Brian David Gilbert explains how he makes $20,000 a month by working from home, and you can, too. The video starts off like any multi-level marketing pitch, but soon lapses into a comedy, and eventually becomes a horror film. Contains one NSFW word. -via Boing Boing

If you’re planning to sell your house in the future, or just plain curious to know the worth of your house, planting a few shrubs and plants can increase the monetary value of your home. That’s right, a simple addition such as plants can do a lot for your home! In a study by Lawn Starter, mowing your grass can yield you more profit than building a swimming pool, as Domino details: 

While lawn-care services see a 267 percent return of investment, the latter recoups just 43 percent of the average $57,000 cost of installation. 

Fancy water features (think: hot tubs and fountains) can negatively affect your property’s value by $2,500 to $10,000. So what will put money back in your pocket? Leading the way is a well-maintained lawn, which costs an average of $270 per year, but adds around $1,200 in value. In other words, nice-looking grass pleases buyers, especially millennials, who ranked it as the number-one feature they search for in a new home. If you don’t love the idea of committing so much time to cutting the grass, consider purchasing a large zero-turn mower to help shave off a few hours, so you can get back to actually enjoying your outdoor space.

Other low-cost outdoor improvements that see a high return on investment? Planting mature trees (taller species can improve a neighborhood’s property values by up to 15 percent) and installing a built-in, all-season deck (it returns an estimated 83 percent of the amount spent). No need to go overboard with elaborate fencing and a Wimbledon-worthy tennis court. Instead, keep things simple. 

Image via Domino 

Keyboard Cat was one of the biggest memes of the previous decade. The meme, usually attached to epic fails, has captured the Internet’s hearts (and funny bones as well). The meme originated when YouTuber Brad O'Farrell posted a mashup video of a man falling down an escalator and keyboard cat. Mashable shares an interview with the creator of the iconic meme, Charlie Schmidt on how he and his cat won the Internet's attention. Check the full piece here. 

Image via Mashable

Among Us tests your detective and survival skills in one intense game of spaceship repair. What happens if you play with an experienced investigator? Chaos, that’s all. It’s still the same chaotic game, but with more screaming (kidding)! Watch as Buzzfeed Multiplayer plays the game with professional private investigator John to see if his skills can help him find all impostors in Among Us. 

Amber fossils provide a small glimpse into what prehistoric or ancient creatures look like. There are some fossil discoveries that leave scientists in awe by just how bizarre it was. Whether it’s how the creatures in the fossils were frozen, or by how they look, check out Gizmodo’s full piece on the strangest amber fossils ever discovered. One of them got frozen as they were doing the nasty, too! 

Image via Gizmodo 

One of the things that caused quite a stir this year was the sudden appearance of Asian giant hornets (or “murder hornets”) in the United States. We no longer have much news about these hornets, and now we suddenly hear that a website called BicBugs, is selling some of them (the website sells dead hornets, by the way).

Sold with their wings spread, they’re available either unmounted ($47), or pinned and framed ($59), and are sure to be one of this Christmas’s must-have gifts.

Would you buy one of these?

(Image Credit: BicBugs/ Technabob)

Colorado, USA — The bear knew that it had to take its chance when it saw this parked car. It really wanted to test its driving skills, even though the bear had no experience driving. So, the bear decided to test its luck, and it turns out that this was its lucky day: the driver’s seat was not locked, and inside the car the bear immediately went. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the keys to make the car run, and so it just left the vehicle a few moments after.

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

Good etiquette at the gym and execution chamber calls for wiping down equipment before leaving. Don't leave your bodily fluids everywhere. Keep it all clean, especially now, as cartoonist Madeline Horwath reminds us.

Bugs and glitches are inevitable in games, and the FIFA games aren’t an exception. In some FIFA games,...

The ball flies off into orbit, limbs twist and turn to form Lovecraftian nightmares, and the AI creates mysterious giant goalkeepers who spread through the game like a virus.

But of all the many bugs that the FIFA games have had, this bug of this year’s FIFA game may just be the most remarkable.

The ball hovers at top of the goal, just under where the crossbar and post meet, neither passing across the line or moving away from it. The goalkeeper flaps about underneath, trying and failing to grab the ball. One of the defenders trots over for a closer look, but doesn't lift a finger to help. Eventually the player-controlled player comes storming in, and there's a brief FIFA physics moment before the ball decides to fall, and it drops over the goal line, seemingly oblivious to the chaos it has caused.

My favourite part of this clip is the commentary - poor Derek Rae seems locked in a loop, rinsing his various lines of dialogue used to describe a shot that hits the bar. It's amazing.

See the clip of the glitch over here.

(Image Credit: u/BuschLatte/ Reddit/ Eurogamer)

The first nest of murder hornets in the U.S. has been discovered in Washington state. These hornets are a threat to the native honeybees, so scientists and state officials are working together to wipe the harmful insects. The state’s Agriculture Department used dental floss to tie tracking devices to the giant hornets, as AP News detailed: 

“Ladies and gentlemen, we did it,” agency spokeswoman Karla Salp said at a virtual briefing. Bad weather delayed plans Friday to destroy the nest found in Blaine, a city north of Seattle.

The nest is about the size of a basketball and contains an estimated 100 to 200 hornets, according to scientists, who suspected it was in the area ever since the invasive insects began appearing late last year.

Image via AP News 

James Buggy of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, was at a low point of his life in 1917. His wife had died in childbirth, and he was left to raise his baby daughter Eleanor alone. Now that the girl was three years old, she needed a mother, and he was lonely. That's when he met 23-year-old Annie Compolo, who returned his attentions and doted on Eleanor. They were soon married.

