Any time I've admitted that I like the smell of gasoline, the reaction from people around me makes me less likely to ever admit it again. I don't seek it out, and I certainly don't sniff it, because that just always seemed dangerous. But I think I agree with the reasons SciShow gives for my long time enjoyment of that smell. And those other folks? Well, gasoline doesn't smell the same to everyone. If it smelled like fish to me, I would probably feel differently. This video is a mere 2:45 long; the rest is an ad.

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"It belongs in a museum!" But does it, really? That's one of the questions modern archaeologists confront when they study ancient artifacts. The world's most famous fictional archaeologist, Indiana Jones, has his newest and confirmed last movie in theaters, which brings up the question again- how accurate are these moves to archaeology? Each of the Indiana Jones films has led real archaeologists to decry the simplification of their painstaking research and the depiction of magical powers in ancient artifacts, but Bulgarian archaeologist Petar Parvanov writes about the facets of archaeology that the Indiana Jones films get right.

First, the movies point out in a spectacular way how destructive archaeology can be. They also highlight how cultural artifacts have been used for political purposes. And there's the question of what really belongs in a museum, and who gets to decide who those cultural or even sacred artifacts really belong to. Parvanov has examples from the movies and from real life archaeology that illustrate each of these ethical questions about studying mankind's history. -via Smithsonian

Lofoten, an archipelago of islands off the coast of Norway, is a beautiful place registered as a UNESCO Heritage Site. These islands may have been settled 11,000 years ago, and there is a great reason why. Despite being inside the Arctic Circle, Lofoten has average high temperatures in the 50s and 60s (Fahrenheit) in the summer (although it has seen the 80s), and average lows barely creeping below freezing in the winter. This temperature anomaly is attributed to its location in the Gulf Stream. The islands of Lofoten are therefore a preferred home for fish, birds, and land animals of the Arctic, not to mention plant life.

Yet being in the Arctic Circle still has the effect of months-long daylight in the summer, and months-long darkness in winter -except when the Northern Lights are shining. This lends itself to an internationally-known bicycle race in summer called the Insomnia Race that covers the entire archipelago and takes place during the midnight sun. Read about Lofoten and see lots of gorgeous pictures at Kuriositas.   

(Image credit: Henrik Johansson)

The giant shark megalodon gave us a few scary movies and single-handedly kept Shark Week going for several years. But this huge predatory fish died out millions of years ago. What we know about them mainly comes from teeth, because they shed teeth throughout their lives, and those huge numbers of teeth were more likely to fossilize and remain with us than bones. But those teeth are enough to show us how big megalodons grew, what they ate, and where they went. When they disappeared 3.5 million years ago, it led to other species having the freedom to grow big as well. Various species may come and go, but the ocean always has its monsters. -via Damn Interesting

Hey, geography nerds! Can you name the roundest country in the world? People who have really studied world maps might be able to. People who haven't might be able to find it in the map above. Yes, it's Sierra Leone. Yes, there have been people who study and rank the earth's nations by the geometry of their borders. Australian geo-statistician David Barry ranked them by how rectangular each country is, using an algorithm he devised. Argentinian mathematician Gonzalo Ciruelo ranked the world's countries by how round they are. With two ranked lists from two different experts, you have to wonder if there's any overlap. Yes, there is.

Sierra Leone may be the roundest nation on Ciruelo's list, but it also came in as the 14th most rectangular nation in Barry's list. The strangest anomaly is Vatican City, which is the fourth roundest in the world but also the second most rectangular! Vatican City may have confounded the algorithms because of its tiny size, which gives it fewer pixels in the data set. On a map, it looks neither round nor rectangular. How to explain Sierra Leone? Well, once you consider all the weird shapes of the other countries in the world, there really aren't all that many that are anywhere near round or rectangular. Find out what countries rank high in roundness and in rectangularity, and how they were calculated, at Atlas Obscura.

