You should bookmark the Trebek Affirmation Soundboard, because it's just what you need when things haven't been going right, or you're a little down and need a pick-me-up. Alex Trebek, the voice of authority and the host of Jeopardy! is there to give you a little boost. Just choose your topic and select your amount, and let Trebek tell you what you need to hear. -via Metafilter

The US threw its heart and soul into the Manhattan Project in order to develop a weapon to stop World War II. It did, but left unimaginable horror behind. Then came the arms race with the Soviet Union, in which both sides developed ever more powerful nuclear weapons. As we became more afraid of nuclear bombs, the US government went to great lengths to maintain public support for nuclear research. That included a 1965 comic outlining the possible peaceful uses of such weapons.

This particular pro-nuke comic was written by scientist and educator Athelstan Spilhaus and was published in the July 4, 1965 edition of newspapers around the country as part of the long-running Our New Age series. Titled, “Atomic Ditch Digging,” this edition of the strip explained that humanity had harnessed the atom, and now it would be used for countless useful purposes in peacetime. Peacetime is a relative word, of course, since the U.S. was dramatically escalating its presence in Vietnam during the summer of 1965 and expanding the military draft at home.

Nevertheless, the comic explained that nuclear explosions were far cheaper than traditional explosives and could be used for building roads, railways, and “huge canals.” The illustration, done by Gene Fawcette, even included a shovel with a nuclear symbol, further pressing the idea that this was a perfect use of atomic energy for large infrastructure projects.

When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. What could possibly go wrong? See more of the comic and the history behind it at Paleofuture. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Brett Ryan Bonowicz)

Sam Battle connected 95 LEGO droids, 42 musical instruments, and 30 iPads together to create the Droid Orchestra. You can probably guess what song they play. The project is to introduce you to the new programmable LEGO® Star Wars™ BOOST Droid Commander. Yeah, they're expensive and probably technically challenging, but they are pretty cool to watch. Learn more about the Droid Orchestra project in a behind-the-scenes video.   -via Geeks Are Sexy

At one time, we thought that humans evolved in a straight line, from one species to another, until homo sapiens sapiens, or modern humans, were achieved -as illustrated in the artwork called March of Progress. But as we developed the ability to analyze DNA, the story gets much messier. Several species of hominins co-existed over the course of our evolution, possibly many species at different times. We now know that non-African humans carry a small percentage of Neanderthal genes, and some carry Denisovan genes. Even more recent genetic research shows that those Neanderthals that modern humans encountered when they left Africa 60,000 years ago already had a legacy of mixing with modern humans in their genome!

The finding also adds to the already compelling body of evidence that there were multiple migrations of modern humans out of Africa, stretching back over hundreds of thousands of years. Modern humans were thought to have evolved in Africa after the departure of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and to have remained on the continent until their well-known out-of-Africa diaspora 60,000 years ago. But recently, fossil evidence has indicated otherwise: A human jawbone in Israel, reported last year to date back to 180,000 years ago, and a skull fragment in Greece that’s even older, indicate earlier human migrations.

In fact, with that piece of skull, archaeologists may have stumbled across a possible member of the long-ago exodus that Siepel and his team inferred in their genomic study. The fossil, which was classified as Neanderthal when it was unearthed in Greece in the 1970s, was analyzed last month by the paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen and her colleagues. Structurally, it looked somewhat like a modern human skull, but it was estimated to be about 210,000 years old — supposedly too old to be modern at that location.

Under this model, it appears that modern humans didn't survive the earlier migrations, and the Neanderthals and Denisovans did not survive the last large homo sapiens sapiens migration. Or did they? The traces of DNA left after each exodus show they are still with us in some ways. Read more about how genome sequencing is revealing more about human evolution at Quanta magazine.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine)

Edi Okoro bought a diamond engagement ring, but it was some time before he popped the question to Callie Read. During that time, he carried the ring around, waiting for the perfect moment. He even referred to it as "my precious," as he got attached to it. But sometime during that period, he realized that he had a secret that Callie didn't know, and he should take advantage of it. So he took a lot of pictures of the ring right in front of her, without ever giving away the secret. Edi even got some video clips! Yes, they eventually got engaged, and she loves the ring. It was another few weeks before he revealed the photos to her. See the imaginative ways he managed to snap Callie and the ring together before the proposal at Bored Panda.

After a few years of bankrobbing their way across the American West, Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh headed to South America with their stolen money and Longabaugh's wife Ethel. Fifty years ago this month, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid told their story and became the biggest movie of 1969. The film ended with Butch and Sundance being shot by the Bolivian military in a hail of bullets, but skipped over the years they spent as wealthy and law-abiding cattlemen in Argentina.   

For six years they managed to elude the most powerful detectives on the planet and outrun their past across the wilds of South America. Hidden, for years, in the tranquil frontiers of Patagonia and the deep forests of the Andes, they started new lives as law-abiding citizens. They roped cattle, built ranches, and spent their ill-gotten gains on glorious living, including tango parties and cabin concerts where a governor—and even lawmen charged with arresting them—were honored guests.  

They tried to let go of the past. But they were hounded for a crime which we now know they did not commit, and the past caught up with them. Found out, the Old West’s smartest robbers responded by going on an epic spree of bank jobs that filled their saddlebags and humiliated law enforcement in three countries. Given the real story of what Butch and Sundance pulled off in South America, it’s no wonder the authorities tried to forget those years.

