Less than a week to go until the opening ceremonies for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, and fashion is at the forefront. The stunning uniforms that the team from Mongolia will be wearing at the opening ceremonies have gone viral for their opulent elegance. Designed by Michel & Amazonka, it took 20 hours of work to craft each uniform, but the result caught the eye of the world already. Get a closer look at the details.



Take a look at what a few other countries will be wearing at the opening ceremonies. The USA is going with Ralph Lauren, as usual, with red, white and blue blazers over blue jeans. Britain's uniforms look like a 1950s sock hop. And the French uniforms are very French, although I don't understand why the women are wearing blazers with no sleeves. Vogue give us their picks for the best Olympic uniforms from a fashion designer's perspective, not limited to the kits for the opening ceremonies.

Every place developed a staple crop that serves to keep a population from starvation: Europe grew wheat, Asia has rice, North America has corn, Africa has yams, and South America is where we got potatoes. Successful societies learn to allocate those crops to bolster their population. The potato allowed the Inca Empire to build its armies and those massive cities. When potatoes were first exported to Europe, it made all the difference in several nations for feeding people (potatoes are more nutritious than wheat) and for a nation's defense. Defense? It all came down to the fact that potatoes are grown underground, and they can stay there until they are needed, while wheat must be harvested and stored for future use. This fact threw a wrench into the military strategies of invading nations. Read how the strategy of growing potatoes changed the history of the world at JStor. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Maja Dumat)

Some feuds start with a petty slight that turns into a war of resentment, betrayal, backstabbing, and animosity that can last for years. Here we learn about ten personal spats that had long-term consequences. Some were instigated by things that might not be petty at all, like when a guy you love marries your rival or a war destroys your business, but that fact that it got our into the public means it got out of control. And when a friendship ends over sincerely-held but disparate beliefs, that's not really petty. Some of these you've heard of, like the Dassler brothers who split their family shoe company because they couldn't get along, and the two paleontologists who turned their rivalry into intense hatred.

This video has a 90-second skippable ad at 4:54. At that point, I had to abandon the closed captions, because they were way ahead of the video. Your mileage may vary.

People sometimes wonder out loud why artificial banana flavoring doesn't taste like the bananas you eat fresh. It's because banana flavoring was developed in the mid-19th century, even before Americans knew what real bananas tasted like. That doesn't mean that the flavoring was wrong; in fact it was very close to the taste of real bananas. But those bananas were the Gros Michel variety. That's the banana that Americans went crazy over when they began to be imported on a large scale. Gros Michel was the type of banana you found in stores up until the mid-1950s. Then it was replaced by the Cavendish variety, which is what we have in every grocery store now. And it tastes different.

Brandon Summers-Miller wanted to taste a Gros Michel banana to see how different that variety is from the ubiquitous Cavendish strain. It was difficult to find any, but he managed to have some shipped to him. Then he tested Cavendish and Gros Michel bananas in old recipes that were designed with the Gros Michel banana in mind, namely bananas Foster and banana pudding. Note for the banana pudding, he made sure to use vanilla pudding instead of artificially-flavored banana pudding for the comparison. The taste tests revealed what we have lost. Read about that comparison, and the history of banana varieties at Epicurious. And if you want to know what a Michel Gros banana tastes like, try a piece of artificially-flavored banana candy. Or go to a farmer's market in Southeast Asia. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Juan Emilio Prades Bel)

Dire Straits released the song "Money for Nothing" in 1985 and it went to #1 for three weeks, becoming the biggest song of the year. But it also holds up well almost 40 years later. Ask anyone why, and you might get six different answers. It's got a great beat that you can dance to, a killer guitar riff, a story to tell, a hot cultural reference (for 1985), and Sting's unmistakable vocals parodying his own song. Oh yeah, and a video that was way ahead of its time. None of those things came about by accident. Well, some of them did. Actually, most of them did. We know that the idea came from an actual conversation Mark Knopfler heard in a store, but the rest of the production was a series of wild stories. Imagine recording a song in the Caribbean, and what do you know, Sting just happens to be there vacationing that week. David Hartley tells the story of the many ideas that strangely converged into one song that become "Money for Nothing."

