After you stop laughing, you should know the story behind this. It’s not CGI or Photoshop. Ben Campbell explains.

I got some fake teeth for some quarantine comic relief and well... Thomas stole them off of the table.

That’s a good dog. -via Boing Boing

Viruses that can survive days on plastic, glass, or steel tend to succumb within minutes on a surface made of copper. Our ancestors knew the infection-fighting property of copper, long before they knew about microbes themselves.

The first recorded use of copper as an infection-killing agent comes from Smith's Papyrus, the oldest-known medical document in history. The information therein has been ascribed to an Egyptian doctor circa 1700 B.C. but is based on information that dates back as far as 3200 B.C. Egyptians designated the ankh symbol, representing eternal life, to denote copper in hieroglyphs.

As far back as 1,600 B.C., the Chinese used copper coins as medication to treat heart and stomach pain as well as bladder diseases. The sea-faring Phoenicians inserted shavings from their bronze swords into battle wounds to prevent infection. For thousands of years, women have known that their children didn't get diarrhea as frequently when they drank from copper vessels and passed on this knowledge to subsequent generations. "You don't need a medical degree to diagnose diarrhea," Schmidt says.

But what makes copper so different from other materials, even other metals, in fighting microbes? The explanation is in its atomic structure, which you can read about at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Stanzilla)

The first trailer for the movie Cats was enough to turn most people off the production. But now Screen Junkies has watched the whole movie so the rest of us don’t have to. They have the details of exactly why this CGI-fest was a stinking bomb, rendered in updated lyrics to the sings from the musical. -via Digg

For many people, the one thing they remember about the 1987 film The Lost Boys is the saxophone player. He only appeared in one short scene, but he made an impression. It was only years later, when people recognized the character parodied in a 2010 SNL short, that we found out everyone else was just as impressed.  

Back in the mid-‘80s, musclebound musician Tim Cappello was performing with the likes of Tina Turner and Ringo Starr. He’d spend months and months learning their songs, recording albums, touring, everything a working musician would do. Then, for just one night, he went to Santa Cruz, California, and shot a single scene in a Hollywood movie. Soon after the movie came out, he watched it once and basically forgot about it. “I did that when I was in my early 30s and it meant nothing to me,” Cappello told io9 over the phone. “It meant nothing when it happened...then all of a sudden it just hit something.”

That movie was called The Lost Boys and Cappello plays “Beach Concert Star,” a bare-chested singer/saxophone player performing a fiery cover of the Call’s “I Still Believe” as soon-to-be-vampire Michael (Jason Patric) sees the mysterious Star (Jami Gertz) for the first time. For Lost Boys fans and non-fans alike, the scene has become an unforgettable snapshot of a time and place in pop culture history.

Read the path that Capello took to making that scene, and what it turned into afterward, at io9. (via Metafilter)

Ze Frank is still doing what he does- putting thoughts into the mouths of various animals. In this video, he addresses social isolation as it applies to pets. First, the residents of an aquarium, where nothing is different because being in an aquarium already isolates you from the larger world with a small group of random weirdos. Then there are cats and dogs, who are used to having the house to themselves all the time, and now have a hard time putting up the humans.

The Instagram account Brand Name Films is just what it says on the tin. These are posters for movies that don’t exist, but are based on familiar brands of everyday products. The mashup of product with poster is well-done, but what really grabs my attention are the casting decisions. Yeah, I could believe the Rock as Mr. Clean.

I can also believe Tom Hanks as Orville Redenbacher, because Tom Hanks can play anyone. See the rest of the posters at Instagram. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The song “Gethsemene” from the opera Jesus Christ Superstar is a challenge for anyone who sings it, due to that one high, sustained note. However, even though it’s in the original, it doesn’t have to be sung like that. Who did it best? Lindsay Ellis compiled a collection of recordings of various singers doing the “Whyyyy?” over the past fifty years for your personal comparison. -via Metafilter

While we get used to washing our hands and using hand sanitizer all the time, we learn that Turks have been doing that for hundreds of years with kolonya.   

Meaning “cologne”, kolonya has been a treasured symbol of Turkish hospitality and health since the Ottoman Empire, and it’s often described as Turkey’s national scent. Traditionally, this sweet-scented aroma made with fig blossoms, jasmine, rose or citrus ingredients is sprinkled on guests’ hands as they enter homes, hotels and hospitals; when they finish meals at restaurants; or as they gather for religious services. But unlike other natural scents, this ethanol-based concoction’s high alcohol content can kill more than 80% of germs and act as an effective hand disinfectant.

But kolonya is more than a disinfectant.It’s part of Turkish culture, as a greeting, an aromatic, and the smell of nostalgia for those who grew up with it. Read about kolonya, including how it’s made, at BBC Travel. -via Damn Interesting

It’s such an old joke that Carnegie Hall has a page on its website dedicated to it. When you pose the question to real New Yorkers, how they answer depends heavily on how old they are. -via Weird Universe

You see wonderful wildlife pictures on the internet, but for every "perfect" picture, there are hundreds that didn't quite make the grade. For those that might have been discarded, there's a Facebook group called Crap wildlife photography. Some are just awful, some are blurry, and some are downright hilarious. There are a lot of pictures that would have been great a millisecond before or after. And some come with a story.

