For around 50 years now, science fiction writers have considered the possibility of terraforming Mars, meaning changing the planet to be more like earth. Scientists have also looked at the idea, and have some plausible ideas. My first thought was water- you need a lot of water to make life work, but apparently Mars has a lot of underground frozen water, so the big challenge is warming it up. This can be done with strategic greenhouses, or putting something in the atmosphere that could cause a greenhouse effect.    

What could possibly go wrong? As of yet, these ideas aren't possible because the necessary materials haven't been developed. But we know they could be in the future. Read up on some of the ways we could change Mars to be more habitable. The more relevant question is "should we?" The time, technology, and money that such a project requires would dwarf the amount we could sink into making the planet we already have more habitable. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Philip James (University of Toledo), Steven Lee (University of Colorado), NASA) 

Conditions at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, were so bad that when a fight between two inmates was broken up in 1971, it started a chain reaction that led to a riot. Critical errors in the guards' containment strategy enabled angry inmates to take control of most of the prison and hold prison guards as hostages. This led to a standoff, and the prisoners took the opportunity to organize, not only to negotiate with authorities, but to run the prison themselves. Their list of demands seemed to be fairly reasonable, and in fact most were reforms they had been requesting for some time and had been ignored. 

The standoff lasted four days and ended with a violent raid that left 43 people dead. The incident shocked America, and the results were a little bit of prison reform and a lot of Americans who learned about prison conditions for the very first time. Weird History explains what happened at Attica.  

Redditor Ok_Illustrator_8711 never met his grandmother, yet he got a glimpse of her personality from a diary she kept from the days when she married his grandpa. The entries are wonderful cartoons she drew of her life events. He shared a few pages from it that start with "Pre-Marital Chaos" as she planned their wedding. They honeymooned in Hot Springs, Arkansas. 



Further entries show us the young couple settling into a home and adjusting to married life, which had both joys and frustrations. 


But eventually, the chronicle takes a dark turn as Art is deployed to Europe in 1944. Grandma went to stay with her parents and cursed Hitler, and her diary entries involved other people and a longing for Art's return. Ok_Illustrator_8711 assures us he returned, and they lived happily ever after, until Grandma passed in 1977. Grandma could have been a comic illustrator, but it was just a hobby for her. See the diary pages at this reddit post, where you can click to enlarge the gallery. -via kottke 

The 911 emergency system was inaugurated in the 1960s, but its rollout was slow, and it took years for smaller towns to fund and implement it. We all knew it was a great idea. Then enhanced 911 came out, and they could locate your landline phone as soon as you called. What sorcery is this? But technology advances, and now cities with the most sophisticated 911 service can even locate the cell phone that made the call. 

We rely on the system, but few of us understand how it works now. Half as Interesting explains what happens when you make a 911 call. I have a bone to pick, though. Back in the day, you never had to dial a ten-digit number to get the local police. That would be a useless long-distance call. Local numbers are seven digits, or four digits if you go back far enough. This video is only 5:27; the rest is an ad. 

The game Star Fling has a really simple premise. You are orbiting a star. You can click and fling an inert ball at the planetary orbit of the next star, and if you hit it, you are then orbiting the second star and can fling at the third. How many stars can you hit? 

The caveat is that the game is over as soon as you miss, but you can start a new game quickly. And you will have to restart a few times before you figure it out. Yeah, a missed shot "falls" to the ground, but hey, it's just a game. I honestly hit eight stars once, but I can't prove it. Those who know say that it's slower and easier on a mobile device, and I was playing on a desktop. Also, I didn't want to play all day before I posted this, so rest assured that you can beat my score if you fool around with this for a while. I found that getting a screenshot of the action was impossible, so all I can show you is my score. I'd like to see the finished star pattern of someone who hit many more stars. -via Metafilter 

When you hear about a mob of wallabies in a nearby park, you might assume that this all takes place in Australia, but no. Lindsay Clarity runs Animal School in East Sussex, UK! It is a shelter for all kinds of rescued animals and also an educational institution where children can learn about nature. One of the odder residents is Blossom, an albino wallaby who was abandoned by her mother at a very young age. She was found at Leonardslee Gardens, an estate that has exotic animals on the grounds that were introduced more than 100 years ago.  

Clarity took Blossom in and had to learn everything about how wallaby mothers normally raise their babies, which includes carrying them around in their pouches until they are 18 months old! Yes, she did that for a year, and now she has a lifetime companion in the little Australian creature. See more from the Animal School at YouTube. 

My family went out of town to see the new movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Before it started, I studied the candy counter and saw something intriguing called Reese's Pieces that looked like M&Ms with peanut butter inside. The clerk said they were brand new and sold me some. I was munching those delicious morsels during the movie and saw Elliot clearly luring E.T. with Reece's Pieces. Now it all made sense- it was a promotional tie-in. And that's how we all learned about product placement. Reece's Pieces became a hit. It's happened with other movies, sometimes intentionally, but often accidentally, as in the adoption of Monty Python's "spam" as the perfect term for junk email. And dramatic stories sometimes unrealistically raise our expectations for the real thing. 

Life is rarely as neat and tidy as a one-hour plot. Read about 15 of the ways TV shows and movies have influenced the real world at Cracked. 

Have you ever had the feeling that every day is the same? Will had that feeling. His life was so mundane and predictable that it took him quite some time to figure out that he was stuck in a time loop. Yeah, you've seen it happen in the movie Groundhog Day, but this story is grungier and downright dismal. Every day is the same no matter what he does with it. And how can you stop a bedwetting problem if you don't know what led up to it? Will finally comes clean to Elise, who doesn't believe him. But she does help him to break his cycle and emerge from the time loop.

