Since the mid-1960s, scientists have argued about an apparent contradiction in our understanding of the early years of planet Earth. At issue was the overwhelming evidence for a warm Earth in its first billion-ish years, alongside evidence that the Sun would have been something like 25% dimmer then than it is today. How could Earth be warm if our star was dim? This is known as the faint young sun paradox.
One possible explanation has to do with greenhouse gases, and that’s what Carl Sagan and George Mullen suggested in 1972. Over the decades since, multiple models have been developed that could explain the contradiction, though it’s hard to be certain which (if any) of our current theories is correct.
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Though it’s officially classified as a romantic comedy, Love Actually—Richard Curtis’s intertwining tale of love and loss in London in the midst of the Christmas season—has become a staple of holiday movie marathons everywhere. Here are 23 things you might not have known about the hit 2003 film.
1. The airport opening and closing was shot with hidden cameras.
Footage of passengers being welcomed and embraced by loved ones at Heathrow Airport was shot on location with hidden cameras for a week. In the film’s DVD commentary, writer-director Richard Curtis explains that when something special was caught on camera, a crewmember would race out to have its subjects sign a waiver so the moment might be included in Love Actually. This was a fitting production device, as Curtis claims that watching the love expressed at the arrival gate of LAX is what inspired him to write the ensemble romance in the first place.
2. Four plot lines were cut from the film.
Curtis initially aimed to include 14 love stories in the film. Two were clipped in the scripting phase, but two were shot and cut in post. Those lost before production involved a girl with a wheelchair, and one about a boy who records a love song for a classmate who ultimately hooks up with his drummer. Shot but cut for time was a brief aside featuring an African couple supporting each other during a famine, and another storyline that followed home a school headmistress, revealing her long-time commitment to her lesbian partner.
3. A fifth of the movie is commonly cut from television broadcasts.
It might be of little surprise that the raciest element of this holiday movie rarely makes it on TV. The love story of John and Judy has Martin Freeman and Joanna Page playing a pair of stand-ins on an erotic drama. Their scenes have the pair mimicking sex acts, but even as simulations of simulated sex, their storyline is usually deemed too hot for TV.
4. Martine McCutcheon’s part was penned just for her.
Curtis wrote his screenplay with some stars in mind, including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, and McCutcheon, the charismatic English ingénue best known for her role on BBC drama EastEnders. So sure was Curtis that he wanted McCutcheon for the role of the love interest to the Prime Minister that he had the character’s name as “Martine” in early drafts. Curtis explained in the DVD commentary that the name was changed to “Natalie” before McCutcheon’s audition, “so she wouldn’t get cocky.”
5. Bill Nighy didn’t realize he’d auditioned for the film.
This was the first collaboration between Nighy and Curtis, with the former playing the shameless, comeback-seeking rocker Billy Mack. On the film’s 10-year anniversary, Nighy recalled to The Daily Beast, “I did a rehearsal reading of the script as a favor to the great casting director, Mary Selway, who had been trying to get me into a film for a long time. I thought it was simply to help her hear the script aloud and to my genuine surprise I was given the job.”
6. Curtis sent request letters to his American talent.
Laura Linney, Billy Bob Thornton, and Denise Richards received letters asking them to consider a role in the film. Both actresses were impressed by the unconventional move, but Linney told The Daily Beast she was even more flattered by its contents. “I got a letter in the mail from Richard Curtis saying that he’d been trying to cast this part, and he’d kept saying to his partner, Emma Freud, that he’d been looking for a ‘Laura Linney-type,’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you ask Laura Linney?'”
7. The actors had their own trailer park village during production.
Nighy told The Guardian, “We didn’t all film together, but we had a big trailer park for all the cast. There were so many famous people in there, we used to talk about being on Liam Neeson Way or Emma Thompson Road or Hugh Grant Avenue. And it was a masterpiece of diplomacy, too; we all had the same size and type of trailer.” Linney remembered the place having a warm sense of community.
8. One scene was lifted directly from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
In Four Weddings and a Funeral, also penned by Curtis, Grant’s character Charles flirts with a woman at a wedding by mocking the terrible catering, only to discover she is the caterer. The scene was cut from the 1994 film, but was reshot nearly a decade later with Kris Marshall acting out the flirtatious faux pas. In the commentary track, Curtis admits that some drafts of the Love Actually script still had Charles’s name on portions of the scene.