You'll have to join the Facebook group to see all it has to offer, but you can see a ranked list of their best images at Bored Panda.

In case you want a concrete reminder that things could always be worse, you might want a nuclear explosion lamp, available from Etsy seller Evil Incorporated. It's made from wood, metal, plastic, and cotton, airbrushed for realism. If you have neither the money nor the patience to have one shipped from Poland, you can make your own by following a guide at Instructables. This lamp is a guaranteed conversation-starter! -via Geekologie

Bathrooms were a fairly new concept in the 19th century. Most people did their business in an outhouse, sometimes shared with other households. Wash basins were for bedrooms or maybe the kitchen if you had one. The rise of the bathroom only started when municipal water and sewer systems began to be built, but even then, progress was slow because those systems are expensive. Early bathrooms were furnished with wood, as other rooms were, including a wooden cabinet over a toilet, or a chamber pot if you didn't have a sewage system. But while water systems were spreading, so was the knowledge of germ theory.

The cover of a 1912 sales pamphlet from the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company (later renamed American Standard) features renderings of American bathrooms dating back to 1875. Though only 37 years had passed between the design of the two rooms, they are starkly different: the former covered in wood, and the latter not all that different from bathrooms as we know them today. “Ideas of sanitation and hygiene apparently unknown but a few short years ago have become so imbred [sic] in our daily lives,” the pamphlet reads, “that were we for any reason, compelled to forgo them, we would feel that we had retrogressed for centuries, instead of the only twenty-five to fifty years in which present day sanitation and hygiene have come into being.”

During that era, medical professionals realized — and then convinced the public — that indoor toilets connected to the public sewer system were far more beneficial to stop the spread of infectious disease. And as tuberculosis and influenza continued to kill indiscriminately among the classes, bathroom design evolved to help stop their spread.

So the use of porcelain instead of wooden furnishings was developed to make a bathroom easier to clean. But that wasn't the only way germ theory influenced the form of the modern bathroom, and the process still goes on. The next step predicted is a sink in a home's entryway. Read about how disease prevention inspired bathroom design at CityLab. -via Damn Interesting

Let's talk about expletives, without using expletives. If you want to use them, get your swear jar ready. Tom Scott is not so much talking about swear words themselves, but the habit of slipping a swear word into a middle of another word, which you hear everywhere these days, but is not exactly new. That kind of English construction doesn't have rules you learn in school, but there are rules anyway.

It's been 50 years now since we learned the Beatles were breaking up. The biggest band in the world who cranked out hits for years would cease to be, although it took a bit of reading between the lines to figure that out. Both Lennon and McCartney were doing solo albums, and McCartney included an interview in his marketing, in which his intention to leave the Beatles was leaked.   

Was McCartney’s “announcement” official? His album appeared on April 17, and its press packet included a mock interview. In it, McCartney is asked, “Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?”

His response? “No.”

But he didn’t say whether the separation might prove permanent. The Daily Mirror nonetheless framed its headline conclusively: “Paul Quits the Beatles.”

While the world was shocked, the band had been moving toward breakup for some time. Paul's single word blew up the group's agreement to keep their troubles under wraps, and only made tensions between them worse. And they still had an album coming out the next month. Read the story of the Beatles' breakup and how it finally became public at Smithsonian.

Check out this beautiful *giant* siphonophore Apolemia recorded on #NingalooCanyons expedition. It seems likely that this specimen is the largest ever recorded, and in strange UFO-like feeding posture. Thanks @Caseywdunn for info @wamuseum @GeoscienceAus @CurtinUni @Scripps_Ocean pic.twitter.com/QirkIWDu6S

— Schmidt Ocean (@SchmidtOcean) April 6, 2020

Researchers aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's RV Falkor used an ROV to survey the ocean floor off the western coast of Australia. They spotted this massive sinophore lying in a spiral shape.

"It seems likely that this specimen is the largest ever recorded, and in strange UFO-like feeding posture," the institute wrote. Schmidt Ocean estimated the siphonophore's outer ring at 49 feet (15 meters) in diameter.  

While the siphonophore, which is related to jellyfish, looks like it's all one animal, it's actually a collection of parts.

A little math tells us that the outer ring could be as long as 150 feet, which means the entire length could make it the longest animal on earth. A single creature that evolved in that shape would be too vulnerable to survive, but since it's a colony, made up of many individual clones, it may just be a uniquely long-lived specimen. Jellyfish scientist Rebecca Helm tells us about the sinophore genus Apolemia. 

...they'll send the nutrients through a long digestive tract that travels down the whole colony, so that every other clone can use the nutrients. In this way, this siphonophore may remain still and feed for a long time, and I mean LONG...

— Open Ocean Exploration (@RebeccaRHelm) April 6, 2020

Find out more about this kind of creature in her informative Twitter thread. -via Digg