Royal Museums Greenwich, home of the Royal Observatory, has announced the winners of their annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The grand prize goes to Shuchang Dong, who traveled to Tibet to get this image of the solar eclipse of 2020, titled The Golden Ring. To his dismay, it was a cloudy day, but the heavens opened up just long enough to get this picture of the corona.
The winner in the Stars and Nebulae category is British photographer Terry Hancock for this image called California Dreamin' NGC 1499. See the winners in each of eight categories plus two other awards, with links to other photographs in the shortlist for each category.
Mike Judge made a pilot for a show called Monsignor Martinez (Las Dias Y Los Noches de Monsignor Martinez) and it's only 20 years later that we get to see it. Well, at least the live-action version. The animated version is a recurring bit in the show King of the Hill. Monsignor Martinez is a Catholic priest who kills drug smugglers. Yeah, it's an action series. I would watch this religiously! -via reddit
Whether a Jeopardy! question is difficult or not all depends on whether you know the answer. If you know a bit of trivia that the three contestants on TV at the time don't know, that makes you a champion, right? Esquire gives us a second chance to outdo those contestants.
Below, we’ve rounded up 20 Jeopardy questions that fall in a rare and ignominious category called “triple stumpers”—a.k.a., legendarily hard questions. A triple stumper is a clue for which no correct response is given by any player. That can mean a few things: either some or all of the players buzz in incorrectly, or no one buzzes in at all.
Be warned that each answer is printed right below the question, so you should control your scrolling to avoid spoilers. I got about half of them, but whether I would be faster than the next contestant is unlikely. See all 20 questions here, and don't miss the video in which three intellectual contestants prove they know nothing about football. -via Digg
If this were a list, you could argue about it. Well, some people will argue about it anyway, even though it's a compilation and should just be enjoyed as such. Looper takes a look at the more ridiculous scenes over the different series of the Star Trek Universe. You may think that the setup for each scene is a little long, but if they didn't explain what was happening, we'd either be confused or else the video would be more than an hour long. -via Laughing Squid
Pinpointing when humans started wearing clothes is tricky, as leather, fur, and textiles tend to rot completely away. However, we can find hints in the tools people used to make clothing. A team headed by Emily Hallett of the Max Planck Institute has been excavating a cave in Morocco that has yielded some 12,000 bone fragments. Some of those bones, dated to around 120,000 years ago, have markings that match newer bones from other sites that were used to skin animals for fur and leather. In addition to these bone tools, other animal bones suggest that the people who lived there ate herbivores and just skinned carnivores.
"In this cave there are three species of carnivores with skinning marks on their bones: Rüppell's fox, golden jackal, and wildcat," Hallett told ScienceAlert.
"The cut marks on these carnivore bones are restricted to areas where incisions are made for fur removal, and there are no cut marks on the areas of the skeleton associated with meat removal."
While for leather, several species of bovid were found at the site.
"Hartebeest, aurochs, and gazelle bones were found in high abundance in the cave, and these animals were also consumed by humans, because there are cut marks associated with meat removal on their bones," added Hallett.
These are the oldest leather working tools yet found. However, genetic studies in lice suggest that head lice and clothing lice diverged around 170,000 years ago, which may mean there are even earlier leather working tools to be found somewhere. Read about the discovery at ScienceAlert. -via Strange Company
At the turn of the 20th century, scientists knew about contagion, but the concept of an asymptomatic carrier was completely new. How could someone spread a disease when they weren't sick? We can't say that Mary Mallon, also known as Typhoid Mary, was the first asymptomatic carrier, but she was the first that health officials knew about. Determining how all these wealthy families families came to contract typhoid would be easy now, since they all hired the same cook, but inspectors at the time were looking for actual sick people or bacteria in the water supply. George Thompson owned a vacation house in which the Warren family became sick, and he was determined to find the source to protect future renters.
Desperate to get to the bottom of the puzzle, Thompson hired George Soper, thirty-seven-year-old freelance civil engineer who had been investigating typhoid outbreaks in well-to-do families. After learning that the Warrens had hired a new cook, who no longer worked with them, Soper had his suspicions. Soper was able to trace Mary's employment history back to 1900. He found that typhoid outbreaks had followed Mary from job to job. From 1900 to 1907, Soper found that Mary had worked at seven jobs in which 22 people had become ill, including one young girl who died with typhoid fever shortly after Mary had come to work for them.
