Autoimmune diseases are those in which the body's immune system turns to attacking vital organs instead of limiting its activities to invaders. They include multiple sclerosis, psoriasis,  type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and many others. These diseases have become more common in the modern era, but there may something more to it than just the fact that people now live long enough to develop them. It may be because we don't get as much exposure to sunlight as we used to.

Now, it's true that too much exposure to sunlight over years can lead to skin cancer, but that may actually be due to the sun's role in suppressing the immune system. Photoimmunology is the recently-developed study of how sunlight affects the immune system. Therapies have been developed using devices that emit light rays in forms that do not induce cancer, with promising results in suppressing symptoms of autoimmune diseases. Read about these therapies, and the science beneath the concept, at Scientific American.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Fiona Storey)

We've heard so much talk about artificial intelligence taking over our jobs. It's happening in all sectors, but is most visible in movies, video, and television. That's bad for real actors, who not only make a living playing roles, but consider themselves artists. But has anyone ever looked at this phenomenon from the side of the AI-generated actors who are taking their place? They don't get paid, they will do whatever you tell them to, and they have no life outside of the screen time they are assigned.

Hashem Al-Ghaili generated a documentary about the sad lives of AI actors, who don't even exist outside of the prompts they get from film directors. Anything they do outside of work time is deemed a hallucination. They are trapped in their work, even if it means getting their head chopped off over and over until the scene is right. And if this video touches your heartstrings, congratulations, you've been manipulated into caring about people who don't exist. -via Laughing Squid

Owls are awesome, and a vital part of the ecosystem. They tend to avoid humans as best as they can, but occasionally, an owl is orphaned, sick, or injured, and there are dedicated rehabilitators who rise to occasion and take care of them. Still, owls are wild animals, and not easy to deal with without someone getting hurt. So wildlife rehabbers wrap them in towels in order to weigh them, treat their injuries, and sometimes even to feed them. This not only protects both the bird and the handler, but also helps to calm down an agitated bird. When an owl is kept still in this way, it's a good time to take its picture. The gallery Owls in Towels brings us wrapped owls from all over the world. Shannon, pictured above, is a ruru morepork owl who slammed into a glass window and was treated at Wildbase Recovery in New Zealand. Grace, below, is showing some attitude as she is examined by a veterinarian at the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital.



Rarely does an owl look happy to be wrapped in a towel by a strange human, but this Eurasian scops owl was rescued from an attack by a pack of crows in Skopje, North Macedonia, and looks quite pleased about it.  

You can click on any of the images in the gallery and read the story of that particular owl. And if you have a box of towels you no longer use, your local wildlife rehab center or any animal shelter will be glad to put them to use. -via Metafilter

A Klein bottle is one that has no separate inside and outside because they are both the same surface. It's not an imaginary shape, and you can buy a Klein bottle easily. Can you fill such a bottle with liquid? That's a problem, because gravity will work against you. But there is a way.  

James Orgill of The Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) tells us that it is air standing in the way of filling a Klein bottle. If we can remove the air, the liquid will fill the space despite gravity. He tests his method with aluminum cans, which is pretty cool, although I wouldn't recommend it unless you have proper safety equipment. On to the glass Klein bottle, in an experiment I wouldn't recommend even with safety equipment because all I could think of was what could possibly go wrong, and that's a lot. But as long as he's doing it instead of me, it's pretty cool. There's a skippable ad from 3:21 to 4:50.

In the grand scheme of things, Grigori Rasputin was a side character in the story of the downfall of Russia's last absolute monarch, Tsar Nicholas II. But the semi-literate Siberian faith healer and mystic, with his questionable hygiene and hypnotically piercing eyes, captured the imagination of the world as he became a celebrated friend and advisor to the Romanov family. Was he a holy man or the devil incarnate? Was Rasputin controlling the Tsar? Was he sleeping with the Empress Alexandra?

Even more sensational was Rasputin's death, when he was murdered in Saint Petersburg in 1916 by five conspirators close to the throne. According to different accounts, he was poisoned, but didn't die. Then he was shot multiple times and didn't die. Finally, he was beaten and bound and thrown into the freezing Little Nevka river, and finally died. The tale of Rasputin's death only added to his reputation for supernatural abilities. But what really happened to Rasputin? The accounts of his death come from Felix Yusupov, who was there when it happened, and from Rasputin's daughter Maria. Both had their reasons to frame the story as they did. The autopsy report contained information that differed from those accounts. Read the inflated tale of Rasputin's sensational murder and what really happened at Mental Floss.