Read what happened to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid during their years in South America, and how their lives really ended, at The Daily Beast.  -via Metafilter

Tom Scott is on a language kick, which is great, because there's always more to learn about the way we communicate. Here, he tells us about the International Phonetic Language (IPL), which no one can read, but it's a standard used to communicate pronunciation across different languages. But that's not really what the video is about. It's about the sounds we make when we speak, and some that we don't. The sounds he says are impossible may present a challenge to you, so go ahead and give them a try.

We all know that taking a summer vacation to the French Riviera is the ultimate in high-class living, but it wasn't always so. Before the 1920s, the region wasn't world-renowned, and the French who could afford to sojourn there only did so in the winter. Then came the Americans to change that.

In the summer of 1923, an American husband and wife could be credited with two rather surprising things. Their name is seldom remembered in the context of the glamorous 1920s, but the French Riviera became the summer destination it is today thanks to the infectious expatriate couple known as the Murphys. Gerald and Sarah convinced their circle of friends to summer with them in Cap d’Antibes at a time when the fashionable only wintered there, leaving the region abandoned during the high summer months. Their pals included a young Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau and a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation who fell into the couple’s orbit.

Read about the Murphys, their social circle, and their influence on the lifestyles of the rich and famous at Messy Nessy Chic. You'll see a lot of historically fascinating pictures, too.

Children affected with acid reflux sometimes take a syrup laced with a pediatric formulation of the drug omeprazole. The parents of 17 of those children in Spain became alarmed when they noticed their child sprouting hair all over their bodies. They had developed hypertrichosis, a condition that is sometimes referred to as "werewolf syndrome."  

Speaking with Güell, Ángela Selles, a mother whose son had at least two bottles of syrup containing the anti-hair loss drug, says her six-month-old’s “forehead, cheeks, arms and legs, hands became covered in hair.” She adds, “He had the eyebrows of an adult. It was very scary because we didn’t know what was happening to him.”

The cases were traced back to one pharmaceutical lab in Málaga, where a labeling mishap led to the syrup being laced with minoxidil instead of omeprazole. You might know minoxidil better under the brand name Rogaine, an anti-baldness medicine. Doctors believe that discontinuing the medication will cause the excess hair to fall out in the case of these affected children, but the long term effects are unclear. Read how this mixup happened at Smithsonian.

Women have always been involved in science, math, technology, medicine, and engineering, but their accomplishments are often overlooked. A set of free posters celebrates eight of those pioneering women from all over the world. Some you've heard of, others may be new to you.

The free downloadable posters, created by Nevertheless, feature eight trailblazing women who have made an impact in STEM fields. Each poster is also uniquely designed by a different female artist from around the world. Nevertheless, a podcast which celebrates women transforming teaching and learning through technology, hopes that you will download the posters and print them out for your school, home, or workplace.

See all eight posters, with information about each subject and artist, at A Mighty Girl. -via Nag on the Lake

If a bank robber were to hit Metropolis Bank, luck would have it that Clark Kent is in the bank, waiting in line. Kent is reluctant to use his super powers to stop the crime. Is it because that would reveal his secret identity? Well, no, as we've all noticed, Superman's "disguise" as Kent is a waste of time. He's staying out of it because he's taking a personal day as his therapist recommended. Studio C gives us an awkward clash between the world of comic book heroes and the self-help movement.  -via io9

Putting the woolly mammoth on the endangered species list is an idea that has been presented to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), which is a international treaty to protect species. Now, mind you, the woolly mammoth is extinct, and no one involved is trying to claim otherwise. So why would anyone want to make an extinct animal into a technically endangered animal? Because of the ivory.  

When mammoths died, many ended up entombed in permafrost, which encased, deep-froze, and preserved their bodies. Now, as the permafrost begins to thaw, more and more of these prehistoric pachyderms—and their spectacular tusks—are emerging, and paleontologists aren’t the only ones picking up the pieces.

“Tons of tusks are found each year, but almost all of them are sold to ivory traders,” says Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan who specializes in the paleobiology of mammoths, which he studies through their tusks and teeth. “Doing the science we would like to do to learn more about mammoth ecology and history has therefore become much more difficult over the last couple decades.”

It's not just the science that is affected. Making mammoth ivory illegal takes away a loophole that traders use to sell their goods, since it is almost impossible to tell mammoth ivory from elephant ivory once it's carved. Read about the pros and cons of making mammoths an endangered species at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Flying Puffin)

We are used to science videos from Kurzgesagt, but this is something very different for them: fiction. They've animated the 2009 short story "The Egg" by Andy Weir. The speculative story is a conversation in the afterlife that takes liberties with various religions, but the point is that it's all about me, which means it's about all of us.   

Keith Busher collects Precious Moments figurines. That in itself is not unusual, because a lot of people do. But Busher is an artist. He takes the figurines he finds and makes them dark and twisted, downright "anti-precious." Apartment therapy tells his story. 

Though he initially shied away from toying with Precious Moments because he didn’t want to upset anyone (and, practically speaking, because people aren’t in the habit of discarding those particular figurines very often), Busher says he hit the jackpot when he found out a local antique shop had an entire box of Precious Moments it was looking to offload. “The Precious Moments pieces tend to get the biggest audiences as they are so recognizable,” he says. “Everyone knows somebody who had this piece or that one.”

Busher uses a self-hardening clay and mostly recycled materials to transform each figurine. And he takes his time. “I’ve learned that I can make pieces quickly, but I won’t be happy when it’s done,” he says. “I often add things that don’t get seen, several layers of paint to get that right feeling of depth.”

See Busher's creations at the Precious Mutations Facebook page and at Instagram.  -Thanks, Linda!

Lucas the spider is always looking for a new friend. Here he looks for one inside the clock! Lucas is trying to make a connection with the little bird inside, in the latest animation from Joshua Slice.