This is Cerro de los Siete Colores, the Hill of Seven Colors in English. You'll find it in the Andes, in Argentina's Jujuy province. Tectonic movement revealed the earth's many layers of sediment and their amazing colors. The dark brown is rich in manganese and is about two million years old. The red layer is a mixture of red clay and sand laid down three to four million years ago. The brown and purple layers are around 90 million years ago and are colored by the ratio of lead and calcium carbonate. The yellow is also from that period, with a layer heavy in sulphur. The white layer is limestone, at least 400 million years old.

The legend of the hill is that the children of the village of Purmamarca at its base decided to paint the hill one day, and snuck away for seven nights to leave it as you see it today. Read more about Cerro de los Siete Colores and see more gorgeous pictures at Kuriositas.

(Image credit: travelwayoflife)

You may have seen a popular TikTok video by Bergman Joe in which water finds its way through a maze with the utmost efficiency. It's an animated simulation, so Steve Mould (previously at Neatorama) felt challenged to recreate it in the real world, just to see if he could do it.

Water in a maze presents some interesting ideas. Trapped air in a maze will force the water to work more efficiently (and only if you can make your maze airtight), but surface tension will force it to work less efficiently. Mould made several different sizes of mazes to see how the different factors changed the overall scheme of the fluid dynamics involved.   

As a bonus, you'll also learn the basics of making your own maze, which is interesting even if you never consider trying it. This video is only a bit more than seven minutes- the rest is for the sponsor. -via Metafilter

The Meyer lemon is named for intrepid “plant explorer” Frank N. Meyer, who discovered the lemon variety in China in 1907. His story alone is worth checking out the history of the Meyer lemon, but he did not live to see his namesake lemon become a sensation in the United States. It was more fragrant and hardy than other available lemons, and soon it became a standard tree in California household gardens, bearing lovely fruit for those who owned one. Grower in Texas and Florida followed suit.

But then in the 1940s, it was discovered that the Meyer lemon tree was the cause of citrus tristeza virus (CTV), commonly called “quick decline citrus” virus. The disease was getting out of hand because the Meyer lemon trees carried the virus, but was more immune to its effects than other trees. Therefore the lemon trees did not show symptoms for years, but aphids carried the virus to orange and grapefruit trees, which succumbed much more quickly. The war was one to eradicate Meyer lemon trees in the US.

Yet we use Meyer lemons to this day. Read how the eradication program was carried out, and what saved the Meyer lemon, at Atlas Obscura. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Burkhard Mücke)

This little skit may seem funny in a "back in my day..." way, but the way we pay for things today is altogether weird. I got used to paying for everything with a credit card because of the points, but then stores won the right to add a surcharge for their expenses, so I try to have some cash on me lately for small purchases. Most of my regular bills go to a credit card automatically, and I pay that once a month with a phone transfer from the bank. I use PayPal for mail order. My kids use debit cards and Venmo. Or at least one does; the other doesn't have any money, so it's all credit.  

I still write checks for bills where the drive-through window is close by, and for taxes. But stores either won't take checks at all, or they don't need you to fill them out at all because they just run the check through a machine and get the money transferred. It never occurred to me that a store would give up on checks because the cashiers can't read cursive. But I'm not surprised that young people don't write checks. The banks won't let you open a checking account until you're 18, and by then it's a bit late to get your parents to show you how to do it. Now I'll step down from my soap box and let you tell us how you feel. -via Nag on the Lake

Once upon a time, feature-length movies were filmed in shoots of two to six weeks, but that was back when they didn't have to worry about color, sound, focus groups, or marketing. Now movies can take years to complete. You can blame competition, audience expectations, and big budgets. But Rocky was a blockbuster zipped up in no time at all. Maybe that's because it was a story Sylvester Stallone had dreamed about for years already. You could say the same thing about a band's first album, which might contain original compositions that the band had been playing for years. The second album is not so easy. But sometimes when inspiration hits, you go with the flow and don't worry about refining, especially if you're as talented as Freddy Mercury.

