We knew that Auralnauts was planning a series about Larry, a previously obscure Star Wars character who looks a lot like Ewan McGregor. It appears they made their fundraising goal, because episode one is here! The first three minutes are a less-than explanatory montage setting up the story. Then Larry explains his party background to Luke Skywalker. They managed to take clips from many different Star Wars films plus Obi-Wan Kenobi and make it a lot of fun. The first episode mainly deals with Larry trying to borrow some cash. Auralnauts say there will be six episodes in all, just like Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries. -via reddit

We have regular banks for storing our money. We have blood banks and milk banks to distribute life saving bodily fluids. We have sperm banks. The latest idea for storage that might be of benefit to one's health is a poop bank. It has become more common to treat digestive problems caused by the bacteria Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) by cleaning out a patient's digestive biome with antibiotics, and then performing a fecal transplant to establish a new colony of digestive bacteria. But there's the possibility that another person's bacterial colony might not be best for our bodies. A new science paper from researchers at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital posit that it may be time to establish the option of storing one's own poop when they are young and healthy for possible autologous transplant is and when they ever need it. They call it a stool bank. In fact, there's already one in the US.

Yeah, there are quite a few unknowns. What conditions should a, er, stool deposit be kept under for years? Would the essential bacteria survive freezing, drying, or long term storage at all? How much energy would such a project require? And would it be only available to the wealthy, like umbilical cord blood, eggs, or frozen heads? Read more about the concept of a stool bank at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Flickr user mary hodder)

In Altoona, Pennsylvania, they serve pizza in squares with each portion holding a slice of salami and a square of American cheese. St. Louis pizza is made on unleavened bread and topped with Provel cheese instead of mozzarella. Colorado's giant pizzas are sweetened with honey. We hear a lot about New York style and Chicago style pizzas, but many places have their own pizza traditions, which you might think are weird or which you might want to plan a road trip around. Each style has a story behind it, even if that story is lost to time. Check out six different pizza styles that go against the grain of the chains, and where to get them, at Atlas Obscura.

We don't know which is the "last" of anything until quite a bit of time passes afterward. The last human born will be someone we will never know about, because that means the human race will die out. Kurzgesagt doesn't have all the answers, but presents some important ideas in a thought experiment. There are a lot of variables in even speculating about a species dying out, especially the one species doing the speculating. We are currently doing our best to destroy our earth, but we are also exploring the idea of living on other worlds. We may slowly (or quickly) evolve into something that is a bit different, but more likely to survive.

While it may be depressing to think about the end of humanity, the best case scenarios are unimaginably far into the future. Kurzgesagt is actually quite optimistic about our future, if we can make it through the next couple hundred years. The subject is only ten and a half minutes long, the rest is promotional.

Wow, there are a lot of superhero movies if you can rank a list of the 50 best! Besides the two dozen or so Marvel Cinematic Universe films of the last 15 years or so, there are plenty of Batman, Superman, and other DC comics films. And then there are superhero movies you didn't think of right off, like Robocop and The Incredibles. Yes, animation is represented in this list, too, and some films from outside the US. And more of them are based on comic books than you may even know. You might agree, or more likely, disagree with the rankings, but after you calm down you'll have fun reading about some movies you haven't seen in a ranked list from Rolling Stone. While I can't argue about the ranking myself, I'm happy to say that I have actually seen four of the top ten. -via Digg

(Photo illustration by Matt Cooley)

Two weeks later, our emu is still carefully sitting atop his nest of adopted goose, duck, and chicken eggs.. he may actually hatch something. In emus, only the males incubate eggs and care for babies, the females lay eggs and bounce; that's the end of parenting for them. pic.twitter.com/hQsgnn03SZ

— Foxfeather Zenkova (@foxfeather) May 27, 2022

Foxfeather Zenkova is a wildlife rehabilitator and educator, and has a coop. In this coop are chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks, and now an emu. The male emu is just doing what comes natural, as emu females lay eggs and then take off, leaving the male to warm the eggs and then raise the young. This guy takes his responsibilities seriously, even though they aren't his eggs, or even his species. On June 23rd, the eggs began to hatch!

