When his planet and all his family and friends are destroyed, an alien comes to earth because he's tired of being sad. Well, you'd be sad, too, if your entire species was wiped out and you had to venture into foreign territory to do something about it. He has an artifact that tells him that Earthlings have the secret to happiness. The little boy he contacts is only happy to help him out. And that's how we learn what "Fun Kitai Furai Dei" is.

"Fun Kitai Furai Dei" is also the name of the new song from Jazz Emu, the alter ego of British comedian Archie Henderson. This animated video is funny and ridiculously weird, but also bittersweet and somewhat touching. This is the kind of thing that can happen when a standup comedian can't go on the road because of a pandemic and turns his creative juices to producing videos.  -via Metafilter

Who knew rats could become wine connoisseurs? Most people know what white wine is, but couldn't identify the variety of grape it was made from. A few people are very good at this, and won't ever let you forget it. The question was whether this learned skill is affected by the language we use in wine tasting. Rats have no wine-tasting language, but an experiment shows they can learn their grapes. Some rats were trained to push a lever if the wine they were exposed to was Sauvignon Blanc, while others were rewarded for pushing the lever when they were exposed to Riesling. During training, these wines were two consistent brands. Then the rats were tested on their knowledge without rewards, and were presented with different brands and types of wine made with Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc grapes, and they could still identify which was which.

Lest you imagine a rodent wine-tasting party with progressively drunken rats, the science paper reveals the detail that the rats were only exposed to the scent of the wine, and never actually drank any. Still, considering how many different kinds of wine the researchers had to purchase, you know someone had to dispose of the leftovers. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Elisa Frasnelli et al)

Legally Trek pic.twitter.com/FT2BE19lB9

— I Love Spaceships (@SpaceshipAddict) May 2, 2025

Science fiction X account I Love Spaceships remade the climactic scene in the 2001 comedy Legally Blonde with Star Trek: The Next Generation-era action figures. Ensign (note that she has just one rank pip) Barbie cross-examines Counselor Troi in the courtroom of Judge Guinan.

It pairs with the original very well, although I Love Spaceships uses what is, I think, a Voyager mess hall playset as a courtroom. And there's also a Conehead on the jury, whom I think was absent in the original film (a poor casting decision by director Robert Luketic).

The more time travel movies we see, the more it becomes clear that the future is too close. In the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II, our hero zipped from 1985 to 2015 and found technology to be quite advanced 30 years into the future. Yet that date is now ten years in the past and we still don't have flying cars. Quite a few other movies set in the future have already been lapped without interplanetary travel or dystopian collapse -not to mention time travel itself. Those who follow such things have a sense of how long major technological advances can take. Plus, we still watch movies that are 50 years old. Star Trek had the right idea, setting its stories 300 years into the future, although we may still be watching when the time comes. Chris and Jack (previously at Neatorama) leverage that movie knowledge to judge whether they've really been visited by a time traveler.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

George Washington didn't have much of a sweet tooth, or many teeth at all, but he did enjoy fruit and alcoholic beverages. His favorite dessert contained both, and was served on special occasions and always on January 6th for Epiphany, which was also George and Martha's wedding anniversary. It's called Great Cake, which may be because the Washingtons liked it so well, or it may be because it's enormous. Martha Washington's recipe called for 40 eggs (separated) and four pounds of butter, as well as proportionate amounts of flour, sugar, fruit, and other ingredients, like brandy and wine.

While Great Cake is Martha Washington's recipe, it was baked by enslaved people, and took hours to bake, not to mention all the time it would take to whip all those eggs whites into a meringue. If you have a really large cake pan and plenty of time, you may want to follow Washington's recipe, or if you prefer a normal-sized cake, you can follow an adapted recipe from Mount Vernon.

Production values have soared since the Dance Your PhD competition was launched in 2008, but we still get a kick out of doctoral students attempting to explain the subjects of their dissertations through interpretive dance. Dr. Sulo Roukka of the University of Helsinki sang and danced his way to the top of the heap this year with a production number about chemesthesis, or the way people react to extreme taste compounds such as hot peppers and menthol. His dissertation is titled Insights into oral chemesthetic perception: A focus on food-related behavior. Roukka won the chemistry division and the overall grand prize. There are also winners in the categories of biology, physics and AI, and social sciences. Continue reading to see them.

AI is amazing, right? But although British voice actor Sam Hughes uses artificial intelligences to add Schwarzenegger's face to all characters present, his human facilities are impersonating the Austrian Oak.

In this scene known as the Council of Elrond, the Schwarzeneggers debate about how to deal with the menace of the One Ring. In their thick Austrian accents, dwarves, humans, and elves consider their options. It is the 4-foot tall Frodo Schwazenegger who proclaims the mission of the hobbits to ensure the Ring's destruction.

-via Giga Based Dad

Taste Atlas introduces us to the Salzwedeler Baumkuchen, which means the tree cake from Salzwedel. This small town in north central Germany is famous for its unique confection that vaguely resembles a tree.

