Basketball fans and enthusiasts alike always have a team they look up to. Some will say their favourite team’s name, and some would actually give the exact year their favourite team played, and what made that team become their ultimate favourite. If you’re looking for a list of the greatest teams of all time, check out The Onion’s picks!

image via The Onion

The human body is always a busy system. Whether a person is awake or sleeping, working or relaxing, the body continues to work non-stop.

Have you ever wondered what goes on inside your body? In this video, The Infographics Show shows in detail the many things that will happen inside the human body. What’s more amazing is that all of these things happen in only one minute. So after watching this video, your body will have already undergone through these things twice, as the video is 2 minutes long.

Via The Awesomer

(Video Credit: The Infographics Show/ YouTube)

Perhaps the reason why I wasn’t that smart compared to my male colleagues was not because I wasn’t studying enough; maybe it was because I was wearing the wrong underwear. This clears up many things for me!

I wonder if this product can be shipped. I’m planning to buy a dozen if ever it can!

What about you?

Image via Engrish.com

Imagine being a zookeeper somewhere and the animal you are in charge of hasn't had a bowel movement in two years. You might be worried. For most critters, keepers would have tried a laxative before that much time passed, but it's really not all that unusual for the giant isopod, which has a very slow digestive process. On May 26, the caretakers of five giant isopods at the Toba Aquarium in Japan found fecal matter in the tank, for the first time since April of 2018. It was an occasion of joy.

Moreover, the feces was found to contain scales of a fish not served by the aquarium.

This means that the food which went into making this poop must have been consumed over seven years ago, before they came to the aquarium. While it isn’t clear exactly which isopod dropped the deuce, the finding is a breakthrough in the field of giant isopod regularity, and will hopefully trigger more detailed research into the subject.

Read more about the weird eating and pooping habits of giant isopods, and see some strange videos at SoraNews24. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Eric Kilby)

Who would have thought that shadows could also be a source of electricity? Scientists from the National University of Singapore have created a device that exploits the contrast between bright and dark spots in order to create electricity that can power small electronic devices.

We can harvest energy anywhere on Earth, not just open spaces,” says Swee Ching Tan, a materials scientist at the National University of Singapore.

Tan and his team created the device, called a shadow-effect energy generator, by placing a superthin coating of gold on silicon, a typical solar cell material. Like in a solar cell, light shining on silicon energizes its electrons. With the gold layer, the shadow-effect energy generator produces an electric current when part of the device lies in shadow.

[...]

Someday, these generators might produce energy in the shadowy spots in a solar array, between skyscrapers or even indoors. “A lot of people think that shadows are useless,” Tan says. But “anything can be useful, even shadows.”

Amazing!

(Image Credit: Royal Society of Chemistry/ ScienceNews)

Abraham Lincoln ushered our nation through extremely tumultuous times and was also known for a self-deprecating sense of humor. But there's always something new to learn about our 16th president.

But on top of all that, as with George Washington before him and the legendary Teddy Roosevelt after, it turns out Lincoln was also an exceptional, near unbeatable fighter who in his younger years would throw down with anyone who felt like they were man enough. In fact, he often found himself in such matches simply because of his reputation as an exceptional fighter and individuals wanting to test their mettle against him.

Standing at an imposing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 meters) tall and weighing around 210 pounds (95 kg) with a lean, muscular build, Lincoln was a formidable figure in his prime, noted by his peers as being, to quote one contemporary, “unnaturally strong”. While the future President shied away from manual labour in his youth, being more drawn to books and poetry, his rather humble beginnings ensured he didn’t really have a choice in the matter in the end. For example, he apparently had an axe put in his hands at the age of 8 and was expected to do his part for his family with it. As a result, by the time he reached adulthood, Lincoln had matured into a fine specimen of man, gaining a reputation for his prodigious strength.

We know Lincoln best from his presidency, when he was in his 50s and suffering some physical ailments, including depression. But the young Lincoln was pretty well-known for his wrestling matches, the most notorious of which you can read about at Today I Found Out.

When Thomas Edison was only 22 years old, he was granted a patent for an electronic voting machine deigned for Congress to use. It was his first patent, and it's a good thing that its reception didn't discourage him from tinkering with other machines.    

Edison’s “electrographic vote-recorder” had the names of all the voters listed twice: in a “Yes” column on one side, and a “No” column on the other. When a person flipped a switch to indicate their vote, the machine would transmit the signal through an electric current and mark their name in the corresponding column, while keeping track of the total tally of votes on a dial. After everyone had voted, an attendant would place a sheet of chemically treated paper on top of the columns and press down on it with a metallic roller, imprinting the paper with the results.

The machine never gained any ground. Read about the reception it received in Congress at Mental Floss.

Tiny critters, around four inches big or less, build complex houses to protect them from predators and filter their food. These complex houses are all made from snot coming out of their homes. The tadpole looking creatures called giant larvaceans builds a new snot palace every day or so, and these infrastructures have piqued the scientists interests. Bioengineer Kakani Katija hopes to crack the snot palace architectural code so that someday humanity can replicate these houses, as Spectrum News 13 detailed: 

Her team took a step toward solving the mystery of the snot houses and maybe someday even replicating them, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

The creatures inside these houses may be small — the biggest are around 4 inches (10 centimeters) — but they are smart and crucial to Earth’s environment. Found globally, they are the closest relatives to humans without a backbone, Katija and other scientists said.

Together with their houses “they are like an alien life form, made almost entirely out of water, yet crafted with complexity and purpose,” said Dalhousie University marine biologist Boris Worm, who wasn’t part of the study. “They remind me of a cross between a living veil and a high tech filter pump.”

