The Goodyear Blimp is still around, still hovering over major sporting events to provide an aerial view, long after other airships and zeppelins have gone the way of the dodo. The blimp debuted in 1925, and although the official date is in the summer, Goodyear is taking the blimp on a year-long tour in celebration of the milestone, and even giving people a chance to ride in it.

But this is no 100-year-old dirigible. Goodyear has gone through a series of blimps and has four official Goodyear Blimps in service now. But at some time, you may have wondered how a tire company came to be known for its blimp. See, Goodyear is a rubber company, and in 1910 it began manufacturing rubber-coated fabric for aircraft, including airships. During World War I, the company started making blimps for the US Navy. In 1925, they built one for themselves and soon realized its promotional value. In honor of the Goodyear Blimp's 100th anniversary tour, Smithsonian tells us its history, and the history of airships in general.

(Image credit: Erik Drost)

Redditor /u/mstacle has an impressive corpus of work, but I'm especially taken with this playful sculpture that looks like a melting ice cream treat. They tell us that the ice cream is made out of walnut and the stick is made of maple. Like the line attributed to Michelangelo that he was freeing the angel concealed in the marble, /u/mstacle experienced "a tedious process of slowly removing the material to get the melty vibe."

In the 2000 movie Gladiator, Maximus (Russell Crowe) addresses the emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who is learning the gladiator's identity for the first time. You know the quote: "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next." It's an important moment in the movie, delivered with all the gravity it deserves. But only until Dustin Ballard, also known as There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), got hold of the clip.

In this version, it is anything but powerful, emotional, or dignified. It is, however, quite memorable with the music from Spongebob Squarepants. You'll laugh at the meowing tiger and probably start to think about the Roman Empire even more than you did before. Yes, we are entertained. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Odds are you're not part of the 1% (in fact those odds are 99%), but it doesn't hurt to take a peek into how those folks might live. We get that opportunity every once in a while when a expensive property is listed. The gallery of images for this home in Leverett, Massachusetts, opens with a lovely manmade lagoon featuring water slides, waterfalls, and tropical islands. Then it switched to aerial views and I couldn't find the lagoon. That's because this mammoth playground is indoors, and therefore useful all year round!

The house has 16 bedrooms and 25 bathrooms in a 99,990 square foot interior on a 57-acre lot. Really. That includes a kitchen with five ovens, two dishwashers, and at least five islands. Four tennis courts. A bowling alley. A stage. A circular office. A game room and arcade, home theater, and gym. A nine-hole golf course. Plus, besides the large formal dining room, you could retire to your medieval conference room in the basement for a game of D&D or LARPing. It's got a sauna, media room, outdoor pool, 14 fireplaces, and a guest house. Oh yeah, and an attached garage with heat and space for 65 cars, plus a detached garage and outdoor parking, too.

The property has been on the market for a couple of years now, and the price has dropped substantially from $23 million to $14.9 million, but the tax assessment is only $5.6 million. If the price drops to its assessed value, I'd consider it. That's easy to say when a house is laughably out of your league. See a gallery of 37 images that does not include a single bedroom or bathroom at the real estate listing. -via Fark

The most popular vegetable in the US is the potato. The majority of the country's potato crop goes into frozen food, most of which consists of french fries. McDonald's sells about nine million pounds of fries every day, making it their #1 item. And many folks say that McDonald's fries are the best you can get. Those fries are the result of years of research and struggle to standardize every serving of fries at every McDonald's outlet, so they will be the same no matter which restaurant you get them from. That doesn't mean they haven't changed over time. The biggest difference is when they changed what kind of oil they were fried in, a move that customers still lament if they are old enough to remember it. Tom Blank of Weird History Food explains what makes McDonald's fries so enticing. But remember, it's fast food, so you better eat them fast. Once they are cold, the magic is completely gone.

Sometimes comedy arises from a simple unfamiliarity with certain terms, and that goes double for projects that aren't as common as they once were. Redditor kiley_marie bought a bag of dried 16-bean soup. The instructions began with "Rinse and sort beans in a large pot." Her question was, "Why put 16 types of beans in a bag and then tell me to sort them?!"

