John Williams composed "The Imperial March" from Star Wars as a military march because that's how Dart Vader enters a scene. The song is not only miitary, but downright evil. It's a tune that's been stuck in your head for almost 50 years now. Or at least in mine. But if you know a lot about music, you can do some odd things with a familiar theme.  

Swedish guitarist Lucas Brar turned "The Imperial March" into a fugue, which is a composition with a main theme plus bells and whistles that complement and compete with the main theme, but always comes back to it. Read a better explanation here. Johann Sebastian Bach was well known for his musical fugues. Brar was thinking of Bach when he dressed up the march in a way that make it sound a little less ominous, or at least least a little less military, and a lot more interesting. 

When you think of child soldiers, you might think of certain African rebel militias, or about the youngsters who fought in the American Civil War. But boys too young to realize what they're doing managed to become fighters in World War II as well. Most of these enlistments were due to a volunteer lying about his age, and induction officers who turned a blind eye because they were desperate for recruits. Or they were members of partisan militias. That's how we managed to have a teenage bombing expert and a 15-year-old kamikaze pilot. There was even a 6-year-old in uniform (shown above), but he was a refugee under the care of a Soviet military unit and not an official soldier. 

The youngest World War II soldier in the US military was 12-year-old Calvin Graham, who forged documents that said he was 17 and had his parents' permission to enlist in the navy. He became a decorated war hero before he was found out. Read about five underage youngsters who fought in World War II at Mental Floss.    

Two adventurers, or looters if you will, separately seek the treasure of an ancient king and queen from a magical booby-trapped castle. Their names are Robin and Rayden, although which is which I cannot tell. The voice actors are named Darci and Parley, which doesn't help. Anyway, they don't know each other. She's tougher, but he has the instructions, so they need to team up to find and steal a huge gem hidden in the labrynthine palace. The plot is far from groundbreaking, but the animation is luscious, the action is invigorating, and there are some funny moments. 

Love & Gold is a student animation, written and directed by Connor Van Dyke and produced by Jaysen Duckworth of Brigham Young University's Media Arts program, although many others were involved. The film won the award for Best Animation  at the Television Academy Foundation’s 45th College Television Awards last week. You can read more about it at Kuriositas. 

NASA's Artemis II mission is on their way home after circling the moon. They are expected to splash down off the coast near San Diego on Saturday evening. They have set a record for the furthest any human has flown away from the earth, at 252,000 miles. While passing around the moon, they took lots of gorgeous photographs of the spaceship, the earth, and the moon, including the "dark side" we never get to see from earth. 

NASA photographs are in the public domain, and they are glad to share them with us all. Many of these high-resolution space photos have been sized to use for computer wallpapers and phone screens, and some have been altered for dramatic effect. You can find these at NASA and from those who have resized and reformatted them for your use, with various links found at kottke, where you'll also find some of his favorite such images. 

There are thousands of different snake species, and they all have a few things in common. They don't have legs, they are carnivorous, and humans are afraid of them. We have good reason to be scared, since snakes can be quite venomous, the better to disable prey and repel threats. But all these different kinds of snakes have a wide variety of techniques for killing. 

Some will eat another animal that's bigger than they are, and have developed some weird physiological tricks to get away with that. Despite one graphic in this TED-Ed video, we've never seen a case of a snake swallowing an elephant, but they have been known to consume an entire alligator or deer. Others specialize in one specific type of prey and have adapted both their anatomy and lifestyle to surviving off of it. There are reasons snakes have survived on earth so long, and why we are seemingly born to fear them.

In 1928, a you could buy a Chevrolet LM one-ton truck for $520. That was for a cab and chassis only, and then you got the cargo box custom-built for your needs. We don't know what this truck was originally used for, because it's undergone a lot of changes. Inside, it now has a V6 motor to pull it, automatic transmission, and and a wooden home in the back. This motor home is a steampunk dream. It's made of red oak, with a copper roof, Dutch doors, coach lamps, and 21 stained glass windows. Even the turn signals are stained glass! Inside, you'll find an all-wood kitchen and a leather couch, plus a bed. It has a stereo but alas, no bathroom or air conditioning. 

This custom coach only has 11,444 miles on it, and it's going up for auction on April 10th. Read more about it and see pictures at the Autopian. 

(Image credit: Mecum Auctions) 

Drones have many uses, but let's not talk about war right now. For aerial entertainment, they are much safer than fireworks, and can light up the sky with intricate 3-dimensional images that are just breathtaking. It all depends on how many drones you have and how well they are programmed to work together. The biggest show yet happened in Hefei, Anhui, China, on February 3rd, 2026. The Chinese company Guangdong EHang Egret Media Technology Co., Ltd. launched 22,580 and set a new world record for the "most multirotor/drones airborne simultaneously from a single computer (outdoors)." Since they qualified that, you have to wonder how many more were ever launched inside a structure. That number beat the previous record by 7,000 drones! 

Still, there were twenty drones that failed to launch, possibly because they didn't have enough chargers.

Oh yeah, and unlike fireworks, these drones can be used again. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom are very different things. It's been said that someone with knowledge will tell you that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting in a fruit salad. That's an example, not a definition. Someone once told me that wisdom is knowing the difference between what is important and what is not. I've always liked that. But wisdom is combination of several factors, like humility, compassion, objectivity, the ability to learn from experience, the ability to regulate one's emotions, and the ability to understand how someone else might see a situation differently. There are other elements, like the ability to adapt, question oneself, and predict the outcome of our actions. 

Philosophers have studied the meaning and value of wisdom since antiquity, and today scientists are trying to measure it. They've found that wisdom exists in all age groups, and even people who are considered wise aren't wise all the time. Can we teach wisdom? It appears that we can, at least somewhat, if the student is open to it. Read about the elements of wisdom and take a self-test of your own wisdom at Knowable magazine.  

