If you haven't seen Barbie yet (and there are a few of us), here's your chance to get an extended look and critique of the movie. Oh, and you won't want to miss the Quentin Tarantino part. Screen Junkies pronounces it a showcase of ad placement, not just for Barbie dolls and all their accessories, but also for Chevrolet and other consumer products. Plus, it's deeply feminist, implausible, and juvenile. But who cares about all that? The movie is really funny, which covers all other sins. But they find plenty of other good things to say about Barbie, so it's no wonder that the movie has made $1.4 billion already, the most of any 2023 movie so far.

Barbie will make another go-round at IMAX theaters for one week beginning Friday (September 22) and is already available for digital download, and will be released on home video on January 2.

The supernatural monster we call a vampire goes back hundreds of years, as reanimated corpses that rose from their graves to terrorize the living, almost the way we view zombies today. But through literature, they were turned into pop culture creatures who are cultured, sexy, and move among the living without being detected until it's too late. We often think of the 1897 novel Dracula as the beginning of that type of vampire, but there were others in literature before. The first aristocratic vampire was Lord Ruthven in the novel The Vampyre. The origin of this story is a story in itself.

There was that one night at a fine house on Lake Geneva in Switzerland in June of 1816 that a group of vacationers waited out a rainy night with a competition to see who could write the best ghost story. They included poet Lord Byron, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron's physician 23-year-old John Polidori. Oh yeah, we already know what Mary Shelley wrote that night. But what about the other participants? They also wrote tales, or fragments of story ideas. Lord Byron came up with an idea that he never fleshed out, but it inspired Polidori to later write a novel about an attractive, cultured vampire. It was published in 1819, with Lord Byron listed as the author! Read what we know about the convoluted route that story went through to become The Vampyre at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: F.G. Gainsford) 

The Canadian marble fox, also called the Arctic marble fox, is a beautiful animal. It's also somewhat confusing. I've found a source that says it's a rare subspecies of the red fox found in the wild. Almost all other sources tell me it is not a naturally occurring fox, but is the result of selectively breeding red foxes for the color variation. Or a hybrid that's the result of breeding red foxes with Arctic foxes. Note that red foxes and silver foxes are the same species with varying colors; the Arctic fox is different. Some sources say the mutation that was then selectively bred originated in Norway in 1945, so Canadian marble foxes aren't necessarily Canadian, either. There's also some talk about these deliberately-bred foxes living in the wild after escaping from captivity in a fur farm, breeding facility, or a household that kept them as pets. I have no idea how true that is, but all those places are not where a fox needs to be. In fact, the fox pictured above is not a fox at all, but a plush doll! It was made by MalinaToys. Here is a more representative picture.

This one looks like a fox, and nothing like a cat. Still beautiful, and still better off in the wild than at a fur farm or in a family living room. Too bad they lack the perfect camouflage natural selection gave other foxes. (Thanks WTM!)

We know that a few words are the same in all languages, or at least many languages, because they move from one language to another. It's only natural, as we travel the globe and find things and concepts that are new to us. There are a lot of "loanwords" that just become a part of the second language. That's what we get for communicating. Even more common are words taken from another language and then get changed a bit to fit better into the second language. You might even call them mangled, as some examples end up being rather funny to people who speak both the old and new languages. Then there are "calques," which I wasn't at all familiar with, but it has to do with translation. Tom Scott explains these leaps of language that eventually enrich all of our languages. Along the way, we also find out where Admiral Ackbar's name came from.

You can always recognize Dutch fans at global sporting events because they are wearing orange. The color is deeply ingrained in their national identity. But did you know that the Netherlands is also responsible for orange carrots? It's true!

Carrots originated in central Asia, where wild carrots were first cultivated by the Persians. Those carrots were purple. There were also some yellow and white carrots, but most were purple. And that's what people were used to when carrots were taken to the rest of the world. An orange carrot was extremely rare, and considered odd. Then Dutch agriculture discovered carrots in the late 16th century, and selectively bred them to be sweeter and more resistant to pests. They were also orange, due to greater amounts of beta-carotene. People liked the sweeter Dutch carrots, and they looked better in a stew than the purple ones. Did they make carrots orange deliberately to reflect the royal House of Orange? Was it a branding thing? Or could it be that the Netherlands' orange identity comes from their famous carrots? It's possible that one had nothing to do with the other, and people argue about it to this day.

