CGP Grey begins by talking about A4 metric paper (which is pretty neat) and then quickly spirals out of control into la-la land. This video becomes a bit like an infinite zoom until we meet “quantum madness at the very floor of the universe.” Then it goes in the opposite direction. Grey is talking about the magic of halving and doubling. It makes sense, but it’s existentially (and exponentially) weird. -via Metafilter

A new LEGO Master Builders Series set recreates the cantina from the original Star Wars movie! The wretched hive of scum and villainy comes in a 3,187 piece kit that includes 21 minifigs you’ll recall from the classic Star Wars scene -including the band. The finished building opens up to expose the interior, and the roof is removable.

There are two downsides: you have to build it yourself from more than 3,000 pieces (which is the point, I guess), and the least expensive one is $475. However, if you are willing to spend that much on a Star Wars fan you love, at least you’ll know that they don’t already have this one. -via Boing Boing

We’ve seen lists of weird or badly-designed stairs, so you may have seen some of these before. However, the real fun in seeing illogical staircases is trying to figure out how they got that way. Often, it’s a matter of a renovation that didn’t quite fit, or adding a handrail after the fact. But what was going on in the minds of the folks who built the extra stairs above? And the list has more than one example of Soviet staircases that look as if they were designed by MC Escher.

They go up, they go down, and then they go up again. Not exactly the model of efficiency. See 45 examples of stairs that turned out bad, no matter what the original intent was, at Bored Panda.

Human beings almost always have a dominant side, a preference for using one hand over the other, which we call handedness. No other animal, even apes, prefers a consistent hand as much us humans do, and it turns out that started way back in our lineage. This video from PBS Eons shows how scientists figured that out, and offers some theories of why it happened. The video is only 8:30, the rest is an ad. -via Damn Interesting

Dasia Taylor is only 17, but she is not only a finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, she may soon own a patent for color-changing sutures she has developed over the past year and a half.

As any science fair veteran knows, at the core of a successful project is a problem in need of solving. Taylor had read about sutures coated with a conductive material that can sense the status of a wound by changes in electrical resistance, and relay that information to the smartphones or computers of patients and doctors. While these “smart” sutures could help in the United States, the expensive tool might be less applicable to people in developing countries, where internet access and mobile technology is sometimes lacking. And yet the need is there; on average, 11 percent of surgical wounds develop an infection in low- and middle-incoming countries, according to the World Health Organization, compared to between 2 and 4 percent of surgeries in the U.S.

Sutures that detect infection would need to be low-tech to be useful in developing countries, so Taylor went to work looking for an infection indicator anyone could read. Read how she developed surgical stitches that turn purple when an incision is infected at Smithsonian.

Where a highway goes down a mountain, you'll see emergency ramps for trucks with brake failure -which happens more often than you think. There are plenty of these in my neck of the woods, but they aren't nearly as fancy and well-maintained as this one in Brazil. Check out that crane! -via reddit

You could spend years studying Martin Luther and the effect he had upon the Christian world, or you could spend four and a half minutes watching this animated short, which only hits the highlights. The character drawings are delightful! -via Boing Boing

A global war can make for strange bedfellows. Such was the case when the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) needed eyes and ears to find out what was going on with East Coast shipping and Axis movements on the sea.

Just months after entering World War II, the U.S. Navy was already feeling vulnerable. Enemy submarines were picking off vessels along the East Coast with alarming ease, and many believed that German saboteurs had set the massive fire that sank a French ocean liner, the SS Normandie, that was being converted into a warship in the Hudson River on February 9, 1942. The ONI suspected that longshoremen must be ferrying supplies to Axis watercraft stationed in the Atlantic, and they were desperate to root them out. Not only did the Mafia pretty much run the docks, but they were also Italian—and therefore more likely to know which Italians might sympathize with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

So the military enlisted New York mobsters and some who were Mafia-adjacent to find out what they could in an operation called Operation Underworld. Their participation was approved by Lucky Luciano (shown above) from prison, where he was serving a 30-50 year sentence. The plan was kept secret from the public for more than twenty years, but you can read about it at Mental Floss.

You know how Pokémons go through a three-stage evolution? You have the initial form, which is like a baby, then the adult form, and then the final form, which can be frightening. Digital artist Ry-Spirit imagined Star Wars characters going through that evolution. The form we are familiar with from the movies is in the middle. The "baby" forms are fairly cute, and follows the kind of thing we've seen with Muppet Babies and Young Sheldon. The final form is pure invention, but always badass.    

See 13 Star Wars characters and their Pokémon-style evolution at Geeks Are Sexy. 

These creations were compiled from Ry-Spirit's Art Facebook feed. You can see more of Ry-Spirits creations at Deviant Art.

Our World in Data compiled a chart showing who we spent our time with at different stages of our lives. Altogether, we spend more time alone than with anyone else. And as we grow older, we tend to spend more and more time alone. But that doesn't mean we are necessarily lonely.

