If you’re a European, your body requires more vegetables and grains

Water bears can replace all the fluid in their bodies with a glass matrix

Welcome to the age of the manufactured meme

In the most wholesome meme on the Internet, a professor attempts to talk about South Korean politics while his kids dance around and his wife races to get them offscreen.

Last week, Pusan National University political science professor Robert Kelly was giving yet another live news interview via Skype about the impeachment of South Korean President Park Geun-hye. An international expert in Korean politics, he was discussing the situation on BBC TV in a jacket and tie, broadcasting from what looked like an office. But then his daughter and son burst into the room behind him, followed by their frantic mother trying to shoo them out. The rest is (very recent) history. What Kelly has since called "a family blooper" became one of the most talked-about clips on the Internet over the weekend, covered in every major news outlet globally. Kelly's family even had to hold a press conference about it in Pusan. Though the incident was an unplanned accident, all the insane publicity is because the BBC deliberately packaged it as a meme.

What's gotten lost in all the crosstalk about what this clip represents in terms of Kelly's work-life balance, or his wife's parenting skills, or just the general adorableness of their daughter's dance moves, is the fact that this was a perfectly architected social media blockbuster. BBC host James Menendez, who was interviewing Kelly when the kids waltzed in, admitted later that he could have cut away from the interview but decided to keep going to see what would happen next. He must have realized it would make a terrific viral video.

Minutes after the interview was broadcast, BBC News producer David Waddell tweeted at Kelly, "Nicely handled interruption, Professor! Do you have any objection to me sharing the clip of that moment on BBC News?" Kelly, who later described himself as mortified and worried the BBC would never contact him again, replied with confusion: "What would that mean, please? Re-broadcasting it on BBC TV, or just here on Twitter? Is this kinda thing that goes 'viral' and gets weird?" The answer, as it turned out, was yes and yes. The video blew up, especially in Korea, where a public reeling from political scandal was eager for comic relief of any kind.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Welcome to the age of the manufactured meme

Get ready for The Matrix reboot

Bay Area: Join us 3/15 to talk about how we know climate change is real

New research changes our understanding of who built ancient Silk Roads

Nature

The Silk Road was a series of ancient trading routes that spanned Asia, reaching as far as the Middle East and Europe. Self-organizing and vast, it fell under the control of various empires—but never for long. The polyglot civilizations of traders who lived along its routes are the subject of legends, and more recently the Silk Road lent its name to an infamous darknet market. Historians usually date the Silk Road from roughly the 200s to the 1400s. But a new study in Nature suggests the trade routes may be 2,500 years older than previously believed and its origins much humbler than the rich cities it spawned.

Historical accounts of the Silk Road begin in China in the 100s, when the Han Dynasty used its many routes to trade with the peoples of Central and South Asia. Han soldiers protected the roads and maintained regular outposts on them, allowing wealth and knowledge to flow across the continent. Monks wandering the Silk Road brought Buddhism from India to China, while merchants brought spices, gems, textiles, books, horses, and other valuables from one part of the continent to the other. Great Silk Road cities such as Chang'an (today called Xi'an) and Samarkand grew fat on wealth from the routes that passed outside their walls.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from New research changes our understanding of who built ancient Silk Roads

Creepy mouse experiment helps scientists understand contagious behavior

A mouse watches a video of another mouse scratching and becomes itchy. This means contagious scratching isn't based on smells or being familiar with the itchy mouse. (video link)

Humans and other social animals suffer from something called contagious itching. It's when you see somebody else scratching and suddenly need to scratch yourself, too. Now, a group of scientists led by Zhou-Feng Chen at the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered that mice have the same problem. In the process, the scientists may have identified what causes some contagious behaviors.

Once Chen and his colleagues had established that mice have contagious itching just like other mammals, they wanted to know more. How did such behavior arise in the neurocircuitry of mouse brains? One possibility was that it was a kind of empathetic reaction to mice they knew well or that it was a response to smelling or touching an itchy mouse. But they found that mice could catch itches from strange mice—and even from mice they saw on video (see video above). So clearly all they needed was to see another itchy mouse to get itchy themselves.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Creepy mouse experiment helps scientists understand contagious behavior

Bay Area: Join us 3/15 to talk how we know climate change is real

Australia was colonized by a single group 50,000 years ago

Nature

There are two central mysteries about human history in Australia. First, when did people arrive on the world's southernmost inhabitable continent? And second, how did they colonize it? A paper in Nature offers new answers, based on an extensive analysis of decades-old DNA.

