There used to be plenty of chain restaurants that offered an all-you-can-eat buffet every day. There were also local eateries that sprung up to get in on the game, too. But many of those chains have folded, and plenty of local smorgasbords have gone back to menus or gone out of business. You can probably think of plenty of reasons, many of them personal. Prices have soared. Eating as a competitive sport has gone out of style. And some have suffered from that Yogi Berra thing: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Yet there are other reasons that buffets have suffered and in many cases, died. Read about them at Vox, and you might swear off all-you-can-eat buffets forever.  

(Image credit: Varaine)

Tom Scott is at the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis University, where they are studying how to make artificial gravity. Why? To make real life space travel more like Star Trek. We know lack of normal gravity does weird things to a human body, and journeys to places like Mars would be a long time to float around weightless. Check out what they're doing about it. It's exceedingly weird. -via Digg

You see movie stars walking through a crowd and wonder why no one is staring at them. That's because this is a movie and they are extras, paid to make a background look as normal as possible without drawing attention away from the lead actors. It's one of the lowest-paid jobs in acting outside of internships, but if you are nondescript and flexible, and live near where the jobs are, you can make a living out of being an extra. There's more involved than just being yourself in the background. For example, sound must be kept to a minimum so that the dialogue can be recorded. Ambient sounds are added in later, so extras must be quiet, even when they're talking to each other in a "natural" setting.

This is generally one of the more difficult things for extras to get good at as many people find it unnatural to make silent vocalisations without overcompensating by moving their eyebrows too much or otherwise trying to use body language to make up for the fact that they aren’t making any noise when fake talking. To avoid this, beyond being conscientious of body movements, some extras practice nonsense phrases they can repeatedly mouth to one another. For a little fun, pay attention to talking extras in the background next time you watch a movie. You can almost always spot the newbies from the veteran pro extras because of things like this.

On that note, because most sounds are added in post-production, scenes involving parties, dancing, or cheering crowds are an especially surreal experience for extras, as the set is almost always completely silent while filming, other than the talent doing their thing. This poses another unique challenge for extras who are required to dance to a song they can’t hear, in time with other people listening to the same, non-existent song, all while pretending to ignore whatever the main actors are doing. And with cheering crowds, extras must be extremely careful not to actually make any clapping noises while they clap and otherwise raucously cheer silently.

It's not all silent, though. Sometimes extras are sequestered away from the action while they wait for their scene, so they can at least talk to each other. And the food is usually really good. Read about the work of an extra, and how to get those jobs, at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Beat Albrecht)

In February, the Wildlife Aid Foundation took in an orphan fox kit. The month-old female was all by herself for a few weeks, but then another orphaned fox game into care, and they took to each other immediately.  



Wildlife Aid tries to raise kits with as little human intervention as possible so they can be released back into the wild, therefore having other foxes around is crucial. There are now three fox kits, and you can keep up with them by opening the live webcam here.  -via Metafilter

The video starts by cutting off a word that I believe is "explosion." Then this three-year-old gives an intelligent and cogent explanation of what happened to the dinosaurs. This is Malene Lawrence's son, Curtis. He is now 13 years old and still studying paleontology. See another video where he volunteers at a traveling dinosaur museum at age 11. -via Digg

People have been fascinated with emperor penguins since they were first encountered in Antarctica. They were likely first studied by naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster in the 1770s, during James Cook’s second voyage to the Southern Ocean, which is why their species name is Aptenodytes forsteri. Surgeon Edward Wilson began studying them in 1901, and later left the 1911 Terra Nova expedition and walked 62 miles to steal penguin eggs. And in 1915, Ernest Shackleton's expedition lived with emperor penguins for months when their ship Endurance was stranded in floating ice. Ship's master Frank Worsley kept a diary of their interactions.

