We've featured the giant mechanical figures of Les machines de l'île, in Nantes, France, a few times before at Neatorama. These impressive behemoths are like something out of a science fiction film -by Jules Verne, of course. The animals are both technological wonders and works of art. Now we can take a look inside the place where they are built, stored, and used. And if you're ever in the neighborhood, you can ride one yourself for less than ten euros! If not, take a ride with Tom Scott on a 40-foot-tall steampunk mechanical elephant in this video. It might be a little loud, and maybe a little wet, but you'll never forget it.
Malcolm Gladwell is a public intellectual famous for his novel takes on human society. His books, which include Outliers: The Story of Success and Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, are widely-discussed bestsellers.
Gladwell is a busy man, so he has personal assistants. In a recent blog post, he says that for many years, he would ask applicants for that position if they could drive a car with a manual transmission. If the answer was no, then they were disqualified.
Why? It's not because they will need to drive stick while on the job. It's because he's looking for the type of 22-year old person who would want to learn that "marginally useful skill." Gladwell explains that the young person who can use a manual transmission has certain useful personality traits:
One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things.
It's an interesting idea, but as one commenter at Ann Althouse's blog points out, it assumes that the average 22-year old has access to a car (let alone a sports car) with a manual transmission, which I think would be fairly unusual in the United States. Gladwell would certainly be disqualifying a lot of otherwise capable 22-year olds who could have other ways of demonstrating the same characteristics.
Photo: Ed Schipul
Remember when we discovered that cats are frightened by cucumbers? We still don't know why, but it's probably just the appearance of a novel item they aren't familiar with. That meme went viral, so everyone had to try it. But this one is real- male mice go into high stress in the presence of bananas. I guess that's good for banana trees, but this particular fear developed for a different reason.
Mice from different experiments happened to be in the same lab at McGill University, and researchers noticed a stress response in male mice when they were in the presence of pregnant or lactating females. Wanting to find out why, they designed other experiments to see what chemical may have caused it. They narrowed it down to a compound called n-pentyl acetate in the pregnant/lactating mice's urine, which induces a stress response in male mice, particularly virgin male mice. That's an adaptive strategy, as male mice tend to kill baby mice.
But wait a minute. It turns out that n-pentyl acetate is the chemical that makes a banana smell the way it does! So of course the researchers went to a supermarket and bought some banana oil to check their work. Sure enough, the male mice were terrified when they were exposed to banana oil in the room. It you don't have a cat, you might be able to deter at least some mice by sticking cotton balls soaked in banana oil around the house. Maybe. The chemical also induced an analgesic effect in the mice. You can read more about these experiments at LiveScience. -via Damn Interesting
An old saying says that behind every great man, there's a hard-working woman. The adage was always meant to point out that women rarely get the respect they deserve for what they do behind the scenes, but in the Mongol Empire, some of them got plenty of respect. While the warriors were out conquering the world, the women who were kept in place by childrearing responsibilities were also tasked with holding territory and making society work. They supervised not only the home, but activities for the entire camp, like resolving disputes, meeting with traders, overseeing livestock workers, and planning migration. Women who weren't restricted to home by children were likely to become warriors themselves. Some estimates say that up to 20% of Chinggis Khan’s forces were women!
Chinggis Khan’s daughter-in-law Töregene became so powerful that she engineered the succession of the new Khan after her husband died, even though she wasn't even his head wife. She reigned as regent for her oldest son with the support of the warlords and advisors. Read about the roles of women in the Mongol Empire at Atlas Obscura.
Just a few decades ago, heart transplants were scary, futuristic procedures that produced miracles. They still are. It's just that now we have more of them and know more about them. Well, at least doctors know more about them nowadays. To the rest of us, a heart transplant is still in the realm of magic. This TED-Ed lesson takes us through the procedures involved in a heart transplant to make it more understandable. But even when you know how it's done, it still seems like a scary futuristic miracle.
