Scientists in Israel have broken a record by growing mice embryos in an artificial environment for 11 or 12 days. This may not seem like a long time, but it is half the animal's normal gestation period. The embryos were five days old when they were taken from pregnant mice. The breakthrough appears to be a system for forcing oxygen into their cells.

It’s record for development of a mammal outside the womb, and according to the research team, human embryos could be next—raising huge new ethical questions.

“This sets the stage for other species,” says Jacob Hanna, a developmental biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who led the research team. “I hope that it will allow scientists to grow human embryos until week five.”

Growing human embryos in the lab for that long, deep into the first trimester, would put science on a collision course with the abortion debate. Hanna believes lab-grown embryos could be a research substitute for tissue derived from abortions, and possibly a source of tissue for medical treatments as well.

Scientists have already done experiments that involve creating artificial human embryos (called blastoids) by coaxing generic skin or stem cells into forming what looks like an embryo. However, there are international standards and laws in various countries that limit how long scientists can grow human embryos. Read more about this research at MIT Technology Review. -via Damn Interesting

(Unrelated image credit: Pazit Polak)

Christopher Nolan's breakout film Memento came out in 2000, and introduced a generation to the reverse-chronology plot. That's a storytelling method very different from sci-fi time travel tales or the device of inserting flashbacks when appropriate. Reverse-chronology is when you begin a movie in the present, and then go backward to explain what happened. The narrative only makes sense when the beginning of the story is revealed at the end of the movie. It's very hard to pull off, but when it works, it's remarkable. Mel magazine has a list of eight movie and one TV show that use the reverse-chronology format to tell a tale, some better than others, that will intrigue you even as they confuse you. The movies are appropriately listed in chronological order, beginning in 1927. -via Digg

Rina Jones' mother often traveled from Vermont to visit her daughter and Rina's husband Brandon in Baltimore. On every trip, they would eat at Ekiben because Mom loved their tempura broccoli. She jokingly mentioned she wanted to eat it on her deathbed. But then Tina's mom fell ill with cancer, and decided to decline treatment. Rina and Brandon prepared for the six-hour drive to Vermont, and wanted to take something that would make Mom happy.

How on earth could they make that tempura broccoli from Ekiben for her? Surely it would turn soggy on the drive.

Brandon, a 37-year-old engineer, emailed Ekiben’s owners and co-founders, Steve Chu and Ephrem Abebe, hoping they could offer some tips. He added one caveat: He’s not a great cook.

Reading his message, Chu thought to himself: “Well … you’re not cooking this.”

Chu wrote back with an offer. He and Abebe would meet them in Vermont. They would cook it themselves.

And so they did. The restauranteurs made the 12-hour round trip to Vermont and set up their fryers outside in the cold Vermont weather. Read the rest of the story at the Baltimore Sun. -via Fark

The first season of Disney+'s Wandavision is complete. Should you jump on the boat and binge-watch it? Get an idea of what the show is like from Screen Junkies and their Honest Trailer. Be aware that it contains spoilers, but nothing that would deter you from watching. To be perfectly honest, this video is liable to leave you completely confused if you haven't been watching Wandavision.

The world's only successful slave rebellion was the Haitian Revolution, ending in 1804, which led that nation to be the first on earth to abolish slavery. Haiti paid an enormous cost for its independence from France. Immediately after the revolution, there was a power struggle between the new nation's founding fathers: a president, an emperor, and a king.

Here are the key players to know: founding fathers Jean-Jacques Dessalines (who became Emperor Jacques I), Alexandre Pétion (who became President) and General Henry Christophe, (who later became King Henry I). Like all burgeoning nations throughout history, there was a power struggle between the three, and within just a few years of independence, Haiti’s new Emperor, Jacques I, had been assassinated by his own generals. His death led to the country’s temporary partition, with Henry declaring himself King the north and Pétion, leader of the south. And with that, the building of King Henry I’s Haitian Kingdom in the north began…

Six richly adorned châteaux, a massive citadel and eight beautiful palaces were constructed to rival the most opulent structures in old Europe during his short reign between 1811 and 1820. Haiti’s “Sans-Souci Palace”, meaning ‘Carefree’ – was the largest of the palaces commissioned. Its gardens were immense, complete with artificial springs and a system of waterworks. Inside, there was said to be mahogany floors throughout, flowing silk curtains and at the top of the grand staircase, a fountain with a gilded sun inscribed with the motto “Je vois tout, et tout voit par moi dans l’univers” (I see everything, and everything in the universe is seen by me”).

Messy Nessy Chic gives us a look at Sans-Souci Palace, with the short version of Haiti's royal history included.