The best dad and his tiny child. pic.twitter.com/teggWmFwxq

— Foxfeather Zenkova (@foxfeather) June 24, 2022

He seems to be quite a patient and caring father. The chicks that have hatched so far are chickens; the other species will take longer. Before this is all over, this one emu dad could have his own menagerie!

Good morning from BB-8 and too many tiny emus!

You can hear him hissing and growling, the babies hiding behind him because the dogs were with me as I was doing morning chores.

Any dog could be a dingo and is not to be trusted (if you're a new emu dad, anyway). pic.twitter.com/RrxzGcTIaj

— Foxfeather Zenkova (@foxfeather) June 28, 2022

There are more pictures of this family you can see in the Twitter thread.  -via Metafilter 

Considering this True Facts video is about beavers, Ze Frank plows through it with an astonishing lack of sexual innuendo. Maybe he wants to be sure it will be picked up by external sites. Works for me. That said, it's quite interesting. Beavers are rodents, but you'd never know it by their behavior. They swim, eat trees, and build dams. Here we find out why and how they do those things, which includes taking a deep dive into the structure and composition of teeth. I now know more about horses' teeth because I watched a video about beavers. Yeah, there are jokes, but even without them, this would be interesting. There is a one-minute ad in the middle.   

You most likely never heard about monkeypox until last month when an outbreak was reported in Europe and America, but the disease has been around a long time. It was first identified as a distinct disease in 1958, when a band of monkeys in Copenhagen, Denmark, were found to have it. The first human ascertained to suffer from monkeypox was a baby in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1970. The disease is believed to be endemic in some nations of Africa, and has probably been around for thousands of years. It's not even particular to monkeys. The first person in the US to be infected was a three-year-old who was bitten by her pet prairie dog in 2003, and the virus has been found in a variety of animals.  

Monkeypox is somewhat similar to smallpox, although not as deadly. There is some evidence that a smallpox vaccine will give some protection against the virus that causes monkeypox. And that's caused a run on smallpox vaccine in the northern countries, leaving Africa with fewer reserves. In fact, some experts relate the current fuss about monkeypox to the AIDS scare or the smallpox eradication program. Read what we need to know about monkeypox in a short history here.

(Image credit: NIAID)

Jordan Durrenberger brings us a brutally epic LEGO stop-motion animation illustrating the Battle of Verdun. That battle between the French and the Germans lasted for almost ten months in 1916, and was the longest of World War I, leaving the two nations with more than 300,000 soldiers dead and even more injured. The LEGO fight is about 6:40 long, then we get a short lesson about the historical battle. The animation is spectacular in its scope and action, from the opening artillery shelling to the hand-to-hand combat in the trenches. While the fight itself is a horror, the stop-motion recreation is a masterpiece, with as much detailed accuracy as is possible with LEGO minifigs. -via Boing Boing

We go to the movies to escape real life. Films make us feel a wide range of emotions, from joy to fear to sentimentality to awe to a satisfying sense of justice. While death and destruction often give us a cathartic thrill on screen, moviegoers don't want to see it the way it happens in real life. Movies give us spectacular, quick, and clean scenes of death, when the reality is much more difficult. For one thing, it is often very hard to murder someone, unless you just shoot them, and that's, sadly, not visually dramatic enough for all films. The good news is that you are not likely to be present at the number of murders or disasters you see on film, or even medical deaths.

But that's how the general public gets a mistaken view of how death works. In real life, death is prolonged and rather gross, two things that filmmakers tend to avoid. Read about five mistaken ideas we've gotten used to by watching movie deaths at Cracked.     