We once speculated on the reasons that the Neanderthals died out, and came up with plenty of possibilities. Maybe modern humans killed them off for their territory, or they were wiped out by diseases brought in my modern humans, or they just couldn't compete for resources. Then we found out by genetic studies that homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, and now most of us carry around a little Neanderthal DNA.  

More precise studies are now possible because we have decoded the genome of some actual Neanderthal remains. These show that Neanderthals that lived hundred of thousands of years ago already carried a chunk of homo sapiens DNA, even more than the traces of Neanderthal DNA we have now. The studies suggest that interbreeding between the two peoples began as far back as 250,000 years ago. The implication is that maybe Neanderthals didn't disappear because of some calamity. Considering their population numbers compared to homo sapiens over time, they may have merely been absorbed into modern human communities until their genome was diminished to the fraction that we carry today. Read how the research points to this possibility at Live Science. -via Strange Company

If your day is not going all that great, a little polka music will fix that right up! "Weird Al" Yankovic just dropped a new polka medley with the classic oom-pah beat and accordion you'd expect. But these aren't classic polka tunes. "Polkamania" has 13 polka versions of relatively new pop songs like "WAP" by Cardi B. ft. Megan Thee Stallion and "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X and "Thank You, Next" from Ariana Grande. Not only that, but Yankovic recruited a slate of animators you may be familiar with to illustrate those tunes, some of them who came to his attention when they made Weird Al fan videos. I was hooked as soon as Cyriak Harris' unmistakable style led things off. Some of them snuck in references to other Weird Al songs that only true fans will recognize. You'll find a list of the songs and a list of the animators at the YouTube page.

"Bond. James Bond. I'm not like other spies." Most of us never get the chance to see our jobs portrayed on the silver screen, because they aren't that interesting to the general public. Those who do complain that Hollywood doesn't get their profession right at all. That applies very much to James Bond, the fictional MI6 agent who is the best known spy of all. Real intelligence agents can easily see that Bond is too flashy, too self-sufficient, and too adventurous to make it in the real world business of espionage. But a realistic portrayal of the profession wouldn't draw millions into a theater.

Alma Katsu is a former US intelligence officer, or what people refer to as a spy, who turned to writing spy novels. She and her former colleagues have a love-hate relationship with James Bond. But as an author, she understands why the fictional version is portrayed like a superhero, while the real work is carried out by heroes who never get recognized. Read what she has to say about Bond at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting

In 1997, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality notified Stephen Tvedten that he was in violation of regulations because of two unauthorized dams built on his property, and gave him six weeks to remove them. Tvedten did not build those dams, nor did a named tenant build them. It was the beavers who did it. Tvedten was an expert on pest control, and had written several books on eco-friendly ways to manage pests. He knew his beavers. So he wrote a letter to the department in response. The letter did its job, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality dropped the case.  

The letter brought Tvedten some notoriety over the years, never more so than when Letters of Note published it in 2012. When that post went viral, MLive interviewed Tvedten, who said he was more famous for that letter that he dashed off in ten minutes than for anything else he's ever done. Tvedten died in 2018. His letter was selected for a Letters Live show in New York, read by Peter Dinklage.

A PhD candidate is buried in science for years on end. Their final dissertation, or thesis, is presented in a precise format, full of math and facts that have been checked over and over. But there's one place that a scientist can write prose from the heart, and that is the acknowledgement section of the dissertation. Tabitha Carvan dove into the archives of the Australian National University College of Science and found that PhD acknowledgements contain a certain kind of poetry.

The rest of the thesis contains careful, reasoned findings and figures, but on this one page, the author-scientist can release all the pent-up emotion they couldn’t express elsewhere.

They’re like an explosion in a lab.

