Saharan silver ants (Cataglyphis bombycina) were already on the list of extreme species because of their unique ability to tolerate the heat of the desert in midday. A new study of the ways they've adapted to the Saharan environment describes their amazing ability to run.

Around noon each day in the Sahara Desert, silver ants emerge from their underground nests. Despite this being the hottest part of the day, they come out to scavenge dead insects, which are most likely to drop dead when sand temperatures can reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius). The ants have to be quick, though. Their prey is scarce, and they have lots of desert to search.

Just how quick these iridescent arthropods can be, and how they achieve those speeds, is explained for the first time today in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Saharan silver ants can travel at 108 body lengths a second, the researchers found. This makes them one of the fastest known running species, bested only by the California coastal mite and the Australian tiger beetle.

To illustrate how fast that is, 108 body lengths per second is the equivalent of a human running more than 400 miles per hour. Read how these ants do it at Discover magazine. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen)

The folks at Big Cat Rescue in Florida are always looking for ways to enrich the cats' experience that will also look good on YouTube. They were recently gifted with large cardboard boxes decorated with autumn motifs. It appears that both goals were fulfilled!

This intriguing photograph was taken by Sara Germain for the Lynx Project. It shows the moment Nathan Berg realizes that the large predator he's carrying is waking up from sedation. The Canada lynx is focused on the photographer but is most likely surprised to be in the arms of the very species he's spent his life avoiding. We can assume that no harm was done because the photo managed to be posted.

After we place a satellite collar on each lynx, weigh them, record measurements, and collect samples for genetic and isotope analysis, we place them back in their enclosed log box trap until they have fully recovered; then we release them. This adult male was just beginning to wake up as we carried him to and placed him back in his enclosure to recover. Thanks @sara.germain for the fantastic photo!

The Northwest Boreal Lynx Project is studying the movements of Canada lynx in relation to their main prey, the snowshoe hare. Read more about their work here.  -via Bored Panda, where you'll see plenty more images of Canada lynx.  

Henry, Emma, and David are sand bubbler crabs. They are tiny, and they eat the even tinier creatures that live between grains of sand in the ocean and on the beach. Ze Frank makes it clear how very weird this lifestyle is in his latest edition of True Facts.  

The Natural History Museum in London has announced the winners of their annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The grand prize went to Yongqing Bao for the above photo entitled "The Moment." A Tibetan fox startled his marmot prey in the Qilian Mountains of China, and Bao caught the moment for posterity.  

Born and raised in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau area, Bao was fascinated by the local wildlife. He is now the Director and Chief Ecological Photographer of the Qilian Mountain Nature Conservation Association of China.

He is also a member of the Qinghai Photographers Association and Deputy Secretary-General of the Qinghai Wildlife Photographers Association. His work has been published in many magazines and newspapers and awarded in several international competitions.

The winner in the Young Photographer of the Year is Cruz Erdmann, for his colorful image of a big-finned reef squid, taken off the coast of Indonesia. Read about the winners at the competition's website, and see winning photos in the various categories in this gallery. -via reddit

There's a new Superman comic available in stores today, except it's not exactly new, but a modern incarnation of an old story. Superman Smashes the Klan is the first of a three-part story in which the Man of Steel battles white supremacy and xenophobia.

The book comes from the award-winning cartooning team of Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru, who were inspired by the 1946 Superman story “Clan of the Fiery Cross.” That story wasn’t a comic, but rather an arc of the immensely popular Adventures of Superman radio serial. In the audio adventure, Superman battled the racist machinations of the Ku Klux Klan. Excoriated and embarrassed by one of the country’s most popular radio shows, the white supremacist group actually saw a drop in membership.

Superman Smashes the Klan is the first time “Clan of the Fiery Cross” has been adapted to comics. And Yang and Gurihiru’s Superman is a classic 1946 Superman. He hasn’t figured out how to fly yet and he’s never seen kryptonite before, a nod to how many core aspects of the character originated in that very series. Writers on the The Adventures of Superman serial went on to introduce those elements, along with Jimmy Olsen, and Daily Planet editor Perry White, and the endlessly quotable “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!”

Polygon spoke to author Gene Luen Yang about his approach to the project, and has a 16-page preview of the first chapter.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Gene Luen Yang, Gurihiru/DC Comics)

The more Pompeii is excavated, the more we see the city as a once-thriving culture instead of just a site of tragedy. Before the 79 CE eruption of Mt. Vesuvius buried Pompeii under several feet of rocks and ash, it was a bustling place full of commerce, education, vice, and art. A fresco recently unearthed in a building thought to be a tavern and brothel depicts two gladiators at the end of a battle, complete with bloody wounds.

