Numbats

The numbat lives in western Australia and eats termites. To do this, they have specialized equipment. This video from the BBC series Life of Mammals. (via Laelaps)

Forty Years Ago Today: Apollo 13

The number 13 had a bad reputation long before 1970, but it only got worse on April 13 of that year. Just eight months earlier, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Apollo 12 had a picture-perfect mission to the moon in November. But Apollo 13 had that number. Lift off two days earlier was at 1:13 PM, or 13:13 in military time. Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell noticed the coincidence of the time, but he is not a superstitious man. Besides, lift-off was on April 11th. He, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise were on their way to the moon to explore the Fra Mauro highlands and bring back moon samples. But that's not the way the mission turned out, as you'll see in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Links for Fun

Cash Cab star Ben Bailey finds out what humans are made of. It makes kicking them out of the cab all that much easier.

TV Characters Who Suffered from Chuck Cunningham Syndrome. If that name doesn't ring a bell, then the producers' schemes have worked perfectly.

Trying to lead someone on when it's clear they aren't human can be hilarious.

These chairs are not stolen goods! There's a perfectly good explanation of how the seller came to possess them.

Superhero or Household Cleaner?

Why men love cats. Even though most would never own up to it.

Fard is a French animated short with no subtitles, but the plot is visual. The action really gets going about four minutes in.

More trivia about the TV show Seinfeld than you ever thought you'd see in one article. You're welcome.

Morphology

Kit Webster overlaid kaleidoscope images on a geometric sculpture. Whatever; just enjoy! (via Everlasting Blort)

Informative Links

A new hominid species found in South Africa may be a link between australopithecines and humans. The two skeletons are two million years old and have been named Australopithecus sediba.

6 Ridiculous History Myths (You Probably Think Are True). Urban legends? Next they'll tell us there's no tooth fairy!

American States That Might Have Been. To think how close I came to living in Transylvania! (via Metafilter)

Babies have sensory experiences even before birth. Practice is required for the development of sight, hearing, and even language acquisition.

Scientists have discovered three new multi-cellular animal species that don't require oxygen to live. They have some features of more primitive organisms that produce energy without oxygen.

Germans, Secret Inventors or Hot Air? UFO sightings in the early 20th century were attributed to German research, but they could have been from outer space!

Behind-the-scenes photographs from the set of Star Trek: The Original Series. There's also a set of blooper pictures, which is even more fun! (via Laughing Squid)

How the Mona Lisa was stolen in broad daylight in 1911. They might have caught the thief if it hadn't taken an entire day for the painting to be noticed as missing! (via Metafilter)

Porky the Fireman

From 1938.

The Beverly Hillbillies

This version had a verse touting the sponsor: Winston cigarettes. I don't remember this one. My memory has the "sponsor of the week, great cereals each morning, fresh from Battle Creek, K E double L, O double good, Kellogg's best to you."

Friday Fun Links

Light the candle, blow it out, then light the smoke trail. Cool parlor trick, but can you imagine how this works in a burning building?

The best and worst Star Wars cakes. Who wouldn't want Darth Vader appearing on a baby shower cake?

Cracked pitches a movie idea that is so ridiculous that by the time you finish reading it, you are dying to watch the film. Lucky for you it's available online, because rental stores have probably never heard of it.

David Thorne tried out Chatroulette, with the results you'd expect from a guy who tried to pay a bill by drawing a picture of a spider.

The award-winning game Small Worlds looks simple with its pixel graphics, but start exploring and the world becomes bigger. I could eat up a lot of time moving around in here!

Math Class April Fools Joke. When a professor sees his shadow, does that mean another six weeks of spring break?

What makes a good internet video? A funny-looking costume, or a cat, or someone falls down. So this video is destined to be a classic.

Christian Van Vuuren (Fully Sick Rapper) has been in quarantine for 102 days. The latest video he made to fight boredom shows signs of extreme stir craziness.

8 Strange and Different Musical Instruments

Middle school music classes will offer you a trumpet, flute, clarinet, drums, and a few other everyday musical instruments. Learn to play one of them and one day you may be asked to play a very different instrument that you might even fall in love with. Here are eight out of the ordinary musical instruments, from the tromboon to the hosaphone, in this article I wrote for mental floss.

Good Reads

78 Things You Didn’t Know About Johnny Cash. Each one of these simple sentences makes you want to know the rest of the story. (via J-Walk Blog)

6 More Restless Corpses. Everywhere you turn, the dead can seem to get no rest at all.

Unpaid internships are a handy way for employers to get free labor, often illegally. Of course, only those who don't need the money can afford to do the work.

5 Secrets of YouTube’s Success. This multi-link tribute goes way beyond what I thought was its greatest attribute: it's so easy to use!

Rocking the House, the Kasbah and the Yurt. A look at heavy metal in the farthest reaches of the earth. It's everywhere!

Scientists have synthesized element 117, which fills in the hole on the periodic table. It could be years before the dust settles over who gets the naming rights.

Of coal mines and methane, which may have caused the mine explosion Monday in West Virginia. Face it, there is no safe and responsible way to extract fossil fuels from underground.

