Over the history of civilization, rats traveled wherever humans traveled. That is, if you count "civilization" as the time beginning when we started growing our own grains. Rats love those things. But furthermore, rats traveled to places where people didn't migrate as much, so they managed to spread fleas and disease to far-flung populations of people, like the plague, which changed Europe forever. They are also invasive species to places all over the world, takemn there by people, who you have to admit are also an invasive species.

But the misery that rats spread among humans and various ecosystems wasn't because they are evil. They've just become dependent on humans to provide their food, and we are very good at that. This TED-Ed lesson from Max G. Levy tells us the good things about rats, too. The video was directed by Ukrainian illustrator and animator Denys Spolitak. -via Laughing Squid

When you're suffering a cold or flu, you eat nutritious chicken soup to feel all warm inside, and you suck on lemon honey lozenges to sooth your cough. But now Progresso has flipped that idea on its head. For a limited time, they are offering "Soup Drops," which are cough drops that taste like chicken soup. The tag line is "Soup you can suck on."

I wondered if these were like chicken bouillon cubes, or sugary candy with a chicken flavor. Dennis Lee at The Takeout volunteered to try a Soup Drop so we don't have to. He says they resemble candy cough lozenges, but they are made with the sugar substitute isomalt, which is not as sweet as sugar. He didn't exactly describe how sweet the Soup Drops are, because he got busy telling us how they really taste. It's not a pretty picture. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dennis Lee/The Takeout)

When several inches of snow piles up, many of us just think about how to get to work, or how to even get down the stairs without slipping. Then there are those who take advantage of the situation for fun.

Woodworker Matt Thompson describes himself at his YouTube channel as a "Maker of mostly ridiculous and unnecessary things." He makes things to sell as well. Recently he solidified his reputation as the coolest guy in the neighborhood after a snowfall, rigging up his model train with a snowplow on the front to clear the tracks as any full-size train would do. Only this track is along his fence. When the snow is this deep, what else would you do with a train? Right, most of us would just stay inside to play with our toys. Kudos to Thompson for selecting the perfect music to accompany this video, too.  -via Born in Space

Every two years, the World Monuments Fund releases a list of the cultural sites that are in most danger of disappearing due to war, environmental damage, or other causes. The "other causes" come into play for 2025 because one of the sites listed is the moon.

On a relative scale, there are not that many cultural sites on the moon, but the legacy that humans have left there are is monumentally historic. It's been almost 56 years since Neil Armstrong set foot on Tranquility Base. Will future historians be able to even find that spot after we've landed more missions on the moon? When the space junk calls to the surface? Saving such sites will require international cooperation between myriad organizations.

But the moon is only one of 250 sites listed in the document. Read about the danger to the moon's historic sites and other endangered places at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: NASA/Neil A. Armstrong)

No one was really surprised that Squid Game came back; the audience loved the death and destruction ands wanted more. But we were surprised that the character Seong Gi-hun would return to play the game again. It works for the show itself to draw back fans from the first game, but logically, who would go through that again? However, the biggest surprise is that the game doesn't conclude in season two, making season three necessary. Score! And that twist provides longer contracts for more actors.

Season two delivers more fright and carnage, but the confusing multiple storylines and overall plot strain credulity to the max. Despite its hit status, Screen Junkies was keen to tear Squid Game's second season apart to show us why it's not all that it's cracked up to be. But if you're like me and waiting for some Netflix customer to help you watch it, this Honest Trailer will give you enough footage of Squid Game season two to learn about the major players, as flawed as they are, and keep you thinking about watching it. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The new film Wolf Man opens nationwide this weekend. Fans of cinematic werewolves have been waiting quite some time for the new Universal monster movie, directed and co-written by Leigh Whannell. Werewolf films aren't as common as superhero or vampire films, but there have been quite a few over the past century. How will this new film compare? Before you go to the theater this weekend, you'll want to revisit the history of cinematic wolf men in their various incarnations, and especially in their transformations.  

