Cephalopod Week will be celebrated June 21-28. To get us excited for it, Science Friday asked various scientists why they love squids, octopuses, and nautiluses. The easy answer is because they are so interesting, but it seems each participant has a great story to share. Read more about the upcoming events of Cephalopod Week. -via (appropriately) Laughing Squid

What makes a great road trip? A few years ago, my family drove from our home in Kentucky to Kansas City, took a right, and then a left at Sioux Falls, and drove to Idaho, and then back again. We visited my husband's cousin, the St. Louis Arch, my college, the 1880 Town, the sculptures of Murdo, the Corn Palace, the presidents' statues in Rapid City, Badlands National Park, Wall Drug, Devils Tower, Yellowstone National Park, Mount Rushmore, Sturgis, a gemstone mine, and his mother. We called it the Great American Road Trip. If you want to limit your time and mileage to a weekend, there are plenty of scenic routes that go to out-of-the-way places and let you make memories. Outside Online details eleven of their staff's favorites routes for a memorable road trip in North America, in places ranging from Florida to British Columbia, but mostly doable in one weekend, or even in one day. -via Digg

(Image credit: inkknife_2000)

The mating habits of the earth's creatures are as varied as those creatures themselves. Some don't reproduce sexually at all, and those who do can surprise us. As with most lists, this one contains some things you've already read about at Neatorama, but not all of them. I bet you don't already know about barnacle penises.

Barnacles may have the most interesting penises in the animal kingdom. Their penises can stretch up to eight times the length of their body. And while many species' manhoods can change size, few can alter their shape. But researchers in Alberta found that barnacles that live in gentle waters have long and thin penises that are good for reach, while those in rough waters have short and wider penises that are better for holding off strong waves. The researchers then transported rough water barnacles to calmer waters and vice versa and found that after getting moved around, the barnacles adjusted their penis's shape to better fit their environment.

Read the rest of the surprising facts about animal sex at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory)

We've seen the staff at Boston Dynamics abuse their robots in the name of testing. This is a lot of that. But then something strange happens at about 1:30. The robot takes matters into his own hands! Gradually, you realize that this is not a Boston Dynamics video at all. It's from Corridor. Okay. Eventually they show us how they did it. You have to admire the work that went into this one. It would, in fact, make a great beginning for a dystopian film, but please, not a documentary!  -via Metafilter

We used to think that, barring injury or illness, the way our bones grow is determined by genetics. But scientists have determined that our living skeletons respond to not only environmental stresses, but the way we use them. In other words, our everyday activities can change our bodies' underlying structure.

This has led to a discipline known as “osteobiography" – literally “the biography of bones” – which involves looking at a skeleton to find out how its owner lived. It relies on the fact that certain activities, such as walking on two legs, leave a predictable signature behind, such as sturdier hip bones.

And from the discovery of a curious spiky growth on the back of many people’s skulls to the realisation that our jaws are getting smaller, to the enigmatic finding that German youths currently have narrower elbows than ever before, it’s clear that modern life is having an impact on our bones.  

One example is that strong men who do plenty of heavy lifting are building not only their muscles, but their bones as well. Scientists have also discovered some traits that are becoming more common and may be caused by modern activities like using a smartphone constantly, as in the case of spikes on the back of the skull, which were once rare, but now are found relatively often in the skulls of 18- to 30-year-olds. Read about more ways that modern life is changing our bones at BBC Future. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ankitshilu)

The cat knows there should be a card flying around somewhere in the room. Or several. This isn't a nice thing to do to the kitty, but the cat's reaction is quite comical. This guy might find some revenge in his shoes later on. -via Boing Boing

In the original Men in Black, Vincent D’Onofrio played Edgar, a man who is invaded by an alien cockroach and then storms into New York City. The alien changes what's left of Edgar into a unique mass of writhing weirdness so disgustingly funny that it's hard to remember there's an actual human underneath the prosthetics. The story behind how that scene was born is fascinating.  

Vincent D’Onofrio: A friend of mine, a producer, got in touch with me, and she said, “Barry Sonnenfeld is interested in you to read this script called Men in Black. The only thing is, he’s afraid you’re going to talk to him about acting. I told him I’d feel you out about it.” And I said, “I’m not gonna talk to him about acting at all.” I read the script, and I didn’t know what on earth to think of the part of Edgar. The script has nothing to do with my performance. An alien comes, he’s a giant cockroach at the end, and there’s no other description, no nothing. I found that super-intriguing. I thought, If Barry doesn’t want to talk to me about it, I probably have a lot of creative space.

So the scene went from nothing at all to the one you can never forget. Sonnenfeld and D’Onofrio tell the story of how they, along with effects master Rick Baker, crafted Edgar at Vulture.

