One of the bonuses from last year's lockdown is that we now get Honest Trailers for movies that are still in theaters. The drawback is that this trailer for Black Widow surely has some spoilers, but not so much that you wouldn't still want to see the entire film. Screen Junkies' major criticism is that this Marvel film has a formulaic plot and stereotypical characters, as if that's a real surprise. Nothing could have prevented this movie from being a big hit.

A tubulum is a percussion instrument made of flexible pipes of different lengths. Israeli designer Asaf Wainberg took that idea and made it wearable. He calls this musical instrument an OCTAV, for when you've got such a good beat you have to dance to it.



See a video of the eight-armed OCTAV in action at Yanko Design. Now, if Wainberg could just make those pipes move around like the Spider-Man villain, he could take over the world. -via Everlasting Blort 

The most famous pigeon ever was a bird named Cher Ami. The homing pigeon worked for the US Army Signal Corps during World War I and was mentioned in the Neatorama article The Lost Battalion. Cher Ami was a genuine war hero.

In the fourth year of World War I on October 4, 1918, as the story goes, Cher Ami, an English-bred bird, was the last available pigeon for the American doughboys of the Lost Battalion, cut off and surrounded by German troops. On the afternoon of the fourth, the Americans found themselves being shelled by their own artillery. The commander of the Lost Battalion, Major Charles W. Whittlesey, hurriedly wrote a brief message: “We are along the road parallel 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake stop it.” The message was inserted into a holder on Cher Ami’s leg, and the pigeon went aloft amidst a hail of exploding shells and enemy rifle fire. When the pigeon reached its loft behind the front, either a bullet or shell fragment had almost completely severed its right leg and sliced across the bird’s breast. Miraculously the message capsule hung to the tendons of the severed limb. The capsule’s contents revealed the location of the beleaguered Americans and helped contribute to their relief on the night of October 7.

Cher Ami received the best veterinary care available, and even toured the United States, but succumbed to those devastating war wounds the next summer. The pigeon was given a taxidermist's treatment and was displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. But one mystery remained: was Cher Ami a hen or a cock? The military records referred the the pigeon as "she," but the Smithsonian's description gave the bird male pronouns. The different press outlets went with either one when describing Cher Ami's exploits. The taxidermist left no evidence or records of the bird's sex. More than a hundred years later, the Smithsonian leveraged the technology of DNA analysis to find out who was right, a story you can read at The National Museum of American History. -via Smithsonian

A couple of months ago, student pilot Brian Parsley did his solo cross country flight, a required step in getting his license. About 12 miles short of his destination, his engine sputtered out. What to do? While he is obviously stressed, he did not panic and just did what had to be done. Parsley managed an emergency landing on a stretch of grass. He explained more of what happened in a further video.   -via Digg

Whenever we confront the problem of opioid addiction, the response is to restrict their use in one way or another. However, opioids are currently the world's best pain relievers. Restricting their use hurts patients who deal with severe or chronic pain from conditions that cannot be immediately fixed. At the same time, offering opioids to relieve the pain often turns the patient into an addict. Short of finding a better pain reliever, the best option science can offer is to turn opioids into something non-addictive. And scientists are working on that.

Many of the addictive qualities of opioids are due to the feelings of calm and euphoria they induce in the brain. For conditions like arthritis and wound and postoperative pain, however, these drugs need to target only the diseased or injured areas of the body to provide pain relief. The question researchers face is whether it’s possible to limit the effect of opioids to specific areas of the body without affecting the brain.

One recently proposed solution focuses on the acidity difference between injured and healthy tissue. Injured tissue is more acidic than healthy tissue due to a process known as acidosis, where lactic acid and other acidic byproducts produced by damaged tissue collect. This means that an opioid could potentially be altered to be positively charged and active only in injured tissue, while staying neutral and inactive in normal tissue. The drug would be biochemically active only at a higher acidity level than found in healthy tissue.

Read more about this research and its potential at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Vaprotan)

This beautifully-animated short by Michael Dockery is set in an apocalyptic future in which humans are gone, but the tech we left behind is still being used... by the tech we left behind. You may read into it what you want. I recommend watching it in a larger format.  -via Nag on the Lake

The Print Shop Club will transport you back to 1984, when you first discovered what marvelous things you can do with a computer! Broderbund's program called The Print Shop allowed us to design signs, banners, and even our own greeting cards on our Apple II home computers, and that was quite exciting. Except this version doesn't feed our banners to our dot-matrix printer loaded with fanfold paper, but converts our creations to .pdfs for sharing ...or even printing, if you choose to do so.