Remember reading about tulip mania? The Netherlands is still a hub for flower sales hundreds of years later, and the biggest flower market is the Royal FloraHolland auction in Aalsmeer. The flower business in Aalsmeer happens at an insanely large scale. The auction itself was known for using a unique clock system, where bidders timed their offers to a clock that counted down the price. So the "clock" actually measured money instead of time. Tom Scott visits the flower auction to explain what happened to the Dutch auction clock, which once drew so many tourists, and is now defunct. The story takes only six minutes; the rest is an ad.

An electric car ready to hit the market this fall has something even better than electric power. Lightyear 0 is the world's first solar powered car! Instead of a battery, the car features a solar array across the roof and hood, collecting power from sunlight. This gives it a range of around 70 kilometers (43 miles) per day in optimal conditions. Don't park it in the garage or under a tree! If you live in a sunny area, you could go months without having to charge the vehicle. But if you do need to charge it up, you can just plug it into an outlet at home instead of driving to a charging station.

So what's the catch? The first model, to be sold in Europe, will be quite expensive, at about €250,000. The company hopes to generate enough interest to expand production and eventually bring the price down to around €30,000. That will take a few years. Read more about Lightyear 0 at My Modern Met. -via Damn Interesting

The problem with crowning anything as "the world's oldest" is that first you have to settle on a definition of the thing you're talking about, and there will always be disagreement about those definitions. What, exactly, is the difference between a "park" and an "amusement park"? And when does a space cross over from one to the other?

Dyrehavsbakken, an amusement park north of Copenhagen in Denmark, is called the world's oldest amusement park. The history of the park began when a natural spring was discovered in 1583, more than 400 years ago. People began to congregate around the spring, which offered better quality water than Copenhagen. Crowds meant an opportunity for vendors, and those vendors knew they would sell more if there was entertainment available, so that was arranged. The history of the park was boosted when the king established an animal park, but it was later made private for royalty, and then opened to the public again. Any of these events could interrupt a historical timeline that enshrined Dyrehavsbakken as the world's oldest amusement park. But no one is going to argue about the title, unless they have a better case for another park.

As it is, the history of Dyrehavsbakken is quite interesting, and shows how some businesses just naturally evolve over time instead of springing up from whole cloth. You can read the story of Dyrehavsbakken at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Insights Unspoken)

After a hiatus of two years due to the pandemic, the World's Ugliest Dog contest has returned to the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California. The fair will close tonight, and the newly-crowned winner of the World's Ugliest Dog contest is a Chinese crested/Chihuahua mix named Mr. Happy Face. He may be ugly, but Mr. Happy Face is very much loved by his human, Janeda Banelly. She adopted the 18-year-old dog last year, even though he has health problems and wasn't expected to live long. He had been at the shelter for quite some time after being rescued from a hoarder situation.  

When I first met him, he was the happiest creature that I had ever met. He hobbled up to me and chose me.  I vowed that day, he would be so loved that he would never remember how awful his previous life had been. Love, kindness and mommy kisses have helped him defy the anticipated short life that we all expected him to have with our family.  

Read the stories behind Mr. Happy Face and several other finalists at the contest page. It's deplorable that these dogs are disfigured or unhealthy because of poor breeding techniques and/or abuse, but at least these few have found loving homes.  -via Boing Boing

See the World's Ugliest Dogs from previous years.

The story went global last week that the Jumbo Floating Restaurant in Hong Kong was towed out of the city and then sank. On Thursday, the owners of the boat walked back that story. In a statement to the Hong Kong government, they said that the restaurant was still in the water off the Paracel Islands.

The apparent shift in messaging follows a request from Hong Kong's Marine Department for the restaurant group to provide a written report into the incident as part of an initial investigation.

A spokesman for Aberdeen Restaurant Enterprises Limited told CNN on Friday it had always used the term "capsize" to describe the incident and had never claimed the vessel had sunk.

Most dictionaries define "capsize" as "to turn bottom up; overturn." The exact condition of the restaurant is still unclear. The clarification raises more questions than it answers, and now there are calls for further investigation. However, the incident occurred in international waters, as the restaurant was being towed to Cambodia. Read more on this mysterious turn of events at CNN. -via Digg