(Image credit: Iconem)

Antarctica is unique in a lot of ways, like being cold, hard to put on a world map, and fairly uninhabitable. It defies successful colonization for a variety of reasons -even mapping the continent is difficult because every direction is north. In this video, comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones go into the sticky question of continent "ownership," but also the history and geography of Antarctica, in a rather entertaining way.  The video is less than seven minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Laughing Squid

Through most of the 20th century, the Barbizon Hotel in Manhattan was a place where single women, mostly those new to New York City, could live in safety. Historian Paulina Bren has published a book on the history of the Barbizon and its illustrious residents, The Barbizon, The New York Hotel That Set Women Free, for which HBO has already secured the TV rights.   

In the 1920s and 30s the Barbizon advertised its role in protecting young working women from predatory men, the “wolves of New York”, capitalising on the influx of women to Manhattan after the First World War, but after the Great Depression it offered a different kind of sanctuary. “Working women were considered deeply suspect for taking a job away from a ‘real breadwinner’,” explains Bren. “If you were walking around New York and you looked like you were going to work, it could be a pretty hostile environment.” Nevertheless, some persisted. The respectable Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School took over three floors of the hotel for its students, as it filled up with young women “determined to type their way out of small-town America”.

But it was the 1950s, the hotel’s “dollhouse” era, when hundreds of young, aspiring models and actresses found their way to the Barbizon, that Bren most enjoyed exploring. “It was an era when women were supposed to be so prim and proper, but there was a bubbling sexuality,” she says.

Notable Barbizon residents included Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, Jaclyn Smith, Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, and Tippi Hedren. While the hotel opened to men in 1981 and was converted to apartments in 2007, there are five women from the hotel's mid-century heyday still living there. Read an overview of the Barbizon's history at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Dmadeo)

While it's not true that pasta first came to Italy from China with Marco Polo, it did travel across the world due to its portability. It was in Italy that pasta was made into an art form, and there are way more pasta shapes than most Americans have ever heard of. Each of these pasta shapes has a story, although some are old and historically murky and others are recent and well-documented, such as Celentano and cavatappi.   

Cavatappi didn’t arrive on the scene until the 1960s. That’s when the Italian pasta brand Barilla introduced a new tubular, corkscrew-shaped pasta called Cellentani. The name is a reference to Adriano Celentano, an Italian pop singer whose energetic stage presence earned him the nickname moleggiato, or “springs.” Barilla writes on its website: “As the shape resembles a coiled spring, it all made sense.” The name cavatappi was actually coined later as a generic term for the pasta shape because Celentano was trademarked by Barilla.

You are probably already familiar with Adriano Celentano. Read the stories behind 14 other pasta shapes, and a brief history of pasta in general at Mental Floss. While the list will introduce you to new pastas, the origin stories are not totally comprehensive. For example, Wikipedia tells us exactly how Cellentani came about.

This particular shape was born in the 1970s at Barilla in Parma[2] when a set of pasta dies had been mistakenly made with a spiral (instead of straight) set of lines. These produced pasta in a spiral or spring (molla in Italian) shape.

So consider the list at Mental Floss to be a portal that may take you down the internet rabbit hole. That's what happened to me.

(Image credit: Francesco Foglieri)

Covehithe is a village on the coast of Suffolk in the UK. It's been there a thousand years, but is doomed to be completely washed away by the sea somewhere between thirty and eighty years from now. But there are no plans to save the village. Imagine being a landowner there and trying to get insurance! But practically, what you'd really be looking for is a new home. Tom Scott explains, and single-handedly turns Covehithe into a tourist attraction against its will.  

Men became friendly with wolves and began to selectively breed them, leading to domestic dogs that range from Irish wolfhounds to teacup chihuahuas. But cats are still pretty much the same as their wild ancestors, the European forest cat (felis silvestris silvestris) and Southwest Asia/North African wildcat (felis silvestris lybica). Experts believe this is because their association with humans was initiated by the cats themselves. They hung around where humans stored food, because that’s where the mice and rats were. Humans accepted the cats as they were for their pest control services, while wolves needed to be improved in order to safely mingle with people.

A study from 2017 looked at the genetics of over 200 cats, from all five wild subspecies, along with cat remains from stone age Romania, and even Egyptian cat mummies, and found that f. lybica in the Near East in 4,400 BCE, and in North Africa around 1,500 BCE, gave rise to the domestic cat, likely because it was here where the earliest agricultural civilizations occurred.  

Still, cats existed unchanged through thousands of years—essentially until the Middle Ages, before selective breeding, the typical activity of domestication, began to give rise to more unique types of cats.

“I think that there was no need to subject cats to such a selection process since it was not necessary to change them,” said evolutionary geneticist and study coauthor Eva-Maria Geigl to National Geographic. “They were perfect as they were.”

Agree or not, you’ll find out more about the domestication of cats at Good News Network. -via Strange Company

(Image credit:Flickr user Cloudtail the Snow Leopard)

School buses in the United States are almost always yellow with black lines down the side. ClawBoss is a school bus driver who is happy to explain what they are for. This short and to-the-point video ends up being more interesting than it has any right to. -via reddit

It’s hard to see the big picture when you are a small, specialized part of a film. Still, it’s fun to see how surprised actors, producers, and directors can be by a huge success coming from what they considered to be a small film they only worked on for a paycheck. Donald Sutherland didn’t think much of Animal House because he only had a cameo role, but his negotiation for compensation was a big miscalculation.