If you are traveling on Elgin Street in Ottawa, it's obvious that construction is going on. But read the signs, anyway, because they will make any delays worthwhile. If the machinery is making too much noise to hear your radio, reading the signs from I Dig Elgin will put a song into your head. The community campaign is really into puns. The real risk here is if you cannot get that song out of your head later. Even reading this post will make you sing something inside. You can enlarge the picture here. -via reddit  

George Washington was a pious and thoughtful man, and always painfully aware of the influence his words had over the nation he helped to birth. His biggest goal after the Revolutionary War was to unite the disparate groups of Americans in order to make the concept of a democratic country work. His first "executive order" (although it wasn't called that) was to set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanksgiving and prayer. Washington's declaration mentioned the Supreme Being in several ways, but could you call it a Christian declaration? Education professor Sam Wineburg and research psychologist Eli Gottlieb talked to a variety of clergymen, scientists, and historians about Washington's public words on religion. Washington's writings turned out to be like a Rorschach inkblot: most people see what they want to see. But the historians saw the political side.

Historians were not deaf to Washington’s religious references. While the clergy and the scientists saw them as evidence of Washington’s devotion, the historians stressed the president’s precision in crafting a vocabulary that would unite the dizzying array of Protestant denominations in post-revolutionary America without alienating the small but important groups of Catholics, Jews, and freethinkers dotting the American landscape. It was precisely because he understood that Americans did not believe the same thing that Washington was scrupulous in choosing words that would be acceptable to a wide spectrum of religious groups.

Read about Washington's carefully-chosen words and what they mean at Smithsonian.

I made this for no one and no reason. Plz Enjoy....

"Jonathan Frakes Asks You Things" pic.twitter.com/A7Wt5MXP39

— Zane Golia (@zbgolia) June 11, 2019

After Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jonathon Frakes was the host of the TV series Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. His introductions had plenty of questions, which were pretty bizarre when you stack them together, as in this supercut from Zane Golia. -via Mashable

Alphabet books have been with us almost as long as the printing press, because children need to learn their letters. But x-rays have only been around since 1895, and the xylophone wasn't widely known by that name until the 20th century. Illustrating the letter X before that was a challenge, one that was approached in several different ways. While A is for apple and B is for bear, ball, berry, baby, and any number of everyday things, it was quite a stretch to use an X. The Persian king Xerxes and Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, got into way more books than they deserved because of their names, as did Xanthus and St. Xystus (which is more often spelled Sixtus). Some early readers used "expensive" or "axe," which is cheating. Others just threw their hands up, like the page shown above from an 1830 alphabet book, which appears to hope no one notices. See a roundup of the treatment of X before x-rays at the Public Domain Review. -via Metafilter

A new science paper details archaeological evidence of ritual inhalation of cannabis fumes at a burial site in the highlands of western China.

Evidence of this practice comes from Jirzankal Cemetery in Central Asia’s Pamir Mountains, says a team led by archaeologist Yimin Yang of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Chemical residues on wooden burners unearthed in tombs there provide some of the oldest evidence to date of smoking or inhaling cannabis fumes, the researchers report online June 12 in Science Advances. Rituals aimed at communicating with the dead or a spirit world likely included cannabis smoking, the team speculates.

The find is significant because, while marijuana has been cultivated for at least 6,000 years, the early versions did not contain much THC and were used for fiber and oil. Exactly when the plant began to be cultivated for higher mind-altering content is unknown, but now we have a marker for that timeline. And the location of the dig is a crossroad for the Silk Road. Read more about the find at Science News.

(Image credit: X. Wu/Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, hundreds of women -and some men- were tortured and executed for witchcraft during the age of witch hunts. It was an accusation you really couldn't defend yourself against. Brian A. Pavlac explains what happened and why in this TED-Ed talk. -via Laughing Squid

If you have a few years behind you, think about what TV was like when you were a kid. The landscape has changed a lot since then. Those changes came about because someone somewhere took a chance and did something different, whether it was a method of production, an experimental format, imaginative casting, our writing that pushed the envelope. Vox takes us through 25 episodes of TV series that broke new ground, in chronological order, with an explanation for each and a link to watch when a video is available. -via Digg

Were you able to experience the total solar eclipse in 2017? Astrophotographer Phil Hart recorded that eclipse for those who couldn't be there. He used 12 remote-control cameras stationed across a wide area, and spent two years stitching the footage together.

The video features footage from 7 out of 12 cameras I had running on the day. Six were onsite at South Menan Butte, Idaho. The other two cameras were at remote locations established in the days leading up to the eclipse: Table Mountain, Wyoming looking over the Tetons and another in the foothils of the Beaverhead Mountains (south of Blue Dome) looking over the Snake River Plains of Idaho.

Learn more about this astonishing video at Hart's website. -via Laughing Squid