Do you recall that old joke about NASA spending millions to come up with a pen that would write in the zero gravity of space, while the Soviets used a pencil? That's what I thought of when Zach Wheeler suggested using lasers to protect us from rainfall because "an umbrella is boring." A laser would be so much cooler! It's the kind of stupid idea nine-year-olds come up with, yet so many of us revert to our nine-year-old selves in our free time. But no question is stupid when you love to geek out on math and science, so Randall Munroe tackled this one in his "What If?" series (previously at Neatorama).

The opening sequence addresses the stupidity of the idea, but then Munroe explains exactly what would be involved in zapping every raindrop with a laser before it falls on your head. While we should stick to umbrellas for the time being, the explanation of this difficult, dangerous, and expensive theoretical idea is pretty cool indeed. -via Damn Interesting

In the British Midlands lies an animal research facility like no other. The animal test subjects each have their own beds in uncrowded but shared rooms, access to the outside at all times, playtime with people and each other, and even TV to watch. Their health care needs are a priority, and when they get tired of their research duties, permanent homes are found for them.

These are the 200 dogs and 200 cats of the Waltham Petcare Science Institute, who test products for a big chunk of the $150 billion pet food industry. Keeping them happy, especially with the food, is the whole point of the research facility. Their findings go to Mars Petcare, a corporation with many pet food brands under its umbrella. Waltham took the lead in determining what vitamins and minerals cats and dogs need to function optimally, which became standard across the industry. In the 1990s, they worked to create food that would make dog farts less stinky. These days, they concentrate more on making food that tastes good to pets, because all the nutrition in the world won't do any good if a pet won't eat it. Read about the cats and dogs who taste-test pet food before it goes into production. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Carsondelake)

Since airlines are charging for every bit of checked luggage these days, people are flying with carry-on luggage only. Finnish maniac Lauri Vuohensilta (previously at Neatorama) has cracked the code for getting everything you need in a small suitcase you can stash in an overhead bin. He needs some help from his wife Anni in arranging clothing, but with the compression power of a 150-ton hydraulic press, Lauri packs everything he needs for the trip- clothing, electronics, and snacks- with room left over. Might as well take a whole bunch of new socks, too.

There's still room left in the suitcase, but it's getting heavy now. You have to wonder what airport security is going to think about this. Lauri is going to need an iron when he tries to unpack all this stuff. Who knows? Maybe he packed one, along with the flashlight and hair dryer. -via The Awesomer

Almost four years ago, we told you how scientists were genetically modifying plants with mushroom genes to produce tobacco plants that glow in the dark. In that post, I predicted garden plants for sale using this technology. It's taken longer than I thought, but those plants will go on sale in April, and they are petunias.  

A company called Light Bio has received USDA approval to sell these GMO flowers they call Firefly Petunias. They look like regular petunias during the day, but at night they glow a soft green, with no black light necessary. The more sun they receive, the brighter the glow. Their bioluminescence is due to enzymes controlled by mushroom DNA. They can be planted in your garden or in pots and will even grow inside if they get enough sunlight. They will cost you $29 a plant, and shipping is almost as much. You can pre-order yours here. I think I'll wait until the price comes down, since I've never had much luck keeping petunias going all summer. -via Born in Space

(Image credit: Light Bio)

Imagine, if you will, songs in the light operetta style of Gilbert and Sullivan used to tell the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Nothing connotes a gory death better than an oom-pah beat. Yeah, it's hilarious, especially the song that accompanies the voyage of the Demeter, as the crew slowly disappears. The rhymes in each song are genius ("I am Doctor Van Helsing / I never let anyone else sing"), yet utterly ridiculous for the tone of the original story. It lacks the full backing chorus of a real Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but we can assume that creator Mitch Benn didn't think a large crew was necessary for this video. The point is that a terrifying classic horror story gets turned into a comedy with cheesy poetry and an accordion. The video clips that accompany the soundtrack are from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula, which couldn't be more incongruent to the music. -via Metafilter

The Pleiades are a star cluster visible from October to March, and to April in Australia. There are several ancient Aboriginal stories about the Pleiades, which are referred to as the seven sisters. A common thread among these stories is that a hunter, represented by the stars in the Orion constellation, chases the seven sisters across the sky. Meanwhile, in ancient Greece, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. Since Atlas was too busy holding up the sky to protect his daughters from Orion the hunter, Zeus turned them into stars. Eventually, Orion also became stars, so he still pursues them in the sky. The strange confluence of these stories is even stranger when you look up and realize there are only six stars in the Pleiades. There are other ancient tales in different cultures about these stars that also refer to them as seven sisters, but something happened to one of them.

