Five years ago, Loz Blain was in the habit of recording the sound of his farts to send to his brother, Shonky. One of them was so unique that he turned it into a song that went viral called the Fart Symphony. It was the biggest video on YouTube for one day, and then just petered out ...or did it? The song found an extended afterlife in music education.
The Fart Symphony was used in music composition classes at Berkeley College of Music in the US, largest independent college of contemporary music in the world.
Loz says he's pleased to see that his fart has resonated with other musicians and students around the world.
It also became a talking point for students at Auckland's Royal Oak Intermediate who had been studying body percussion and how different parts of the body, such as one's voice, can be used to make sound.
Kids love it, and the composition adds spice to what could be a boring music class. -via Metafiter
Takotna, Alaska, has a population of 52 people. You can only get to the town by plane, snowmobile, dogsled, or ATV, since there are no roads there. But the people of Takotna have their own claim to fame, and once a year they proudly show off their pies to the participants of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
Despite its remote location and diminutive size, Takotna is known by mushers for its outsized generosity. Since the race started in 1973, locals have dished out turkey dinners, made-to-order breakfasts, and other free meals to the mushers. But Takotna is best known for the staggering number of pies available. This year, the village plans to make more than 100 pies (roughly two for each of the 57 racers). For the mushers, who mainly consume bland, lightweight trail meals, while traversing a landscape of muted white and brown, stepping into the community center in Takotna is akin to Dorothy appearing in Oz: The colors come on. But instead of plucky munchkins with oversize lollipops, it’s gregarious locals with tables of riotously colorful pies spanning the fruit and cream spectrum.
Ze Frank asks many questions about your creativity, or lack thereof. The answers are yes, yes, yes, yes, and oh yes! Somewhere in this video, you start to wonder if Ze Frank has undergone a crisis, but no. We all have these thoughts, conundrums, and setbacks. We're only human.
New York City has eight million residents, but the big city can also be seen as a collection of small towns jammed together, neighborhoods that each have their own flavor, culture, and name. Redditor bigchunguslolfunny constructed an interactive map labeling those neighborhoods. You can zoom in and out, and click on a colored unit to find out the name of the neighborhood.
Of course, defining a neighborhood is difficult, as they came into their current form unofficially over time. Quite a few of them are small neighborhoods within larger neighborhoods. Their borders are fluid, and even next door neighbors may disagree on what to call their corner of the city. You can read some of the clarifications in the discussion at reddit.
This faux trailer was made from video clips of the Toy Story movies overdubbed with audio from the TV series Westworld. The way it works together so well is downright creepy, almost horrifying. -via Laughing Squid
Here's a myth/rumor/urban legend I hadn't heard before, possibly because I spend so much time on the internet I've developed a radar for BS. The "factoid" contained in the headline has been making the rounds, and a closer look at it reveals not so much junk science, but downright fake news. What is true is that if you look hard enough, you can often find some living cells in a woman's body that contain male DNA, meaning a Y chromosome.
To begin with, back in 2012 a study titled, Male Microchimerism, noted that after dissecting a number of deceased women’s brains, 63% of the brains (37 out of 59) had male microchimerism present. While it was touted by many a media source that this was a huge discovery, in fact, it has long been known that a large percentage of women eventually carry living male cell lines in their bodies. For example, a study in 1969, published in The Lancet, showed that 70% (21 of 30) pregnant women, 19 of whom were pregnant with boys and 2 others having previously had boys, were found to have male microchimerism.
From there countless other studies have shown the same thing, including some animal studies that showed some of these cell lines are able to cross the blood-brain barrier in mice. What made this particular 2012 study interesting was simply that it was the first to show these cell lines could cross the blood-brain barrier in humans too.
So it appears that being pregnant with a male child can leave cells with male chromosomes behind. There are a few cases where this happens in a woman who has never been pregnant, but those women had older brothers, so they could have received a few male cells from their mother's microchimerism before birth. The real question is how those studies became fodder for the idea that women retain male cells from having sex. Today I Found Out ran that story down to its source, and determined the exact assumptions that led to the urban legend.
Brett happens to know a couple of aerospace engineers, and asked them about propelling yourself through space with a fart. Both Nate and Dan took the question completely seriously, and had a rather involved group text discussion on the many variables in the scenario. First they mused on how different flatulence would be in space compared to earth's air pressure and the restrictions of a space diet. The question of force was tabled because there is a limit to what the human body can do, and pivoted to how fast can you travel that one meter distance. Once the parameters were set, they went to work.
Thirteen minutes is a long time, but this is SCIENCE! However, astronaut Chris Hadfield addressed this years ago, and said it was pointless. Maybe that's because he was wearing pants at the time, and the original question assumes that the farting person is naked. Fart propulsion has been used for the plot of a movie, but as you might assume, it was a comedy. See the entire discussion at Imgur. And may the Force be with you.