Jules Verne wrote the novel Around the World in Eighty Days in 1872, in which Phileas Fogg makes a wager that he can travel around the world in just eighty days. Fogg did precise calculations to gauge his travel, and although he ran into complications, completed the trip in time. Can someone do that today? There have been a few people, mainly celebrities, who recreated Fogg's feat, one even on a bicycle. But can an ordinary person using ordinary travel methods do it? Yes they can! You don't even need a private plane.
There are a few trick involved, though. Rail travel is still feasible in many parts of the world, and your route should take you through nations that aren't at war or hard to enter. The real trick is to book passage on cargo ships. Read how, with a bit of planning, you can circumnavigate the earth in eighty days at The Travel.
Back when all humans were nomads, they would do their business and move on. Then when people started to settle down into stable communities, we had to figure out our shit. In the Bible, God told the Hebrews how to treat the promised land. Outhouses became a thing, and many societies recognized the fertilizer value of our waste, either on a household scale or as an industry. Larger cities posed a problem, though, and that's how we ended up with modern sewage systems. While we've created a world where we never have to think much about human feces, seven billion pounds of excreta every day is a problem.
Lina Zeldovich, author of the book The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health, tells how her grandfather would ceremoniously clean out the septic tank once a year and use the sludge as fertilizer for trees, garden soil, and to activate the compost. She also goes through a short history of how people have utilized human waste over millennia and why we should go back to using our gross domestic product more sustainably instead of paying to treat it as a problem. Read The Power of Shit at Aeon. Oh yeah, it contains the proper amount of puns for the subject. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Myotus)
Dogs naturally want to protect their homes and families, but some are better at it than others. Some need only their reputation, while others have to actually make a move to scare a stranger off. And some are just plain lousy in both intimidation and home protection. Jonny Devaney acts out a range of reactions when a burglar confronts a few different dog breeds. Do you have one of these breeds? Let us know how accurate he is. -via reddit
Have you ever had a brain fart and couldn't remember some common word or term that you needed to use? You can often get the point across by using whatever words might be close. That's how a peacock becomes a "disco chicken," or a cow can be called a "moo beast." In an AskReddit thread, people tell funny stories of folks communicating the best they can when the exact word escapes them.
Couldn't remember groomsmen, went with dudesmaids instead.
I forgot the word for ‘exterminator’ so I used ‘ant exorcist’ instead.
It gets even better when people who speak English as a second language go all the way around the world for an English term they don't know. That's how a reindeer became a "Christmas llama." That's really odd, but you still know what he means. And you'll always remember it. Read forty of the funniest incidents of this sort of thing at Bored Panda.
Soon after YouTube debuted in 2005, the concept of "supercuts" took off. Some are works of art, some are specifically to drive a point home, and many of them made us say, "That took a lot of work!" We could imagine someone searching through countless hours of source material, looking for the clips they needed. That may have been true in the early days, but now there are tools to aid in the process, like search engines and video editing software.
In 2014, artist and educator Sam Lavigne built a tool called Videogrep that automatically makes supercuts. No, it's not as simple as, say, online image generators, but in the new tutorial Lavigne posted, the magic behind the search is revealed. It's subtitles.
Videogrep uses the timestamps in subtitle files to make supercuts of videos. It will automatically look for a few different types of subtitle files, including .srt files (the most common subtitle format), .vtt files (a common web-based subtitle format), or specially formatted .json files that videogrep can generate itself (more on this later).
That makes so much sense, you have to wonder why we didn't figure it out earlier (unless you already did, in which case you'll think I'm an idiot). The tutorial explains how to download videos, find subtitle files or make one, and make a supercut based on words. You can search for specific words or phrases or words ending in "ing." You can adjust the parameters to include an entire sentence, since subtitles have punctuation. That makes for a less-jarring supercut like this one. Or you can search for the most common words in a video. This would be a lot of fun for someone who knows what they are doing. Now if we can just figure out the trick to making dance supercuts... -via Metafilter
Here at Neatorama, we've long loved and admired Benedetto Bufalino's funny public sculptures, such as his cement mixer disco and his street sign skateboard. This artist adds whimsy and humor to urban life.
The latest project from Bufalino's studio in Lyons, France is this ping pong table. It's built around a bicycle for easy transportation between or even during games. It comes equipped with training wheels. I don't think that's because of his limited bicycling skills but the sheer weight of the table.
