Don't look! Don't look! Okay, now look. Nerdist brings us a parody of the Netflix movie Bird Box with the monster revealed! This monster is from Sesame Street, though, so it's not all that terrifying. But it might induce you to ...giggle. Watch it at Nerdist. -via Geeks Are Sexy

We brought you the story of the Linder family, who is trying to stop a genetic disease from passing to another generation. Patrick Burleigh also suffered from a genetic disease, one which meant he began puberty as a baby, just as his father and grandfather did.

Having a mutant LHCGR gene leads to what doctors now call familial male-limited precocious puberty, an extremely rare disease that affects only men because you have to have testicles, which is why it’s also called testotoxicosis. The condition tricks the testicles into thinking the body is ready to go through puberty — so wham, the floodgates open and the body is saturated with testosterone. The result is premature everything: bone growth, muscle development, body hair, the full menu of dramatic physical changes that accompany puberty. Only instead of being 13, you’re 2.

Testotoxicosis affects fewer than one in a million men, and a leading expert estimates that we may only number in the hundreds. Being an anomaly for having pubes when you’re still breastfeeding isn’t typically something one brags about, which is why, like my forefathers, I spent the majority of my life hiding it, lying about it, repressing it, and avoiding it. This feeling of freakishness, of being strange and different, persisted well into adulthood, such that I refused to talk about it with anyone other than close friends and family.

Unlike his ancestors, Burleigh was studied and treated for the condition starting when he was three years old. Eventually, he married and he and his wife began the process of becoming parents through in-vitro fertilization. That's when Burleigh was confronted with the possibility of testing embryos for the mutant LHCGR gene. Would he want to eliminate any embryos that carried it? Unlike the Linders, his condition isn't fatal. To make the decision, he retraced his life dealing with testotoxicosis, and the lives of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather (who was the youngest soldier to serve in World War I). That gives us a fascinating story that you can read at The Cut. -via Digg

(Image courtesy of Patrick Burleigh)  

Last fall, there was another Halloween sequel. Or was it a remake? It had the same characters, the same name, and virtually the same plot as the 1978 movie, but set 40 years afterward. Halloween is the 11th movie in the series, but it was designed to be the "real" sole sequel to the 1978 original. Confused? You'll be even more confused after watching this Honest Trailer for Halloween from Screen Junkies.

More and more people are being classified as obese, now about 1.9 billion around the world. Our pets are also becoming more obese. Much of that is easy to understand, as people often overfeed pets and don't give them enough exercise. But obesity is rising in dogs and cats even when they don't overeat or under-exercise. What's going on? Research on pet obesity is uncovering several potential answers, like genetic links, the quality of our food, and even the use of antibiotics.

The good news is that animals could help us disentangle those environmental factors, too. Factory farm animals are traditionally fattened with antibiotics that transform their gut so they need less food to gain weight. New regulations have pushed antibiotic use in UK food-producing animals to their lowest level since data were first published and the EU has banned antibiotics as growth promoters in feed.

If antibiotics fatten animals, could they be doing the same to humans?

The answer to that question lies in your gut. The microbiome describes the genomes of the vast colonies of micro-organisms – bacteria, fungi, protozoa, viruses, all 100 trillion of them – living in your digestive system. This community influences your weight: germ-free mice that receive gut microbes from an obese (human) twin gain more weight and body fat than mice that receive microbes from the lean twin. An imbalance in the microbiome possibly leads to not only obesity, but irritable bowel syndrome, coeliac disease, and type 2 diabetes.

Read about other research findings on obesity in people and their pets at BBC Future.

(Image credit: Tripp)

If you have one of those jobs where you sit at a desk (or even worse, in a cubicle) and do things that are hard to describe to people outside the business, then you need something to cheer you up. Prince Michael works in an office full of cats. Bored cats. So bored that they resort to making music with office supplies.  -via Tastefully Offensive

We've seen ice carousels, spinning disks of ice that were cut with chainsaws and set in motion with rotary tools or outboard motors. This is different. A giant spinning disc of ice appeared on its own in the Presumpscot River in Westbrook, Maine. Is it an artifact of an alien landing? No, just a rare phenomenon that's been seen before.

