Video artist Duncan Evans gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how Disney created the special effects in the 1942 movie Bambi. You always wondered how they did that, right? Then he skipped to 1994 with a special look at the making of The Lion King.  



See more of Evans' creative videos at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort

Any ongoing comic or animation series needs to set standards, in order to keep consistency over time.  Sure, the very earliest Simpsons cartoons are different from what you are used to, but after the first couple of years, they've pretty much remain unchanged for three decades. That's because there are rules.

If you've wanted to make your own Rick and Morty drawings, but can't seen to get it just right, maybe you need some guidance. There's plenty of it, in notes from designer Maximus J. Pauson and co-creator Justin Roiland. They have apparently made all these mistakes in the past so that you don't have to. See more of these Rick and Morty drawing guides at Cracked.

(Image source: Character Design References)

Louis Le Prince was a pioneer of motion pictures. He was the first person to shoot a motion picture with a single lens camera and a strip of film. His ultimate masterpiece was called Roundhay Garden, Leeds Bridge, produced in 1888. Who knew motion pictures went back that far? Prince mysteriously vanished in 1890, believed to be a suicide, and never publicly showed the film. Now the original exists as 20 still frame shots.

Denis Shiryaev took those 20 frames and restored the film using artificial intelligence. He explains what he did in the video, but if you want to only see the animation, skip the first two minutes. The restoration contains 250 frames. And he added sound effects. -via Geekologie

During World War I, millions of Americans planted gardens in their yards or on public property to raise vegetables for the war effort. When the second World War broke out, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to set an example and plant vegetables at the White House. But Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard was against the idea. He saw the gardens as a waste of time and resources.

Novices, especially those in cities, Wickard feared, would plant in poor soil. They would try to cultivate crops ill-suited to their climate. They would fail to recognize cucumber beetles and tomato worms. They would start with enthusiasm and then abandon the project. And, worst of all, they would waste valuable resources: seeds and fertilizer the country’s farmers needed.

Instead, Wickard’s Victory Garden program was aimed at the farmers themselves. Their know-how and equipment would make short work of tending a few extra rows of beets, spinach, and peas, planted alongside the commodity crops in their fields. Those vegetables would feed the farmers’ families while saving valuable canning tin and transportation fuel. Wickard wanted to see 1.3 million new farmer-grown victory gardens in 1942. Those who “gardened for pleasure,” as one advertisement put it, should limit themselves to flowers, shrubs and trees. “This, of course, is for Morale,” it explained. “Because Morale is equally important as Nutrition.”

Morale is one thing, but the patriotic feeling of doing one's part is even stronger, so people sowed their yards with vegetable plants anyway. Read about the rise of World War II Victory Gardens at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: DrBirdBrain)

Someone once said that cats don't show emotion in their faces. Cat owners know that's not true at all. While some cats are stone-faced, which is actually good for predators, many pet cats can be drama queens. Kiwi, above, panicked when he saw his human apparently drowning in the bathtub. He went into emergency mode, calling for someone to save him/her. Believe it or not, Kiwi is just one of four black and white cats upset at the idea of a bathtub in this gallery.

(Image credit: @TheDreamGhoul)

This looks like my Marshmallow, who also has a resting concerned face. See 50 dramatic cats putting extra mustard on their situations at Bored Panda.

A current topic that is sure to start an argument is how to make tea. Should one use a tea kettle, or just put a cup of water in the microwave? I use the barbaric American method of microwaving the water, because I need some hot caffeine in a hurry, and I already have a microwave that needs to justify its continued existence. Really, is there a difference in hot water made by one method or the other? Yes, according to research from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

Typically, the study describes, if you're warming a liquid like water on the stove or within a kettle, the heating source warms the container from below. This is when a process called convection happens, when the liquid at the bottom of the container warms up, diminishes in density, and moves to the top, letting the remaining cooler liquid to get access to the sweet, sweet heating source below. This results in even, uniform temperature throughout the container.

