Have you seen the latest Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus One? The giant lizard we all know and love is infinitely recognizable, but if you were to watch that movie and the original 1954 Godzilla, the two titular monsters are very different. You don't normally see movies that are 70 years apart in a double feature. Godzilla fans generally see them when they are new, although the earliest ones make a good weekend binge.

Godzilla stays so familiar to us because while every movie changes him, they only change a little. There are officially 37 movies in the Godzilla franchise (with another one coming next year). It's the longest continually running film franchise ever. Each production aims to improve over those that have gone before, but you can't change the monster too much or fans will rebel. If you look through all the movies, you will be struck by how much bigger Godzilla has become. But the design has also become more like a natural, if fictional, reptile, and therefore more believable. Film technology has advanced so that we see ever more realism and more "bling" at the same time, in order to bring more thrills. Read about the changes in each iteration of Godzilla, movie by movie at Polygon. Then be on the lookout for the differences in the big guy in the TV show Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters starting November 17 on Apple+ TV and the movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, set to hit theaters on April 12, 2024.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Will Joel/Polygon)

Historically, the toughest armies are made up of the fiercest warriors. Modern armies depend on technology and brainpower, but still require tough warriors. Over thousands of years, rulers have shaped their societies to produce brave fighters that will risk their lives for glory, honor, and victory. Weird History highlights eleven of history's fiercest fighting forces of the past and what they accomplished. Not all of them were official armies led by government rulers, but they all had a leader who knew how to motivate their fighters, whether by patriotism, rewards, fear, loyalty, cultural manipulation, or survival instinct. Or some combination of those techniques. Some you know about from history class or the movies, but there will be a couple of armies that are new to you.  

The question Tom Howell posed to himself was, "Is it normal to know only five people in your neighborhood?". He has been living on the same street for 15 years, and a recent New Year's Eve Party put his neighbor knowledge to the test, wherein he found that he actually had an abysmal score. So, in order to get to know his other neighbors, he asked them how many neighbors they can name, and gave them a sheet to fill out.

With that cheat sheet, he was literally able to know all his neighbors' names. But then that poses the interesting issue of the "middle ring" which was mentioned by the sociologist Marc Dunkelman in his book The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community. The "middle ring" refers to that group of people with whom you must socialize despite not liking their company.

Of course, living in the suburbs might be a factor to whether or not you know your neighbors is a good or bad thing. It might be different if you were living in an apartment complex or in the city where people's social lives usually do not revolve around the people within their immediate vicinity. How many of your neighbors do you know?

(Image credit: Tom Howell)

It's with good reason. The town of Fenton has a population of 226 people. It's the size of about 20 blocks, and the major thing that helps keep the town running is its collection of fines and forfeitures from traffic tickets. In 2022 alone, it raked in a whopping $1.3 million on traffic fines alone.

That's where the mayor is the judge comes in, because these traffic fines were collected through the "mayor's court", which is a special court that can only be found in Louisiana and Ohio. Mainly, it processes traffic tickets, which surprisingly come up to the thousands each year. From the collections gathered, the town is able to support itself and pay for the salaries of the people in the courtroom. But the mayor's court has been challenged for its fairness in passing judgment given the conflict of interest that having the mayor as the judge brings.

So, in order to investigate on the matter, a team from Pro Publica and journalists from WVUE were sent to Fenton to look into what goes on in the mayor's courts proceedings, and how the traffic cases were handled. Check out their full report here.

(Image credit: Tingey Injury Law Firm/Unsplash)

Just as streaming has become a burgeoning threat to the TV and film industry, cable TV way back when was seen as a threat by the film industry. The reason being television production was just more efficient and cost-effective compared to films at the time, and a lot more profitable. Of course, later on, HBO became a big boon to the film industry, aiding with the economics of releasing a film, but that almost never happened due to a campaign that targeted cable TV altogether. That was the Save Free TV campaign.

It basically wanted the public to support a petition to prevent cable TV from existing. They wanted to assert that consumers should not have to pay for TV programs to be transmitted to their TVs at home. However, the reality of the situation was that cable TV providers just wanted to see whether the technology would be viable, instead of attempting to uproot network TV or movie theaters. But the big players who had large stakes in TV ads aggressively pushed for the ballot and the campaign was a success. The public voted against cable TV. Then, it was challenged in California's Supreme Court which ruled in favor of cable TV.

Still, the proponents of free TV kept pushing. But it was for naught as the Federal Communications Commission had already approved cable TV technology and handed out licenses. So that's why the US now has a multitude of TV shows to watch, not just from its big three networks.