Curiosity about giant, rotating ice disks dates to at least the late 1800s. Research on prior instances of the phenomenon, published in Physical Review E in 2016, found that as melting ice sinks off disks it “goes downwards and also rotates horizontally, so that a vertical vortex is generated under the ice disk.” Speaking with the the Press Herald, Bowdoin College in Brunswick associate physics professor Mark Battle suggested the Westbrook ice disk’s rotation could also be the result of thick ice moving with the river current, getting trapped, and grinding against the shoreline.

However, this disc is particularly large, estimated at 100 yards across. So far, the only ones brave enough to ride on it are some ducks. Read more about the disc and see a video at Earther.

(Image credit: Tina Radel/City of Westbrook)

Working dogs Roy, Lass, and Celt show off their teamwork in getting their ducks in a row. Or, rather, getting their ducks to go exactly where the dogs want -and you might be surprised where they take those ducks. The little girl's acrobatics are pretty good, too! This happened in Livingston, Tennessee. Those are good dogs. -Thanks, xoxoxoBruce!

If you want to know who built the first rock 'n' roll guitar, you first must define what a rock 'n' roll guitar really is. If we mean solid-body electric guitars, they evolved in increments from the classic acoustic, or "Spanish" guitar. Those developments are attributed mainly to two men: Leo Fender and Les Paul. They were friends, competitors, and rivals of guitar craft in Southern California in the 1940s and '50s. Ian Port wrote the book The Birth of Loud about how the rock guitar came about.    

Port’s passion for his subject grew from his love of music and, in particular, guitars. “I’ve been a guitar player pretty much my whole life,” Port told me when we spoke over the phone recently. “I think I got my first electric guitar, a Peavey Predator, when I was 10 years old. It was a beginner model, a Strat copy, but a really nice guitar. I still pick it up and play it sometimes.”

“Strat,” as in “Stratocaster,” a model introduced by the Fender Electric Instrument Company in 1954. “Strat,” as in the guitar Buddy Holly purchased in Lubbock, Texas, in the spring of 1955, and subsequently took with him when he conquered the UK in 1958. On that tour, Holly’s trio, the Crickets, were booked on a television variety show called “Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium,” which Port describes in The Birth of Loud as “the British equivalent of Ed Sullivan, but with even worse sound.” Watching the live telecast on the evening of March 2 were a couple of teenagers from Liverpool named John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who, Port writes, were “mesmerized by the curves of Buddy’s guitar.” The two were also impressed enough by Holly’s music and style that they changed the name of their incubating band from the Quarrymen to the Beetles, before changing it once more—Lennon, a pathological punster, thought the word “beat” was a better allusion to the music of the day than the name of a bug.

The Strat, therefore, was a guitar that the Peavey Electronics Corporation of Meridian, Mississippi, would have wanted to copy. But Leo Fender’s first guitar, the Esquire? Not so much. As Port describes it, when the Esquire was introduced in the summer of 1950 at the National Association of Music Merchants convention in Chicago, the instrument was derided by competitors as a “toilet seat with strings.” In fact, the Esquire did have a lot in common with crap...

Leo Fender and Les Paul were only the most famous of the luthiers who developed rock 'n' roll guitars. Paul Bigsby, Adolph Rickenbacker, Ted McCarty, and George Fullerton all had a hand in making the instrument that changed music forever. Read the history of the rock 'n' roll guitar at Collectors Weekly.

UCLA gymnast Katelyn Ohashi, a two-time All American and former member of USA Gymnastics' Junior National Team, scored a perfect 10.0 at the 2019 Collegiate Challenge on Saturday with this awesome routine. Besides her incredible sequences of flips, she exudes a contagious joy in what she does. It was the 6th perfect 10 of her career. -via Digg

Dronestagram has announced the winners of their annual drone photography competition. Of thousands of entries, the three winning photographs are announced here. The top prize goes to zekedrone for the above image called Hungry Hippos taken in Tanzania. The other finalists are well worth a look, too.  



