IKEA Monkey

NASA’s Curiosity rover has been on Mars for more than 2000 days now, and it has sent back over 460,000 images of the planet. Looking at them, it still boggles the mind that we can see the surface of another planet with such clarity, like we’re looking out the window at our front yard. Alan Taylor has collected a bunch of Curiosity’s photos from its mission, many of which look like holiday snapshots from the rover’s trip to the American Southwest.

Tags: Alan Taylor   astronomy   Curiosity   Mars   NASA   photography   science   space

On Thursday, Politico reported that Bernie Sanders gathered advisers over the weekend to begin discussions about mounting a 2020 presidential campaign. The Vermont senator has not said whether he plans to run, but he has conspicuously refused to rule it out.

President Trump is pretty proud of his golf game. Over the years, he's bragged that he's "won many club championships" and that there are "very few people that can beat me in golf." But according to a pro who's known him for more than a decade, Trump's impressive record doesn't have everything to do with skill.

"He cheats like hell," LPGA pro Suzann Pettersen told Norwegian outlet Verdens Gang. "I’m pretty sure he pays his caddie well, since no matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there."

"I don’t quite know how he is in business," she added. "They say that if you cheat at golf, you cheat at business."

Apparently that's not the only shady move Trump pulls on the links. Pettersen said he also has a habit of taking "gimmes"—a putt so close to the hole, you don't have to actually hit it—that aren't really gimmes.

"He always says he is the world’s best putter. But in all the times I’ve played him, he’s never come close to breaking 80," Pettersen said. "But what’s strange is that every time I talk to him, he says he just golfed a 69, or that he set a new course record or won a club championship some place. I just laugh."

Pettersen said she and Trump are pretty good friends and talked at least once a month before he became president, so there's no clear reason to doubt her account of Trump's creativity on the course. But the president has gone out of his way to deny he cheats every time he's accused of it.

Whether or not he's actually playing fast and loose with the rules merited an entire Washington Post investigation, in which sportswriters and celebrities said Trump takes some major shortcuts on the links. Boxer Oscar De La Hoya has spelled out just how Trump allegedly cheats, and even Samuel L. Jackson has weighed in with an accusation about his golf ethics. When asked who the "worst celebrity golf cheat" was in 2012, Alice Cooper just said, "I played with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say."

To be fair, Trump apparently has a pretty good swing, and some pros think he's the best golfer the White House has ever seen. Given just how much he plays—we know he's visited his golf courses 94 times since the inauguration—it doesn't seem like the guy would really need to cheat. It's tough to say what he's really up to out there on the course, but as we've come to learn over the course of this presidency, the answer here may just lie in a tweet.

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Related: Trump Works All Weekend... on His Swing

Now that Daniel Day-Lewis is retiring (or so he says), Paul Thomas Anderson is in the market for a new go-to lead. And he may have found one in Girls Trip breakout star Tiffany Haddish. As Haddish explains in the same Vulture interview where she describes asking Beyonce for a selfie at a party, she and the There Will…

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A top Department of Health and Human Services official looked into “reversing” the abortion of an undocumented teenager in the agency’s custody last year, according to a report in Vice. Scott Lloyd, the director of the department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, admitted in a deposition that he had talked to colleagues about the possibility of giving the young woman a shot of progesterone—an unproven means, promoted by anti-choice activists, of halting an in-progress abortion—after she’d taken the first of the two drugs that make up a medical abortion.

Before introducing Kesha's knockout performance at the Grammys, Janelle Monae delivered an empowering message of her own about the #MeToo movement and Time's Up campaign.

3M Introduces New Line Of Protective Foam Eye Plugs

And Coco Rocha walked with her daughter.

Doug Kenney’s life was practically made for a movie. As a Midwestern kid carrying a chip on his shoulder all the way to Harvard, Kenney and put-upon bestie Henry Beard channeled their abiding contempt for authority into the Harvard Lampoon and its nationally scaled big brother. Kenney went on to build the faux…

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It wasn’t until I moved to New York after college, far away from family and most friends, that I truly felt like an Adult. Especially when I had to furnish my own apartment on the $15/hour wage I was earning as an intern (my mom’s SUV could only fit so much when she drove from Michigan to New York to drop me off at my…

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Uninhabited by humans since 1934

If you hate people and love ponies, this private Scottish island could be your perfect personal retreat. Linga is an uninhabited, 64-acre island for sale off the Shetland coast for £250,000 ($351,700).

The isle is not a cozy sort of place—averaging temperatures of around 39 degrees Fahrenheit in winter and 55 degrees Fahrenheit in summer. But it’s the region’s subarctic weather and tough terrain that helped produce one of the most adorable animals in existence: the Shetland pony. Perhaps it could have the same effect on you?