The last time the ancestors of the Greeks and the Australian Aborigines were together was around 100,000 years ago, when modern humans began to migrate out of Africa. The Australians were quite isolated until the British arrived in 1788. Could the story of the seven sisters have been around that long ago? Of course it could, because the stars were always a great subject to hang a legend on. What drives the idea home, though, is the fact that these stars could easily have been the six sisters, as that's how many stars you see. The seventh star is Pleione, which is too close to the star Atlas to distinguish it with the naked eye. However, a team of astronomers ran simulations and found that all seven stars would have been easily visible 100,000 years ago. So it's quite possible that the seven sisters being chased by Orion is the oldest surviving story on earth. Read more about this idea at IFL  Science.  -via Strange Company        

(Image credit: NASA)

A mutineer who left Hernan Cortez’ expedition sailed up the west coast of Mexico observed the Gulf of California in 1533 and assumed that the place he called California was a large island. He compared it to a fictional island from a novel and the name stuck. And so did the idea that it was an island. Only a few years later, in 1539, the Gulf of California was thoroughly explored and California was found to not be an island after all. But explorers, geographers, and cartographers didn't get the memo, and maps were drawn showing California as an enormous island that went up the entire west coast of what is now the US for the next 300 years! Granted, the last of these maps, dated to 1865, was Japanese and relied on hopelessly outdated information. Still, it is odd that European mapmakers continued to draw California as an island up through the middle of the 18th century.

There were reasons for the misunderstanding, including slow communication between continents and translation between languages, but it was also politics. Spain and England were in a race to claim North America, and cutting off California, claimed by Sir Francis Drake, would leave the mainland open to the Spanish. Read about the island of California at Atlas Obscura. The post has 18 maps made between the 16th and 19th centuries, 17 of which show California as an island.

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam was quite an athlete of sorts back in the day. He was famous for climbing the light rigging at concerts. You can see a long compilation of these stunts here. The most amazing was at a Rock the Vote concert in Seattle on September 20th, 1992. Vedder had thrown the microphone up, and it became tangled in the rig about 20 feet up. What to do? It would have been simple to just replace the mic and cord, but no. Vedder climbed the scaffolding, inched over to the mic, and untangled it most of the way.

But then Vedder realized that if he freed the cord entirely, he would have to either climb down or jump, and he was no doubt getting tired. So he just slid down the mic cord! We don't know what damage that did to his hands, but the cord did not break. And a legend was enshrined in rock 'n' roll history. -via reddit, where you can see an alternate video of the same stunt.  

Why do people knit? In the charming, award-winning stop-motion animation Visible Mending, we hear from a variety of people who knit for a variety of reasons. An engineer used knitting as physical therapy after a stroke. A mother knitted a blanket to ease her stress when her son was injured. A knitting club member remembers friends who she inherited yarn from. A terminal cancer patient knits to feel a sense of accomplishment. And there's a man who knits burial clothes for a maternity hospital so he can focus on the needs of others. Knitting improves hand-eye coordination, provides feedback, reduces stress, improves focus, and builds community with others. And it makes an awfully cute group of knitted animals to illustrates these concepts in film. They are, in fact, mending themselves. -via Laughing Squid 

Leap Year is when we add an extra day to the calendar to make up for the fact that it takes 364.25 days to travel around the sun. It happens every four years, and means that we also have the summer Olympics and a US presidential election. I had always heard that February 29th is the day that women can actually propose marriage to men, which is a joke on how rare that outrageous act should be. But it turns out that traditionally, women can propose to men any time during a Leap Year. Until recently, that was still seen as a strange twist on the the usual custom of a man proposing to a woman. Sometimes it made the papers, and sometimes it backfired.

In 1932, Alf Shepherd, the manager of the Ashington Ballroom in England, launched a promotion in which he offered a free wedding reception, including the venue, orchestra, and a cake to a woman who proposed to her gentleman while in the ballroom. With no takers by the February 11 deadline, the business extended the promotion to February 29 and encouraged women to propose by valentine, but some women misunderstood the update notice. Shepherd received at least three valentines from women who asked for his hand in marriage, sight unseen!

Read about this and other newsworthy Leap Year proposals through the years at Fishwrap. -via Strange Company

Once upon a time, when there were many fewer academic journals than there are now, a scientist or team would submit a paper on their research, and then scientists in the same general area with no connection to the authors would then review the paper before it was accepted for publishing.