9. The late Joanna was played by a real-life Curtis crush.
In the commentary, Curtis also confessed his affection and admiration for writer-director Rebecca Frayn and how it led to a heartbreaking scene in Love Actually. She’s uncredited in the film because she never has a scene to perform. But when Curtis needed images to create a slideshow of Sam’s beloved mum/Daniel’s departed wife, he turned to Frayn, asking for “all the prettiest pictures of her from her whole life.” In real-life, Frayn is married to Oscar-nominated Scottish producer Andy Harries.
10. Emma Thompson shot her crying scene 12 times.
Arguably the saddest moment in Love Actually is when Thompson’s character realizes her husband is unfaithful. In the privacy of their bedroom, she listens to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and weeps. “We decided to do it like how Mike Newell did it in Four Weddings—I shot in medium-wide, and didn’t move the camera,” Curtis recalled. “We just let it happen, and Emma walked into the room 12 times in a row and sobbed. It was an amazing feat of acting.” He also noted this was the only scene she was asked to perform that day.
11. Hugh Grant did not want to dance.
Though he and Curtis had worked together on Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, they had a deep disagreement on how the Prime Minister should be played. Grant wanted it to be a grounded performance and resented Curtis’s push to make the part more whimsical. This came to a head when shooting the dance number, which Grant refused to rehearse. “He kept on putting it off, and he didn’t like the song—it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn’t get it—so he was hugely unhappy about it,” Curtis explained. “We didn’t shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words!” It was a tricky thing to cut, but the final result with Girls Aloud’s cover of “Jump (For My Love)” speaks for itself.
12. Real PM Tony Blair found it impossible to live up to Grant’s fictional one.
In 2005, when facing criticism for his dealings with the United States, Blair responded by saying, “I know there’s a bit of us that would like me to do a Hugh Grant in Love Actually and tell America where to get off. But the difference between a good film and real life is that in real life there’s the next day, the next year, the next lifetime to contemplate the ruinous consequences of easy applause.”
13. It took 45 minutes to pick out Aurelia’s underwear.
When the loose pages of Jamie’s in-progress novel blow into a nearby lake, Aurelia (Lúcia Moniz) is quick to strip down and dive in to rescue them. But in the DVD commentary, Curtis admits that what she wore beneath her cozy sweater was a major matter of debate that involved a lengthy meeting with his producers and 20 different sets of bras and panties to be considered.
14. Simon Pegg auditioned for the film.
Before he broke out with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Pegg was best known for his work on the British sitcom Spaced. It was in this stage of his career that he was eyed for the role of Rufus, the jewelry salesman in Love Actually. However, Curtis ended up casting Rowan Atkinson, who was not only a bigger star but a longtime friend from their college days; the two had previously worked together on Four Weddings and A Funeral, Mr. Bean, and Black Adder.
15. Rowan Atkinson’s character was meant to be an angel.
Rather than just an overenthusiastic gift wrapper with a good Samaritan streak at the airport, Atkinson’s Rufus was initially written as a heavenly helper in disguise. A scene was even shot were he’d evaporate after helping Sam get past security at Heathrow. “But in the end,” Curtis said in commentary, “the film turned out so sort of multiplicitous that the idea of introducing an extra layer of supernatural beings was (too much).”
16. Sarah’s apartment is based on Helen Fielding’s.
When Sarah (Laura Linney) takes her office crush Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) back to her flat, a crane shot reveals that her bedroom is perched above the first floor, with a half-wall serving as a sort of balcony. In the DVD commentary track, Curtis mentioned this layout was poached from the Bridget Jones’s Diary author’s home. To him, it seemed a charming staging place for this tender seduction scene.
17. Test audiences spurred a change to the ending of Sarah’s story.
Curtis originally intended for Sarah and Karl’s love story to fizzle out after the phone call from her brother. However, when Love Actually was screened to test audiences, the feedback begged for a clearer resolution. So Curtis provided it, creating an extra scene in reshoots that made it unmistakable that Sarah and Karl would not end up together. “Be careful what you wish for,” he warned on the DVD commentary.