Ask a competitive cyclist why he* shaves his legs, and you could get all sorts of answers: it keeps sweat from sticking to you, it makes road rash less painful, it makes bandaging an injury easier. He might have tried to avoid explaining it was for aerodynamics, because what difference would a few legs hairs make? But that would have been before engineer Marc Cote started working for a high-end bicycle company, and talked them into building a wind tunnel specifically for cyclists. The aim was to produce more aerodynamic bicycles, but Cote's research went further. After all, 75% of the drag in a bicycle race is due to the cyclist himself.

When triathlete Jesse Thomas showed up at the lab with his hairy legs in 2014, Cote talked him into cycling in the wind tunnel, shaving his legs, and trying it again. He calculated that Thomas could save 70 seconds over a 40-mile time trial just by shaving! More hairy cyclists were recruited to confirm the results. Further research showed that Laurent Fignon would have won the 1989 Tour de France if he had only cut his ponytail. Now, shaving one's legs is expected among all competitive cyclists, along with other aerodynamic innovations that came from Cote's wind tunnel. Read how cyclists lost their hair at Nautilus.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: TJBlackwell)

* Women cyclists aren't asked this question.

In 1962, British newspaper editor Brendon Grimshaw bought a tiny island in the Republic of Seychelles for £8,000. He moved onto the uninhabited Moyenne Island and went to work. For the next four decades, Grimshaw cleared the island of invasive species and planted thousands of native trees as well as other plants. He carefully maintained a couple of the island's historic sites, like a purported pirate's hideout and a gravesite, as well as the homes of previous owners. He also built a path around the entire island to those sites, which is barely more than a mile long. Grimshaw brought in and raised giant tortoises. Those years of work transformed Moyenne into a tropical paradise of birds, geckos, tortoises, palm trees, and more. The 24-acres island is now Moyenne Island National Park, the smallest national park in the world, but one that people go to great lengths to visit.

To preserve the island's nature, the number of visitors is strictly limited. But you can see its beauty in a post at Moss and Fog. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Camera Eye)

Were you in Dayton, Ohio, recently and saw an early biplane pass overhead? Tom Scott stopped at the Wright “B” Flyer Hangar/Museum in Dayton to see where Orville and Wilbur Wright built planes to sell beginning in 1910. The first commercial airplane was the Wright Model B, of which there are only two surviving examples from that era. But they have been built recently, using the Wright Brothers' design and new and safer materials. This biplane has two propellers driven with a bicycle chain! It's somehow both illuminating and reassuring that the plane designed in 1910 is still a valid design, although anyone in it is exposed to the wild blue yonder, which is an incredible experience. Tom has come a long way from being scared to ride a roller coaster. No, they didn't let him fly the plane, but he got to ride in it. They don't even let pilots fly this plane, with one exception you might be able to guess.

The National Audubon Society has crowned the winners of its annual photography competition. The Grand Prize went to the photo above by professional nature photographer Liron Gertsman of Vancouver. These are two rock pigeons engaged in allopreening, a new word I learned today that means grooming each other as a courtship gesture. Look how their iridescent feathers stand out against the dark background! Rock pigeons generally mate for life and share child care duties.

The photograph that won in the Professional category is this Atlantic puffin, captured in the Westman Islands off Iceland by Shane Kalyn. Kalyn shot this puffin sitting on a lava formation on a rainy day. It was the first Atlantic puffin that he'd seen!

Other awards were given in categories such as Amateur, Female Bird, Plants for Birds, Fisher, Youth, and Video. You can see all the award winners and honorable mentions at the Audubon contest site. The top 100 photos not making the winner's circle are listed here. -via Kottke

You've probably seen it a million times, but never thought much about it. The stock photos of women lying on their stomachs while typing on a laptop or writing in a journal are really common, yet just as physically impossible as that movie poster pose. To see what's in front of you while lying this way, a woman must prop herself up on her elbows, which makes using her hands for typing too difficult. It's not comfortable, either. These photos never show men doing it, because that would be ridiculous. This pose happens in movies and TV shows as well. No one does this in real life.  

