In 1972, the United States signed "the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction," along with 108 other countries. But before that, Cold War experiments were carried out in many cities and rural areas across the US to simulate enemy biological warfare attacks, in order to prepare defenses against such attacks. These used common strains of bacteria that they considered benign (Serratia marcescens, Bacillus globigii, Bacillus subtilis, and Aspergillus fumigatus), plus chemicals used as tracers, also thought to be benign, like fluorescent zinc cadmium sulphide. The tests began in 1949 when bacteria was released in the Pentagon's ventilation system. This program moved to US cities in 1950, and over the next 20 years, the US military carried out 239 experiments in 66 cities in the US and Canada.

The public was never informed of these experiments. It was later learned that the bacteria weren't quite benign. Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii in particular can cause serious infections. A bacterial spray in San Francisco in 1950 led to eleven people being hospitalized and one man died. It was also later determined that zinc cadmium sulphide is a carcinogen. Read about the biological warfare experiments of the Cold War era and what we learned from them at Today I Found Out.

James Cameron's second movie about the planet Pandora made two billion dollars at the box office in no time flat. That's the amount Cameron said it would have to make to break even! Avatar: The Way of Water grossed $2.314 billion by April 9. Now that it's on streaming television, Screen Junkies gives us a rundown on whether it's worth watching or not. And it appears that despite a lot of silliness, if you liked the first Avatar, you'll like the sequel. Oh, that doesn't mean they didn't find a lot to pick about. The movie relies on cliches, stereotypes, outdated slang, and twisted logic. Just like the first one. And you saw the first one, didn't you?

They don't make 'em the way they used to. You can say that about about a lot of things. A cathode-ray television set from the 1960s will not accept an HDMI cable, and it's too heavy to move, but darn it, it still works, while a flat screen TV falls apart if you touch it wrong. But that's just my personal experience. In the case of satellites, the first one ever was Sputnik 1, launched on October 4, 1957. It relayed radio signals for three weeks until its battery ran down, and fell to earth in 1958. But it served its intended purpose, and wasn't expected to last long. In the years that followed, both the US and USSR launched multiple satellites and discovered how useful they are for a wide variety of applications beyond showing up rival nations.

On May 6, 1965, the Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1 was inserted into orbit. This satellite, a 3-feet, 8-inch metal ball, is still in orbit and still carrying out its original job 58 years later! The LCS's mission is to serve as a reference point to calibrate ground-based instruments. Its ace-in-the-hole is that it needs no power source at all, so there are no batteries to run down. Solar-powered satellites are used now, but that technology was not available in miniaturized form in 1965. It's still amazing that the LCS stays in its orbit perfectly even after all these years, and so still works as a reference target. The LCS1 is expected to outlive us all. Read about the world's oldest functioning satellite at Amusing Planet.  

When two kitten advocates love each other very much, they end up volunteering to rescue them. They might also end up getting married.

Hannah Shaw, also known as Kitten Lady, recently married her longtime love Andrew Marttila with an animal themed wedding. The ceremony was outdoors at Farm Animal Refuge in San Diego. When they announced the wedding on Instagram, their friends speculated on how odd it would be to see them in fancy clothing. They cleaned up quite well, and it was a lovely ceremony, officiated by a veterinarian. 

The bride and groom were chill about what could go wrong when farm animals are incorporated into a wedding, and so any deviation from the script was considered just more of the fun. A pig served as the ring bearer. Instead of the traditional bouquet toss, they had a watermelon toss, which the pigs quite enjoyed. The centerpieces were fed to the animals after the wedding. But the big moment was when Hannah presented Andrew with a very special gift basket filled with calico kittens! A good time was had by all.   

You'll find more wedding pictures at Instagram.

And in case you are wondering, the father of the bride was there, and in fact sang a song at the reception, which you can see in the next-to last image in this gallery.

Breez Harley has a toddler son named Lander who has long hair. But the front has been getting shorter! Has someone been cutting the child's hair? Her boyfriend denied it was him. The boy doesn't normally interact with anyone else without his parents around. But he's definitely been sporting bangs lately, and his hair seems to get a little shorter day by day. He's starting to look like he's got a mullet, although the front is quite uneven. Has Lander been playing with scissors? Or is it something more sinister? They finally figured out what was happening, but you won't guess the real story.

