In this short video, USA Today's Reviewed team tries out three different ways to make bacon to see which would be the best: stovetop, oven, or microwave. And now I know why my bacon always turn out the way it does. If you want to learn more about the methods of making bacon and their pros and cons, check it out on USA Today.

(Image credit: Casey DeViese/Unsplash)

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Grey alien face captured in Google Earth map in Antarctica. Go and search it for yourself. Shoutout to Thirdphaseofthemoon 👉 https://youtu.be/BVjH1onTFO4 Follow me👉 @ufo_scandinavia 🤘 . #ufo #alien #ovni #love #planet #earth #phenomenon #strangerthings #news #insta #instagram #ufosighting #antarctica

A post shared by 👽UFO👽 (@ufo_scandinavia) on Aug 20, 2019 at 3:35pm PDT

Our minds are able to make out images or patterns from seemingly unconnected or random things and places. We might see animals or flowers formed in the clouds, shadows, or even in rocks and other objects in the environment. However, this one particular find is quite weird in that it forms the shape of an alien face in Antarctica.

While looking at Google Earth images of Antarctica, the researcher noticed what appears to be a rather sizeable face standing out amid the frosty mountainous terrain.

Sporting what seems to be a proportionate set of eyes, a nose, and a mouth, the eerie 'visage' has captured the imagination of conspiracy theorists who contend that Antarctica is home to all manner of esoteric secrets.

Numerous observers were quick to note that the potential face bears an uncanny resemblance to the famed 'Face on Mars' that is said to sit in the Cydonia region of the Red Planet and was first photographed by NASA's Viking 1 back in 1976.

-via Strange Company

(Image credit: UFO_Scandinavia)

Tom Scott is on a language kick, which is great, because there's always more to learn about the way we communicate. Here, he tells us about the International Phonetic Language (IPL), which no one can read, but it's a standard used to communicate pronunciation across different languages. But that's not really what the video is about. It's about the sounds we make when we speak, and some that we don't. The sounds he says are impossible may present a challenge to you, so go ahead and give them a try.

August 26 was International Dog Day, so the Montreal offices of the Ubisoft game development company compiled this video of dogs wearing its motion capture suits. I had never thought of it before, but it makes perfect sense to add realistic canine motions into the video games using the same types of interfaces that humans wear.

-via Super Punch

They say that children spend more time in school with their teachers than at home with their parents. As such, educators take up a special role as they make an impact in the lives of their students.

For Karen Wunderlich Loewe, caring for her students means breaking the ice at the start of the school year through this “baggage activity,” which she conducted after “establishing that the classroom would be a respectful place where ideas were valued, students would speak individually, and kindness.”

"I asked the kids what it meant to have baggage, and they mostly said it was hurtful stuff you carry around on your shoulders," she wrote in the post, which had over 425,000 shares on Tuesday evening. "I asked them to write down on a piece of paper what was bothering them, what was heavy on their heart, what was hurting them, etc. No names were to be on a paper. They wadded the paper up, and threw it across the room."

The said activity changed the dynamic of the students within their classroom.

"They don't interrupt or talk down to each other," she said. "They're not rude. It's completely, completely changed how they treat each other...I wish I would have done this years ago. It's been so good."

As Loewe shared her story on her Facebook account, it went viral and people started to ask her for tips on how she conducted the activity successfully.

Photo Credits: Karen Loewe

We all know that taking a summer vacation to the French Riviera is the ultimate in high-class living, but it wasn't always so. Before the 1920s, the region wasn't world-renowned, and the French who could afford to sojourn there only did so in the winter. Then came the Americans to change that.

In the summer of 1923, an American husband and wife could be credited with two rather surprising things. Their name is seldom remembered in the context of the glamorous 1920s, but the French Riviera became the summer destination it is today thanks to the infectious expatriate couple known as the Murphys. Gerald and Sarah convinced their circle of friends to summer with them in Cap d’Antibes at a time when the fashionable only wintered there, leaving the region abandoned during the high summer months. Their pals included a young Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau and a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation who fell into the couple’s orbit.

Read about the Murphys, their social circle, and their influence on the lifestyles of the rich and famous at Messy Nessy Chic. You'll see a lot of historically fascinating pictures, too.

