The band OK Go has a catalog of songs on generic subjects that are all quite pleasant but not earth-shattering. However, they will go down in history for their videos, which are not only clever but so meticulously choreographed that they should be classified as dancers as well as musicians. In other words, the videos themselves are an art form. The video for their new single "Love" (as generic a title as it gets) is all about mirrors and the kaleidoscopic effects they produce, with the aid of precisely-timed robots. It's a feast for your eyes. And the song is rather nice, too.

If you're interested and have 20 minutes to spare, you can see a behind-the-scenes video about the making of the "Love" video. But as a commenter said, you can just watch the music video itself and see exactly how they accomplished each scene in the video and it's still amazing. -via Laughing Squid

What people remember -or have heard- about the Vietnam draft was that millions of young men were drafted to fight the war, millions tried to get out of it, sometime fraudulently, and millions fled to Canada to avoid it. The real story is not quite so extreme. Only about 25% of the eight million Americans who served in Vietnam during the war were draftees, and only about 40,000 young men fled to Canada to avoid the draft.

Not every eligible young man was in danger of being drafted, since the Selective Service had a lottery to determine who would be called up first- by the date of their birthdays. These lotteries were televised, so young men could witness their odds of being shipped overseas in real time. While the lotteries were fairly random, getting a student deferment or a medical exemption was easier for those with money and connections. The threat of the draft hanging over one's head for years led to massive cultural shifts in the 1960s and '70s. Read the facts behind the Vietnam War draft at Mental Floss.

We all know what bubble gum flavor is. We all know what it tastes like. But how do we explain that taste to someone who's never tasted it? We might try to compare it to natural ingredients, but that would be rather difficult. Like everything else these days, it's made with artificial flavors. But what flavors?

Weird History looks into bubble gum flavor, what's in it, what it's supposed to taste like, and how it came about. That, of course, means telling us the history of gum, and then bubble gum in particular. Bubble gum is less than 100 years old, as it was invented in 1928 when the crucial ingredient latex was added to a failed prototype. All that history is pretty interesting, but if you want to learn about the flavoring only, you'll need to skip to about nine minutes into this video. If you watch the whole thing, you'll know everything there is to know about bubble gum.

TimeOut dares to go there, and they did it in a big fashion, by making a ranked list of the 100 best science fiction films of all time. But it wasn't just the TimeOut staff who contributed opinions. They also asked a few experts, "from Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, to Oscar-decorated film director Guillermo del Toro, to Game of Thrones writer George RR Martin and Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker," to make the list seems more, uh, professional.

Since this is a list of 100 movies, I expected it to begin with some that are pretty bad, but no. There have been so many good science fiction films over the past century that the entire list is worth a watch. The list is populated with good movies interspersed with movies I haven't yet seen, and in that it works as a recommendation list. You'll want to argue about the rankings, and maybe the categorization of some movies, but you have to admit that it's a treasure trove of sci-fi goodness. -via Metafilter

If someone were to ask to you to guess the most expensive substance on earth, you would probably reflexively answer "printer ink." Yeah, it's quite pricy, but nothing compared to some substances you don't think of because you can't afford them anyway. But what makes a substance expensive? First, there's supply and demand. If something is rare, like a red diamond, people are willing to pay more to have it. Or the expense could be calculated by how much we invested to get it. Samples brought back from outer space require millions to retrieve, and are irreplaceable. Or it could be that a substance is just so wonderfully useful, like a cure for cancer.  

Science Focus has a list of the seven most expensive substances on earth, and the top two both combine all three reasons: they are rare, very difficult and expensive to manufacture, and highly coveted because of their usefulness. But you won't guess what they are until you read about them.  -via Real Clear Science

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! That line from The Wizard of Oz has accompanied the viral images of a lion, tiger, and bear living together for more than 20 years. The story is true. While it may have started tragically, these animals were devoted to each other and well-cared for most of their lives. They were confiscated from the home of a drug dealer in Atlanta in 2001, and were sent to Noah's Ark Animal Sanctuary in rural Georgia. The creatures, all apex predators, saw each other as family and only thrived when they were together, so that's how they lived for 15 years at the shelter. They came to be known as BLT (bear, lion, tiger). Leo lived to be 15 years old, and Shere Khan died at the age of 17, both having lived quite long for their species. You can learn more about Leo, Shere Khan, and Baloo at Wikipiedia.

Ernest Hemingway, a notoriously manly man, for better or worse, was given a gift of a polydactyl kitten by a sea captain. Polydactyl cats, those which have more than the regulation number of toes, were said to be good luck on a ship because they had more ways to grip the deck. There is some disagreement over whether this kitten was named Snowball, or was Snowball's kitten named Snow White, but Hemingway fell in love with the cat and installed her at his Key West home. He doted on the white cat and her kittens and grandkittens. When Hemingway died in 1961, his will stated that all of the cat's descendants, many of which were polydactyl, would be housed there and protected in perpetuity.

The Hemingway estate has carried out those wishes, and more than 50 years later is home to nearly 60 cats, about half of which are polydactyl. In fact, cats with extra toes anywhere are often called Hemingway cats. Visitors to the estate report that the cats are very friendly. If you can't visit, you can see the cats by downloading a cat app from the estate's website. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Hans Malmberg)

Kawasaki is known for their motorcycles and ATVs, and now they've surprised the world with a robotic walking vehicle you can ride like a motorcycle. This is CORLEO, a quadruped robot vehicle that runs on a hydrogen fuel cell. The independent movements of its four legs was inspired by a wolf. You ride it as if you would a horse, but its movements are smoother and more wide-ranging, more like a cat, making it more useful than a horse in rough terrain. But there's something rather human about those rear feet and hindquarters that strikes me as a little creepy. This robot responds to the rider's movements, such as a shift of weight. Sure, it has a dashboard, but we don't know much yet about the controls. CORLEO will be unveiled at Osaka-Kansai Expo 2025 later this month, but don't expect it at your local motorcycle dealership anytime soon. Kawasaki aims to have it ready for retail sale sometime in the next 25 years. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A company called Colossal Biosciences has been working on "de-extinction" with projects set up to bring back extinct species such as the dodo, woolly mammoths, and Tasmanian tigers. Their first announced success, however, has been the birth of three dire wolves, two males named Romulus and Remus, and a female named Khaleesi. Dire wolves have been extinct for ten thousand years.

