DJ Cummerbund is back with a mega-mashup featuring the music of Ram Jam, Oingo Boingo, Chumbawamba, Randy "Macho Man" Savage, Lead Belly, The Beatles, Soundgarden, Michael Jackson, and Tom Jones, along with assorted video clips. The result is really weird, but oh-so enjoyable. -via Laughing Squid
Because some bacteria develop immunity or some sort of resistance against antibiotics after a few generations, it has been the dream of scientists to discover or create an antibiotic that is extremely effective against these bacteria, while being immune to resistance, and safe for humans as well. An antibiotic compound of such a caliber has just been discovered.
A team of Princeton researchers reported today in the journal Cell that they have found a compound, SCH-79797, that can simultaneously puncture bacterial walls and destroy folate within their cells -- while being immune to antibiotic resistance.
[...]
The greatest weakness of antibiotics is that bacteria evolve quickly to resist them, but the Princeton team found that even with extraordinary effort, they were unable to generate any resistance to this compound…
More details about this amazing antibiotic over at ScienceDaily.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
What did McDonald’s look like 30 to 40 years ago? Old photos of the said fast food company have been posted on the Nostalgia subreddit by people from both the US and the UK, giving us a glimpse of how it looked like from the past.
One user reminded us all of the burger-shaped stools the chain used to have as well as chairs shaped like packets of fries.
"I completely forgot about this," commented someone.
Mirror compiles some of the nostalgic photos from the subreddit over at their site. Check them out and have a blast from the past.
(Image Credit: sugarcain/ Reddit/ Mirror)
A restaurant in Taiwan named Eatpire has released what may perhaps be considered as one of the weirdest burgers in the world — Bubble Milk Tea Burger. The bubble tea can be seen spilling on the top of the patty covered in what seems to be mustard sauce. There also seems to be bubble milk tea on the bottom of the patty, alongside the onions and the tomatoes.
Does it taste good? Unfortunately, it doesn’t say. But what are your thoughts about this one?
Via 9GAG
(Image Credit: Eatpire/ Instagram)
The science of anthropology is chock-full of theories that have become common knowledge, but at the same time, science is all about questioning and researching what we think we know. The prevailing theory about why men are on average taller than women is explained by natural selection: men who are taller are more successful in competition with other men, including competition in mating, and therefore more likely to pass their genes on. Biological anthropologist Holly Dunsworth tells us that could be an example of circular thinking. What if it's not all about men?
“We need to have more if we’re going to advance the sexual selection hypothesis for why men are taller than women,” she said. In fact, we could turn the narrative on its head: “Maybe dominance and competition are consequences of those size differences rather than the cause,” she said.
Dunsworth found a more direct explanation when she dug into the literature on bone biology and development, focusing in particular on how those relate to hormones. That’s when it became clear to her that “women are shorter than men because most of them have ovaries.”
Read what effect ovaries -and therefore estrogen- could have had in the evolutionary development of human sexual dimorphism at Quanta magazine. -via Digg
(Image credit: Wellcome Images)
June 9 is "Bill & Ted Day" (because it's 6/9, ya know). That's why the first glimpse of the new movie Bill & Ted Face the Music has been released in trailer form. The now-middle-aged slackers confront the fact that they still haven't written the song to unite the world, and come up with a scheme to fulfill their destiny. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter look every bit their age, but strangely still have that same attitude they embodied in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey three decades ago. Fans don't care, they are just happy to have more of the characters. Bill & Ted Face the Music opens on August 21. -via Geeks Are Sexy
When a scientist is restricted to his home, he will find something interesting to study. An entomologist is lucky in that respect, since insects are everywhere. Dr. Adrian Smith took at look at the globular springtails (which are technically not insects) that gathered on his garbage can. These bugs are spring-loaded, and can jump and spin in enormous arcs relative to their size. I had never even heard of a globular springtail before, but I will be keeping my eye out for them now. I hear they have a super-weird sex life, too. -via Digg
Taking medicine into space hasn't been a big concern up to now, as even the longest human flights (to the moon) only took a few days. But a trip to Mars is expected to take three years, and that's just getting there. You can't just come home when you're sick, or wait for the next shuttle of supplies. Astronauts on a Mars mission could need any number of medications. However, every extra ounce of supplies taken comes at a cost, so figuring out which medicines are most likely to be needed is the subject of serious research. But the medicines most likely to be needed is just one factor. Drugs can affect the body differently in microgravity. And they'll need to stay stable.
