The Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus), which died out about 8,000 years ago, sported the largest antlers of any animal ever. Their antlers could be as big as 12 feet across- and they regrew those antlers every year! Males of the species were about the size of an Alaskan moose, while females were somewhat smaller and did not grow antlers.  

As a name, Irish elk is a double misnomer. The animal thrived in Ireland but was not exclusively Irish, ranging across Europe to western Siberia for some 400,000 years during the Pleistocene. Nor was it an elk; it was a giant deer, with no relation to the European elk (Alces alces) or North American elk (Cervus canadensis). The evolution of its most striking feature was driven by sexual selection; no survival advantages derived from such enormous antlers. “It was all about impressing the females,” says Adrian Lister, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London, England, and a leading expert on the species.

The prevailing theory for some time was that those antlers eventually grew to be so big that they disabled the animal, but scientists now have better ideas as to why the Irish elk went extinct. Read what we've learned about the Irish elk at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Smithsonian Institution)

I saw the term "alien zombies" in the title and thought it weird. In a fictional story, there is no need to make aliens into zombies because aliens can be as weird and dangerous as the plot needs them to be without bring the zombie trope into it. But then I read the article, which has a lot of examples of space zombies, many that I've seen. In TV, it's a way of introducing a new concept into a series that already takes place in space. In standalone films, it's a way of explaining how zombies happen: a novel microbe infection from space. But there are practical reasons, too.   

The appeal of putting a zombie in a spaceship for a TV show is easy to see. Zombies are a cool and instantly recognisable monster. Spaceships are a cool and instantly recognisable setting. What’s more, while your production values may vary, zombies on a spaceship is a pretty damn cheap concept to realise on screen. Zombies are just however many extras you can afford with some gory make-up. All you need for a spaceship is some suitably set-dressed corridors and maybe a couple of exterior model shots if you’re feeling swish.

And as with the zombie apocalypse genre as a whole, the audience instantly and instinctively understands “the rules” of a zombie story, allowing you to focus on your characters and the solutions they come up with.

However, there are problems with making a classic zombie movie work in space. Den of Geek takes a look at the concept, how it's been done before, and how it clashes with our expectations of a zombie story.  -via Digg

So, we ordered 51 trays of plants to install on our shed's new green roof.

We just got a phone call from the company.

They are delivering 510 square meters.

— Molly Quell (@MollyQuell) May 18, 2021

In the Netherlands, it's not unusual to build a garden on one's roof. Ready to install a green roof, Molly Quell ordered some plants, and a load of gravel to provide it with drainage. The delivery was more like a truckload -a BIG truck that couldn't make it all the way to their house. This was all Onno's fault.

Breaking News: Onno doesn't work for the company who we purchased the green roof from. Onno works for their distributor.

No one likes Onno.

— Molly Quell (@MollyQuell) May 18, 2021

Well, the plants were a screwup, but the gravel they wanted was behind the plants on the truck, so they had to be unloaded. The story gets even funnier from there, with quite a bit of swearing in Dutch. You can read the whole story at Twitter or at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

Have you ever wondered why the French word "souvenir" was adopted into English? It came home with soldiers returning from World War I, and often referred to trench art. See, while soldiers in the Great War faced harrowing danger and deprivation, they also did a lot of waiting. Some of them filled their downtime, in which no entertainment was possible, fashioning useful and/or beautiful items from spent artillery shells and other battlefield scrap. You can imagine these items became highly collectible in the years afterward.

From the winter of 1914 to the spring of 1918, millions of Allied and Central Powers soldiers hunkered down within an estimated 35,000 miles of zigzagging trenches, from the Belgian city of Nieuwpoort on the North Sea to “Kilometre Zero” at the Alsatian-Swiss border. When these soldiers weren’t being exposed to mustard gas, sent into suicidal battles in the deadly no-man’s land between the opposing front lines, or struggling with the dysentery, typhoid fever, lice, trench mouth, and trench foot that were endemic to life in the trenches, they made art. Naturally, the vases, ashtrays, and other decorative objects they fashioned from spent brass artillery shells and other detritus of war were dubbed trench art.

It’s an inspiring story—we love it when the human spirit triumphs in the face of adversity—but if you’re picturing doughty doughboys painstakingly tapping out intricate designs on empty artillery shells while bullets whistle overhead, your imagination has gotten the better of you. In fact, only a fraction of the trench art produced during what was then called the Great War and what we now know as World War I was made by soldiers in the trenches, and of that fraction, the first wave of Great War trench art was mostly the handiwork of infantrymen who wore the uniforms of France and Belgium rather than the U.S. of A.

Scott Vezeau, antique dealer and trench art expert, explains the history of trench art and
how it was made. He also gives us the ins and outs of identifying and collecting trench art and "trench art style" items at Collectors Weekly.