Soper tracked Mary down to her new place of employment, the family of Walter Bowens, who lived on Park Avenue. There was typhoid in the residence too. Soper found that two of the household's servants were hospitalized, and the daughter of the family had died of typhoid.
Soper confronted Mary in the kitchen of the Bowens, and asked her to give samples of her urine and stool. This infuriated Mary. Grabbing a carving fork from the table, Mary chased Soper out of the house. Sopher tried again, this time in the apartment of a man Mary was spending time with. Mary threw Sopher out again, swearing the whole way.
If she had cooperated, the name Mary Mallon might only be known in science and medical circles, but she fought quarantine for years and became so notorious that her nickname is still used for people who spread disease. Read the story of Typhoid Mary at Amusing Planet.
North Farmington High School in Farmington Hills, Michigan, (previously and previously) has a tradition of letting their senior class wear what they want for their student identification cards. They've been doing it since 2014, and the incoming seniors plan their costumes long ahead of time. The class of 2022 has received their ID cards, and the students have posted them to Twitter.
We all know George Washington, Father of our Country, Commander of the Continental Army which defeated the British Empire to create the first modern democracy. He was the most famous and most respected man of his time among the 13 states, and so Americans elected him to the presidency twice. But do you recall exactly what Washington did while he was in office? He had his work cut out for him, as the young nation's government was fairly unorganized, and the states worked as if they were all separate countries. Washington went to the people, to sell them on the idea of putting "United" before "States."
Washington took his show on the road in the spring of 1789. Over the span of two years, he visited all 13 original states (14 if you count Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts), traveling on horseback and by carriage along rutted dirt roads and over rising rivers. The president often donned his magnificent Continental Army uniform and rode his favorite white stallion into towns, where he was greeted by cheering citizens. Along the way, he communicated his hopes for the new nation and how he needed everyone’s support to make this vision reality.
“It was awe inspiring,” Philbrick says. “Washington was seriously the only one [who] could have sold the concept to the people. Not only was [he] able to unify us politically, he was able to unify us as a nation. Instead of saying our state is our country—as was customary back then—we were saying the United States is our nation. We take that for granted today, but it wasn’t that way when Washington took office in 1789.”
Get an idea of how the new nation came together under the leadership of Washington on his road trip at Smithsonian.
Some celebrities find no rest in death. There are plenty of people who want just a little piece (or more) of a famous body for one reason or another. That's to be expected if one becomes a saint, but keeping body parts around is not limited to religious icons. When Galileo's remains were moved to a new tomb in 1737, several pieces were snatched up along the way. One of the scientist's fingers ended up in a museum, and a stolen vertebra eventually went to the University of Padua. That left two missing fingers and a tooth unaccounted for.
Galileo’s tooth and the other two fingers didn’t leave such an obvious trail. The original thief, an Italian marquis, bequeathed them to his progeny, and they stayed in the family for generations. But the last written reference to the artifacts was from 1905, and historians later in the 20th century assumed they were gone for good. Then, in 2009, two fingers and a tooth showed up in a jar at an auction in Italy. The auction organizers didn’t know whose body parts they were selling, but the buyer had an inkling that they were Galileo’s. They brought their purchase to the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, where museum director Paolo Galluzzi confirmed the theory.
He based his verdict on the fact that the items and their container matched the detailed description from 1905. And since the objects were unlabeled and sold for a scant sum, it seemed unlikely that someone had produced them in some kind of bizarre counterfeiting scheme. As Galluzzi told CNN, “[The] story is so convincing I cannot think of a reason not to believe it.” After renovations, the museum reopened in 2010 under a new name—the Galileo Museum—which proudly exhibited Galileo’s two shriveled digits (and lone tooth) next to the finger already on display.
Melissa Miller started a project called Bad Science Jokes back in 2012 when she was in high school. She had a science teacher that would give extra credit for a science joke, and so she saw and heard a lot of them. Her collection was very popular on Tumblr, and then moved to Instagram. Some consider it just a meme page, but she also hears from students who credit the jokes in helping them to remember important concepts to get through science class.
Bored Panda picked out a bunch of these jokes that are both funny and understandable to anyone with a passing knowledge of science. See 40 of them in a list ranked by votes. Some of them are actually good science jokes!
