If you love the taste of KFC chicken nuggets, but regret that they come from chickens, maybe you'll want to eventually try some nuggets that are 3D printed, or to be precise, "bio-printed." KFC is taking the plunge, in collaboration with a Russian company called 3D Bioprinting Solutions. From the KFC press release:

KFC is taking the next step in its innovative concept of creating a "restaurant of the future" by launching the development of innovative 3D bioprinting technology to create chicken meat in cooperation with the 3D Bioprinting Solutions research laboratory. The idea of ​​crafting the “meat of the future” arose among partners in response to the growing popularity of a healthy lifestyle and nutrition, the annual increase in demand for alternatives to traditional meat and the need to develop more environmentally friendly methods of food production. The project aims to create the world's first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets. They will be as close as possible in both taste and appearance to the original KFC product, while being more environmentally friendly to produce than ordinary meat. Receiving a final product for testing is already planned for the fall of 2020 in Moscow.

3D Bioprinting Solutions is developing additive bioprinting technology using chicken cells and plant material, allowing it to reproduce the taste and texture of chicken meat almost without involving animals in the process. KFC will provide its partner with all of the necessary ingredients, such as breading and spices, to achieve the signature KFC taste. At the moment, there are no other methods available on the market that could allow the creation of such complex products from animal cells.

You probably won't be able to travel to Russia to try them out yourself, unless you are already there, but if all goes well, 3D printed nuggets could become part of the menu of the future. I think I'll just have a salad. -via Boing Boing

The small village of Linby in England had no strategic value in World War II, but it ended up on the radio as a Luftwaffe bombing target. Or did it? It made for a good story, and maybe that's all it is. Tom Scott discusses the accuracy of historical accounts and whether it really matters in the long run. -via reddit

Russian cosmonauts are pretty tough. They always return from their space missions on land, which can be a pretty bumpy ride even when everything goes perfectly. They used to carry guns, to protect themselves from bears they might encounter before the search team reaches them. I looked up Boris Volynov, and he walked away from this crash with some broken teeth. He also went into space again after that incident. I also looked up Linda Morgan.

However, every one of these 21 pictofacts about amazing survival stories comes with a link to the original Cracked article they came from, so you have some extra reading ahead if any of them intrigue you.   

Early in 2019, reddit artists got hooked on a painting and made a spontaneous recursive project of painting the previous artist holding the painting. One of those artists was seamuswray. This past weekend, he's found himself stuck in another recursion loop, this one of his own making. First he did the self-portrait above, and submitted a photo of himself painting it. That was Friday. Saturday, he posted another, of himself painting the top photo.

Sunday, he couldn't help but post another photo, this one again showing himself drawing the previous photo. I guess he was in too much of a hurry for paint.

Will he have another picture ready for Monday, or will he have to stop and sleep or maybe even change clothes? You can check seamuswray's profile to find out. Or Instagram.

Update: Yep, there he is.

Well this ever end?

A puzzle recently posted at 3 Quarks Daily will make you think. Or at least it should make you think.

There are two boxes on a table, one red and one green. One contains a treasure. The red box is labelled “exactly one of the labels is true”. The green box is labelled “the treasure is in this box.”

Can you figure out which box contains the treasure?

Now, before you decide that you know, pay attention to how the question is asked. The answer and an explanation is at The Universe of Discourse. The author also addresses the many ways you could ague that you are right, even if you aren't. -via Nag on the Lake

If you're going to install a light in your workshop, you may as well make it interesting. Storyboard artist Mark Simon did so with a tribute to Bruce Willis' Die Hard character climbing through a vent. While many DIY videos are way too long, this one gets right to the point, and it's tres cool. -via Digg

When humans learned to twist natural fibers together to make string or rope, it opened up a new world of useful inventions, from animal traps to clothing to sailboats. But natural fibers tend to decompose, and the oldest rope found, in a French Neanderthal cave, dates back only to around 50,000 years ago. But while we cannot yet pinpoint who invented rope, archaeologists in Israel have found evidence that manmade string existed more than 120,000 years ago. It comes from seashells found in Qafzeh Cave near Nazareth that had been populated by humans that long ago.

The shells, some of which had been painted with red ochre, belonged to the species Glycymeris nummaria, a bivalve mollusk common throughout the Mediterranean and the northeastern Atlantic. What was particularly interesting was that the people of Qafzeh, which is 40 kilometers from the sea, had purposely brought back to the cave only naturally perforated clams – that is, shells that had developed a hole due to erosion from the sand and sea.

The researchers also compared the finds to shells unearthed at Misliya Cave, a site on Israel’s northern coast that was inhabited much earlier than Qafzeh, between 240,000 and 160,000 years ago. There archaeologists had also found a small cache of Glycymeris – but in this case the shells were whole.

The study notes that if you take a walk on a beach, about 40 percent of the Glycymeris you come across will be naturally perforated, meaning that both the Misliya and Qafzeh shells were selected deliberately, not randomly. But why? The difference only made sense if the shells at Qafzeh were intended to be strung up, Bar-Yosef Mayer suspected, but the evidence just wasn’t there.

