We've read plenty of horror stories from nature about animal parasites infecting other animals and causing them to behave in ways that benefit the parasite. Funguses can do that, too. The parasitic fungus Massospora will infect a male cicada and then cause it to flirt like a female cicada. When a male cicada approaches, the fungus spreads to a new, healthy host.

“Essentially, the cicadas are luring others into becoming infected because their healthy counterparts are interested in mating,” said Brian Lovett, study co-author and post-doctoral researcher with the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design. “The bioactive compounds may manipulate the insect to stay awake and continue to transmit the pathogen for longer.”

These actions persist amid a disturbing display of B-horror movie proportions: Massospora spores gnaw away at a cicada’s genitals, butt and abdomen, replacing them with fungal spores. Then they “wear away like an eraser on a pencil,” Lovett said.

That's some pretty sophisticated chicanery for a fungus. You might think the fungus couldn't be too smart, or they would infect a species that didn't lay dormant for 17 years, but Massospora has adapted to that, too, which you can read about at WVU Today. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Angie Macias/WVU)

The problem with making a satirical movie is that if you are at all subtle, the satire can be completely missed. And so it was with the 1997 film Starship Troopers. It was supposed to be a sendup of overly militaristic speculative fiction, but ended up way too close to what it was supposed to satirize. It fulfilled the audience's desire for space aliens, sex, and carnage so well that they didn't care what the aim was. Or was it a case that the movie was just so bad that director Paul Verhoeven came up with the excuse that it was a satire after the fact? In any case, you can see from this Honest Trailer how the audience might have been confused. Sure, the plot, characters, and themes were over-the-top, but so were many other steroid-laden movies of the time. The lesson to take from Starship Troopers is that if you are going to make a satire of a movie genre, do like Mel Brooks or the Zucker brothers and put some laughs into it.

The area known as Alabama Hills is not in Alabama, and there aren't many hills, either. There you'll find a crop of rounded rock formations that proved to be quite useful. It's where you can place antagonists on different levels, hide them from each other, stage an ambush, shoot from safety, and convince whoever sees it that these rocks exist where you say they do.

These strange rock formations are versatile actors, having played Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Mexico, Spain, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and China—not to mention distant planets, alternate dimensions, and fantasy realms. It would be impossible to list all the screen legends that have shared scenes with these majestic bowed rock arches and potato-shaped stones, but they include Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn, Clint Eastwood, Lucille Ball, Cary Grant, Cesar Romero, Natalie Wood, and Russell Crowe.

As of 2019, it’s been 100 years since the earliest confirmed filming in the area.

With a history like that, it's no wonder there's a film festival nearby, with tours to the rocks themselves. Read about Alabama Hills and its cinematic history at Atlas Obscura. And then keep your eye out for them during your next movie night.

(Image credit: Tyler Malone)

Dr. Quentin J. Lee is principal of Childersburg High School in Alabama, and is doing his best to promote and enforce new safety rules as school opens for the fall to the tune of "Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer. If it takes a catchy song to explain social distancing, mask wearing, and hand washing, he's game to do it. He pulled it off well! -via reddit

Dr. Lee's previous video about COVID-19 is pretty good, too.

Scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology dug up 75 million-year-old dinosaur bones in Alberta in 1989. They've been studied on and off ever since, and one bone from a horned dinosaur called Centrosaurus showed some abnormalities. Thirty years later, scientists took a closer look.  

A multidisciplinary team led by a paleontologist and a pathologist studied the bone inside and out, examining everything from the outside shape to the inner microscopic structure. In the end, the experts arrived at a diagnosis of osteosarcoma–a malignant bone cancer that afflicts about 3.4 out of every million people worldwide. The team’s new study, published today in The Lancet, provides the most detailed evidence yet for cancer in a dinosaur.

Discovering osteosarcoma in a dinosaur has implications for the evolutionary origins and history of cancer. “If humans and dinosaurs get the same kinds of bone cancers,” says George Washington University paleontologist Catherine Forster, “then bone cancers developed deep in evolutionary history, before the mammal and reptile lineages split 300 million years ago.”

