Your local vet probably won't tell you to stop getting pugs and bulldogs, but deep inside, they really want to urge dog lovers to think about buying these pure breeds. The reason is that the features people love about them so much - their cute faces, squished noses, and double-curled tails - are all genetic defects.

Having these anatomical features actually causes them pain and suffering such as difficulty breathing and eating which could lead to more serious conditions like overheating or cardiovascular stress. The British Veterinary Association has issued several statements expressing their concern over the popularity of these breeds, and they urged people to reconsider a different breed or a crossbreed instead.

Although there's some debate on whether mixed breeds are healthier than pure breeds, data from a study has shown that out of 24 genetic disorders, there is a higher incidence of 10 genetic disorders in pure breeds than in mixed breeds with only one disorder being higher in mixed breeds. The rest are equally distributed.

In fact, some of the more famous pets online actually had health problems. Lil Bub and Grumpy Cat both had genetic mutations that caused them to look funny, but in reality, they were going through some painful conditions. Lil Bub had osteoporosis and died of a bone infection, while Grumpy Cat had dwarfism and died from urinary tract infection.

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Despite being the carriers of the deadliest diseases known to humans like ebola, SARS, MERS, and even some precursor of COVID-19, bats rarely get sick or even get cancer. This has become the subject of increased research interest for scientists, as bats may hold the key to how we can combat pandemics and possibly how to treat deadly human diseases as well as slow aging.

One of the reasons why bats are impervious to deadly diseases, despite being hosts to them, may have something to do with their physiology and how they evolved. The fact that they are the only mammals that can fly may give us a hint to their extreme capabilities. Not only that, bats have long lifespans compared to other mammals, with some estimates going up as high as 200 years in human equivalents.

Scientists have now begun to receive heavy funding to research bats. From sequencing their genomes to studying their immune systems, many researchers have turned to bat biology for possible answers to pandemics, and possibly cancer although many say it will still be a long time before a cure for cancer or COVID-19 can be found in bats.

Although still in its infancy, research into bat biology has had a breakthrough when Dr. Thomas Zwaka, a stem cell researcher was able to turn bat tissue into pluripotent stem cells, which means they are capable of transforming into other kinds of cells.

(Video credit: Vox)

If people were stranded on an island with very limited resources, struggling for survival, would we chastise them if any were to turn to cannibalism just to survive? What if they were settlers who have been tasked to build a new colony and found themselves in the above scenario? That's something that Kelly and Zach Weinsersmith discussed in their book about the different aspects of building settlements and a city on Mars.

Of course, the ethical decision would be to exhaust all other options that don't sacrifice human life, at least from a humane standpoint. However, the question is whether one is willing to risk letting the whole crew die and failing the mission or sacrificing one's life for the sake of the mission and their fellow astronauts' lives.

So far, not much has been published on this subject, but the Weinsersmiths did find a book written by Dr. Erik Seedhouse titled Survival and Sacrifice in Mars Exploration, which not only discussed the topic of astronaut cannibalism but also stated in detail how exactly to go about it.

Still, if we were to go by legal precedent, there was one case of four seafarers whose ship capsized, and after being stranded for more than a week on a dinghy without any sign of rescue, decided to kill the youngest and weakest member of their crew, in order to survive. They were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

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From bloodbaths and betrayals to incest and illegitimate children, the history of kings, queens, princes, and princesses have always been fraught with spicy controversies which we, commoners, find both shocking and intriguing. The idea that the royals are the paragon of class, elegance, stature, and proper conduct no longer holds true, if it ever did. Much to our consternation, they are humans just like us, and equally susceptible to the foibles of ordinary human life.

Still, we hold them in high regard, if only as the symbols of what once was and the ideals that they should represent. However, in time, all things that have been hidden from public view come out, but unlike our bag of bones, theirs are just weightier being the figurehead of their nations as well as constantly being under the scrutiny of the public.

Although much talk has come about the British royal family, with Prince Harry and Meghan's self-exile and more recently, a bit of a spat between Prince William and his father, King Charles III, there are more scandalous royals throughout the world. There's Prince Frederik of Denmark's supposed affair with Genoveva Casanova, the dubious financial affairs of King Juan Carlos of Spain, the philandering exploits of Prince Albert of Monaco, and the familicide of Prince Dipendra of Nepal because of his family's objection to a marriage with an Indian princess.

All of these and more on The Daily Beast.

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The process by which Merriam-Webster's team of lexicographers choose the word of the year is simple. They look at how many hits and searches words receive, and among the words in the pool, they pick the one that represents the zeitgeist for that year. Last year, it was "gaslighting". And perhaps, it's no surprise then, that the word of the year for 2023 is "authentic".