Hey, a scientific breakthrough and adorable baby kitties in one video! Ahem. There are not enough cheetahs in the world to ensure their survival as a species, but breeding cheetahs in captivity has always been a challenge. Some are already overbred, while others do not make good mothers for one reason or another. The biologists at The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) have been working on the problem, and now we have two cheetah cubs to show for it. They are the product of IVF and surrogacy, meaning they are the genetic product of two cheetahs and were gestated and birthed by a third, all in different locations. The two cubs were born at the Columbus Zoo on February 19. Read more about the experiment at Smithsonian.
Samuel Ruben and Martin Kamen were doing pure research on the basics of life. How did plants photosynthesize sunlight and turn it into oxygen? Could the answer be carbon? They did experiments using a particle accelerator called a cyclotron. Their experiments ran through the dead of night, because the cyclotron was used for more important things during the day- namely a cure for cancer.
In the early morning hours of February 27, 1940, chemist Martin Kamen sat in a cold, dark police station. Police officers apprehended the disheveled scientist, too tired to protest, outside of his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and hauled him to the station for questioning. They accused him of committing a string of murders that took place the previous evening.
But the police couldn’t pin the crimes on Kamen because the scientist had been locked away in his lab for the past three days, lobbing deuteron particles at a tiny sample of graphite with his colleague, the chemist Samuel Ruben. After he was released, Kamen went home for a brief nap, returned to the lab, and then made one of the most important discoveries of the 20th Century: the carbon-14 isotope.
It wasn't the last time Kamen would be accused of a crime, but those stories faded in importance to the discovery of carbon-14, which is used to determine parts of our history, measure the effects of climate change, and even authenticate Scotch whisky. Read that chapter of science history at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg
Disney has always known that six years is just enough time for a new generation of kids to be born that would enjoy their movies. Expectations were pretty high for Frozen 2, six years after the first Frozen was a global phenomenon. But the reason Frozen was such a hit was its unique characters and unique magic. The sequel, by definition, is not unique, and the plot appears to be stolen from a Marvel movie. So of course it made a ton of money ($1.4 billion so far) for Disney. This Honest Trailer explains Frozen 2.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells, And pretty maids all in a row.
Flowers have an amazing range of appearances. The one called Calceolaria uniflora is also called the flower-doll plant, and you can see why. This plant is native to South America, and thrives in high altitudes with cooler temperatures. See more stunning examples of the flower-doll plant at Cantinho with an English translation here. -via Nag on the Lake
Some animators were overjoyed to switch to computer generated cartoons, because drawing the same scene over and over was a lot of work. The big animation studios had already outsourced a lot of those "in-between" drawings to lesser-paid workers. However, experimental animators keep looking for ways to make the work harder, as in stop-motion animation, because that's just cool. A film crew at Wriggles & Robins went a step further- they cooked more than 6,000 pancakes to bring you this simple animated story. It's only appropriate that they unveiled it on Mardi Gras, also known as Pancake Day. -via Digg
The Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo) has employed professional mapmakers for 175 years now. They plot out the topography of the country and record changes over time, such as growing cities and more accurate measurements. But every once in a while, an anomaly is found that show a cartographer's sly and subversive sense of humor.
Watching a single place evolve over time reveals small histories and granular inconsistencies. Train stations and airports are built, a gunpowder factory disappears for the length of the Cold War. But on certain maps, in Switzerland’s more remote regions, there is also, curiously, a spider, a man’s face, a naked woman, a hiker, a fish, and a marmot. These barely-perceptible apparitions aren’t mistakes, but rather illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.” Maps published by Swisstopo undergo a rigorous proofreading process, so to find an illicit drawing means that the cartographer has outsmarted his colleagues.
Some of the illustrations were only discovered decades after they were embedded in the maps. Why would they do this? And how did the hijinks begin? For all we know, it's still going on. Read about the hidden pictures in Swiss maps at Eye on Design. -via Amusing Planet
Disney/Lucasfilm has unveiled the creation of a new Star Wars universe. Oh, it's still in a galaxy far, far away, but a new series of books called The High Republic is set even longer ago, specifically 200 years before the events we know from the movies. We'll see the first of these publications in August.
Phase one of The High Republic debuts in August at the Star Wars Celebration Anaheim convention, and will feature five releases: young adult novel Into the Dark, middle grade novel A Test of Courage, comic book series The High Republic Adventures, another comic book series (this one from Marvel) called simply The High Republic, and finally a novel called The Light of the Jedi.
In 2016, Disney de-canonized the "expanded universe," the hundreds of novels, comics, and games set in the Star Wars universe, in order to exert more control over the narrative. With the creation of the High Republic series, the universe will expand once again. It will be an "incubator" of sorts: the stories from the High Republic that prove the most popular among Star Wars fans will be the ones ripe for investing with a movie budget. You can pre-order books through the links at Star Wars.
A couple of weeks ago, we found there are two ways to regard books, which determines how you treat them. Now it appears there are many ways to save your place in a book that range from methods that border on idolatry to downright crimes. I suppose most of us are somewhere in the middle -except for chaotic neutral, what's up with that? This alignment chart was found at Laughing Squid.