In a statement, Massimo Osanna, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park, says the establishment probably proved popular among the city’s gladiators, who lived nearby. He adds, “We are in Regio V, not far from where there was a barracks for gladiators, where among other things, there was graffiti referring to this world.”

The three- by four-and-a-half-foot fresco features two types of gladiators: a murmillo armed with a short straight sword, curved shield and distinctive crested helmet and a thraex wielding a smaller shield and angled blade. The painting finds the thraex, who has dropped his shield and is seriously wounded, holding one thumb up in a plea for mercy.

Read more of what this scene, and other recent discoveries, tells us about Pompeii in its heyday at Smithsonian.

The Japanese company Toto is internationally famous for their high-quality toilets. The company has a museum in Kita Kyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, where the company gift shop sells chocolate candy called Toilette Chocolat in the form of their toilets!

756 yen (US$7) gets you five chocolates inside a toilet-shaped box, complete with a functioning lid. While you might be expecting them to be a deep brown, they’re actually made of white chocolate, in order to visually represent the pristine porcelain of a brand-new Toto toilet bowl.

As we unwrapped one, we were struck by how intricate the detailing is. Not only is the shape of the bowl accurately reproduced, the seat and tank are separately molded.

Sora News24 suggested that they might add a tiny dollop of regular milk chocolate to the bottom of the bowl. For taste, ya know. Read more about Toilette Chocolat at their website. -via Dave Barry

There are some who would say the only reason to read an opinion-based internet list is to condemn the ranking. If you do, you probably think "Who is this guy, and why does he have such terrible opinions?" But Paste magazine approached the project with a lot of experience.

This list has been a long time coming for Paste. We are fortunate—some would say “cool enough”—to have quite a lot of genre expertise to call upon when it comes to horror in particular. Several Paste staff writers and editors are lifelong horror geeks, and there’s also a strong sentiment toward the macabre among several of our more prolific contributing writers. Case in point: We have so many writers focused on horror that we’ve produced huge lists of the best horror films on Netflix,Amazon Prime and Hulu that are all updated on a monthly basis. We’ve even given you the likes of the 50 best zombie movies of all time, and the 100 best vampire movies of all time, if you can believe that.

And yet, somehow, despite all that expertise, we’ve never put together a definitive ranking of the best horror films of all time. That ends now, with the list below: a practical, must-see guide through the history of the horror genre.

There are classic films on this list, of course. There are also likely a handful of independent features that will be unknown to all but the most dedicated horror hounds. There are foreign films from around the globe, entries that range from 1922 to 2017. In some cases, you will likely be shocked by films that are missing. In others, you’ll find yourself surprised to see us going to bat for films that don’t deserve the derision they’ve received.

But even better than finding your opinions validated or contradicted is the opportunity to seek out horror films you've never seen to watch during the Halloween season. You might want to skip ahead to the top 25 first (where you'lll most likely find some movies you've never seen), but then you'll want to go back and read the entire list.

The 2009 film Zombieland was not the first zombie comedy, but it was a shining example of what the sub-genre could be. As such, this Honest Trailer from Screen Junkies is less a takedown than a homage that will make us yearn for a sequel to Zombieland. Oh yeah, right, the sequel Zombieland Double Tap opens this weekend.

In 2010, Ray was a Navy corpsman in Afghanistan who stepped on a roadside bomb while trying to reached a wounded soldier. The blast blew off both of his legs, plus his penis, scrotum, and a chunk of his abdomen. In his years of recovery, he learned to walk again with prosthetic legs, but it was his unseen wound that bothered him more. Significant genital injuries affect 1,367 American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The standard treatment for a missing penis is phalloplasty reconstruction, creating a living prosthetic from the patient's own tissues, but that is not only a poor substitute, it was not enough to replace Ray's missing body parts. In 2012, his military doctors referred Ray to the reconstructive surgery group at Johns Hopkins. Surgeon Richard Redett thought Ray might be a good candidate for their first penis transplant. A suitable donor suddenly became available in 2018.

Once they had removed and packed Ray’s graft, nothing else mattered except speed. Bodily tissue begins to break down the instant it’s deprived of blood. If enough toxins are released, the tissue can swell so much it asphyxiates. It’s why you throw transplants on ice, as Redett’s crew did for their Learjet flight back to Baltimore—it delays the breakdown process.

It’s also why surgeons train, practice, and visualize their maneuvers. Redett’s team had already run dry rehearsals of their procedure. In the operating room, they had set up the table where Ray would lie, figured out where the ice machine went, placed the optical microscope Redett would use, and even tested every power outlet to make sure they wouldn’t short a circuit.