Websites are always asking you to agree to their terms and conditions, which usually means agreeing to let the site collect data from you and sell it. Of course, all that is buried in the small print that may take all day to read, so many websites just plain ask you to agree now or go away. Or sign up for their newsletter. Or agree to various things as a default, if you don't actively opt out. The tricks some websites use to get your agreement can be pretty sneaky. Jonathan Plackett created a game out of those tricks, called Terms & Conditions Apply. Can you get through all 29 pop-up windows without accepting terms and conditions, cookies, or notifications? Yeah, some are easy, while others can be maddening. Try the game and let us know how you did. Difficulty: there are time limits on at least some of them. I did not do as well as I'd hoped, but it was fun trying. -via Metafilter

Seventy-four years ago, Lois Lew showed the world how to use the first electric Chinese typewriter. Here’s her remarkable story. https://t.co/0NELmCI5yP

— Fast Company (@FastCompany) May 17, 2021

In the 1940s, Kao Chung-chin invented a typewriter that would produce 5,400 Chinese characters, plus letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks. To use the machine, the typist had to depress four of the 36 keys at once, which meant memorizing four-digit codes for the needed characters. IBM manufactured the machine, which was demonstrated in a 1947 film. The young woman who typed on the machine made it look easy. How did she do it? And who was she, anyway? Tom Mullaney spent years trying to find her, and after he did, spent years getting an interview. Lois Lew is now 95 years old, and has a fascinating story. She arrived in the US for an arranged marriage as an undereducated 16-year-old. Read the story of how Lew became the star of IBM's campaign to sell the Chinese typewriter at Fast Company. -via Damn Interesting

the explanation for why he-man has a tiger is one of the funniest things i've ever seen in my life and i have to share the whole clip pic.twitter.com/1pgtQglG0M

— Bobby Schroeder (@ponettplus) May 21, 2019

The Netflix series The Toys That Made Us looked into the origins of He-Man and She-Ra, and found that, like many cartoons of the era, the two TV series were conceived solely to sell action figures. The clip above (which contains NSFW language) explains why He-Man had a gigantic tiger for a sidekick. While the relative size of the tiger varied in the TV series (Cringer the pet was half the size of the transformed Battle Cat), it was huge in the toy line. We can assume that the reason the cat was green was to signify that it was a different species and could not be compared with a normal, everyday tiger. -via Boing Boing

Muriel Howorth founded the Atomic Gardening Society in 1959. Years before that in 1950, the atomic energy enthusiast staged a ballet/pantomime production based on atoms. A review from Time magazine said,  

Last week in Aldwych's Waldorf Hotel, Mrs. Howorth's high-minded Atomic Energy Association of Great Britain (membership: 300) celebrated its second anniversary with an atomic pantomime called Isotopia.

Before a select audience of 250 rapt ladies and a dozen faintly bored gentlemen, some 13 bosomy A.E. Associates in flowing evening gowns gyrated gracefully about a stage in earnest imitation of atomic forces at work. An ample electron in black lace wound her way around two matrons labeled "proton" and "neutron" while an elderly ginger-haired Geiger counter clicked out their radioactive effect on a pretty girl named Agriculture. At a climactic moment, a Mrs. Monica Davial raced across the stage in spirited representation of a rat eating radioactive cheese.

You can read the script for the show at Atomic Gardens. If the idea of combining dance and science sounds familiar to you, it’s because people still do it. The winners of the annual Dance Your Ph.D. competition were announced just a few weeks ago.

(Image credit: Jacobo37)

Tom Scott titled his latest video “I promise this story about microwaves is interesting.” But I went ahead and took a shortcut with a spoiler title. However, those hamsters are only one of the many interesting things you’ll learn about microwaves in just a few minutes. -via reddit

You are, no doubt, familiar with kamikaze, the Japanese pilots who flew explosive-laden planes directly into Allied warships in World War II. The suicide missions came about because the Japanese military was fairly desperate by 1944. But they weren’t limited to aircraft. Kamikaze missions also used trucks, motorboats, submarines, and even pedestrians. But the weirdest were the Fukuryu, or kamikaze frogmen.

The Fukuryu, or “crouching dragons,” were first conceived in late 1944 by Captain Kiichi Shintani at the Yokosuka Naval Base Anti-submarine School. With an American invasion expected within a year, Shintani feared that the Navy’s plan to use suicide torpedoes and motor boats to sink incoming landing craft would be inadequate given the critically low supply of men and materials needed to construct such craft. Instead, he proposed using an army of divers who would live underwater for weeks at the expected landing sites and emerge at night to attack incoming ships directly. While the Japanese Navy had used surface swimmers or Kaiyu to attack ships around the island of Peleliu, Shintani’s scheme would require far more sophisticated equipment and tactics. But as with the aerial Kamikaze, the doctrine of “one man – one ship” proved extremely attractive to the Japanese High Command, and in November 1944 feasibility studies and training began at Yokoska and Kawatana under the direction of Lieutenant Masayuki Sasano.

