Quick- how many science dogs can you name? There's Laika, and, uh, maybe Balto, and...  Dogs have been involved in science for a long time, not only as experimental subjects, but also in the work that they do. In the case of a dog named Robot, he was just acting as dogs do, but made quite an important discovery.

The caves at Lascaux in southwestern France are famous for containing some of the most detailed and well-preserved examples of prehistoric art in the world. More than 600 paintings created by generations of early humans line the cave walls. But if it wasn’t for a white mutt named “Robot” who, by some accounts discovered the caves in 1940, we may not have known about the art until many years later. Marcel Ravidat, at the time an 18-year-old mechanic’s apprentice, was out walking with Robot when the dog apparently slipped down a foxhole. When Ravidat followed Robot’s muffled barks, he recovered more than just the dog—Robot had led him to one of the biggest archaeological finds of the 20th century.

That's a good dog. Read about other dogs who have been important to science at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Pilleybianchi)

In movies, a phone booth is a place to call for help, to find refuge, or to change clothes if you are Superman. You don't see many of them in the real words anymore now that everyone carries their own phone with them. But phone booths have given us some classic cinematic moments, as you'll see in this tribute from Little White Lies. -via Laughing Squid

In elementary school, we learned that the earth is made up of layers: the crust, the mantle, and the core. If you asked the teacher how we know all that, she'd get frustrated and tell you we know because it's in the textbook. At least that was my experience. But what we learned back then is just a small fraction of what scientists know about the earth beneath us.

There are four main layers to the Earth: crust, mantle, outer core and inner core, along with transition zones between these layers. The world we know lies on tectonic plates making up the Earth’s crust, which varies in thickness from three miles to over 40. Beneath the crust lies the mantle, the layer of rock making up 84 percent of the Earth’s volume. The rocks in the upper mantle are white-hot, but if you could cool them to room temperature, they’d be a speckly olive green thanks to the mineral olivine — you might know it as the August birthstone peridot. “I think the mid-upper mantle would be gorgeous, because it would be olivine green, like 60 percent, and it would also have garnets, these beautiful red cubic minerals,” says Wendy Mao, a mineral physicist at Stanford University.

Deeper in the mantle, heat and pressure reconfigure the atoms making up olivine into two new minerals, bridgmanite and ferropericlase, which are brownish-orange and yellow at room temperature. Beneath the rocky mantle, there’s an outer core of churning liquid iron (and a little nickel) surrounding an inner core of solid iron (again with some nickel) that’s about 70 percent the size of the moon. The center of the Earth is almost as hot as the surface of the Sun, about 9,800 degrees Fahrenheit, with pressure that makes the compressive forces at the ocean floor look like child’s play.

But we haven’t been to any of these places inside the Earth. We haven’t seen them. We haven’t sent cameras or probes to bring back samples of iron glowing like coal embers. So, how do we know what’s there?

The data we have comes from several types of research, but more importantly, how those different types of research work together. Read more about studying the world below that we can't directly observe at Discover magazine.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Mats Halldin)

🎶 Your virus is beyond compare
With spikey bursts of auburn hair
That covid, that corona emerald green
Your lockdowns took up all the spring
Your bubbles soft like summer rain
The whole world waits alone for you
Vaccine 🎶

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) November 17, 2020

When the news broke that Dolly Parton had quietly given a million dollars to Vanderbilt University back in April to fund COVID-19 vaccine research, which was used to help develop the Moderna vaccine, Gretchen McCulloch of Wired wrote some new lyrics to Parton's song "Jolene." Ryan Cordell put the lyrics to music while his family slept.

I couldn't resist trying it immediately, though I had to sing a bit more quietly than I typically would—for this tune in particular—because my family's all asleep right now. But you can see it scans, good enough for country at least! pic.twitter.com/joQL29e7Uk

— Ryan Cordell aka Ryan Cordrell (@ryancordell) November 17, 2020

There's now a version with captions. -via Metafilter

Certain reptiles have spent millions of years doing weird things with their tongues, like smelling in stereo or launching like a slingshot or licking their eyeballs. This video is surprisingly informative, but still funny, because that's what Ze Frank do.

The animal kingdom has developed a variety of methods for combining DNA to create the next generation, under the umbrella of what we call sex. The most obvious observable part of all that is the penis, which can be ten feet long, or several times an animal's body size, or attached to creatures who have the capability of both sending and receiving sperm. In one case, two of them fight (with their penises!) to determine who inseminates who. Then there's the echidna:

Sometimes one just isn’t enough. Or so it seems for the echidna, a spiny egg-laying mammal, which has evolved a four-headed penis. During copulation, echidna penises operate on a part-time schedule: half the penis temporarily shuts down while the other two heads are responsible for fertilization. But those extra two heads aren’t there just to show off. Next time the echidna mates, he’ll alternate which half he uses.

By shutting down half of their penis at a time, male echidnas fit perfectly with the female’s two-branched reproductive tract. This creature’s coat of quills don’t spare its genitalia, which features penile spines—a horrifying frequent trait in the animal kingdom (even humans once had them) which may increase fertilization success or trigger ovulation.

Other animals have even more disturbing sex habits, but it works for them. Read about nine animals with extreme penises at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: benjamint444)

The Toy Story franchise began in 1995 and became a spectacular hit with children and adults alike. Each time a new movie comes out, you feel like you've seen at all, only until the next movie comes out. Toy Story 4 premiered in 2019 and made more money than any of the three previous films, so you can bet there will be another eventually. Since Toy Story 4 is now streaming on Disney+, Screen Junkies figured it was time for an Honest Trailer.

In Antartica, sunset takes a long time, and night lasts for half the year. Most of the workers leave, and those who are left behind get no supplies for nine months. Astrophysicist Robert Schwarz has "wintered over" in Antarctica 15 times, more than anyone else on earth. Now that he's retired from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, he misses those winters and the sunrise that comes in September.

Denis Barkats, a senior scientist who wintered with Schwarz in 2006, recalls an old Antarctic joke: “The first time you winter, it’s for the adventure. The second time, it’s for the money. The third time, it’s because you don’t fit anywhere else.” But that doesn’t seem true of Schwarz, who is cheerful and easygoing, Barkats says. “He has something I don’t have,” he goes on. To return 15 times, one must effectively treat the rigors of winter as one’s job. “You might say, ‘Oh boy, I really want a watermelon!,’” Barkats says with a smile. “Well, you can’t have it for nine months.”

Schwarz doesn’t regard himself as unusual. Still, at the start of each winter, as Pole’s summer population fell from around 150 to under 50, he usually felt relief. “Suddenly everything is quiet, you only hear the wind, and there are only a few people left,” he says. “It’s a great feeling.”

Read about the people who spend winters at the South Pole and how they cope at Atlas Obscura.

What's the funniest movie you've ever seen? Comedy is certainly subjective, but a well-crafted funny film that appeals to many is likely to become a hit, then a classic. It may even become a standard bearer for the humor of its era. This list of the 30 best comedies is in chronological order instead of rank, so you can read through the history of cinematic comedy, while reading what made each movie great and seeing a clip besides. It's over at Mental Floss.

The first manned space flight by a private company began on Sunday when the SpaceX Crew Dragon lifted off with four astronauts bound for the ISS. The astronauts are Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi, plus a very special little fella, The Child that we call Baby Yoda.  

The Baby Yoda plush had a very important role to play during the flight: he was acting as the “zero-gravity indicator,” an object that is brought on board to determine when a microgravity environment has been reached.

See a video of Baby Yoda floating in microgravity, plus a related clip from The Mandalorian at Geeks Are Sexy.

You might not ever get the opportunity to take jetpack lessons, so Tom Scott went through the experience to show us what it's like. Gravity Industries won't let you go off on your own in the first lesson, which is honestly a good call. Just don't aim those jet engines at your feet!

Verona, Italy, is the setting for Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet. In normal times, the city welcomes flocks of tourists who come to soak up the romantic atmosphere and visit the famous balcony to imagine Romeo declaring his love for Juliet. People also write letters to Juliet, 50,000 or so a year. These letters end up at a small archive called the Juliet Club, which is not as well publicized as the balcony, but still welcomes visitors. A group of volunteers answer the letters, with the help of crowdsourcing.  

Through a doorway under a sign for The Juliet Club and up a flight of stairs, the Secretaries of Juliet work out of a room filled with boxes and boxes of letters, the vast majority of which are handwritten and sent via post. Secretaries respond on official Club di Giulietta stationery and sign off as “Secretary of Juliet.” Anyone can drop in for a day to read and reply to letters as Juliet’s Secretary. Upon arrival, you’ll be led to the workroom and given a box of letters in the language of your choice to sort through until you find one that you want to respond to.

Reading through these notes is a veritable portrait of love in the world. There are letters about school-girl crushes and heartbreaking divorces, long-lost loves, indecision about staying or leaving, pregnancy, marriage, death, and everything in between. The tradition of answering them began in the 1930s when the keeper of Juliet’s tomb began collecting the letters left by visitors, and felt so moved by some of then, he decided to start responding.

Read about the Juliet Club and how it works at Messy Nessy Chic.

Even though this is an ad, the Ghanian Coffin Dancers have the same message as always:

Wear a mask... or dance with us!

They have teamed up with Afrisocks to promote mask wearing, specifically masks that match your cool socks! They feature patterns named after Ghanian slang terms.

Boga: A Ghanian living abroad. 

Dumsor: A persistent, irregular, and unpredictable electric power outage.

Tro-tro: Privately owned minibus taxis.

No Wahala: No trouble.

You can order the masks, or matching masks and socks, here.  -via Digg

New Zealand's organization Forest & Bird takes their Bird of the Year (Te Manu Rongonui o Te Tau) competition seriously. When voter fraud was detected in the online poll to crown the winner, the organizers went to work immediately. In just two hours, 1500 votes for the the little spotted kiwi (kiwi pukupuku) came from the same email address.

The illegitimate votes briefly pushed the kiwi pukupuku to the top of the preferred bird leaderboard, but the votes have since been removed from the competition.  

“It's lucky we spotted this little kiwi trying to sneak in an extra 1500 votes under the cover of darkness!” says Laura Keown spokesperson for Bird of the Year.  

Emma Rawson, campaign manager for the little spotted kiwi disavowed the fraudulent rush of votes, saying, "Voter fraud is not the kiwi way." After the votes were counted (and discounted), the critically endangered kākāpō emerged as the winner. Still, they are all good birds. -via Mashable

(Image credit: Flickr user Jake Osborne)

When we are introduced to a character in a movie or TV show, we assume that the character is supposed to be exactly who he is. It is only later that we learn what process the character went through to become the finished product we see. It's difficult to imagine the woman from The Ring as anything but crawling around with her face covered by hair.   

Even before the movies, it's hard to see how anyone would interpret Gollum as a giant. The picture I got from the books was that he was short, emaciated, and terribly gross, even more so than the Andy Serkis version. See what other well-known characters were like in their formative stages at Cracked.