A Chef Guides Us Through The Weird Process Of Creating A TV Dinner

Ever wondered just how all those pre-packaged meals, with the list of unpronounceable ingredients on the back, are made and just who it is who develops the recipes? A chef takes us through the whole process, from the lab/kitchen all the way to your grocery cart. Commenter Stroppydog, a research chef whose job involves creating…

Hear The Brand-New Song Stephen Sondheim Wrote For Into The Woods 

Composer Stephen Sondheim wrote a brand spankin’ new song for the Into The Woods movie debut. It was titled “She’ll Be Back,” and it was for Meryl Streep’s character — and it was also cut. But they’ve released the clip and now you can hear new Sondheim. If you don’t want to hear the PR…

What will fine dining look like in the post-apocalypse? Photographer Henry Hargreaves has been photographing the “Armageddon menus” of various doomsday preppers — including those whose food choices are limited by their religions and medical conditions. Some look much more appetizing than others.

Trout Behavior Shows Why A Stagnating Hierarchy is Good For Everyone

What could we learn from brown trout? We could learn to give up our dreams of continuously renewing our culture through immigration. Yep, blending populations works out badly for nearly everyone. Or at least for fish. We’ll tell you how. If you want to find out about fish cultivation, you should probably go to Erik…

These Hi-Tech Faucets Prove That The Future Is Coming To Our Bathrooms

Faucets already seem a bit like magic — you turn them on and the water flows right out. But these faucet designs add a bit more pizazz to conventional plumbing technology, letting us better control the flow and temperature of water. Ripple Faucet, designed by Smith Newnam, 2008. It uses a metal ball on electromagnetic…

The Great Internet Debate Over Not Reading White Men

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to The Kerfuffler! I’m your host, fantasy writer, essayist, and mad tweeter, Saladin Ahmed. Every other week I’ll be looking at America’s seemingly endless culture wars playing out online, tracing their fault lines, and wading hip-deep into comment sections so you don’t have to. My first dispatch comes from the…

New “Senolytic” Drugs Can Dramatically Increase Healthy Lifespan

Researchers from the Scripps Research Institute and the Mayo Clinic have developed a new class of drugs that were shown to significantly slow the aging process in animal models. Remarkably, dramatic improvements were noticeable just days after treatment. The research was only carried out on mice, but the introduction of an entirely new class of…

Sleepy Hollow Just Got Some Very Bad News

No, the show hasn’t been canceled… yet. But that fate seems more more likely now that showrunner Mark Goffman is leaving the series to work on new projects at CBS. Losing its showrunner doesn’t necessarily mean the show will be canceled, but it could be that Goffman saw the writing on the wall for the…

If You Could Relive A Relationship’s Best Memories, Could You Move On?

Henry can’t stop reliving his favorite memory of his girlfriend Sophie (played by Jena Malone) in the short film Memory 2.0. But his obsession may pay off when he realizes she’s left a message for him inside his brain. Memory 2.0 was directed by Dugan O’Neal and co-stars Wilson Bethel as Henry. We’ve seen quite…

How To Make Smoke Rings With A Water Bottle, A Balloon, And Incense

In high school, I once tried to build a smoke-ring-generating vortex cannon out of a five-gallon paint bucket, a t-shirt, and some dry ice. My contraption was a letdown. It produced weak, wispy rings, and did so inconsistently. This video shows how to build a DIY vortex cannon that actually works. All you need is…

The Avengers 2 Trailer Redubbed With Adorable Little Kids Is Pure Joy

Sorry, Spider-Man. I thought adding you to the latest Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer’s leaping shot was the only way to improve upon it. As it turns out, if you have small children rerecord all the characters’ lines — and the sound effects — you turn a stirring movie preview into an avant-garde masterpiece. [Via…

How The Sugar Industry Continues To Subvert Public Health Policies

A recent analysis of nearly 320 internal sugar industry documents from 1959 to 1971 shows how the industry sought to influence the setting of U.S. research priorities during that time. Disturbingly, it’s a strategy that continues to this very day. Forty or 50 years ago, at least in the United States, tooth decay was seen…

Just How Impossible Is This Elusive Particle?

In the early 2000s, physicists at a particle accelerator in France saw something that simply couldn’t be. And it “couldn’t be,” two different ways. Now the world is attempting to figure out which way is more impossible. In 2001, Francisco-Miguel Marqués and his team were having a typical day firing one tiny thing at another…

New Vaccine Proven Effective Against Genital And Oral Herpes Viruses

An unconventional take on vaccine design has been shown to protect mice against HSV-1 and HSV-2, the two most common forms of herpes that cause cold sores and genital ulcers, respectively. Above: TEM micrograph of a herpes simplex virus | Credit: CDC/Dr. Erskine Palmer Researchers led by Albert Einstein College of Medicine researcher William Jacobs…

The Secret History Of Marvel’s Movies Before Iron Man: Part 1

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has changed the face of blockbuster movies as we know them today. But Marvel’s own history with film started long before the first Iron Man film in 2008. Here’s the history of Marvel movies on the big and small screen, from the 1940s to the dawn of the Avengers Initiative. The…

This Short Movie About An Endless Future War Looks Unspeakably Great

Check out the trailer for The Shaman, a new short film debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival. As with a lot of short films we’ve seen lately, this has top-notch visual effects — but more than that, it looks like a thing of pure beauty. And it has an original story, with a concept I…

Arya Stark Is Barely Recognizable In Her New Game Of Thrones Outfit

We’ve seen concept art of the outfit that Arya Stark will be wearing in the upcoming season of Game of Thrones, the one that made Maisie Williams unrecognizable on set. Now we get to see what it looks like in the flesh — and Arya does look radically different. Check out the whole thing below.…

A College Girl Starts Seeing Her Classmates As Monsters In This Webcomic

Do you ever wonder if what you’re seeing is real or just part of some vast visual conspiracy? That’s a question Allison Beaufort has to confront in Suzanne Geary’s webcomic Brainchild. After a blow to the head, Allison starts seeing her classmates as mutant creatures — but what if that’s their true form? Allison is…

How One Man Wanted To Save The World By Taxing Its Poop

I think we can all agree that, in the early 1800s, there were a lot of problems with the world. One man saw those problems and came up a solution… a solution involving poop. Pierre Leroux liked society, but not authority. Born in the late 1700s, he somehow found a way to be both a…

Here’s NASA’s Deep Space Rocket Booster In Action, On The Ground

It’s the most powerful rocket booster ever built, could be our best bet to set a foot down on Mars, and it just successfully fired up in this test explosion not out in the wilds of space, but right here on the ground — and you can see it in action in these incredible pictures.…