The Nazi party in 1930s Germany was all about convincing the majority of Germans that they were superior to Jews and foreigners because of their racial purity. This led to an entire scientific discipline out to prove that theory, and the mad race to find evidence to support it.
Those who swore by the idea of a white Nordic superior race were believers in the tale of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where people of "the purest blood" had apparently once lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this mythical island allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt.
All the Aryans who survived had supposedly moved on to more secure places. The Himalayan region was believed to be one such refuge, Tibet in particular because it was famous for being "the roof of the world".
In 1935, Himmler set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe - or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage - to find out where people from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the deluge, and where traces of the great race still remained and could be discovered.
In 1938, he sent a team of five Germans to Tibet on this "search operation".
The Germans were reportedly there to study zoology and anthropology, all the while taking casts of human body parts and measuring skulls and features of the local people, before the war cut their research short. Read about the Tibetan adventures of Himmler's research team at BBC. -via Damn Interesting
YouTuber Paulogia Live asked the Question, "If every copy of Star Wars was destroyed, could we recreate A New Hope from non-Lucasfilm projects?" And then he answered the question himself, by editing together a shorter but comprehensive version of Star Wars Episode One: A New Hope using parodies, tributes, and cultural references found in movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, ads, and other media that are not from Lucasfilm. The effect is somewhat like Star Wars Uncut, except you'll recognize most of the clips used here. -via Boing Boing
Long ago, four mysterious beings, who were both male and female, sailed from Tahiti to Hawaii and brought the art of healing with them. They were named Kapuni, Kinohi, Kahaloa, and Kapaemahu. The Hawaiians erected four great boulders in their honor at Waikiki, which are still there. Their story is told in this beautiful animated short by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu featured in the 2021 PBS Short Film Festival. Read more about the film at The Kid Should See This.
Dolls can be creepy, especially when they are staring at you in the middle of the night from the top of the dresser. But there are a few dolls that have become famous for their activities in addition to their appearance. These real-life dolls have a reputation for inspiring terror. Whether the stories are real or not, the dolls are, even though one was also a movie character.
Twilight fans will recall that the film series concluded with the birth of the offspring of fang-crossed lovers Bella and Edward. In The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1 (2011), their baby, Renesmee, was represented by some questionable CGI. On set, she was embodied by a very peculiar-looking animatronic doll (above). That prop is now being accused of malevolent sentience by people near the Forever Twilight display at the Chamber of Commerce in Forks, Washington, where the movies are set.
“One day she might be standing up straight, and the next, when you come in on another day, she’s in a weird position,” Lissy Andros, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, told Jezebel in 2020. “It’s like, is she moving around in there? We don’t know. But we tell everybody that the [display case] cover is on her for their protection.”
Fortunately, Renesmee appears to be decomposing as a result of the fragile materials used to build her, so she likely won’t be around to disturb people for too much longer.
Since 2015, Egypt has been busy building a new, planned city to replace Cairo as the nation's capital. The first buildings may be completed in 2022, but the first phase of moving the government in won't begin until 2030. The unnamed city is designed to be clean, efficient, sustainable, and will have plenty of room to grow into the future.
The goal of this new city, which is currently going by the placeholder name “New Administrative Capital (NAC)” is to relieve the congestion of Cairo, one of the world’s most crowded cities, with a “smart traffic” system, as well as solve many of its other problems. It already has a park twice the size of New York’s Central Park and the new capital has also committed to “allocate 15 square metres of green space per inhabitant (the project is being sold as a green initiative to tackle pollution). Its downtown is to have skyscrapers, including the Oblisco Capitale, designed in the form of a Pharaonic obelisk at a height of 1,000 metres (3,300 ft), becoming the tallest in the world; and the Iconic Tower, which will be the tallest tower in Africa. The city will also have artificial lakes, about 2,000 educational institutions, a technology and innovation park, 663 hospitals and clinics, 1,250 mosques and churches, a 90,000-seat stadium, 40,000 hotel rooms, a major theme park four times the size of Disneyland and 90 square kilometers of solar energy farms. They have also built the 2nd biggest mosque in the world (after the one in Mecca) and the biggest church in the middle East.
While Egypt as a whole is embracing the new city, there are still some questions to be resolved. How much influence will the financiers have, specifically the Egyptian military and foreign investors? And what will happen to Cairo's poor? Read about the new Egyptian capital city at Messy Nessy Chic.
