October 2016 – Page 87

October 2, 2016

Name the Seven Countries That Start With ‘U’

October 2, 2016 – 10:05pm

October 2, 2016

This Week’s Best Amazon Deals You Can Still Get

Smart Shopping Team

filed under: shopping

Image credit:

amazon / istock

As a recurring feature, we share some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. These items were the ones that were the most popular with our readers this week, and they’re still available.

Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers (including Amazon) and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Good luck deal hunting!

October 2, 2016 – 11:00am

Amazon Product Id:

B00F3S5QJY

October 2, 2016

15 Fun Facts About ‘Scrubs’

Julie Kliegman

filed under: Comedy, Lists, Pop Culture, tv

Image credit:

YouTube

Stop shouting “Eagle!” with your bros and delve into these little-known facts about Scrubs, which premiered 15 years ago today.

1. THE HOSPITAL IS REAL.

Sacred Heart is a real, abandoned hospital building. Patients used to drop by the set, seeking medical advice. The writers’ room was North Hollywood Medical Center’s former psychiatric ward, which might help explain some of the show’s more out-there fantasy sequences.

2. REAL DOCTORS REVIEWED THE SHOW’S STORYLINES.

Real doctors served as consultants on set to make sure Scrubs‘s storylines were scientifically accurate. One was a cardiologist named Jonathan Doris—J.D. for short. Another was Jon Turk. See what they did there?

3. THERE WAS AN ERROR IN THE OPENING CREDITS.

The X-ray sign in the opening credits was backwards for nearly five whole seasons. Then urologist Kim Briggs (Elizabeth Banks) strolled in, said “It’s been bugging me for years,” and flipped it over.

4. J.D. and Elliot’s stunt doubles got married.

They met on set. Hopefully their route to happiness was less rocky than that of the characters they portrayed bungee jumping.

5. DR. COX’S TEASING IS PULLED FROM REAL LIFE.

Dr. Cox calls J.D. girls’s names because John C. McGinley jokingly does the same to close friend John Cusack in real life. Cox hit everything from Abby to Zsa Zsa on the show, according to a fan-compiled list. Poor Cusack.

6. Ted’s a cappella group, The Worthless Peons, performs in real life as The Blanks.

Naturally, they made a music video for the show’s musical episode hit “Guy Love.” The Blanks also do sketch comedy.

7. Neil Flynn, the janitor, ad-libbed most of his lines.

“Sometimes a script would show up and when Neil enters it would just say (Neil makes up something and then exits),” Zach Braff told Redditors.

8. The janitor was originally supposed to be a figment of J.D.’s imagination.

In the first season, Flynn’s character only talks to J.D. Braff said writers broadened his role when they realized just how funny he could be.

9. Judy Reyes fractured her pelvis before the musical episode.

Knowing she had recently undergone surgery makes Carla and Turk’s tango all the more impressive.

10. Men and women had equal-opportunity risqué scenes.

“One of the things I swore to the female actors on the show was ‘You guys will have to be in skimpy lingerie and doing sexy shit, but I promise you for every time one of you guys is like that one of the male characters will be like that,'” said creator Bill Lawrence. That certainly explains The Todd’s frequent banana hammock appearances.

11. The real reason J.D. and Turk get a new stuffed dog, Steven, is because a fired crew member hid Rowdy in the hospital’s ceiling.

“It’s not really easy to find dead, stuffed golden retrievers,” Lawrence said in a Paley Center interview. The inspiration was a guy Lawrence knew in college.

12. Writers killed off beloved Nurse Laverne Roberts in a car crash because they thought the show was going to be cancelled.

When it was renewed, Lawrence re-hired Aloma Wright as Laverne’s twin sister, Shirley. Only J.D. notices the similarities between the two nurses.

13. The janitor cleaning up outside the hospital after the eighth season finale montage is series creator Bill Lawrence.

It’s one of a handful of cameos he made on the show.

14. There’s an epic Scrubs reunion during the Cougar Town credits.

It’s another Lawrence-created show. Even Bob Kelso shows up.

15. Zach Braff actually hates appletinis.

He prefers to sip Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Some fans aren’t pleased.

October 2, 2016 – 10:00am

October 2, 2016

A math professor had worked out an equation…

A math professor had worked out an equation to calculate how long into a car journey it takes a child to ask: “Are we there yet?”

October 2, 2016

After being deposed by the Soviet Union in 1940…

After being deposed by the Soviet Union in 1940, the President of Estonia was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Russia for “persistent claiming of being the President of Estonia”.

October 2, 2016

On Japanese island Yakushima, macaque monkeys are known…

On Japanese island Yakushima, macaque monkeys are known to ride deer for transportation, and in return they groom deer and share food with them.

October 2, 2016

There is a “white man” café in Tokyo, where Japanese..

There is a “white man” café in Tokyo, where Japanese ladies ring a bell to summon tuxedo-wearing caucasians who respond with “yes, princess?” and serve them cake.

October 2, 2016

Your Brain Knows You’ve Quenched Your Thirst Before Your Body Does

Jordan Rosenfeld

filed under: biology, science, brain

Image credit:

iStock

Thirst is one of the most basic human signals that allows for our survival. For decades, research on the subject presumed that the brain only knows thirst has been quenched once the water enters the bloodstream. However, research on mice, published in Nature, has found a set of thirst-predicting neurons.

“There are many things you experience every day when you become thirsty or drink water that can’t be explained by [the old] model,” Zachary A. Knight, coauthor of the study and assistant professor in the department of physiology at University of California, San Francisco, tells mental_floss.