(Video credit: SMUJonesFilm - Film and Video Collections/Youtube)

This new property in Victoria, Australia is an interesting piece of architecture. From the side, it looks like two cargo containers one on top of the other, with the top container placed perpendicular to the one below it, and a large portion hanging on both sides, yet it's completely balanced, and has no sign of falling over. The property is called View Hill, and is priced from $13.5 million to $14.85 million.

It was designed by architect John Denton, using the concept of cantilevered minimalist architecture, which is typically seen in bridge construction wherein there is a long projecting beam or girder fixed at only one end. Inside, it has five bedrooms and three bathrooms. The bedrooms are located on the eastern side of the first floor, where the living room, kitchen, and dining room are situated. On the second floor, there are two offices, a powder room, and a wine room. Outside, one has an idyllic view, a 60-hectare vast expanse of grass and vineyards.

(Image credit: Kay & Burton Flinders)

Archaeology tries to understand how humans in the past lived, what kind of customs or traditions they had, through the things that they left behind or have been preserved. With these artifacts, we're able to paint a picture of what human societies and cultures were like, and how they could have evolved through time. Most of these artifacts are stored in museums or archaeological collections.

But there are some artifacts that are dubious or even dangerous, as Mark Warner, an archaeologist, and Ray von Wandruszka, a chemist, both from the University of Idaho found. They sifted through 500 artifacts over 15 years and found many weird items from the gross to the deadly. Oddee shares a list of six examples of the most dangerous and disgusting archaeological artifacts that the two have found.

(Image credit: Jes Rodriguez/Unsplash)

In a city of more than 8 million people, you're likely to meet all sorts. New York City is known the world over, and many dream of visiting or even living there. And at the heart of New York stands one of the finest luxury hotels in the city, The Belvedere Hotel. To some, it might be a great accommodation when they want to explore and experience as much of New York as a leisurely trip could afford them. However, with rent stabilization, the Belvedere also serves as a home to many who ventured to come to New York in search of better pastures.

Room 208 was one such room and it was where Hisako Hasegawa stayed for more than 40 years. Not much was known about her, even by those who daily met her along the hallways or those living next to her. She was born in Japan in 1934, and she moved to New York in the '70s. What people can say was that she was overall kind and genial with everybody. The hotel staff liked her as she would always greet them and even give them thank you cards for their small acts of kindness.

Renee Querijero lived right across from her and Hasegawa would sometimes initiate some small talk, but she didn't say much else about herself to anyone. Until one day in 2016, Hasegawa passed away in her apartment at the age of 82. She was buried on New York's Hart Island, America's largest public cemetery. Her story has been recorded by Radio Diaries in its series The Unmarked Graveyard.

(Image credit: Belvedere Hotel NYC)

Our Thanksgiving celebration is modeled after the 1621 harvest feast of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. But there were at least a couple of feasts between Europeans and Native Americans before that. One notable feast occurred in 1566 when the notoriously fierce Calusa people hosted the Spanish governor of Florida, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. The Calusa ruled southwestern Florida from a manmade island now called Mound Key near Fort Myers, where they had built a city of around 4,000 people.

King Caalus hosted the event in a dining hall that could hold 2,000 people, and served a variety of fish and oysters. Avilés brought a retinue that included a band, with fifes, drums, trumpets, a harp, and a guitar. They also brought biscuits, wine, molasses ...and tablecloths. King Caalus gave Avilés his sister as a wife. A good time was had by all.

But it didn't last. The Calusa weren't all that keen on sharing Florida, and the Spanish wanted to rule. Within a year, relations fell apart, and the Calusa would have nothing to do with Europeans afterward. Read about the Calusa culture, the feast, and what ultimately happened to them at Atlas Obscura.      

Science will tell you the only real difference between the earth's species of cats is their size. Let's take a closer look at that, with wonderful footage of leopards in the wild doing the things all house cats do, in a clip from the BBC TV series Planet Earth 3.

Big cats will get high on catnip, too, although that's hard to catch in the wild. However, size makes a big difference. Male leopards typically max out at around 100 pounds, but can reach 200 pounds. A leopard eats things like antelopes and warthogs, and needs a minimum of between six and eight pounds of meat a day. Leopards are just as food-motivated as the typical house cat, so if your leopard doesn't get his daily allowance, well, you are about the right size prey to supplement that. Maybe we should stick to domestic house cats, which are predators just the right size to eat mice. -via Laughing Squid

If you have ever found yourself in a bout of insomnia, you might have tried different ways to get yourself to sleep. I used to listen to chill music with sounds of rain in order to make me sleep, but there are some people who find listening to white noise effectively puts them to sleep. Recently, people have been saying that they have been using brown noise to make them go to sleep. But what is brown noise?

Let's try to compare it with white noise to give a more colorful picture. White noise is a broadband sound that includes all audible frequencies. It's like a mishmash of different frequencies being played at an equal intensity put into one sound. Some examples include static from TV or radio, vacuum sounds, and the humming of an AC.

