Those horrible monsters aren't so scary when you are surrounded by others who help you feel brave. Still, I think the would fit better if the crowd had torches and pitchforks. I don't have any torches, but I'll gladly contribute a box full of flashlights. And I have my own pitchfork. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.
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The nominees for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects are Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Deepwater Horizon, The Jungle Book, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Doctor Strange. They all contain the kind of action scenes we like to see, with sometimes amazingly similar elements. Vic Rincon created this mashup to show us those parts of all of them. I don't think there's much in the way of spoilers here. -via Tastefully Offensive
Mark and Scott Kelly are identical twins who were both selected for NASA's astronaut program. They are the only siblings ever to both fly in space. Mark Kelly flew the space shuttle for ten years, then retired in order to take care of his wife. Scott Kelly spent an entire year in space aboard the ISS. Now NASA is studying the differences between the two after Scott's year in space, and the early results are intriguing.
As identical twins, the brothers are genetically very similar. However, researchers found that while he was in orbit, Scott’s telomeres—the caps on the ends of chromosomes—grew longer than his twin brother’s. Though Scott’s telomeres returned to their pre-flight lengths shortly after he returned to Earth, these results were totally unexpected, since telomeres naturally shrink over the course of one’s life, and the stresses of spaceflight are supposed to accelerate this. At least that was the idea.
“That is exactly the opposite of what we thought,” Susan Bailey, a radiation biologist at Colorado State University, told Nature.
That's not the only genetic difference they found in the twins. Read more about the study at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: NASA)
When you see a list of trivia about the states, you are sure to hear about the most famous facts; you know, the ones you've heard so many times. Wendover productions has some facts about all the 50 states, but these are not the facts you've heard before.
The geographic oddities in this video are mind-boggling. El Paso is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Houston. Maine is the closest state to Africa. Mind blown. -via Tastefully Offensive
Look! Up in the sky! Randall Munroe at xkcd created a handy chart so that all those people on the ground trying to identify a flying object can tell whether it is actually a bird, or a plane, or Supermen.
San Jose, California, has a new superhero city council member. Lan Diep is a Republican legal aid attorney, a comic book nerd, and as of Tuesday when he was sworn in, a member of the city council. Diep displayed both his patriotism and his nerd cred by holding his cosplay Captain America shield while taking the oath of office.
In an interview after the meeting, the proud comic book geek and Houston-born son of Vietnamese refugees said that Captain America stands for the "kinds of things I strive for: equal justice, fair play and democracy."
Diep won a council seat on his second try, after losing in 2015, though the 2016 vote is still being contested. He's been recognized by presidents Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush, after moving to Mississippi to help people affected by the BP oil spill.
Imagine stained glass reflected by a disco mirror ball, and that's only the beginning of what you can expect from Shah Cheragh, which means "King of the Light." The walls and ceilings are covered with glass and mirror tiles that shimmer and shine as you walk by.
Shiny! The mosque was built as a mausoleum in Shiraz, Iran, and was later fitted with an interior designed to magnify any light passing through. -via Atlas Obscura
At some restaurants, you sit down and they cook you some food. At others, you pick up the food and take it home. Now there's a restaurant in Helsinki that turns that idea on its ear. Take In doesn't even have a kitchen, but you sit down to eat take out food ordered from any of 20 other restaurants.
With no kitchen, guests at Take In choose from a curated selection of dishes from roughly 20 restaurants via an app called Wolt, the other sponsor of the pop-up. Guests eat their dinner in the Take In dining room. Take In offers bar service, and “hosting service,” helping get orders to the correct table. Guests who just want to drop in for a drink are welcome to do so. While it seems like a concept designed for solo diners, a Wolt spokeperson tells Monocle that the restaurant offers a solution for groups who can’t decide on what they all want to eat. The Take In pop-up started at the beginning of November, and will run through April 2.
It sounds like a fancier version of what we'd call a food court. Read more about this odd concept in dining at Eater. -Thanks, John Farrier!
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
"There had never been a show about an idiot before. I wanted to be the first"
-Mel Brooks
The original idea for Get Smart came from Patrick Melnick, a member of the show's production company Talent Associates. He wanted to capitalize on "the two biggest things in the entertainment world today," James Bond and Inspector Clouseau. The show's co-creator Mel Brooks (who created Get Smart along with Buck Henry) described the series as "an insane combination of James Bond and Mel Brooks comedy."
The original pilot for Get Smart featured Tom Poston as the show's protagonist, an inept, bumbling (but successful) secret agent Maxwell Smart. It was offered first to ABC, who turned down the show, calling it "un-American."
They suggested the show feature "a lovable dog" as Max's pet and they wanted Max to have a mother, who he would routinely report to. Mel Brooks bristled at the suggestion of a mother: "They wanted to put a print housecoat on the show. Max has to come home to his mother and explain everything. I hate mothers on shows. Max has no mother. He never had one."
After ABC's rejection, the pilot was offered to NBC, who accepted, with the understanding that Don Adams (who they had under contract) be given the lead role of Maxwell Smart. Don Adams had already played a very similar character on NBC's The Bill Dana Show- an inept hotel detective named Byron Glick. Glick had a catchphrase which Don Adams was to carry over into his Get Smart role and make world famous- "Would you believe…?"