But if you're throwing your cup of water in the microwave for 90 seconds, like the researchers did, the device's electric field heats it from all angles, not just from below, so while the top part of the cup's water may be sitting at boiling point, the bottom may not. "Because the entire glass itself is also warming up, the convection process does not occur, and the liquid at the top of the container ends up being much hotter than the liquid at the bottom," reads the study.

This is crucial, since the temperature of the water affects the taste of the tea. However, different types of tea require different temperatures. The researchers came up with a solution, which is to invent a new gadget you can put on top of your cup while you microwave it. I think it might be simpler to just use a spoon to stir the water after microwaving it, and then see if the homogenized water is hot enough. Your microwave time can be adjusted accordingly. Read the findings on this important subject at Mashable.

(Image credit: Liebesland)

Hanns Scharff was drafted into the German army during World War II. Terrified of being sent to the Eastern Front, he used his family connections and ability to speak English to work his way into the position of interrogating Allied POWs for the Luftwaffe. The Nazis had established brutal tactics for extracting intelligence from captives, but Scharff found them distasteful and decided to go his own way.

And so it was that Scharff would use the role of “Good Cop” to achieve his goals. Scharff first gained the trust and confidence of the captives, plying the captives with long walks in the woods, his wife’s baked delicacies, casual conversations, good medical care, and even letting one POW fly a plane. Beyond all these little kindnesses, he would sell himself as their biggest advocate with his superiors. He was the one who could keep them from the Gestapo, but only if they worked with him and played ball. No Nazi dentist would dig into their gums and ask them, “is it safe?”

His methodology was as follows: get to know the POW, and then allow him to talk without coercion. Along the way, Scharff pretended to know everything beforehand, but stated that his superiors insisted that the information come from the captive. Then he would either confirm that he knew the information or discontinue the conversation. This eventually became known as the Scharff Method, and it was highly successful. POWs often offered up vital intelligence on their own through his trickery. No brutality, no torture…no raising of voices. No use of the Gestapo.

Scharff didn't follow the manual, but the Nazis couldn't argue with his success. Read about the life and legacy of Nazi interrogator Hanns Scharff at Today I Found Out.

(Image: not Hanns Scharff)

Seventy-five years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States unleashed a terrifying new weapon as the new atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, followed by another in Nagasaki three days later. An estimated 200,000 people were killed, and others who survived the bombings dealth with the effects for years afterward -some for the rest of their lives. Many suffered in silence, as they were victims of discrimination in postwar Japan, only opening up about their experiences recently, in their old age, for projects like the 1945 Project and The Last Survivors of Hiroshima. Taeko Teramae is one such hibakusha.

Hiroshima survivor Taeko Teramae didn’t realize the full extent of her injuries until her younger brothers started making fun of her appearance. Confused, the 15-year-old asked her parents for a mirror—a request they denied, leading her to surreptitiously track one down on a day they’d left the house.

“I was so surprised I found my left eye looked just like a pomegranate, and I also found cuts on my right eye and on my nose and on my lower jaw,” she recalled. “It was horrible. I was very shocked to find myself looking like a monster.”

Nine people who agreed to be a part of these projects tell their stories of surviving Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's bombings at Smithsonian. Warning: these accounts are disturbing and sometimes graphic.

Movie stars are photographed from all angles, and if they make enough movies, eventually all those angles will end up on movie posters. Duncan Robson compiled enough movie posters featuring the biggest stars to make animated sequences of them turning their heads! The effect is a bit disconcerting, probably even more so to the actors themselves. -via Digg

There are more than 1,400 different species of bats known to science, but most of us just know fruit bats with their dog-shaped faces and insect-eating bats with relatively flattened faces. Nature is full of very different-looking bats, some adorable and others the stuff of nightmares. The picture above is of a white-throated round-eared bat. While these species have their taxonomic Latin names, their common names tend to describe them well. See 30 species of odd-looking bats at Bored Panda, with names like the hammer-headed bat, the yellow-winged bat, the little white-shouldered bat, the big-eared woolly bat, the desert long-eared bat, the eastern tube-nosed bat, and the wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bat.