The 2025 movie Avatar: Fire and Ash is the second sequel to Avatar (2009) following Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). The title sounds like the film takes place in a volcano, but that turned out to be a small part of the movie, which is focused on water like the previous film. Jake Sully and his family once again deal with the mostly evil humans who have invaded Pandora. They now have a human child, but the franchise seems to have forgotten how much taller the Na'vi are than humans. There seems to be some magical shenanigans that make the boy called Spider start to turn into a Na'vi. Who knows? 

Avatar: Fire and Ash was not as popular as The Way of Water, but it was hella successful. The budget was maybe $400 million, and it grossed $1.4 billion. When your only real competition is your previous work, what does "success" mean, anyway? Screen Junkies found Avatar: Fire and Ash to be a bit repetitive, but it still looks gorgeous. 

The Ocean City (New Jersey) Welcome Center is such a popular place for birds to nest that it has been designated as a rookery where the Audubon Society holds events. Jacqueline Burke was visiting from Pennsylvania with her camera in May of 2024 and said there were dozens of active nests. Underneath a ramp, she spied an egret's nest with three chicks, sporting punk plumes and attitude, under a parent's watchful supervision. The scene made for a good picture, and now it has won the grand prize in Smithsonian Magazine’s 23rd Annual Photography Contest. These chicks would now be adults and look like every other egret you've seen. 

The contest gathered over 17,000 submissions from 108 countries. There were winners in the categories of artistic, travel, people, American experience, wildlife, and drone photography, plus the reader's choice award, and you can see all eight images and read the stories behind them at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Jacqui Burke) 

It's always a treat to get a mashup of two (or more) familiar songs from Bill McClintock. Usually, they are shockingly different songs that meld in a surprising way. This time, the two main songs are thematically similar- they are about a working woman.

Donna Summer's 1983 hit "She Works Hard for the Money" was inspired by a tired restroom attendant she met at a Grammy afterparty. The song is about all blue-collar women. On the other hand, the 1978 song "Roxanne," the first hit by The Police, is definitely about a sex worker. Together, the two songs seem to be about a really hard-working prostitute. You can also appreciate a 1970s disco singer with an '80s hit mashed up with an '80s band's song from the 1970s. 

Musically, McClintock shows his skill at making disparate rhythms work together better than they should. There are also snippets of "Never Enough" by L.A. Guns and "Round and Round: by Ratt in this mashup.   

Humans spent thousands of years looking for ways to make life easier. We turned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, then we invented machines to help with labor. Now we have artificial intelligence so we don't have to bother thinking anymore. Recent research has identified what is called "cognitive surrender," when critical reasoning is abandoned to trust in external reasoning from algorithms.  

The experiments used Cognitive Reflection Tests, which are designed to separate people who make decisions on a quick, intuitive basis and those who slowly deliberate the details to come to different conclusions. In other words, the tasks are designed to be somewhat confusing on the surface. The option to consult AI was added (except for a control group), with the AI programmed to give the correct solution only half of the time. While many people took the option to consult AI, some double-checked the algorithm's advice and others blithely accepted what the algorithm told them.   

Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. 

Significantly, those who trusted artificial intelligence with their answers were more confident about their decisions, no matter how correct they were or weren't. And adding a time limit only increased the number who trusted AI. Read more about this research at Ars Technica. 

We clean our kitchens and we clean our toilets, because that's where the germs are, right? Sure, but bacteria, viruses, fungi, and even insects are more universal than our cleaning habits are. During the pandemic, we learned to clean our doorknobs and wash our hands correctly. But you can't get those nasty little germs off everything. Chill Dude Explains might ruin your day by looking at the things that never get washed in our homes and revealing how nasty they can get. He explains how you can mitigate the germ infestations on some of these, but not all of them. It's a good thing we have immune systems, right? 

You might check off your lifestyle habits as the list goes on. I, for example, am now thankful that I don't wear makeup, buy meat, or have an ice maker. I'm surprised that a keyboard isn't included in this list, because I touch that more than anything, and it rarely gets washed. 

If you've been following Neatorama for a while, you are familiar with Tristan da Cunha, a tiny island in the middle of the widest part of the Atlantic Ocean. The British territory is 38 square miles and has one town, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, with about 250 residents. There is no airstrip, and ships arrive only about once a month or so. The island has a school, a doctor, and internet access. 

On such a remote island with a small population, you'd think that life would be slow and bucolic, but nothing is further from the truth. There are so many tasks necessary for community life that everyone learns to pitch in and multi-task. Residents fish, process seafood, care for livestock, tend to gardens, repair homes, help out at the school, and run the government. When a ship arrives with supplies and a limited number of tourists, everyone knows what their job is. NPR has a lovely multi-media presentation that shows us what everyday life is like for the few dozen residents of Tristan da Cunha. That life is not for everyone. -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: The Official CTBTO Photostream) 

We've all seen the viral instructions for bathing a cat, which mainly consists of retrieving the cat from another part of the house and tending to your wounds. There's the easier alternate method, too. Cats are famously hydrophobic (which does not means rabies in this case). They will loudly proclaim they are self-cleaning, but sometimes they require extra help. I have always considered bathing a cat to be a two-person task. 

Ash is an outlier. He is the kind of cat we all wish we had, because he loves taking a bath. Here we see how eager he is, and how calm he stays during the procedure. In return, his owner makes a big production out of it, basically giving Ash a spa day to keep him clean and happy. If I had such an amenable cat, I would bathe him more than once a month, just for a fun of it. See more of Ash at Instagram.