It's been 84 years since Lon Chaney, Jr. first turned into a werewolf in the 1941 film The Wolf Man. You might not remember, but the movie also starred Claude Raines and Bela Lugosi. That set off a line of Universal films featuring the Wolf Man, even though the character was often relegated to taking a second string role to Dracula or Frankenstein's monster or both. A few attempts followed to regain Universal's original glory, but often fell short. Will the new movie improve the Wolf Man's reputation? To know for sure, you'll have to relive the previous eleven films featuring the Universal Wolf Man. Video samples are included for most of them.

(Image credit: monstersforsale)

He'll never forget this interview pic.twitter.com/JeE3vC8QRp

— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) January 15, 2025

Do yourself a favor and watch the above video before reading the rest of this post.

Yeah, you can't always judge a book by its cover. Now that you've seen the funny part, meet John bin London. You might think he is a Saudi who has been raised in the UK, but no. This Nottingham native only began learning Arabic in the last few years. He started off with the language, and then wanted to learn the Arabic alphabet and then got into the history and culture of Saudi Arabia. He finally got to visit that land a couple of years ago. Those who know say John's Arabic is fluent but not perfect, and very good for someone who wasn't raised speaking it. He has also mastered different Arabic dialects. Learn more about his journey in this video. The documentary is mostly in Arabic, so you'll need to turn on the closed captions for English. The English parts have Arabic captions.



 -via reddit

In the late 19th century, con men of all kinds made money traveling from town to town promising to cure all manner of problems. A rainmaker, using various methods, could redeem a desperate drought-stricken town. It had long been observed that rain often follows a military battle. Or was it just that those incidences were noticed and recorded? Civil War general Edward Powers noticed, and published a book about it in 1871. He proposed experiments on inducing rain with heavy artillery, with lots of noise, flash, and reverberation. Twenty years after his request, the US government finally authorized a budget for such experiments, led by lawyer and engineer Robert G. Dyrenforth.

Dyrenforth set up his experiments with mortars, electrical kites, and hydrogen balloons. In a series of noisy deployments, some were followed by rain. But if you look out a window every Thursday morning, some mornings you will see rain. While the government didn't find his results convincing, Dyrenforth did, and took his show on the road to drought-stricken places in the West, with mixed results. Was it a matter of a good idea unevenly executed? Or was it wishful thinking on Dyrenforth's part? Or did the desire to succeed (and make money) color his thinking? Read about Robert G. Dyrenforth and his rainmaking experiments at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Harper's Weekly 1891 via Texas State Library and Archives Commission)

Have you ever seen a truck rolling around on balloon tires this big? This 1953 British Pathé newsreel introduces us to the Rolligon, and gives the impression that it's a vehicle. But the name Rolligon actually refer to the tires that make this vehicle special. Inventor William Albee designed the tires after watching the Inuit roll heavy boats on inflated seal hides. Rolligon tires only need pressure of about seven psi because there are a lot of square inches on tires that are five to nine feet wide. They are great for rolling over soft terrain, no matter how uneven it is, and they do very little damage to plants and animals in their way. Rolligon tires never made much headway with the military because these vehicles can't go fast enough. As far as consumer use, well, any vehicle using them would be too high to easily get in and out of, and too wide for standard lanes. But they are being used today, in the oilfields of Canada and Alaska. See a modern truck on Rolligon tires here.  -via Nag on the Lake

Astronaut Don Pettit (previously at Neatorama) took this image on January 11 from the International Space Station (ISS), or more specifically, from a window of the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle docked to it. They are both 254 miles above the earth. Pettit is an avid space photographer and a talented educator as well as an astronaut. In this picture, he was focusing on deep space, so the city lights of earth rotating below at night show up as a series of streaks. The closer stars are pinpoints of light, while the further stars illustrate why our galaxy is called the Milky Way. The horizontal streaks are Starlink satellites. The bright bands on the horizon are the sun about to rise. You can also see zodiacal light and emissions from the ISS. All this in one photo that Pettit posted to X (formerly Twitter), therefore completing an Elon Musk trifecta. -via Ars Technica

