Remember the guy who repurposed his deceased cat by making it into a helicopter? This stunt goes much further in making a dead animal into something useful by using the its anatomy in movement! Spiders move their legs by hydraulic pressure- they pump water into them to make them extend, and then flex them with muscles. Spiders do not have opposing muscles in their legs to extend them. Mechanical engineering professor Daniel Preston and graduate student Faye Yap found a dead spider curled up in the lab and decided to do something with it. They found that they could blow air into the spider corpse and make its legs extend. By releasing the air pressure, the spider legs flexed again. It became a rather hardy gripper tool, good for at least a thousand grips, and able to pick up 130% of its weight.

This seems like a neat thing for mechanical engineers to discover, but is there any use for such a tool? The spider-gripper could be used for collecting fragile biological samples, like insects. Read about this research at Gizmodo, and if you're interested, there's also a slideshow that will show you how it's done.

When we are kids, birthdays are wonderful. Your birthday marks a milestone in the steps of growing up. Your family wants to celebrate the milestone, your friends love the parties, and you like a day when the world revolves around you (not to mention the gifts). However, for many people, the date hits differently as an adult. There are several reasons for the birthday blues, including missing how special birthdays were in your childhood. As an adult, you find that people you know often don't remember and sometimes don't care. It's also a time for taking stock of your life so far, which may be disappointing. And you can't help but ponder getting older and inching toward the end of your life. You're not the only person who feels that way when a birthday rolls around, but there are things you can do to make your birthday less depressing. Read about them at Refinery29. Practice these tips and sooner or later, you'll even forget how old you are! -via Digg

The history of food is as rich and long as the history of language or war, as just as consequential as either. Anything that makes food preparation simpler, safer, or more enjoyable is going to eventually become universal. Mental Floss take us on a tour of some culinary inventions that had a profound impact on people all over the world. You would probably guess that the process of baking food is in there, and microwave ovens, but it turns out that the simple hand-cranked can opener was a game changer, because it was invented long after canned food!  

Preservation is a major theme of food history’s biggest breakthroughs. When modern canning was invented in the early 1800s, eating nutritious meals on long journeys or during hard winters became more feasible. But perhaps just as important as canning is the invention that made cans easier to use. Believe it or not, the can opener came nearly five decades after the first metal cans. Before that, people literally had to chisel away at their containers to get dinner.

One has to wonder why they even bothered to pack food in cans when no plan was in place to open them. Read how the can opener made canned food usable, and the origins of nine other inventions at Mental Floss. Or you can listen to the list in a video at the same link.

(Image credit: Hedwig von Ebbel)

Katherine went to the livestock market in Kashgar, China, to see the big butt sheep she'd heard so much about. She found fat-tailed sheep everywhere. Like camels, they carry a deposit of fat in one place because they live in a desert, where it's too hot to have fat dispersed all along the body. In this ancient market, Katherine also found souvenirs, lamb dishes, rice dishes, ice cream, badly-translated t-shirts, and some disdain for Americans.

In the comments under the video, we get a clarification on the "pillows" being sold. They aren't for slapping, but more like an oven mitt used to bake naan without getting burned. -via Digg

Baking soda, or bicarbonate of soda, has multiple uses, like making your cake rise, killing odors in your laundry, alleviating stomach acid pains, or removing rust. Oh yeah, and that grade school volcano. And it has many other uses you might not have ever heard of. Nik Sharma is a molecular biologist who is also a cook. Along with writing recipes, he's got plenty of things to tell us about baking soda, which he believes should be used in the kitchen for a lot more than making cakes rise.

