If you wake up by a phone alarm, your natural instinct is to make it stop by any means necessary, and if you are too sleepy to function, that may even include destroying the phone. Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama) made a chain reaction contraption that tries to do just that. But while the machine works, all it does is move the phone through the course of the device, without harming it at all.

The reason for that is that this is an ad. Herscher got the attention of Casetify, a company that makes protective phone cases. He was glad to construct a Rube Goldberg machine to abuse the phone mercilessly to show how well the case protects it even if it meant his machine didn't quite do the job it was seemingly designed for. Clever. What makes it funny is that the chain reaction machine made more noise than the alarm! And at the end, after all that nonsense, he got up out of bed against his wishes by the actions of the machine anyway. -via Boing Boing

The image above is titled The Swarm of Life. It depicts tadpoles swimming through a forest of lily pads in Cedar Lake on Vancouver Island. It won Shane Gross the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the winner in the category Wetlands. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is held annually by the Natural History Museum in London, and the top entries will be on exhibit at the museum from October 11 through next June. The Young Grand Title Winner is Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas of Germany for the image below of a two-millimeter springtail insect with a slime mold. It's titled Life Under Dead Wood. 

There are winners named from each of the 18 different categories, too. I was particularly taken with the winner in the Portrait category.



Titled On Watch, it shows a mother lynx with her two grown offspring behind her. Photographer John E. Marriott tracked this family of Canada lynx for a week in the Yukon and captured this image from a distance. Explore the gallery for the winners in the various categories plus highly commended photos, and the top five in the People's Choice award voting. On both pages you can click on an image to bring up information about it. Read more about the competition at NPR. -via Damn Interesting

Cheese is made of milk, which is white, but many of our cheeses are shades of yellow passing into orange. Cow's milk contains beta carotene from the grass they eat, which is orange. The real question should be why milk is white in the first place. Sheep's milk doesn't have nearly as much beta carotene as the milk from cows, which is why cheese made from sheep's milk is almost always white. That same beta carotene is the reason butter from cow's milk is yellow. We really should qualify the assertion by saying cheese made from high quality milk from grass-fed cows is yellow-orange, but cheesemakers have found a way around the question of color (and quality) by making cheese any color they want. People expect a yellowish or orangish cheese, so that's what they will get, one way or another. This video contains a 70-second skippable promotion at 1:05. -via Laughing Squid

The Amazing Maize Maze was the name of the first documented corn maze, which is such an awesome name that it's no wonder it became a thing. You might be surprised that it was so recent, too, in 1993. While mazes have always had entertainment value, they were traditionally made from trees or hedges or stone walls by wealthy people with a long-term plan. But corn, that most American of crops, lends itself well to a temporary seasonal amusement. It's tall enough, grows fast, and is laid out in a grid that makes planning a relatively simple matter. Plus, the layout can be changed every year. Modern technologies like computer-assisted design and GPS enable farmers to cut corn in designs that can double as advertising seen from above.  

If you play your cards right, a corn maze can bring in more money than the corn crop itself. But to be successful at it year after year, the maze has to be challenging enough to get people to buy tickets, but not so challenging that they give up and never return. Besides, getting lost is half the fun! Read about the business of corn mazes, and what to do if you're ever lost in one, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Mike's Maze)

What makes holidays special are the traditions that surround them. We celebrate the same way every year, with maybe just a little variation until those variations become tradition themselves. For children, it's exciting to recall what happens every year and enjoy it all over again, and for adults, these traditions evoke wonderful memories. Since 1966, part of the tradition of Halloween is watching It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown as Linus once again waits confidently for the Great Pumpkin to arrive at the local pumpkin patch. His annual disappointment doesn't shake his faith that it will happen next year. Meanwhile, Charlie Brown gets rocks in his trick-or-treat bag and Snoopy battles the Red Baron and ends up giving Lucy dog germs in the bobbing for apples game.    

