A chef makes a horrendous mistake. Short, sweet, and if you don't get it, check out a couple of definitions that will make it all clear.  -via Digg

Using data from more than 742,000 site users who had babies in the past year, Baby Center has once again announced the top baby names of the year. The most popular names for 2018 show few changes from previous years. The top names for girls are:

1. Sophia
2. Olivia
3. Emma
4. Ava
5. Isabella
6. Aria
7. Riley
8. Amelia
9. Mia
10. Layla

Sophia (and Sofia) have been at the top of their list for nine years now. Layla is new to the top ten, almost 50 years after the song was first heard. The top names for boys are:

1. Jackson
2. Liam
3. Noah
4. Aiden
5. Caden
6. Grayson
7. Lucas
8. Mason
9. Oliver
10. Elijah

Teachers are already used to student lists that read Aiden, Caden, Jaden, Bradon, Grayson, Mason, etc. See the list of the top 100 baby names for girls and for boys, where you can click on a name and learn how it's been trending. But even more interesting is a look at the names that are rising on the list, meaning the ones that are trendy. People are naming their children after food, characters in Fortnight, and the Kardashian babies. -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Flickr user Dave Herholz)

Imagine a planet populated entirely by robots. Then imagine a new robot falls from the sky- an alien! But this is no imaginary planet; it's Mars. The newest exploration robot, named InSight, landed on the red planet on Monday. Curiosity, as well as Spirit and Opportunity and the other Martian robots are naturally be happy to see a new friend, but this one wasn't even built to roam, just dig. Looks like they'll just have to drag him around themselves! This comic is from CommitStrip.

The Will Ferrell movie Elf came out in 2003, and although it seems like just yesterday, it has become a Christmas classic. So of course, Screen Junkies has to make an Honest Trailer and ruin the magic for all of us. Strangely that doesn't quite happen, because as silly as Elf is, people love it. -via Tastefully Offensive

An enormous steer in Western Australia is making headlines. At 194cm 'Knickers' is the largest in his category in Australia. Story: https://t.co/ZI472MBUU4 #7News pic.twitter.com/MDEMwEbD8R

— 7 News Central Queensland (@7NewsCQ) November 27, 2018

Knickers is outstanding in his field. The big Holstein Friesian steer is unofficially Australia’s biggest bovine, at 194 cm tall and 1.4 tonnes of weight. In freedom units, that's 6 feet 4 inches tall and a little over 3,000 pounds. And if you are wondering how many steaks that could translate to, save yourself the trouble.

Third generation Myalup cattle farmer Geoff Pearson said Knickers’ startling size had saved him a trip to the abattoir.

“It was too heavy. I wouldn’t be able to put it through a processing facility,”

“So I think it will just live happily ever after.”

Read more about Knickers the oversized steer at Perth Now. See more pictures at Buzzfeed.

Kids invariably put things in their mouths that they shouldn't, and sometimes they end up swallowing small objects like coins, marbles, and in modern times, LEGO building blocks. Pediatricians hear stories of children swallowing LEGO pieces quite often, told by panicked parents. The pieces usually pass through the digestive tract intact with little or no trouble. But parents want to know, how long does that take? A new science paper details an experiment to find out.

Six paediatric health‐care professionals were recruited to swallow a Lego head. Previous gastrointestinal surgery, inability to ingest foreign objects and aversion to searching through faecal matter were all exclusion criteria. Pre‐ingestion bowel habit was standardised by the Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score. Participants ingested a Lego head, and the time taken for the object to be found in the participants stool was recorded. The primary outcome was the Found and Retrieved Time (FART) score.

The conclusion was that the LEGO minifig head took an average of 1.71 days to pass through. The study was intended to be a lighthearted way to reassure parents, even when the process didn't go quite as planned.

And you searched through your own poo to find them? How?

As with any piece of research it is important to have a robust search strategy in place prior to commencement. A variety of techniques were tried – using a bag and squashing, tongue depressors and gloves, chopsticks – no turd was left unturned. And although we only used a very small sample size the fact that one of our heads went missing suggest that you really shouldn’t worry if you can’t find it.

What happened to the missing head?

Who knows? Perhaps one day many years from now, a gastroenterologist performing a colonoscopy will find it staring back at him.

Read more on the particulars of the study at Don't Forget the Bubbles.  -via Gizmodo

(Image source: YouTube)

If you had a pleasant Thanksgiving feast or none at all, you might wonder what the classic dysfunctional family holiday dinner is like in real life. Lauren Lorenzo of eLL cartoons (previously at Neatorama) knew you would ask, so she recorded her family's Thanksgiving dinner conversation and animated it for our pleasure. Spoilers: little brother isn't thankful, Dad opens a can of worms with an enigmatic statement, and Grandma drinks too much. -via Laughing Squid

Findings from an online survey indicate that the funniest word in the English language is "fart." We already knew that, but what makes it so funny? Professors Chris Westbury and Geoff Hollis of the University of Alberta conducted a study looking into the sounds, connotations, and other features of words that determine how funny they are.

