Alluding to the human fertilization process as a squadron of Rebel fighters attacking the Death Star may seem silly on paper, but it works in the video The Beginning. Biologists Don Ingber and Charles Reilly at Harvard's Wyss Institute set out to make a hyper-accurate film of how sperm fertilizes an egg. They used real data from research, converted into animation. The purpose was to engage non-scientists, so they framed the process as a Star Wars parody. It was a cheesy idea that turned out to be sublime in the rendering. But even more interesting, the process of animating the sequence uncovered something new about the morphology of sperm.

By combining insights from Hollywood animation studios and empirical data from biology, Ingber and Reilly set out to create a hyper-accurate 3D model of a sperm cell. Their goal was to see whether cinematic storytelling based on data could be a way to engage people who might be turned off by numbers and dry technical papers. As a bonus, their pursuit of engagement through animation resulted in a scientific discovery about how energy is distributed in a sperm cell to make it move.

(vimeo link)

The short explanation of the energy distribution and how it was discovered is at Motherboard.

The following is an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy.

(Image credit: Flickr user Dave)

Good thing it’s pretty in the Sunshine State. At least the view will be nice as you try to outrun all of these dangerous things.

AFRAID OF LIGHTNING?

(Image credit: Flickr user NASA HQ PHOTO)

Then don’t go to Florida. A study conducted from 2004 to 2007 by the American Meteorological Society found that people are more likely to get struck by lightning in Florida than anywhere else in North America. The state averages 35 lightning injuries and seven fatalities per year, and “Lightning Alley,” a hot spot that spans central Florida from Tampa to Titusville, receives an average of 50 strikes per square mile per year. And right in the middle of Lightning Alley: Disney World. Even with lightning rods strategically placed throughout the park, a quick-moving storm in 2003 caught animal handlers by surprise at Disney’s Kilimanjaro Safaris attraction. Before they could move the animals to safety, a lightning bolt killed a 12-foot-tall giraffe named Betsy. Also located in Lightning Alley: Universal Studios, SeaWorld, Daytona Beach, and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where they launch spaceships.

AFRAID OF ALLIGATORS?

Emma Perrier was a 34-year-old French woman living in London who had just broken up with a boyfriend. She went online to meet someone new, and she did. She connected with an Italian man living in England named Ronaldo “Ronnie” Scicluna. Above you see their profile pics. But Ronnie was actually 53-year-old Alan Stanley, who didn't really want to date, but liked meeting women online. His dating profile, and the things he told Perrier, were a complete fraud. Of course, she eventually found out, since he never wanted to meet in real life, even though he didn't live that far away. But who was the man in the profile picture? Perrier used a reverse image search.

“Believe me I was scared to use it for the first time,” Emma said. She uploaded the photograph of Ronnie wearing his leather jacket. The results arrived in seconds: The man in the photographs was a model and actor from Turkey, called Adem Guzel. Emma was confused. She found his model-management website, an official Twitter account, and his Facebook. Adem’s closest connection to the United Kingdom was that he had studied at the Gaiety School of Acting in the nearby Republic of Ireland.

Perrier sent a message to Guzel, warning him that a man was using his publicity shots in a catfishing scheme. Guzel, who was then 35 and managing a hotel after a TV gig fell apart, returned her message. And that's where the story really takes off. The two are now living together in London. You can read the entire story at the Atlantic. -via Uproxx

This Sunday night will be the premiere of The Walking Dead season eight. It will also be the series' 100th episode. To celebrate (and promote) that milestone, producer, director, and effects guy Greg Nicotero teamed up with Michael Broom and John Wheaton to produce a series of The Walking Dead posters in the styles of posters you recall from classic movies.

"We had a really, really good time. I thought it was a great opportunity to celebrate that we've done 100 episodes, by looking at other classic titles and skewing them toward the world of The Walking Dead," he says of the series. "I found an opportunity to celebrate what I love about the show and what I know fans love about the show, too: the community of people who embrace the pop culture aspect of filmmaking and movies. I can't get enough of it. Being a collector of movie posters and props and things like that, it was just another opportunity to live vicariously through these movie posters that I love so much."