Actor Chris Hemsworth uploaded a video titled "Thank You! The Legacy of Thor." Just the title will make you think, did I miss something? Hemsworth talks about how much of an honor it was to play the character Thor. Filming of Avengers: Doomsday just began last month, and Hemsworth is definitely playing Thor in the movie scheduled to drop in late 2026. Is the superhero/Norse god of thunder going to die in that movie? Is Hemsworth setting himself up for retirement? Or did he get fired? Or is the studio throwing this "tribute" out as a teaser to get people talking about Avengers: Doomsday? Odds are that it's the latter, although we won't know for quite some time whether Thor is doomed to bite the bullet onscreen or maybe go back to Valhalla or neither. If this video is designed to spark speculation among Marvel fans, it's working. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The east coast of Australia once had plenty of emus, but those days are gone. The native population has been decimated by introduced predators, such as foxes. Now it's rare to see an emu in the wild anywhere along the east coast. Except at Potato Point, which has 159 people and almost as many emus. Around 30 years ago, a prosperous businessman brought about a dozen emus from Western Australia to his private island off Potato Point. He didn't know emus could swim. They can and they did, and set up housekeeping in the small town.

The emu population grew, delighting the residents of Potato Point. All these years later, the vegetation in the area is being restored by the emus' talent in spreading seeds that cling to them or move through their digestive system. They are protected from predators by the staff of the Eurobodalla National Park, which surrounds Potato Point. Read about the colony of emus who came to stay at ABC. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Annette Teng)

German teacher Jörg Hillebrand knows a lot about Star Trek. He knows how to translate star dates and the hours between them. He knows how many times Commander Ryker wore blue pajamas onscreen. He knows what other TV series used the same costume. And he knows what all the props used to be before they were portrayed as future technology.

Hillebrand noticed that Captain Jean-Luc Picard keeps an open book in his ready room. What book is it, and what page is it opened to? Hillebrand discovered it was two different books in different seasons, so he bought both of them. Not only did he find the exact pages, but one has a reference to the actor Sir Patrick Stewart!

Read the story of that discovery, and stay for David Friedman's interview with Hillebrand, where he tells us how he knows so much about Star Trek, and how his vast Star Trek knowledge got him a job as a research assistant for the series Star Trek: Picard.  -via Metafilter

Students who are in college today grew up with iPhones. For the past three years, they've also had access to ChatGPT to do their homework for them. There are ways to know whether a paper has been written by artificial intelligence, but it's not as easy or reliable as Googling a phrase to check for plagiarism. College professors know students are using AI, since all the major services show usage way down during the summer break months. So what is a professor to do when it comes to final exams and you want to find out if the student has learned anything at all? This year, many are going low-tech and requiring students to bring blue books.

Blue books are standardized blank booklets of paper that are used to write out exam answers. This may frighten students, but it's not easy for the professors, either, since the students haven't used actual handwriting for their college years, and that makes deciphering what they've written really tough. But these students (as well as many of the rest of us) gave up handwriting because a machine can do it better. Is it any different to give up studying and learning because a machine can do it better? Read about the return to blue book exams in an article from The Wall Street Journal. -via Slashdot

May is as good a time as any to think about the problem of snow removal. The question came in to the guys of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama) about using a flamethrower to melt snow. Or would a microwave be better? This person was imagining putting either on the front of a car to melt the snow in front of you. If they had asked me, I would remind them that melted snow is water, water will soon turn to ice in a cold environment, and ice makes the road even more hazardous. But they didn't ask me.

Instead, they look at the pros and cons of flamethrowers, microwave emitters, infrared heat lamps, jet engines, and lasers, particularly in their energy consumption. I would also have some concern about what's under all that snow, like your other car buried in the driveway. Also about the safety of such snow-melting schemes. Find out the best way to remove snow illustrated with ridiculous theoretical scenarios in this video from Randall Munroe and Henry Reich.    

The skull pictured above was found in the Djurab Desert in northern Chad in 2001. It has been dated to somewhere between six and seven million years ago. But what is it? Its owner had a small brain and a protruding brow, like an ape, but also had a smallish jaw and an opening for the spine that hinted it could be a hominid. If so, it would be the oldest hominid fossil ever discovered. But where is the line between apes and hominids? The paleontology world in the 21st century looks at it as whether the creature walked on two legs or four. What is called the Toumaï skull was assigned the species name Sahelanthropus tchadensis, but that didn't classify where it stood in the evolution of humans. If only there were other bones that could indicate whether S. tchadensis walked on two legs, the question could be laid to rest. But it turns out there were other bones.