Also, when they abandon their clogged homes about every day, the creatures collectively drop millions of tons of carbon to the seafloor, where it stays, preventing further global warming, Worm said. They also take microplastics out of the water column and dump it on the sea floor. And if that’s not enough, the other waste in their abandoned houses is eaten by the ocean’s bottom dwellers.

image via Spectrum News 13

📷 Here's the brute responsible for all the disruption at Wishaw tonight. ^Angus pic.twitter.com/dYtIrZ17pa

— ScotRail (@ScotRail) June 4, 2020

Sometimes, all it takes to stop a whole complex system from working is just one thing, and that’s just what happened in the Scottish rail service. The trains were stopped because there was a wild boar blocking the railroad.

ScotRail tweeted Thursday evening that the line between Glasgow Central and Larkhall was being blocked in Wishaw by an animal on the tracks.

"There's a pig (yes, you read that right) on the line at Wishaw," ScotRail tweeted. The tweet said National Rail officials and police were attempting to capture the animal.

A later tweet clarified that officials had been "advised that the beast involved is in fact a wild boar."

Thankfully, the railway service resumed later in the evening. It wasn’t stated, however, if the boar was caught, or if it just wandered away from the railroad.

(Image Credit: ScotRail/ Twitter)

When we feel pressure, art can be such a great relief to us. Experience its beauty fully as your stress leaks away. Never mind what the other visitors at the museum gallery think.

Clark Sorensen, a professional sculptor, brings his skills to the task of crafting urinals. These need not be strictly utilitarian designs. They can be expressions of nature's beauty when nature calls.

So, one day, I got a phone call at the White House. I can't remember if it was '98 or '99. One of these guys, from another Federal agency needed help and advice from me. Obviously the exact words are lost to me but it went something like this

— Dan Kaszeta (@DanKaszeta) May 26, 2020

Now that summer has begun, you might find yourself looking for ways to beat the heat, and maybe one thing you would have thought of might be taking a dip at a swimming pool, and that’s not a bad idea at all. After all, swimming is fun, but not when you’re swimming with lots of harmful chemicals and bacteria.

A specialist in chemical and biological warfare named Dan Kaszeta has warned us not to get in the pools in Las Vegas. And when he says don’t get in the pool, we don’t get in the pool. That’s how dangerous Las Vegas pools are.

After receiving a few annoyed replies from Las Vegas pool enthusiast Twitter for the enigmatic tweet, he decided to elaborate on why you shouldn't go swimming in a Las Vegas pool, or even touch the water. Fair warning, it makes for some grim reading. 

In a Twitter thread, he explains in the late 1990s he was working as the "chemical and biological terrorism guy at the White House Military Office," right around the time they were starting to take chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense seriously. While working there, he got a call from another federal agency that needed his help.

[...]

The suspicious sample, it turned out, contained something relatively harmless "like glycerine". But the control sample, in this case, swimming pool water from a major Las Vegas Hotel, hoo boy.

See the full story over at IFL Science.

(Image Credit: Dan Kaszeta/ Twitter)

Twitter user SuperSartre is one supportive parent! When his son finally got his long-awaited Spider suit, SuperSartre made sure that his son would feel the power of the special suit. The Twitter user took photos of his son in the suit and made it appear as if he can really climb walls. Isn’t that adorable?

image via SuperSartre

San Francisco residents are complaining about loud, whistling music coming from the Golden Gate Bridge. It's been described as deafening to those crossing the bridge, and annoying to people for miles around. Is it the scream of a banshee haunting the bridge?

Nope—the eerie sound you're hearing from the Golden Gate Bridge is in fact the result of new sidewalk railing slats, just installed, meant to curb the wind. Funny thing about wind: when it passes through certain open spaces, it creates a hum. This is how all reed instruments work, and it's something that the engineers of said sidewalk panels apparently forgot to take into consideration.

And, because it spans a very windy gap across the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge is now effectively a giant orange wheezing kazoo.

Commuters and nearby residents will be glad to hear that there are no plans to fix the problem. Hear more in videos posted at KQED.

In 1870, Frederick "Fanny" Park and Ernest "Stella" Boulton were arrested in London while wearing women's clothing. While cross-dressing was not the main reason for their arrest, it was a minor charge tacked onto the prosecution, and it was the reason that their trial was a sensation in newspapers across England.

It was not just Boulton and Park that were on trial, however. Also facing the same conspiracy and incitement charges were Louis Hurt and John Stafford Fiske, the United State’s consul in Leith, Edinburgh. Three more had absconded – Martin Cumming, William Somerville and C.H. Thompson – meanwhile, another had died, the aristocrat Lord Arthur Clinton, whose love-letters to Ernest Boulton had been discovered by law enforcement. Clinton reportedly died from natural causes, but suicide has always been largely suspected.

Although seeking a guilty verdict for ‘conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence,’ the prosecution focused mainly on Boulton and Park’s cross-dressing, and brought in a variety of witnesses who had seen them dressed in women’s clothing.

The conspiracy and incitement charges were hard to prove, and even harder for journalists of the time to write about. Newspapers, like the prosecution, focused on the cross-dressing. However, no one really complained about Park and Boulton and their fashion choices. People who saw them agreed that they were well-behaved and did not bother anyone, so why were they on trial? Read about the sensational landmark trial of Park and Boulton at the British Newspaper Archive. -via Strange Company

The ethereal sounds of Toto's biggest hit are rendered on two Tesla coils. While the song is faithfully reproduced, it does have a bit of a kazoo vibe. Maybe they could tune the Golden Gate Bridge to play this! -via Geeks Are Sexy