18. Andrew Lincoln hand-wrote those romantic signs.
In 2013, The Walking Dead star reminisced about his climactic gesture in Love Actually with Entertainment Weekly, and revealed, “It is my handwriting! It’s funny, because the art department did it, and then I said, ‘Well, can I do it?’ because I like to think that my handwriting is really good. Actually, it ended up with me having to sort of trace over the art department’s, so it is my handwriting, but with a sort of pencil stencil underneath.”
19. The American bar scene included some improv.
Regarding the scene where three American girls (Elisha Cuthbert, January Jones, and Ivana Milicevic) flirt with Kris Marshall, Cuthbert told VH1, “It was such a creative space and we were allowed to improvise and try different things and it wasn’t just completely set into Richard’s writing. I mean we were allowed to sort of venture … It was nice that we got to sort of play around.” Curtis remembers it differently, noting in the commentary track that the Brits were “respectful” with his script, but these Americans wanted to “pep it up a bit.”
20. Bernard is a running joke based on a real man.
Every film Curtis writes contains a “Bernard,” and he’s always the butt of a joke. In Love Actually, he’s the son of Thompson’s character who is described as “horrid.” This all dates back to a love triangle that didn’t turn in Curtis’s favor. Bernard was the name of a young man who won the heart of Curtis’s crush Anne, and so he will forever be lampooned. In real life, Bernard is a successful politician, namely Bernard Jenkin, Member of Parliament for Harwich and North Essex.
21. Olivia Olson was too good for the role of Sam’s crush.
Over 200 girls auditioned for the part of Joanna, the talent show star that young Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) falls hard for. But with pipes that blew away the casting director, Olson won the part with aplomb. In the commentary track, Curtis notes that Olson sang the song “All I Want For Christmas Is You” so flawlessly that he feared it sounded manufactured. He had sound editors cut in breaths to the performance to make it more believable.
22. Sam and the other Joanna reunited on kids’ television.
Child stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Olivia Olson were utterly adorable together as drum-playing Sam and his grade school crush Joanna. But Love Actually wasn’t the end of the pair’s onscreen romance. They were reunited in 2008 when Olson joined the voice cast of the Disney Channel cartoon show Phineas and Ferb. While Brodie-Sangster lends his voice to the oft-silent Ferb, Olson often sings as Ferb’s crush, the sleek and cool Vanessa Doofenshmirtz.
23. Love Actually has been remade three times already.
The central concept of a movie packed with stars and intertwining love stories has been translated into a trio of films. The first is the Indian offering A Tribute To Love, an unofficial remake in the Hindi language. Next, Poland took a turn with Letters to St. Nicolas. The most recent version is Japan’s It All Began When I Met You, which borrows the concept as well as the film’s poster layout.
Though it’s officially classified as a romantic comedy, Love Actually—Richard Curtis’s intertwining tale of love and loss in London in the midst of the Christmas season—has become a staple of holiday movie marathons everywhere. Here are 23 things you might not have known about the hit 2003 film.
1. The airport opening and closing was shot with hidden cameras.
Footage of passengers being welcomed and embraced by loved ones at Heathrow Airport was shot on location with hidden cameras for a week. In the film’s DVD commentary, writer-director Richard Curtis explains that when something special was caught on camera, a crewmember would race out to have its subjects sign a waiver so the moment might be included in Love Actually. This was a fitting production device, as Curtis claims that watching the love expressed at the arrival gate of LAX is what inspired him to write the ensemble romance in the first place.
2. Four plot lines were cut from the film.
Curtis initially aimed to include 14 love stories in the film. Two were clipped in the scripting phase, but two were shot and cut in post. Those lost before production involved a girl with a wheelchair, and one about a boy who records a love song for a classmate who ultimately hooks up with his drummer. Shot but cut for time was a brief aside featuring an African couple supporting each other during a famine, and another storyline that followed home a school headmistress, revealing her long-time commitment to her lesbian partner.
3. A fifth of the movie is commonly cut from television broadcasts.
It might be of little surprise that the raciest element of this holiday movie rarely makes it on TV. The love story of John and Judy has Martin Freeman and Joanna Page playing a pair of stand-ins on an erotic drama. Their scenes have the pair mimicking sex acts, but even as simulations of simulated sex, their storyline is usually deemed too hot for TV.
