You know your lettuce, and you’re not going to confuse broccoli and cauliflower. But how well do you know your more obscure veggies? Take this delectable quiz to find out.

Take the Quiz: Obscure Vegetables

With so many churches around the world, it stands to reason that some will end up unused from time to time. But there’s no reason to call in the demo crew. There are a lot of good ways to repurpose the House of God.

1. Restaurant & Brewery

The Church Brew Works in Pittsburgh pays special homage to the former occupant of its location with a beer called Pious Monk.

2. Children’s Indoor Playland

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Last week I came across a long-lost film by Jim Henson from 1963. Here’s a companion piece featuring Jerry Juhl, Henson’s longtime collaborator. Juhl stars as “Charlie Magnetico” and Charlie’s mother, “Mom Magnetico,” as well as various other human roles.

The AT&T archive released this film to the public today. Here’s part of what AT&T’s archivists say about the film:

Juhl’s collaborations with Henson, especially in the late 1960s, with their commercial work for IBM and American Oil, return to the theme of the interactions of man and machine (and their subsequent difficulties!). Juhl’s interest turned to writing late in the decade, and besides penning some science fiction, he contributed greatly to the crafting of the Sesame Street and Muppets characters’ personalities. He later became the head writer for The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock.

Early in the 1970s, he moved to California. And he was able to work with his peers, who were located in New York, via Data Communications! Juhl was an early adopter of modem technology, and it allowed him to continue to do his work with Henson for decades.

Read the rest, or just enjoy seven minutes of Henson-y goodness:

Stick around for the explosions and missile launches towards the end.

Our shiny new gadgets (and one teen wizard) are proving once again that human beings are really easily breakable.

1. Text Neck

Texting image via Shutterstock

Do you have shooting pains down your neck and arm, as well as numbness or tingling in your fingers and hand? If you’re over forty, you might want to call an ambulance — you could be having a heart attack. If you’re younger than that, though, it could be the fashionable new injury among cell phone users: text neck. Yes, it seems that the act of hunching over our phones for most of our waking hours might actually have some negative side effects.

Back pain clinics and chiropractors in North America and Europe are reporting seeing thousands upon thousands of text neck cases. One chiropractor, Dean L. Fishman, has seen so many injuries directly caused by over-texting that he now specializes in their treatment, registering the term and opening the Text Neck Institute. He also trains other chiropractors in how to fix the problems resulting from the fact that we all really hate actually speaking to other people. Fishman calls text neck a “global epidemic” and claims his youngest patient is three years old. The Institute’s website describes the problem like this: (more…)

Rabbits image via Shutterstock

Is there any truth to the phrase “breed like rabbits”? Sort of. Bunny sex itself is nothing to write home to mom about. When a doe lets a buck know that she’s ready to mate, he circles her, shows off his tail, and sometimes urinates on her. This is what passes for foreplay. Then, the act itself last about 20-40 seconds. Isn’t nature glorious?

The real wow factor of rabbit reproduction is how fast they get around to breeding, and how often they can do it. (more…)

This is both adorable and a tad freaky. I hope Hollywood doesn’t come knocking and turn her into some freak on display. For now, she’s just a cute, strangely talented young woman having fun with a unique gift.

Mary Roach is thoroughly awesome: she’s funny, whip-smart, and well-read. In other words, she’s one of us. Roach is the author of Stiff, Spook, Bonk, and most recently Packing for Mars; in this lecture, Roach tells stories about space (mainly from NASA), including exactly the kinds of questions we all have about space: what’s it like to be there? Does it smell weird? How does food work? What if you get mad at your fellow astronauts? And of course, what’s up with the toilets??

Topics: funny (and sometimes slightly gross/weird) stuff that happens in space. Roach has interviewed tons of people, plus read zillions of transcripts of NASA transmissions, to find the best bits for you.

For: anyone who is not currently eating lunch.

Representative quote:

“The Space Toilet. You may not really appreciate gravity in your lives the way that you should. … [In space] you’re sitting on a shop vac, essentially.” Later: “Okay. I give people the impression that this entire book is about crapping in space, and it’s not, really, honest to God, it’s not. But there’s just one more thing [about crapping in space] I have to tell you.”

Viewing tip: jump to about three minutes in for the actual lecture. Also, you can download the lecture directly from YouTube (link is below the video player) if you want to take it offline.

Further Reading

You’re in for a treat, as Roach’s books are universally awesome: funny, smart, educational, and easy to pick up — basically great vacation reads, but with science content. The book she discusses in the lecture above is Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. See also: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex; and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

Transcript

I couldn’t find a transcript for this lecture. Anybody got one?

Suggest a Lecture

Got a favorite lecture? Is it online in some video format? Leave a comment and we’ll check it out!

Since the first Super Bowl in 1967, 29 different starting quarterbacks have won the big game. How many can you name in 8 minutes? Last names will suffice. Hints: It’s spelled “Roethlisberger,” Earl Morrall is not one of the answers, and this quiz will not change after this weekend. Good luck!

Take the Quiz: Name Every QB Who’s Won a Super Bowl

In 1984, Apple defined the Super Bowl Commercial as a cultural phenomenon. Prior to Super Bowl XVIII, nobody watched the game “just for the commercials” — but one epic TV spot, directed by sci-fi legend Ridley Scott, changed all that. Read on for the inside story of the commercial that rocked the world of advertising, even though Apple’s Board of Directors didn’t want to run it at all.

The Ad

If you haven’t seen it, here’s a fuzzy YouTube version:

Why 1984 Won’t Be Like 1984

The tagline “Why 1984 Won’t Be Like ’1984′” references George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984, which envisioned a dystopian future, controlled by a televised “Big Brother.” The tagline was written by Brent Thomas and Steve Hayden of the ad firm Chiat\Day in 1982, and the pair tried to sell it to various companies (including Apple, for the Apple II computer) but were turned down repeatedly. When Steve Jobs heard the pitch in 1983, he was sold — he saw the Macintosh as a “revolutionary” product, and wanted advertising to match. Jobs saw IBM as Big Brother, and wanted to position Apple as the world’s last chance to escape IBM’s domination of the personal computer industry. The Mac was scheduled to launch in late January of 1984, a week after the Super Bowl. IBM already held the nickname “Big Blue,” so the parallels, at least to Jobs, were too delicious to miss.

Thomas and Hayden wrote up the story of the ad: we see a world of mind-controlled, shuffling men all in gray, staring at a video screen showing the face of Big Brother droning on about “information purification directives.” A lone woman clad in vibrant red shorts and a white tank-top (bearing a Mac logo) runs from riot police, dashing up an aisle towards Big Brother. Just before being snatched by the police, she flings a sledgehammer at Big Brother’s screen, smashing him just after he intones “We shall prevail!” Big Brother’s destruction frees the minds of the throng, who quite literally see the light, flooding their faces now that the screen is gone. A mere eight seconds before the one-minute ad concludes, a narrator briefly mentions the word “Macintosh,” in a restatement of that original tagline: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ’1984.’” An Apple logo is shown, and then we’re out — back to the game.

In 1983, in a presentation about the Mac, Jobs introduced the ad to a cheering audience of Apple employees:

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Here’s a new Monday Math Square for today’s mentalfloss.com Brain Game. Enjoy!

The nine white squares inside the main red grid should be filled with the digits 1 through 9. Each digit should appear only once in this main grid (the red square). Place the digits 1 through 9 in their correct spots so that the mathematical equations work both across and down.