He explains that if you’re thirsty and you drink a glass of water, your thirst feels quenched within seconds, “but it takes up to 20 minutes for that water going down your throat to actually reach your bloodstream and change anything.” Likewise, Knight says, it’s a common experience to feel thirsty within seconds of eating something salty—and that response also poses a question: “When that food is still in your mouth or going down your throat, there’s been no change in your blood,” he notes. “How does your brain know that there’s going to be this change in the blood that occurs 10 to 20 minutes into the future?”

Knight and his lab team suspected the answers to these questions resided in a deep brain structure known as the subfornical organ (SFO). Thanks to advances in optogenetics—using tiny fiber-optic probes in the brain to stimulate neurons—and methods of encoding fluorescent proteins into individual neurons, researchers were able to view real-time neural activity in the brains of thirsty mice.

When they stimulated neurons in the SFO of the mice, the animals drank water. Similarly, giving the mice salt stimulated these “thirst” neurons. When they blocked the neurons altogether, the mice didn’t drink water at all—even when their physiology suggested they should. “What was very surprising, and also explains a lot … is that these neurons that people had thought for a long time just sensed the signals in the blood actually receive a second class of signals from the mouth and the oral cavity,” Knight says.

But that’s not the most exciting part, he says. The signals that come from the mouth and oral cavity “basically tell these neurons, on a rapid timescale, about food and water that’s going down the throat in a way that allows these neurons to essentially predict how that food or water is going to change the osmolarity of the blood 20 minutes in the future, when it’s absorbed.”

So how do these thirst neurons know that it’s water going down a person’s throat? Knight says the physical sensation or viscosity of the liquid in your mouth might be picked up on by your nerves, which then send the information to the brain. Another important component—which Knight calls “the most surprising result”—appears to be temperature, “because when you drink water, you’re cooling down your throat” in most cases. “The amount that your throat has been cooled probably loosely correlates with how much water you drank in the very recent term,” Knight says.

Thus, it may explain why people often crave cold water when thirsty or feel quenched by drinking a cold beverage, even if it’s not water. “It’s one of the cues these thirst neurons use to figure out how much water you’ve just been drinking,” he suggests.

Indeed, in one experiment, they found that simply applying a piece of cold metal to a mouse’s tongue would activate the thirst neurons, and the activity would decline when the metal was removed. Even more compelling, they found mice will often lick a piece of cold metal if they are thirsty.

Knight finds this temperature-dependent function a “bizarre phenomenon” that he could see one day being used in creating drinks that are warm but can manipulate your thirst neurons into turning on, so you’d perceive the beverages as tasting cold.

“You could just eliminate refrigerators and ice,” he says.

October 2, 2016 – 8:00am

October 2, 2016

This Undersea Museum Helps Conserve Coral Life

Kirstin Fawcett

filed under: art, environment, museums

One of Yucatán’s most fascinating tourist attractions sits 25 feet underwater, on the Caribbean seabed. Situated between Cancun and the nearby Isla Mujeres, the Museo Subacuático de Arte (MUSA) is a living art museum dedicated to environmental preservation and awareness. The dive location contains more than 500 porous cement sculptures, which are designed to promote the growth of seaweed, coral, and algae. As marine life colonizes and feeds off the statues, the cement figures will gradually transform into a giant coral reef.

Take a vicarious swim through the MUSA by watching Great Big Story’s video above.

[h/t Great Big Story]

Banner image: Andy Blackledge via Flickr // CC BY 2.0

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

October 2, 2016 – 6:00am

October 2, 2016

Penn & Teller’s Bullet Illusion

Chris Higgins

filed under: magic, video

Image credit:

YouTube // screenocean

Penn & Teller have plenty of famous illusions, but one of the scariest is their Magic Bullet. In it, they “catch” bullets in their teeth, apparently by shooting them at each other using .357 Magnums.

Now, we all know that this can’t really be happening. What’s fun about the illusion is trying to sort out what might be happening. There are so many layers to this act, so many moments when misdirection could be happening, that it seems to overwhelm the viewer. How does it work? Only Penn & Teller can say for sure.

Behold:

What really gets me is the rifling on the bullets. It sure does seem like they’ve been fired…but how were they retrieved and put in each others’ mouths?

October 2, 2016 – 4:00am

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1. THE HOSPITAL IS REAL.

2. REAL DOCTORS REVIEWED THE SHOW’S STORYLINES.

3. THERE WAS AN ERROR IN THE OPENING CREDITS.

4. J.D. and Elliot’s stunt doubles got married.

5. DR. COX’S TEASING IS PULLED FROM REAL LIFE.

6. Ted’s a cappella group, The Worthless Peons, performs in real life as The Blanks.

7. Neil Flynn, the janitor, ad-libbed most of his lines.

8. The janitor was originally supposed to be a figment of J.D.’s imagination.

9. Judy Reyes fractured her pelvis before the musical episode.

10. Men and women had equal-opportunity risqué scenes.

11. The real reason J.D. and Turk get a new stuffed dog, Steven, is because a fired crew member hid Rowdy in the hospital’s ceiling.

12. Writers killed off beloved Nurse Laverne Roberts in a car crash because they thought the show was going to be cancelled.

13. The janitor cleaning up outside the hospital after the eighth season finale montage is series creator Bill Lawrence.

14. There’s an epic Scrubs reunion during the Cougar Town credits.

15. Zach Braff actually hates appletinis.