You probably learned about the schwa (Ə) somewhere in the lower grades, and it didn’t make a bit of sense, so you didn’t bother to remember anything that was taught. The teacher gave us plenty of examples, but we couldn't figure out how they were supposed to sound alike, or what the real soundof a  Ə is. Okay. TomScott brings it back with a much better explanation: the schwa is a vowel that is so unstressed that we cannot really define it. Of course, Tom is British, and thinks that the vowel sound in “bath” is made in the back of the mouth. But he does shine some light on phonetics for us in his latest video.

If you’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time at home the last couple of months, you’ve probably turned to TV for entertainment. Streaming services and on-demand TV make it easy to binge-watch some of your old favorites or maybe a series you never got around to watching before. The website Cable TV maps out what people in the 50 states are watching most. Check out how your choices compare to your neighbors! I have a couple of college refugees upstairs who are finally watching all of Breaking Bad, since one of them was too young for the show when it aired, and the other arrived in America after it finished. But more folks in Kentucky are watching The Walking Dead, despite the fact that we all saw it the first time around. Overall, Friends is the binge-watching winner, being the top show in eleven states. -via Digg

The Italians developed star forts, a geometric design to help protect the interior village from cannonballs, in the 15th century. The idea caught on and was imitated far and wide. While cities are now mostly protected by nations, and defense from cannonball fire isn't a priority, these existing forts live on because they were built to last. But it's only been in the last century that we can see them from above and appreciate their geometric beauty. Read about the why's and how's of star forts, their history, and where you can see them today ay Messy Nessy Chic. Yeah, there are plenty of pictures.

Union Glacier Camp is a unique, but real, camping experience in Antarctica. it is only open from November through January, which is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and houses guests in tents. Talk about getting away from it all! -via The Kid Should See This

Some duos are so iconic that you might assume they knew each other from elementary school, or else sought each other out for something to do with whatever made them famous. You would then be surprised to find out how some people met. For example, Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't particularly like each other when they met.

College tours aren’t normally life-changing—but in the case of Google’s founders, a walk around Stanford ended up changing the course of their careers (and had a pretty big impact on the rest of us). In 1995, Sergey Brin, then a second-year grad student in computer science, volunteered to be a tour guide for prospective students who had just been admitted to the school. By pure chance, Larry Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in his group.

Although the pair didn’t exactly start off as friends (they clashed during the tour and found each other “obnoxious”) it was a meaningful first impression. Several months later, when Page’s dissertation on the World Wide Web turned into a much bigger project involving a prototype search engine, he needed help building the system—which was originally named BackRub but, thankfully, was renamed to Google. The person he chose for the job? Someone who he had come to respect: his former tour guide.

Would we have Google today if Page and Brin had never met? Would we have the Beatles catalog if Paul McCartney and John Lennon hadn't decided to play music together? How would the world be different today if  the future king of England had never met Wallis Simpson? Read how other famous partners, couples, and co-workers met at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Joi Ito)

When my daughter requested I buy King Arthur unbleached flour, I didn't know why, but the store was completely out. The shelf was labeled, and there was a large empty space for the product. While I had heard of the brand, I didn't know anything about it because I am not a bread baker. But the US suddenly became a nation of home bread bakers in March. That's why King Arthur co-CEO Karen Colberg was shocked in early March when she saw that the company's sales had shot up 600%.  

When Meaders Ozarow and her husband started an artisan bakery called the Empire Baking Company in Dallas 27 years ago, neither of them knew all that much about baking. But they got a piece of advice from a successful baker friend back East: Stick with King Arthur; it was the only major U.S. flour brand that approached Europe’s higher standards. “We tried switching once to save money,” says Ozarow. “But our head baker started complaining right away that he wasn’t getting a consistent rise, and the color was off. That wasn’t good, because people buy bread with their eyes.” They turned to King Arthur and haven’t looked back.

King Arthur’s pitch — its high quality — is basically the same one the company began with when it was founded in 1790 in Boston as an importer of European flour. When it switched to milling its own American wheat in the 1820s, it took more care than its major competitors throughout the manufacturing process, from selecting prime wheat, to milling only the heart of the wheat’s “berries,” to leaving the natural creamy color unbleached. It even eschewed the addition of dough-stiffening bromate. The company also tightly controls and specifies to a decimal place (in prominent numbers right on the front of the package) the precise protein content of each its flours, a key factor in a baked good’s rise. Though all the extra pains carry a significant price premium of about 25% over its closest competitors, the payoff by most accounts is a more consistent, predictable, and appealing result in baking, particularly with bread.