Without the string, it was difficult to say that the shells were tied, but a team led by archaeologist Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer of Tel Aviv University conducted an experiment to find more clues. Read what they did to determine whether the shells were actually jewelry at Haaretz. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Iris Groman-Yaroslavski)

You know maraschino cherries as a bright red garnish for cocktails, ice cream sundaes, and pineapple upside-down cake. There's probably a jar that's been in your refrigerator for years. Maraschinos don't resemble fresh cherries much, in either appearance or taste. So where did they come from, and how did they become a thing? In the early 1800s, the cherry-producing Luxardo family in Italy began to preserve cherries in alcohol. They were the original maraschino cherries, and they became quite popular with the rise of cocktail culture in the latter years of the 19th century. And with popularity, they spread to other manufacturers and evolved with the times.  

Yet it’s also notable that the maraschino cherry’s turn-of-the-century ascendancy also coincided with the wider vogue for lab-made dyes, flavorings and additives that flourished in the pre-FDA era. (Relevant: This was also a time when, at the behest of nervous dairy farmers, margarine had to literally be dyed pink in some states to broadcast the fact it wasn’t butter.) “For many years, I’ve asked audiences at tasting events what maraschino cherries, grenadine and sloe gin have in common,” says Brown. “And the answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing! And yet, go back to my childhood and they were all the same color and flavor because they came from the same lab.”

With Prohibition, the recipe had to change again, which meant maraschino cherries veered even further from nature. Read a history of maraschino cherries, and learn what's in them, at Mel magazine.

(Image credit: Véronique PAGNIER) 

Here's a really cool but very short video of a gold man dancing. It's actually Fernando Livschitz of Black Sheep Films, and it's not computer generated. After the stop-motion dance sequence, he quickly shows us how he did it, which is just as interesting. -via Colossal

A good pirate character has some recognizable pop culture pirate features, plus fighting skills, menace, charisma, and at least a slight sense of humor. Within these parameters, they vary greatly. A list of the most memorable movie pirates at io9 include the classics, but also animated pirates, women pirates, and one character played by several actors. Who's your favorite movie pirate? No matter, you'll want to watch all of the ten pirates in this unranked list, especially the movies you haven't already seen.

John Capes was a passenger on the HMS Perseus, a British submarine that sunk in the Mediteranean Sea in 1941. He was either the luckiest man alive, or the unluckiest, depending on your point of view. Capes managed to escape the submarine, survived a dangerous rise from the depths, and swam five miles, only to find dry land which was occupied by the enemy. He suffered even more after the war, as many people doubted his story. Despite the video length, the story is only eight minutes long. -via Digg

Seven-year-old Maria Ridulph of Sycamore, Illinois, was offered a piggyback ride by a man she didn't know, and wasn't seen again until her body was found the next year, 100 miles away. The only witness was another child named Kathy. That was in 1957. John Tessier, a neighbor, was an early suspect, but passed a lie detector test. The case went unsolved for more than a half-century, but was reopened in 2008.

State Police reviewed the evidence and found testimony from neighbours of John’s seemingly erratic and strange behaviour around young girls (which included giving another young girl a piggyback and refusing to put the girl back down); which probably did not sit well next to the previous conviction and rape charges. John is just one of the many “outsiders” targeted by law enforcement as a perfect suspect. That being said; there were definite factors that could have had John fingered.

Everything seemed to go against John upon the re-opening of the case when Kathy personally picked out John from a picture line up and stated: “that’s the man”.

Read how the Maria Ridulph case went from unsolved to solved and then back to unsolved again at Mystery Confidential. -via Strange Company

New Technologies and Face Mask Innovations is the title of a project by artist Kit Layfield. Hey, if we're going to wear face masks, they may as well do double duty by providing carbon dioxide to a personal terrarium, right? Not all the designs make quite as much sense, though.



There are quite a few more of these fantastical face masks at Layfield's Instagram page. -via Laughing Squid

Women have worked in lighthouses for as long as there have been lighthouses, usually toiling alongside her husband the lighthouse keeper, who was the one who got paid for it. But there have been quite a few women who were totally in charge of lighthouses, like Harriet Colfax, who worked her lighthouse for more than 40 years, Mary Ryan, who kept a diary of her work and misery, and Ida Lewis, who saved numerous lives.

But most of her counterparts lived and died in obscurity. Lighthousekeeping was one of few jobs available to women in the 18th and 19th centuries, provided they inherited the post from a husband, father, or other male family member. “The lighthouse service thought the easiest thing to do would be to let the widows take over, because they were so familiar with the operation,” says DeWire. The actual job remained the same. “What really struck me was that they immediately took a reduction in pay, because they were women,” she says. They were also not permitted to wear the brass-buttoned lighthouse keeper uniforms, introduced in the 1880s. “That’s why I always called them ‘keepers in skirts.’”

Today, there is only one lighthouse keeper who is a woman. That would be Sally Snowman, who cannot wait to get back to her duties at Boston Light. Read about her life and those of other women lighthouse keepers at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: US Coast Guard)

V1 Analytics gives us a map visualization of the top trending Google searches, state-by-state, for every day from the beginning of 2010 to a couple of weeks ago. It's mesmerizing to see what everyone suddenly wanted to find out more about, or else what song or TV show they wanted to pull up and enjoy when nothing else was happening. It also appears that our curiosity gets satisfied pretty quickly, which just tells us that the Google machine has all the answers. -via Metafilter