In choosing the word, Merriam-Webster removes certain words that constantly get looked up like "love" and "affect". They also filter out words which people playing word games search in the dictionary from time to time. What they look at are unusual spikes in searches for certain words such as "EGOT" after Viola Davis' unofficial induction into the club, when she won a Grammy, or "X" when Elon Musk had changed Twitter's name in July.

This year, the rationale behind "authentic" was not from a particular event, but rather due to the continued and constant interest people have placed on the word. Perhaps, the pervasiveness of AI these days may have contributed to people's curiosity for what it means to be "authentic". Maybe the fact that we are constantly inundated with false information and fabricated facts online and even in the real world, provided impetus for lookups of the word.

One evidence as to the extent of our search and need for "authenticity" may be reflected by some other runners-up for word of the year which include "doppelganger" and "deepfake", which was also quite prevalent last year.

No matter what reason people may have in searching for the meaning of the word "authentic", this might just be a message that we, as a whole, are either lacking in authenticity or trying to be more so but are falling short.

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Twin brothers Pat and Sean Kelly are musicians and DJs for private events in Philadelphia. When you mix music on the fly, you get a feeling for what works together, and an awful lot of songs work together. You know sometimes you get a song stuck in your head, and it reminds you of another song that uses the same chord progression, and then that song is stuck in there as well. Take this to the limit and you've got magic, especially if you've got a brother to sing with. They call this medley "My Brain at 3:59am – A Mashup." Twenty songs in one minute, divided by two singers, means each song gets about six seconds, but that's long enough for you to know what song it is, and now you've got an entire mashup stuck in your head. If you hear any songs you don't know, there's a list of them at Boing Boing.   

Futility Closet tells the true tale of four men who went adrift in the Pacific for 49 days in 1960. Soviet barge T-36 originated in the Kuril Archipelago on the eastern end of the USSR. When a hurricane hit, the barge battled to avoid being thrown up on land. After the eye of the storm passed, the barge crew battled against being blown out to sea, and ran out of fuel doing so. The radio was ruined. A search was launched, but when some debris from the barge was found, Soviet officials declared the barge and crew had sunk.

The four sailors, ages 20-22, had a three-day supply of food and hardly any fresh water, so they were reduced to drinking the rusty water used for engine cooling and eating leather. They were picked up 49 days later by the US aircraft carrier Kearsarge, which was traveling from Japan to San Francisco. If this story intrigues you, you can read an expanded version with photographs at Wikipedia. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: USS Kearsarge crew)

While Boston Dynamics keeps working on Atlas, their humanoid robot, and Spot, the quadruped that actually does real world jobs, Disney is concentrating on building robots for their entertainment value. Does it surprise anyone that they are the ones giving us real life droids? A few weeks ago, they took their new droids out for a test run at the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge theme park at Disneyland in California. These bipedal self-learning robots don't look all that useful for the real world, but they are impossibly adorable and are ready to show off their personalities, which is perfect for the immersive fantasy of Disneyland. They look like a cross between an AT-ST and Wall-E. See what else they can do.



Look for the souvenir toy version coming back from the theme parks soon, and in stores by next Christmas. Disney is also working on non-Star Wars free-roaming characters with soft, expressive faces for their other theme parks. -via Metafilter

Ellen Baxter of the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMA) has finished her hard work in restoring a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de Medici. She was the daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Eleonora di Toledo. 

Her artwork was actually concealed beneath a 19th-century overpainting depicting what is assumed to be her mother. Baxter undertook a laborious process of restoring the years of damage through inpainting with tiny brushes. She also used pipettes of varnish and solvent. “You have to …tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she stated. 

The conservator was brought into the project after Louise Lippincott, the CMA’s former curator of fine arts, ran across the work in the museum’s basement storage. Lippincott, who thought that the art was “awful” let Baxter look at it for her second opinion. 

Baxter had a hunch that something wasn’t right, and an x-ray confirmed her initial read on the situation, which was extra layers of paint over the original artwork. After the confirmation, Baxter then proceeded to carefully strip the dirty varnish and other layers until the face of de Medici could be seen. “I’m not the artist. I’m the conservator,” she further explained.”It’s my job to repair damages and losses, to not put myself in the painting.”

And what a good job it was!

Image credit via Carnegie Museum of Art

We don’t want you to get arrested on your vacation!

France is a beautiful country filled to the brim with various cities and towns that you can enjoy, as well as lots of tourist attractions that will be a treat to the senses. But be careful– France is also notorious for its quirk laws that make visitors puzzled. 