A few other really successful projects came about in astonishingly short time, including architecture, video games, and one very fast mountain climber, in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

It's pretty rare these days that I wake up and realize that I've been dreaming. But just a few minutes later, all memory of the dream is gone, and I go about my daily routine. It's only the memory of remembering that lets me know I dream at all. But maybe you're one of those people who can remember dreams, and maybe you're even sometimes aware that you're dreaming before you wake up. Experiencing a dream while knowing it's a dream is called lucid dreaming, and a few people are lucky enough to be able to guide those dreams by force of will. The good news is that there are some things you can do to induce and practice lucid dreaming and your control of it. Bright Side has some tips and tricks that will help you. If you ask me, it seems to be more trouble than I want to put into it, but you do you. Even if you don't want to try it, there are a some tips for a better night's sleep toward the end of this video. -via Digg

Scientists did an analysis of hair from a 3,600-year-old body unearthed at a burial site on the island on Menorca, off the coast of Spain. The hair showed traces of hallucinogenic drug use. They also found evidence of a storage box for such drugs, elaborately carved with geometric designs. Groovy. So what kinds of hallucinogenic drugs did people use that long ago? The Face gives us four plants available at the time that could be used to produce hallucinogenic effects. The caveat is that these are all poisonous, and could easily be lethal. Yet ancient people used them as medicine and for mind-expanding rituals. You have to wonder how many people died before they got the preparation and dosages right for the effects they were looking for.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Michael Pirrello)

Given the size of the universe, there is a high likelihood that there would be life on other planets. So why don't we have any evidence of these alien life forms? Well, when your mother complains you don't call her, you remind her that contact and non-contact goes both ways. Life on earth has been around for billions of years, and we've only managed to send machines to the next planet over. Kurzgesagt poses the idea that if life is out there, they may be waiting for us to find them. Our human civilization may be well ahead of any other intelligent life, and space exploration is very difficult, for a whole lot of reasons. Other planets may have even more reasons not to try interstellar travel. The last minute of this video is an ad.

In 1972, the United States signed "the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction," along with 108 other countries. But before that, Cold War experiments were carried out in many cities and rural areas across the US to simulate enemy biological warfare attacks, in order to prepare defenses against such attacks. These used common strains of bacteria that they considered benign (Serratia marcescens, Bacillus globigii, Bacillus subtilis, and Aspergillus fumigatus), plus chemicals used as tracers, also thought to be benign, like fluorescent zinc cadmium sulphide. The tests began in 1949 when bacteria was released in the Pentagon's ventilation system. This program moved to US cities in 1950, and over the next 20 years, the US military carried out 239 experiments in 66 cities in the US and Canada.

The public was never informed of these experiments. It was later learned that the bacteria weren't quite benign. Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii in particular can cause serious infections. A bacterial spray in San Francisco in 1950 led to eleven people being hospitalized and one man died. It was also later determined that zinc cadmium sulphide is a carcinogen. Read about the biological warfare experiments of the Cold War era and what we learned from them at Today I Found Out.

James Cameron's second movie about the planet Pandora made two billion dollars at the box office in no time flat. That's the amount Cameron said it would have to make to break even! Avatar: The Way of Water grossed $2.314 billion by April 9. Now that it's on streaming television, Screen Junkies gives us a rundown on whether it's worth watching or not. And it appears that despite a lot of silliness, if you liked the first Avatar, you'll like the sequel. Oh, that doesn't mean they didn't find a lot to pick about. The movie relies on cliches, stereotypes, outdated slang, and twisted logic. Just like the first one. And you saw the first one, didn't you?

They don't make 'em the way they used to. You can say that about about a lot of things. A cathode-ray television set from the 1960s will not accept an HDMI cable, and it's too heavy to move, but darn it, it still works, while a flat screen TV falls apart if you touch it wrong. But that's just my personal experience. In the case of satellites, the first one ever was Sputnik 1, launched on October 4, 1957. It relayed radio signals for three weeks until its battery ran down, and fell to earth in 1958. But it served its intended purpose, and wasn't expected to last long. In the years that followed, both the US and USSR launched multiple satellites and discovered how useful they are for a wide variety of applications beyond showing up rival nations.