Carvan discovered that acknowledgements written before 1980 or so were very businesslike, but more recent ones drew a picture of the scientist who wrote these things in their head over and over for years. She gathered quite a few segments of poetic and representative samples for us, from the simple to the heartfelt to the funny to those that combined all of the above. Just a line or two tells us about the real person behind all that science in the rest of the paper. You won't be able to read them all without getting a little verklempt.  -via Metafilter

The Boeing company has been around for more than 100 years, since William E. Boeing became interested in planes. For most of that time, the company was the gold standard in aircraft manufacturing. The Boeing company bought up other aviation companies any time it got the chance, and incorporated their experts into its research and development division. In the 1990s, Boeing acquired its most notorious rival, McDonnell Douglas. Many in the industry say that merger was the turning point for Boeing, although the general public wouldn't know for years. Boeing's corporate culture had always deferred to its engineering experts, while McDonnell Douglas was run to produce corporate profits. Lately, we've seen which culture prevailed. 

In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing commercial airliners crashed catastrophically. Then in 2024, the company has experienced a spate of parts falling off its planes left and right. What's going on? Weird History tells us what we know about the Boeing company from its inception to today's troubles.

The Olympics, or at least the broadcasts of the Olympics, have always been about the stories behind the athletes. We love the long shots, the lovable losers, and the human drama of sports. Hollywood loves those stories, too, and there have been many movies involving Olympic athletes and the their drive to compete with the world's best. But the Olympic games are a great backdrop for fiction, too. The 2024 Olympic Summer Games in Paris begin in ten days, so a list of ten Olympic movies will give you some inspiration every evening until the opening ceremonies. Half of these movies are about the winter games, which may cool you off. Seven are based on true stories, and three are comedies. Two are actually comedies based on true stories, so you know the story is unforgettable. The movies aren't ranked, but are instead listed in chronological order. All have trailers, which strangely chronicles the evolution of the movie trailer if you watch them all in order. Check out all ten movies at Mental Floss.

This video from the DJI drone company lets you climb Mount Everest from the comfort of your living room, without paying the $100K or so cost that climbers incur and with no danger of dying. And it only takes four minutes!

The trip begins at the Khumbu Icefall just above Base Camp. The drone follows the South Col route, which is a bit tamer than the North Col. Now, the drone didn't do this in one trip, rather, many segments were stitched together. There are still limits on what drones can do in extreme cold. The latter part of the trip is a little disappointing because the drone camera focused on the ground instead of the peak, but it's still an epic journey.

DJI is involved in a pilot program, no pun intended, to use drones to remove garbage from the upper parts of Everest. The specs of the drone used in this video are posted at the YouTube page.  -via Metafilter

The American Heart Association tells us that with a healthy diet of natural foods, we don't need to add any sugar at all. But they recommend that we limit added sugar to six teaspoons a day for women, and nine for men. "Added sugar" doesn't mean we spoon it into foods ourselves; it means the sugar in all that processed stuff we consume. A 12-ounce can of soda contains about ten teaspoons of sugar, so that's over the recommended limit already. The average American consumes 17 teaspoons of added sugar every day!  

Redditor Smacpats111111 made a visualization of the estimated added sugar per capita for each US state. The data came from a 2023 study citing estimates taken in 2010 and 2015. My home state of Kentucky comes in first, with an average of 21.2 teaspoons of added sugar per day! I'm not surprised, as this is where some people consider a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew to be a single serving. But if you live in a state that is the darkest green on this map, don't let that make you feel superior. The residents of your state are still consuming about twice the recommended amount of added sugar. -via Digg

The US is in an obesity epidemic. If you aren't obese, you are still most likely a bit overweight. How do we lose weight? For years, we've been told it's a matter of diet and exercise. More updated research tells us diet is much more likely to work than exercise, and Kurzgesagt explains why.

But that doesn't mean you can swear off exercise, far from it. Exercise may be only a minor factor in losing weight, but it's a major factor in just about everything else to do with your health. So if you want to lose weight, you'll have to pay attention to what and how much you eat. All of us need to exercise, no matter what our weight is, due to the constant expenditure of energy our bodies have. That expenditure must be channeled in the right direction. The length of the video is 9:19; the rest is an ad.