Did you know that the country has strict rules on what you can wear to public pools and beaches? If you want to take a dip in a public bathing area, the law requires you to wear specific items of clothing. To elaborate, men need to wear either un slip de bain (trunks) or un boxer (tight shorts) and in some areas, swimming caps.

Loose-fitting or baggy shorts are prohibited, as France considers it to be unhygienic. And before you come at us with pitchforks, this isn’t a new rule — it can be traced to date back to 1903. "Small, tight trunks can only be used for swimming. Bermudas or bigger swimming shorts can be worn elsewhere all day, so could bring in sand, dust or other matter, disturbing the water quality," Emmanuel Dormois, a head pool attendant in Paris' 11th arrondissement, told The Guardian.

Image credit: Korhan Erdol

Being a civilized, sensible, and well-informed people, the Japanese have an appreciation for Texas. Twitter user @chairmanwon, a hobbyist gunsmith from Texas, discovered this on his ongoing journey through Japan.

He reports that his hosts, upon learning that @chairmanwon and his wife were Texans, took them to a Texas-themed bar. Everyone there dresses like Texans (or how they imagine that we dress) and the bar itself looks like a Texan honky-tonk.

On Star Trek: The Original Series, "fascinating" is a word Mr. Spock used when confronted by something unexpected. How often did that happen in the series? More than once an episode, at least. Merriam-Webster defines the word fascinating as "extremely interesting or charming, captivating." I doubt Spock would use it to mean charming, but since the character is supposedly immune to human emotions (which wasn't quite true), we will assume he finds all things extremely interesting.  

Here we have incidents that Spock found fascinating from all three seasons of the original Star Trek series, plus Star Trek: The Animated Series, the Star Trek movies, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. The use of the word is not confined to Spock, because others picked up the habit from him, too. This is another Trek supercut from John DiMarco. See some others in our previous posts. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Louis Sherry owned one of the finest restaurant in New York City during the Gilded Age, when Sherry's would compete with Delmonico's across the street to impress millionaires and others of the city's upper crust. Sometimes this involved stunts that would make the newspapers as well as the gossip circuit. None was more spectacular than the time Sherry served a dinner party on horseback. In his grand white ballroom, on the second floor. A classic tale of conspicuous consumption. 

In 1903, millionaire C.K.G. Billings, a horse racing enthusiast, built an elegant new stable and wanted to celebrate its grand opening with his closest friends. Thirty-six guests, all men, showed up in formalwear at Sherry's on the appointed night, and were led to the ballroom, which contained 36 horses! Each horse was outfitted with a silver tray attached to the saddle as a dining table for each guest, with champagne in the saddle bags. The dinner included caviar, turtle soup, rack of lamb, and flaming peaches. The horses must have stayed calm during the serving of the flaming peaches, because no mention of panic made it into the papers, although the term "freak dinners" was used. Read about the banquet on horseback at The Bowery Boys. -via Strange Company 

Red Side made an illustrated comparison of how fast various birds can move, on foot or flying. They start with the slowest birds which are overtaken by faster ones, one by one. I felt sorry for the penguin, who leads things off as the slowest walker, but never gets to show us how fast he can swim. The information is interesting, and you have to appreciate the research that went into this. But the animation itself is way more fascinating. Where are all these birds going? Why are they all going as fast as they can? Is something chasing them? Some are rather awkward even as they are speeding by other species. I found myself waiting for the roadrunner to show up, wondering if a coyote would be watching. The running birds seem to have no knees, and the ostrich has hips hidden way up in its backbone, which makes this frantic chase seem all the more hilarious. Oh yeah, the epic music will have you wondering if there's some kind of reward at the end of this race. -via Nag on the Lake

It was called Project Iceworm, inspired by Norwegian-born US Army colonel Bernt Balchen, who pushed for the US military's continued presence in Greenland as a strategic geographical midway point between the US and the Soviet Union.

The US Army had planned on digging trenches under Greenland's ice, in which they will burrow medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) as a means of deterring the Soviet Union from targeting the US. They had also wanted to build an underground city where they will presumably conduct operations undetected by Soviet satellites.

However, what foiled the US Army's plans was neither Soviet spies or budget constraints. It was nature, as Greenland's ice started to shift. After nine years of building the facility that was supposed to house 600 MRBMs, they were forced to abandon the site, which cost an estimated $2.37 billion.

However, this also led to some tension between Denmark and the US after the truth was exposed. Thankfully, the discovery of fossilized leaf and twig fragments under the ice helped ease those tensions as it suggested that there had been plants growing there before.

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