Swedish producer Chetreo remixed portions of the Peanuts TV special using autotune to make a song about Halloween. It's guaranteed to take you back to the autumns of your childhood and the excitement of the one time a year you got to see the show ahead of Halloween. Knowing what will happen doesn't make it any less special. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The staff at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium were quite excited to see a baby king penguin hatch, the first one in two years at the Australian facility. Pesto weighed less than a pound at the time. Normally, king penguins grow to be between 31 and 37 pounds as adults. But Pesto, at nine months of age now, weighs 51.8 pounds! Pesto is being raised by penguin couple Tango and Hudson, both weighing around 24 pounds, and he towers over both of them now. But they aren't his biological parents. Pesto's sire Blake is a large penguin at 39 pounds, and Pesto even eclipses him.

It's possible Pesto might lose weight as he matures into an adult, but he'll still be on the large side for a king penguin. His size may be due to his appetite- he eats around 25 fish a day! Meanwhile, this big chick has become a media darling, drawing crowds into the aquarium to see the penguin that rivals Baby Huey. Read more about Pesto and the other king penguins at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: HoseIsFaucet)

This Honest Trailer contains NSFW language. Deadpool & Wolverine has made $1.3 billion and became the first R-rated film to pull in more than a billion dollars. It's now the second-biggest movie of 2024, only surpassed by Inside Out 2 so far. So you know that Screen Junkies were salivating to make an Honest Trailer. Sure, people loved the movie, but that doesn't mean it's perfect, and they were determined to find its flaws. They highlight the fan service, the ridiculous cameos, the product placement, and the incomprehensible plot. None of that is accidental; Deadpool & Wolverine leaned heavily into its own criticism to parody these things, and hey, it paid off well, financially or in laughs. The audience knows what it's supposed to take seriously and what it's not, and to be honest, there's no upside in taking Deadpool & Wolverine too seriously. We're just here for the action and the jokes. You can look for Deadpool & Wolverine on Blu-ray and DVD on October 22.  

When people saw this viral video on TikTok, they at first thought this animal was a llama, a dog, or a bobcat. Other, more amusing guesses include Chewbacca, a horse, or a toddler in a Halloween costume. This is Zeus, a Maine coon cat from Moldova that stands a meter tall (39 inches) on his back feet! Measured horizontally on four legs, he's 1.2 meters (47 inches) from his nose to the tip of his tail. You can get a better sense of this cat's size when his feline housemate is in the picture, because she's a normal sized cat. Zeus towered over her even when he was just a kitten. The number of videos of Zeus will tell you that this isn't a matter of forced perspective like other internet Maine coon cats, -he's just a big boy. You can keep up with Zeus's life at TikTok and at Instagram. -via Boing Boing

What if your favorite Looney Tunes cartoons happened in the Star Wars universe? Or more specifically, what if Wile E. Coyote and the roadrunner were droids on a ship of the Empire? AFK presents this short as a part of their series For the Empire (previously at Neatorama) They refer to it as a "cartoon," even though it's quite realistically animated by artificial intelligence, namely Unreal Engine. But the music, the sound effects, the action, the camera angles, and the familiar elements from the roadrunner cartoons are all there. An Astromech resembling a mechanical Darth Vader is bedeviled by a quick-moving Mouse Droid. What can he do but order a miniature death star from ACME? Keep your eye out for the printed signs everywhere that make up for the lack of dialogue. One that is rendered in binary actually says "Help!" As entertaining as this cartoon is, it's only 4:30; the rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The most common pop culture depiction of a ghost is a floating apparition that appears to be covered in a white sheet. That is a lasting image from Britain over the past few centuries, when poor people were often buried in a bedsheet, wrapped up as they were laying on their deathbed, instead of being buried in a coffin. It only made sense that they'd be wearing that sheet when they reappeared to haunt us. But it was also cemented in the popular image because of those who put bedsheets over their heads to impersonate ghosts and cause their own mischief, ranging from pranks to serious crimes, such a rape and murder. These "bedsheet ghosts" frightened the more superstitious, and even those who weren't superstitious knew the fellows in the bedsheets were up to no good.

In 1804, a spate of ghost sightings in Hammersmith, on the west end of London, had everyone on edge. Was it a real supernatural ghost, or an impersonator in a bedsheet meaning to cause harm? The only real difference was how much fear each identity would cause in the potential victims. When Francis Smith took his gun out in the night to look for the Hammersmith ghost, he was on edge, but did not expect to shoot a man who was merely trying to protect his wife from the same ghost. The strange part of the case was that there was neither a ghost nor a criminal wearing a bedsheet involved in that night's crime, but merely the fear of those things. Read about the case of the Hammersmith ghost and the consequences of Smith's trial, at Mental Floss.  