There are 17 posters in the series. You can see them all at the Hollywood Reporter. -via io9

Webcomic artist Liz Climo always has a great time dressing up her animal characters for Halloween. I think the whale's idea is pretty clever, even if he does have to explain it. I love the banana porpoise and Superotter, too. Then there's Batman and his psychic, and the witch and her cat. Be sure to check back for more critters getting ready for Halloween at Hi, I'm Liz.

The Salem Witch Trials get all the publicity, but it was far from the only witch panic that invaded colonial America. In Hartford, Connecticut, witch hysteria gripped the community in 1662 and 1663, so much that it came to be known as "The Year of the Witch." It all started with the death of eight-year-old Elizabeth Kelly, who died of an unknown ailment. Suspicion instantly led to Judith Ayres, who nobody liked anyway. She was arrested for witchcraft, and for good measure, they arrested her husband, too.

Judith and William were subjected to that indispensable part of any good witch trial: the "water test." The couple were bound hand to foot and tossed into a pond. If they floated, that was proof positive they were witches. If they sank, well, at least Judith and William would have the satisfaction of knowing that they would die vindicated.

To no one's real surprise, the pair floated like a pair of corks. A ghastly death at the gallows awaited them.

Luckily for the Ayerses, there were a few people in town who had not come down with the prevailing hysteria. These supporters managed to arrange a jailbreak, and the couple fled to Rhode Island, leaving behind their two sons, ages five and eight. One wonders what sort of lives those boys went on to have.

Unfortunately, the departure of Judith and William did not signal the end of the Hartford witch panic. In truth, it was just getting started.

The young girls of Hartford started talking about witchcraft, and accusing others of the practice. One suspect named an entire coven, including her own husband. Read the account of the Year of the Witch at Strange Company.

Markus Klemelä just wanted to brush his teeth. His cat wants some lovin'. The cat, like all house cats, doesn't recognize boundaries when he wants something, so Markus could only do one thing -grab his phone to record this interlude.

(YouTube link)

The cat is pretty insistent, and has a world-class purr machine. -via Digg

Does the 1986 film Labyrinth make you think of David Bowie or Jim Henson first? Henson directed the cast of humans and puppets, and Bowie played Jareth, the Goblin King who kidnaps the baby Toby while his sister Sarah is babysitting. The film was a financial flop when it was first released, but became a cult hit as further generations of children saw it on home video. Let's have some trivia from the making of Labyrinth.  

7. The only way that Toby could sit on Jareth’s lap was to have a sock puppet off screen for him to look at.

The kid just wouldn’t stop screaming when he was sitting on Bowie’s lap, but once Bowie had the puppet in his other hand he couldn’t look away.

6. There were a few different stars that wanted to play Jareth.

Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger were a couple, and Jim Henson was going to try to get sting before his kids convinced him to ask David Bowie.

Read more about Labyrinth at TVOM.

Burger King released a video about bullying. They staged a scene of high school students bullying a kid in the dining area, and the also "bullied" their Whopper Jr. burgers. That's the goofy part. They compare how many people complained about the burger to how many people stood up for the kid. As you can guess, more people were concerned about the burger. After all, they paid for that.  

(YouTube link)

It's the later part of the video that gets you, when people are shown intervening in the teenager's abuse. That might trigger you. You can say that sticking your nose into the situation won't help, and might even make the bullying worse at a different location. But a lot of folks in the reddit comments recalled being bullied as a child, and their clearest memories were of that one time someone stood up for them and let them know they weren't alone. The ad directs you to the No Bully site.

The Hamburger Helper mascot is a disembodied hand, wearing a glove, with a face in its palm. It's ridiculous already, but trying to envision what kind of bone structure it has inside is even weirder. That's the question michael SCAREa‏ posed on Twitter. He got over 500 replies, including plenty of illustrations of the inside of a fictional advertising character.

I can see why you'd think it was one of those, but as an actual skeletologist I can confirm it's actually this: pic.twitter.com/OBwASgeuhd

— Sinderula™ (@Sindershift) October 15, 2017

well that's enough internet for today pic.twitter.com/ft1V7lm6wE

— Cates Holderness (@catesish) October 16, 2017

You can see quite a few of the silliest ideas collected at Nerdist.  -via Metafilter

The latest comic from Randall Munroe at xkcd is a graph, a scatter plot indicating the danger of research subjects. If you think hard enough, you can come up with a movie or some kind of story for each one. I thought of Frankenstein and The Andromeda Strain for the upper right, Sharktopus and The Birds for the lower right, Doctor Octopus and various Bond villains for the upper left, and Darth Vader at the top. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes would be close to the middle. The further you go to the right, the more 1960s B-movies you'll find. Molasses storage? Well, there was that flood, but I don't know if they've ever made a movie about it. Too unbelievable.  