Longer missions bring more variables to how drugs work differently in space, including expiring faster. “Typically what we purchase and what is approved by the FDA or the equivalent European organizations has a 24 month shelf life,” Wotring said. Unfortunately, it takes about 36 months to get to Mars, which could be a major issue. It’s not like astronauts can get a new shipment of Vicodin.
“The stability of medications as a result of the spaceflight environment is largely unknown,” Bayuse said. “There has been some evidence that suggests that some medications may degrade [in space] before the listed manufacturer expiration date. Unfortunately, there have been some issues highlighted with those studies, such as not having ground controls to compare the results to, confounding variables and limited sample sizes hindering the reproducibility of the results.”
“Currently we do not have enough data to fully characterize what those results mean or how the care of our astronauts may need to be adjusted, if at all,” she added.
Scientists are busy gathering the data they'll need to stock an efficient, workable pharmacy for a Mars mission. Some experts tell about their research on drugs in space at Ars Technica.
(Image credit: SpaceX)
10 years ago, Santa Fe, New Mexico personality Forrest Fenn buried a chest with $1 million worth of gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. As clues, he publicly offered a map and a poem. That was all that some 350,000 treasure hunters had to go on.
Now Fenn reports that one adventurer has found the treasure. The Santa Fe New Mexican reports:
“It’s true,” Fenn told The New Mexican in a phone call Sunday, adding that the finder of his chest located the valuable goods “a few days ago.”
Fenn wouldn’t say where the treasure was found or who found it.
“The guy who found it does not want his name mentioned. He’s from back East,” he said, adding that it was confirmed from a photograph the man sent him.
The Icknield Way my be the oldest road (or footpath) in England. It was there before the concept of opening land, and people have been traveling on it for thousands of years. So it should be worth saving, right? But what if it cut through your land? Surely you want to have some control over who walked through your property. And that's the conundrum Tom Scott explains here- the tension between the rights of people to travel the same paths they always have and the people who bought up that land and would just as soon have those historic walkways erased from maps.
Scott Wiener is an expert on pizza. He operates Scott's Pizza Tours, which offers guided tours around New York City's finest pizzerias. As a connoisseur of the pie, he has tasted them all--and collected the boxes in which they are shipped.
His collection of 1,550 boxes from pizzerias as far away as McMurdo Station, Antarctica doesn't consist of used specimens. Wiener preserves unused ones for posterity. Atlas Obscura reports:
But the journey to the world’s largest pizza-box collection started in New Jersey, when Wiener spent much of 2009 rounding the state to choose its best pizzerias with Peter Genovese, food writer for Newark’s Star-Ledger. In Genovese’s Munchmobile, a van topped with a gigantic fake hot dog, Wiener and other readers visited 333 pizzerias. “Visiting so many places, you start to notice differences,” he says. He fixated on the pizza boxes. “Pizza boxes are not all the same, and that means they’re interesting,” he says.
Photo: Scott Wiener
You learn from your mistakes, and from the looks of these stories, children are doing a lot of learning. The picture above is from redditor StumpedatUserName, who tells the story of his kid who swallowed a SIM key. The next day, he demonstrated to his brother how it happened by swallowing a penny! Let's hope he learned not to do that again.
Today my son drew in red marker all over his face then got scared that we’d be mad so he tried to hide it by wrapping toilet paper around his head like a mummy. Then he promptly ran into a wall and nearly knocked himself unconscious. A comedy of errors every day with this kid.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 26, 2019
Kids fumbling around trying to get a handle on life can give us some hilarious stories. For a laugh or two, read a bunch more of them at Bored Panda.
Isa Bredt, an artist from the Netherlands, has charmed people all over by taking pet pictures and turning them into Disney-style illustrations. Click to the right on the images to see the original photograph. But you probably already recognized the picture above as Cole and Marmalade.
Bredt told reddit that she's overwhelmed with the response, and is completely booked up for months. But you can enjoy other people's pet pictures turned into cute cartoons at Instagram, including internet-famous critters.
-via reddit
Avast, me mateys! Board yon barge so that we may ply the Seven Bars this Friday night! This fine vessel is the Gypsy Rose, a 1998 Ford bus converted, at some point in its life, into a pirate-themed party bus. Until recently, it was on sale on Craigslist. MSN reports:
In its previous life, the bus was used by a tour company as a colorful transport for winery and brewery tours, corporate team building outings, and even weddings. Some of the experiences included costumed actors and actresses that played out skits in the aisles, capped off with an appearance from the lead character, the infamous Cap'n McKraken.
The 26-passenger Ford bus is powered by a 5.9-liter Cummins diesel engine with 104,835 miles on the clock. The seller says that the bus was hand built and has a custom sound system with USB and auxiliary inputs.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Craigslist
