This tiny film doesn’t feature any big stars like Brad Pitt, or even any littler stars—because there literally wasn’t enough room for them. Instead, A Boy and His Atomstars, amazingly, just a few microscopic particles. Guinness World Records has declared the stop-motion-animated short film “the world’s smallest movie.” The 90-second film consists of a “boy” bouncing an atom-sized ball while dancing and jumping around. There’s not much of a plot but given the methods involved, it’s pretty incredible.
IBM scientists created the film with a “scanning tunneling microscope” that manipulated a few dozen carbon atoms placed atop a copper surface. First they had to chill the microscope to just above absolute zero (-450° F) because at a higher temp, the “excitable” atoms would have ignored their stage directions.
Name the bestselling solo male musician of all time. Elvis Presley? Bing Crosby? Elton John? Nope. It’s country superstar Garth Brooks, who has sold more than 128 million albums in the U.S., which is especially remarkable because unlike those other guys, he didn’t have a recording career that lasted decades. His first record came out in 1989 and his last one in 2001. Why’d he retire? He wanted to try new things, particularly starring in and making movies.
Brooks is one of the most popular musicians of all time, and if a new lawsuit filed by a former business partner is to be believed, one of the prickliest. Former business partner Lisa Sanderson is taking Brooks to court because his bad behavior and pattern of bridge-burning resulted in a number of movie projects that never saw the light of day, and thus prevented Sanderson from earning a great deal of money.
Here are some of the movies Sanderson alleges she and Brooks worked on that never made it to the big screen:
Though it does closely resemble our ducky mascot, we swear that we are not behind this.
For the past few weeks, a gigantic, inflatable rubber duck has sat in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour and drawn thousands of onlookers. How big is it? Pretty big—16.5 meters tall, or 54 feet of inflatable ducky goodness.
Lauryn Hill was one of the most promising singers of the late ’90s. As part of the Fugees, she sang on a smash hit cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and then in 1998 released her solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Hill wrote and produced most of the album, which sold 19 million copies and won five Grammys, including Best New Artist and Album of the Year.
It looked like Hill would be one of the biggest pop stars of the new millennium…but then almost nothing happened. The only album she’s released since was a live performance in 2002, which was marked by emotional breakdowns and bizarre stage banter. After that she retired from music to raise her five children.
Allow us to explain. Margaret Groening was the mother of Matt Groening, the cartoonist who created the comic strip Life in Hell, and later, when he didn’t want to sell the TV rights to Life in Hell, an animated family sitcom called The Simpsons, which you may know as one of the longest-running and universally beloved entertainments of all time.
All aboard? Back in February, Australian billionaire Clive Palmer held a press conference to announce his plans to build a duplicate of the Titanic—arguably the most famous ocean-liner in history. The original Titanic, billed as “unsinkable,” hit an iceberg in 1912 and sank. Palmer is calling his ship, of course, Titanic II.
Think that might be a bad idea? Of course you do. And you’re not alone. While Palmer promises that Titanic II will have a stronger, more iceberg-proof hull (and way more lifeboats), critics say that the new ship makes a mockery of the hundreds of passengers who died on the original Titanic. Descendants of survivors of the disaster are even passing around a petition to block the construction of Titanic II.
Surefire blockbuster Iron Man 3 gets the summer movie season going when it’s released tonight. The villain who will try to take down Tony Stark this time: The Mandarin, an original character from comic books of the 1960s. Fortunately, the blatantly racist, stereotypically Asian elements of the character have been toned down for the movies (and he’s played by Sir Ben Kingsley).
Here are couple other questionable—and offensive—comic book characters.
You probably use Google, Bing, or Yahoo! to find things on the Internet, but have you ever heard of Shodan? Like the competition, it can be used to search the web for celebrity gossip and Game of Thrones spoilers, but unlike the competition, Shodan specializes in helping hackers to navigate the Internet’s back channels.
Did you know that National Park Week is April 20-28, 2013?
Did you know that there are 401 national parks? That they include seashores, battlefields, historic homes, archeological sites, and spectacular natural areas?
Did you know there is at least one national park in every state? …
You can plan your visit by what you want to do, or where you want to go … or you can browse our event calendar and check out the special programs offered that week. Also, from Monday through Friday, April 22 to 26, every national park will have free admission!
Free admission—that’s a big savings if you go to a park with your family or a group of friends, just to note.
