Dune, one of the world's best-selling sci-fi novel, was inspired by giant sand dunes here on Earth.

In the late 1950s, Frank Herbert visited the Oregon Dunes, a 40-mile long stretch of windswept sand along the coast. The coastal sand dunes had been there for 100,000 years but human development had encroached on the area and the drifting dunes were threatening to swallow houses and roads. Humanity's answer was one of the largest geo-engineering project to stop the advancing dunes:

Herbert chartered a small plane to fly over the shifting sand dunes and what he saw inspired him to write that the project was "the first enduring answer to shifting sands in all history" and was "an unsung victory in the fight of men against dunes."

The moving dunes could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways," Herbert wrote in a letter to his literary agent

I visited the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, and it was fantastic. If you're ever in the area, do check it out. No need to ride a sandworm, you can rent dune buggies and ATV from local businesses.

BTW, I'm experimenting with a free new email newsletter publication called Geeky Pop Forever - it's basically like Neatorama, but focused on geeky pop culture topics. If you like movies, comics, video games and fan art, please check it out and, hopefully, subscribe.

Image: Rebecca Kennison/Wikimedia

We've talked about viruses as being an outlier that strains the definition of life. Viruses do not have the ability to reproduce on their own, but must harness a host cell of another species to replicate. But now there's a new type of life form that is even more primitive than viruses called obelisks.

Obelisks consist of a viroid-like disc of RNA, but they do not have the protein shell that viruses have. Their genetic information is completely distinct from any known species, putting them into a unique phylogenic group. They reproduce by infecting another cell, like viruses do. They haven't yet been classified into the Tree of Life because scientists aren't really sure where they belong. But obelisks have been found in the microbiome of humans, in the digestive tract. One type of obelisks studied infects the bacteria Streptococcus sanguinis, found in human mouths. The impact of obelisks in the human biome has not been determined, but they've been there all this time and just haven't been found until recently. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ivan N. Zheludev et al. via Cell magazine)

Don't just mow your lawn! Channel your inner artist and create a Mowna Lisa. A grassterpiece, if you will.

For 11 years running, British mowing machine manufacturer Allett has a competition where lawn care enthusiasts prove that the grass is always greener on their side of the yard.

I'm partial to the 3rd Place winner of the 2023 Allett Creative Lawn Stripes competition. It's 3D shaped cube by Tito Triana of East Sussex, UK, who wrote:

I began by measuring out a cube using stakes and string and slowly began reducing the height of cut in the surrounding areas over a 4-week period. I always enjoy the added attention the lawn needs when cutting at such low heights and was impressed with how well the grass held up with daily mowing at 8mm. The 3D elusion is a result of different heights of cut as well as tapering the design from bottom to top which was a lot harder than I initially thought to do within scale across the shape and in a way that made it look realistic.

More unbeleafably fantastic lawn art over at Allett's 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 competitions.

When you are desperate to cure an illness or heal a wound, you are willing to try anything. And eventually, any substance could be tried as a medicine. If it worked, great. If it didn't, we'd probably find out why in a couple hundred years. But by then, students of history would think us really dumb. Not dumb; just desperate. After all, some of our greatest medical discoveries came about by accident or by someone trying some random substance as medicine.

Rabies is a good example of that desperation. Once symptoms appear, the disease is fatal, so victims were willing to eat burnt hair or the liver of the dog that bit them. After all, it couldn't hurt. For arthritis, people were advised to sit inside of rotting whale carcass and breathe in the fumes emitted by its decaying flesh. Those patients would be mighty relieved to have access to some opioids. Weird History is eager to fill us on bizarre medicines that were once trusted, but now just make us say, "What were they thinking?"

The city with the largest population in the world is no longer Shanghai. The link said, "I bet you can’t name it." I thought, I bet that Guangzhou and Hong Kong were officially merged and got a new name. While I was wrong, that is the way that Chongqing, China, became a municipality with 32,054,159 residents.

Like many superlatives, it all comes down to how you define your terms. The Chinese government designated Chongqing in southwestern China as a "direct-administered municipality" which includes the city of Chongqing proper plus several surrounding cities and the rural areas in between. However, Chongqing proper still has 22 million people, which puts it close to Shanghai's 25 million. Wikipedia still lists Tokyo as the biggest city, but such rankings depend on whether you go by city limits, government designations, or metropolitan areas.

At any rate, Chongqing is massive, the size of Austria, and has more people than many of the world's countries. Read about Chongqing and see some gorgeous pictures at Kuriositas.  -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: Jay Huang)

How does this even happen??? pic.twitter.com/gEHesbYxq8

— Springfield Cardinals (@Sgf_Cardinals) January 15, 2025

This guy had the best seat in the house for a Springfield Cardinals game. He was sitting in the front row, behind home plate. He was ready for the action with a beer that probably cost fifteen dollars. And then a foul ball arced over and landed right in that beer, splashing foam all over him. One in a million shot! He wasn't hurt, and his instant reaction was to laugh at the situation. He knows he'll get over the wet face and the lost beer, but he gained a great new story to tell. One redditor mentioned he surely told at least 38 people before the video hit the internet. But it's not just a story, it's a viral video, which is made even greater by his laughter. It's sure to make the ESPN highlight reel. This is a fellow who knows how to enjoy a baseball game. And a beer. -via reddit

Experts say it's best to clean your winter coat at least twice a season. And the rest of us laugh. As Mitch Hedberg once said, "My jacket says 'Dry clean only' on it. Which means ...it's dirty." That label deters many of us from doing anything about it, but even if your winter coat is completely washable, it's easy to put it off until you don't need that coat anymore in the spring.