For the next five months, the men experienced all that a drifting ice floe can offer: cracks suddenly opening up beneath their tents, leopard seals lying in wait for a meal of penguin at the edge of the floe, a shortage of fresh water while all around lay a vast desert of sea ice too salty to drink. But in spite of all the dangers in those liminal spaces between ice and water, penguins proved to be their most cherished companions. Then, as winter closed in and the last remaining penguins and seals disappeared, the men were left with the loneliness of the sea ice. “Our craving,” wrote Worsley, “to see some living, breathing creature, any creature at all, may be imagined when I say that we missed them as though they had been our personal friends.”

Early explorers' delight in the penguins did not prevent them from eating them or taking them as specimens. Read about the early research into penguins at the Atlantic.

If you want to show off your fancy new high-speed revolving camera, you need another camera to show us how it works. This one is really impressive as it manipulates both time and space. Macro Room brings us some stunning slow-motion video of objects dropping into colored liquids. It's pretty! -via Laughing Squid

For quite a few years, the Name of the Year tournament has been the highlight of the various March Madness tournaments that have nothing to do with basketball. Now hosted at Deadspin, the tournament celebrates real people with unusual names, and uses your votes to winnow down the field until a winner is crowned. On the first day of voting, winners included number one seed Dr. Trentington Outhouse, Dijonnaise Norman, Syncere Friends, Storm Duck (who barely defeated Truman Peyote), Apollokreed Gardner, Manchester United MacGyver, Ionosphere Torres, and Pretzel Monteclaro. That was just one region of the first round. Can any of these beat number one seeds Surender Nada, Jizyah Shorts, or Ecclesiastical Denzel Washington? Follow the matchups each day here. -via Digg

(Image credit: Kristen O’Callaghan)

Aladdin has played on Broadway for five years now. To celebrate, five Genies gave an extra musical performance following Sunday's matinee. They include current Genie Michael James Scott, understudies Juwan Crawley and Deonte L. Warren, tour Genie Major Attaway, and Tony Award winner James Monroe Iglehart. -via Metafilter

The National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, now casually known as Fermilab, was built between 1967 and 1972. The first accelerator built was a tube shaped into a ring four miles long. The scientists working there bought a ferret in 1971, a small creature named Felicia, hoping that she would run through the tube.   

The NAL staff doted on Felicia, feeding her chicken, liver, fish heads, and raw hamburger—her favorite. Some employees even took Felicia to their home for the night when the mink farm she generally bunked at had no room for her.

Now, I don't want to spoil the story, which is quite interesting, but I will assure you that they did not bombard Felicia with accelerated particles. And the "tried" part of the title is a little misleading, because they really did put a ferret in Fermilab's particle accelerator.

(Image credit: Fermilab)

Batman, Captain America, Wolverine, Iron man, and Deadpool walk into a theater... That sounds like the beginning of a joke, and in a way it is. But it's also a music video for the NSYNC song "Bye Bye Bye," covered by the band Heavy Metal Heroes. If you've ever wanted to hear a metal version of the song, or even if you never considered it, this is for you. Thanos appears as well. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Most caterpillars will not sting you, but it's not a good idea to pick them up, because you could hurt them. A few will make you wish you'd never even thought about touching them. And strangely, they are the prettiest and most interesting of the many caterpillar species.

The saddleback moth caterpillar, Sibine stimuli, pictured above has a 'face' that scares off many a potential predator. Yet it will also send you a definite message that it is unhappy with your sticky fingers on it. In a purely defensive tactic it will give you a sting that will dissuade you from picking up another. You can see the ‘horns’ that the caterpillar has on each end of its body – these are barbed spines which are also known as urticating setae.

You'll have to click the link to see the saddleback moth caterpillar's face, since the picture above doesn't make it clear which way it's facing. It's only one of a dozen or so caterpillar species that look great -go ahead, take a picture if you see one, but don't touch them, at Ark in Space. -via Everlasting Blort

(Image credit: Flickr user Lisa Brown)

When you ask what the oldest disease is, you first need to define what you mean by disease. Then you have to qualify whether you are talking about disease in humans or any species. But even with all that out of the way, the answer is still a mystery. Gizmodo asked a variety of scientists who might be able to shed light on the subject, and they all said we don't know for sure, but they have some ideas. Anthropologist Scott S. Legge of Macalester College studies humans, but doesn't limit the question to them.