The island hasn’t had human residents since 1934, but it does have sheep and a pair of idyllic roofless stone cottages approved for renovation. The local council has also granted preemptive approval for additional development on the island, including a pier, a third cottage, several outbuildings, and wind and solar power generation.

If you’re worried about too much isolation, the town of Walls—with its population of 978 and wandering bands of ponies—is a mere 1,600-foot boat ride away. Getting further afield can be a bit of a trek, with a 13-hour ferry ride from Aberdeen or Kirkwall. Or, more conveniently, there are flights in and out of Shetland’s capital, Lerwick, just half an hour’s car ride from Walls.

Via: The Spaces

When I first heard of "souping," it brought me back to my clinical days working in a hospital, where pureed soups and other easy to digest foods -- also known as "full liquids" -- would be prescribed for patients recovering from gastrointestinal surgery, or those who had difficulty chewing or swallowing.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z have reached dizzying heights of fame, but they’re not too big to be brought down a notch or two by their daughter, Blue Ivy.

There are lakes at the bottom of the ocean. These are places where the water contains far more salt than usual, making it extremely dense. It sinks, pools, and refuses to mix with the surrounding seawater, creating perception-defying lakes that, despite being hundreds of meters deep, have their own surfaces and shorelines. One such lake features in “The Deep”—the second episode of Blue Planet II, which aired Saturday on BBC America and other networks. Illuminated by submersible headlights, and accompanied by choral music, cutthroat eels wriggle from the “shores” of the lake and dive into its midst for reasons unknown. Some are so overwhelmed by the salt that they go into shock, their sinuous bodies twisting into convulsing knots.

Two weeks ago, I described Blue Planet II as the “greatest nature series of all time.” I stand by that, and I’m also crowning “The Deep” as the greatest of the series’ seven episodes. It follows in the tradition of the original Blue Planet from 2001, which also voyaged into the abyss for its second episode. The result was groundbreaking. To devote 50 minutes of television to exploring the deep ocean seems, at first, like lunacy. Its perpetual darkness does not exactly make for compelling cinematography. And its low temperatures and crushing pressures make it so inaccessible that it has barely been explored, much less filmed.

And yet, Blue Planet succeeded amply. It took us to fantastical worlds, from belching hydrothermal vents to a whale fall—the decaying carcass of a sunken whale. It avoided the usual menagerie of clownfish, penguins, and sharks in favor of oddities like the improbably dentured fangtooth, slimy hagfish, and Phronima, a parasite that inspired H. R. Giger’s chest-bursting alien. It even showed us species that were new to science, like the Dumbo octopus, so named for the earlike flaps that protrude from its head.

In some ways, the sequel series treads the same ground as the 2001 original, featuring similar locations (the original ended on a brine lake), similar creatures, and even the same structure, sinking deeper and deeper as the minutes tick by. But it also considerably ups the ante on its predecessor. It features a love story between two shrimp. This species of shrimp, as larvae, will waft into a Venus’s flower basket sponge, and grow up trapped within its crystalline walls. It shows how abundant life can be in belching underwater volcanoes and the cold depths of Antarctica. It reveals bubbles of methane violently erupting from the ocean floor in front of a submersible’s headlights, like rockets launching in front of an angry sun.

I talked to the producer Orla Doherty about rising—or perhaps, sinking—to the challenge. This interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity.

---

Ed Yong: Did you feel a sense of responsibility to live up to the legacy of that original deep ocean episode?

Orla Doherty: That episode blew everyone’s brains, my own included. When they told me they’d like me to make the deep episode, I kind of gulped. The largest habitat on Earth. The most unknown habitat on Earth. The hardest to get into. Oh, thanks a bunch, everyone. I remember being in that original planning meeting and thinking: Wow, I am literally out of my depth. My worst fear was that we’d make a poor man’s imitation of the original episode.

We did an awful lot of research: I have about 250 deep-ocean scientists in my inbox on a regular basis. In my first few weeks, Alex Rogers at Oxford told me about the shrimp and the sponge. I thought: Oh my god, it’s a love story in the deep ocean. We cannot leave the Galapagos without finding the Venus’s [flower] basket sponge.

Yong: When you plan a show like this, do you head out with a checklist of things to film, or do you venture into specific places and cross your fingers?

Doherty: You don’t just take out your submarine and go out exploring. Our first shoot, we tried to film shoals of lanternfish, spawning in biblical numbers. But that’s in the open ocean, where they can escape in three dimensions—and that’s what they did. It was a very informative disaster. It made me think that we should strike a balance between going for these animals that move around, and going to very fixed points where we know animals congregate.