Brown noise, on the other hand, or Brownian noise which takes its name not from the color but from Robert Brown who discovered Brownian motion, produces a deep rumbling sound by lowering the high-frequency sounds from white noise. Some examples include rainfall, waterfall, thunder, and a shower with strong water pressure.

As of yet, there's no research backing up the claims that brown noise aids in sleep, unlike white noise which has had studies showing that it helped newborn babies and adults fall asleep faster. Different people have different means of falling asleep, and whether brown noise is truly effective or not, there's no harm in trying it.

(Image credit: Sean Benesh/Unsplash)

Forest & Bird, a conservation organization in New Zealand, annually holds a contest to elect the Bird of the Year, in order to raise awareness for some of the threatened native birds in New Zealand. The pūteketeke (Podiceps cristatus australis) was first recognized in 1844 as a subspecies of the great crested grebe and is native to Australia, Tasmania, and the South Island of New Zealand. Currently, there are fewer than 3,000 of the pūteketeke birds left in the wild.

Catching a whiff of the Bird of the Year contest, the staff of the late night show Last Week Tonight contacted the organization to ask them if they can campaign for the pūteketeke, to which they agreed. So, John Oliver released a worldwide campaign on behalf of the endangered bird. He and his team put out billboard ads in different parts of the world to convince people to vote for the pūteketeke. With all that effort, the pūteketeke won first with 290,374 votes, a landslide victory over the rest of its competition. Second place was taken by the North Island brown kiwi with 12,904 votes.

(Image credit: JJ Harison/Wikimedia Commons)

NASA was founded on July 29, 1958 under the Eisenhower administration. Its purpose was to conduct research into flying within and outside the earth's atmosphere, but it was also established to consolidate the different US missile and space programs being done by different branches of the military. Over its 65-year history, NASA has made great strides toward learning about space, the different celestial bodies within our galaxy, and other technological advancements that further our efforts toward interplanetary exploration.

There have been many breakthrough moments in NASA's history, the most famous being the first landing of humans on the moon. But apart from that, NASA also took the first image of a black hole, took a photo that gave us definitive proof that the Earth is spherical, showed us what the Earth looked like viewed from the moon, and captured a photo of the Earth from roughly 3.2 billion miles from the Sun, just beyond the orbit of Neptune. These 16 iconic photos from NASA have been a testament of how far space exploration has come, and how much farther we have yet to go.

(Image credit: NASA)

I grew up listening to a whole variety of songs. Being raised in a religious household, gospel music has become ingrained in me and although my preferences for that particular genre has shifted and my musical sensibility for that category of songs has become more scrupulous, many of the songs that I heard when I was a child are still a part of me. On Sundays, my grandmother would turn on her radio and listen to songs from the 50s and 60s, and those also left their mark on me.

So, nowadays when I listen to new songs or a different genre of music, it fascinates me how many of the songs I find appealing have a connection to songs that I have grown up with or that I heard when I was younger. I have discovered, however, that my particular taste in music gravitates toward the alternative rock genre and some electro pop. This is more likely influenced by my discovery of Japanese bands, and songs from Japanese animated shows.

These things are all factors that contribute to my music palate. According to Nolan Gasser, a musician and musicologist, sociology plays a tremendous role behind our musical tastes. What we hear when we were babies and throughout our formative years become the home base of our musical sensibilities. But as we grow older, our taste in music evolves and expands as we become exposed to different music. For a deeper dive into musical taste, you may check out Nolan Gasser's Why You Like It: The Science & Culture of Musical Taste.

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No, it's not a virus that turns humans into vampires although that would be terrifying and cool at the same time, if the vampires get superpowers. But the vampire part is just an analogy used to describe the behavior of a particular bacteriophage which latches itself onto the 'neck' of another bacteriophage and leaving what looked like bite marks where its tendrils had been attached.

The bacteriophage, dubbed MiniFlayer, was first discovered by Tagide deCarvalho, the Assistant Director of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Maryland. At the time, she was supervising an undergraduate class wherein two students, Jenell Lewis and Hira Ahmed, had isolated and named their phage MindFlayer. However, when the genome sequencing turned out some odd and perplexing results, suggesting a contamination, deCarvalho looked at it, and found that there wasn't one phage, but two.

Bacteriophages usually infect bacteria in order to replicate themselves, but MiniFlayer had lost that ability, so instead, it found another method of reproducing through hijacking another virus' genetic machinery. DeCarvalho and her collaborator Ivan Erill have published a paper describing what they have observed, but they also hope that some other researchers who use a different form of electron microscopy could help illuminate what exactly is going on between MiniFlayer and MindFlayer.

(Image credit: Tagide deCarvalho/University of Maryland)