Kaplamino (previously at Neatorama) has really outdone himself this time. This marble run is relatively short, but it's densely packed with moves that will astonish you. Physics and timing. He said it took 40  attempts to get it right, to which I respond "Only 40?" -via Digg

About 20 million years ago, the Sahara Desert melted. The immense heat formed Libyan Desert Glass, which covered hundreds of square miles.

Libyan Desert Glass’ value comes from the miraculousness of its origin story. As Dr. Jane Cook, chief scientist at The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, explains, “glass happens when just the right ingredients are heated up and cooled down quickly.” But in the case of Libyan Desert Glass, the series of events was much more elaborate. “About 20 million years ago, either a meteor impact or atmospheric explosion got to the desert part of the lower atmosphere, heated it up and fragmented and exploded,” she says. “It dumped a huge amount of heat, like in thousands of Fahrenheit degrees, into that portion of the desert, which was a relatively pure deposit of quartz sand. And it brought it up hot enough that it was able to liquefy for a short period of time.” When this liquefied quartz cooled down, desert glass was formed. Cook adds: “Because it was almost pure silica it was able to solidify without crystallizing,” making it glass instead of geological crystal structures.

Any millions years later, when humans discovered the glass, it was considered as precious stone, and it even ended up in King Tut's tomb. Read about Libyan Desert Glass at Atlas Obscura.  

Ballet dancers are amazing, and their moves are even more amazing when they are broken down into pieces we can understand. Well, maybe we can understand what's happening when we see it explained to us, but we still can't understand how they manage to do it. Alexandra Macdonald also explains the move called a French fouetté at The Kid Should See This. You can also see why a ballerina goes through so many of those expensive toe shoes.

AMC once stood for American Movie Classics, but when they began to do their own drama series, they went big, with Mad Men, The Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad. And now they are getting into movies again- their own movies, based on their hit TV shows. The strange departure of Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead was followed by the news that star Andrew Lincoln will reprise the character in several Walking Dead movies to air on AMC. And Vince Gilligan is said to be working on a two-hour film set in the Breaking Bad universe. The news of the Breaking Bad movie came from unnamed sources.

It's unclear if the movie would be another prequel — like AMC's Better Call Saul — or a follow-up of some sort. It's also unclear is if any of the original stars, such as Bryan Cranston or Aaron Paul, are involved in the new project, which sources stress will be set in the existing Breaking Bad franchise.

Gilligan, sources say, will pen the script, executive produce and possibly direct. Breaking Bad and prequel series Better Call Saul exec producers Mark Johnson and Melissa Bernstein are also said to be attached to the film project, which is said to follow the escape of a kidnapped man and his quest for freedom. Production is expected to begin this month in New Mexico.

That sure sounds like a Jesse Pinkman plot, considering he escaped from slavery in the final Breaking Bad episode, don't you think?  -via Mashable

Things were different in 1975. The FCC was appalled at the "adult themes" of certain shows on television, like the sound a toilet flushing and the use of the word "crap." They instituted what was called the Family Hour, the first hour of prime time, which was 8-9 PM Eastern Time. The hit show All in the Family, which led off the Saturday evening lineup on CBS, was moved to 9 PM. The network, the producers, and the show's cast didn't like it a bit, and recorded this unaired song to show their feelings. Read more about the Family Hour, which only lasted two years, at Boing Boing.

Capybaras, the world's largest living rodents, normally give birth to litters of three or four pups. But a capybara named Iapa at the Wellington Zoo in New Zealand produced seven a couple of weeks ago! The pups are still in seclusion and not available to zoo visitors, but you can see quite a few pictures of them at Zooborns. -via Metafilter

He constantly thinks the screen door is closed, so we have to pretend to open it for him to come inside pic.twitter.com/oy6Hi8TsII

— jensen kendall (@jensenmares) November 4, 2018

This poor dog obviously has some history of running into screen doors. It's nice that his family indulges him when he needs some encouragement. -via Digg

Thunderbolt, Georgia, was the center of the US shrimp industry for most of the 20th century. The entire town relied on the shrimp haul. But 1980 was not a good year. Shrimp were scarce, and the price of gas was rising. Many shrimpers took a loss just to go look for a catch.

Meanwhile, in Cuba, Fidel Castro had just granted dissidents a brief window of freedom. Anyone who didn’t support his Communist regime was permitted to leave, under two conditions: that they exit via the harbor at Mariel, 25 miles west from Havana, and that someone be there to pick them up. Within hours of that decree, a mass exodus had begun. In the shrimping community, word spread quickly that Cuban-American families would pay as much as $1,000 a head to boat captains who would transport their loved ones from Mariel.

In the following weeks, more than 100,000 emigrants poured out of Cuba through the strictly policed floodgates of Mariel Harbor. Upon reaching America, they became known as Marielitos; their egression, the Mariel Boatlift. The boats that arrived to retrieve them—a scrappy, ad-hoc fleet of privately chartered American fishing boats, lobster boats, and shrimping trawlers of varying sizes and degrees of seaworthiness—earned the name the “Freedom Flotilla.”