This particular specimen did not die of cancer, though, which itself carries implications about how dinosaurs lived. Read about this new research at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Fred Wierum)

When someone dies in their 90s, or even older, people aren't all that curious about what caused their death. After all, there is a limit to how long a human body can last, and death in a person who has achieved an extremely advanced age is not a surprise. But what does it really mean to die of old age? Gizmodo spoke to four experts about that. University of California, San Francisco, professor of medicine Elizabeth Dzeng says, in part,

It’s common, in our society, to say that someone “died of old age.” But nobody ever actually dies of “old age.” There are always other pre-existing diseases—or new diseases—that cause the deaths in question. “Old age” isn’t something you’d put on a death certificate—most likely, it would be something like cardiac arrest, which occurs due to some underlying issue such as an infection, heart attack, or cancer. For example, a clot could go into the lungs which prevents somebody from oxygenating their brain or their body, and which then causes the heart to stop. When somebody dies, whether or not they’re young or old, some disease or disease-process has caused their body to stop working.

There's more, and they also address aging, filling out a death certificate, and the idea of dying peacefully in your sleep at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Angelica Alzona/Gizmodo)

Mississippi is getting a new flag. The Commission to Redesign the Mississippi State Flag will select a new design from submitted entries by September, and the state's citizens will have a referendum to accept or reject the new flag during the November election. The deadline for submissions was August first, and now those hundreds of submission are in a gallery for public view. The only rules are that the design must contain the words "In God We Trust," and that no Confederate flags are used. You can "♥" flags, but that probably won't have any sway over the commission. Most of the submissions are straightforward, many with magnolia blossoms, but the few posted here show that there is a wide range of inspirations. -via Metafilter

Sandra and Lloyd Simpson adopted more than two dozen children in the 1970s and '80s, to add to several that Sandra gave birth to. That was something that Toronto had never seen, and won't likely see again. But Sandra saw the need in Canda's foster care system, then in Vietnamese refugee children, and in international adoptions that didn't work for other people.

With their sprawling numbers and the haphazard way they came together, the Simpsons pressed up against the boundaries of what it meant to be a family. They arrived in Forest Hill in 1978 like an asteroid, crashing into a wealthy white neighbourhood that had never seen so many Brown faces before, let alone enough Brown faces to field both sides of a baseball game, and all under one roof. They embodied a particular strain of mid-century Canadian liberalism—a belief that the complications and inconveniences of race could simply be discarded and replaced with a new collective identity.

Talk to the Simpsons today and they’ll say they were just like any other family. Over the course of 20 years in the big house on Russell Hill Road, they played on soccer teams and got into fistfights, snuck around with boyfriends and delivered newspapers. They experienced joy as well as tragedy—troubles with the law, illness and disability.

Now, 40 years later, the Simpson kids have grown into chefs, business owners, athletes, hospitality workers and parents with kids of their own. And they’ve had time to reflect on the singularity of their childhood and of their mother’s vision, and on the peculiar moment in time that allowed their family to flourish. Sandra pushed the limits of adoption so far that her motivations still seem alien, even to her own children. “To tell you the truth, she’s not normal,” her daughter Kathryn told me. “I don’t think anyone could really explain her.” She had a unique brand of stubborn, no-nonsense altruism that persevered in the face of bigoted NIMBYism. What happened on Russell Hill Road is not just the story of an extraordinary woman, but of a radical experiment in child rearing. Sandra Simpson didn’t keep the suffering of the world at a distance. She invited it into her home and made it family.

Read the story of Sandra Simpson and the children she raised at Toronto Life. -via Digg

In the late 1950s, two musicians, John Mansfield and Philip Hayward, bought up a string of small clubs in and around London and named them all Ricky-Tick. These clubs were intimate and welcoming, and became a favorite among young musicians trying to hone their craft and try out material in front of an audience. These included bands that made it big, like The Rolling Stones, and bands that didn't, like Hogsnort Rupert and the Good Good Band. Bob McGrath, Hogsnort Rupert's alter ego, played the Ricky-Ticks, designed the posters, and witnessed the early days of many musicians' careers.   

As a participant, McGrath had an insider’s view of the birth of the British R&B scene. Of the Rolling Stones, McGrath is matter of fact. “They were good,” he allows. “Jagger couldn’t sing to save his soul, but Charlie Watts was one of the few English drummers who had any sense of rhythm. It was quite a shock to see their audiences clapping on the right beat, the 2 and the 4 instead of the 1 and the 3. Jagger and Richards had very little interest in anything other than themselves,” he concludes. “Apart from Brian Jones, they all seemed like immature assholes.”