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
(Image credit: Flickr user Andrey)
Some of Guéguen’s Attempts to Observe the Effects of Women Wearing Red
by Alice Shirell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Nicolas Guéguen researches the effects of women who wear red on men. He does research on other subjects too, many of them focusing on the effect of women’s appearance, while hitchhiking or waitressing, on men’s behavior. Guéguen is based at Université de Bretagne-Sud, France. Here are a few of Guéguen’s women-wearing-red studies.
Guéguen and Red Clothed Women
“Color and Women Attractiveness: When Red Clothed Women Are Perceived to Have More Intense Sexual Intent,” Nicolas Guéguen, The Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 152, no. 3, 2012, pp. 261-265. Guéguen explains:
Research has shown that with some nonhuman primates, red is associated with greater sexual attractiveness of females, and recent studies found that a woman with red clothes increases attraction behavior in men. However, the mechanism that explains such behavior was not studied. In this experiment, we hypothesized that men overestimated women’s sexual intent when wearing red clothing. Participants evaluated attractiveness and the sexual intent of a woman presented in a photograph wearing a red, a blue, a green or a white teeshirt. It was found that men evaluated higher sexual intent in the red clothing condition. It was also found that perception of the woman’s sexual intent was not moderated by attractiveness rating.
Six years ago, Annie Correal found a discarded photo album on her Brooklyn street. It contained snapshots of a black couple in New York in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, but the notes gave little information as to their identities. She held on to the album, but as time passed, Correal knew that time was running out on finding who the pictures belonged to.
Gentrification was transforming the neighborhood — soon there might be no one left who recognized the world in these pictures. And the album was literally falling apart in my hands. If I was ever going to try to get to the bottom of it, this was the time.
I decided to uncover its story. I thought it would be simple. But chasing the album would become something of a journey, one that would take me far from present-day Brooklyn to the Jim Crow South, from a remote island in the Pacific to the packed tenements of Harlem, before returning me to Lincoln Place at another moment of great change.
Through knocking on doors, searching public records, and traveling to North Carolina, Correal pieced together the story of Etta Mae and Isaiah Taylor and their experiences in World War II, Harlem nightlife, and the changing demographics of New York City. She even found out why the album was thrown out. Read about the project and the people she found at the New York Times. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Jesse Williams)
hey psst, wanna buy some cubes
Serbian artist Tomislav Jagnjić creates lovely digital artwork of science fiction and fantasy scenes, and then gives them hilariously subversive titles.
yo bro is it safe down there in the woods? yeah man it's cool
You can see more of these at his web gallery. Hovering over an image will give you its title. I think there's an implied permission to use these images from the Facebook comments.
Leo Olten Dunkelberger Tomislav, do you have a site that sells prints or anything? :D
Tomislav Jagnjić no man just download it from artstation and print it who gives a sh*t :D or pm me and say which one u want in hi-res and i'll send it to ya
-via io9
Last fall, a weasel failed to read the warning signs and crossed a fence guarding CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The stone marten was immediately zapped with 18,000 volts, and the incident shut down the collider temporarily. Now the corpse of that hapless creature is on display in an exhibition called Dead Animal Tales at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The exhibit looks at animals that died due to circumstances caused by humans, one way or another. Kees Moeliker is the director of the museum.
The stone marten is the latest dead animal to go on display at the museum. It joins a sparrow that was shot after it sabotaged a world record attempt by knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonalds McFlurry pot, and a catfish that fell victim to a group of men in the Netherlands who developed a tradition for drinking vast amounts of beer and swallowing fish from their aquarium. The catfish turned out to be armoured, and on being swallowed raised its spines. The defence did not save the fish, but it put the 28-year-old man who tried to swallow it in intensive care for a week.
It was another unfortunate incident that spurred Moeliker to establish the exhibition in the first place. In 1995, a male duck flew into the glass facade of the museum and died on impact, a fate that did not deter another male duck from raping the corpse for 75 minutes. The incident ruffled feathers in the community but earned Moeliker a much-coveted IgNobel prize when he published his observations . “I was the one and only witness,” Moeliker said. “I’m a trained biologist but what I saw was completely new to me.”
Yes, that's where you know the name Kees Moeliker. Read more about the Dead Animal Tales exhibit at The Guardian. -via Gizmodo
(Image credit: Kees Moeliker)
The Soviet Union produced millions vehicles every year in the 1950s and '60s. In a collection of advertisements for them, there are some that border on fine art, like the art deco poster above. Then there are some that just invite mockery, like ads of the era from all over the world. Consider this ad for the Ukrainian LuAZ 969-M.
It's supposed to evoke an image of the hardy outdoorsman, as he drives his LuAZ into the wilderness for a day of hunting. The wild boar is obviously pasted in, but they carved him a path in the snow to indicate his location. Or did they? The model, who isn't what you'd expect of a typical hunter of the Soviet Union, has no idea where to point the gun. Maybe he didn't really want to field dress a boar that day. You'll find a wide variety of styles in the roundup of Soviet car ads at Vintage Everyday. -via the Presurfer
Evidence of alcoholic beverages goes back at least 9,000 years, and we may eventually find evidence even older. Even before that, our primate ancestors were attracted to fermented fruit for its good qualities: calories, easy digestion, and the good feeling it gave them. Historians once considered alcohol as just another consumable, but it's becoming more clear that alcohol was one of the driving forces behind a lot of developments and upheavals of human civilization.
Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities—for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”
Alcohol had a big role in the rise of agriculture and communities, then trade, then war. Read what we we know about the role of alcohol in human history at National Geographic. -via Digg
(Image credit: Brian Finke/National Geographic)
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