Old movie special effects, the world's largest illegal rally, water available on Mars, mutant bacteria in space, and the origin of the phrase 'curiosity killed the cat,' among many other things picked for the avid reader of 'Recommended Links of the Week.' Enjoy!
16 classic films with better special effects than any modern movie: "Surely at some point, while revisiting a classic, you've ended up murmuring 'Well, these effects could be completely current.' Even more: at some point (with a table punch and a lupine howl, too) you've shouted: 'What is this! These old-school effects are BETTER than today's!' And it's no wonder: there are films from ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago whose effects would make today's productions blush." We already saw the example of the witch's transformation in depth in this article about Sh! The Octopus.
Most 15-year-old teens can't tell when facts are really facts and not opinions: "The worst, however, happens when we confuse an opinion with a fact, an anecdote with a statistic, a correlation with a causation, a hunch with evidence, a prejudice with a judgment. We can all be victims of these biases, but among teenagers these biases seem to be very pronounced, making them overly credulous and manipulable individuals."
Cannonball, the world's largest illegal rally: "In 1903 Horatio Nelson Jackson bet $50 with a friend that he could travel from San Francisco to New York by car in less than three months. It took him two months and five days, and to win those fifty dollars he spent a little over eight thousand. It was the first cost-to-coast car trip, the first road trip in history, an absolute record for the time in a country that, like the rest of the world, lacked any kind of road infrastructure for long-distance travel."
NASA releases a map of water available at a shovel's reach on Mars: "The authors of the new paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, use data from two of those spacecraft, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Mars Odyssey orbiter, to locate water ice that could be within reach of astronauts on the Red Planet. 'You wouldn't need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel,' said the lead author of the article."
How dangerous are meteorites to astronauts when they are on the Moon?: "It makes sense to conclude that micrometeorite bombardment should not pose a short-term problem for the structures we build on the Moon, and its effect will only become visible over the decades as its surface accumulates microcraters. Okay, well, but what if those grains of space dust hit an astronaut, who is not made of metal or rock?"
Should we worry about mutant bacteria in space?: "We are getting closer and closer to sending astronauts to Mars and consolidating space tourism flights. However, there are still many variables that must be taken into account for these trips to be truly safe. One of the factors, and a very important one, has to do with microorganisms."
A Soviet diamond in the sky, the forgotten OPS space stations: "Curiously, despite Soviet attempts to hide the true military nature of the OPS, Western intelligence services immediately knew that Salyut 2 was a different vehicle and of a military nature because it used communication frequencies identical to those used in other Soviet military satellites."
The Arctic is a climate time bomb about to explode: "Thus, a couple of days ago, a consortium of more than a hundred scientists from more than 50 prestigious research centers around the world published an exhaustive study showing that Greenland's melting rate has gone from about 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to the current 254 billion tons per year, meaning Greenland is melting today at a rate seven times faster than 30 years ago."
The footprint of the first nuclear bomb exploded at sea that is still visible in Bikini after 73 years: "It happened on July 25, 1946, at Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. It was an event that went down in history as the fifth nuclear bomb explosion and the first underwater. We have all seen the images: a giant mushroom-shaped cloud in the middle of the Pacific that swept away ships that had been left on purpose to simulate what could happen in a nuclear war. Now, 73 years later, a group of scientists has returned to the site to map the ocean floor."
Three mistakes we make when linking intelligence and success: "Intelligence fascinates. Many parents wish their children to have high IQs and there are companies that still select their candidates based on this type of assessment. We are wrong. IQ does not guarantee success, and much less in complex environments like today's, as countless studies show. Let's see what the most widespread popular beliefs are and how studies end up with them."
The curious origin of the famous phrase 'Curiosity killed the cat': "It came to Spanish in the last quarter of the 19th century from the English 'Curiosity killed the cat,' whose meaning was practically the same, but the Anglo-Saxon phrase came from a much older one to which, over time, a word had been changed."
Why do we keep doing things that harm us even though we know they do (and on top of that we recommend not doing them)?: "Even knowing that we are subtracting health and quality of life, we continue to perpetuate certain behaviors or actions (putting cancer images on cigarette packs, for example, had no effect on consumption). Paraphrasing what a character says in the Spanish film Boca a boca, directed by Manuel Gómez Pereira: there are people who, being able to have the best, always choose the worst."
Videos: Baby Yoda saves The Avengers, two Chinese girls do nice beatbox, he gets stuck, giant 20-foot great white shark, what happens if you photocopy water (from the same guy who photocopied fire), the rotation of the planets, John Wick with Lightsabers, the 1960s Hover Scooter, '...You Killed my Father. Prepare to Die' Compilation, octopus reacting to colors, Chinese portrait artist makes street sculptures, 'Die Hard' on ice, dolphins getting high, cats reacting to Snapchat filter, super prepared for the apocalypse, Baby Yoda changes the radio, the latest from Banksy, motobase jump, luckily there's a fence, only women can do it, they modify a motorcycle to ride in a flood, the defeat of Vasily Kamotsky, and impossible album covers (and the music on them).
Galleries: The first photos of the 2020 Sony World Photography Awards, Magomed Votsaev's monsters, the best photos of 2019 panorama awards, the Plymouth Tornado, the Matilda actors then and now, seals playing with a photographer, fat kitten, adorable animals, kid who draws, the worst foods posted on social networks, the evolution of Roman Legions equipment, the Animated Dump and the sensational Visual Dump of the Week.
https://old.neoteo.com/creepypasta-scp-307/
