Camels have been called "the ships of the desert" because they are so good at negotiating hot, dry, sandy territory. Every part of their bodies is optimized for such a journey, but it took a long time to develop all those specialized features. Who better to explain those body parts than Ze Frank? As part of his True Facts series, he goes over a camel's body piece by piece to show us how weird they are, and how they are perfect for living in, and carrying people through, the desert. For example, it's handy to have tough pads  to protect your body in areas where it comes in contact with the earth. Camels have them on their feet, their knees, and even their chests so they can sit down on hot sand. But it's their internal physiology that's really weird, from their red blood cells to their sinuses that are all optimized for desert survival. This video doesn't make me want to live in the desert any more than I already did, but it works for camels. There's a 70-second ad at 5:10.

Do you remember when movie theaters used to have double features? Two movie for the price of one! Which, of course, wasn't really the case, since double features were so common we didn't know what the proper price for one movie should be. Usually, the double feature paired an expensive Hollywood production (an A-movie) with a B-movie, which was made on a budget of less than $100,000, which could be as low as $10,000. People sometimes fumed about having to sit through the B-movie first in order to see the film they really came for. Or if the B-movie played last, they only stayed because they felt they needed to get their money's worth. Or the double features might even be two B-movies, because the teenagers making out in a dark theater or a drive in didn't care.

But the double feature wasn't just a marketing stunt that stuck around. It was a scheme to keep Hollywood studios in business, and theater owners didn't have a choice. It was only when antitrust laws were enacted and enforced that the double features went the way of the dodo. Whether you enjoyed them or not, you'll want to learn about how the double feature worked at JSTOR Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Warner Bros./Toho)

Luna is described as a "unique-looking dog." That's quite an understatement! Luna has huge ears that stand straight up, and markings that make her nose look like a pig's snout. Her mouth is outlined in black, which just highlights how crooked her smile is. Her skull deformities are the result of distemper when she was a puppy, which she was very lucky to have survived. Distemper has a mortality rate of 50% in adult dogs, and 80% in puppies. Luna's color markings also accentuate her differences. There's really no explaining those ears! But Luna gets along fine, and has a great life with her human Danni, who is the daughter of Luna's original rescuer. Luna's bubbly personality -and her amusingly odd voice- endear her to everyone she meets. You can follow Luna and her adventures with Danni and with her new canine sibling Milo at Instagram.

Our modern lives have been shaped by technological breakthroughs and scientific discoveries that make our lives better. Often, the "making life better" part comes a long time before the "whoops- that's actually very dangerous" part. The automobile changed family life forever, as the large sedans of the past could haul all the kids at once! They could even be comfortably rocked to sleep in a baby hammock suspended across the back seat! The ad touts how this would keep your baby safe in the car, meaning something like safe from rolling down the window and jumping out. However, in the event of a collision, it could easily become a slingshot.

But the car hammock is just one of many products that went to market without someone trying to imagine what could possibly go wrong. Read about five of those dangerous items especially designed for babies, or rather, especially designed for the convenience of parents to the detriment of the child, at Cracked.

As you may have gathered from the recent Honest Trailer, Nickel Boys is one of the lesser-hyped nominees for a Best Picture Oscar. The story is fictionalized, but is based on the true horrors of the Dozier School For Boys, earlier called the Florida Industrial School for Boys. The reform school opened in 1900 and operated until 2011. At first, juveniles were sentenced to the school for real crimes, but as time wore on, they could be sent there for truancy or general misbehavior.

What went unknown for almost of the school's history is the cemetery behind the school's garbage dump that held unmarked graves of the boys who died there, many of them undocumented. There are survivors around still who can tell you about the harsh physical punishments for minor infractions that included beatings, isolation, starvation, and sexual abuse. In 1996, 31 metal crosses were installed in the cemetery, but a later investigation and exhumation showed that that was far too few to represent the juveniles who died there. Read about the real school behind The Nickel Boys at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: State of Florida)

The annual Oscars will be bestowed this coming Sunday, March 2, to deserving films as selected by the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And every year, Screen Junkies runs a mega-Honest Trailer for all the nominees for Best Picture. Why? Because these are the prestige films that the majority of us didn't see, including Screen Junkies, which means these movies don't already have Honest Trailers. This small group of online producers had to sit down and watch all ten movies to get this video prepared in time for the awards, so you don't have to. But if you're like me and saw exactly none of the ten contenders for the top award, this Honest Trailer, however abbreviated for each movie, might serve as a guide to which of them you might want to check out after the awards, win or lose. Check out the full list of nominations here.

Chris Terrill, despite being 73 years old, is quite an athlete. He has completed more than 50 marathons, and was registered for last year's Brighton Marathon in his native England. But then Terrill suffered an injury and got a hip replacement. Since he was already registered to run and raise money for wounded veterans, he decided to run the marathon anyway, on crutches. Terrill completed that marathon in six hours, 11 minutes and 11 seconds. That's quite an accomplishment, especially since he was on crutches. When people mentioned his feat may be a world record, he was astonished.

"If I'd known there was a record to be beaten, I'd have gone faster," he said.

Terrill had even stopped to take selfies with his fans along the way! Since it wasn't an official attempt, the Guinness officials had to verify Terrill's feat by the race records, which took a year. Read about this iron man and his record at BBC. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Royal Navy and Royal Marines Charity)

You've hear about "illegal" LEGO techniques or joins or methods. The LEGO company has no power of law over what you do with the LEGO pieces you have bought and paid for, so the term "illegal" should be taken with a grain of salt. But the company does have its own rules for users to follow. These rules are codified building techniques that try to ensure that whatever you build will be sturdy enough to stay built and won't warp or break the bricks you used to make it. I think some of these rules might be for safety's sake, too. Beyond that, this video gives us a glimpse into the world of the LEGO company and how they produce so many building pieces of so many different kinds, resulting in glorious sets designed for every type of fandom. It's a little over seven minutes long; the rest is an ad.


