Warning: if you are still on the fence about whether it is ethical to eat an octopus, this video might push you right over the edge.

Elora Explora owns a watersports center in Bonaire in the Caribbean. But before that, she lived in Belize, where she went diving almost every day. One day, she saw a tiny octopus and reached out her hand toward it. The octopus reached back! Another day, Elora found him again, and he seemed to remember her. Elora named him Egbert and they became friends. She brought him food and toys, and he would run to meet her. Uh, I mean swim to meet her, I guess. One time, Elora didn't get to dive for a whole week and she wondered if Egbert would remember her. Of course he did!  

You can see more of the sweet interactions between the diver and the tiny octopus at Laughing Squid. 

Here's a mega-list of funny films that will certainly give you ideas for what to watch this weekend. It's supposedly a list of "the funniest movie the year you were born" but I don't see how that makes a movie special among great films. All the listed movies that I've seen are indeed worth the time, and I want to check out some of them that I haven't seen. The funniest comedy of each year was determined by ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, with later movies also factoring in box office. Bonus: trailers are included.

Your opinions may vary, for the designation of "funniest," and even the categorization. I saw The Graduate during its initial run, although its been a long time, and I never knew it was supposed to be a comedy. For most of the years represented, it's hard to complain when you can't think of what other movies came out that year, but in 1987 I have to argue that Raising Arizona was much funnier than Moonstruck, which I also didn't realize was a comedy.

Check out all 73 films, one for each year from 1950 to last year, at Mental Floss.

What if you staged a robbery and no one cared? A man tried to rob a nail salon in Buckhead, Georgia, near Atlanta. But no one paid any attention to him as he demanded money. The guy behind the counter was on the phone, and the waiting customers just ignored him. What did he expect? It's a nail salon; they probably didn't have much cash, since people pay with credit cards, and there's no expensive merchandise to take. He obviously had no weapon, even though he held his hand in a bag like he was trying to fool them into thinking he might have. The guy managed to grab one woman's phone as she left, but since he was getting nowhere, he just gave up and walked out. Police are asking the public if they can help identify the suspect, but if they catch him, you can imagine the giggles when the jury is shown the security footage.  -via Boing Boing

It happens quite often that old legends and folk tales turn out to have a grain of truth behind them, even if the details get muddied over time. We also read just the other day how classic archaeology can be very destructive, as in ruining a 1,000-year-old structure to find the 2,000-year-old structure underneath it. But new technology is finding a way around that.

In southern Mexico, in the city of Oaxaca, the much older Zapotec city of Mitla lies in ruins. In 1674 a Catholic priest described a bygone temple there as having four chambers above ground and four below ground in which the dead were buried. One of the underground chambers had a sealed entrance to the underworld, called Lyobaa. Spanish missionaries considered this heretical, so in 1533 they destroyed the temple and built churches in its place. The churches are still there, making exploration of the area impossible until now.

A collaboration of scientific and government entities have employed non-invasive geophysical methods to explore what may be underneath, and have discovered underground voids that indicate the chambers may still exist. Read about the ancient city of Mitla and the Zapotec temples at Ars Technica.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Marco M. Vigato/ARX Project)

Ready for a brain teaser? In this puzzle from TED-Ed, you are the protagonist in a Back to the Future scenario. You have to go back in time to set some things right, but apparently you are not meant to get it right, because you from the future, uh, your future, is also there. This time travel paradox can be a bit confusing, but I think you can find your way out of it, at least theoretically. We really don't have time-traveling Deloreans. If you want to solve the puzzle on your own, stop the video at two minutes in. They will give you the answer and explain it thoroughly after that.

If you get confused, I have a clue, but only if you need it. Show clue

Every year, Duck brand duct tape awards scholarships to high school students who make their prom attire out of duct tape. There's a $10,000 scholarship at stake for the winner in both the dress and the tuxedo category in the Stuck at Prom contest, plus $500 goes to the four runners-up in each category. The 2023 contestants are in, and they've been winnowed down to the top five dresses and top five tuxedos. Now you can help decide who wins! See the finalists at this page. Click on the name to bring up their story and more pictures. Clicking on the image indicates a vote, but your selection can be changed up until you register your vote with the button on the bottom of the page. You can vote for one dress and one tuxedo every day until July 12. But what of the contestants that didn't make the top ten? You can see eleven pages of them in a gallery here.  -via Boing Boing

Presentacion espectacular. pic.twitter.com/WBkdBwtSDP

— Solo para Curiosos (@Solocuriosos_1) June 25, 2023

A domino shot is exactly what it sounds like- a series of cocktails made by arranging one ingredient to fall into another and also initiate the falling of the next cocktail. You can buy special glasses to do it. Adding pyrotechnics is just icing on the cake, so to speak.

Ideal Tafarshiku is a mixologist at Studio 1806 in Pristina, Kosovo. A master of theatrics, he recently mixed 151 domino shots in one graceful move. These weren't just falling glasses- these drinks involved dry ice and burning alcohol on the bar (hence the music). Too bad the falling cocktails outran the fire. It's still an impressive accomplishment, and must have taken hours to set up. A few people pointed out that there are way more drinks made here than there are people in the bar, but it was done for the 'gram, and if it were a busy time of day, they would have never been able to set these up all the way around the oblong bar. The original video is here.  -Thanks, WTM!

Theodore Roosevelt never knew what to do with his daughter Alice. On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt's mother died just hours before his beloved wife Alice died. He could not face raising the daughter she had borne two days earlier, nor could he bring himself to speak her name, which was the same as her mother's. Baby Alice was sent to live with her aunt, and only became part of the family when Teddy remarried and then had five more children. But Alice was always the odd one out, never getting along with her stepmother and always rebelling.

As a teenager in the White House after Roosevelt became president, Alice continued her contrary ways, by interrupting presidential meetings, drinking, driving around with boys, and smoking on the roof. She became a media star when her debutante ball was held at the White House, and the papers began following her every move. She was called everything from a guttersnipe to a princess, but she refused to conform to expectations. President Roosevelt thought he had the problem of Alice figured out when he began sending her overseas as an informal diplomat, but instead of keeping her out of the national headlines, her foreign antics continued to draw the press. Read the story of the First Daughter who refused to play the part at Messy Nessy Chic.    

(Image credit: Théobald Chartran)

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)