These wolf pups were produced by a complex process that involved sequencing dire wolf DNA from fossils. This DNA is not viable, but it could be compared to modern canine DNA. Then they spliced modern wolf DNA in 20 places to make it resemble the dire wolf DNA. Once that was accomplished, the resulting cell was grown using the usual methods of cloning, including embryo implantation into domestic dogs who gave birth to these puppies.

Colossal Biosciences considers this a major breakthrough in bringing back extinct species, but scientists from elsewhere have their doubts. Sure, they look like dire wolves, but can they really be a different species, or are they just genetically-modified grey wolves? Read about how the dire wolves came about at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Colossal Biosciences)

This is short and sweet and might put a smile on your face or even make you laugh. Artist Rudy Willingham, who finds creative ways to make street art (previously at Neatorama), has taken a simple pun and made it work in the real world. He took 133 pieces of bread, toasted each one, and then burned onto each one an image of Post Malone in the process of singing. These 133 slices of toast were assembled in order to make the bread lip-sync Malone's song "Circles." The resulting animation, this magnificant work of art, is entitled "Toast Malone," of course.

This wordless project could be considered a video version of a shaggy dog story of sorts, as it goes to great lengths to eventually lead us to a simple pun as a punch line. You have to admire the ridiculous amount of effort that went into this. -via Laughing Squid

Barry Enderwick makes a sandwich every day on video for his YouTube and other social media platforms under the name Sandwiches of History. We've featured him here before. Since he started his daily sandwich project, Enderwick has made more than 700 videos of more than 700 sandwiches, and hasn't had to make one up yet. These sandwiches are all from published or otherwise documented recipes dating back as far as 2,000 years ago. They can be pretty strange, like a 1909 sandwich recipe with popcorn, cayenne pepper, sardines, ketchup and parmesan. In an article at The Guardian, Enderwick explains how his channel got started and makes us hungry with his picks for the five best sandwiches featured so far. That will make you crave a sandwich, but then you can read his list of the five worst sandwiches and lose your appetite. Or you can skip that one. -via Metafilter

Probably no tomb has been studied more than King Tutankhamen's, and studies show he was a young king who was fabulously wealthy but suffered from disabilities and early death due to royal inbreeding. However, the many royal possessions he was buried with still amaze us. The most mysterious and surprising among them is a "space dagger." It's a finely crafted dagger made of iron from a meteorite, made using technology that the Egyptians didn't have at the time. That doesn't mean that aliens gifted him the knife, but it's pretty impressive anyway. How do we know the iron in the dagger came from outer space? That requires some really modern science tech, like X-ray fluorescence that reveals nickel content and Widmanstätten patterns. And if you don't know what Widmanstätten patterns are, well, I didn't either until now. They're from outer space! SciShow is glad to explain them to us.

You'd know an elephant when you see one, wouldn't you? Today we have African elephants and Asian elephants, and we are all familiar with the extinct mammoths and mastodons. But there were once many more species of the order Proboscidea, from which elephants and other long-nosed species came. The strange-looking elephant shown above is Stegotetrabelodon, which really did have super-long and fairly straight tusks on both the upper and lower jaw. These tusks could be up to nine feet long! Can you imagine what and how they ate with those teeth in the way?

Stegotetrabelodon is just one example of the many Proboscidea, or what we would recognize as elephants today, that roamed the world over the past 60 million years or so. Meet some of the most notable and unusual elephant species, including the earliest short-trunked ancestor, the ones whose tusks curved backwards, and ones who used their bottom jaw as a shovel, at Smithsonian.

Last December we showed you the teaser for James Gunn's Superman, which will open in theaters on July 11. We were quite delighted to see that this Superman film shows the heroics of Krypto the Superdog as he saves an injured Superman, played by David Corenswet. Now we have a sneak preview that makes clear the teaser scene was heavily edited. In this expanded version, we find that the rescue scene was not quite as simple as we might have thought. Krypto is certainly Superman's best friend, has super powers, and loves his human very much. But he's a dog after all, and acts the way you might expect your loving dog to act. Which doesn't help a bit until Superman comes up with specific orders.

Notice this sneak preview doesn't mention the name of the movie at all. It doesn't have to, since everyone knows Superman. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Does your country have more immigrants or emigrants? Immigrants are people who move in from another nation, while emigrants are people born in a country and then move out. Brilliant Maps crunched the numbers for all the nations of the world to see who has the most of each, and who has the biggest ratios of people arriving and leaving. You might be surprised to learn that North Korea has a better ratio of arrivals to departures than South Korea. Then you think, well, that's because no one is allowed to leave North Korea. However, records show that 46,379 people moved out of North Korea in 2024, while 50,439 moved into North Korea. There's a story there, I'm sure. While the ratio is puzzling, South Korea records both immigrants and emigrants in the millions.  

The United States, as of 2024, is still the most common destination for people moving to a new country, while India is the country the most people are leaving. That still doesn't tell the whole story, because smaller countries may have more extreme percentages and ratios. Check out the stats for nations around the globe at Brilliant Maps. -via Nag on the Lake