Why this pose? Most likely it's an opportunity to show both boobs and butt, and also hint at the behavior of a teenage girl in her bedroom. Merrill Markoe is a writer, and those images got under her skin, so she wrote a funny and relatable essay about these women in stock photos who not only appear to be writing while on their stomachs, but also drinking coffee, talking on the phone, and otherwise multitasking in bed. -via Boing Boing

The assignment - do not need the ER this #July4th pic.twitter.com/wUa0Ye9HEX

— US Consumer Product Safety Commission (@USCPSC) July 1, 2023

After a three-year absence due to the pandemic, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission returned to the National Mall in Washington last week to put on a demonstration of how not to use fireworks. They used styrofoam mannequins to show us the most common ways people get injured during the Fourth of July (and then they picked up all the pieces before they left). Last year, eleven people were killed by fireworks, and 10,200 people were injured badly enough to go to the emergency room. If Elon Musk's latest tweaks to the algorithm prevent you from seeing the video, you can watch the carnage here.

USCPSC coming through solid on this July weekend.

— Kenny_Blankenship (@Blank3nship89) July 1, 2023

Lifehacker has a list of the latest fireworks safety tips, including warnings about how to supervise children and pets. Besides all that, the the USCPSC Twitter feed is a pretty handy reference for the latest product recalls, and they can be quite funny at times, too. -Thanks WTM!  

In 1961, Forrest Ackerman, editor of  Spacemen magazine, received the above letter from a writer named Stephen King. But King was only 14 at the time, and not quite the household name he would become some years later. You can see hints of the horror master he would eventually be, in the declaration that the obituary section was his favorite part of the magazine.

Ackerman declined to publish the story accompanied by this letter, titled "The Killer." You can read a synopsis of it at Wikipedia. Despite this and other rejections, King kept writing and submitting stories until he finally got one of his tales published in another magazine in 1967. He also wrote full-length novels, and his fourth book was the first to be published: Carrie, in 1970. Persistence pays off!

Ackerman reconsidered his rejection many years later, and finally published "The Killer"in the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, in 1994. -via Nag on the Lake

When we think of a saber-tooth, we imagine Smilodon, once called the saber-tooth tiger, that roamed America thousands of years ago and left remains in the La Brea tar pits. There were actually three species of the Smilodon genus. But not all saber-tooth animals were cats. They weren't even all carnivores! Terrifyingly long canine teeth evolved separately in mammals from the very beginning of mammals. Tiarajudens eccentricus was a proto-mammal that lived in Brazil 260 million years ago. It didn't eat meat, but had long canines that were possibly used to fight others of their species. The genus Inostrancevia was a ten-foot-long proto-mammal with species found in both Russia and South Africa, indicating they migrated over time before the continents split apart. Get a short course in saber-toothed creatures in a roundup of eight very different toothy animals that lived millions of years apart at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Momotarou2012)

The United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, is the elite college for army officer candidates. It has at least 4,000 cadets, all who go through both academic and physical training at the same time. Feeding these students and the faculty means preparing around 13,000 meals a day. That much food requires huge vats and advance planning. But what makes the West Point food service notable is its efficiency. All the cadets arrive for meals in formation at the same time, and must finish eating within 25 minutes. The schedule allows for no lags or screwups, and every member of the kitchen staff and the cadets themselves have specific duties to get it all accomplished in time. The plan goes off like clockwork, three times a day.     

The dietician said that they provide between 1,200 and 1,500 calories a day to each student. That will certainly keep them on the skinny side, as the average American adult consumes more than 3,000 calories a day! But most likely she actually meant for each meal, since they are eating hearty portions.

People ask why the cadets don't clean up their own tables. There are several reasons: that would be inefficient, they don't have time before their next class, and perhaps most importantly, they are officer candidates learning to be officers.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in theaters this weekend. The fifth Indiana Jones film has so far garnered so-so reviews. So let's look back at the one that started it all: Raiders of the Lost Ark. The extended opening scene set up the character of Indiana Jones so well, it grabbed us and wouldn't let go. Jones being pursued by a giant boulder rolling straight for him is unforgettable even more than 40 years later, and that first chase scene has been recreated and parodied endlessly. Cracked looked back and resurrected six of the best parodies of the boulder scene, from Weird Al Yankovic, The Simpsons, Robot Chicken, The Muppets, and more. Even if you've seen them all before, you'll probably enjoy them at least as much as the new Indiana Jones film.