They started with a list of 4,997 common words previously compiled by a team of psychologists at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and scored with funniness ratings by a panel of 800 online participants. The Warwick psychologists found that words like "booty," "tinkle" and "nitwit" were consistently ranked as being very funny, while words like "pain," "torture" and "deathbed" were ranked as being decidedly humorless.

Westbury and Hollis looked at each one of the nearly 5,000 words under a humorist microscope, categorizing them based on 20 different factors, including how long the word itself was, how positive or negative the word's meaning was, how common each letter or combination of letters was in English, and whether the word contained a crude or profane-sounding string of characters within it (like "pike" and "bunghole," for example).

We hate to break the news to them, but "bunghole" is already a crude word in its entirety, one we learned from President Johnson. Read what else the research found about the common factors in funny words at Live Science. -Thanks, Tim!  

(Image credit: Flickr user Taming Emus)

This cat is taking a break underneath a car to do his daily workout routine, starting with sit ups. At least that's what it appears to be, although I suspect that the cat is cleaning his chest. Doesn't matter; we take inspiration where we can get it. -via Buzzfeed

While we often hear the phrase "American royalty" in reference to the rich and famous, there is only one place in America that was an actual kingdom with a palace and a royal family. ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu was built in 1879 for the royal family of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which was soon overthrown by American forces. The palace is a national historic landmark, and a reminder of the way that the US annexed the territory.

The Kingdom of Hawaii had originated in 1795 and was recognised by the major European monarchies while the United States became its chief trading partner. When the Hawaiian Royal Family was warmly welcomed by Queen Victoria for the Golden Jubilee and sat alongside other foreign royal guests at Westminster Abbey, it only fuelled US suspicion and jealousy that some other power might seize control of the territory. The family was eventually betrayed by the kingdom’s own elite. leading to the monarchy’s loss of absolute power before Queen Liliʻuokalani was finally overthrown in 1893. Her army did not rally to her defence, and within a year, Hawaii was annexed by the United States to become the Territory of Hawaii.

More than a hundred years later, there are still members of the Hawaiian royal famly, most notably two princesses from different branches of the clan, who are ready to ascend the throne if the time ever comes. Read about the royalty of Hawaii at Messy Nessy Chic.

While visiting Interlaken, Switzerland, Gursk3 decided to try hang gliding the safe way- by going on a tandem ride with a pro. Easy, right? Until he's in the air and realizes that his harness was never connected to the glider! All he can do is hang, with both hands, for his life. For more than two minutes. The pro cannot help him and guide the glider at the same time. Gursk3 survived to post the video, but he was not unscathed. Surprisingly, he kept his sense of humor long enough to produce the video. We don't know what happened to the pro afterward, but we would like to think he is unemployed. -via Digg

On the night of April 28, 1908, the small town of La Porte, Indiana, was shaken by tragedy when a fire destroyed a home on a nearby farm, killing the family that lived there. Little did they know at the time that the fire was not the beginning of the story, nor the end of it.  

When the embers finally cooled, firemen sifting through the rubble found evidence that the fire was not accidental. In the basement, they discovered the four burnt bodies of three children and an adult female. The woman’s corpse was headless.

Immediately, neighbors began mourning the tragedy: Belle Gunness, a lonely widow who had spent years fruitlessly looking for love, had died surrounded by her children in a horrendous fire. For all her life, it seemed that tragedy had followed Mrs. Gunness—she had lost two husbands and multiple children to terrible accidents—and now it looked as though fate had come for her, too. Within days, a disgruntled former farmhand named Ray Lamphere was arrested for setting fire to the building.

But soon authorities were impelled to look further, as a man inquired of his missing brother who had left his home town to visit Gunness seeking matrimony. He wasn't the only missing man who had been courting the widow, and eventually their bodies began showing up in shallow graves around the farm. Read the story of the Belle Gunness murders and the mystery that the case remains after more than 100 years, at Mental Floss.

You've heard of federal land, but who controls it, how does it differ from state or private land, and how did it become that way? Even if you've never wondered about it, when CGP Grey tackles a subject, you know it's going to be interesting, and that you'll learn more than you bargained for.

Boys will be boys, even in the robot apocalypse.

Brian Vowles had two sons and an iPhone, so he made a movie, a short film, about two young warriors who fall into a trap set by a robot programmed to destroy the human race. Whatever you do, don't miss the Neatorama-esque punch line. You can read about the project at its website, including a running video diary of the 4.5-year-long struggle to get Robot Attack finished. -Thanks, WTM!

Warning: This Christmas ad will make you reach for a hanky. While most Christmas ads encourage you to buy something, this short film focuses on love. There's also the anticipation of a Christmas gift, but one with a twist. It was made on the cheap by Phil Beastall.

The video cost just £50 to make and was made as a Christmas film back in 2014. Phil decided to share it again on his Facebook page on the back of this year’s John Lewis Christmas ad, starring Elton John. “I love making films and telling stories and I decided back in 2014 I wanted to create a short film that would resonate with people, Phil told Bored Panda. “Ultimately I wanted people to take a moment to realize how lucky we are to be here and remind themselves that although life can be really tough, we’re not defined by our careers or materialism. Family comes first and it’s important we look after each other. So although it’s not a true story, it’s one I hope hits home.”

-via Bored Panda