Four weeks later, James would realize that he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

Annie, it seemed, had a fiery temper, and while quarrels among newlyweds are not uncommon, James had decided that he didn't want any disruptions in the peaceful Edgewood home he had fought so hard to maintain. His first wife, Kathryn, had been a kind and gentle woman who rarely, if ever, raised her voice. James himself was known among his friends and co-workers as a kind-hearted fellow, the sort of man who had always put his faith and his family above everything else in his life. He had attended St. Edward's Catholic School as a youth and was an active member of his church. He was proud of his community and never passed up an opportunity to volunteer for a good cause. So when he heard through the grapevine that the former Miss Compolo had been less than faithful as a married woman, a terrible argument ensued. James put his foot down. On the night of Sunday, February 25, he told Annie, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted her out of the house by the time he returned home from work the following day.

On Monday afternoon, James returned to his home at 825 West Independence Street and found that his wife was gone. But, much to his alarm, so was his young daughter.

One has to wonder why James made no arrangements for his daughter to be looked after when he ordered his wife gone before he returned. But anyway, you can tell at this point of the story that no good would come of the child's disappearance. Read the strange story of the Buggy family at Pennsylvania Oddities. -via Strange Company

Steroids have legitimate medical uses, but they are well-known as an enhancement technique for bodybuilders, athletes, and everyday people who believe they will look better by using them. To understand steroid use, it is necessary to look at their history and chemical makeup, how they are used today, and the many side effects that could come with non-medical use.

But why is it so bad to use these drugs? To begin with, people who misuse steroids often use dosages that are 10 to 100 times higher than the doses which are usually prescribed for medical conditions. As side-effects are usually dosage-dependent that makes things even worse.

Long-term effects include kidney problem up to kidney failure, liver damage and tumors, enlarged heart, high blood pressure and changes in blood cholesterol all of which increase the risk of stroke and heart attack – even in young people. And if that wasn’t bad enough, also the risk of blood clots increases. In men, sperm counts also decrease, they go bald, develop breasts, have an increased risk of prostate cancer, and, of course, then there are the balls.

So let’s look at your balls shall we?

And there we get to the real reason you want to read about steroids, which is addressed at Today I Found Out. The effects of steroids on women are also addressed.


For a more humorous and less fact-filled look at the subject, see the previous article Bodybuilders Have Tiny Testes.

A man named Ivan Smirnov has created a computer model that could predict a student’s educational outcome by analyzing his/her tweet. Through the use of mathematical textual analysis that takes into account the student’s vocabulary, the model is able to identify if a student is a high or a low academic achiever, and it bases its prediction from that.

Every word has its own rating (a kind of IQ). Scientific and cultural topics, English words, and words and posts that are longer in length rank highly and serve as indicators of good academic performance. An abundance of emojis, words or whole phrases written in capital letters, and vocabulary related to horoscopes, driving, and military service indicate lower grades in school. At the same time, posts can be quite short--even tweets are quite informative. The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), and an article detailing the study's results was published in EPJ Data Science.

[...]

By 'predict', the researcher does not refer to future forecasting, but rather the correlation between the calculated results and the real scores students earned on the PISA exam, as well as their USE scores (which are publicly available online in aggregated form--i.e., average scores per school). In the preliminary phase, the model learned how to predict the PISA data. In the final model, the calculations were checked against the USE results of high school graduates and university entrants.

Head over at EurekAlert to know more details about the study.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: I.Smirnov/ EurekAlert)

At first glance, mole rats look like puny creatures because of their appearance as well as their poor eyesight. But don’t let their appearance deceive you; these rodents can be a force to be reckoned with, at least to their enemies at their own size, which are other mole rats.

New research suggests there’s brute power in those numbers: Like ants or termites, the mole-rats go to battle with rival colonies to conquer their lands. 

Wild naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) will invade nearby colonies to expand their territory, sometimes abducting pups to incorporate them into their own ranks, researchers report September 28 in the Journal of Zoology. This behavior may put smaller, less cohesive colonies at a disadvantage, potentially supporting the evolution of bigger colonies.

Researchers stumbled across this phenomenon by accident while monitoring naked mole-rat colonies in Kenya’s Meru National Park.

The phrase “quantity has a quality of its own” is, indeed, true to some extent.

More details about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Roman Klementschitz/ Wikimedia Commons)

Pet the dogs. Start a fire. Observe or hunt down some animals. Go fishing. Tend to your wounds. Distribute the food you have accordingly to yourself and your dogs, to ensure that no one will starve. These are some of the things that you have to do in order to survive in the Alaskan wilderness.

The Red Lantern is a survival game developed by Timberline Studios and was recently released in the Nintendo Switch. As a survival game, your goal is to survive in the wilderness, and prevent your dogs from dying.

When people saw the announcement trailer last year, some were turned off because of the scene where one of your sled dogs presumably died from a bear attack. 

But there are some options to keep your dogs alive in the game, and one of them is by turning off dog deaths in the settings.

“Though The Red Lantern contains roguelike elements and poor decisions can result in unfortunate consequences for your sled team, an optional toggle can disable death for your dogs,” Can You Pet the Dog? tweeted.

People in the tweet comments are pretty excited to see an option like this, which makes the stakes pretty clear. Things might not go right, but it won’t send you over the edge if seeing dogs die is something that upsets you. Plenty of folks reacted with relief, noting that they weren’t originally going to play the game because of it — but now they might be able to give it a go.

Yay!

(Image Credit: Can You Pet The Dog?/ Twitter)