What one may not realize is that to "sort beans" means to check the contents to make sure there aren't rocks included in the bag. It can happen, although it is rare in this day and age. Still, one pebble can break a tooth when you're chewing on beans. You should also be on the alert for twigs, dirt clods, and insects, not to mention beans that don't look edible. All that is an artifact of the way beans are harvested by machine. But I don't sort them in a large pot because using a cookie sheet with a lip is easier.

On the one hand, someone who has never prepared dried beans wouldn't know this, but on the other hand, the very idea of sorting all 16 kinds of beans is funny. Kiley_marie knew what she was doing. I have to admit that I would be tempted to sort at least some beans in this manner to see if there were really 16 kinds. I only count 14 in this picture.  

(Image credit: kiley_marie)

In 1502, Leonardo da Vinci designed a self-supporting bridge for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul, intended to span the Bosphorus. It consisted only of interlocking beams with no supports underneath, no fasteners, and no mortar. The sultan didn't use the design, because he didn't believe it could possibly work. But it does, because of physics! What's more, the design is simple and portable, making it a useful military tool. Da Vinci wasn't the first to build bridges in this manner, as the Chinese used this concept a thousand years earlier, but Leonardo came up with it independently.  

Still, I can't help but think of all the things that could go wrong. Sure, the physics are sound, but it would be built and used by fallible humans. If you used one piece of weak wood, it could break. It you used wet or algae-covered wood, a tiny slip by someone walking on it could bring the whole thing down. If your builders make one mistake in construction, it could be a disaster. However, as an engineering concept, it's pretty darn cool. -via the Awesomer

Our earth is vast and filled with living things, including us. But you might not have a real grasp of the relative mass of all humans to all marine animals to livestock to plants. An interactive presentation called Biocubes shows us cubes of all the plant mass, all the animal mass, etc. so we can compare. You might not be surprised to learn how the biomass of all earth's plants dwarfs the biomass of animals, but you might gasp at how fungi and bacteria also take up way more space than animals. Then when we break down the animals cube, we find that most of our animals are in the ocean. Humans are a larger biomass than wild mammals, and our livestock biomass is bigger than humans and wild mammals combined.

But it's the last part of the presentation that's a real eye-opener. The "technomass" is the volume of the things humans have made, including building materials, plastic, and metal. An animated sequence shows how the technomass has grown over time until it dominates the earth and takes up more space than all living things combined. It's a breathtaking journey with lots of information along the way. -via kottke

The genius of the best modern mashups in which characters cross over from disparate TV shows lies in their comedic value, sure, but it doesn't work without great editing skills. In this one, the YouTuber behind Alternative Cuts took three weeks to place drug dealer Tuco Salamanca from the series Breaking Bad into the competition of Squid Game. Tuco's not taking mistreatment from anyone- even when his life is at stake. Oh no, he's not going to win the game for sure, but he might make it worth watching. He fits in so well, not logically, but in a perfectly-edited way.

Alternative Cuts teased that he will have more of these. He's working on bringing the entire crew from Breaking Bad into participating on the Red Light, Green Light game from Squid Game. He says it should take about a month to get that one ready to post. -via Laughing Squid

Ai Nurul, a cosplayer in Malaysia, integrates the hijab into all of her costumes. This often involves making creatively designed and assembled hijabs that serve as wigs, convincingly presenting as hair. You can see that vividly in this horror version of a female Ronald MacDonald.

There's been a conundrum in the world of Star Trek that's been bothering fans many years. Why do Klingons look so different in every Star Trek TV series? For some of us, it's easy to explain. Star Trek: The Original Series aired in the 1960s with a measly special effects budget. To indicate an alien, all they had to do was change the shape of his ears or eyebrows, or give him an "exotic" mustache. By the time Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek: The Next Generation came about, there was money for prosthetics and they were able to make aliens look more alien. And that was fun, so they threw more into the special makeup effects with each series afterward.