The executives at King Arthur knew they had to deliver more flour, but couldn't skimp on quality, since that's what they had going for them. Read about how the small company with deep roots is reacting to its sudden popularity at Marker. -via Nag on the Lake

Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) took up birdwatching as a hobby. However, squirrels discovered his new bird feeders. So, handy fellow that he is, Robert constructed an obstacle course to make things more difficult. But it's not just an obstacle course; it's more involved than anything you'd see on American Ninja Warrior. He even designed a photo opportunity in the middle of it! Yeah, the video is long, but you can skip to 7:40 and see squirrels trying to negotiate the course. Watch from the beginning to see how he built it. -via Gizmodo

In 1976, Led Zeppelin released a feature-length concert film called The Song Remains the Same. It was supposed to be a concert at Madison Square Garden in New York, where they played for three nights in 1973. The film begins with the group arriving in their private jet and being driven to the venue, where director Joe Massot had a film crew ready to capture the concerts.

The problem was, as the group and their manager Peter Grant found out only after they’d fired Massot from the project, is that he’d gotten inadequate—practically unusable—coverage that wouldn’t sync properly or cut. Some great shots but nothing that could be used to create an edited sequence.

Grant brought in Aussie director Peter Clifton, the guy they probably should have hired in the first place, to see what could made from this mess, but the initial prognosis looked pretty grim until Clifton suggested reshooting the entire running order of the Madison Square Garden show on Madison Square Garden’s stage… recreated at Shepperton Studios in England!

Everyone assumes they’re watching the group at MSG, but in reality what we are watching (for the most part) is Led Zeppelin rocking out on a soundstage in Surrey, southeast of London. Without an audience.

Complicating matters was the fact that Robert Plant had his teeth fixed, and John Paul Jones had cut his hair short in the intervening year. Read the story of how The Song Remains the Same was filmed at Dangerous Minds.

(Image credit: Heinrich Klaffs)

It's funny enough when an unbalanced washing machine gives you a good beat, but this is something else! Kurt Hugo Schneider has a hi-tech washer that has all the electronic tones needed to play the intro to the song "Take On Me" by a-ha. Schneider is a musician, and has also shown us how he can play a microwave, an oven, and a code lock, which you can see at Laughing Squid.

Mother Nature is adapting to climate change as best as she can. Bumblebees are waking up earlier in the year now, before the flowers they depend on blossom. Needing pollen, the bees bite the plants, which forces them into earier bloom! Scientists first noticed this bee behavior during an unrelated experiment, and didn't know why bees were biting plants. But they soon found out.   

To learn more, the scientists placed hungry bumblebees into mesh cages full of unflowered tomato and mustard plants. Before long, they found the bees using their mandibles to pierce the plants. The team also tried to replicate the bees’ moves by taking razor blades to the plants’ leaves.

The experiment found that all of the punctured plants bloomed more quickly, but the ones the bees damaged produced flowers weeks earlier than the ones the scientists cut. For tomato plants, it was 30 days while mustard plants damaged by the bees saw flowers bloom 14 days earlier.

This suggests that either a chemical in the bees saliva speeds the flowering process, “or our manual imitation of the damage wasn’t accurate enough,” Consuelo De Moraes, a study co-author a professor at the university ETH Zürich and study author, said in a statement.

Maybe that's why my tulips bloomed in March this year, instead of April as they used to. Read more about this discovery at Earther.

(Image credit: Kabir Bakie)

Data Broz gives us a mesmerizing visualization of the most watched TV shows over the past seven decades. Before that, few people actually owned TV sets. But during the time analyzed here, the number of people rose greatly, the number of TV sets per household also exploded. Notice that about 1987 the total number of people watching the same shows started to drop, as cable began offering a wider variety of channels. The data is "mostly" based on the USA, and NFL shows are excluded. -via Geekologie

Luring industry to your town can involve "sweetening the pot," as in giving corporations tax breaks to bring in factories and jobs. Often the gain in jobs does not offset the loss in tax revenue, but that's not the only way to gain a CEO's attention. In order to lure a Tesla Cybertruck factory to Tulsa, they've repainted a 75-foot statue of an oilman, called The Golden Driller, to resemble Tesla's founder Elon Musk!