4. Martine McCutcheon’s part was penned just for her.
Curtis wrote his screenplay with some stars in mind, including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, and McCutcheon, the charismatic English ingénue best known for her role on BBC drama EastEnders. So sure was Curtis that he wanted McCutcheon for the role of the love interest to the Prime Minister that he had the character’s name as “Martine” in early drafts. Curtis explained in the DVD commentary that the name was changed to “Natalie” before McCutcheon’s audition, “so she wouldn’t get cocky.”
5. Bill Nighy didn’t realize he’d auditioned for the film.
This was the first collaboration between Nighy and Curtis, with the former playing the shameless, comeback-seeking rocker Billy Mack. On the film’s 10-year anniversary, Nighy recalled to The Daily Beast, “I did a rehearsal reading of the script as a favor to the great casting director, Mary Selway, who had been trying to get me into a film for a long time. I thought it was simply to help her hear the script aloud and to my genuine surprise I was given the job.”
6. Curtis sent request letters to his American talent.
Laura Linney, Billy Bob Thornton, and Denise Richards received letters asking them to consider a role in the film. Both actresses were impressed by the unconventional move, but Linney told The Daily Beast she was even more flattered by its contents. “I got a letter in the mail from Richard Curtis saying that he’d been trying to cast this part, and he’d kept saying to his partner, Emma Freud, that he’d been looking for a ‘Laura Linney-type,’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you ask Laura Linney?'”
7. The actors had their own trailer park village during production.
Nighy told The Guardian, “We didn’t all film together, but we had a big trailer park for all the cast. There were so many famous people in there, we used to talk about being on Liam Neeson Way or Emma Thompson Road or Hugh Grant Avenue. And it was a masterpiece of diplomacy, too; we all had the same size and type of trailer.” Linney remembered the place having a warm sense of community.
8. One scene was lifted directly from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
In Four Weddings and a Funeral, also penned by Curtis, Grant’s character Charles flirts with a woman at a wedding by mocking the terrible catering, only to discover she is the caterer. The scene was cut from the 1994 film, but was reshot nearly a decade later with Kris Marshall acting out the flirtatious faux pas. In the commentary track, Curtis admits that some drafts of the Love Actually script still had Charles’s name on portions of the scene.
9. The late Joanna was played by a real-life Curtis crush.
In the commentary, Curtis also confessed his affection and admiration for writer-director Rebecca Frayn and how it led to a heartbreaking scene in Love Actually. She’s uncredited in the film because she never has a scene to perform. But when Curtis needed images to create a slideshow of Sam’s beloved mum/Daniel’s departed wife, he turned to Frayn, asking for “all the prettiest pictures of her from her whole life.” In real-life, Frayn is married to Oscar-nominated Scottish producer Andy Harries.
10. Emma Thompson shot her crying scene 12 times.
Arguably the saddest moment in Love Actually is when Thompson’s character realizes her husband is unfaithful. In the privacy of their bedroom, she listens to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and weeps. “We decided to do it like how Mike Newell did it in Four Weddings—I shot in medium-wide, and didn’t move the camera,” Curtis recalled. “We just let it happen, and Emma walked into the room 12 times in a row and sobbed. It was an amazing feat of acting.” He also noted this was the only scene she was asked to perform that day.
11. Hugh Grant did not want to dance.
Though he and Curtis had worked together on Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, they had a deep disagreement on how the Prime Minister should be played. Grant wanted it to be a grounded performance and resented Curtis’s push to make the part more whimsical. This came to a head when shooting the dance number, which Grant refused to rehearse. “He kept on putting it off, and he didn’t like the song—it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn’t get it—so he was hugely unhappy about it,” Curtis explained. “We didn’t shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words!” It was a tricky thing to cut, but the final result with Girls Aloud’s cover of “Jump (For My Love)” speaks for itself.
12. Real PM Tony Blair found it impossible to live up to Grant’s fictional one.
In 2005, when facing criticism for his dealings with the United States, Blair responded by saying, “I know there’s a bit of us that would like me to do a Hugh Grant in Love Actually and tell America where to get off. But the difference between a good film and real life is that in real life there’s the next day, the next year, the next lifetime to contemplate the ruinous consequences of easy applause.”