 

The Hubble telescope has been taking images of the Andromeda galaxy for years, and now that work has paid off in the form of the we have the largest galactic mosaic of all-time. The project is called PHAT: the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury, and the result is a map of that entire galaxy, made from more than 600 images stitched together, comprising 2.5+ billion pixels. That's the big picture, so to speak. But Hubble takes images in X-ray, ultraviolet, and near infrared, too, so this image contains way more information than just what the Andromeda galaxy looks like.

The full image shows us 200 million or so individual stars in the Andromeda galaxy. It is the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way, and is actually moving closer to us. But it's still more than 2.5 million light years away, and won't collide with our galaxy for another few billion years. Read about the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury mosaic and zoom in on some images that tell us about those 200 million stars, at Big Think.  

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

The best art will be relatable to many people, and will touch your emotions. That's exactly what the kinetic sculpture Eternal Frustration does- it pushes our emotional buttons. All of us have spent way too much of our precious time trying to find the end of transparent tape on a roll. Box tape is even worse than cellophane tape. The process is like Sisyphus rolling a stone up hill, knowing that the task is futile in the long run. If you are lucky enough to find the end, you find that getting your fingernail under a corner isn't the end of your problems, because the tape will split just to spite you.

The sculpture is from Italian designer Amedeo Capelli of Stoccafisso design (previously at Neatorama), who knows how to get a rise out of the viewer. Some of his more whimsical and pleasant automata are available at his Etsy shop.

-via Boing Boing

Canadians are a hardy bunch, and they don't stay home just because of a little cold and snow. Or a lot, by American standards. Quebec Comiccon Winter Edition was held over the weekend for the second year in a row, because so many people attended last year in the middle of winter. And once again, there were plenty of folks who brought their cosplay skills to top con, like Skull Kid from the world of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask you see above. The camera, or more precisely, our friend from Geeks Are Sexy, was drawn to more than one woman cosplaying as various iterations of Deadpool. He tells me the "Blingpool" lady shown here spent 200 hours sticking those little rhinestones to her suit! 

Other cosplay characters came from movies, television series, comic books, and video games. See the entire gallery from Quebec Comiccon Winter Edition at Geeks Are Sexy, and click on each image to bring up a full-size version. A good time was obviously had by all.

My parents took me to the Outer Banks of North Carolina almost every year as I was growing up. I also took my children, although not as often. Even as a kid, I was astonished at how details of the land changed from year to year. That's because the ocean currents are building up and tearing down these barriers islands all the time. These same currents have been bringing down ships for hundreds of years- ever since transatlantic travel began. Add to that the fact that these islands were once a very popular maritime destination for ships that did not want to be caught in a major port, and you start to see how this string of islands ended up with a reputation for destroying ships. Shipwrecks that have been buried for who know how long are still emerging from the shifting sands. But the sea around the Outer Banks isn't just swallowing ship these days- it's also taking down homes. PBS Terra explains what makes this stretch of coastline so dangerous.      

Over two hundred years ago, James Tilly Matthews became the first documented case of schizophrenia. The condition no doubt existed before then, but mental illnesses were often lumped together and rarely documented in detail. Matthews was a writer, and so was his psychiatrist. His case is also an interesting glimpse at an early conspiracy theory. After involvement in certain factions of the French Revolution, Matthews was imprisoned, then later committed to the infamous Bedlam asylum. There he developed his theory about the "Air Loom," a device controlled by a small group of Jacobin terrorists, which he named, that could control or torture others from a distance.

The Air Loom was fuelled by a grotesque mixture of substances, including “fetid effluvia,” “spermatic-animal-seminal rays,” “putrid human breath,” and “gaz from the anus of a horse.” Its magnetic discharges, Matthews insisted, could implant thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations directly into his brain.

Friends and family spent years trying to free Matthews, as they claimed his lunacy was spurred by unfair imprisonment and the cruel conditions of Bedlam (both valid concerns). Indeed, Matthews' story contributed to the overdue reforms at the institution. Read about James Tilly Matthews and his delusions at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: James Tilly Matthews)

The dodo was a flightless bird native to Mauritius, and was first described in 1598. It's been said that the dodo was so friendly that it would walk right up to people, making it easy to kill. These birds didn't have any natural predators besides man, and the last confirmed sighting was in 1662. That's barely a half-century that we knew about them, and afterward it wwa said that dodos were mythical all along. But they were real, and we have a few skeletons to prove it. But I just now learned that we really don't know what the dodo looked like! A few paintings were made, but these were often painted by artists who had never seen the actual bird.

Sir David Attenborough tells us what we know and what we don't know about the dodo, including some speculation on what they really looked like based on genetic testing. The animated dodo he is talking to may or may not be an accurate representative. Attenborough, however, is real in this clip from the PBS series Nature.  -via Born in Space 

In 1922, explorers discovered the tomb of Egypt's King Tutankhamun. Then we went a hundred years without finding the burial place of any pharaoh, until now. In 2022, a tomb was uncovered near Luxor that at first seemed to be for a royal woman. It was near the tomb of Hatshepsut, wife of Thutmose II, and near the wives of Thutmose III. But possessions found in the tomb more recently, namely alabaster flasks, have been identified as belonging to Thutmose II, so they believe this is his tomb. The mummy of Thutmose II was discovered in 1881, along with other royal Egyptian mummies that had been moved from their tombs. Experts believe that Thutmose's tomb may have become flood, and the contents removed after that. The mummy is housed at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, and we don't know if there are any plans to reunite this pharaoh with his original tomb. Read up on this singular discovery at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)