Children affected with acid reflux sometimes take a syrup laced with a pediatric formulation of the drug omeprazole. The parents of 17 of those children in Spain became alarmed when they noticed their child sprouting hair all over their bodies. They had developed hypertrichosis, a condition that is sometimes referred to as "werewolf syndrome."  

Speaking with Güell, Ángela Selles, a mother whose son had at least two bottles of syrup containing the anti-hair loss drug, says her six-month-old’s “forehead, cheeks, arms and legs, hands became covered in hair.” She adds, “He had the eyebrows of an adult. It was very scary because we didn’t know what was happening to him.”

The cases were traced back to one pharmaceutical lab in Málaga, where a labeling mishap led to the syrup being laced with minoxidil instead of omeprazole. You might know minoxidil better under the brand name Rogaine, an anti-baldness medicine. Doctors believe that discontinuing the medication will cause the excess hair to fall out in the case of these affected children, but the long term effects are unclear. Read how this mixup happened at Smithsonian.

They say that if you want to lose weight or to have a healthy gut but don't want to give up alcoholic drinks altogether, then red wide would be the best alternative to other liquor like beer. However, researchers say that there is no proof to suggest that red wine provides such benefits.

Researchers looked at the self-reported drinking habits of 916 female twins in the UK, and cross-checked their findings in similar groups from the US and Belgium. They found women who drank red wine had more diverse gut micro-organisms.

They also noted that women who drank red wine tended to have a lower body mass index (BMI), which their analyses suggested might be related to the effect on gut micro-organisms.

Despite these findings, the researchers said that there may be other factors contributing to gut diversity and lower body mass index. Furthermore, it is not advisable to drink red wine if one wants to lose weight or stay healthy.

As the researchers made clear, any potential beneficial effects on red wine intake could possibly be achieved by drinking just 1 glass of red wine every 2 weeks.

(Image credit: Kelsey Knight/Unsplash)

56% of the world's ejector seats, including the one photographed above, are made by a British company named Martin-Baker. They are remarkably complex, precise machines that designed to keep pilots alive under extreme conditions. According to Popular Science, so much happens in 1.35 seconds after pulling the lever:

Pulling the handle fires the ejection gun for .2 seconds, starting the ejection at 50-55 feet per second. Simultaneously the aircraft’s glass canopy either shatters, is blown off, or the seat breaks through it, depending on the aircraft model. The rocket motor then fires for .2 seconds with a 5,000 pound thrust, and then a top-mounted side rocket fires for .05 seconds at a thrust of 584 pounds. This side rocket (located to the left of the front seat, and the right of the back one for aircraft with two crew members) ensures the two ejectees hurtle different directions with the person in the back seat always ejecting first, to avoid being burned by the front seat rocket.

Straps tighten around the pilots' arms and legs and an emergency oxygen supply is released. Then a drogue parachute at the back of the 214-pound seat opens. At the same time two small panels about 16 inches long and 8 inches wide open up on either side of the seat to keep it straight.

Then the parachutes deploy:

Then the small box at the top of the seat, which contains the main parachute (harnessed to the pilot) lifts away from the seat, the drogue parachute drops off and, as the main parachute opens, the pilot and the seat shell part company—apart from a section under the butt that contains the survival kit and a raft, which automatically inflates in water. These hang underneath the ejectee, deploying just 5.5 seconds after they’ve pulled the ejection handle.

The forces at work are brutal on the pilot and usually result in injuries:

“It was inconvenient,” one ejectee says, dryly. He was in the backseat of a plane when it collided with a bird in June 1999. “The overhead canopy was smashed and there was blood and gore everywhere,” he recounts. “I didn't realize it was the bird—I thought it was the pilot and when I looked in front he wasn't there, so I ejected. I broke five vertebrae and so lost a few centimeters,” he says wryly. In fact the pilot was there, just bent over checking for damage, and later able to land the plane.

On the upside, people who survive after ejecting with a Martin-Baker seat receive a complimentary necktie:

Ejectees whose lives have been saved by Martin-Baker seats automatically become members of the Ejection Tie Club.

-via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Martin-Baker, The Ejection Tie Club

This is the Orion Nebula, a massive stellar nursery located some 1,500 light years away. This image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope was built from data intended to monitor the brightness of the young stars of the said nebula, of which many are still surrounded by “dusty, planet-forming disks.” Orion’s young stars, which are only around a million years old, are younger than our own Sun, which is already 4.6 billion years old.