Every year for Christmas, I get my husband an Uncle John Bathroom Reader – as the throne room IS his favorite place to read. He is a golfer, too. THIS book has to be one of the funniest since the laughter floating out the bathroom door was just plain fun to listen too. Later on or days later on the golf course, he would be sharing the stories he read and the laughter would begin again.
This year, I gave him a new padded toilet seat for his throne and 3 Uncle John Readers! I do believe it was one of the best choices I’ve ever made as far as gifts go…especially on the grin and giggle meter!! Thanks, Amazon for having the best choices.
Cicadas are the vuvuzelas of the insect world. (What are vuvuzelas? Those loud horns that nearly caused soccer fans’ brains to explode during the 2010 World Cup.) Vuvuzelas reach a decibel level of 60, but cicadas? These little bugs can reach a decibel level twice that loud.That’s as loud as a rock concert or a jet engine.
BROODY BUGS
Cicadas are bizarre, especially the “periodical cicadas” that live only in eastern North America. What’s odd about them is that they’re on either a 13- or a 17-year cycle. They emerge in “broods” of so many bugs it’s like some shock-and-awe insect invasion, make a lot of deafening noise, mate, lay eggs, and, within just a few weeks, die. Then they disappear again for an another exact number—13 or 17—of years. Entomologists are still trying to figure out what makes periodical cicadas tick. The main problem: those long cycles. It’s difficult for scientists to study an insect that shows up only once or twice in their careers. The name cicada is Latin for “tree cricket,” which is actually incorrect: cicadas are not crickets. And though one species is commonly called the “17-year locust,” they’re not locusts, either. Locusts are “eating machines” that can devour entire crops. Cicadas don’t eat leaves; they’re sapsuckers, like their closest relatives leafhoppers and spittlebugs. Cicadas have also been called “jar flies,” “harvest flies,” and “dust flies,” but their Australian nickname, “galang-galang,” which echoes the racket they make, may be the most fitting.
The three ads feature illustrations of Paris Hilton, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and German racecar driver Michael Schumacher each sitting in the front seat of a Ford Figo. In each ad, the celebrity had their “enemies” tied up in the trunk (to demonstrate how big it was). Hilton had paparrazi bound and gaggedl Schumaker had rival drivers. Berlusconi had a bunch of scantily clad models in his trunk.
Of course, this isn’t the first time an ad campaign has courted controversy. Last year, the makers of Pop Chips thought it would be hilarious to dress actor Ashton Kutcher up as “Raj,” a sleazy, thick-accented Bollywood producer and stick him in a commercial. Following an outcry on the Internet, the company yanked the ad. But here it is!
Gullible bargain hunters at Argentina’s largest bazaar are forking out hundreds of dollars for what they think are gorgeous toy poodles, only to discover that their cute pooch is in fact a ferret pumped up on steroids.
One retired man from Catamarca, duped by the knock-down price for a pedigree dog, became suspicious he had bought what Argentinians call a ‘Brazilian rat’ and when he returned home took the ‘dogs’ to a vet for their vaccinations.
Imagine his surprise when his suspicious were confirmed – he had in fact purchased two ferrets that had been given steroids at birth to increase their size and then had some extra grooming to make their coats resemble a fluffy toy poodle.
Meat is getting a makeover. Meat cuts are renamed to give them more marketing flair.
As the weather gets hotter and more and more Americans’ fancy turns to thoughts of grilling, the beef and pork industries are planning on some thick and juicy changes. They’re going to rename as many as 350 different cuts of meat.
This has nothing to do with the recent horsemeat scandals at European IKEA stores and Burger Kings. Rather, the industries want to promote their products with some marketing flair while at the same time eliminating confusion over the same cut of meat having multiple, often long and confusing names.
In the study, published in the journal Science, researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto, western Japan, used MRI scans to locate exactly, which part of the brain was active during the first moments of sleep.
They then woke up the dreamer and asked him or her what images they had seen, a process that was repeated 200 times. These answers were compared with the brain maps that the MRI scanner produced.
Researchers were then able to predict what images the volunteers had seen with a 60 per cent accuracy rate, rising to more than 70 per cent with around 15 specific items including men, words and books, they said.
This tiny film doesn’t feature any big stars like Brad Pitt, or even any littler stars—because there literally wasn’t enough room for them. Instead, A Boy and His Atom stars, amazingly, just a few microscopic particles. Guinness World Records has declared the stop-motion-animated short film “the world’s smallest movie.” The 90-second film consists of a “boy” bouncing an atom-sized ball while dancing and jumping around. There’s not much of a plot but given the methods involved, it’s pretty incredible.