4 Secret Societies You (Probably) Don’t Know About. And that right there is the definition of a successful secret society.

Maru Plays the Tambourine

Is there no end to Maru's talent for entertaining? (via Arbroath)

Our Adorable Relatives: 9 Tiny Primates

The biological order of primates includes humans, apes, and monkeys. It also includes prosimians, which are smaller, more primitive animals that we recognize as cute enough to be our relatives. See nine of them in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Informative Links

Why the songs on the radio seem to sound the same. I honestly thought it was just be getting old and crotchety. (via Dark Roasted Blend)

The death of photojournalism. Why would a magazine pay thousands for a professional to take pictures when you can buy one from a Flickr user for peanuts? (via Metafilter)

What Quirk of the Brain Turns People Into Compulsive Hoarders? It could be a set of inherited tendencies that coincide to produce the bizarre behavior.

The TV Deal the NBA Wishes It Had Not Made. The most profitable team in the National Basketball Association has never played an NBA game, and the profits will roll in "in perpetuty". (via Metafilter)

The earliest known survey on women's sex lives was conducted from 1892 to 1920. The 45 women confided things that completely contradict the popular notion of women of that time. (via Boing Boing)

Pigeons outperform humans at the Monty Hall Dilemma. Ah, but they had an edge in that they got to practice all day instead of just thinking it through! (via Neatorama)

Lil' Presidents, from LIFE Magazine. It's surprisingly easy to pick out which president sat for each childhood picture just by looking at those young faces. (via Buzzfeed)

A 6-year-old boy in China who was born with 31 fingers and toes had the extras removed. Here we have pictures before and after surgery, but be warned that post-surgery pictures can be painful to look at.

Gone With the Wind

Sure, you’ve seen the 1939 movie Gone With the Wind, who hasn’t? There’s a lot more to GWTW besides the film itself, like the reviews, parodies, documentaries, and historical footage you can see in these videos I posted at mental_floss.

Funny Links

This soccer report was certainly informative.

Boys will be girls, and girls will be boys. How men and women see each other, illustrated with the acting skills of the Harvard Sailing Team.

Feline Mission: Impossible. Cats have always excelled at parkour, so putting together a best-of was a challenge.

What Chewbacca does in his free time.

A to Z of Awesomeness. From Aztecs in Atomic Armor to ZZ Top Zapping Zombies. Zowie!

The game Tremerz is exactly like the movie Tremors, except that it's a video game. You are Kevin Bacon, and you must collect the other movie characters and lead them around while avoiding the Graboids. (via Metafilter)

You have less than 38 seconds to pay to park in Melbourne before getting a ticket. This guy has some ideas on how to get the cash to the ticket machine faster.

A list of things that can give you cancer, at least according to the Daily Mail. Can be summed up as "everything that makes life worth living."

Going to Korea

Knoxville comedian Henry Cho has a one-of-a-kind experience.

Good Friday Reads and Information

5 Virtuous Figures Caught With Their Flies Down (Or Skirts Up). Not that we are care about people's sex lives, it's just that the hypocrisy makes these stories stand out.

Are you a victim of "lifestyle creep"? The first step in getting your finances under control is recognizing whether you are actually living within your means.

10 Jewish Messiah Moments. Still waiting.

15-year-old Phoebe Prince was bullied and harassed for months and finally committed suicide. Nine students were arrested on various charges in the case, but what about the teachers and school administrators who did nothing to help her?

Black lights will make your room look groovy. They also help paleontologists find fossil structures that are invisible under normal light, like the faint imprints where feathers used to be.

5 Deadly Animals That Might Just Save Your Life. Mother Nature knows what she's doing, as long as we follow the rules.

Bill and Amarins packed up their three young daughters and set off on a 7,000 mile journey from Kentucky to Alaska. What's different about this trip is that they are traveling on a bicycle built for five!

5 Animals That Are Terrifyingly Hard to Kill. Fascinating, but it's from Cracked, and therefore has NSFW text.

This is where your pens go.

(via Buzzfeed)

6 Easter Customs from Readers

After Tuesday's post 6 Easter Traditions You Might Not Know, many mental_floss readers were kind enough to share their Easter customs with us. Now we will share those customs with everyone! Read about sawdust rugs, flying bells, cracked eggs, and fighting marshmallows in this post I wrote for mental_floss.

Fun and Funny Links

I have become an action figure. Go figure.

Here are the winners of the Washington Post Peeps Show. See all the entries in this gallery.

The 7 Most Insane True Stories of Neighbors from Hell. Be careful who you strike up a conversation with at your next block party.

I guess the last line explains everything.

Internet Pictures for Blind People. NSFW. The algorithm might need a little tweaking.

7 Totally Spectacular and Totally True Ways People Quit Their Jobs. Although this post is technically SFW, you might want to shield the article title from your supervisor.

Saturday April 3rd 2010 is International Pillow Fight Day! There will be massive pillow fights in cities around the world, so find out which one is nearest to you. (via Everlasting Blort)

Scratch a cat in that spot they can't reach, and they'll do something amazing in return. Try it with your own feline and see what happens.