Nine days ago, a Thai soccer team and their coach went to explore the Tham Luang caves in Chiang Rai. The were forced to go deeper into the caves after a sudden rainstorm. As the days passed, the country did not lose hope in the soccer team. A team of British divers found the boys and their coach. The saga is not over yet, though, because the team still has to be extracted, a feat made more complicated by mud and floodwaters.

Gene editing was once (mostly) the realm of science fiction, with movies like Gattaca dramatizing the possibility of “designer babies” ruining society as we know it. But the invention of a new kind of gene editing called CRISPR has revolutionized the possibility of gene editing in plants, animals, and even humans. John Oliver explains the risks and rewards of CRISPR in this video. For more on gene editing, you can read this article from Vox, which goes into some detail on the subject––specifically CRISPR. 

Brennan McCarthy has been practicing law for nineteen years. In all that time––with all the insane, scary, or evil people he has dealt with––he called Jarrod W. Ramos, suspect in the Annapolis newspaper shooting, the “most dangerous person I’ve ever dealt with.” McCarthy encountered Ramos when McCarthy represented a woman who Ramos was stalking. McCarthy also noted that Ramos’s stalking was extreme.

The Jurassic Park series brought every kid’s favorite critter to life: the dinosaur. Beginning with the first film, the series brought these gigantic lizards to life, but of course the films had to take some artistic license. In this Wired video, Nathan Smith, associate curator in the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County goes through the dinosaurs in the series and explains what the movies got right and what they got wrong. What’s most surprising is that the velociraptor was likely feathered and the size of a large turkey. 

This past week saw the end of an era. Toys R Us, the toy store that many of us either grew up going to or spent too many hours shopping for our kids at, has closed its doors forever. While this has been tragic for those of us with fond memories of the place, there has been one silver lining. A mystery donor has bought a whopping one million dollars worth of toys from a Raleigh, North Carolina store. The donor plans to give the toys to local children.

Modern people are obsessed with Roman history, and particularly the Roman military. There are dozens of YouTube channels, TV shows, and podcasts dedicated to the history of Roman military tactics, Roman battles, and so on. But those tend to dehumanize the Roman military. This video puts the human face back on the legions by describing how romans were fed by the army, what they ate, how they prepared it, what they drank, and more.

Fashion standards have always been different for men and women, and even despite the huge gains in equality in the past decades, women still have an undue fashion burden placed upon them. But watching this video might put things into different perspective. Women in the eighteenth century had to wear the most absurdly complicated, and certainly uncomfortable, outfits that you have ever seen. Imagine going through this rigamarole every time you wanted to go out!

At first blush, Nathan Fielder’s Comedy Central show Nathan for You seems like a standard awkward-comedy, faux-reality show in the vein of Punked. In it, Nathan Fielder plays a version of himself who helps struggling businesses with his “expertise.” Generally, things are pretty awkward for everyone, inspiring a mix of genuine and shocked laughter from the you, the viewer. But this Nerdwriter installment suggests that there’s more going on with these episodes, and Fielder plays with the power of perspective to draw his audiences in.

There’s a reason that Californians buy more electric cars than anyone else, and it’s not because they’re a bunch of granola-crunching, tie-dye wearing hippies. It’s because the climate in California is warm, and big, electric car batteries (or any battery) can’t quick charge in anything below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. But, thanks to a group of researchers at Penn State, electric cars may soon be feasible in the midwest or northeast, where the climate isn’t above 50 degrees year round. They’ve created a battery that self-heats, meaning quick charging is possible in low temperatures. 

Young adult fiction is, in the world of literature, extremely new. Indeed, it’s about as old as the concept of teenager, which is relatively new. The advent of the concept of teenagers led to the marketing of young adult books circa the early 1940s. Librarians pushed these books because they wanted to reach the nation’s youth. The genre was relatively niche until Harry Potter, which exploded the boundaries of young adult fiction. Now, about half of YA novels are sold to adults.

Despite the “deal” President Donald Trump made with North Korea, in which he hoped that the North Koreans would abandon their nuclear program, the North Koreans appear to be making rapid upgrades to their nuclear reactor.

Are you––or is someone you know––overly woke? Symptoms of being overly woke include finding everything to be racist, calling innocent victims an “x’-phobe or a “y”-phobe, and being “high key anxious” that whatever you do will offend someone. This video is an hilarious look at the struggles of being so aware of social justice issues that you are too paralyzed to act. They’re not real, of course…yet. The money line from this is: “Oh my God, is water racist?”