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5 Questions: It’s Yiddish to Me
Thursday, February 16, 2017 – 01:45
No wardrobe is complete without two—or a hundred—novelty t-shirts, right? If you’re looking to revamp your tee collection without breaking the bank, we have some good news: BustedTees is having a crazy sale today. Using the code HOTPOTATO, tee enthusiasts can get any full price tees half off. That means all shirts are under $12, which is a serious steal.
We pulled out a few of our favorites, and you can check out the full collection here.
February 16, 2017 – 6:30am
Stuff in Space is an interactive visualization of all the objects orbiting the earth. Aliens should be able to find us by all our satellites, rockets, and garbage.
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Cynthia: John Lennon’s First Wife. She handled chaos with grace.
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Some animals kill each other after sex because their distinction between hungry and flirty is blurred. Single parenting is already common in those species.
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19 Insanely Cute Kittens Who Just Don’t Know Any Better. Your daily supply of squee.
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The Underwater Photographs Of The Year Are Here, And They’re Breathtaking. It’s a live action version of Finding Nemo.
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Films That Led To Other Films Being Cancelled. The victims were from a similar genre, a dying trend, or had their budgets slashed.
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Medieval Europe Couldn’t Quit This Story About a Woman Eating Her Lover’s Heart. There are 14 to 24 versions, with varying lessons attached.
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The Wheaton and Other Unusual Units of Measurement. How many milliHelens equal a Smoot?
February 16, 2017 – 5:00am
Wax sculptor Marie Tussaud’s history is just as gruesome as the Chamber of Horrors in her London wax museum.
February 16, 2017 – 4:00am
Courtesy of V-Formation
For some kids, no backyard birthday celebration is complete without a bounce house. Since an inner child lurks inside every adult party guest, Travel + Leisure reports that a Belgian company called V-Formation has created what’s billed as the world’s biggest inflatable obstacle course, designed for grown-ups.
Called The Beast, the course features 839 feet (that’s longer than two football fields combined) of inflatable plastic fun, with 32 different obstacle course pieces—think bouncy balls, air-filled walls, nets, and other soft barriers—that can be assembled according to personal preference.
Sadly, you can’t purchase The Beast for your own backyard, as it appears to be one-of-a-kind. However, you can book it for private, corporate, and public events, by reaching out to V-Formation. And if you live in England, you can catch The Beast at the Betteshanger Country Park in Kent, from May 26 to 29; and at the Extreme Festival, a “brand new festival for adventure seekers and adrenaline junkies,” held at Kent’s Groombridge Place Estates from April 29 to 30.
Watch how The Beast works below.
[h/t Travel + Leisure]
February 16, 2017 – 3:00am
Driving around Iceland is a great way to catch the Northern Lights. Unfortunately, staring up in wonder at the sky is not a great way to drive. According to Iceland Magazine, drivers in the Land of Fire and Ice should take heed: They could be pulled over for driving under the influence of the aurora borealis.
Icelandic police patrolling near the Keflavík International Airport recently pulled over two separate drivers who claimed their erratic behavior on the road was due to the celestial phenomenon, not drunkenness. Both cars were swerving on the road as their passengers—all foreign tourists—stared up at the sky rather than keeping their eyes on the road. Unfortunately, there’s no breathalyzer for natural wonder.
While it’s understandable to get a bit carried away while checking the aurora borealis off your tourism bucket list, that’s no excuse for treating lane markers as suggestions. The police skipped ticketing the distracted travelers and recommended that next time, they pull over to look up at the Northern Lights. Better yet, they should have booked a room in a glass igloo to watch them all night long.
[h/t Travel + Leisure]
February 16, 2017 – 1:00am
Ever wonder why there are stupid labels on things like “Do not hold wrong end of chainsaw” on a chainsaw? Probably because some genius actually tried it once and then filed a lawsuit against the maker of the chainsaw. Frivolous lawsuits are nothing new, but sometimes they are taken to such extremes that they really are worth taking a look at – for a laugh if for no other reason. 1. Man Sues Woman After Killing Her Dog A San Jose, California freeway became the scene of an extraordinarily cruel act one day in 2000 following a minor accident. The
The post 10 of the Strangest Lawsuits Ever Filed appeared first on Factual Facts.
Hair is a pretty big deal. It generally gets more attention from women, who style it in any number of ways, color it, curl it, straighten it and adorn it with various things like headbands, pins, flowers, barrettes, jewels and other things. Men, on the other hand, don’t tend to spend as much time fussing with their hair, and some men even eliminate it entirely by shaving their head or their entire body. Hair is pretty unique to each and every person, but in many other ways, it’s the same no matter who you happen to be. Did you know
The post 10 Interesting Facts About Hair appeared first on Factual Facts.
Seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is most famous for his paintings and etchings, but he was also a prolific drawer. Approximately 1400 sketches attributed to Rembrandt survive today—and recently, CNN reports, experts identified a new one hiding in plain sight inside a museum in Braunschweig, Germany.
Rembrandt drawing ‘hidden’ for 250 years is found: A chalk drawing of a dog has been identified as a work by… https://t.co/zuWq5ezyid #cnn
— Breaking News World (@BreakingNews_nl) February 15, 2017
The chalk sketch of a dog was previously thought to be the work of Johann Melchior Roos, a 16th century German Baroque artist known for his paintings of landscapes and animals. The Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum has owned the drawing, called The Braunschweig Terrier, since 1770.
