It's a special kind of heartbreak when you come up with a great idea for a story, incubate it in your mind, write it down, polish it, and convince yourself it's worthy of a Hollywood movie, then ...you see a trailer for that movie. This isn't about plagiarism, but about convergent ideas. You can't sue for plagiarism if you've never pitched the script or published the story. Often it's not the exact story, but close enough so that you can give up on the idea of a movie being produced, at least anytime soon. Just ask Liz Smith, who in 1997 imagined a story about a rich young man who falls involve with a poor woman while both are traveling on the Titanic. Inverse has the stories of five screenwriters who were crestfallen when they found out their stories had been beaten to the punch, and how they coped with the disappointment afterward. -via Digg
 

NASA’s Psyche mission is scheduled to launch on August of 2022 and head toward a 140-mile wide asteroid named 16 Psyche. It lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists are interested in the asteroid because they believe it may be a planetesimal, which resembles the earth underneath its mantle and crust. We could learn about how our planet formed. But the asteroid is interesting for something else.

Asteroid 16 Psyche reflects light in a way that lead scientists to believe it is made of metal, or at least contains a lot of iron, nickel, and gold. The resources on the asteroid could be worth as much as $10 quintillion! And now you're thinking of the movies Armageddon, Avatar, Prospect, or Alien, in which earth's biggest corporations send crews to other planets to extract their natural resources. While that may be a long way off, 16 Psyche has captured NASA's imagination for many reasons, which you can read about at Smithsonian. -via Fark

(Image credit: NASA)

Look at this rat. Look at this marvelous rat. Reorganize your brain around this image of a rat.

Claire McFadden brings us a song that you think maybe is trying to teach us something or make a point, but eventually you come to realize, no, it's some kind of art. Or maybe it's just one of those weird things that make the internet an interesting place to be. It gets funnier as it goes along. Contains one NSFW word. (via Metafilter)

The Bosphorus, also known as the Strait of Istanbul, is a waterway that cuts through Istanbul, Turkey, connects the the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, and separates Europe from Asia. That's a lot to ask of a small strait. It forms a historically important trade route for international navigation. But it's not a river. At least, not all of it is. The water flows both north and south, depending on the depth.

...in modern times, local boatmen know that the surface current flows south into the Sea of Marmara and thence into the Aegean/Mediterranean.  If they want to take a boat north, they can lower a bucket of rocks on a long rope to the bottom, where the northward current of seawater is located; it will carry the bucket north and thus tow their boat on the surface.

There's a scientific explanation at Wikipedia. Read how a horrific event in history took advantage of this weird flow at TYWKIWDBI.

(Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

The song "Creep" by Radiohead is a classic, but as far as I know, it's never been done honky-tonk style. The YouTuber we know and love, There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), has fixed that with a performance by Tommy Yorke and the Radiohead Boys. While the cognitive dissonance might make you laugh, the music is actually quite good. And the best part is the video editing. You may or may not recognize the background singers, but the lip-synching is astonishing; it must have been a lot of work. Don't miss special appearance by Conway Twitty, Loretta Lyn, Buck Owens, Dolly Parton, and some stars that don't sing. Go ahead and listen to it, the F-bomb is censored. -via reddit

Most of the industrial spills we hear about are dangerous because of traffic disruptions or the toxic nature of what was spilled. While floods are dangerous, industrial accidents rarely have enough liquid to drown anyone. But the London beer flood of 1814 not only drowned people, the biggest danger was the sheer explosiveness of the brewery's failure.

The Horse Shoe Brewery was one of London's biggest. It participated in a game of one-upmanship to see who could boast the largest beer fermentation vats. These ever-bigger vats were made of wood held together by iron hoops. The Horse Shoe Brewery's biggest vat held 18,000 barrels of beer. When it suddenly failed on October 17, the force was great enough to wreck the vats beside it. Combined, they sent 323,000 imperial gallons of beer surging, with enough force to break through the brewery's brick wall and into the neighborhood. Eight women and children were killed by the ghastly accident. Read an account of the beer flood at Amusing Planet.

Some cultures tend to celebrate military victories, weddings, holidays, sports victories, and/or random events by firing guns into the air. This includes the United States. These events can be extremely dangerous just because firearms are present, and even more so when the participants are already inebriated, but when someone is just firing towards the sky, what's the harm? As physicists will tell you, what goes up must comes down, even though they weren't all that sure ablout it when firarms were first developed. Those bullets will have to come down somewhere, and it's almost impossible to determine where that will be ahead of time. Debunked explains the physics of shooting into the air and the consequences of falling bullets. The ad in the middle is about 1:15 long, and can be fast-forwarded.  -via Digg

You might have noticed that there are fewer diet sodas in stores. This is not a supply chain issue (at least not in most places) but a production decision. While manufacturers are making and selling less diet soda, they are producing more "zero sugar" sodas. What's the difference? Mainly the words.

The word "diet" technically only means what one consumes, but consumers are used to "diet" meaning fewer calories so that you can lose weight. It has a connotation of a poor self-image and a regimen of deprivation. Who wants that? Younger consumers (i.e. Millennials) prefer to "eat healthier" instead of going on a diet. Less sugar is a draw for them, even if the same artificial sweeteners are used.

So is there a difference between "diet" sodas and "zero sugar" sodas? The ingredients may vary slightly, and some people consider zero sugar brands to more closely resemble the original sugary soda. The actual difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero is explained here. Read about the shift in consumer preferences and the labels that cater to them at All Recipes. -via Digg

(Image credit: Ben Schumin)

Modern hospitals are designed to use the latest technology and systems for providing top-notch health care efficiently to as many people as possible. In the US, those systems assume short stays and unlimited resources. Those assumptions do not always translate well to other parts of the world. The country of Rwanda has been busy growing and modernizing since the genocidal war of 1994, and in 2008 was ready to build new hospitals. However, existing hospitals built with Western architectural designs were not working, and a new approach was needed.

Many hospital patients in Rwanda battle tuberculosis and other highly communicable diseases. They were spreading antibiotic-resistant microbes to each other while waiting to be seen. Ventilation systems used in Western hospitals were prone to breaking down, repairs are hard to come by, and they were often disabled to save power costs. Another problem was isolated inpatients in closed rooms with few staff members and even fewer monitoring devices.

To tackle these problems, architect Michael Murphy looked back in time, to Florence Nightingale's writings on how hospitals should work. He incorporated many of her ideas into the design of a new hospital in Butaro, which is now being copied across the country. Read how hospital design can be adapted for local conditions at Fast Company.

Recycling is good, but re-using items instead of manufacturing new things is even better for the environment. Mannequins are made of fiberglass, which won't decompose and is notoriously difficult to recycle. Roz Edwards sort of fell into the business of putting mannequins back into use in one way or another. The ones that are useable are refurbished and sold or rented. Others go into a mountain of fake body parts where people can take as much as they can in 15 minutes for £75. They not only go back to the fashion industry, but are used in movies and music videos, art projects, and holiday decorations. Oh yeah, and then there are those folks who put one in their car to discourage dangerous people from approaching (which is good) and to use the carpool lane (which is bad). Even totally ruined mannequins are good for a scary Halloween tour! It's creepy and crazy, but Edwards' project Mannakin has turned out to be a viable business. Tom Scott shows us how the weirdness works.

