THE CHOICE IS YOURS! You decide which one of these pitches will become a new comic book series in #DCRoundRobin2022. Vote for your favorites in the thread below. 👇

Learn more here: https://t.co/8g6FCpW0GR #DCUniverseInfinite pic.twitter.com/Ro46SzTnSu

— DC (@DCComics) March 29, 2022

While some people are busy deciding who is the best college basketball team, there are always a bunch of alternate tournaments on the internet that have nothing at all to do with basketball. DC Comics launches one today between 16 story ideas featuring their superheroes (with the exception of Batman). Fans can vote on their favorites in each round, and the winner will be a comic published online. You can vote at Twitter or at the DC Universe Infinite forum, which requires membership.

Will Green Lantern defeat Captain Carrot? Do you prefer Suicide Squad to the Justice League? Read a description of each of the 16 contenders in the first round at Gizmodo. The initial response from fans is: why don't they just publish all of them?

Common logic might tell you that the easiest way to get away with a crime is to convince everyone that you are dead and cannot be prosecuted. What could possibly go wrong? A little more thought will show how stupid that idea is. If the police are after you for criminal activity, they've already figured out at least one thing you tried to pull over their eyes. Faking your own death ("pseudocide") might involve killing someone to pass off as your own body, which only makes your crimes that much worse. Then there's the problem of being someone else afterward, which comes with its own set of complications.

But not all such cases follow the same modus operandi. Sometimes the death is not to cover earlier crimes, but for insurance fraud or even just to leave your old life behind- not that those schemes work any better. This video even includes one case you might remember when the fake death was done for criminal investigative purposes.  -via Damn Interesting

A Texas teen received his brand new truck after he survived a powerful tornado in his Silverado. The shocking video of the red truck being flipped over by the tornado went viral on March 21. (Credit: Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet)https://t.co/Q7MUeEbD6P pic.twitter.com/uhvwQbdiPO

— WPDE ABC15 (@wpdeabc15) March 27, 2022

You saw the dramatic video last week of a red pickup truck that was thrown about by a tornado in Texas, and drove away from it. Now we know who the driver is, and how he's doing. Sixteen-year-old Riley Leon was going home from a job interview at Whataburger when he encountered the twister. While he was able to drive away, he was not unharmed. Leon's truck was totaled, and he suffered a fracture in his back which may require reconstructive surgery. His family does not have health insurance.

However, others have stepped in to help him out. Chevrolet worked through Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet in Fort Worth to give Leon a 2022 Silverado LT All Star Edition to replace his truck, plus $15,000 to help with expenses. A GoFundMe account raised $42,000 to cover Leon's medical expenses. And to top it all off, Whataburger offered him the job! Read Leon's story at Texas Monthly.

Many places around the world use defunct salt mines for storage. We posted about one in Kansas some years ago. In the UK, there's a salt mine storage facility that's being filled up as the mine continues! See, this mine is so big that underground chambers are emptied and used to store not only historical records, but actual historical items that may one day be displayed in a museum, while mining is still going on somewhat down the line, so to speak. The salt itself makes up the walls of the facility, and also causes it to have much lower humidity than above-ground storage or other kinds of underground holes, which is crucial for preserving precious materials. Tom Scott, who can talk his way into any place, takes us on a tour of this underground storage facility and finds out what they'll tell us and what they won't about the treasures stored there for posterity.  

A large ship full of passengers sets sail from England to the Unites States in April, but halfway there runs into an iceberg and sinks, causing the death of hundreds of passengers because there weren't enough lifeboats. You might think this is the Titanic in 1912, but it was the Titan, a fictional ship in the 1898 novel called Futility (later republished as Futility: or, the Wreck of the Titan) by Morgan Robertson. The story was about more than just the shipwreck, but when the Titanic sank 14 years later, the novel seemed suddenly like a chilling premonition. The list of eerie similarities goes on and on.

Was Robertson a prophet? No, but he had ten years of experience as a sailor, and kept up with shipping news. As it turns out, he wasn't the only one who wrote about ocean liner disasters of the time, which only makes us wonder why ship designers and those who created maritime procedures couldn't see it coming. Read about Morgan Robertson and how he came up with a fantastic story that came true, at Mental Floss.

If you know the names Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, you should also know Biruté Mary Galdikas. Galdikas was the third member of the "Trimates," women who dedicated their lives to the study of primates, specifically great apes, under the auspices of anthropologist Louis Leakey. They were also sometimes referred to as "Leakey's Angels." Galdikas operated far away from Leakey, Fossey, and Goodall because she went to Borneo to study orangutans. That was in 1971, and she's still there.

Of the three, Galdikas' work may have the most lasting impact. Orangutans are critically endangered due to both habitat destruction and poaching. Galdikas not only gained the orangutans' trust and studied them, but also worked with local people and governments to protect them and their environment. She founded a rescue and rehab center, and has been fighting poachers for decades. This work led to the founding of the Orangutan Foundation International. Read what Galdikas has gone through in her quest to save orangutans at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Simon Fraser University-University Communications)

Twitter user Enfys J. Book (Lucky) accompanied their cousin to the Ax-Man Surplus store in Fridley, Minnesota. They found an odd collection of items, as expected, but what struck them most were the signs labeling the goods, which are well worth sharing.