With the brine lakes, I’d written a whole complicated storyboard about how I was going to show the toxicity of this world. But on the very first dive, an eel took the plunge and demonstrated in 45 seconds flat just what that place was all about. I owe that eel a lot. We always speak to just about everyone who’s been to these worlds, and we pick their brains about what we’d see. Nobody mentioned the eel, or that the eel might go swimming in the pool. It was one of those amazing moments, which felt like the deep really wanted us to see something and show it to the world.

The same goes for the methane volcano. [The episode features shots of methane bubbles erupting from the ocean floor.] Nobody had seen that before. We went back the next day and it was like nothing had ever happened. It was a flat empty seabed. We got these windows in time and the windows closed.

Yong: You also show a whale fall—the community of creatures that scavenge on the carcasses of sunken whales. How did you find one?

Doherty: Deep-sea scientists have worked hard on whale falls in the Pacific, but no one has observed one in the Atlantic. It’s something we really wanted to do. Tragically, whales do die, when they’re struck by ships or entangled. Eventually, our scientists were alerted to the fact that a whale had been found dead at the surface. We attached weights to it so it would sink quickly without being attacked by sharks, a pinger so we could find it with a sub, and a little GoPro camera. The scientists wanted to know how long it would take for the word to get out that this mighty beast had landed on the seafloor. It took 26 minutes for the first sixgill shark to arrive.

Nobody knew what would come, but I was absolutely adamant that I would have sixgills in the film. They’re majestic, ancient animals. The way they move ... everything about them says: “I don’t live in your world and I don’t come from where you come from.” We didn’t know that our whale fall would attract seven of them, and we didn’t know about their Jekyll-and-Hyde nature. They’d go from these languid, placid animals to absolute demons, tearing this whale’s carcass apart.

Yong: It seems that you included several shots to convey a sense of scale and perspective in an otherwise dark, featureless habitat. For example, there’s a scene in which your submersible descends into the abyss, and there’s a long manta ray swimming in the background.

Doherty: I couldn’t believe it when I got that shot. It’s about scale. But it also makes you stop and think: That’s an animal from the top 20 meters of the ocean. We’re way into the twilight zone, but we’re still seeing it. When you spend time in the deep, you realize that the animals we know don’t think: “Should I stop at 200 meters?” They keep going, and they use the deep in a way we’re only starting to comprehend. We showed swordfish hunting in the deep. I saw a mako shark at 700 meters down, which is not its deepest recorded depth. It showed me how interconnected the deep is to the rest of the ocean. It’s not a separate world. And showing the manta ray was a way of visually getting across that message.

Yong: I also noticed that many of the shots in the new episode seem far more atmospheric than the original. Is that because you got to use two submersibles?

Doherty: That is one of our key differences. If you’re just in a single sub, your camera is always pointing from the same direction from which your lights are shining. It’s really, really difficult to get shade, relief, shadows, and a sense of the landscape. But we shot half of this film from a research vessel with two submersibles. Through the extreme skill of the pilots, we could bring the extravagant lighting techniques that you’d use in a Hollywood movie to a depth of 1,000 meters. That just transformed how these worlds look.

Yong: In the making-of segment that follows the episode, there’s a scene in which you and your colleagues realize that your sub has sprung a leak. What was it like being in these tiny metal spheres, so far away from the surface?

Doherty: I spent 500 hours in the subs. It was really like going in a capsule and going off into orbit. Once you’re released from the ship, you’re on your own. Whatever goes on, you have to deal with it. The scrubber, which sucks the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, can begin to fail because it’s too cold or humid. The battery might burn faster because the water’s so cold. And when you’re filming on land and your camera stops working, you can tap something or change the battery. In the sub, the camera is outside and if it packs up, your dive is done. It’s a reminder that this is a world that humans really shouldn’t be in.

Yong: And yet, we kind of are. You show how thoroughly ships can destroy deep-sea reefs when they drag their nets along the seafloor. Past BBC series have tended to push environmental messages to a coda. What made you decide to interweave those messages throughout the entire series?

Doherty: We set out to make a series about the ocean. When I went out to film these incredible deep-sea coral beds, that’s what I found. While we were filming the Great Barrier Reef, it went through the greatest bleaching event it’s ever seen. These stories became embedded within these habitats, because that’s what we saw. We could have not included them, but that would have been disingenuous to what our ocean looks like today.

A Pennsylvania man accused of opening fire at a car wash early Sunday morning and murdering four people — including his ex-girlfriend and the married man she was allegedly having an affair with — was driven by jealously and rage stemming from a recent breakup, family members said.

It should go without saying, but apparently it needs to be said: Do not bite into smartphone batteries. Phones are made with toxic chemicals and are usually teeming with bacteria. But since the risk of ingesting dangerous shit doesn't turn people off these days, a guy in China just discovered another fantastic reason to avoid biting into batteries—they tend to explode.