The Fukuryu were equipped with a specialized diving suit made of rubberized canvas with a steel helmet and a simple rebreather system. 3.5 litres of oxygen were stored in two tanks on the diver’s back, the carbon dioxide from their breath being scrubbed out by a canister of Sodium Hydroxide. With 9 kg of lead for ballast, the suit allowed a diver to walk along the ocean floor at a depth of around 5-7 metres for up to 8 hours, a special liquid food even being developed to sustain them underwater. In the lead-up to an invasion the Fukuryu would live in special underwater bunkers from which they could emerge undetected to attack enemy ships.

The reasons we never heard much about the Fukuryu are the same reasons that the Japanese military was desperate by 1944. Read about the suicide divers at Today I Found Out.

Could there be a better place to hide a gun, or should we say, disguise a gun, than inside a Bible? This 17th-century gun was embedded in a Bible, carved in a way that the holder could discharge the weapon without opening the book!

In his book, Venise, L’hiver Et L’ete, De Pres Et De Loin, Lorenzo Cittone talks about this incredible gun-book: “I’ve found in a display case (of the Correr museum, in Venice), Morosini’s prayers book that I used to love so much as a kid. This wonderful book, apart from a few prayers, contains a buttless gun. The binding, of course, is gorgeous. And once the book closed, it is impossible to make the gun out.”

Francesco Morosini (February 26, 1619 – January 16, 1694) was the Doge of Venice from 1688 to 1694, at the height of the Great Turkish War. He was a member of a famous noble Venetian family (the Morosini family) which produced several Doges and generals. He “dressed always in red from top to toe and never went into action without his cat beside him.”

Sounds like an interesting fellow. Read about Morosini and see more pictures of his gun-Bible at Vintage Everyday. -via Strange Company

A talented Finnish cat named Nipa climbs the stairs on his human's feet. Neat, but if you were to train a cat to do a trick, why this one? It turns out that Nipa knows a lot of tricks, which you can see at his Instagram gallery. -via Laughing Squid

This is what happens when a whale gets too close to a propeller-driven ship. A humpback whale known as Bladerunner is believed to have had a close encounter with a large propeller in 2001. She has deep scars along her left side and on the right wing of her tail fluke.  

Rosalind Butt, who owned a whale watching business in the New South Wales town of Eden, saw Bladerunner twice in her 30 years in the business.

"The first was in 2008, my husband was the first one to comment on it," Ms Butt said.

"It looks like a zebra, it has got stripes on it.

"As we got closer, we saw it was very badly cut, it must have been a huge ship that struck her."

Ms Butt saw Bladerunner again in 2013, with a calf.

"She’s probably one of the most unique animals I've seen," she said.

Read about Bladerunner, and the danger that ship's propellers pose for whales at ABC News Australia. -via reddit

(Image credit: Rosalind Butt)

Attention, Friends fans! LEGO is offering a new build set that recreates the two main apartments in the TV series Friends. The 2048-piece set will allow you to reconstruct the most telegenic parts of Chandler and Joey’s apartment, Rachel and Monica’s apartment, and a tiny hallway between them just perfect for eating cheesecake. The set includes seven minifigs (all six Friends plus Chandler’s ex-girlfriend Janice), and all kinds of memorable props like a foosball table, a duck, a canoe, turkeys that fit on heads, a ruined cheesecake, and a cat that may or may not be smelly.    



The set will be released on June first, and will retail for $150. Central Perk sold separately. -via Mental Floss

In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius in Italy erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In the 1980s, 300 skeletons were excavated from the ash, rock, and lava. They were identified as soldiers, and later placed on exhibit. In 2017, new research began that has now determined that one of the soldiers was a high-ranking Roman officer who was sent to Herculaneum to help rescue the victims of the eruption.

The rescue mission to Herculaneum and Pompeii is one of the most well-documented events of the period. It was led by Pliny the Elder, a historian and Roman naval officer who also died in the mission, and described by witness accounts collected in notes left by his nephew, Pliny the Younger.

A letter from Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus described the scene: "The ash already falling became hotter and thicker as the ships approached the coast and it was soon superseded by pumice and blackened burnt stones shattered by the fire.

"Suddenly the sea shallowed where the shore was obstructed and choked by debris from the mountain."

So how did archaeologists come to the conclusion that this one officer was there to rescue Herculaneum? The clues that led to the identification are explained at NBC.  -via Strange Company