Bufalino rides it here in Esch-Sur-Alzette, a town in Luxembourg known for its vibrant art scene. He reports that he's already returned to France via bike, but not necessarily this bike.
There have always been tales of vast wealthy cities hidden in the Amazon rainforest. Explorers have died trying to find these cities, and the gold they supposedly contained. Conventional wisdom among archeologists was that the soil was too poor for agriculture, which was crucial for supporting large cities. Besides, they hadn't found any. It turns out that when a large civilization is wiped out or moves away, a rainforest will hide what they left. Trees and other vegetation sprout up, animals and floods leave their mark, and before you know it, all that's left are rumors. Oh, these places are still there, you just can't get to them.
Lately, concrete evidence of advanced societies in the Amazon has come to light. Deforestation uncovered some clues. Now a remote-sensing laser system called lidar has detected 26 urban centers hidden by the forest in southeast Bolivia. Two of them each cover an area three time the size of Vatican City! These cities contain pyramids, walls, elevated roadways, terraces, and buildings. The largest site, called Cotoca, belonged to the Casarabe culture, which flourished between 500 CE and 1400 CE. Their disappearance predates European invasion, and scientists don't know what happened to them. Read about the new discoveries at Nature.
It's called "Period Crunch."
Intima, a company that makes menstrual products, such as environmentally-friendly period cups and Kegel muscle training devices, would like to normalize conversations about periods. Yahoo! News reports that the company has launched a cereal with little bits shaped like a human uterus. The cereal is, appropriately, raspberry flavored and stains milk red.
Period Crunch comes in boxes with diagrams of the female reproductive tract and conversations starters about menstruation. Intima argues that cultural forces prevent many women from talking comfortably about periods. Chatting about menstruation over breakfast could be a way to overcome these inhibitions.
Photo: Intima
Several years ago, we were teased with the idea of Diego Luna returning to the Star Wars universe in his role as Cassian Andor, one of the heroes of Rogue One. Finally we see that it's a sure thing, as the TV series Andor is scheduled to land on Disney+ on August 31. It's a prequel to Rogue One, not only an origin story for Andor, but also about the formation of the Rebellion, when everyday people could no longer take the abuses of the Empire and decided to stand up for their rights. Luna not only stars in the series, he is the executive producer. We will also see a young Mon Mothma, played by Genevieve O'Reilly, and Forest Whitaker will appear as his Rogue One character Saw Gerrera. The cast also includes Stellan Skarsgård, Adria Arjona, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough, and Kyle Soller. First announced as a 12-episode series, Andor has since been expanded to two seasons, and possibly more. Let's hope so, because this two-minute teaser is intriguing.
An active volcano with sharks inside seems like the premise for a SyFy movie, doesn't It? And we've made fun of such movies many times. But this story is real, and NASA and marine biologists have evidence. The Kavachi Volcano is an active, completely underwater volcano near the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean. By "active," we mean it erupts quite often since its discovery in 1939. Large eruptions occurred in 2000, 2007, and 2014, with smaller eruptions in between. If it's on a seven-year schedule, there's no surprise in Kavachi erupting on May 14, 2022. NASA's Landsat 9 satellite captured images of the underwater plume.
Meanwhile, life has been thriving inside Kavachi's volcanic crater. Sulphur-loving microbes that seek hot water have been observed, and sharks, too! Both hammerhead sharks and silky sharks have been seen living in the crater since 2015, and there are pictures. When bait was lowered into the crater, sharks swam up from the depths of the active crater to retrieve it. Don't they know it's supposed to be too hot and acidic for them to live in? What the sharks know is that there are other tasty species of fish also living in the crater.
Unfortunately, we have no reports actually showing the sharks being ejected from the volcano during the latest eruption, or whether they survived. The SYFY version will probably show it in detail.
By the way, there is already a movie called Sharkcano, but since it was a National Geographic documentary shown on Disney+, it wasn't all that heavily promoted. We can assume there were no sharks shown ejecting from an exploding mountain.