On the other hand, while DC might have had little hope for a Batman film, Michael Uslan had been working for that chance all his life. You can read his story in a previous post. See the other pictofacts about actors and filmmaker who had little faith in their movies at Cracked.

Filmmakers always have more projects in their heads than will ever make it to theaters. They can be dismissed at any point in the process, meaning some will always be just ideas, while other projects begin production, or otherwise get plenty of publicity before they are eventually scrapped. Afterward, they never have to face the critics, but those projects become part of Hollywood legend. For example, Peter Jackson's movie project based on the game Halo.

After dazzling the world with his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Peter Jackson next sought to oversee the film adaptation of the wildly popular video game series “Halo.” Jackson was executive producing a movie from a script by Alex Garland, who would later find great success in the science-fiction genre with directorial efforts “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation.” Directors came and went from the “Halo” movie, including Guillermo del Toro and Neill Blomkamp, who could have made his feature directorial debut with “Halo.” When the project died, Blomkamp moved on to his breakthrough “District 9.” “Halo” is now in development as a television series for the new streaming service Paramount+.

Or that biopic about Edgar Allen Poe.

Sylvester Stallone has been trying to get a movie about Edgar Allan Poe off the ground for nearly 25 years. As the writer-director-actor once said, “What fascinates me about Poe is that he was such an iconoclast. It’s a story for every young man or woman who sees themselves as a bit outside the box, or has been ostracized during their life as an oddball or too eccentric. It didn’t work for him either…His work was too hip for the room…but he developed the modern mystery story. He was also one of the great cryptologists; there were very few codes he couldn’t crack. He was just an extraordinary guy.”

While Stallone originally wanted to play Poe himself, he later recruited Robert Downey Jr. to star in the title role. “It has [to] be like Downey, I designed it for Downey,” Stallone explained. “Perhaps I could re-work the script. [Maybe] Johnny Depp. It needs a very special actor like that.”

Read about 30 such projects that might've been great or might have been awful, we'll probably never know, at Indiewire. -via Digg

How do we define "life"? It's been tried many times, but there's always an edge case that makes a simple definition fall apart. Viruses can replicate, but not by themselves. Blood cells split and carry out life's functions, but have no DNA. Seeds can be completely dried for hundreds, even thousands of years, and still come back to life when conditions are rights. So can bacteria. Scientists have come up with definitions for life, but those definitions are often for use within their area of expertise, and do not cover all the uses of the word. There have been some who reject the very idea of a definition of life. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden carried out a survey not to define life, but to categorize it into something people can recognize when they see it.  

The Lund researchers found that they could sort things pretty well into the living and the nonliving without getting tied up in an argument over the perfect definition of life. They propose that we can call something alive if it has a number of properties that are associated with being alive. It doesn’t have to have all those properties, nor does it even need exactly the same set found in any other living thing. Family resemblances are enough.

One philosopher has taken a far more radical stand. Carol Cleland argues that there’s no point in searching for a definition of life or even just a convenient stand‐in for one. It’s actually bad for science, she maintains, because it keeps us from reaching a deeper understanding about what it means to be alive. Cleland’s contempt for definitions is so profound that some of her fellow philosophers have taken issue with her. Kelly Smith has called Cleland’s ideas “dangerous.”

So not only is defining life difficult, the very nature of the quest to define it is a matter of contention. Read more about the topic in an excerpt from Carl Zimmer's new book Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, at Quanta magazine.  -via Damn Interesting

It’s time to make your predictions for the men's NCAA basketball tournament! You can get a bracket to fill out here. The tournament bracket is handy for keeping up with games, and for understanding how teams are eliminated along the way. But when did this kind of bracket come about? The first one was organized in the 19th century by chess master Howard Staunton.  

For a chess tournament in 1851, Staunton had 16 players draw lots for random pairings, called brackets because they resembled the punctuation marks of the same name. The eight winners would then draw lots for pairings, and the four winners from that round would do the same, leaving two finalists. The idea, Staunton said, was “to bring the two best players in the Tournament into collision for the chief prize.” The reality, however, fell short: Random drawing after every round led to complaints that some players had easier matches. As a result, chess tournaments shifted to a round-robin format.

Brackets were used again—and have been ever since—for the Wimbledon tennis tournament in 1877, and they found a home in college basketball in 1939, when the National Association of Basketball Coaches had an eight-team tournament. The University of Oregon beat The Ohio State in what is regarded as the first NCAA Tournament.

The science of constructing a tournament bracket has evolved quite a bit. The NCAA ranks teams for seeding to make sure the top teams don’t meet each other in the early rounds, and in most years, there are geographic considerations (but not this year). Read about how the tournament bracket came about and how March Madness took over the country, at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Pete Souza)