A security robot from the firm Knightscope was patrolling the Georgetown Waterfront complex in Washington, DC. It apparently descended into the pit of depression and gave up its will to live, plunging itself into a fountain face first. The robot suicide was documented in a photo Tweeted by Bilal Farooqi. He said,

We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots.

The Georgetown robot may be the first to end its own life in the real world, but its demise reminds us of the many depressed robots in pop culture. There's Marvin, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the Pass the Butter Robot from Rick and Morty, and quite a few others named in an article at Buzzfeed.

In order to get out of the dungeon, you must perform a service for the king. He wants you to identify the one counterfeit among twelve coins, but you can only use his scale three times to do it. Lucky for you, you are the kingdom's top mathematician. I can slice a tomato into 18 pieces with five cuts, but this one's a real head scratcher.

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Jennifer Lu sure came up with a hard one in this riddle. I might have been able to figure it out, if I had infinite time and no stress, but the scenario as it is would not allow for that. The king has a temper, you know. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research and Feedback About Facial Feedback Theory
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Some researchers are trying to see whether reality smiles on the idea that (a) smiling causes happiness, and (b) frowning induces unhappiness. Here are some prominent attempts.

2006: Pencil-Chomping and Race Bias in Several Persons
“The Influence of Facial Feedback on Race Bias,” Tiffany A. Ito, Krystal W. Chiao, Patricia G. Devine, Tyler S. Lorig, and John T. Cacioppo, Psychological Science, vol. 17, no. 3, 2006, pp. 256-261. The authors, variously at University of Colorado, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Washington and Lee University, report:

Participants were surreptitiously induced to smile through holding a pencil in their mouth while viewing photographs of unfamiliar Black or White males or performed no somatic configuration while viewing the photographs... [The study was conducted on] 33 (6 Asian American, 2 Hispanic American, 22 Caucasian American, 3 other) and 40 (3 Asian American, 4 Hispanic American, 29 Caucasian American, 4 other) undergraduates.

2008: Poisoning Your Face Might Increase the Happiness of the Human Race

Watch the weird way this bird flies! The original video from Al Brooks is 21 seconds long, but all the action happens in the first two seconds. What's happening is that the frame rate of the security camera synched up with the bird's flapping rate. You've seen that effect in wagon wheels in movies and helicopter blades in videos. The effect makes the bird seem to just float around eerily. -via reddit

A group of two-year-olds are competing in the Dutch Championship walking bike race on July 8. Senn Swieters pulls out in front, giving it his all on his green walking bike, having the time of his life. Senn's headed straight for the finish line. The crowd cheers him on!

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Or maybe not. Don't celebrate until the finish line is crossed. Considering how much the average two-year-old cares about winning, he's probably avoiding the finish line because he doesn't want the event to be over. A good time was had by all.  -via Mashable

John Farrier's recent DIY art project is a stained glass panel depicting an anime character. It's beautiful, but I'm not familiar with many characters, so I'd like an anime fan's take. Do you readily recognize the character? Is she well-known? The image source at DeviantART is a giveaway, in case you just want to know. -via John Farrier 

A 65-year-old woman was being prepared for cataract surgery at Solihull Hospital near Birmingham, UK. Trainee ophthalmologist Rupal Morjaria says that as a team prepared to anesthetized the patient, they found a "blue mass" in her eye. On removing it, the mass turned out to be a glob of 17 disposable contact lenses! They looked around and found ten more lenses still in her eye. The patient hadn't complained of any irritation.

"When she was seen two weeks after I removed the lenses she said her eyes felt a lot more comfortable," Morjaria tells Optometry Today. "She thought her previous discomfort was just part of old age and dry eye."

The woman had not complained about problems other than cataracts, according to the report Morjaria and others published in the British Medical Journal. The patient had been wearing monthly disposable contact lenses for some 35 years, she said.

The cataract surgery was postponed because of the risk of infection. The case raises concern about patients who order contact lenses online and don't see their optometrist regularly. Read more on the story at NPR.

(Image credit: Bpw)

If you've ever seen your career depicted in a movie, your first thought was probably on how wrong it was. It's true of most occupations, because everyday functional workers don't make for compelling drama (or comedy). But since very few of us deal with stockbrokers on a regular basis, the stereotypes in movies can easily give us the wrong idea. Only the greediest, most hubristic, amoral, and clever characters are stockbrokers in film. Learn how wrong that is in so many ways in an article at TVOM.