The region's hottest stars are found in the Trapezium Cluster, the brightest cluster near picture center. Launched into orbit around the Sun on August 25, 2003 Spitzer's liquid helium coolant ran out in May 2009. The infrared space telescope continues to operate though, its mission scheduled to end on January 30, 2020. Recorded in 2010, this false color view is from two channels that still remain sensitive to infrared light at Spitzer's warmer operating temperatures.

No matter how many times I look at space photos, I never cease to be amazed by the wonders of the cosmos above us.

(Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech)

A team of Argentinian scientists from the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) discovered the oldest parasite DNA when they studied the coprolite taken from a rock-shelter in Catamarca Province in northwest Argentina, a place where the remains of an extinct megafauna have been recovered in stratigraphic excavations.

Radiocarbon dating revealed that the coprolite and thus the parasitic roundworm eggs preserved inside dated back to between 16,570 and 17,000 years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age.

[...]

Ancient mitochondrial DNA analysis was used to confirm the coprolite came from a Puma (Puma concolor) and that the eggs belonged to Toxascaris leonina, a species of roundworm still commonly found in the digestive systems of modern day cats, dogs and foxes.

[...]

The discovery marks a number of firsts: it represents the oldest record of an ancient DNA sequence for a gastrointestinal nematode parasite of wild mammals, the oldest molecular parasite record worldwide, and also a new maximum age for the recovery of old DNA of this origin.

For Dr Petrigh, the findings also cast light on both the past and the present. She said: "This work confirms the presence of T. leonina in prehistoric times, presumably even before that of humans in the region, and it represents the oldest record in the world. The common interpretation is that the presence of T. leonina in American wild carnivores today is a consequence of their contact with domestic dogs or cats, but that should no longer be assumed as the only possible explanation.

More details of this discovery on Science Daily.

(Image Credit: Bas Lammers/ Wikimedia Commons)

New research from the University of Stirling suggest that health warnings printed on individual cigarettes could play an important role in reducing smoking. The researchers from the Stirling’s Institute of Social Marketing studied smokers’ perception of the warning “smoking kills” on individual cigarette sticks as opposed on the warning only appearing on cigarette packs.

The team, led by Dr. Crawford Moodie, found that smokers felt the innovative approach has the potential to discourage smoking among young people, those starting to smoke, and non-smokers.

Participants felt that a warning on each cigarette would prolong the health message, as it would be visible when taken from a pack, lit, left in an ashtray, and with each draw, thus making avoidant behavior more difficult.

Head over at Neuroscience News for more details of the study.

(Image Credit: University of Stirling)

In various cities around the world, city officials are using certain types of music to deter unwanted behavior like homeless people sleeping in properties or teenagers congregating in parking lots. Songs like "Baby Shark" and "Raining Tacos" are being played late in the night to shoo people away though some are just sleeping through it.

Now, “Baby Shark” and “Raining Tacos” are being used by city officials in West Palm Beach, Fla., as a property management tool.

To deter people experiencing homelessness from sleeping overnight at the city’s Lake Pavilion and Great Lawn, venues that offer “million-dollar views” for special events, West Palm Beach officials began playing the catchy, obnoxious tunes three weeks ago from strategically situated speakers.

Others use classical music to disrupt crowds of teenagers from parking lots. Many people might find it soothing but their reasoning for playing it is that teenagers seem to dislike classical music so naturally they would move away from it.

But is using music as a means to deter certain types of behavior really effective?

(Image credit: Pao Edu/Unsplash)

Sometimes, in our dreams, we might get premonitions or we see events that we would later recognize in the future and consider as having "deja vu". But sometimes, dreams can also be very specific and we remember the details clearly. However, what do they mean exactly? Check out this little comic strip by Cujko Comics. -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: Cujko Comics)

If there's an initiative to repopulate the world's forests and plant a trillion trees to help mitigate the climate crisis, there are other proposals to address concerns regarding the poles such as the design plan submitted by a team of Indonesian designers who suggested to "refreeze the Arctic".

Led by 29-year-old architect Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, the group envisaged a submersible vessel capable of producing 16-foot-thick, 82-foot wide hexagonal icebergs.

The process would begin with the submarine dipping beneath the surface to fill its central cavity with seawater. Salt would then be filtered out, raising water's freezing point by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit, after which a hatch closes over the chamber to protect it from the sun.

(Image credit: Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha)