Mattel gave Barbie a variety of body shapes, skin tones, and styles last year, and now Ken has them, too! The new Ken dolls were introduced this morning on Good Morning America.

Mattel has just rolled out a brand new line of Ken dolls — fifty years after the eponymous blond-haired, blue-eyed, perpetually tanned figures were first introduced — only now sporting three body types (regular, slender, and the delicately put “broad”), seven skin tones, and nine hairstyles. The first 10 dolls, which were unveiled on Good Morning America Tuesday morning, hit stores today — while the following five will be released in the coming months.

WATCH: Mattel introduces a new line of diverse Ken dolls (INCLUDING MAN BUN KEN): https://t.co/rF9l5l71fz pic.twitter.com/MuM5fujcNo

— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 20, 2017

One of the new styles has a man bun. But no beard. My 16-year-old nephew stated clearly the other night that a man must have a beard if he is going to wear a man bun. That's a new one on me. The new selection of Ken Dolls are available in some stores now, and should roll out nationwide by July 8. See more images of the new dolls at GQ.

Worldwide, 2.4 billion people don't have access to toilets, and a billion don't even have latrines or outhouses. Plumbing and sewer systems are expensive to build, and many places either have too little water to run them, or too much water, which makes it hard to keep sewage out of the freshwater supply. The answer may be a new technology that uses no water, and even recycles human waste. Virginia Gardiner designed the toilet called the Loowatt.

In Loowatt’s waterless flush design, the waste is sealed into a biodegradable bag underneath the toilet with not a drop of water being spilled. Once full, the bag is replaced by a service team, and the waste is brought (yes, hand-delivered) to Loowatt’s pilot waste-processing facility, where it’s converted to fertiliser and biogas.

This very manual setup sounds very archaic compared to the slick and convenient arrangements of the Western world. But sanitation experts think that in the era of climate change, when droughts and floods are becoming increasingly common, the West may have something to learn from the little waterless loos piloted in penniless Madagascan neighbourhoods. With the world’s population ever-increasing, places that historically relied on water for sanitation may have to reconsider how they flush.

Read how the Loowatt was conceived, and how it could change people's lives. -via Digg

(Image credit: Tomasz Kuran aka Meteor2017)

We love a feel-good movie about folks who made sacrifices to improve the world. As a group, teachers fit under that category more than the rest of us as a whole, but even among teachers, some stand out. For example, Emma Willard, born in 1787, started teaching early as a teenager and never stopped advocating for her students.

Emma Willard was born in a time when women were permitted no more than basic learning. Fortunately, her father supported her interest in education, with the result that she became a teacher at the age of 17. In time, she went on to found the first school that offered higher education to women in the whole of the United States, which can still be found in Troy, NY under her name. Later, when she had entrusted her school to both her son and her daughter-in-law, she went on to promote education for women not just in the United States but also throughout Europe.

Read about other inspirational teachers who would make good movie subjects at TVOM. 

When you hear the name "the Unsinkable Molly Brown," you might picture the character Kathy Bates played in the 1997 movie Titanic. Margaret Brown was a real person who led a charmed life that she made the most of. Brown married for love instead of money, but then grew rich anyway. She spent that money improving the world wherever she saw fit. Her personality made her a media darling after the Titanic disaster, and she leveraged her celebrity to promote various causes.

Mrs. Brown dove into high society, becoming a devotee of the arts and learning four languages. She raised funds for a cathedral in Denver, and helped establish the country’s first juvenile court. Two years after the Titanic, Brown ran for the U.S. Senate, but cut her campaign short to volunteer to help France recover from the first World War. She used her Titanic fame to work for workers’ rights, women’s rights, education, and historic preservation, before dying of a brain tumor at age 65.

Read more about the remarkable -and unsinkable- Margaret Brown at the A.V. Club.

Fictional teenage sleuth Nancy Drew wasn't supposed to be a feminist. When publisher Edward Stratemeyer conceived the character, he was just adding to his empire of young reader book series that included The Hardy Boys, The Rover Boys, and The Bobbsey Twins.

The creator of the original Nancy Drew Series was actually a strident believer in “traditional” roles for women

While it’s no surprise that Edward Stratemeyer held these conservative views in the ’20s, he saw the success of the Hardy Boys series—in which brothers Frank and Joe Hardy solve mysteries—as an opportunity to develop a similar series for young girls. Previously, Stratemeyer’s former girl heroines were much more domestic, like Honey Bunch, a character, who the New Yorker points out, “knew exactly how to do a washing for she had watched the laundress many times.”

It was the authors who actually wrote the books who gave Nancy Drew the guts to do the things she did, particularly Mildred Wirt. Read about Wirt and learn a lot more about the history of the Nancy Drew mysteries at The Daily Dot.

(Image credit: Flickr user Abbey Hendrickson)

(YouTube link)

This horse knows what babies like! Just a slight push on the baby seat handle rocks the child and produces smiles and squeals of delight from 8-month-old Ruby. Her mother, Stacey Storer from Nottingham, England, said Ruby was tired and upset before Red started rocking her. That's a good horse. -via Tastefully Offensive

The United States Postal Service is releasing a new stamp today that uses thermochromic ink to give us two different images on one stamp. The eclipse stamp is a commemoration of the total solar eclipse that will cross the U.S. on August 21.

The stamp image is a photograph taken by astrophysicist Fred Espenak, aka Mr. Eclipse, of Portal, AZ, that shows a total solar eclipse seen from Jalu, Libya, on March 29, 2006.

In the first U.S. stamp application of thermochromic ink, the Total Eclipse of the Sun Forever stamps will reveal a second image. Using the body heat of your thumb or fingers and rubbing the eclipse image will reveal an underlying image of the Moon (Espenak also took the photograph of the Full Moon). The image reverts back to the eclipse once it cools.

Stamp collectors (and people who take months to use a sheet of stamps) are warned to store the stamps away from sunlight to preserve the effect. You can buy a special envelope for them. The First-Day-of-Issue ceremony will be at the University of Wyoming library in Laramie today, during a summer solstice event. The eclipse stamps should roll out to post offices across the country soon. -via Metafilter

Leo Tolstoy, the Russian author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and other classics, had thirteen children. Six of those children had their own children, and they eventually produced nearly 400 direct Tolstoy descendants, almost 300 of them living today. Every two years, they get together for a reunion at the Tolstoy estate in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, despite the fact that they live all over the world. They renew family ties, try activities that recreate life in 19-century Russia, and play soccer and party games.      

But while the reunion is a bona fide good time, it’s also a lot more than that. "The first reunion literally turned my ‘consciousness upside down,’ as they say in Russian,” recalls Anastasia Tolstoy, Vladimir’s daughter. “Prior to then, I had known only a close circle of family and a few Tolstoys abroad. Everyone else was just a collection of names and numbers in the book detailing our family tree. In 2000, that tree was brought to life, and the colorfulness of the Tolstoy descendants was reawakened. We become a force to be reckoned with that goes beyond the renowned Russian writer, but back to centuries of illustrious ancestors with daring, history-making deeds.”

I do not have centuries of space here to describe those deeds, but to sum it up briefly: Historically, the Tolstoys have been known for their wild nature, intelligence, and creativity, with a very long legacy woven throughout Russian high society in politics, literature, and the fine arts.

Sophie Penkrat, Leo Tolstoy's great-great-granddaughter, writes about her family history, from Leo Tolstoy's life to the school he founded, to the trashing of his home during World War II, to the literary and human rights activities of his descendants, in an article about the Tolstoy reunions at Mental Floss.   

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!

(Image credit: Artur Bergman)

compiled by Ernest Ersatz, Improbable Research staff

Medical personnel must deal with sneezing by both patients and themselves. Insights and advice often get transmitted informally. The formal professional literature does include a few instances where the trade secrets are made quasi-public. Here are three such cases.

Gross: Eye Surgery on a Sneezing Patient
“Cataract Surgery in Patient Who Sneezes,” Jay Gross, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 253, no. 2, January 11, 1985, p. 202. Gross explains:

[The] phacoemulsification [method for removing cataracts from the eye] uses only a 3-mm incision, which would be enlarged to 7 mm to insert an intraocular lens. Another advantage of the phacoemulsification is that it is done with an essentially closed eye and there is much less risk of severe damage to the eye due to coughing or sneezing during surgery. Also, it is much easier to control such an event if it were to occur. 