13. It took 45 minutes to pick out Aurelia’s underwear.
When the loose pages of Jamie’s in-progress novel blow into a nearby lake, Aurelia (Lúcia Moniz) is quick to strip down and dive in to rescue them. But in the DVD commentary, Curtis admits that what she wore beneath her cozy sweater was a major matter of debate that involved a lengthy meeting with his producers and 20 different sets of bras and panties to be considered.
14. Simon Pegg auditioned for the film.
Before he broke out with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Pegg was best known for his work on the British sitcom Spaced. It was in this stage of his career that he was eyed for the role of Rufus, the jewelry salesman in Love Actually. However, Curtis ended up casting Rowan Atkinson, who was not only a bigger star but a longtime friend from their college days; the two had previously worked together on Four Weddings and A Funeral, Mr. Bean, and Black Adder.
15. Rowan Atkinson’s character was meant to be an angel.
Rather than just an overenthusiastic gift wrapper with a good Samaritan streak at the airport, Atkinson’s Rufus was initially written as a heavenly helper in disguise. A scene was even shot were he’d evaporate after helping Sam get past security at Heathrow. “But in the end,” Curtis said in commentary, “the film turned out so sort of multiplicitous that the idea of introducing an extra layer of supernatural beings was (too much).”
16. Sarah’s apartment is based on Helen Fielding’s.
When Sarah (Laura Linney) takes her office crush Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) back to her flat, a crane shot reveals that her bedroom is perched above the first floor, with a half-wall serving as a sort of balcony. In the DVD commentary track, Curtis mentioned this layout was poached from the Bridget Jones’s Diary author’s home. To him, it seemed a charming staging place for this tender seduction scene.
17. Test audiences spurred a change to the ending of Sarah’s story.
Curtis originally intended for Sarah and Karl’s love story to fizzle out after the phone call from her brother. However, when Love Actually was screened to test audiences, the feedback begged for a clearer resolution. So Curtis provided it, creating an extra scene in reshoots that made it unmistakable that Sarah and Karl would not end up together. “Be careful what you wish for,” he warned on the DVD commentary.
18. Andrew Lincoln hand-wrote those romantic signs.
In 2013, The Walking Dead star reminisced about his climactic gesture in Love Actually with Entertainment Weekly, and revealed, “It is my handwriting! It’s funny, because the art department did it, and then I said, ‘Well, can I do it?’ because I like to think that my handwriting is really good. Actually, it ended up with me having to sort of trace over the art department’s, so it is my handwriting, but with a sort of pencil stencil underneath.”
19. The American bar scene included some improv.
Regarding the scene where three American girls (Elisha Cuthbert, January Jones, and Ivana Milicevic) flirt with Kris Marshall, Cuthbert told VH1, “It was such a creative space and we were allowed to improvise and try different things and it wasn’t just completely set into Richard’s writing. I mean we were allowed to sort of venture … It was nice that we got to sort of play around.” Curtis remembers it differently, noting in the commentary track that the Brits were “respectful” with his script, but these Americans wanted to “pep it up a bit.”
20. Bernard is a running joke based on a real man.
Every film Curtis writes contains a “Bernard,” and he’s always the butt of a joke. In Love Actually, he’s the son of Thompson’s character who is described as “horrid.” This all dates back to a love triangle that didn’t turn in Curtis’s favor. Bernard was the name of a young man who won the heart of Curtis’s crush Anne, and so he will forever be lampooned. In real life, Bernard is a successful politician, namely Bernard Jenkin, Member of Parliament for Harwich and North Essex.
21. Olivia Olson was too good for the role of Sam’s crush.
Over 200 girls auditioned for the part of Joanna, the talent show star that young Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) falls hard for. But with pipes that blew away the casting director, Olson won the part with aplomb. In the commentary track, Curtis notes that Olson sang the song “All I Want For Christmas Is You” so flawlessly that he feared it sounded manufactured. He had sound editors cut in breaths to the performance to make it more believable.
22. Sam and the other Joanna reunited on kids’ television.
Child stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Olivia Olson were utterly adorable together as drum-playing Sam and his grade school crush Joanna. But Love Actually wasn’t the end of the pair’s onscreen romance. They were reunited in 2008 when Olson joined the voice cast of the Disney Channel cartoon show Phineas and Ferb. While Brodie-Sangster lends his voice to the oft-silent Ferb, Olson often sings as Ferb’s crush, the sleek and cool Vanessa Doofenshmirtz.