Staff members have a lovely sense of humor. They see that the goods are odd, and their impressions reflect what customers are thinking anyway. We don't know what these are or what they are for, either, but they are darn cheap!  

See all the pictures and replies in the original Twitter thread, although you can see the images without having to open them at Threadreader. -via Bored Panda

(All images credit: Enfys J. Book (Lucky))

There was a time when all we knew were the nine planets (now eight) that revolve around our sun. Then we developed amazing space telescopes that can capture images outside our solar system. On March 21, NASA confirmed the 5,000th exoplanet. To celebrate this milestone, NASA put together a data visualization, a timeline on a 360° map, showing when each exoplanet was discovered.

As each exoplanet is discovered, a circle appears at its position in the sky. The size of the circle indicates the relative size of the planet's orbit and the color indicates which planet detection method was used to discover it. The music is created by playing a note for each newly discovered world. The pitch of the note indicates the relative orbital period of the planet. Planets that take a longer time to orbit their stars are heard as lower notes, while planets that orbit more quickly are heard as higher notes.

The big blue blob that appears on the left in 2013-14 represents data picked up from the Kepler space telescope. That data confirmed 1,284 exoplanets and hinted at thousands more possible exoplanets. -via Metafilter 

For almost a hundred years, Tavira, Portugal, was a town centered around the tuna fishing industry. When the supply of tuna declined, the town focused on other things, but a remnant of that legacy remains. No one knows who first arranged out-of-service boat anchors on the beach at Praia do Barril, but after they did, it became a custom for others to add to the collection any time they discarded an anchor. Now hundreds of them stand in formation as a monument to bygone days of fishing. It's called the Anchor Graveyard, and draws tourists to Tavira.

The Anchor Graveyard is just one of the many specialty scrapyards, er, cemeteries around the world where old objects go when they are no longer useful. Messy Nessy Chic takes us on a tour of graveyards for bicycles, airplanes, fiberglass statues, concrete statues, phone booths, rickshaws, tanks, firetrucks, and even ice cream.

(Image credit: VITIMan)

Dr. Ernesto Di Maio is a professor of Materials Science and Technology at the University of Naples. He is also allergic to yeast. Naples is the birthplace of pizza. In a confluence of biology and geography, Di Maio was destined to develop a way to make pizza crust without yeast. In a normal pizza crust (and most bread), yeast produced carbon dioxide bubbles as it ferments, which causes the dough to rise, making it light and airy. Di Maio's team looked for a way to infuse raw dough with carbon dioxide artificially.

To artificially aerate the crust, the team placed the dough—a mixture of flour, water, and salt—into an autoclave, a chamber with controlled pressure and temperature settings. They then flooded the golf ball–sized dough with gas at high pressure, similar to carbonating a soda. When they gradually released the pressure and increased the heat inside the chamber, the team watched the dough rise.

They ended up with several mini-crusts, which they declared tasty. This experiment may lead to specialty pizzas and even breads that can be tolerated by people with yeast allergies. Read more about the experiment at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Breville USA)

We take lace for granted in the age of mass produced textiles. Lace in the modern era is priced in the range of other fabrics, although that range can be quite wide. But before machine looms, lace was a precious commodity because it was hand made, and the finest of lace was made in Alençon, France. Point d’Alençon needle lace was very expensive because it was so labor intensive. Every square centimeter (less than half an inch) required around seven hours of painstaking labor. It took entire teams to produce the lace, from the designer who drew it to the finisher who polished it with a lobster claw. Lace was so expensive that wearing it was naturally restricted to the very wealthy or royalty. The lace industry involved so much money that there were importers, smugglers, tariffs, trade wars, and a campaign to produce domestic lace that gave rise to Alençon lace. Read what made Point d’Alençon needle lace so special, which entails a description of how it was made, at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company

Mass production can be a beautiful thing. This video is a compilation of machines that we rarely get to see, and the amazing way they get things done. You probably won't learn a whole lot from watching this (or you just might), but how they do what they do is almost like art. We get to see materials we don't recognize perfectly formed into things we suddenly recognize. But it's not just manufacturing. Get a close up view of large equipment farming, cooking, street cleaning, earth digging, and more. None of the clips are long enough to get boring. They just move on to the next machine. -via Nag on the Lake

My favourite thing is when people stick trackers on animals and one does literally nothing interesting and sits in 1 place 99% of the time and the researchers are like oh yeah that weird datapoint is Lazy Geoff, he doesn't ever do anything for reasons we don't entirely understand

— Dr Dani Rabaiotti (@DaniRabaiotti) March 23, 2022

Dr. Dani Rabaiotti, author of the book Does It Fart?: The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence, posted a Tweet that went on to tell the story of tracking an urban fox when she was an undergrad. The fox just sat under a shed for three months, which isn't all that interesting and probably sounded sketchy to her supervising professor. But it is a tale that all animals scientists know, because they have all encountered a "Lazy Geoff."

YouTuber WUZU clay uses polymer clay to construct a Minecraft temple, set in an ocean, encased in acrylic for preservation. The process is painstaking, but in this video it is sped up by edits for our enjoyment, without narration. The precision in planning, measuring, and construction is engrossing. There are just enough bubbles in the acrylic to make it really seem to be underwater! -via Boing Boing