But is it really a flaw in the space/time continuum? There are clues throughout this video that things aren't exactly what they seem. You may have to watch it through twice to catch them. Even then, you might disagree with the person next to you about what is really happening. This video contains NSFW language.  -via the Awesomer 

In 1941, the SS Britannia was en route from the UK to Bombay when it was attacked by a German warship and sunk. Almost half the passengers and crew were lost. Several of the survivors were picked up five days later clinging to a raft. Among them was Second Lieutenant R.E.G. Cox of the Indian Army, who had some strange wounds. Were they a result of an attack by a giant squid? 

In 1960, Cox's story was published in the book Kingdom of the Octopus as a warning of the danger of cephalopod attacks. It was aired on TV in 1980 in an episode of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. And it has been retold as fact ever since. But giant squids don't come to the surface to feed. Historian Jonathan Dyer looked into the story, and traced it back to an account by Cox in 1960, in which he first identified the attacker as a giant squid. In a newspaper article from only seven months after the 1941 attack, Cox's story was quite lurid- he was attacked by a stinging octopus, while a shark bit another man clinging to the life raft, then that man was eaten by a manta ray. Another newspaper account told quite a different story. Read what really caused Cox's wounds, and how the tale grew bigger and stranger over the years, at the Public Domain Review. -via Strange Company 

John Williams composed "The Imperial March" from Star Wars as a military march because that's how Dart Vader enters a scene. The song is not only miitary, but downright evil. It's a tune that's been stuck in your head for almost 50 years now. Or at least in mine. But if you know a lot about music, you can do some odd things with a familiar theme.  

Swedish guitarist Lucas Brar turned "The Imperial March" into a fugue, which is a composition with a main theme plus bells and whistles that complement and compete with the main theme, but always comes back to it. Read a better explanation here. Johann Sebastian Bach was well known for his musical fugues. Brar was thinking of Bach when he dressed up the march in a way that make it sound a little less ominous, or at least least a little less military, and a lot more interesting. 

When you think of child soldiers, you might think of certain African rebel militias, or about the youngsters who fought in the American Civil War. But boys too young to realize what they're doing managed to become fighters in World War II as well. Most of these enlistments were due to a volunteer lying about his age, and induction officers who turned a blind eye because they were desperate for recruits. Or they were members of partisan militias. That's how we managed to have a teenage bombing expert and a 15-year-old kamikaze pilot. There was even a 6-year-old in uniform (shown above), but he was a refugee under the care of a Soviet military unit and not an official soldier. 

The youngest World War II soldier in the US military was 12-year-old Calvin Graham, who forged documents that said he was 17 and had his parents' permission to enlist in the navy. He became a decorated war hero before he was found out. Read about five underage youngsters who fought in World War II at Mental Floss.    

Two adventurers, or looters if you will, separately seek the treasure of an ancient king and queen from a magical booby-trapped castle. Their names are Robin and Rayden, although which is which I cannot tell. The voice actors are named Darci and Parley, which doesn't help. Anyway, they don't know each other. She's tougher, but he has the instructions, so they need to team up to find and steal a huge gem hidden in the labrynthine palace. The plot is far from groundbreaking, but the animation is luscious, the action is invigorating, and there are some funny moments. 

Love & Gold is a student animation, written and directed by Connor Van Dyke and produced by Jaysen Duckworth of Brigham Young University's Media Arts program, although many others were involved. The film won the award for Best Animation  at the Television Academy Foundation’s 45th College Television Awards last week. You can read more about it at Kuriositas. 

Author Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how online services tend to, over time, get stupidly worse. More generally, enshittification has become used to describe how products and services have become worse over time. Things are not built to last, but to break down almost immediately upon purchase. Contracts are not honored, trust is not nurtured, and providers of services take every opportunity to barely fulfill obligations.

It's what happens when a high trust society degenerates into a low trust society.

The Norwegian Consumer Council, a government organization ostensibly tasked with protecting consumers from enshittification, produced this humorous video describing a man whose job is to enshittify everything he can.

-via Kottke

NASA's Artemis II mission is on their way home after circling the moon. They are expected to splash down off the coast near San Diego on Saturday evening. They have set a record for the furthest any human has flown away from the earth, at 252,000 miles. While passing around the moon, they took lots of gorgeous photographs of the spaceship, the earth, and the moon, including the "dark side" we never get to see from earth. 

NASA photographs are in the public domain, and they are glad to share them with us all. Many of these high-resolution space photos have been sized to use for computer wallpapers and phone screens, and some have been altered for dramatic effect. You can find these at NASA and from those who have resized and reformatted them for your use, with various links found at kottke, where you'll also find some of his favorite such images. 

There are thousands of different snake species, and they all have a few things in common. They don't have legs, they are carnivorous, and humans are afraid of them. We have good reason to be scared, since snakes can be quite venomous, the better to disable prey and repel threats. But all these different kinds of snakes have a wide variety of techniques for killing. 

Some will eat another animal that's bigger than they are, and have developed some weird physiological tricks to get away with that. Despite one graphic in this TED-Ed video, we've never seen a case of a snake swallowing an elephant, but they have been known to consume an entire alligator or deer. Others specialize in one specific type of prey and have adapted both their anatomy and lifestyle to surviving off of it. There are reasons snakes have survived on earth so long, and why we are seemingly born to fear them.