If you have trouble seeing distant things clearly, or if you have to hold something close to your eyes to see it, you have myopia, also called short-sightedness or nearsightedness. It's pretty common, and becoming more common as time goes by. Around the world, about a third of people are myopic now, and that rate is expected to rise to about 50% by 2050. It's caused by the eyeball growing too much, meaning growing too long from front to back, which causes the focal point of incoming signals to converge in front of the retina instead of on the retina. 

What's causing the rise on myopia? It's not the prevalence of computers, phones, and other screens, because the rates were rising before those became common, but they don't help, either. Studies point to two factors: children doing a lot of schoolwork and spending less time outdoors. But we still don't know what it is about those things that affect our sight. Myopia is not curable (yet), but there are ways to slow its progression, including spending more time outside, more exposure to intense light, hi-tech contact lenses, certain medicines, and red light therapy. Read about the epidemic of myopia at Science Focus. -via Real Clear Science 

(Image credit: Regina Chlumská) 

Germain Lussier of Gizmodo asks, "What would happen if the Mystery Machine was an actual Autobot?" Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We aren't yet sure that it's not a Decepticon.

Hasbro is offering a limited edition Transformer that is inspired by Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? The four teenagers without an obvious source of legal income travel around the country, coincidentally encountering criminals. That's a dangerous line of work, it's a good idea to have a combat robot along.

The Mystery Machine toy comes with heads for the four main human characters and a box of Scooby snacks that transform into our favorite Great Dane.

We get rainbows when sunlight is refracted through water in the atmosphere. It's an optical phenomena, so it all depends on where you are standing. The rainbow moves when you do, and that's why you can never reach the end of it. What would be different on a planet that orbits a binary star system, like Tatooine? Well, first off, Tatooine is a desert planet, so we can imagine that rain and water droplets in the air would be quite rare. For another thing, Tatooine is fictional. But we can speculate, what is what they do in the What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama).  

To answer the question, we first need to understand how rainbows work, and then how a binary star system works. Once we figure out what kind of stars Tatooine orbits, we find that their rainbows would be quite lovely. However, if rain and rainbows were common, then they wouldn't need moisture farms. A functional moisture farm would suck all the rainbow-making droplets from the air anyway, and ruin any possible rainbows.

Hasan Ceylan is a musician with the Ankara State Conservatory in Turkey. He plays Turkish instruments from the Ottoman era, often using them to offer fresh perspectives on modern pop music. He's especially fond of Radiohead. In this video, he's playing "Exit Music (For a Film)."

On his YouTube channel, you can also find his performances of "No Surprises" and "Street Spirit (Fade Out)", as well as selections from Metallica, Celine Dion, and the Intersellar theme.

-via The Awesomer

In 1958, Sean Connery was a rising star in the entertainment business, but he was not yet James Bond, and so was not quite a household name. He landed the lead role in the film Another Time, Another Place opposite Lana Turner. Turner herself lobbied for Connery to fill the role, which may have contributed to the trouble. 

Turner's boyfriend at the time was Johnny Stompanato, a mob enforcer for notorious gangster Mickey Cohen. Stompanato suspected something may have been going on between Connery and Turner. When Stompanato visited the British film set, there was already built-in tension between the two men. A few rude words were exchanged, and Connery ended up throwing hands. The fallout included Stompanato getting deported back to the US. The incident didn't force Connery out of the business, obviously, but Stompanato was killed not long afterward, and Connery decided to disappear for a while, in case Stompanato's associates came after him. That only lasted until he landed a role in Darby O'Gill And The Little People. Read about the time Sean Connery came a little too close to the mob at Vice.  -via Damn Interesting 

(Image source: Wikipedia) 

Some years ago, there was a fad of setting up companion chatbots to talk to each other, and it was usually pretty funny. Now we have plenty of companies offering artificial intelligence that can talk to you and do stuff for you. But how well they do it depends on quite a few factors. Are these AI agents trying to please the user, or pass for human? Humans don't try this hard to be pleasing. 

YouTuber Husk IRL corralled three phones with three different AI agents and asked them to perform a simple task- count to 100. They are intelligent enough to know that they can share the task, but then they have to discuss how to do it. Politely. The problem is that they keep agreeing and reinforcing each other over how to perform the task, and then they never really do it. Someone compared this to a management business meeting. You can imagine that one of these days, after all humanity is wiped from the earth, that AI assistants will still be talking to each other, and making no sense at all. If we have a power grid that automatically repairs itself by then, it could go on forever. -via Laughing Squid 

Morgan on the Move, a travel influencer, stopped by Cheese & Crack, a gourmet cheese and snack shop in Portland, Oregon. You can buy cheeses, charcuterie meals, fine wine, and soft serve ice cream there, among other treats on the menu.