23. Love Actually has been remade three times already.
The central concept of a movie packed with stars and intertwining love stories has been translated into a trio of films. The first is the Indian offering A Tribute To Love, an unofficial remake in the Hindi language. Next, Poland took a turn with Letters to St. Nicolas. The most recent version is Japan’s It All Began When I Met You, which borrows the concept as well as the film’s poster layout.
Cattle were first domesticated from wild aurochs about 10,000 years ago, as a portable source of wealth for our ancestors, and have proliferated alongside us ever since. There are now about 1.5 billion cattle on Earth, making a lot of milk and meat for human consumption, but in the process, creating a tremendous amount of waste.
Not only do cows pollute groundwater with their excrement, they also produce a lot of gas. Headlines are fond of discussing the issue of cow farts, but in reality, the gas that scientists are concerned about—methane—comes mostly from cow burps. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with a climate change impact 25 times greater than carbon dioxide.
Earlier this year, researchers from Denmark’s Aarhus University launched a four-year study to gauge whether adding a potent type of Greek oregano to cow feed could reduce methane emissions from dairy cow belches. Earlier research led by Penn State scientists suggested that oregano could cut cows’ methane emissions up to 40 percent.
Now, Australian researchers have found even more promising results from a beach staple (or nuisance, depending on your perspective): seaweed. Scientists on the Agriculture and Food team at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) showed introducing a particular kind of seaweed, Asparagopsis taxiformis, to livestock feed can reduce the methane production in sheep by more than 80 percent. Some of those researchers also did experiments with artificial cow stomachs, which found even higher potential reductions.
“Seaweed’s been fed to cattle since farming began,” agricultural scientist Robert Kinley, part of the CSIRO team, told mental_floss. Anywhere it washed up on beaches near where cows grazed, the animals would eat it, so it’s long been a natural food source. But after a farmer on Prince Edward Island in Canada noticed in 2006 that his cows that ate seaweed were healthier than those that he kept inland, researchers—including Kinley, then at Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University—began investigating.
“Nobody really cared about seaweed until 10 years ago, but since then there have been various seaweeds on the market because it improves animals’ reproductive success and makes for healthier, happier animals,” says Kinley. Cows that eat seaweed have more efficient digestion, with 10 to 20 percent fewer methane emissions. Methane only persists in the atmosphere for about 10 years, as opposed to carbon dioxide’s hundreds of years, so cutting how much methane cows produce could help immediately address climate change impacts.
For farmers, better cow digestion creates economic benefits by making the cost of feed more efficient. So supplementing feed with seaweed has recently become a trend, and that’s where Kinley got involved—he wanted to make sure seaweeds were safe for cows to eat regularly. As he was testing different types of seaweeds, he wondered if there was one that might cut methane even more than 20 percent. He reached out to a group at CSIRO “who already had some ideas about the unique chemistry of seaweeds,” he says. They began collaborating. “We wanted to find seaweeds that would benefit animals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions too.”
They found what they were looking for in Asparagopsis taxiformis, a red seaweed. It aids digestion as other seaweeds do, but has an additional gas-reducing function. “The big punch comes from an enzyme inhibition. The seaweed chemistry debilitates the methanogen process so the pathway to form methane can’t be completed,” says Kinley. This leads to cows producing much less methane—a reduction of 99 percent in preliminary tests on the artificial cow stomachs. However, that reduction was dependent on a constant supplementation of the seaweed to keep the methane-reducing benefits going. Once the supplementation was stopped, methane production went right back up.
Kinley and his colleagues are now working on health protocols to establish the seaweed is safe for long-term consumption; next up is a feedlot trial with cows to determine what minimum amount of seaweed supplementation is needed for methane reduction.
Kinley sees an opportunity to create jobs by cultivating seaweed farming in places where A. taxiformis grows, which is pretty much everywhere; it’s a cosmopolitan species with multiple lineages (and is considered invasive in some locations). Right now, no one’s farming it, which presents a barrier to scaling up. “The biggest barrier isn’t animals or time, it’s how much seaweed can we get?” says Kinley. “Right now, I need 25 tons of seaweed just to do a feedlot trial with 1000 animals.”