Read up on the history of carrots and the meaning behind their color at ZME Science. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Stephen Ausmus)

When we think about the Stone Age, we think of cave men, or The Flintstones. You might be surprised at the many important steps that mankind took toward civilization during the Stone Age, which lasted a couple of million years. What we think of as "primitive" during that period was the best life ever gets for early man, and those folks made great efforts toward making their own lives better with new ideas and technical innovations. We call it the Stone Age because that's what they left behind. Who knows what else they used? Bones, sure, and maybe wood, leather, plants, and a host of other things that just didn't survive long enough for us to find them. Meanwhile, during that time humans developed fire-making, cooking, art, clothing, agriculture, and long-distance travel. That's a lot of innovation for "cave men." We only call them "prehistoric" because they didn't write their accomplishments down, but we can figure out their history from what little they did leave behind.

Dutch coffee company Man Met Bril Koffie (Man with Coffee Glasses) is building a hotel in Rotterdam. The hotel isn't quite finished yet, but they have big plans for the Coffee Hotel. One of those plans is a residency program, in which baristas and other hospitality pros are invited to come work for a few months at a time. It's not like an American internship, as they will pay you, and also put you up in the hotel for free. It's not clear whether Americans are invited; the website offers several languages, none of which is English, but the residency program page is in English. It's an opportunity to spend a few months in the Netherlands without spending like a tourist. The program is kicking off with a residency roadtrip through Europe, so they can recruit coffee enthusiasts from all over. Read more about the Koffie Hotel and the residency program at Sprudge. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Man Met Bril Koffie)

In 1924, Fritz Heinrich Angerstein was arrested for eight murders in Germany. His wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and several household employees were all dead. Angerstein blamed bandits for the carnage, but the police told him there was evidence against him. He was told an expert had photographed the retinas of the victims, and his image had been preserved as their last sight before death. Angerstein then confessed to the murders. It was a risky move, but the police never had to actually produce those photos, which probably didn't exist.

However, the idea that the last thing one sees before death becomes imprinted on the retina at the back of the eyeball had been around a long time, and became a scientific pursuit with the rise of photography. Serious and often gruesome experiments were done to find images recorded by the eye itself, most notably by German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne. He even achieved some success- in rabbits. Read about the study of optography, as it was called, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Aravind Sivaraj)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both Florida and California were desperate for new people to come and put down roots. Both states had to battle deeply-ingrained Puritan beliefs that the comfort of year-round warm weather wasn't good for a person. Besides, California was a desert and Florida was a swamp. State boosters and land developers spent decades convincing people that their state was a paradise. California rerouted rivers and built aqueducts to bring water to Los Angeles and San Diego. Florida drained swamps and concentrated on beach access. Both states also pitched the wonders of healthy and delicious fresh oranges and other citrus fruit. And neither state was above criticizing the other.

Both campaigns worked well over the long term. California and Florid are high-population states- ranking first and third among the 50 states. Both became tourist meccas, even before the Disney theme parks. But now that warm semitropical climate is threatened by change. California is dealing with chronic drought, wildfire, and landslides. Florida is increasingly a hurricane magnet, and the rising sea level threatens its most costly real estate. Read about the campaign to settle Florida and California and their precarious status as paradise at the Conversation. -via Smithsonian

(Image source: Covina Public Library)

The Jewish high holidays wouldn't be the same without a new song from a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama). Rosh Hashanah, the New Year celebration, began Friday evening and will continue through sunset on Sunday. By the Hebrew calendar, we have reached the year 5784. The guys in Six13 have been waiting years to bring you this song, a Rosh Hashanah anthem that uses the tune of the 1970 Chicago song "25 or 6 to 4." The time has finally come. Honestly, they've probably been working on this recording for years, with its many-layered voice orchestra. No instruments were used; even the drums are voices. The lyrics are at the YouTube page, although you will have to click "more" to see them. They make more sense than the original lyrics. L'Shanah Tovah!

There are people who love J.R.R. Tolkien's books about Middle-earth, and there are fanatics who study their history, origins, and inspirations. Sometimes these people are also geography geeks and love studying maps of Tolkien's imaginative universe. Then there's Mohammad Reza Kamali, an Iranian Tolkien fan who spent years comparing Middle-earth to real maps of the real world. He noticed an uncanny similarity between Mordor and the Himalayan mountain range.