Face Mask Facing

A security camera at a South Korean zoo caught a scary incident when a baby elephant fell into the deep end of the pool. Its mother went right into panic mode as another elephant runs up to help.  

(YouTube link)

Both adult elephants rush around to the ramp, and walk the baby back to the shallow end. All's well that ends well. This goes to show that elephants are great parents, and not only to their own offspring. -via Tastefully Offensive

When the Civil War began, Americans starting hoarding coins, as the metals they were made of were bound to become scarce. This caused a shortage of coins, and the U.S. mint responded by issuing paper currency in fractional denominations, like three cents, five cents, up to fifty cents. The state of our currency system was changing so rapidly that mistakes were bound to happen, and Superintendent of the National Currency Bureau Spencer M. Clark knew it.

It was the third issue of that five-cent note that caught Clark’s attention. Congress had asked for the note to honor William Clark of the Lewis and Clark explorations. But allegedly, the document that reached the Treasury specified only that the new bill should honor “Clark,” without clarifying which one—and Spencer M. Clark, despite surely knowing Congress’s true intention, seized the opportunity to print his own face on the bill.

William Clark, Spencer Clark, what difference does it make? Spencer was in hot water with Congress already, and they didn't take to his latest shenanigans one bit. Read what happened when Clark put his own face on the five-cent bill at Atlas Obscura.

YouTuber S U does not have a cat, but he does have a Tesla Model X electric car. His car was meowing when he went out Saturday morning. It was a kitten stuck inside the bumper!

(YouTube link)

Or, he assumed it was a kitten, since he still couldn't see it. A Tesla technician came out to disassemble the bumper and remove the foreign object. Wearing leather gloves, of course.

(YouTube link)

They estimate the kitten had been in there for 14 hours or more, so the first thing they did was provide it with water. And one of the Tesla technicians said he and his wife would adopt "Tessie"! S U also made a follow-up video speculating on how the kitten got into the car. -via Gizmodo

We don't know the provenance of this delightful newspaper ad posted at reddit. We can assume that it was published around 1865, as the young man was a fan of Andy Johnson, or president Andrew Johnson, who served from 1865 (upon the death of Lincoln), was impeached in 1868, and remained in office until 1869. For an 18-year-old, the writer seems to have his life together, but was probably working too hard so far to meet many young woman. When he says he wants to buy waterfalls, he is most likely referring to a waterfall bustle, as was the style at the time. I would bet that he got responses to this ad. The last line makes him seem cute as well as successful.

Update: This appeared earlier on Flashbak's Twitter feed. -Thanks, gwdMaine!

The sitcom The Big Bang Theory is fast approaching ten years on the air. It's about two nerdy physicists who share an apartment. One of those characters, Sheldon Cooper, began the series in 2007 as the super nerdy, socially-inept character who was all comedy, as compared to his roommate, Leonard Hofstadter, who was more of the straight man of the series. But Cooper changed and evolved. Over ten years, the show climbed to the top of the ratings, and he became less of a stereotype and more of a real personality, as he bonded with his roommate and other friends, met women, and gradually fell in love and started a serious relationship. You can see those important moments in video clips as they tell the tale of Sheldon Cooper's evolution at TVOM.

Brett Foxwell is an animator who uses stop-motion, time-lapse, motion graphics and other techniques, and he's always looking for a new method to experiment with. WoodSwimmer was made by photographing cut trees as layers were milled away from the wood. The effect is that of traveling through the wood itself.    

(vimeo link)

“Fascinated with the shapes and textures found in both newly-cut and long-dead pieces of wood, I envisioned a world composed entirely of these forms,” Foxwell told Colossal. “As I began to engage with the material, I conceived a method using a milling machine and an animation camera setup to scan through a wood sample photographically and capture its entire structure. Although a difficult and tedious technique to refine, it yielded gorgeous imagery at once abstract and very real. Between the twisting growth rings, swirling rays, knot holes, termites and rot, I found there is a lot going on inside of wood.”

WoodSwimmer is less than two minutes long, and you will be mesmerized the entire time. It's hard to look away from the ever-shifting wood images. The music is by Bedtimes. Read more about the video at Foxwell's website.