(Image credit: Phiz)

Identical twins are formed when one fertilized egg results in two babies, who are then genetically identical. But are they really identical? The person we are is a factor of both genetics and environmental factors. Studies of identical twins separated at birth amaze us with the similarities that two people can have after being raised in different families. Genetics can be very strong- but they aren't everything. You might expect identical twins who were raised together to be, well, identical. But even when they share everything, including their mother's womb, there are environmental differences that leave a lasting mark. Did one fetus have a larger placenta? Did one twin spend more time sick as a child? Did they prefer different foods with different nutritional values? Or did either undergo a cell mutation at any point in their lives? Jaida Elcock of SciShow gives us a lot of different reasons why identical twins may not be quite identical. Knowing all this is pretty neat, but it's still not going to help you tell those two apart. There's a 50-second skippable ad at 3:30. -via Laughing Squid

David Kunst was a restless 30-year-old with dreams in 1970. We don't know all the factors that went into his decision to walk around the world, but it was a big, brash project that appealed to him, and to his brothers. Now, the world is mostly ocean, and David didn't walk across those, but crossed continent after continent on foot. He and his younger brother John secured a financial sponsor and letters of introduction from Minnesota senators Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. They had a wagon of supplies pulled by a mule, or actually several wonderfully-named mules, but only one at time. They walked from Minnesota to the east coast, then from Spain across Eurasia. Despite diplomatic efforts, they couldn't get permission to cross through the Soviet Union or China, so they took more dangerous routes. That led to John's death when he was shot by bandits. But David walked on, with his other brother Pete joining him. In Australia, David met his second wife. He finally made it all the way around the world when he walked back into Minnesota four years after walking out. Read the story of David Kunst's impossible quest at Smithsonian.

Between 1942 and 1981, Billy Wilder co-wrote and directed 25 movies that included Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, The Spirit of St. Louis, Sabrina, Sunset Boulevard, and The Seven Year Itch. All of these are quality films, but what made them that way? Wilder was a storyteller, a collaborator, and as a director, he intimately knew how he wanted the story to be told. Wilder was a master of the double entendre, or verbal irony. His characters always had underlying motives that the audience could understand because of the way he directed the actors. Nothing was what it seemed, but the viewer was always in on the act. Wilder managed to make everyday characters rich with depth no matter what kind of people they are. Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting (previously at Neatorama) explains what makes each Billy Wilder film the unmistakable treasure it is while maintaining a uniqueness at the same time.  

Rin Tin Tin was a German shepherd who became the star of a series of Hollywood movies in the 1920s, playing himself as a hero of all sorts. His movies were so successful that the dog has been credited for saving Warner Bros. from bankruptcy. You probably already knew that. But you might not know Rin Tin Tin's origins. He was born in France in the midst of World War I.

When the Allies took over a section of northern France from German occupation, American soldier Lee Duncan was among those tasked with searching through what the Germans left behind. In an abandoned military kennel, Duncan found a starving mother dog with five puppies less than a week old. After their rescue, Duncan kept two of the puppies, and snuck them aboard a ship when he returned after the war. One was Rin Tin Tin. Back in California, Duncan entered his dog in shows, but more importantly, showed him to friends involved in the movie business. Rin Tin Tin got his start in film by playing wolves, then worked his way up to top billing. Read the biography of the biggest dog in Hollywood at Vintage Everyday. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

If the earth had no predators, then the rest of the animals would live without fear, and flourish in their own ways, right? The lion laying down with the lamb, so to speak. But in the real world, nature tries to balance all animals, plants, and even microbes into their own ecological niche. We can speculate as to the effects of a predator-less world, but it's already happened in real life, with an accidental experiment in Venezuela. Lost predators mess with every layer of the ecosystem underneath them, including plants and insects, in what is called a "trophic cascade." Minute Earth tells that story.

Venezuela is not the only place where this lesson has been learned. Another real-world experiment revealed the massive effects only after predators were re-introduced, when wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone National Park. The effects become more notable the longer the experiment continues. Sooner or later, we will learn to stop messing with Mother Nature. -via Geeks Are Sexy