Now, Tolkien himself said that the Shire was based on rural England, and that action of the story takes place in a part of Middle-earth that is "equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean.” Many fans took that simply as meaning Europe. But "equivalent in latitude" doesn't mean Europe. Kamali was very familiar with Tolkien's maps, and recognized their lines and shapes when he saw the real-world topography of Pakistan's mountains. Furthermore, the Indus River shares many similarities to Anduin, the Great River of Middle-earth, where the One Ring was lost. Read Kamali's theories about Tolkien's maps and the reasoning behind them at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Ian Alexander)

The TV series M*A*S*H introduced us to the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, an innovation of the Korean War. Studies from World War II led authorities to determine that wounded soldiers who received immediate care near the front lines were much more likely to survive, so medical teams were mobilized to be there. You can't argue with the results: a 30% drop in fatalities among wounded front line soldiers. The difference between the MASH units and the M*A*S*H TV show was that in the real world, there wasn't much comedy, and that almost all the round-the-clock work was done by nurses. And they were all women, as men could not serve in the military as nurses until 1956!

In the three years of the Korean War, around 1500 women were put on the front lines to care for wounded soldiers, often stepping up to act in capacities beyond their training. Mike Weedall, the author of the new novel War Angel: Korea 1950, gives us an overview of the life of an army nurse of the real MASH units in Korea at Military History Now.   -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Stewart/U.S. Army)

Science can be weird. Your goal may be to unlock the mysteries of how the human body develops, but you find yourself counting nose hairs in dead bodies to see if there are more hairs in the left or right nostrils. How does one obtain a grant for that?

The annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night in an online ceremony to researchers who published studies concerning the sexual activities of anchovies, hi-tech toilets, people who talk backwards, and other science that makes you laugh, and then makes you think. These prizes are sponsored by The Annals of Improbable Research, and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

Each winner this year received a .pdf document that can be printed and assembled to make a three-dimensional trophy, and a ten-trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. The prizes were bestowed by a line-up of real Nobel Prize winners: Frances Arnold (chemistry 2018), Marty Chalfie (chemistry 2008), Peter Doherty (physiology or medicine 1996), Esther Duflo (economics 2019), Jerry Friedman (physics 1990), Wolfgang Ketterle (physics 2001), Eric Maskin (economics 2007), Ardem Patapoutian (physiology or medicine 2021), Al Roth (economics 2012), Rich Roberts (physiology or medicine 1993), and Barry Sharpless (chemistry 2001 and chemistry 2022). Continue reading for all the winners.

Prohibition left lasting effects on the US still felt today, like organized crime, NASCAR, and state liquor control. Fortunes were made providing illegal booze to a thirsty nation, and not all by men. Women were just as likely to jump at the chance to get rich in the underground liquor trade.

Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan knew an opportunity when she saw it. She had already made a name for herself under the name "Texas" Guinan in vaudeville and silent movies where she played a rough and tumble Western gunslinger. In the 1920s, her fame got her gigs as a celebrity hostess in speakeasies, where she provided entertainment and became quite a draw. Guinan invested her earnings in her own nightclubs scattered throughout New York City, where she hosted celebrities, sold illegal liquor, and staved off police raids as best she could.

Then there was “Moonshine Mary” Wazeniak, who re-purified methanol to make liquor, with deadly results, and “Spanish Marie” Waite, who operated a fleet of boats running rum from Havana to Miami, even after her husband was imprisoned. And Elise Olmstead, an FBI agent assigned to keep an eye on a suspected liquor smuggler, who instead married him and joined his business. Read about these women and others who became notorious for their Prohibition exploits at Mental Floss.

If you were to fall into the Amazon River, are you doomed to be torn apart and eaten by piranhas? Piranhas can be pretty ferocious, and we've all seen those demonstrations where a meaty bone is offered to a school of piranhas and they go to town, churning the water until it's bloody. Teddy Roosevelt wrote about piranhas in his 1914 book Through the Brazilian Wilderness, describing how they consumed an entire cow before his eyes during his South American safari, and would likely do the same to a human. That's how the idea of piranhas as dangerous man-eaters got started, and we have plenty of gory movies to show for it. A century of research has raised questions about that demonstration, but the piranha became a terrifying symbol of the dangers of the Amazon just the same. Learn about piranhas and the danger they pose in this this TED-Ed lesson.