The cake is made of multiple layers--generally a dozen or so--of batter dripped over a form rotating on a spit over an open flame. The ingredients are simple: butter, eggs, flour, sugar, and vanilla. Sometimes honey or brandy is added for flavor. Once finished, the cake is slid off the spit and coated with chocolate or a sugar glaze and sliced into individual servings.

Photos: Sven Tetschke, Klass Brumann, respectively.

"Kerning" is the art of spacing letters so that the finished words are visually balanced and easy to read. It's more than just consistent spacing, because letters are shaped differently, and some should be closer to the next letter than others. Bad kerning gives us the word "keming," which is gloriously self-explanatory.

Pope Francis lived humbly for a pope, and requested that his tombstone be engraved simply with his name. He was laid to rest on Saturday at the St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome, and the tomb has a stone with his name, Franciscus, spelled FRANCISCVS in the Latin style. But the stone reads more like “F R  A NCISC VS.”

Some have argued that the bad kerning is a symbol of humility before God, but there is no tradition of such a gesture in papal tombstones. It may have been because the stone carving was a rush job, or possibly incompetence. Fast Company has a possible explanation of how the poor design could have occurred.  -via kottke

If you knew about an isolated mountain lake that was ringed with a whole bunch of human skeletons that no one had retrieved, you might think about avoiding that area, lest you become one of them. But that's not quite the case at Roopkund Lake, also called Mystery Lake or Skeleton Lake, at 16,470 feet of elevation in northern India. Plenty of Himalayan hikers have visited the site, and rearranged the skulls and bones found there.

An ancient tale tells of a royal entourage on a pilgrimage that was caught in a hailstorm near the lake and were all killed. But scientists have found evidence that whatever disaster befell those people happened more than once, and hundreds of years apart. Not only that, the dead of Roopkund Lake came from different corners of the earth! What happened to them? And where were they going? Savannah Geary of SciShow tells us what we now know and what we don't know about the Roopkund Lake skeletons. There's a 45-second skippable ad at 4:05.

Only a couple of hundred years ago, people weren't sure why birds disappeared in the winter (or the summer, depending on where you are). The idea that birds flew away and came back was common, but where did they go? Other theories were that they hibernated, possibly underwater, or as Aristotle mused, maybe they turned into another species. One Harvard scholar suggested that birds flew to the moon for the months they were missing. And people believed him, because they didn't know how far away the moon is. What they needed was a way to track where a particular bird had been.

Then in 1822, someone in northern Germany shot a stork. The stork was retrieved and was found to have a 31-inch arrow in its neck! We don't know how long the bird survived carrying the arrow, but it was sent to the University of Rostock for study. There it was determined that the arrow originated in central Africa, proof that the stork had flown more than 1,800 miles with an arrow in its neck. Over time, other birds were discovered flying with arrows from faraway places, and scientists confirmed the theory of bird migration. Eventually, we started tagging birds with less painful identifiers. Read about this discovery and how it changed ornithology at Xatakaon. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Zoologische Sammlung der Universität Rostock)

Cosplayer @shellzyeah_cosplay wore this fantastic costume at the 2023 DragonCon. It perfectly blends the madness of the Barbie movie with magnificence of the 1988 Tim Burton film Beetlejuice. I've seen this movie about 167 times and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it.

For humans, polar bears are perhaps the most dangerous of all ursines. That's why Churchill, Manitoba has a special-built jail for them and residents leave their car doors unlocked.

The Noregian archipelago of Svalbard, which is frozen year-round is home to many polar bears. As a result, carrying a rifle while outside of a settlement is not only lawful, but mandatory.

This gentleman in the village of Pyramiden was caught by surprise by a polar bear. He fired off a round from his rifle at the bear, which still charged him. The man fled on foot until he got onto a snowmobile. Nonetheless, the bear kept up the chase. It's not a bad strategy for a polar bear, as the species can run at up to 25 MPH.

-via kira

Law professor Eugene Volokh notes that Magistrate Judge Ray Kent ordered a firm named Dragon Lawyers to cease filing documents with an enormous watermark of a suit-wearing dragon on every page of its documentation.

Each page of plaintiff's complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multi-colored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit, presumably because she is represented by the law firm of "Dragon Lawyers PC © Award Winning Lawyers". See Compl. (ECF No. 1). Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(f)(1) allows a court to "strike from a pleading an insufficient defense or any redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous matter." Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent. The Court is not a cartoon.

-via Jarvis

Birds are dangerous for planes, and vice versa. Up until the last decade or so, most airports killed owls and other birds that took up residence near airports. But Boston's Logan Airport was the exception. Snowy owls live in the Arctic most of the time, but migrate south during the coldest months of winter. They often ended up at the airport in Boston, where they could find plenty of mice and rats to eat, as well as other birds.

In 1981, Norman Smith began trapping and relocating the airport owls instead of exterminating them. He's been doing this ever since, and the idea has spread to other airports, especially for birds that are threatened or endangered. Logan Airport has relocated more than 900 snowy owls since Smith came on the scene, and he vows to continue saving these birds as well as the planes for as long as he can. -via Nag on the Lake