But if cultivation takes off, the seaweed could be a quadruple win—helping clean wastewater and remove runoff nutrients and carbon dioxide near reefs, growing happy cows, aiding farmers, and mitigating climate change.
Fans of the LEGO Ideas website know it’s an outlet where LEGO hobbyists can share ideas for potential designs made from the plastic toys. Once 10,000 different fans support a submission, it becomes eligible for review to become a real-life, licensed LEGO product. One new member of the so-called “10K Club” is Nathan Readioff, who goes by the username “NathanR2015.” A physics PhD student at the University of Liverpool, he created a miniature version of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Readioff drew inspiration for the design from real life experience: As part of his PhD, he’s worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, using data from the ATLAS particle detector to study the Higgs boson. Readioff helped run the ATLAS detector, and he also observed experiments conducted on all four of the LHC’s particle detectors, which, in addition to ATLAS, include CMS, ALICE, and LHCb.
The LEGO model came about because “I thought it would be fun to have a model of ATLAS sitting on my desk at work,” Readioff told the LEGO Ideas blog. The physics student found an ATLAS detector model on the LEGO Ideas blog, but it didn’t pass muster, so he “simply hauled out LEGO Digital Designer and started work on my own version,” he says. “Once my own little ‘baby’ version of ATLAS was finished though, I couldn’t stop until I had built the full set of experiments and built a model of the entire LHC.”
Around a year and a half ago, Readioff decided to share his creation with the world, and he posted it on the LEGO Ideas website. Now, if the toy company execs give the go-ahead, the tiny LHC may become a real-life, commercially sold design.
Readioff’s LHC model uses nearly 500 bricks—“373 bricks in the LHC ring, and a further 86 in the control room,” he says. Watch him talk about (and show off) the tiny model in the video below.
There are some technologies we really don’t think about as “technology,” because they were invented so long ago. Canned food is one of those. The technology required to preserve and can food on an industrial scale are surprisingly diverse. Part of the puzzle involves scaling up agriculture itself, but beyond that, canning transforms the economic utility of food. Canning radically redefines the boundaries of food freshness, and smooths out the seasonality of eating. All of these things—plus a dollop of odd jingoism—were on the minds of the 1956 film crew making the documentary below, produced by the American Can Company.
Here’s a sample quote:
“Just as harvest time means more than the ending of one bountiful season, it contains within itself the seeds of another more fruitful spring. So this humblest little servant of your daily life, contains not just a product but symbolizes a more abundant life for all freedom-loving people everywhere in the world. This is the miracle of the can.”
If you’re looking for a soothing video to snooze to, here it is. If you’re interested in the attitudes of 1950s America for your Sociology thesis, this is pure gold. Note: Just past the 19-minute part, the film turns into an extended “how it’s made” segment.
Ever wonder why Santa Claus is so jolly? It might be because his hat is filled with booze. This festive hat, which is currently being sold on Amazon, has a secret flask inside for when your office party hits a lull.
Available in black, green, and red, the hat features a pouch that can hold up to 10 ounces. When you want to spike your eggnog, just grab the end of the hat and twist the secret nozzle. Just like that, you can have holiday cheer flowing right out of your headwear. After the party, the bag can be removed for easy cleaning (since we don’t all have elves to do our laundry).
Susi Kenna gets crafty with her nail art. The social media director covers her nails in miniature works of art inspired by everyone from Pablo Picasso to Keith Haring.
Kenna, who works in the art world and serves as co-chair of the Junior Associates of the MoMA, uses her extensive knowledge of art to help design each set of nails. After deciding what artwork she wants to recreate next, it takes about 24 hours to create the design. Next, she finds a qualified nail artist to handpaint the creation.
You can check out all of Kenna’s manicures on her blog, Nail Art History.
The holiday season is full of (prettily wrapped) potential land mines. Even if you know better than to re-gift Aunt Ida’s sweater or insult Grandma’s fruitcake, you could still be slipping up. We spoke with etiquette expert Joy Weaver, author of How to Be Socially Savvy in All Situations, to get the scoop on how you can secure your spot on the “Nice” list.