Two years ago, Dr. Thomas Döring, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings, gave the work another look while cataloging works for a digital archive. Thanks to his prior experience studying sketches by Rembrandt and his pupils, Döring was able to detect subtle stylistic details that were unique to the Dutch Master.
The “boldness of the strokes, the variations in the shading from very gentle to quite violent and the expressive gaze [of the dog]—these are very typical idiosyncrasies of Rembrandt’s work,” Döring told CNN.
Doring compared The Braunschweig Terrier to the artist’s other known sketches, and asked other Rembrandt experts to weigh in with their opinions. They, too, are convinced that Rembrandt produced the work, the professor told CNN.
Rembrandt practiced his artistic technique by sketching animal studies in chalk. He rarely made preparatory sketches for his paintings, but experts at the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum have compared his terrier drawing to the barking dog crouching in the corner of the artist’s famous 1642 painting, The Night Watch.
The newly-labeled drawing is slated to go back on display this April, as part of a new exhibition at the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum.
[h/t CNN]
February 15, 2017 – 12:15pm
by Alex Carter
You know what it’s like: You live somewhere all your life but never realize just how great it is until someone comes to visit. While it’s just a shame we don’t get any visitors to marvel at all the peculiarities of our home planet, here are five facts you might still appreciate.
The core of the Earth is a solid lump of nickel and iron, rotating in a sea of molten iron and nickel. This rotation functions the same way winding up a hand-held generator does, giving Earth an enormous magnetic field that extends up to 50,000 kilometers out into space. This magnetic field is crucial for life on Earth, as without it we would be exposed to the full force of the Sun’s radiation. As well as causing cancers and other radiation-aggravated conditions, the radiation’s sheer force would blow our atmosphere into space, as happened with Mercury, and to a lesser extent, Mars. Instead, charged particles are (mostly) harmlessly deflected away, giving rise to the auroras.
It’s not all good though: Any particles that hit the Earth head-on tend to get trapped in the field and can’t get out. These so-called Van Allen Radiation Belts can pose a hazard for astronauts who leave low Earth orbit.
While Earth may not be the biggest planet in the system, it is the biggest rocky planet in the solar system, and also the densest. Therefore, Earth has by far the highest surface gravity of any terrestrial object in the solar system. This is both a blessing and a curse.
The reason for the high density is the large deposits of heavy elements in the Earth’s makeup. Elements such as lead and uranium are much rarer on other worlds, which gives us a huge advantage in the amount and variety of construction materials available here on Earth. The high gravity has also demanded that humans develop the reflexes and endurance necessary to cope with such gravity, meaning we are far more durable than the potential delicately boned, sloth-like creature we could be had we evolved in low gravity.
Unfortunately, that high gravity makes Earth the worst place in the solar system for space exploration. The sheer cost of overcoming Earth’s gravity during every launch has been the single biggest barrier to space travel. To put it into perspective, if the Earth only had the same gravity as the Moon, a typical airplane would be fast enough to get into orbit. The human race might have explored much more of the solar system using present day technology if we had lower gravity—although, of course, the weakness of low-gravity humans might have proven to be an equal barrier.
Most planets in the solar system have moons, and our moon may not be the biggest of them, but in comparison to Earth’s size, it’s enormous. Most scientists think that rather than coalescing on its own like the other large moons, it was violently shorn off Earth billions of years ago by a collision between Earth and another planet. The impact—with a planet about the size of Mars—liquified Earth in the heat, and the Moon broke off, gradually cooling into a ball of rock. New research suggests that not just one but multiple collisions may be responsible for its formation.
The Moon’s size and distance are a giant cosmic coincidence, allowing us on Earth’s surface to experience total eclipses, annular eclipses, and partial eclipses, all from the comfort of our own planet. If the Moon were smaller or farther away, we wouldn’t see any sort of eclipse at all.
The Moon is also an important tool for scientists trying to better understand Earth’s composition. Starting with all the same raw materials, except for the magnetic field, the Moon cooled, geological activity stopped, and the solar wind blew away what atmosphere there was. Now, the surface is littered with craters which could not be healed, like scars. And the razor sharp soil sticks to everything, even the radiation coming in from the Sun. (Seems like we got the better end of that deal.)
Take a spade to many points on the Earth’s crust and you might dig up a selection of radioactive elements. While we might think of the Earth’s magnetic field as protecting us from radiation, it does little to protect us from what’s right under our feet.
Most of the radioisotopes on Earth reside in the core, where the heat from their decay keeps the core molten, the tectonic plates moving, and the dynamo deep in the Earth rotating. If it weren’t for radioisotopes, the core would cool, the magnetic field would disappear, and the Earth would slowly become uninhabitable. There is another consequence of all these radioactive elements, though. In Oklo, Gabon, it was discovered that the uranium mines contained significantly less uranium-235 (the kind used in nuclear reactors and weapons) than the other isotopes. The startling conclusion was that the reserves had been used over millions of years in a naturally occurring nuclear reactor.
Despite current attempts to find other habitable planets, Earth is the only place in the universe we can be sure that there is life. With liquid water, oxygen, and plenty of sunlight, we really lucked out. But with recent findings of water on Europa and Callisto, Jupiter’s moons, we have new hope that someday we’ll find another planet capable of supporting life.
February 15, 2017 – 12:00pm