Bored Panda has a ranked gallery of the 68 finalists in the Dronestagram contest.

Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés wanted to study human sex and violence up close, so he conceived of an experiment that may remind you of modern-day reality TV shows. In 1973, he gathered ten young and attractive volunteers to make an ocean voyage on a raft together with no chance to escape. Genovés expected alliances and conflicts to develop, which he could study in detail.

Genovés had even grander motives in planning his voyage: he sought to diagnose and cure world violence. To that end, he placed ads in international newspapers and made his selection from respondents, choosing a crew of strangers from different races and religions so that he could create a microcosm of the world. Among the five women and five men were a Japanese photographer, an Angolan priest, a French scuba diver, a Swedish ship’s captain, an Israeli doctor and an Alaskan waitress who was fleeing an abusive husband. Genovés called his boat the Peace Project, but it rapidly became known in the world’s press as the Sex Raft.

However, Genovés' assumptions about the crew's interactions were turned upside down over the three-month voyage. The experiment is the subject of a new documentary, The Raft, but you can read a short version of how the experiment proceeded at The Guardian.

The Jetsons was an animated prime-time series that debuted in 1962, about a nuclear family living in the distant future where everything was high-tech. Despite the fact that the show is more than 50 years gone, people on the internet are arguing about the family's backstory. George Jetson was supposedly 40 years old, and Jane was 33. And they had a teenage daughter.

If we do the math on the admittedly fictional relationship between George and Jane—specifically, when their daughter Judy was born—then Jane was just a teenager when Judy was conceived. And the seven-year age difference between George and Jane doesn’t help matters. But marrying young was less abnormal when the show premiered in 1962. In fact, the median age for marriage was at its lowest in the 1950s.

Paleofuture goes through the evidence of each character's age in the show's premier season, particularly the conflicting evidence of Judy Jetson's age, and lays out the argument that George and Jane Jetson's marriage was not particularly odd in context. If the planned live-action remake of the show ever gets off the ground, the characters' ages will no doubt be different.

What's the real difference between organic produce and fruits and vegetables without the organic label? Kurzgesagt takes us through the ins and outs of how organic produce compares, in nutrition, in how natural it is, and how organic farming affects the environment. One thing that surprised me is that organic foods can be produced using pesticides -as long as the pesticide itself is organic. Of course, all this only makes a difference if you eat a decent amount of fruits and vegetables, which most of us don't.

How grand is the Grand Canyon, anyway? Data visualization geek John Nelson got the idea to turn the canyon into something more familiar to us: mountains. That meant inverting a topographical map.

Some of my earliest memories of the place had to do with the trippy feeling of my eyes and mind trying to make sense of the scale. I had seen many mountain ranges and vistas, including some on the way, but the vast negative space played havoc with my perception of magnitude. I’ve felt it a few times since, but never like that first Grand Canyon overlook.

I wondered, then, if flipping the Grand Canyon into a Grand Mountain might in some way help me make sense of its scale. I’m much more accustomed to seeing the mass of something rather than the massive void of something. So, here’s what that looks like.

While it's true we are more used to seeing mountains, this Grand Mountain is smaller than the Rockies, and oddly-shaped. Mountains generally form a line where they were pushed up by collisions of the earth's crust. This one has branches, so it has a huge mass in a relatively cramped space. See the Grand Canyon inverted from several angles, and find out how Nelson made it, at Adventures in Mapping.  -via Kottke

A stormtrooper has suffered a battle loss and is contemplating what it all means in this award-winning Shakespearean Star Wars fan film from Maxime-Claude L'Écuyer. Be warned, the disturbing content prompted io9 to post the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number (800-273-8255) with this video.