The gargantuan statue, unveiled earlier this week at a community event and on Bynum’s social media, now features a red Tesla logo painted on its chest. The Driller’s 48-foot belt, which once read “TULSA,” was changed to read “TESLA.” If you squint, the statue’s head now looks like a low-budget YouTube cartoon of Musk. “I was told onsite it was an ‘Elon Musk Face Skin,’” one worker wrote on Facebook. “It went on like a fruit roll-up.”

“It’s this weird, ghostly, white mask-like thing,” said Lucas Wrench, a 28-year-old Tulsa Artist Fellow, who runs an arts space called OK #1. “It sort of looks like if you FaceSwapped with some creature. I just couldn’t believe it. I’m shocked at how transparent it is—the kind of a symbol they created in putting this enormous billionaire, literally a giant towering billionaire in Tulsa—the lack of self-awareness. They’re groveling.”

Read the story of the "Golden Elon" at The Daily Beast. -via Digg

The deadline for entering the 2020 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards isn't until June 30th, so if you have a funny picture of wildlife, send it in! The winners will be announced in September. Meanwhile, there are some pretty funny entries. You can see a dozen of them in a ranked gallery at Bored Panda. Currently at the top is this picture from Anthony Bucci entitled "Rough Night."  

Pigeon
-Rejects the extravagances and hypocrisy of late-stage capitalism
-Doesn't care what you think anyways
-The only god is chaos pic.twitter.com/jlEwd1ubUz

— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) May 7, 2020

Science writer Ferris Jabr studied bird nests to see what they say about the bird itself. Or something along those lines. You know how we judge people by the homes they choose and the way they keep them? This is sort of like that.  

Penguin
-It's fine, I put some blubber on it pic.twitter.com/ROADdRsGcj

— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) May 7, 2020

Some birds are perfectionists, while others take the easy way out.

Megapode
-Uses compost pile, sunbaked sand, and geothermal energy to warm eggs
-Possibly the most ecologically intelligent species
-Literally one with the Earth
-Megapode 2020 pic.twitter.com/CaTTKW9m02

— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) May 8, 2020

See lots more of these, from robins to toucans to ostriches to potoos, in a Twitter thread that was so popular he published part two as well. -via Metafilter

In our latest blog, scientist Kate Fulcher explores the mysterious ‘black goo’ used in Egyptian burials nearly 3,000 years ago.

She investigates what it’s made of and what it can tell us about life in ancient Egypt: https://t.co/oPakiIuZrh pic.twitter.com/HLOTVFpWsJ

— British Museum (@britishmuseum) May 20, 2020

The funerary practices of ancient Egypt are still fascinating us today. Archaeologists have unearthed mummies from thousands of years ago, meticulously preserved by techniques that are not written down, so they are studied and sometimes reverse-engineered in order to be understood. One of these methods is the use of "black goo," used to seal coffins and therefore hiding the craftsmanship of the artwork on mummies. One example is the mummy of Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh, a priest who died around 3,000 years ago.  

After Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh died, he was mummified, wrapped in fine linen and sewn into his plaster and linen mummy case. This case was beautifully painted in bright colours and gilded with gold leaf over the face. At the time of his funeral, he was lowered into his coffin, and carried to his tomb. Then several litres of warm black ‘goo’ were poured all over the mummy case, covering it completely, effectively cementing the case into the coffin. The lid was then placed on the coffin, and he was left to journey forth to the underworld.

Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh was not unique. Though not used by everyone – there are a number of instances of this ‘black goo’ being used in Egyptian burials. But what is it? And if we find out what it was made from, can we learn more about why the Egyptians used it?

The black goo was found in objects besides coffins. Was it used as a religious practice or for more practical purposes -or both? Researchers at the British Museum's Department of Scientific Research analyzed the substance to find out what it was made of and what that can tell us, which you can read about at the British Museum's blog. -via Strange Company