(Image credit: Desmodus)

If you want to get really away from it all, keep the rest of the world at bay, and have plenty of space to spread out, you might be interested in a property for sale near Fairdale, North Dakota. The brutalist architecture envelopes an interior steampunk aesthetic. 

Unique opportunity to own a bit of Cold War history!  Located in Fairdale ND, this Walsh County Sprint Missile site offers a nostalgic Cold War experience.  Site needs some repair, but could provide that extra privacy, security and protection when needed.  The site is surrounded by dual fences and sits on 3 parcels totaling 49.48 acres. There is a cement entry building, a command bunker, and 14 sprint launch tubes.  Current owner utilizes portable power and water tanks. Power is available nearby and a well could be drilled for water requirements.  Property will be offered as one total unit.

From the outside, the facility looks like a 20th-century Stonehenge. Before you purchase, you should read some of its history at Atlas Obscura. Then see lots of pictures at the auction listing. The missile silos will be auctioned off on August 11.

(Image credit: Pifer's)

It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of other planets where humans could live was considered a fantasy. Now we have lots of data coming in from exoplanets, those outside our solar system, and they come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors. Could they support life? The common theory is that only planets in which water would be in liquid form are suitable for us to live in, and these fall into the "habitable zone." Our solar system has three such planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Since we can't live on Mars and Venus as they are, you can see that habitability actually depends on many factors.    

The idea of a habitable zone is a bit squishy, because having liquid water depends on a laundry list of other things, including the existence of an atmosphere, what’s in it, and more. But it’s a useful concept as long as you don’t look at it too closely†.

So technically, three planets orbit the Sun in its habitable zone. But how many could you fit in there?

At some number you’d hit a limit. The finite region of space means planets would get too close together. They’d interact gravitationally, and celestial hijinks would ensue: They’d create chaos, and some planet or planets would have their orbit messed up, dropping them into the Sun or ejecting them from the system entirely.

Scientists have crunched the numbers to find out how many planets could be in a system's habitable zone. It depends on the size and heat of the star, and a few other factors. But the answer will have you imagining a system where people could send mail to their relatives on the next planet over. Read how it might work at Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt/IPAC)

Fox Benwell has a postal cat! His cat Linnet waits by the door for the mail to be delivered. Watch as she enthusiastically receives a package, checks to see if anyone is watching, and then steals upstairs to put it in her stash. See more of Linnet at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort

In 1992, Pepsi-Cola was in a war with Coca-Cola over the Philippine soda market, and Pepsi was losing badly. So they launched a sweepstakes in which people would collect bottle caps with numbers. The winning number would be worth varying amounts of money, up to a million pesos (worth $68,000 today). Number Fever, as it was called, boosted Pepsi sales as people collected bottle caps with numbers. The winning number was announced on May 25. Marily So tells how her husband located a bottle cap with the winning number, 349, and saw that it was worth a million pesos. There was rejoicing, but the couple did not know that Pepsi had printed 600,000 bottle caps with number 349 on them.

Similar scenes were playing out across the country. A bus driver had three 1 million-peso 349s. A mother of 12 whose children went through 10 bottles of Pepsi a day had won 35 million pesos. Winners raced to the iron gates of Pepsi’s bottling factory in Quezon City, just northeast of Manila, to claim their prizes. As the crowd grew, a secretary dialed the marketing director, Rosemarie Vera. “There seems to be many 349 crowns in circulation among people I know,” the secretary said, according to an account in the Philippine Daily Enquirer. At 10 p.m., someone from the company telephoned the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry and said a mistake had been made.

Within a year, a violent consumer uprising would be under way, with riots and grenade attacks leaving dozens injured and five dead.

Read the full story of the soda pop promotion that went oh-so-wrong at Bloomberg Businessweek.  -via Damn Interesting

When I hear the word "herpes," I automatically think "the gift that keeps on giving." But maybe I should switch that to "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." People with latent herpes hiding in their cells may have some advantages in their immune system. In our world of modern medicine, it's most certainly not worth contracting a case, but research into how our bodies harness the virus might someday lead to replicating the good effects without the bad. -Thanks, SnowMan!