McGrath also sheds light on why the Ricky-Tick clubs outside of London seemed so much more fun than the ones in the city proper. “London and Soho were mean streets,” he says, “even then. It was pretty seedy—drug people, gangsters—not a friendly place to be. I never felt at ease there, and I was there an awful lot.”

In contrast, the Ricky-Tick clubs that popped up in the cities and towns of the Thames Valley were welcoming places, notwithstanding the occasional punch-up between rival groups of mods and rockers. Beyond the more relaxed attitude that came with being outside of London, the U.K. in general warmly embraced music performed and/or composed by Black artists. Unlike in the United States during the early 1960s, when rhythm and blues records by Black performers were mostly listened to by Black audiences, white kids in England were fully on board. Thus, when Black performers from the United States such as Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe played Ricky-Tick, they were greeted by packed clubs filled with adorning fans, from the predominantly white locals to the Black American servicemen stationed at nearby U.S. Air Force bases in South Ruislip, West Ruislip, and High Wycombe.

Read about the clubs that gave birth to rock 'n' roll as we know it at Collectors Weekly.

Aliens in TV shows and movies often have the same size and shape as human beings, which correlates somewhat with the production's budget. But in the real universe, we have no idea what alien life would look like, even intelligent life. What if intelligent life already exists, but those beings are so different from us that we can't even recognize that they exist, much less what they are like? They may know we exist, but why would they bother to communicate with us if we are no more important to them than insects are to us? Kurzgesagt gives us some food for thought.

This story is about penises, but it's also about science itself. Science is supposed to be the study of the world through observation and experiment. But who is doing those observations? And how important is the truth of those observations to the observer?

For years, researchers asked men to self-report the length of their erect penises by measuring along the top from the abdomen to the tip, and over that time, men consistently informed researchers that their members ranged from roughly 6.1 to 6.5 inches.

Can you see the problem with this procedure? Asking men to accurately report the size of their penises is like trying to eclipse the speed of light in a junker car: it's not gonna happen.

Whether because of measurement error, respondent selection bias (only men with larger penises want to participate in research), or good old fashioned misreporting (i.e. lying), it seems that studies employing self-report to find the length of the average erect penis have given us the wrong answer for decades.

Turns out the real average penis is shorter, which raises the issue of all those average men who read the science and think they are below average. Knowing how important that number is, it's no wonder guys are spending way too much money on sketchy enhancement devices and supplements. Find out the real average penis size and the research behind it at Real Clear Science.

(Image credit: victorgrigas)

Turkish artist Garip Ay shows us the art of ecru, or paper marbling. He paints on top of water, where the paint can be manipulated before transferring the work to a stable surface such as paper. His works are not just patterns or abstract art, but also representative pictures, and often a combination of all those. Subtitled in English. -via Twisted Sifter

In Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree, a tree gives its all to a boy it loves, expecting nothing in return. While you admire the tree for its unconditional love, you also feel sorry for it, and the boy comes across as a real ass.

Playwright Topher Payne gives us a different ending for the book, one in which the tree actually teaches the boy to become a better person. They are both better off for the tree's efforts, and so is the world around them. You can read it by clicking on the image here.

It's part of Payne's series called Topher Fixed It, which also includes a new ending for Rainbow Fish. -via Digg

Ranking the cuisine of various countries is a mission fraught with danger, as food is a matter of both national pride and personal opinion. And it really doesn't matter, as long as you can get something good to eat. But Uproxx still published a top ten list, based on an online survey of 450,000 people willing to rank world cuisines. The descriptions are based heavily on street food, which tells us what you might expect to see if you ever get to travel to those nations. But even if you can't travel, a lot of the dishes mentioned are available in US cities. Check out the top ten and an overview of each nation's food at Uproxx.

Artist Kathy Maniscalco lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Last month, a family of bobcats, a mother and five bobkittens, paid their home a visit. The Maniscalcos kept their distance, but managed to get plenty of photographs and some video footage, too. Kathy says she may make a painting out of the portrait above that her husband took. Don't they pose nicely! See all the pictures and videos at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: John Maniscalco)