Today, science journalism is a cutthroat industry, and we have artificial intelligence to help create shortcuts. A paper published in the journal Frontiers drew peer review from the public for its AI-generated images. The authors disclose that the illustrations were generated by the program Midjourney, but they are so inaccurate and badly labelled as to be completely useless. Science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik described the image above as "a bunch of pizzas with pink salami and blue tomatoes." But the real show-stopper is an image of a rat with the world's largest penis and four testes. Now, science illustrations will often enlarge an important inset, but will indicate this somehow. This rat's parts are labeled with words like iollotte sserotgomar, testtomcels, dissilced, and dck. The testtomcels label points to the rat's hind leg. But at least the word Rat is spelled correctly.   

A commenter who knows more about molecular biology than I do says the text appears to be AI-generated in places, too. Twitter is having a good time with the paper.

really, the only thing i'd take issue with here is the unclear labeling of the diƨlocttal stem ells.

— Paranoid Delusion Mocker, Professional Gangstalker (@legs_snail) February 15, 2024

One day after Bik posted her article, Frontiers has retracted the paper. A document of the original is still available. -via Metafilter

(Image source: Frontiers)

The 1988 movie Beetlejuice revolves around Barbara and Adam Maitland, who are killed in an auto accident early in the film, but continue to live in the house they love. Being ghosts, they cannot stop the sale of their home to a new family, so they try to scare them away. If you didn't know the movie already, you might think that makes them the villains in the story, but no, that belongs to the chaotic Beetlejuice who they enlist to help them out. But one fan theory suggests we look elsewhere for the real villain.

Before the accident, the Maitlands are visited by pushy realtor Jane Butterfield, who could make a large commission selling their home. The couple aren't interested in selling the house. But then they immediately die, making the real estate deal possible. What if Jane had engineered the accident? It was ostensibly caused by a stray dog in the street, but Jane could have led him there. Was it murder? It may seem silly at first, but why include the realtor in the film before the death otherwise? A deleted alternate ending brings Jane back, and lends more credence to her importance in the story. This theory could open up possibilities for the as-yet-unknown plot for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the 2024 sequel opening in September. Read about this theory at Screen Rant. -via Mental Floss

Ukraine is known as the breadbasket of Europe. Its farmers raise and export a huge chunk of the world's wheat, barley, and other grains. But in 1932 and '33, Stalin decided to show Ukrainians who was boss and suppress those who would oppose the authority of the Soviet Union. The collectivization and modernization of agriculture was going on throughout the USSR, and all areas that were once abundant resources were harmed when experienced farmers were replaced by government policies and unreasonable goals. Bad weather made things worse. Still, Ukraine suffered so much more that many countries consider the Holodomor an act of genocide. And it was kept secret from the outside world for decades.

Tom Blank of Weird History makes no attempt at humor in this video, because it's a truly tragic story. He does allow a little sarcasm when appropriate. You can learn more about the Holodomor at Wikipedia. Beware, the details are gory and heartbreaking.

Casimir Zeglen left his Polish monastery in 1890 and immigrated to the US to lead a Polish Catholic congregation in Chicago. He was shocked when the mayor of Chicago was assassinated by gunshot in 1893. So shocked, in fact, that he went all in on developing a way to protect public figures from such attacks that could be worn unnoticed underneath a regular shirt, namely, a bulletproof vest. After two years of research with other materials, Zeglen learned that silk had an extraordinary strength, enough to slow or even stop a bullet. Zeglen began learning about the art of silk weaving and developed new methods to make it as strong as needed for his lifesaving vest. He received two patents for his innovation in 1896.

But despite the vest's effectiveness, Zeglen ran into problems. His business partner betrayed him. His funding, spent on research, ran out when it came time to manufacture the product. And then the real problem with a silk bulletproof vest came to light- it was biodegradable. Still, Zeglen's research paved the way for bulletproof materials we have now. Read the story of Zeglen's bulletproof vest at Amusing Planet.

In ancient times, a solar eclipse caused people to believe the world was ending. We know better now, but animals can act like they feel the same way. Some begin to act anxious, or run away, or start acting like it's nighttime when the sun goes dark, which only makes sense. Other behaviors are not so easily explained. Tortoises who start mating could be the wisest of the bunch, because, well, if the world really were ending, what would you do? But then again, how much attention do we pay to these animal behaviors when there's no eclipse?

The next solar eclipse will be on Monday, April 8, which will be seen in the parts of the US. Those places are already battening the hatches for the hordes of tourists who will be rolling in to see it. Learn more about the April eclipse at NASA. They've got some cool visuals. -via Laughing Squid