But that doesn't make sense within the universe of Star Trek. Avid fans like their fantasy worlds to have a logical cohesion. You really can't blame them for wanting an explanation, because this is the kind of thing that can nag at you over the years. The producers have listened to enough complaints, and in a recent episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, this season's finale, there appears to be somewhat of an explanation. However, even if you watched it, it could be confusing. An article at Inverse tries to parse the different ways Klingons look, although it won't be satisfactory to all fans.     

If you aren't an athlete, even if you consider yourself the picture of health, your doctor will inevitably tell you that you should get more exercise. However, the thought of joining a gym, buying exercise equipment, or counting 10,000 steps a day seems like a lot of work, and such lofty goals are liable to set you up for failure. Instead, your goal should be to incorporate walking into your daily routine until it becomes a part of your normal lifestyle. Any increase in walking will benefit your body over time. One short stroll around the neighborhood will make you feel good, and may lead to two strolls around the neighborhood.

Walking around the neighborhood has benefits beyond health, too. It gives you the chance to speak to your neighbors, meet all the dogs and cats, and admire (or judge) the houses in your area. Walking alone gives you a chance to think, and walking with a companion is a great opportunity for conversation. This TED-Ed video goes into more detail on the importance of walking just a little more than you walk now.  

Archibald Montgomery Low was an eccentric yet visionary British inventor of the early 20th century. He would have been more well known to history is he hadn't been so distractible that he went on to a new idea before completing the previous project, or if he weren't disliked for his self-aggrandizement. Low introduced a prototype television in 1914, but abandoned that work to invent the first powered drone aircraft during World War I.

Low published quite a few books, including the 1925 volume titled The Future, in which he predicted the technology that would be available in the year 2025. He predicted power from wind turbines, smart phones that you wouldn't have to dial, moving sidewalks and escalators, and news delivered by television. He also predicted online banking and online crime to go with it. Read about these and other predictions for 2025 made 100 years ago at IFL Science. -via Strange Company

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Matt Nelson of We Rate Dogs brought us The Top Ten Dogs of 2024, which we posted a few days ago. Those stories of heroic dogs were emotional enough, but there were only ten. We Rate Dogs ranks thousands of dogs every year, all above perfect. In their annual compilation video, Nelson collaborated with filmmaker West Webb to show us hundreds of the goodest boys and girls in clips from 2024 videos. After all, a dog doesn't have to save lives to be a hero. They don't even need to be heroic, because being themselves is more than we deserve. You will laugh at some dogs, tear up at others, but you'll smile the whole time.  

By the time this video is over, you'll fall in love with the song, too. It's "Bloom" by The Paper Kites. See the original video here. You can keep up with the dogs of 2025 at Instagram or Facebook.

Montchavin is a picturesque village in the French Alps where many are employed in the skiing industry. The region is home to Paradiski, one of the world's largest ski resorts. Thousands of people visit every year, but Montchavin itself only has a couple hundred permanent residents. In 2009, a woman from Montchavin was referred to neurologist Emmeline Lagrange, who diagnosed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Dr. Lagrange contacted the Montchavin general practitioner, who told her he was well aware of ALS, because he knew of three other cases in the village.

Lagrange was puzzled, because ALS is fairly rare, with two or three new cases diagnosed per 100,000 people in a year. She eventually uncovered 16 cases of ALS in Montchavin, an extraordinary cluster of diagnoses. The patients were not all related, and several came from other countries, although they had lived in Montchavin for years. Of 12 patients who had blood tests, none had genetic markers for ALS susceptibility. Was it an environmental pollutant? Many possibilities were investigated, but no risk factor was identified as being common to all the patients. However, a 2017 report mentioned that six of the patients reported eating wild mushrooms. Lagrange spotted that detail and went back to the 13 patients she was studying. She discovered that all of them had eaten Gyromitra esculenta, a delicious wild mushroom that is so toxic that it is illegal to sell them in France. Read about the investigation, and the state of research into the causes of ALS at Knowable magazine.

(Image credit: Audrey OT)