1. RESPOND TO INVITES.
Yup, all of them—and promptly. And if you really want to be proper, don’t ring up your friend and let them know you’re calling to RSVP. As Weaver explains, that’s technically an abbreviation for the French phrase “Répondez s’il vous plait” (meaning “reply if you please”): “So you don’t say you’re going to RSVP. It’s not a word!”
2. SHOW UP ON TIME(ISH).
If it’s a sit-down dinner party you should be there right on time, says Weaver. But if it’s a more casual drop-in situation, showing up promptly is actually kind of rude. “You know what it’s like, the party starts at seven and you’re running around getting everything just right,” she says. Best to allow your pal a second to breathe, she notes: “Give it a minute or two before you ring the doorbell.”
3. FORGET THE FLOWERS (BUT DON’T COME EMPTY-HANDED.)
If there are multiple hosts, you only need to bring something for the person whose home it is, explains Weaver, because they’re the ones that had to clean up their spread. And your trinket should be well-thought-out, she says, “You always want to give them something they’ll like.” Off limits: flowers (“Unless they come in a vase so the host doesn’t have to take time out from the party looking for one”) and any wine or food to be set out. “The menu has been determined and the drinks selected,” she says. “So if you bring food or champagne let them know it’s for them to save.”
4. KNOW WHEN TO SAY THANKS.
It’s proper form to send your pal a written thank you for having you at their get-together. But if you’re the host, you’re off the hook. Even though you should, in theory, be collecting all sorts of hostess gifts, you don’t have to send notes for any of them. “This is the one time you’re not required to write a thank you,” says Weaver, “because it’s like saying thank you for a thank you. It could go on and on.”
5. DON’T SKIP THE OFFICE PARTY.
Ever. Even if it’s just a conference room gathering with stale crackers and cheap wine, “it’s a must-attend event,” says Weaver. Opting out “shows disrespect for your company, supervisors, and colleagues and can be a career-killer.”
6. BUT DON’T BE THE LIFE OF IT, EITHER.
You (hopefully) know dancing on the bar is a bad call. (“It’s just not the time to be over-served,” says Weaver.) But overindulging in the cheese tray isn’t a good look either, she says: “You don’t want to seem like you’re going there because the company owes you food. You’re there to establish better relationships.”
7. MAKE IT EASY FOR HIGHER-UPS TO MEET YOU.
If your office bash is a name-tag-required situation, place it high up on the right side of your body, says the expert: “When you’re about to shake hands, your right shoulder comes forward, so it’s a perfect glance.” And when you go in for the palm-to-palm grab, make sure you’re standing. “Never shake hands sitting down,” says Weaver. “It’s a respect thing.”
8. GET (SLIGHTLY) POLITICAL.
Talking too much about business or your kid’s latest milestone just isn’t done, says Weaver: “Talk about something interesting, current events, just something unique and different.”
9. WHEN HOSTING, DON’T FORGET THAT YOU’VE GOT A JOB TO DO.
And it’s not just refilling the chip bowl. It’s considered proper to stand at the door to greet each guest as they arrive. Repeat the process at closing time, walking each of your attendees to the door for a brief goodbye. Note to guests, says Weaver: “Do not engage the host in a long conversation at the door.”
10. MASTER THE ART OF ADDRESSING HOLIDAY CARDS.
If you’re keeping it formal, technically, you shouldn’t be sending a card to Mrs. Joy Weaver. Explains the expert, “Mrs. means married to the next person. I’m not married to Joy, I am Joy.” The truly proper form, she says, is Mrs. [husband’s name] Weaver or simply Mrs. Weaver. And these days, she says, Miss is only appropriate for women under the age of 18.
11. NEVER, EVER USE THE EXCUSE “MY DOG ATE YOUR GIFT.”
We’ve all been there: your cubicle mate presents you with a gift and you didn’t realize you were that tight. Don’t fib and say you forgot their present at home, says Weaver; simply be gracious. “The only thing they want in that moment is for you to be happy,” she explains. “Do not bring up the fact that you don’t have a gift for them. Just say, ‘This is wonderful. Thank you.’” If you’d like to surprise them with something down the road, you can, but it’s not a must: “You need to think through, is this someone that I want to give a gift to next year, or should I just accept this gift and move on?” Now that’s learning how not to be a jerk to yourself.