Once you try it out, you'll also remember what a pain that all was, and realize that the value of this throwback, while nostalgic, is also to show our kids what we went through to become the computer whizzes that we are today. Melody and April Ayres-Griffiths created this application to pay tribute to David Balsam and Martin Kahn, who created The Print Shop and exposed a generation of children (and adults) to the wonders of computing. -via Metafilter

Imagine trying to figure out a calendar from scratch, in which one could keep track of the days of the year, year after year. It's such a difficult project that what really happened was that every few hundred years we figured out what the problems with the existing calendar were and started over again to correct them. Today we use the Gregorian calendar, which takes into account that a year is 365.25 days and 11.5 minutes long. Before that, there was the Julian calendar, which didn't account for those 11.5 minutes, and before that it was the Roman calendar that didn't have much consistency from year to year at all.   

The Julian Calendar itself was created by Julius Caesar in 46 BC in order to fix the inherent errors of a lunisolar calendar, which the Roman calendar was. The Roman calendar consisted of 12 months for a total of 355 days, which is approximately 10 days shorter than the solar year. In order to catch up with the sun, the Roman calendar added either 22 or 23 days to every alternate year, the same way we add leap days every four years. As a result, Roman years alternated between 355, 377 and 378 days.

To make matter worse, the leap days (also known as the intercalary period) were not added in a regular and systematic manner, but was determined by the Pontifex maximus, the high priest of the College of Pontiffs. Often the Pontifex would abuse his power and lengthen a year when his political allies was in office, and reduce it when his opponents were in power. The net effect of this was that the average Roman citizen often did not have a clue what date the current day was.

The Julian calendar offered some consistency, but it wasn't an easy transition. Read about the shenanigans involved with changing a calendar at Amusing Planet.

St. John the Baptist Church in Danbury, Essex, UK, was built in the 13th century and is the burial place of a few Knights Templar. One of the graves, in the floor of the church, was unearthed briefly in 1779, and an account of the disinterment was published in a magazine in 1789. It describes the discovery of a lead vault containing an elm coffin with a shell inside, and inside that, a corpse. The following excerpt may be disturbing for sensitive readers.

The magazine continues, “The lid of this shell being taken off, we were presented with a view of the body laying in a liquor or pickle resembling mushroom catchup…As I never possessed the sense of smelling and was willing to ascertain the flavour of the liquor, I tasted; and found it to be aromatic, though not very pungent partaking of the taste of catchup and of the pickle of Spanish olives. The body was tolerably perfect…The flesh, except of the face and throat appeared exceedingly white and firm…The body was covered with a shirt of linen; the stitches were very evident, and attached very strongly…There was no hair on the head, nor do I remember any in the liquor, though feathers, flowers and herbs in abundance were floating..the leaves and stalks of which appeared quite perfect.”

Read about the church, its Templar connections, and the pickled knight at MJ Wayland's blog. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Malcolm Reid)

Imagine you are on a spaceship approaching the solar system's largest planet, but first you swing by its largest moon. This is what you might see.

On June 7, 2021, NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Ganymede than any spacecraft in more than two decades. Less than a day later, Juno made its 34th flyby of Jupiter. This animation provides a “starship captain” point of view of each flyby. For both worlds, JunoCam images were orthographically projected onto a digital sphere and used to create the flyby animation. Synthetic frames were added to provide views of approach and departure for both Ganymede and Jupiter.

If you liked this, you'll love the gallery of more images from Juno at NASA. -via Metafilter

When did humans start experimenting with alcohol and drugs?https://t.co/1PDHqAOIT2 pic.twitter.com/8DCduwolpD

— Damn Interesting (@DamnInteresting) July 16, 2021

Common sense would tell you that humans discovered drugs in nature pretty early, since we are omnivores and there's always someone in the group who will try anything. But that doesn't mean they survived the attempt, nor does it mean that the wider culture adopted the use of psychoactive chemicals found in nature. So how far back does alcohol and drug use really go?

Archaeologists have found evidence of opium use in Europe by 5,700 BC. Cannabis seeds appear in archaeological digs at 8,100 BC in Asia, and the ancient Greek historian Herodotus reported Scythians getting high on weed in 450 BC. Tea was brewed in China by 100 BC.

It’s possible our ancestors experimented with substances before the archaeological evidence suggests. Stones and pottery preserve well, but plants and chemicals decay quickly. For all we know, Neanderthals could have been the first to smoke pot. But archaeology suggests the discovery and intensive use of psychoactive substances mostly happened late, after the Neolithic Revolution in 10,000 BC, when we invented farming and civilisation.