You can watch the video at reddit if you want to be surprised or at TikTok if you don't care about spoilers in the tags and comments.

(Image credit: Breez Harley)

A body farm is a research facility where scientists study dead bodies in a controlled environment. It may sound gruesome, but this is crucial research in archaeology, crime investigation, and environmental studies. Hayley Mickleburgh is a forensic archaeologist studying buried bodies to determine who they were and how they died. Her current research is in mass graves, because that information can be very important to determine what happened after wars are fought.

In an interview at Vice, Mickleburgh explains what a body farm is, the importance of her work, and some of the things she does. For example, she investigates how bacteria from the environment interacts with the bacteria from one or more decomposing bodies to determine how long they've been buried, what killed them, and who they are. Even the soil covering a grave can be evidence of a crime. She also talks about the people who volunteer their bodies for this work after they die, and why she's willing to do the same.  -via Damn Interesting

You can imagine Tom Scott going to Japan with a long list of things he'd like to try so he can show us what we're missing. Hideyasu Ito bought a leaf blower just because it was on sale. He didn't even need to blow leaves. But it was there later on when he thought about building a hovercraft, not for profit or for clicks, but just to see if he could do it. So Ito kept at it, improving his hovercraft through several iterations at his Micro Hovercraft Laboratory founded just for this kind of project. His latest versions look like a bicycle mounted on a pontoon boat. It's a steerable bouncy castle, sort of. Cool toy, bro! And he was nice enough to let Tom try it out.

Tom noted at YouTube that this is his last video from Japan. Any guesses on where he might go next?

Toilets are connected to vent pipes, which connect with outside air. These allow for gravity to work properly in flushing a toilet and they keep swamp gasses out of your house. They can also be an emergency source of air. In 1982, William O. Holmes patented a hose device that would allow you to snake the hose through the toilet trap and breathe the air from the vent pipe.

Why would you ever want to do that? It's an emergency device in the event of a fire. Toilet air could be smelly, but the concentrations of noxious gasses are pretty low, and it beats being disabled by smoke inhalation. Still, it seems that the better alternative would be to leave the building entirely. I suppose this invention was targeted at large buildings where people may be trapped from escape, and the fire is less deadly than the smoke where you happen to be. -via Nag on the Lake

If you've ever eaten asparagus and soon noticed a terrible smell when you urinate, you can blame asparagusic acid. That's the simple explanation, but there's a lot more to it. Dr. Daniel Whitehead is a chemistry professor at Clemson University, and somewhat of an expert in bad smells. His research involves fighting against them, so the sacrifice may be worth it. He explains why asparagusic acid is potent- it contains a double dose of sulphur. Sulphur is what makes skunks smell the way they do, and rotten eggs, and roadkill, and all manner of things that aren't good for us. Yet asparagus doesn't smell that way until our bodies break down the asparagusic acid into its sulphuric components.  

But maybe asparagus doesn't affect your urine that way. Or maybe it does, but you can't smell it. Both these conditions are are in the minority, and you wouldn't know which you fit into unless you lived with someone who could smell it, or looked for those genes in a genetic test. You get the feeling that the people that fall into these different categories should be plottable on a Venn diagram, but they really have no relation to each other and can appear in any combination. I have no idea what category I would fit into because I don't like asparagus and have no interest in eating it to find out. Find out more than you ever thought you needed to know about asparagus and urine at Serious Eats.

(Image credit: H. Zell)

In the late 13th century, the town of Dunwich in Suffolk, UK, was as big as London, with about 10,000 residents. It was near the North Sea, not quite on the shore, but then the shore moved. Dunwich had eighteen stone churches, chapels, and monasteries. But that was before the sea storms of 1288 and 1328 began a calamitous progression of the sea, which drew closer and carved away the foundations of those ancient buildings. It took 600 years for the sea to eat away at the town, and in 1922, the last of the ruins fell into the ocean.   