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A cat in Quebec gave birth to a litter of kittens upstairs. Not long afterward, she decided that they needed her cat bed, which was downstairs. Whether it was because the bed is soft, or because it has sides to keep the kittens corralled, she knew what she wanted, and went to work to make it happen. YouTube commenters are wondering why the humans didn't help her, but she seems to have the situation pretty well under control. Smart cat. -via Tastefully Offensive

Grandma Betty saw the solar eclipse in 1991, and regretted that her new grandson was too young to know what it was all about. But she looked up the next solar eclipse that he might see, and wrote a letter about it. Trevor's mom kept the letter until it was time to open it 26 years later, which was this past week. The letter is overflowing with love and pride for her grandson, and with wonder at the marvels of the universe.  

In case you're wondering, Grandma Betty is still going strong at age 79. Trevor (redditor davedavedaveck) told us so.

People remember Martin Landau as Rollin Hand in the TV series Mission: Impossible, or maybe his numerous appearances on The Twilight Zone. Or for his Academy Award-winning role as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. I will always remember him as Commander John Koenig in the TV series Space: 1999. Laundau appeared in 79 movies and dozens of TV shows. Landau died unexpectedly Saturday from complications during a hospital stay in Los Angeles.

"Mission: Impossible," which also starred Landau's wife, Barbara Bain, became an immediate hit upon its debut in 1966. It remained on the air until 1973, but Landau and Bain left at the end of the show's third season amid a financial dispute with the producers. They starred in the British-made sci-fi series "Space: 1999" from 1975 to 1977.

Landau might have been a superstar but for a role he didn't play — the pointy-eared starship Enterprise science officer, Mr. Spock. "Star Trek" creator Gene Rodenberry had offered him the half-Vulcan, half-human who attempts to rid his life of all emotion. Landau turned it down.

"A character without emotions would have driven me crazy; I would have had to be lobotomized," he explained in 2001. Instead, he chose "Mission: Impossible," and Leonard Nimoy went on to everlasting fame as Spock.

Ironically, Nimoy replaced Landau on "Mission: Impossible."

Laundau was 89. -via Metafilter

Want to know who will play the 13th incarnation of The Doctor in the BBC series Doctor Who beginning in December? Speculation has been rampant since it was announced that Peter Capaldi will be retired from the series. If you really want to know, you'll need to continue reading, in consideration of those who don't want to know this soon.

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.

(Image credit: Srdjan Živulovič)

If you think dancing is for sissies, the battlefield ballerinas of Vienna will change your mind.

CRISS CROSS

We'll start with Hannibal's elephants and Genghis Khan. Vilano horses from the mountains of Spain were known for their strength at least as far back as the days of Julius Caesar. These big guys carried Hannibal's warriors across the Alps alongside those famous elephants. Then someone got the bright idea of crossing Vilanos with the Barb horses (whose ancestors carried Genghis Khan and his hordes from Asia). The result was the Andalusian horses of Spain. If all this Alps crossing and horse crossing makes your eyes cross, be patient- we've almost got our dancing horses.

In 1580, Charles, Archduke of Vienna, founded a stud farm at Lipica (also called Lipizza), a village in Slovenia close to the Italian border. There, using the Spanish bloodstock, the archduke created strong, graceful horses that are born dark in color but whose coats gradually lighten to a brilliant, snowy white -the Lipizzan breed. At about the same time Austrian royalty also founded the Spanish Riding School in Vienna to teach classical horsemanship. The horses used and bred at this school became exclusively the Lipizzan.

GETTING THEIR KICKS IN BATTLE

Every time we post about someone who has lived to be 100 years old -or older- they have a story about how they did it. But each of those interviews is just one person's story. AsapSCIENCE has an overview of the science that pinpoints the specific things that may lead to longevity.

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However, some of the factors aren't under our control at all. And those that are might be confounded by other factors. Keep in mind also that a long life is not much of a benefit if the last decades are spent in ill health. Still, we can live a perfectly healthy life and be hit by a bus tomorrow. So we are back to the old adage: Plan your life as if you'll live forever, savor it as if today were your last day. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Since 1984, July has been designated as National Ice Cream Month, and the third Sunday in July (July 16 this year) is National Ice Cream Day! You can celebrate by learning some facts about ice cream, but the most obvious way to mark the day is to eat some ice cream. Many ice cream companies and some fast food outlets are offering free ice cream, or very good deals, on the best treat for a hot day. See a list of the deals at Uproxx. Unfortunately, the only free ice cream deals available in my town require downloading an app, which probably won't help, since I don't use a smartphone. Your mileage may vary.