Drink a mixture of baking soda and water, and you can neutralize excess stomach acid. But you'll also belch when it's working. That's the same mechanism that works to make a cake rise. The soda neutralizes an acid, like buttermilk, and produces gas bubbles that lift the cake to lofty deliciousness. But you might not know how soda works on beans and potatoes. And coffee. Learn about those, as well as the history of baking soda, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Willis Lam)

Almost every town has a festival, and its theme is important to drawing tourists. Who wouldn't want to attend a dragon-slaying festival? It happens every August in the town of Furth im Wald, Germany, for more than 400 years now. They re-enact a classical dragon tale, with a huge dragon, once operated by people, although it eventually became mechanical. Now they have an 11-ton remote-control robot dragon! The dragon is named Tradinno, and for a while it held the record for the world's largest robot. Tom Scott gets a look at the dragon ahead of the festival. Want to go? Check out the festival site, which is in German.

The Barbie doll was introduced in 1959. That's a run of 63 years so far, and plenty of time for a massively popular toy to have some ups and downs. Indeed, the doll and her marketing changed with the times, often in misguided ways. The bigger Barbie became, the more opportunities there were for marketing mistakes as the Barbie brand moved into books, movies, and video games. And Barbie embraced new technology, often awkwardly. In 1992, Teen Talk Barbie put her ditziness into words, saying phrases like “Will we ever have enough clothes?” and "Math class is hard!" which sparked quite a backlash.

The Teen Talk Barbie was the last straw for a group of people who called themselves the Barbie Liberation Organization. They bought a bunch of Teen Talk Barbies, swapped their voice boxes with those of talking G.I. Joes that were unfortunately produced at the same time, and put them back on store shelves just in time for Christmas. Around 300 Barbies in at least two states were opened on Christmas morning only to announce “Vengeance is mine!” and “Eat lead, Cobra,” definitely radicalizing at least a few second-graders.

Can you imagine what those dolls are worth on the open market today? Anyway, there are plenty of other missteps in the long history of Barbie dolls that you can read at Cracked.

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有田工、3回裏 8番・山口洸
1球ごとに右打席と左打席を入れ替えるスイッチヒッター！
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— バーチャル高校野球 (@asahi_koshien) July 23, 2022

Baseball has a lot of rules because otherwise there would be chaos. Players do their best to exploit existing rules whenever they can, and flagrantly pushing the envelope will eventually lead to new rules. Observe Japanese high school batter Ko Yamaguchi playing in their national tournament. He makes no effort to swing at the ball, but does everything possible to draw a pitching violation. He crouches to shrink the strike zone, he moves back and forth to destabilize the zone, and he changes hands for each pitch. Yamaguchi eventually gets on base by being hit by pitch, which we suspect was his goal all along. You have to wonder what his batting average is. These shenanigans led sportswriter Larry Brown to dub Yamaguchi "the most annoying batter of all time." If someone else can beat this performance, I'd like to see it. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Charles Davis Photography)

The subreddit Confusing Perspectives collects images that are accidental illusions. Most are just everyday snapshots that make your brain think something really weird is happening. No, it's a matter of matching colors, strange angles, or something going on behind the subject you don't know about. The picture above looks like a nice normal tree until you are told that the tree is dead and there are no leaves on it. Those are all Australian budgerigars, which the British call budgies and Americans call parakeets. They are having a meetup. At least they are actually sitting in the tree, while this cat is levitating.   

(Image credit: Flamind666)

You'll find 50 pictures that are photographic illusions at Bored Panda. Make that 49 accidental illusions and one at the very bottom that is a real deliberate illusion.

We've laughed at retro posts examining the "exercise machines" of the early and mid-20th century, that required no effort at all and were essentially massages that promised to work your body for you. It's no surprise that people are drawn to the promise of effortless fitness But the first exercise machines weren't that at all.

Swedish physician Dr. Gustav Zander put his theories of muscle strength into practice in 1864 with his own exercise machines. They were designed to work individual muscles with weights and pulleys that could be adjusted for each patient, beginning with light resistance and were changed as the user grew stronger. That's pretty much the idea behind the machines at gyms today. The image above may look like an overly engineered effortless machine, but the woman is there to strengthen her back and core muscles by pulling against the weight. Zander did build some machines that were essentially massage devices, but they were specifically for paralyzed patients to fight muscle atrophy.