The National History Museum in London announced the winners of their annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The winner in the youth competition, the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year, is Daniël Nelson of the Netherlands. The 16-year-old, who is a professional wildlife photographer, entered this portrait of nine-year old Caco the gorilla. Lewis Blackwell, Chair of the jury, said,

‘This is a lovely moment, combining careful and protracted observation of an animal in its habitat with an eye for compelling composition. Our eyes move through the image, from the face to the hand on the breadfruit and back again. The photo takes us right into the life of the young gorilla called Caco and makes us curious to understand his day. Images this good can help inspire and educate, and may perhaps help save this critically endangered species.’

The overall winner of the adult division is too graphic to show here. Brent Stirton of South Africa won for his photograph of a rhino that was a victim of poachers who took its horn. You can see it here. On a more lighthearted note, check out Marcio Cabral's photo of a Brazilian giant anteater. It won first place in the "Animals in their Environment" category.  

There are winners in several categories and age groups. You can see them all at the contest website, in the gallery of adult winners and youth winners. -via Digg

(Image credit: Miss Cellania)

Roy G. Biv is a mnemonic used to remember the colors of the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Let's learn something about all the colors.

THE TRUE RED BARON

How the Danish protest pig got its stripe.

(Image credit: Axel Krampe)

In the 19th century, Denmark and Germany went to war over a slice of the southern Jutland Peninsula (today called Schleswig-Holstein). Denmark claimed the land in 1848, but 16 years later, Germany regained the territory and promptly barred any Danes who lived there from raising their country’s flag. So, crafty Danish farmers started raising pigs. Through crossbreeding, they created a pig that resembled the Danish flag, featuring red fur and a prominent white belt. By the 20th century, the Protestschwein, or “protest pigs,” had become a snorting symbol of Danish cultural independence.

WHAT CAME FIRST: ORANGE THE FRUIT OR ORANGE THE COLOR?

The fruit! Medieval English speakers rarely encountered the color orange in nature- so they simply called the shade geoluhread (yellow-red). The fruit, imported from northern India to Europe in the 11th century, changed that. Called orenge by medieval Latin speakers, the fruit took over geoluhread’s place in English in the 1530s.

THE YELLOW INDEX

(YouTube link)

These facts are bizarre -John Green said so- because royalty is weird. These folks spend their lives surrounded by fabulous wealth and have people taking care of their every need. Then some of them have to be a leader of a country, without understanding anything about the common people who make up the vast majority of the population. There are no job qualifications for royalty other than being born into it, but there are some weird rules for living your life that have nothing to do with governing. Learn a lot of obscure and strange facts about European royalty in the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.  

We've read about how San Francisco city officials had all the city's dead moved to Colma in 1914 in order to reclaim the valuable land taken up by cemeteries. As methodical as they were, the project was massive, and mistakes were bound to be made. One was unearthed in May of 2016, when a construction crew dug up a small coffin under Ericka Karner's garage. The sealed coffin had two windows showing the corpse in good condition. There was no identifying information attached. The nonprofit Garden of Innocence organization built a new coffin and provided a burial for the child. But who was she? Her gravestone called her Miranda Eve.

That name was meant to be temporary, given to the dead girl by Karner’s own two young daughters, to be replaced when Miranda’s identity was finally discovered. See, before her second burial, researchers extracted DNA from the corpse, first to make sure that there was no foul play, then for clues.

The samples suggested Miranda had been weaned from breast milk a year before her death, putting her age between two and three-and-a-half years old when she died. They also hinted at a diet change that took place a few months before death, which suggested she died from a longer illness, not trauma. An analysis of her hair concluded she died of marasmus, or severe malnutrition, likely due to an infection.

Other information from the DNA, plus a painstaking search of city records finally yielded results. Read her story at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Garden of Innocence)