemic, they have fallen to fewer than 800 a day. As a result, the birds are restless for more company.

With a lack of regular tourists, the birds have been venturing away, according to those who work there.

Christopher Skaife, a raven master, told the Sun: “If the ravens were to leave, the tower would crumble to dust. The tower is only the tower when the people are here.

Is this an ominous omen or just a sign of the times? Why not both? Read more about the ravens at the Guardian. -via Strange Company