Thunderbolt's desperate shrimp boat owners jumped at the opportunity, but complications soon arose. Boats were stuck in Cuba while their passengers went through the bureaucratic process of being released. And only a couple of weeks after announcing that Cuban refugees would be welcome, the Carter administration reversed its stance and declared the rescue missions illegal. The fallout would affect the shrimp boat crews of Thunderbolt for years afterward. Read the story of the Georgia shrimp boats and the Mariel Boatlift at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Raymond L. Blazevic)

Google Maps uses little icons to welcome you to a new state. Each one represents a stereotype or something the state is known for. Maine is a lobster, Montana is a cowboy, Iowa is the farmer from American Gothic, and Tennessee is Elvis. Some are hard to figure out- New Hampshire is a librarian, because the state is home to America's first state library -I think. Georgia and North Carolina have the same default icon for some reason. Ohio's icon above is an homage to Neil Armstrong, one of the many astronauts from the state.



There's no confusion over what state you are entering when you see a Prince icon.



I was so glad to see Kentucky's icon as a Kentucky Derby attendee instead of, say, Li'l Abner, despite the fact that most of those ladies with the big hats and mint juleps (strangely depicted as a champagne glass) fly in from out of state for the race. You can see the Google Maps icons for plenty of states at Instagram. -via Metafilter

Jun Yoshizuki of JunsKitchen takes his well-trained cats Nagi and Haku for an outing. For some reason, Poki was not invited. The cats and the gorgeous landscape make this video altogether beautiful and soothing, just the thing to calm you down about the US elections. -via Tastefully Offensive

There are hiking trails all over the US, and they were constructed with a lot more thought than you may have imagined. The length, incline, destination, and features are taken into account, and some are designed for casual walkers, while others are for serious hiking enthusiasts only. And after all that work, hikers sometimes take shortcuts that will result in social trails (also known as "desire paths"). 

If avoiding the problem completely isn't possible, builders work to minimize the impact on the environment. One common trick used to subtly contain the creation of social trails is the installation of “gargoyles.” [PDF] Often stone or a large rock (thus the name), but always made of natural materials, gargoyles divert hikers away from potential short cuts by creating an obstacle harder to cross than the path itself. For example, a collection of fallen trees and vines might be piled around the entrance of an old social trail to block the way. A few well placed rocks could also create a seemingly natural endpoint to a one way trail. If you hike, you’ve likely come across a gargoyle without noticing it.

You might be surprised at how "un-natural" hiking trails really are, but it's still a great way to get out and enjoy nature. Read more about the design of hiking trails at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user pete)

Ze Frank is back to drop some True Facts about an order of predatory insects called Odonata, which includes dragonflies and damselflies. These goofy-looking bugs are voracious and not at all picky about what they eat. Their anatomy and lifestyle become more ridiculous and horrifying as the video progresses. Warning: contains a graphic description of insects mating. -via Laughing Squid

Previously: More True Facts from Ze Frank.

Everything old is new again. Texting replaced talking on the phone, and for a lot of folks, it's because they don't want to listen to their friends. But now you can text an audio message. The technology has been available for a few years, and was meant to replace voice mail, which is time-consuming to access. But young people, the ones with the most up-to-date phones with an OS that can use it, don't particularly like it.

In an ideal world, the voice text—also referred to as a voice note, voice message, or voice memo, and not to be confused with text dictation—is far less rambling than its despised predecessor. It typically arrives amid a written exchange and functions as a kind of conversational speed bump. If you’re lucky, it’s somewhere between 10 and 30 seconds. Anything longer than that, and it creeps into the territory of what a close WhatsAppian friend of mine calls “sneaky voicemail.” Reggaeton singer J Balvin is even more conservative in this department. Over the summer he suggested that anyone who could not keep their “notas de voz” between five and 10 seconds should just call, adding an aside that, roughly translated, read: “TEN MINUTES IS ONLY ALLOWED FOR MOMS.”

The reasoning behind these guidelines is simple. Listening to a voice text requires having your earbuds handy, or being in a relatively quiet, private space. It also means offering up something rare in the era of multitasking: your undivided attention. “Text messages are a much shorter read and you can get the bulk of the message without much effort,” said Graham Gerhart, a 25-year-old digital marketing specialist and one of the 28 texters I surveyed via Twitter for this story. “Voice notes require actually listening to the full communication.”

Still, there are advantages to voice text, and its use is spreading fast. This is causing a rift between those who embrace voice text and those who resist it. Read more about this new digital divide at The Ringer. <puts on curmudgeon hat>I'd just as soon make a "phone call."</hat>

Martin Rosner of Hot Paper Comics did a series called If People Acted Like Dogs. The canine thinking behind them is so familiar that you have to laugh, except for one that might make you cry a little inside. Watch a guy with a dog's mind confront squirrels, strange dogs, the mail carrier, and of course, his human. The series is posted at Bored Panda. See more of Rosner's work at Hot Paper Comics.

To be honest, this thing is powered by a pull on a rope, so it doesn't really matter whether it's pulled by cows or by a rugby team. Doesn't it look fun? You have to wonder what happens when one person can't hold on any longer. A machine translation from the French YouTube description explains.

The craziest project of the summer! The first turnstile towed by oxen in the middle of a lake. The rules of the game are simple on this funny ride: who will hold the longest! Thanks to a trigger system made with 2 release carabiners, as soon as a person loose, the rope slips and the other is automatically dropped. In the end, the centrifugal force was such that nobody managed to hold beyond 30/35 km / h!

-via Metafilter