That makes sense, because agriculture made manufacturing alcohol and drugs easier to scale up. Or was that just the point where they left evidence behind? Read about the history of drugs and alcohol at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

Mount Athos is not only a mountain, but also the peninsula it rests on, geographically connected to Greece, but socially isolated from it. It is home to many monasteries, and women aren't welcome. Athos was given special administrative status in order to get around Greek and European anti-discrimination laws, as those customs are sort of grandfathered in. You may wonder, as I did, why the area wasn't just given to the Orthodox Church to be kept as private property, but I imagine it's a rather large chunk of land to cede in that manner. This video is only four minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Digg

P.T. Barnum famously said, "There's a sucker born every minute." Or maybe he never said that. Or if he did, we don't know whether he came up with it himself or got it from someone else. There's a lot of things we don't know know for sure about Barnum, as he was in the business of making things up. So we don't know whether or not there is any truth in the tale of the cherry-colored cat.  

According to this tale, one day Barnum received a letter from a Connecticut farmer who claimed to possess a genuine cherry-colored cat. The farmer asked Barnum if he would be interested in purchasing the cat, explaining that his cat would beat any of the other odd critters Barnum had on display at his museum.

Barnum contacted the farmer and said he’d gladly purchase the cat for his museum if the cat were truly cherry-colored. The farm agreed to ship the cat to Barnum for $300 (other articles say Barnum paid $25, $50, or $200.)

A few days later a crate arrived at the museum. When Barnum opened it, he found a an ordinary-looking jet-black cat inside. In response to Barnum’s angry letter, the farmer responded with a note: Dear Mr. Barnum, did you never see a black cherry? We have loads of them born in Connecticut. There’s a sucker born every minute.”

The kicker is that, instead of getting upset, Barnum took this trick and ran with it. Read the rest of the story at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Trends in television were easier to define when there were only three networks. If a show became a hit, suddenly there were other shows just like it, and a simple formula could be run into the ground before the audience demanded something different. In comedy, the 1950s were the age of the suburban nuclear family sitcom. The '70s had more workplace comedies and families dealing with modern issues. In between, TV comedy in the 1960s was dominated by hillbillies, from The Andy Griffith Show to The Beverly Hillbillies to Hee Haw. Comedies that poked fun at a fictional rural South were a total escape from the real world.

When the newscasts were full of footage from My Lai and Saigon, from Selma and Birmingham, Americans looked for laughs in Hooterville. They sought them in Cornfield County, Pixley, and Mayberry. These were fictional rural places full of carefree, unencumbered country folks. There was no racial strife in these burgs because everyone was white. In these worlds, the sheriff didn’t carry a gun, a man could join the Marines and never talk about the war in Vietnam, and nobody even thought about the War on Poverty.

“Rural America was like true America: simpler, without all the problems of big city life, technology, the Russians, and that kind of stuff,” says TV historian and former executive Tim Brooks.

CBS did not invent the idea of using the South as a foil for modern life, but the shows it aired streamlined the concept for television. The combination of old stereotypes and mass media created an alternative "South" that combined all of rural America into a single land of silliness, simplicity, and safety. And it put an exaggerated idea of the white working class at the center of everything.

"Hillbilly TV" flourished until it was suddenly purged in 1971. But it never really went away completely. Read about the rise and fall of rural comedy from the perspective of its producers at The Bitter Southerner. -via Metafilter

In one way, this is the story of a highly respected physician, Dr. Jim Lee, who treated AIDS patients in the early '80s when other doctors wanted nothing to do with the "gay epidemic." He was a star among his patients, and became well-known in Los Angeles. In another way, this is the story of a unique drug. In 1996, Serostim was approved to treat the wasting away that plagued AIDS patients towards the end of their lives, at a cost of $75,000 a year, although its maker Serono Labs eventually lowered the price somewhat. Serostim is essentially human growth hormone (HGH), which is very popular among body builders and people who believe it may extend their lives, but cannot be prescribed for those conditions.

But for Serono, the timing of the drug’s introduction was inauspicious. Effective combinations of antiretroviral drugs designed to combat AIDS had just been approved, leading to massive decreases in deaths from the virus. Serostim’s “use as an HIV drug was limited by the fact that wasting is a really late-stage manifestation of AIDS,” says Ng, the immunologist. Advances in other therapies soon meant that the symptom Serostim was meant to treat rarely presented.

In response, Serono launched a marketing blitz. In 1997, it trained sales representatives to broadly “redefine AIDS wasting,” developing an unapproved device to measure “body cell mass” so that more HIV patients would qualify for Serostim. In 2001, federal prosecutors filed a suit against Serono on charges of filing false claims, or illegally promoting the sale of a medication. The firm pled guilty to charges related to bringing a group of American doctors on an all-expenses-paid trip to Cannes, France, in exchange for prescribing Serostim. The suit was settled in April 2005; Serono was ordered to pay more than $700 million. Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in Boston, told The New York Times that 85 percent of all Serostim prescriptions were unnecessary.

There were still ways to sell Serostim, even to those who wanted it for off-label purposes, which involved cash-strapped AIDS patients, insurance companies, and Dr. Jim Lee. You can read (or listen to) that story at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting