The US birth rate dropped by 4% during the pandemic, but it's a baby boom for the Tran family of Orange County, California. The Tran triplets, Gina, Nina, and Victoria, are all pregnant at once! The  three women were born just minutes apart, 35 years ago, and now are sharing commiseration, maternity clothes, and an obstetrician.

“I’m actually the oldest by four minutes and I’m having a girl, and her name is Leighton Grace,” Gina said.

“I’m in the middle by four minutes and I’m having a boy, and his name is Hendrix Paul,” Nina said.

“I’m the youngest by four minutes and then eight minutes, and having a boy,” Victoria said. “His name is Zaden Seth.”

The three births are expected in July, August, and November. Read more at CBS. -via Fark

(Image credit: The Tran Family)

Summer holidays are the time for putting away candy in favor of fresh fruit and ice cream, and for moving the cooking outdoors because the kitchen gets too hot. If your perfect cookout includes grilling a nice steak, you might want to learn a bit of the science behind the process. Meat scientists are willing to share what they've learned about grilling steak. First, they advise us on what to look for when selecting steaks at the butcher shop.  

The biggest influence on the final flavor of that steak, though, is how you cook it. Flavorwise, cooking meat accomplishes two things. First, the heat of the grill breaks the meat’s fatty acids into smaller molecules that are more volatile — that is, more likely to become airborne. These volatiles are responsible for the steak’s aroma, which accounts for the majority of its flavor. Molecules called aldehydes, ketones and alcohols among that breakdown mix are what we perceive as distinctively beefy.

The second way that cooking builds flavor is through browning, a process that chemists call the Maillard reaction. This is a fantastically complex process in which amino acids and traces of sugars in the meat react at high temperatures to kick off a cascade of chemical changes that result in many different volatile end products. Most important of these are molecules called pyrazines and furans, which contribute the roasty, nutty flavors that steak aficionados crave. The longer and hotter the cooking, the deeper into the Maillard reaction you go and the more of these desirable end products you get — until eventually, the meat starts to char, producing undesirable bitter, burnt flavors.

Read what science has to say about the way you prepare steak at Smithsonian.

Kevin Parry has entertained us with all kinds of stop-motions videos. In a followup to his fruits and vegetables video, he zooms into the inner structures of tropical fruits, some you may not be familiar with (there's a list in the top comment here). But the best part is after the fruits, where we get to see how it's done. And that's where it becomes clear why Parry didn't treat the coconut the same way as the other fruits. -via Kottke

Erstwhile Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein once wrote a romance novel, but that was totally non-controversial compared to his later literary adventure. As the supreme ruler of his nation, Saddam indulged his whims without the input of Islamic theologians, as in the time he commissioned a copy of the Qur’an to be written with his own blood!  

The dictator had recently re-embraced his Islamic faith after his son, Uday Hussein, narrowly survived an assassination attempt on December 12, 1996. In an official letter published in 2000, Saddam explained that the book was intended as thanks to God for bringing him safely through many ‘conspiracies and dangers’ throughout his long political career: “My life has been full of dangers in which I should have lost a lot of blood…but since I have bled only a little, I asked somebody to write God’s words with my blood in gratitude.”

To write the book, Saddam commissioned calligrapher Abbas Shakir Joody al-Baghdadi. Over the next two years a nurse drew a total of 27 litres of Saddam’s blood and delivered it to al-Baghdadi, who after treating it with chemicals to stabilize it, used the liquid to write out the 114 chapters and 6000 verses of the Islamic holy book. Completed in 2000, the finished book runs 605 pages and is written in lettering two centimetres in height with borders decorated in intricate blue, red, and black designs.

Saddam is no more, but the blood Qur’an remains, and presents quite a paradox. While the book and its contents are holy to Muslims, human blood is considered unclean, so what is the status of this particular copy? And is it really Saddam's blood -or that of someone else? The calligrapher al-Baghdadi refuses to discuss the project to this day. Read about the blood Qur’an and what it means at Today I Found Out.

Bored Panda culled some entertaining stories from the subreddit I Don't Work Here Lady. They vary greatly, but all involve someone who completely misunderstood the role of a stranger. In one of them, redditor Billiam201 recalled how he got a new phone number in a new town and discovered it once belonged to a business. The business owner had dropped one phone line, but still had the number on the receipts he gave to customers. That led to many callers who thought Billiam201 worked for that business, so he found and confronted the owner.

"You guys are still giving out my home phone number on your receipts."
"Yeah. So?"
"Well, f*****g stop it. It's been at least a year since you haven't had that number. At least cross it out or something."
"That's a pain in the ass, I'm not making my employees do that."
"So you're the manager?"
"I'm the owner."
"So let me see if I have this right. You, what was your name again?"
Let's call him Fred.
"You, Fred have decided that it's too inconvenient to cross my home phone number off of your receipts, so you're just going to keep giving it out?"
"Yup. What are you gonna do? Sue me?"