Just look what you can do with an oscillating fan and some household junk! Well, maybe not you, exactly, but someone did, and we are trying to figure out why. This might be an art installation of some kind, or it might be someone's lockdown project. While the idea of automating the fun of blowing bubbles seems a bit sad, this weird machine is mesmerizing to watch. The YouTube page has no information and no comments, but they titled this video "Delicate balance." However, nothing is really balanced; it's all held together by clothespins and clamps and weighted to the ground by a cinder block. So.... nothing about it makes any sense at all. This is what the internet was made for. -via reddit

Dhaka muslin was made in Bengal, now Bangladesh, for thousands of years. This fabric was so fine, light, and transparent that it was considered a national treasure. Around 200 years ago, it revolutionized fashion in Europe, as stylish women such as Joséphine Bonaparte and Jane Austen ditched their heavy, wide dresses in favor of the Empire-style muslin chemise, which could be scandalously thin. Dhaka muslin was made by skilled artisans in a 16-step process taken on seperately by villages around the city of Dhaka. The cotton fibers used were so fine that thread counts of 800 to 1200 per square inch could be achieved and the muslin would still appear diaphanously thin. But it's been 100 years now since Dhaka muslin was produced this way. The British Empire killed the industry, artisans turned to other fabrics, and the unique cotton plant that produced the fiber went extinct. An effort is being made to reproduce Dhaka muslin, but they're not quite there yet. Read about Dhaka muslin and what happened to it at BBC Future. -via Nag on the Lake

The point where the Fahrenheit and Centigrade temperature scales meet is -40. Once you get that cold,  a degree here or there makes little difference because you do not want to be out in it. Winter is a lot colder than that in Yakutsk, Russia, the coldest city in the world. The lowest temperature ever recorded in Yakutsk was −64.4 °C (−83.9 °F). It also has the distinction of being the city with the greatest temperature differential, because the short summers can be quite warm. Yakutsk is where cold weather is a way of life for most of the year. If your car isn't in a heated garage, you leave it running all the time. You learn early how to dress for the weather. And when you want to impress people, you do some crazy experiments to show how fast things will freeze.

Kiun B has a bunch of videos about living in Yakutsk, the cold weather, and her Sakha culture.

This is the logo for the Cleveland Browns football team. It is a football helmet; everyone can see that. But if you cropped it in a certain way, as Fox Sports did for the Christmas Day game against Green Bay, you lose that context and it looks like something else.

Christmas thoughts by Megan: At first I was like "WTF is that on the score bug for the Browns? A rabbit using a walker?" and then realized that the helmet blends into the background color. Though, rabbit using a walker is close maybe. *lifts glass* pic.twitter.com/kHRWtCADGt

— Megs (@YankeeMegs) December 25, 2021

The Browns’ logo looks like a chocolate bunny pushing a cart. I’m probably the only one who sees this. 🐇 🏈 pic.twitter.com/5QE8zsn5Wh

— David Tarkington (@davidtark) December 25, 2021

No, you weren't the only one who saw it. Far from it. It's definitely a bunny rabbit, but people are split on whether it is pushing a shopping cart or using a walker. The difference may have to do with one's experience with such devices. This is a prime example of pareidolia, when we see a familiar pattern in an image that is not necessarily there. In the Browns' logo, the cropping took away the most important element of a helmet- it's head shape. The helmet being the same color as the background doesn't help. What was left was a jumble that our brains needed to make sense of. See more of these Tweets at Design Taxi. -via Digg

(Top image credit: Erik Drost)

If you had "raining fish" on your 2021 Bingo card, you can check that one off. The City of Texarkana, Texas posted a notice on Facebook that residents aren't losing their minds; fish really did rain down on the town on Wednesday.

Animal rain is a phenomenon that occurs when small water animals like frogs, crabs, and small fish are swept up in waterspouts or drafts that occur on the surface of the earth. They are then rained down at the same time as the rain.

The post asked residents to leave pictures of any fish they found in the comments. There are over four hundreds comments. As you can imagine, a lot of them are jokes, but some show small fish, or fish parts, found in lawns around town.

We've seen phenomena like this before, when frogs, worms, snails, or other critters manage to fall from the sky. That time it rained meat in Kentucky was the strangest. For now, we can just take flying fish for what they are. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: The City of Texarkana, Texas)