(Image credit: NASA/Don Pettit)

Certain species of frogs appear to hop across the surface of water in a process that's been called "skittering." It's like watching someone skipping a stone across the surface. While the frogs go pretty fast, it would be pretty rough to hit the water as hard as a stone does. So how do they do it? A team led by engineer Talia Weiss of Virginia Tech put some northern cricket frogs to the test and filmed them with a high-speed camera. When the film was slowed to 5%, they could see that the frogs actually become submerged in a kind of belly-flop. They don't sink all that deep, though, and use their webbed feet to re-launch themselves into another belly-flop. This kind of motion is seen in cetaceans, so it's less skittering and more like "porpoising." Read more about this research at ScienceAlert. And if you see a remix of this video with the appropriate sound effects (whee! plop) let me know. -via Damn Interesting

Besides fried chicken and a horse race, Kentucky is also known for its bourbon, particularly Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. It's a common misconception that for a whiskey to be labeled as bourbon, it must be distilled in Bourbon County, Kentucky. This is not true. While there are legal standards for bourbon, the distillery location is not one of them. Bourbon is distilled in North Carolina and other places. Yet most bourbon is indeed distilled in Kentucky, the whiskey was developed there, and the word itself came from Bourbon County.

Kentucky is known as the home of bourbon for its history in the state, and that history comes from the confluence of the state's geography and climate and the people who settled there. Read up on what makes bourbon, how it differs from regular corn liquor, and why Kentucky was the perfect place to make bourbon what it is today.
 
(Image credit: Jackdude101)

In the year 2071, technology has achieve the ability to connect our brains to our computers and other machinery through an implant in our bodies. But that communication goes both ways. The implant called Integrated Intelligence, from the company BrightMind, can also filter one's perception of reality using artificial intelligence, in essence building the reality that we think we want. But is that a good thing? Being disconnected from reality, as comforting as it can be, is not really in line with what it is to be human. Everyone thinks Mina is in need of such manipulation, so she became an early adopter.

The science fiction short film (DIS)CONNECTED from Dust was produced and directed by Karl Stelter. The film explores the upsides and downsides to outsourcing our reality to elevate our emotions. The last few seconds are a twist, leaving us wondering what it means and what will happen next. What do you think?  -via Geeks Are Sexy

Archaeologists are finding out a lot about ancient Egypt from excavations at the Saqqara necropolis in the ancient city of Memphis. They recently uncovered the tomb of the most distinguished physician of his time, a doctor named Tetinebefou. The 4,100-year-old tomb has an inscription on a stone sarcophagus labeling Tetinebefou as "the chief palace physician, priest, chief dentist, director of medicinal plants and conjurer of the goddess Serket." Serket was a deity who cured snake and scorpion bites.

Ancient Egyptian doctors often specialized in treating one body part, and the label Tetinebefou sported as an expert in many specialties elevated him greatly. The title of dentist is especially rare in that culture, so it's no wonder Tetinebefou was tapped to be the pharaoh's personal physician. The tomb had been previously looted, and Tetinebefou's funerary treasures are no longer there, but the rich wall paintings and carvings depict his belongings and the objects he may have used in his practice. Read about Egypt's medical practitioners and see more of this lavish tomb at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Franco-Swiss Archaeological Mission of Saqqara)

If you recall the climactic scene in Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke Skywalker is negotiating a terrifying trench run on the Death Star, risking certain death with one false move. That's the feeling you'll get watching Carl Weiseth flying down a mountainside with a gliding parachute and skis. He speeds through rock formations like it's easy, and even flips around a few times on his way.

Besides wondering about Weiseth's sanity, you might also wonder how this is filmed. There is no cameraman following him; this was all captured from his helmet with a Go Pro Max 360° camera, which has the ability to appear as if it is filming from a distance. Luke Skywalker looked real in the trench run, although it was filmed in a studio with special effects. This video is real, but looks fake because the technology used to capture it is beyond our experience. This sport is also beyond our experience, so hey, don't try this at home. -via Laughing Squid