By studying the mitochondrial DNA of Aboriginal Australians from all across the continent, University of Adelaide biologist Alan Cooper and his team were able to trace the population back to its most recent common ancestor, a woman who lived between 43,000 and 47,000 years ago. Because mitochondrial DNA is passed from mothers to children virtually unchanged, it's often used to trace genetic histories over long time spans. Based on this finding and dates of the earliest archaeological sites in Australia, Cooper and colleagues write that the continent was likely colonized by a single group of people about 50,000 years ago.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Australia was colonized by a single group 50,000 years ago

Fireside Fiction Company is science fiction’s best-kept secret

The Amazon forest is the result of an 8,000-year experiment

With Logan, Wolverine finally gets the movie he deserves

20th Century Fox

The X-Men movies are often pyrotechnic affairs, full of flashy CGI and casts of thousands. But then Deadpool changed everything, with its loner snarkface anti-hero who isn't interested in Saving The World. Logan feels like a movie that learned the best lessons from Deadpool: keep it small, keep it real, and keep it focused on lots and lots of stabbing. The result is not just the only Wolverine movie that's worth seeing (which—we know that's a low bar); Logan is also a brilliant standalone entry in the ever-evolving cinematic world of the X-Men.

Light spoilers ahead.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from With Logan, Wolverine finally gets the movie he deserves

Fossils reveal ancient “unknown” human in China

Science

The chance discovery of two nearly intact crania, or skull caps, has given us a window into how Homo sapiens evolved in Asia over 100,000 years ago. Dubbed Xuchang 1 and 2, the crania are between 105,000 and 125,000 years old and have distinct shapes unlike anything seen before in the fossil record. Describing the new findings in Science, paleoanthropologist Xiu-Jie Wu and her colleagues say they've found an ancient human where the features are distinctly Neanderthal mixed with those of a modern human.

Zhan-Yang Li, Wu's colleague at the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, found miraculously undamaged fragments of the two crania in Lingjing, a village in Henan, China. A spring flowed there during the Pleistocene period when these humans would have lived, and the area was full of now-extinct megafauna like Bos (aurochs, or wild cows), Megaloceros (a massive deer), and Coelodonta (a rhino), as well as elk and horses. Bones from these animals were found with Xuchang 1 and 2, along with stone tools made from quartz. It appears that Xuchang 1 and 2 were successful hunters with a rich array of foods to eat.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Fossils reveal ancient “unknown” human in China

Get ready for robots made with human flesh

First trailer for Okja proves that giant monsters can always get weirder

The first teaser trailer for Bong Joon-ho's new kaiju flick, Okja.

Okja is a twist on the classic monster movie. It's also a twist on mad science movies, coming-of-age movies, and satires of corporate life. Things are so twisty because it's the latest offering from cult director Bong Joon-ho, who previously gave us wacky, dark science fiction movies like The Host and Snowpiercer.

Okja is the result of Netflix giving Bong $50 million and complete artistic freedom, and the results look just as bizarre as you might hope. The movie stars Ahn Seo-hyun, Tilda Swinton, and Giancarlo Esposito, among others.

The central struggle is between image-obsessed corporate scientist Nancy Mirando (Swinton) and a girl named Mija (Ahn). In this teaser trailer, we hear Nancy proclaim that she's put science and nature together to create something extraordinary. But that "something" is Mija's best friend, who also happens to be a giant monster. We only see a glimpse of the monster, but if Bong's previous monster movie The Host is any indication, this megabeast is going to look great.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from First trailer for Okja proves that giant monsters can always get weirder

The Stars Are Legion is bizarrely original space opera

One of the joys of good space opera, aside from the action, is the discovery of worlds that are meaningfully alien. In award-winning science fiction author Kameron Hurley’s latest novel, The Stars Are Legion, we get to slither into the fascinating, saliva-covered scenery of the biotech world-ships that make up the mysterious Legion. As civil war rips the Legion apart, Hurley draws us into an intense, Bourne Identity-style mystery about who our heroes are and why they’re fighting.