Spending time alone is not the same as feeling lonely. This is a point that is well recognised by researchers, and one which has been confirmed empirically across countries. Surveys that ask people about living arrangements, time use, and feelings of loneliness find that solitude, by itself, is not a good predictor of loneliness.

The chart is interactive at the site, so you can look up any age and see who Americans are spending their time with.  -via Digg

This may look like a facade left over from a demolished building, but no, it was built to look that way. This is the Grudge Building ("al-Ba`sa" in Arabic), the thinnest house in Beirut, Lebanon. The end you see here is only two feet wide, but the other end is 14 feet wide, which you can see in the third picture in the gallery above. Still a very small footprint for a four-story building.

According to a Lebanese urban myth, one man turned sibling pettiness into an extreme sport when he erected the country's thinnest habitable building in front of his brother's property. His intentions were simple: to block his brother's seafront views and devalue the property.

The root of the feud is said to be one brother inheriting a much bigger piece of property than the other. Or that the brother with the property in front lost some area when the road was widened. Either way, we don't know how much truth there is to the tale. No one lives there now, but it does have a history of tenants in its eight apartments. Read more about the Grudge Building at Insider. -via reddit

Speedriding or speed riding is paragliding on skis. We can assume the point is to go as fast as you can. In this video, French speedrider Valentin Delluc shows what he can do while speeding through Avoriaz, a resort town in the French Alps. The resort was closed at the time, so the only one in danger is Delluc himself -and the film crew. Of course, it was Red Bull that talked him into it, as if you couldn't tell by the product placement. The run is only two minutes, then there are making-of clips and outtakes. -via Geekologie

Anything that can be created can become an art medium. That includes microbes in a petri dish. And therefore, since people will make a competition out of anything, we have the American Society for Microbiology Agar Art Contest. Scientists take a dish of agar, a nutritious gel made from seaweed, and add invisible germs of different types to just the right spot. When the microbes divide and proliferate, a colorful scene is formed -if the artist knows what they are doing.

Despite its growing popularity over the past five years, microbial art isn't a recent fad. Alexander Fleming, who discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin on an agar plate in 1928, created images using live organisms. Yet, this genre of scientific art didn’t gather much attention from researchers until the last decade, when the American Society of Microbiology brought agar art into the spotlight in 2015 with an annual contest.

Learn how agar art is done, and see more works from the contest, at Smithsonian.

People understood hot and cold a long time before we had what we call temperature, which is the way we measure heat. While other scientists had tinkered with the idea of measuring temperature, it was not until 1714 that Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit gave us a practical and fairly accurate thermometer.

Fahrenheit had based his invention on Danish scientist Ole Roemer's alcohol-based thermometer. Roemer labeled his temperature scale with zero marked at the temperature where brine (salt water) froze and 60 as the point at which water boiled, wrote Ulrich Grigull, the late director of the Institute for Thermodynamics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, in a 1986 conference presentation. Ice melted at 7.5 degrees on the Roemer scale, and a human body registered at 22.5.

Fahrenheit's thermometer, though, was much more accurate. He used the same freezing and boiling reference points as Roemer's scale — referred to in his writings as "Extream Cold" and "Extream Hott" — but roughly multiplied the scale by four to divide each marker on the scale into finer increments. On Fahrenheit's scale, wrote Grigull, the four reference points were: 0 (at the combined freezing temperature of brine), 30 (the freezing point of regular water), 90 (body temperature) and 240 (the boiling point of water).

These points were recalibrated after Fahrenheit's death. But there was room for improvement, so Anders Celsius made a temperature scale that was more math-friendly and Lord Kelvin made another that expanded the scale for scientific use. An article at LiveScience explains how the concept of temperature evolved and how we got our scales. The question of which measurement scale is best still depends on where you are and exactly what you are measuring. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user barbbarbbarb)

In the late 19th century, there was a slew of unexplained maladies among people who were involved in train accidents. After a series of crashes in Britain in 1867, so many victims came forward that the syndrome was dubbed "railway spine." While spinal difficulties were prominent, the effects were varied, from anxiety to hearing loss to paralysis, and some even died. But doctors could find no injury or source for those symptoms.

The problem was, there was no way to really verify these claims, since medical science at the time was limited largely to what doctors could see. And they couldn’t see anything wrong with these victims—there was no obvious spinal injury, and traditional concussion symptoms were known to disappear after a while. But these people were reporting injuries for years.

The railroads called bullshit. They said these people were just malingerers who wanted money. John Eric Erichsen coined the term and wrote a whole book about these people. The craziest part was, some of the folks complaining of physical or mental problems were witnesses. They hadn’t even been in the crash.

Railway spine remained a mystery to those who suffered from it and their doctors, but we have an explanation in the present. Read what we know now at Jalopnik.  -via Damn Interesting