He didn't sue, but what he did was much more satisfying. Most of the stories involve bullies getting their comeuppance, but a few are wholesomely sweet. Like the time redditor somethingwithatwo2 had a guy get in his car thinking it was a taxi. He was going that way anyway, so he played along.  

We drove off together and he peered out the window, smiling.

He said "You taxis are much quicker these days! Ah it's a beautiful day for a train ride, don't you think?"

He looked at me, still with this big smile and said:

"I'm Jerry, lovely to meet you. I'm meeting my friend for breakfast today! I'm so excited. I haven't been on the train in years. All my friends have passed on and I don't really need to go out of town. Well, not until I made a new friend recently. It's funny how life goes isn't it? An old codger like me with a breakfast date! Can you imagine."

You could easily spend an hour reading all thirty wonderful stories posted at Bored Panda, even if you have to bookmark it to get to all of them.

Baseball uniforms change over time, but they change rather gradually so that we always recognize a baseball player in uniform. Pants go up, pants reach lower, stripes are in or out, shirts button or they don't. One fashion that comes and goes is stirrup socks. How did those ever become part of a baseball uniform? It's not just because of fashion, although fashion begins the story of how they came about.

In the mid-1800s, ballplayers were prone to wearing uniforms that had pants extending all the way to the top of the shoe. Then, in 1868, the players of the Cincinnati Red Stockings decided to make a fashion statement by hiking their pants up to just under the knees, knickers-style. Other teams followed suit in the belief that a shapely calf might excite female fans attending the game. (Remember, this was the 1800s.)

This, of course, showed their red stockings. The rest of the story has to do with practicality and safety, which you can read about at Mental Floss.

The new movie F9 is in theaters now. It's a simple name for the ninth film in a series centered around a set of characters driving cars very fast. That's nine movies, and a few spinoffs. These characters -and their plots- have come a long way from that first film in 2001, The Fast and the Furious, which Screen Junkies is just now getting around to making an Honest Trailer for.

A “Potemkin village” is a neighborhood or town purposely made into an illusion, with a shiny facade that hides a not-so-shiny truth. Named after Russian military leader Gregory Potemkin, these villages look prosperous and inviting on the outside, while inside they may be empty, or poverty-stricken, or even full of nefarious activities.

The sole purpose of a Potemkin village is to make outsiders think that a situation is better than it really is, and perhaps no other country is better versed in this practice today than North Korea. Situated in the Demilitarized Zone is a village called Kijong-Dong, built in the 1950s in an attempt to encourage defection from people in South Korea.

From afar, the small town which directly faces its enemy, also known as the “Peace Village”, looks relatively normal. It has clean well-kept streets, a number of brightly-painted multi-storey buildings and identical low-rise apartments which all appear to have working electricity which would demonstrate North Korea’s prosperity and economic success following the split. The government claims that the village is home to some 200 residents, a farm, a hospital, and a school. Despite appearances however, the more likely reality is, KijongDong has no permanent residents.

Telescopic lenses have revealed that the village’s buildings are nothing more than empty concrete shells, lacking glass windows, interior rooms and even flooring. According to South Korea, caretakers flip light switches and sweep empty pavements, all to preserve a grand illusion. Photographs from inside the village, are non-existent and Western media know it better as ‘Propaganda Village’.

But Potemkin villages exist all over the world, and they aren't always government projects. Read about such villages in different parts of the world, including the US, at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Don Sutherland, U.S. Air Force)

We mistakenly sent out an empty test email to a portion of our HBO Max mailing list this evening. We apologize for the inconvenience, and as the jokes pile in, yes, it was the intern. No, really. And we’re helping them through it. ❤️

— HBOMaxHelp (@HBOMaxHelp) June 18, 2021

Last week, thousands of HBO Max subscribers received a mysterious email from the company. The subject was Integration Test Email #1, which implied there would be more, but there was no information that made any sense, and no action requested. HBO Max posted an explanation on Twitter, which blamed an intern, but also appeared to be supportive. You can just imagine how embarrassed and frankly terrified an intern could be over such a public screwup. Twitter users were also supportive, and shared the huge mistakes they made when they were interns, just starting out in their careers.

Dear Intern, I was using my desktop calendar to make a monthly note of when I started my menstrual period, but after several months I realized I was making that note on a calendar I shared with all of my colleagues company wide. I was 37 years old.