Footage of the unnamed man has gone viral in China after cameras caught the guy chomping down on a smartphone battery in a Chinese electronics store, causing it to erupt into a massive fireball, the Verge reports.

The accident reportedly happened on January 19, while the guy was shopping for a replacement battery for his iPhone, and footage from the store's surveillance camera was uploaded a day later on China's Vine-like video site, Miaopai. In the ten-second clip, an employee hands the man a battery, which he then puts in his mouth to take a bite. Seconds later, the battery explodes just inches from his face as nearby shoppers recoil in shock.

It's not clear what possible motive the man had for biting into the thing—Taiwan News pointed out that people sometimes bite down on gold to check its purity, but that pirate method isn't exactly transferrable to electronics.

To be fair, smartphone batteries have been known to explode on their own in pants pockets and cars and under pillows, so it's not clear if the bite directly caused the explosion, but the video sure makes a compelling argument that it had something to do with it.

Give the footage a watch above and try to keep your phone away from your mouth from now on, alright?

Check out that multi-tiered porch

Have a nomination for a jaw-dropping listing that would make a mighty fine House of the Day? Get thee to the tipline and send us your suggestions. We’d love to see what you’ve got.

Location: St. Petersburg, Florida

Price: $425,000

A special midcentury modern house is on the market in St. Petersburg, Florida, where architect Glenn Q. Johnson left his mark with “bird cage” designs. This particular home was completed in 1954 and bears many of his signatures, like open plan living quarters and a large porch.

Set on a platform of sorts and propped up stilts, the 1,460-square-foot residence features a triangular design that allows for soaring vaulted ceilings and a massive overhanging roof. The latter offers coverage over the multiple verandas, patios, and decks—on both levels.

Inside the split-level space, the living room, dining area, and kitchen occupy the main floor, which features a wall of windows opening onto the expansive deck. A bedroom is tucked behind this space as well as a bathroom (check out that penny tile floor!). Downstairs, a guest apartment has direct access to the outdoor space.

Although period details like the tongue-and-groove ceiling and flooring appear to be original and combine with other updates, the two-bedroom-2.5-bath could really shine with just the right refresh. Located at 721 Pinellas Point Drive South, it’s offered at $425,000.

Courtesy of Bedinghaus Real Estate Services (h/t Estately)

For the past few years Da Share Z0ne has been one of the internet’s best and weirdest parodies of internet culture—most directly of the kind of Facebook page that posts tough-guy memes over pictures of skeletons that your fuck-up cousin shares. They’re this generation’s version of a “Keep honking, I’m reloading”…

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A northern Maine town manager who espoused white separatist views was fired on Tuesday and is getting $30,000 for agreeing not to sue the town.

In the return episode of Comedy Central’s Drunk History, a drunk Tiffany Haddish takes us back to World War II France, recounting the story of Rose Valland, the war hero who saved thousands of works of French Jewish art that had been plundered by the Nazis. In the words of tipsy Haddish, “She ready.”

A cougar allegedly spotted Friday in Glendale Heights has not been seen again, and officials say they have found no physical evidence to confirm that a big cat actually visited the suburbs.

Brian Kraskiewicz, an ecologist with the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, said a visitor and a...

The world has taken so much from bros. Abercrombie & Fitch golf shirts have left widespread distribution; butt-rock and dubstep are on life support; there hasn’t been a new Daniel Tosh special since 2011. It’s hard out there and the recent death of Spike TV, a Valhalla of nonstop bro-gramming, is only pouring salt…

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President Donald Trump suggested Sunday that Republican senators should use their majority to bypass Democrats and pass a long-term budget, effectively ending the government shutdown.

New Year’s resolutions are too often restricted to boring junk like cutting down on drinking or going to the gym more often. Predictably, they fail because nobody likes exercise or sobriety, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

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This is probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever posted and I love it.

Tags: Pee-wee Herman   remix   Star Wars

Let’s say your house is on fire, or overrun by a gang of psychotic raccoons. You don’t hesitate—you take out your phone, and you call the fire department, or animal control, and then firemen/raccoon-wranglers are promptly dispatched to your home. These are well-established protocols, essential to the maintenance of a…

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Oscar nominations were announced early this morning in Los Angeles, setting the stage for what’s sure to be a politically charged ceremony similar to the Golden Globes earlier this year. Never ones to turn down a good montage, the Academy’s livestream opened with a stirring tribute to itself before cutting to hosts…

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Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for using his Twitter account to tackle everything from urgent scientific issues to pop culture.

As a non-fan of baby-back ribs or unlimited breadsticks, I tend to avoid the giant sit-down restaurant chains. I am fortunate enough to live in a major metropolitan area, so why would I go to Olive Garden when there are so many superior Italian restaurants around? But I have one glaring exception, a lifelong devotion…

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