But you can get your winter coat clean; it just takes getting around to it and knowing how. If your coat is wool or natural fur, it really should go to a professional cleaner. Down, fleece, and leather can be cleaned at home. But don't just throw them into the washing machine, because different materials require different techniques. And don't be intimidated by the idea of washing a winter coat by hand in the sink. It could take some time, but your friends, family, and co-workers will appreciate you showing up without the smell of coat that is years overdue for a cleaning. Read the best methods for cleaning each kind of winter coat at Mental Floss.

Self-surgery is not new. Most famously, a Soviet doctor performed his own appendectomy in 1962 because there was no one else available in Antarctica to do it.

Dr. Chen Wei-nong, though, performed a less time-sensitive operation: a vasectomy. Oddity Central tells us that this plastic surgeon in Taiwan performed his own vasectomy, recorded it, and then posted the video online. I can confirm that this video is indeed available, should you wish to watch it.

Although a vasectomy normally takes 15 minutes, Dr. Chen is not a urologist, so figuring out the procedure and completing it took him a full hour. He suggests that men seeking to follow his example instead have it performed by a urologist.

In every movie, there's an extra character that never gets mentioned, but that character's point of view is crucial. That's the camera, because the camera is the viewer. A filmmaker has to make a choice as to what the viewer will see, what they will focus on, and what that point of view means to moving the story along. That decision is also affected by the way the characters in the scene move around, and the way you want the camera to move around, because after all, the camera is representing the viewer.

So many of us watch movies and either enjoy them or not, but never think about the hundreds of different decisions filmmakers have to make with every scene. But those decisions together drive how well a film incorporates the viewer into the story. Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting (previously at Neatorama) takes us into the nuts and bolts of the rigorous decision-making process behind every film. Or at least, every good film. -via Nag on the Lake

In the 1920s, the role of women in public life was changing. They could vote, drive, and hold jobs formerly reserved for men, and they reflected this freedom by wearing short hair and shorter skirts than their mothers. Most noticeable were the party girls who drank and danced and were known as flappers. Rebecca Bradley wasn't that kind of woman. She was a graduate student who also held a job and took care of her elderly mother, but she wore her hair short, so the newspapers branded her as a flapper when she was caught robbing two banks -by herself- in Texas. Her very appearance led bank employees to trust her up until the moment she made off with the money.

Newspapers recognized a sensational story when they saw it. Bradley was pretty and petite, and the sexy headlines about her crime sold a lot of papers. She wasn't even the only "flapper bandit" of the time, because who needs facts when you've got a sympathetic criminal to write about? Even the justice system was confused. How could such a pretty young woman pull of these crimes? Read about Rebecca Bradley and her criminal activities at Atlas Obscura.

Over the history of civilization, rats traveled wherever humans traveled. That is, if you count "civilization" as the time beginning when we started growing our own grains. Rats love those things. But furthermore, rats traveled to places where people didn't migrate as much, so they managed to spread fleas and disease to far-flung populations of people, like the plague, which changed Europe forever. They are also invasive species to places all over the world, takemn there by people, who you have to admit are also an invasive species.

But the misery that rats spread among humans and various ecosystems wasn't because they are evil. They've just become dependent on humans to provide their food, and we are very good at that. This TED-Ed lesson from Max G. Levy tells us the good things about rats, too. The video was directed by Ukrainian illustrator and animator Denys Spolitak. -via Laughing Squid

For many years it was a tradition for local students sitting exams to make sure to ride this bus or a bus driven by this driver, who famously did not fall (in Japanese fall/fail can be the same word). Everyone remembers seeing this bus on a collapsed highway after the big… https://t.co/ETceFMbATL

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) January 17, 2025

Wrath of Gnon, a culture critic who lives in Japan, shares this story about the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which struck southern Japan 30 yeras ago today on January 17, 1995. Bus driver Yusui Yoshimasa survived, as did his Mitsubishi Fuso Aerobus. In fact, the bus was put back in service and was popular among students preparing for exams.

NHK World-Japan interviewed Yoshimasa about his experience during and after this terrifying event. He's still driving, but a different bus.

Popular Science reports that scientists from Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam have just classified a species of giant isopod in Vietnam. They've named it Bathynomus vaderi after Darth Vader, as they see a resemblance between its head and Vader's famous helmet.

Giant isopods are a popular source of meat in East Asia, so it was easy for the researchers to acquire large quantities of them from fishermen for examination. The researchers' article in the journal ZooKeys makes no mention of mysterious powers from Bathynomus vaderi, such as the ability to choke people without touching them.

-via Dave Barry

Joe Velaidum of Prince Edward Island has a doorbell camera mounted at the front door of his home. CBC News reports that in July, that camera recorded a meteorite strike right in front of his home. Velaidum says that he had stood in that spot just a couple minutes before the bug meteor attack, so he's very lucky to have been elsewhere at the time.

Scientists think this is the first time that a meteorite strike has been recorded with both audio and video. They recovered about 95 grams (3.3 ounces) of extraterrestrial material from the site, which they are now testing.

-via David Thompson

USS Seadragon (SSN-484) was a Skate-class nuclear submarine that surfaced through the icecap at the North Pole on September 15, 1960. For recreation, the sailors laid out a softball diamond that used the marker for the North Pole as the pitcher's mound. When a sailor successfully cleared the bases, he circumnavigated the world.

-via US Naval Institute | Photo: Norman Polmar