As the team ate snacks from their go-bags on the plane back to Hopkins, other surgeons wheeled Ray into the operating theater. By this time it was 11 p.m. on Sunday, almost 24 hours after he had arrived at the hospital. They prepared him by removing all the diseased tissue and exposing the blood vessels, nerves, urethra, and penile stump. At 2 a.m. Monday, Redett and his fellow surgeons took their places—some standing above Ray, the rest tending to the graft at another table—and steeled themselves. The gravity of his mission consumed Redett’s thoughts.  

The surgery took 14 hours. Read how the operation was done, the history of penis transplants, and how Ray is doing a year later, at MIT Technology Review. -via Real Clear Science

(Image: Johns Hopkins surgeons performing a different transplant)

Magic City in Paris was one of the world's earliest permanent theme parks. It opened in 1900, and offered Parisians amusements and distractions beyond imagination for its time.

Dragons curled up under the bridge. Toboggans splashed Parisians in to the Seine, benches twirled, and wine flowed freely. It was a Saturday afternoon like any other at the “Magic City” of Paris, the long lost fun fair that was the nation’s very first parc d’attractions. As such, it was quite literally the gateway to extravagances unknown – a ticket into a world of whimsy matched only by the Universal Exposition, aka the Greatest Show on Earth – that could be enjoyed by all, but especially the LGBTQ community, whose legendary drag balls swept Brassaï (and his camera) off his feat. So grab your top hat, darling, for a day at the fair…

The theme park rides closed in 1926, and the ballroom space left behind became a place of celebration for the city's gay and drag community. But if you went to that neighborhood now, you would never guess its history. Read about the heyday of Magic City, with lots of pictures, at Messy Nessy Chic.

Every February in Laredo, Texas, the entire town celebrates George Washington's Birthday with a festival, which includes a peculiar debutante ball sponsored by the Society of Martha Washington, in which young women dress as a stylized fashion ideal of the mother of our country.

The dresses take a year to sew, and the girls spend a year learning how to wear them: how to glide, how to float their arms out so they never touch the skirts, how to hold their heads under the weight of the coiffure. The look is Marie Antoinette in her let-them-eat-cake days, and the dresses, like Marie’s dresses, weigh so much—up to one hundred pounds—that they hurt the girl. They leave bruises at the shoulders and hips where the dress bones pull down on girl bones. The dresses, like the gestures, are passed down from mother to daughter.

Each girl needs five dressers, who first lace her into her corset, then affix the “cage” of the hoop skirt to her waist, sneaking a pillow between the cage and her body so her skin isn’t rubbed raw. Then come petticoats, and the dress on top. The dressing occurs over a tarp with a hole cut into its center, and once everything is in place, the women pick up the girl and the tarp together and walk her to the stage so that the dress never touches the ground. If it is raining, they wrap her in plastic too.

The history behind the ball goes back to the 1840s, when settlers from the East were sent to Laredo to "Americanize" the newly-annexed Texas. Read that history and how the modern Marthas do their thing at Believer magazine. -via Digg

Kurzgesagt says "What would it be like if we nuked a city?" The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki say, "Well, let us tell you about it..." Those bombings were devastating, but nuclear weapons have come a long way since 1945. They are much bigger and more powerful, and the damage goes way beyond the city limits. Even in cheery neon-colored graphics, the story is terrifying.

Previously Unpublished Photo, By L7′s Jennifer Finch: Kurt Cobain & Krist Novoselic At An L7 Record Release Party. pic.twitter.com/81aZFKr2dq

— Nirvana (@NirvanaFan1994) April 26, 2017

In 1991, a young band from Seattle named Nirvana released an album called Nevermind. DGC Records had high hopes for the album and threw a release party at a club called Re-Bar on Friday the 13th. From the perspective of 2019, you can imagine that the invitations were coveted and the party was a wild night. And you'd be right, but there was more to it.

The first signal that things at Nirvana’s record release party for Nevermind might get out of hand was it was a strictly “beer only” event. To remedy this, Kurt Cobain’s pal Dylan Carlson of the band Earth snuck in a huge bottle of whiskey (allegedly Jim Beam) served it up covertly in a photo booth inside the infamous Seattle entertainment mecca/gay-friendly watering hole, Re-bar. Smuggling booze into a bar is a thing thrifty drunks do, but you also might be asking yourself why did it have to be smuggled into a bar hosting a party full of industry types from Geffen Records, local label Sub Pop and thirsty musicians? To explain this, we have to consider Seattle’s long, complicated history with hard liquor. Prior to the 1970s, it was illegal for people to drink whilst standing up, and women were not permitted to sit on bar stools.

Even in 1991, the liquor laws were quite strange, including one against serving liquor where food was served. Did the local legislators fear that a food fight might break out? Um, that's exactly what happened. Read about the Nevermind release party at Dangerous Minds.