The oldest disease is probably a bacterial infection. I can imagine that, right along with the evolution of the first eukaryotic life, there was a prokaryote waiting to exploit it. This would have been the first evolutionary arms race, a fight that we’re still waging today. In addition, bacteria have ruled this planet since nearly the beginning. Every major adaptive radiation was likely accompanied by a parallel bacterial radiation. The Cambrian Explosion, cool, but think of all of the new species for bacteria to use. The Age of the Dinosaurs, ditto, but on land. The Planet of the Apes (the Miocene), probably saw the rise of many of the bacterial diseases that humans encounter today. And in the Anthropocene, humans are actually shaping the evolution of these bacteria through the use of antibiotics. Once again, bacteria dominate the planet.

Other scientists talked about evidence they've seen in fossil bones, about some of mankind's oldest maladies, and different classifications of disease. There's some interesting brain food about ancient diseases at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Angelica Alzona/Gizmodo)

In 1969, spiring artist David Singer set out to market some of his collages in San Francisco. He was steered to the office of legendary promoter Bill Graham at the Fillmore, who had artists working for him constantly, producing posters for his rock shows. Singer tells about that day.

At the time, Pat Hanks was Bill’s right-hand man, trusted enough to run interference for the boss when artists showed up with their portfolios hoping to get a shot at designing a Fillmore poster. That happened a lot. Designing a poster for Bill Graham was no guarantee that an unknown artist would become the next Victor Moscoso, but that was certainly the hope.

“Pat was backstage somewhere,” Singer continues, “but eventually he came out.” Apparently, Singer was a novel sight for Hanks. “He looked me up and down,” Singer recalls. “Back then, I had fairly short hair and didn’t wear the normal hippie attire. Plus, I was carrying this beautiful black art case, really professional looking, that was filled with my collages.” Hanks asked Singer to follow him to the other side of the big room outside Graham’s office. The two men walked together until they reached a door. Hanks opened it. “Inside was a smaller room, maybe more like a big closet,” Singer remembers, “and he said, ‘You can leave your artwork in here.’ And as I’m standing in the doorway, looking into this room, I see it’s filled with portfolios. I couldn’t believe it. There must have been 40 of them in there.”

It was, in short, the room where the pipe dreams of would-be rock-poster artists went to die.

“A lot of them were really hippie-looking portfolios,” Singer says, “made of two pieces of cardboard tied together, decorated with paisley designs—stuff like that. I said, ‘You mean here, leave my artwork here?’ And he said, ‘Well, Bill only looks at artwork when he needs another artist, and this is where we keep it.’ I said, ‘I can’t do that. I won’t have anything to show anybody else.’ While we were talking, Pat kept looking at my black art case, until finally he asked, ‘What do you have in there?’ So I opened it up and pulled out several collages. He said, ‘Well, that’s pretty interesting. How many do you have?’ I told him I wasn’t sure, but that it was probably about 20. He said, ‘Wait here,’ took two of the collages, and walked all the way back across the room into Bill’s office. In a minute or two, he poked his head out through the doorway and waved his hand, motioning me in.”

Singer had been invited into the inner sanctum, a stranger off the street without a resume, reputation, or appointment. Once inside, Graham needed no introduction. “He knew I knew who he was,” Singer says of his first meeting with Graham. “Everybody knew who he was. Before a show, Bill would walk up and down the line of people waiting out front and talk to them, and he always introduced the bands. He ran his club. He was in charge. Everybody recognized Bill Graham.” But Graham did not know Singer. “I remember that he asked me my name,” Singer says, “but I hesitated, being uncertain what to tell him, as I was not sure what last name I’d want to put on my artwork if it was ever published; it was Holsinger back then. He was interrupted by a phone call, and after he finished, I motioned toward the ‘Star of David’ dangling from a chain around his neck and said, ‘My name is David.’”

David Singer ended up producing more rock concert posters for Bill Graham than any other artist. His posters rarely had anything to do with the acts they promoted, but they got attention, and are now collector's items. Read David Singer's story and see a bunch of his posters at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: David Singer)