Zan awakens in a medical bay. She can speak, but she doesn’t know who or where she is. A doctor explains that Zan’s been recycled and reconstructed, hinting that she’s been in this situation many times before. But that’s all Zan knows—well, that and the fact that she has the kind of warrior instincts that let her fight like she’s about to enter the Octagon. Plus, she knows an awful lot about how to ride sentient space-motorcycles. The Legion flies these beasts from one ship to the other, trailing plumes of yellow exhaust like something out of a 1960s comic book.

Biotech worlds

A mystery woman named Jayd eventually visits Zan and tells her that she’s currently on a planet ship called Katazyrna. Jayd tells Zan that the time has come to get back to her mission to penetrate the defenses of another world called Mokshi. And it would be nice if she could do it without getting all her troops killed this time around. Apparently, whenever Zan goes to Mokshi, she’s completely destroyed and loses her memory. But Jayd and her mother, Lord Katazyrna, keep sending Zan back because she’s the only person able to breach Mokshi’s outer perimeter.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from The Stars Are Legion is bizarrely original space opera

Get Out is the rare movie that perfectly blends horror and satire

Universal

It's the perfect setup for a horror movie: there's a lonely house in the woods and a weird ritual that our naive protagonist Chris (Black Mirror's Daniel Kaluuya) doesn't understand until it's too late. Except the "woods" are a bucolic suburb and the weird ritual is meeting his girlfriend Rose's family for the first time. But something even creepier than awkward small talk is going on. And that's where the horror/fun of Get Out begins.

Chris has a tragic past, but he's become a successful photographer and finally found happiness with new girlfriend Rose. They've been together for five months, and now he's ready to meet her family. But there's a little more tension than usual in this relationship rite of passage: Rose (Girls' Allison Williams) is white, and she hasn't told her parents that Chris is black. Chris is nervous, but Rose points out that telling her parents: "Oh yeah, I'm bringing my BLACK boyfriend home" would have been even more awkward.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Get Out is the rare movie that perfectly blends horror and satire

Bees are even smarter than we realized

Ars Technica Live: What to do when border officials ask for your passwords

Ars Live #10, filmed by Chris Schodt and produced by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Under President Trump in the United States, we're seeing a dramatic shift in border regulation and the treatment of immigrants. What exactly are your rights at the border, and should you really hand over your social media passwords to a customs agent? UC Hastings law professor Ahmed Ghappour, an expert in national security and cybersecurity, recently talked to Cyrus Farivar and me about the answers in all their complexity.

Outside of legal circles, most people don't realize that your Fourth Amendment right to not be subjected to "unreasonable search" is suspended at the borders. Ghappour explained this gives border agents a lot of leeway in terms of how much they search and detain people crossing into the US. He talked to Ars about recent cases where people have been asked to hand over the passwords to their phones and computers, as well as other personal items. During the discussion above, we also touch upon surveillance at the border and what's likely to come next in terms of sensors, drones, and data mining for "national security threats."

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Ars Technica Live: What to do when border officials ask for your passwords

It took less than a minute of satellite time to catch these thieves red-handed

The heart of the Pacific Ocean is a vast, barely explored region outside national boundaries, teeming with undiscovered species and dramatic undersea terrain. A few organizations monitor activity here, mostly international fisheries management groups, but it's easy for a vessel to get lost in the enormous distances. That's exactly what many pirate fishing fleets depend on.

Though normally we associate the term piracy with rogues who commandeer other people's ships, it's also used as shorthand to describe illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing. The Pacific is crawling with fishing pirates. Often their ships are crewed by malnourished slaves who don't see land for months at a time, a practice that has been documented by rights groups and exposed in a 2015 Associated Press investigation. They make their money by fishing illegally or in poorly regulated areas and then offloading their goods to the crews of large refrigerated cargo vessels called reefers in a process called transshipping. The reefer crews mix their legal catch with the pirate catch and then sell it all in port.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from It took less than a minute of satellite time to catch these thieves red-handed