— Caissie (@Caissie) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern, when I was 25 I made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded me of the most. I meant to send it to my work friend, but I accidentally sent it to the entire company. My supervisor (Beaker) wanted to fire me, but the owners (Bert & Ernie) intervened. https://t.co/zMKvQ6nxjj

— aerin. (@AerinChevyFord) June 18, 2021

Some were very public, while others were only terrifying until someone else fixed it. The upshot was that you haven't really arrived in a job until you've messed up big time.

HBO Intern, you are breathtaking! I mean it! Congrats on making your first big mistake. It's like a right of initiation for us developers
HT to @_workchronicles pic.twitter.com/8SsQNiXBBr

— Charles C. Pustejovsky III 👍 (@CCPustejovsky) June 18, 2021

See a ranked list of the top 30 responses at Bored Panda, or all of them at Twitter.

The phrase usually refers to something important that everyone is aware of, but no one wants to talk about. In this case, there's no ignoring the real-life elephant that crashed through Ratchadawan Puengprasoppon's kitchen wall in Chalermkiatpattana, Thailand, Saturday morning. The elephant, named Boonchuay, lives in Kaeng Krachan national park, and was likely just looking for something to eat. Read about the incident and see the video at The Guardian. - via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Ratchadawan Puengprasoppon via reddit)

Welsh miners used to make their own fireworks to celebrate important occasions, which mainly consisted of sticking gunpowder into holes. These were called rock cannons. Tom Scott shows us how they worked. What could possibly go wrong? Please don't try detonating a rock cannon yourself, unless you have a test range and an expert explosive engineer. Also, be sure not to surprise your local law enforcement agency, because they could easily surprise you back.

As kids, we learned that our solar system is made up of nine planets (now eight) and the sun. Oh yeah, there's the asteroid belt. And the moons of other planets. And solar winds, comets, and the Oort cloud. But even as we learn about exoplanets and other galaxies, our own solar system hides a lot more mysterious objects that are too small and far away to know much about. One such object, designated 2014 UN271, revolves in a manner that brings it close enough to study only once every 600,000 years! What's more, that time is coming soon. But what is it? Astronomers call it either a tiny planet or a really big comet.     

But by far the most intriguing thing about 2014 UN271 is its orbit around the Sun. This thing is extremely eccentric, journeying between the inner solar system and the Oort cloud that marks the boundary of interstellar space over a period of 612,190 years.

And it turns out, astronomers are about to witness the closest pass of this incredible round trip. Currently, 2014 UN271 is about 22 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun (for reference, Earth is 1 AU from the Sun). That means it’s already closer than Neptune, at 29.7 AU. And it’s not stopping there – it’s already traveled 7 AU in the last seven years, and at its closest in 2031, it’s expected to pass within 10.9 AU of the Sun, almost reaching the orbit of Saturn.

Considering the relatively short time that mankind has studied the stars with telescopes, you have to wonder how many other distant objects are orbiting the sun without us ever getting the chance to see them. Read more about 2014 UN271 at New Atlas.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: JPL Solar System Dynamics)

The tiny animal known as the hydra is the closest thing we've seen to an immortal being. They don't have a lot of organs, and the ones they have stay young because the cells are completely replenished regularly. Cut it in half, and it doesn't die -rather it reproduces. Put it in a blender and separate all its cells? It will just reform itself! The secret is stem cells, which the hydra has plenty of. -via Aeon 

When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Clark Gable was at the height of his Hollywood fame. He called Franklin Delano Roosevelt to offer his services for the war effort, which FDR took him up on, but it was to be in a Hollywood role. Gable was 41 and in a position to publicize whatever the president needed -safely in California. But that was to change.

Gable had success, Gable had power, and for the first time in his four decades on this earth, Gable had something approaching peace thanks to his marriage to Carole Lombard, the firecracker screwball star. Yet in less than a year, all of those things turned to ash following Lombard’s violent death. When her plane went down in a fiery blaze, it was treated as a national tragedy around the country, and for her husband it was the beginning of the end.

The King became broken, despondent, and finally disillusioned enough to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. To this day, some say he went to Europe with a death wish, and on at least one bombing raid, Capt. Gable almost had it granted as a Luftwaffe shell passed right between his feet.

Lombard was decorated after her death, since she had been on a mission to raise war funds. Despite Gable's fear of flying, he became an officer and a gunner with the 351st Bombardment Group. It was rumored that he did not care whether or not he survived the war. Read about Clark Gable's military service at Den of Geek.

Highway 65 in Minnesota has a ditch with its own ducks. These aren't the kinds of ducks that come and go, though. They are decoys, in a rainbow of colors. Is it a joke, an art installation, a local tradition, or a crowdsourced project? It's kind of all the above. The story of how they came to be there is pretty neat. These ducks even have their own Facebook page. -via TYWKIWDBI