If you can tear yourself away from constantly rewatching the clip of the ITV morning show presenter on BBC News, here's some other stuff on the Internet that might be worthy of your attention
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- Can humans ever understand how animals think? - ”A flood of new research is overturning old assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of – and changing how we think about our own species.” They should do understanding humans next because frankly, some of you lot are baffling
- How 3D Changes in the Genome Turned Sharks Into Skates - ”The marine creatures called skates skim along the sea bottom, rippling their winglike pectoral fins to propel themselves and to stir up small creatures hiding in the sand… Now researchers have discovered how skates evolved their distinctive profile: Rearrangements in the skate’s DNA sequence altered the 3D structure of its genome and disrupted ancient connections between key developmental genes and the regulatory sequences that governed them.” Biology's getting as weird as quantum mechanics
- How the most successful submarine in US Navy history ended up sinking itself - HT to vetran for this epic nautical fail: ”By October 1944, the USS Tang had racked up the best record of any US Navy submarine… But the Tang's run came to an end in clash with a Japanese convoy — not from a Japanese weapon, but from the sub's own errant torpedo.”
- Cordless Drill Uses No Electricity - And another HT to vetran for this DIY project: ”There are few projects on how to make your own cordless drill, but what sets [Johnnyq90’s] amazing project apart is the fact that his power plant is a nitro engine.”
- Every Room A Battlefield - Geoff Manaugh visits a U.S. Army training centre: ”Fort Irwin is a U.S. Army base the size of Rhode Island, roughly three hours outside Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert… Its scale and isolation make it an ideal setting for immersive training exercises, which are staged in a series of 14 simulated towns and cities.”
- The Quality of Mercy - The story of U.S. convict Gary Settle who, sentenced to 177 years for bank robbery, works to gain compassionate release for other prisoners even as he himself lives with numerous medical conditions including prostate cancer: ”After nearly three decades in federal prison, whenever Settle was transferred to a new facility, he almost always ran into someone he knew… except that many of the people he recognized were dying.”
- Forgotify - Listen to something new: ”We love music. That’s why we were so shocked to learn that millions of Spotify songs had been played only partially or never at all. A musical travesty, really. So we set out to give these neglected songs another way to reach your earholes, and Forgotify was born.”
- Time takes a cigarette - A nostalgia trip for all ex-smokers (or still-smokers) as Alwyn Turner looks back at the branding and social connotations of different kinds of fags: ”Someone who smoked Dunhill, say, was the kind of person who’d have a desk-lighter, while someone who smoked Embassy was unlikely to have a desk… There were different flavours available, but the taste didn’t mean anything in itself. The associations built up around a cigarette were entirely down to the packaging and the advertising.”
- Nerding Day: The Incredible Hulk Hostess Snack Ads ? - And also from the field of marketing, though possibly less successful: ”Sometime during my career of making jokes about weird things I accidentally became the planet’s preeminent Hostess snack ad expert… A superhero would run into a problem they’d normally solve with violence, and instead throw a cupcake at it. They were stupid and insane, but sort of took place in a universe with rules. Except when it came to the Incredible Hulk. Despite appearing in a dozen Hostess ads, Hulk never figured out what the hell was going on or what he was supposed to be doing.”
- Jugend - ”The magazine Jugend was founded and edited by Georg Hirth (1841-1916), and was published in Munich between 1896 and 1940. It lent its name to an entire artistic and literary movement, the “Jugendstil”, and is therefore one of the most important German sources for art and literature at the turn of the century.” And here they all are
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