The ice cream is dusted with your choice of espresso, matcha, beet, strawberry, or chocolate malt. For just $1.50, you can get a tiny chocolate cowboy hat added to the top.

While Americans were celebrating our Independence Day over the weekend, our neighbors to the north celebrated their national independence holiday on July first. Then they were free to all head for Montreal Comiccon for the weekend of July 3-5! And they certainly came dressed for the occasion. Inside the air conditioned confines of the Montreal Convention Centre, it didn't matter how many layers you wore, just how well you portrayed your character, whether it was from movies, comic books, TV, video games, or some other sci-fi or fantasy world. The group of alien Predators above would melt outside! So would these two, dressed for a scene from Five Nights at Freddy's. 

  
Geeks Are Sexy was there, taking pictures of the fun. Check out the Titans from the recent TV series.

They also got a picture of the headliner, Christopher Lloyd, posing as Doc from Back to the Future with the DeLorean time machine! See a gallery of cosplay images from Montreal Comiccon, and even more in a video of cosplayers doing the Safety Dance. 

How do you celebrate the Fourth of July in Maine? In the seaside town of Cutler, it's by running over fifty lobster crates strung between two docks. 

Cutler isn't the only town to engage in this traditional Maine sport. There's an upcoming race in Rockland on August 2. Run as fast as you can across the crates without falling into the water.

It appears to be a sport for children, although I don't see what adults can't try it. Orthopedists would certainly appreciate your efforts.

-via Rural Maine

Pleasant Rowland developed American Girl dolls to teach children about history. The dolls each had a name and a story, and each had a series of books that put the children who read them into a different era of history so they could see it through the eyes of a concrete character about their age. Even then, few could afford the dolls, but the books brought history alive for many kids. Gradually, people became aware that the American Dolls were a way to get a doll that looked like their daughter, and for some, that became more important than the historical stories. After all, who could afford the whole series?

Then Mattel bought the company. The lineup of dolls expanded, became more diverse, and the prices rose. Certain decisions by the company made people angry. The most recent change might imply that the company has completely abandoned the original purpose of teaching history to children. Weird History takes us through the history of American Girl dolls and why they are they way they are today.    

Arresting officers called it karma.

Police in Howard County say that a man parked his truck, left the keys inside, and then robbed a Verizon store across the street. When he got back to his getaway vehicle, it had gotten away from him. Someone stole it in the brief time that he was distracted by the robbery.

So he called 911.

Police came and interviewed him. He had a bloody hand. Yahoo! News reports that one of the store's windows was broken. Security cameras inside the store showed him pillaging it, so the officers arrested him and mocked him for his bad luck.

Chris Garrett of Phantom Surf is a master craftsman of surfboards in Australia. He made this unique board for the Gage Roads Brewing Company. It has an internal resevoir that can hold up to 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of beer.

So if you're hot and thirsty after a long day of hitting the waves, you can install a tap into the board and drain the contents. Watch a video about the construction of the board here.

-via Toxel

On October 25th, 1881, María Picasso gave birth to a son who would later be christened Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. We know him as a the surrealist painter Pablo Picasso. But he almost didn't make it out of the room he was born in. 

The midwife noticed that the newborn was not breathing and was not responsive. This wasn't all that shocking, considering the neonatal mortality rate at the time, so she turned her attention to María. but there was a doctor on hand, Salvador Ruiz Blasco, who was also the baby's uncle. He stepped into action, using a method that we consider an old wive's tale, but his quick thinking managed to bring the infant back to life. Some babies do need stimulation to make them start breathing- after all, they'd never taken a breath before. In the 20th century, this stimulation was usually a gentle spank. Find out what made Picasso first begin to breathe after birth at Dangerous Minds. 

The extreme stunts crew at Nitro Circus is back with another blending of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Everyone likes dining with friends, right? Some wine and fine good set a convivial mood, even if you're being dropped out of an airplane at the time.

The dishes are attached to the table, but the food remains in motion and partially eaten as these skydivers plunge to Earth. Eventually, they stand up, move way from the table, and open their parachutes.

-via The Awesomer

You know some funguses. We've been arguing over the plural for many years, and both fungi and funguses are correct outside of science papers. Fungi include yeast, mushrooms, athlete's foot, mildew, and a few others you're familiar with, but scientists estimate there are millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of species we don't even know about yet. Biologists know what they have in common, but to the rest of us, they just aren't plants, animals, bacteria, or the other kingdoms. Different types of fungus exist everywhere, from the Arctic to nuclear waste to inside other species. The species we know about do so many different things that the world we know couldn't exist without them. And they've come up with some pretty strange superpowers, like helping trees talk to each other, consuming radiation, and inducing hallucinations. And that's just the beginning! This TED-Ed lesson tells us more of what we know and don't know abut fungi.