Zander opened a gym with his machines in 1865 in Stockholm, and his machinery became a sensation. Sadly, his machines were superseded by gym equipment that required less effort after his death in the 1920s, but they became a sensation again during the fitness craze of the late 20th century. Still, Zander's machines look quite odd to the modern eye because they were not photographed with the debilitated physical therapy patients they were designed for, but rather models in Victorian dress. See a gallery of Zander's exercise machines at Amusing Planet.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is a bestselling children's book that is supposed to be soothing for young children, but some parents found themselves a little creeped out when reading it to them. This version may put those parents over the edge. Joris Bax used the text-to-image artificial intelligence program Midjourney to generate illustrations for the book. He used Lightroom and After Effects to process the images. The collection was so creepy he had to use a voice changer and a creepy soundtrack behind them. The result is a real nightmare that no child should have to endure, especially right before turning the lights out. -via reddit

San Diego Comic Con is in full swing this weekend, and that means lots of celebrity appearances, panels, many new trailers released, and news. We've long known that Marvel Studioos plans its movies years, sometimes decades, in advance. The stories would be impossible to keep up otherwise. The movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will be the final film of the current Phase Four of the MCU later this year. Thanks to covid, almost all of Phase Four was delayed, and therefore later movies were also delayed.

Today, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige announced the schedule of movies and television shows for Phase Five. Six new Marvel TV series now have dates, all to be shown on Disney+. The movies for 2023 include Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Blade. Captain America: New World Order and Thunderbolts will be in theaters in 2024. Read the complete list of the new announcements, previously scheduled upcoming Marvel movies and shows, and projects that still don't have an announced date at Gizmodo.

Update: Sunday they had some announcements about Phase Six.

The same guys behing the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards launched another competition in 2020 featuring pets! The entries in this year's Pet Comedy Photography Awards are in, and the finalists have been selected for 2022. Click to the right on the image above to see more of them. The categories are cat, dog, horse, all other creatures, pets who look like their owners or a celebrity, and the junior photographer category. In addition, they have a video competition. The finalist below, featuring Rosie, was photographed by Sarah Fiona Helme.



See all 26 finalists in a gallery here. You can vote on these finalists for the People's Choice Award, which also gets you entered into a sweepstakes drawing. Maybe your vote is what Rosie is begging for! The winners of the Pet Comedy Photography Awards will be announced on September 14. You can see more comedic pets in the other entries at Instagram.  -via Bored Panda 

Believe it or not, there's a word for the smell of the outdoors after a rain. It's called petrichor, and perfumers have managed to find a combination of chemicals to recreate it in a bottle, including the earthy-smelling geosmin. The smell after a rain is very familiar to all people, and usually quite pleasant because we know what it means. The taste of pure rain is like nothing, and please don't drink it after it has run down your roof or through the gutters. The smell we recognize as fresh rain (petrichor) requires a world of nature, but the actual components taste terrible. The earth is full of things we don't want to eat, like soil, leaves, and tons of bacteria. The smell of rain is good to us because of its implication. Adam Ragusea explains all of this in detail in this video. There's an ad from 3:30 to 4:30. -via Laughing Squid

Forensic science wasn't all that advanced in 1896 when a young woman's body was retrieved from the Miami River in Dayton, Ohio. Refrigeration wasn't a thing, either, so the unidentified body was assumed to be a suicide and quickly buried. However, Bessie Little was eventually buried three times as Police Chief Thomas Farrell tried to ascertain the cause of death as her family secrets came out.

Bessie was a domestic servant who fell for the wealthy young Albert Frantz. She was thrown out of her parents' home over the relationship. Albert was engaged to another woman, but it was thought that Bessie was either pregnant or had undergone an abortion, because of a visit to a doctor shortly before her death. Did Albert murder her? He insisted it must have been a suicide, but his story later changed to him witnessing her suicide. But after Bessie was disinterred the second time, her head was cut off to preserve evidence. The trial hinged on the question of whether someone could shoot themselves in the head twice.

Read the story of the gruesome investigation into a sad but everyday story of love gone deadly at Murder by Gaslight.  -via Strange Company