While England was powerless in stopping the undermining of Dunwich, many people documented its demise, although with varying accuracy. Residents moved inland one by one, although some held out for as long as possible. In an exercise in wishful thinking, some signed long-term leases and others donated inheritances to the doomed churches. Tax records show that in 1674, only 95 houses were occupied. When the last remnant of All Saints’ Church fell in 1922, it took the remains of its graveyard with it, as bones of the long dead were uncovered and swept out to sea along with the last vestige of Dunwich. Read about the city that fell off a cliff at the Public Domain Review. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Joseph Mallord William Turner)

If you haven't been to the Tampa International Airport in the last year, let me introduce you to Phoebe the Flamingo. This clever piece of art gives us a 40-foot-tall flamingo in one one story by putting you, the viewer, under water! The installation by artist Matthew Mazzotta is titled HOME. Only the bird's head, neck, and legs are visible. The rest of the body is implied by a shimmering reflective ceiling that throws dappled lighting underneath and acts as the surface of the water. That perspective makes people the size of the shrimp that flamingos feed on. But there's no danger here. The floor around the sculpture even has warning bumps to help blind people avoid walking into it.



In late 2022, the airport launched a contest to name the flamingo. So many people participated that the procedure was extended, but early this year, Phoebe emerged as the winner. Bryan M, who first submitted the name, received free airline flights for his efforts. He says the name Phoebe is a play on the flamingo's genus Phoenicopterus.  -via reddit

Adaptive plant evolution is amazing. Over time, some plants came up with an ingenious chemical that repelled over even killed insects that tried to eat the plant, yet had enough beneficial effects that in the right concentration, it encouraged bees to help with pollination. We call this chemical caffeine. When humans discovered it, we made darn sure that those plants flourished so we could continue to harvest the world's greatest molecule. How that addiction fueled colonization and shaped human history is a story for other posts. Caffeine is so popular that MinuteEarth designed a coffee mug around it, giving them a reason to explain how caffeine works in this ad.

There are two main ways to approach Easter eggs. The first way is to look at it as a kid's activity, where they have fun dipping eggs in dyes and later go look for those eggs after you've hidden them in the yard. Then there are these people. They see eggs as an art medium, an opportunity for creative expression. Whether they use natural dyes, negative transfers, the scratch method, brush and paint, or the traditional Ukrainian pysanky method, their eggs are a feast for the eyes.  



While many are works of art, some are just plain clever and funny. Redditor samartypants once attended an egg decorating event and intended to decorate eggs as Hugh Hefner and a Playboy Bunny. But then they dropped and cracked the egg, forcing a reconsideration of the subject matter. What does a cracked egg remind you of? And this was the result.



And samartypants won the decorating competition. You can see 50 ranked examples of beautiful, clever, and amusing Easter egg designs in a roundup at Bored Panda. Take some as inspiration for your own egg decorating!

The Passover Seder is a meal full of traditions that tell the story of the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt. In the internet age, we've also established the tradition of the Passover parody song that celebrate the exodus story to the tune of a hit song. We've posted many of those over the years from the group Six-13, like Chozen, Uptown Passover, A Lion King Passover, and A Billy Joel Passover. Aish did it with two songs in 2016.

Y-Studs is another all-male Jewish a cappella group. They got together in college at Yeshiva University in New York City and stayed together after graduation to go professional. In their new song, they boost the harmony of "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey to tell us what Passover is all about. Passover continues through the evening of April 13.

Since The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, Disney and Lucasfilm have stepped back from feature films to concentrate on TV series, with varying results. But now they think they have their ducks in a row, and have told the participants at Star Wars Celebration in London that they have plans for three new films. It won't be a trilogy, but will span the vast timeline of the Jedi order long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.

One film will be set 25,000 years before the events of the original Star Wars trilogy, when the very first Jedi harnessed the Force. Dawn of the Jedi will be directed by James Mangold, who recently directed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Dave Filoni, who you know from The Mandalorian and The Clone Wars, will direct a film set in the time of The Mandalorian that deals with the conflict between the Imperial Remnant and the New Republic. It will wrap up several story lines from the TV shows The Mandalorian, the Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka.  

The other movie is, uh, a sequel to The Rise of Skywalker. Daisy Ridley will return as Ray Skywalker as she revives the Jedi order, 15 years after her previous adventures. The film will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who did Ms. Marvel. The script is from Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight.

There are no projected release dates for these films, as far as we know. Star Wars Celebration Europe will continue through Monday.