On May 6, 1965, the Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1 was inserted into orbit. This satellite, a 3-feet, 8-inch metal ball, is still in orbit and still carrying out its original job 58 years later! The LCS's mission is to serve as a reference point to calibrate ground-based instruments. Its ace-in-the-hole is that it needs no power source at all, so there are no batteries to run down. Solar-powered satellites are used now, but that technology was not available in miniaturized form in 1965. It's still amazing that the LCS stays in its orbit perfectly even after all these years, and so still works as a reference target. The LCS1 is expected to outlive us all. Read about the world's oldest functioning satellite at Amusing Planet.  

When two kitten advocates love each other very much, they end up volunteering to rescue them. They might also end up getting married.

Hannah Shaw, also known as Kitten Lady, recently married her longtime love Andrew Marttila with an animal themed wedding. The ceremony was outdoors at Farm Animal Refuge in San Diego. When they announced the wedding on Instagram, their friends speculated on how odd it would be to see them in fancy clothing. They cleaned up quite well, and it was a lovely ceremony, officiated by a veterinarian. 

The bride and groom were chill about what could go wrong when farm animals are incorporated into a wedding, and so any deviation from the script was considered just more of the fun. A pig served as the ring bearer. Instead of the traditional bouquet toss, they had a watermelon toss, which the pigs quite enjoyed. The centerpieces were fed to the animals after the wedding. But the big moment was when Hannah presented Andrew with a very special gift basket filled with calico kittens! A good time was had by all.   

You'll find more wedding pictures at Instagram.

And in case you are wondering, the father of the bride was there, and in fact sang a song at the reception, which you can see in the next-to last image in this gallery.

Breez Harley has a toddler son named Lander who has long hair. But the front has been getting shorter! Has someone been cutting the child's hair? Her boyfriend denied it was him. The boy doesn't normally interact with anyone else without his parents around. But he's definitely been sporting bangs lately, and his hair seems to get a little shorter day by day. He's starting to look like he's got a mullet, although the front is quite uneven. Has Lander been playing with scissors? Or is it something more sinister? They finally figured out what was happening, but you won't guess the real story.

You can watch the video at reddit if you want to be surprised or at TikTok if you don't care about spoilers in the tags and comments.

(Image credit: Breez Harley)

A body farm is a research facility where scientists study dead bodies in a controlled environment. It may sound gruesome, but this is crucial research in archaeology, crime investigation, and environmental studies. Hayley Mickleburgh is a forensic archaeologist studying buried bodies to determine who they were and how they died. Her current research is in mass graves, because that information can be very important to determine what happened after wars are fought.

In an interview at Vice, Mickleburgh explains what a body farm is, the importance of her work, and some of the things she does. For example, she investigates how bacteria from the environment interacts with the bacteria from one or more decomposing bodies to determine how long they've been buried, what killed them, and who they are. Even the soil covering a grave can be evidence of a crime. She also talks about the people who volunteer their bodies for this work after they die, and why she's willing to do the same.  -via Damn Interesting

You can imagine Tom Scott going to Japan with a long list of things he'd like to try so he can show us what we're missing. Hideyasu Ito bought a leaf blower just because it was on sale. He didn't even need to blow leaves. But it was there later on when he thought about building a hovercraft, not for profit or for clicks, but just to see if he could do it. So Ito kept at it, improving his hovercraft through several iterations at his Micro Hovercraft Laboratory founded just for this kind of project. His latest versions look like a bicycle mounted on a pontoon boat. It's a steerable bouncy castle, sort of. Cool toy, bro! And he was nice enough to let Tom try it out.

Tom noted at YouTube that this is his last video from Japan. Any guesses on where he might go next?