Paleontologists are ambitious scientists. Paleoanthropologists, who study human fossils, are the most ambitious, since finding a hominid fossil can make up for years of fruitless digging. The Holy Grail of paleoanthropology is to find the earliest hominid, which brings worldwide acclaim in the field. In paleontology, there are certain ethical conventions that govern the ownership of fossils, the hierarchy of academic publishing, and the need to share research so that it can be confirmed. That all went out the window in the case of the Toumaï skull, as a femur found with the skull could be the key to what kind of creature S. tchadensis really was. The feuding and subterfuge went on for years as reputations and careers were shattered, and still hasn't been resolved. Read the gripping story of the French paleoanthropologists who had so much riding on the research into the Toumaï skull at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Didier Descouens)

The Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake was held yesterday in the British village of Brockworth. The event has been held almost every year for at least 200 years, and may be more than 600 years old. The origins and meaning of the event are obscured by time, but must have been a good story. A wheel of Double Gloucester cheese is tossed down the notoriously steep Cooper's Hill, and competitors race to catch it. No one ever catches it, so the first person to the bottom wins the cheese. You might think that a downhill race would be easy, but it also involves falling and rolling, so much that no organization will sanction the race anymore, therefore it is an informal competition where injuries are common. Yet thousands of spectators show up. There were seven races this year, with one reserved for women only. Winners included German YouTuber Tom Kopke, and Luke Preece, who wore a Superman costume. One person was sent to a hospital by ambulance.

Have you ever wondered why a blind person's guide dog is called a seeing eye dog instead of just a guide dog? That's because they came came from the organization The Seeing Eye, founded in 1929 by Morris Frank. Frank lost his sight in one eye at age six, and the other at 16. He heard about an innovative program in Germany that trained dogs to guide blind people. Frank ended up going to Switzerland to work with dog trainer Dorothy Harrison Eustis and came back with a female German shepherd he named Buddy.

The real innovation in training Buddy and other guide dogs was "intelligent disobedience." Buddy was trained to disregard her owner's commands when the situation called for it, such as in dangerous traffic. In 1928 Frank gave a demonstration in New York City to show reporters how Buddy could guide him safely in walking through Manhattan. The next year, Frank and Eustis opened the dog training program that's still in operation today. -via Nag on the Lake

Team Singapore dominated the 5th FAI World Indoor Artistic Skydiving Championships in Charleroi, Belgium, last month. They placed in a couple of team events and won a speed competition as well. Above is their performance in the 4-way Dynamic Open routine, in which they won first place. Don't blink or you'll miss moves you couldn't imagine were possible in a wind tunnel, and they make it look effortless. These athletes aren't limited to indoor skydiving; they jump out of planes all the time.

While I look at indoor skydiving as a bit, okay, a whole lot safer than the outdoor version, I can imagine I would find myself plastered to the ceiling or else flailing like an idiot until someone came and got me or else turned the air off. Meanwhile, these athletes are doing air ballet. Don't miss their dismount, when they actually exit the wind tunnel backwards. -via Geeks Are Sexy

When I was a kid, if anyone had to go to the hospital for a medical emergency, the telephone operator would call a funeral home and they would take you in a hearse, although with a temporary red bubble light stuck on top. They were the only vehicles that could accommodate a person lying down. Up through the 1960s, ambulance service in the USA was a local concern, operated by the police or fire departments, hospitals, or funeral homes. It was mainly a matter of transport, as few places had EMTs. Your odds of survival often depended on how long the trip took.

In Pittsburgh’s majority-Black Hill District, hospital transport was carried out by the city police, and they weren't all that enthusiastic about it. Local leaders looked into the problem, and in 1967, the nonprofit organization Freedom House Enterprises partnered with Presbyterian-University Hospital to develop an ambulance service with trained paramedics. The Black paramedics of the Hill District responded so well that people started calling Freedom House in an emergency instead of the police or hospital. Freedom House suffered political backlash and defunding from city leaders, but its standards of care started a revolution in ambulance service that was felt nationwide. Read about the paramedics of Freedom House Ambulance Service at Smithsonian. A video documentary is included.