Okay, the study of robotics is starting to really take off– researchers at the French Institute For Computer Science have recently designed a robot that is able to diagnose and compensate for its own injuries. Most mobile robots, when faced with a broken leg, will helplessly plod around in circles, unable to continue. These robots are different– they re-learn how to walk with their new limitations.

Source: Nature

The post Impressive Robot Learns To Limp On A Broken Leg appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration has recommended the approval of flibanserin, a drug designed to increase sexual desire in women, with the caveat that the pill works just as effectively for unattractive women as it does for attractive ones. “The pill is effective no matter what the woman looks like,” said FDA commissioner Stephen Ostroff. “Let that sink in for a second.”

While the 18-6 vote is considered a victory, most of the panelists voiced concern about its efficacy. “This is not a miracle drug,” said Dr. Phil Hoffman, a member of the board. “Sure, some tens will be screwing more, but it’s at the cost of a bunch of ones and twos running around with itchy twats.”

Several panelists said the label should advise ugly women of using the drug around men who are drinking alcohol, since it could impair male judgment. One member suggested that a hand mirror be included in the box to give women “one last shot to decide if they’re fuck material, though that would only protect against butterfaces.”

In some states, pharmacists would be allowed to turn customers away if their belief system dictates that they’re not pretty enough for the pill. “I’m not gonna help some busted chick get porked,” said Randy Willis, a Walgreens pharmacist from Arkansas. “That’s like asking me—so basically Jesus—to pork her.”

“The nation’s undesirables will be hornier than ever once this pill goes to market,” said Dr. Tobias Blount of Cornell University. “Luckily, there are 26 male sexual dysfunction drugs, which should help those poor guys married to suddenly randy bushpigs.”

Interested in more news from the medical world? Check out Newly Discovered Disorder Prevents Angry White Men From Understanding The First Amendment.

The post ‘Female Viagra’ Will Increase Libido For Ugly Chicks Too, FDA Panel Warns appeared first on Runt Of The Web.

See more from our sister site Roint: TLC Announces New Cosby Project: 47 Women And Counting and Turns Out Parents Don’t Like You Filming Their Kids No Matter How Sexy They Are

The post From Our Sister Site: Is He The Love Of Your Life Or Just Trying To Harvest Your Organs? appeared first on Runt Of The Web.

Source: Thing Link

Nearly 80 years ago, Amelia Earhart attempted to circumnavigate the globe with fatal results. Before that, though, she captured the world’s attention by breaking a score of records, expanding popular conceptions of womanhood and writing best-selling books, among a host of other things.

Newly discovered footage of Earhart was recently unearthed, depicting the pilot a few months before her last flight in 1937. The video appears to be shot at Burbank Airport, and features the pilot walking around her Lockheed Electra L-10E. The son of John Bresnik, one of Earhart’s photographers, found the film after going through his deceased father’s belongings. While this discovery will likely prompt another investigation into the exact cause of Earhart’s death, we’re more interested in her life.

Check out these surprisings facts about Amelia Earhart–we guarantee they’ll blow your mind.

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Check out the new black-and-white footage of Amelia Earhart just before her final flight:

Many theories seek to explain just what happened to Amelia Earhart on her fateful journey in 1937. Here’s one of those hypotheses:

The post 19 Things You Should Know About Amelia Earhart appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

Female Peshmergas on their base at the border between Syria and Iraq. These female fighters are motivated by the words of Abdullah Ocalan, head of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), who promotes Marxist thought and empowerment of women. Source: Newsha Tavakolian/TIME

To an ISIS militant, one of the worst things that could happen in combat is not just being killed, but being killed by a woman. If this happens, ISIS members believe that they will go directly to hell. If hell exists, rest assured that they have been sent there by a number of Kurdish women.

In August 2014, ISIS moved to the Sinjar area of Iraq and began to persecute, capture and kill its minority Yazidi population–an ancient, mainly Kurdish people. Female Kurdish soldiers were instrumental in the Kurdish counteroffensive, rescuing thousands of Yazidis trapped by ISIS on Mount Sinjar. The women have since extended their fight against radical militants to Kobani, Syria. See what life for these soldiers is like in the gallery below:

Click here to view slideshow

Many of these Kurdish women compose the female branch of the YPG militia, which, along with PKK (a Kurdish nationalist party) guerrillas and US-backed peshmergas (recognized Kurdish soldiers), have been fighting ISIS back and providing humanitarian aid to local populations for nearly the past year.

Anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000 women form the all-female branch of the YPG–the YPJ–and are usually 18 to 25 years old. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist thought of jailed PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish nationalist party demands that gender equality be re-instated, making women’s “liberation” a key component of the party’s nationalist project. Gains by ISIS, which seeks to severely curtail the rights of women, thus represents not just an international security threat. To Kurdish nationalists, it sets the dream of an independent Kurdish state that much further in the distance.

A map of Kurdistan. Source: Wikimedia

Kurdistan encompasses parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, which makes its people particularly vulnerable to the conflicts engulfing the region–and stand to benefit from a weakening Iraqi state.

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, Allied forces attempted to create several countries within the empire’s former boundaries, Kurdistan being one of them.

This did not end up happening for a number of reasons, and millions of Kurds were left without a state of their own. Since then, members of the PKK–labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, NATO and the European Union, among others–have been engaged in a long-standing fight with Turkey, and are looking for ways to gain international support for their cause.

Beyond providing humanitarian support, one such way seems to be through pumping its female fighters to the West. According to Jacob Russell, a photojournalist who has lived in Kurdistan for nearly two years, both international media and Kurdish politicians see the PR potential of “girls with guns” and have objectified these women, presenting a false, vaguely glamorous reality to Western audiences clamoring to see ISIS’ downfall–and “empowered” women leading the fight.

This photo of a female Kurdish fighter was retweeted thousands of times. The woman is believed to have been killed by ISIS.

Said Russell in an interview with CNN, “A lot of the women’s backstories were quite difficult. It seemed like this unit provided an alternative network for women who maybe would struggle in normal Kurdish society, because despite being relatively progressive (within the Middle East), it is still quite a conservative society.”

Regardless of PKK political objectives, many feminists praise the YPJ for “confronting traditional gender expectations in the region” and “redefining the role of women in conflict [there].” According to photojournalist Erin Trieb, “the YPJ is in itself a feminist movement, even if it is not their main mission…they want ‘equality’ between women and men, and a part of why they joined was to develop and advance the perceptions about women in their culture. They can be strong and be leader.”

Perhaps put better by 18-year-old Kurdish fighter Saria Zilan, “In the past, women had various roles in the society, but all those roles were taken from them. We are here now to take back the role of women in society.”

What becomes of ISIS and Kurdistan remains to be seen. Rest assured, though, that women will play a substantial role in determining the fate of both.

To learn more about the Kurdish female fighters, be sure to check out these awesome VICE documentaries:

Want more on ISIS and Iraq? Be sure to check out our posts on life under ISIS, the conflict in Iraq and Syria explained, and Baghdad in the early 20th century!

The post Meet The Kurdish Women Fighting ISIS appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

Source: Wikimedia

Saint Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria between 414 and 444, was a leg breaker for Jesus. During his career, he outmaneuvered and ruined pagan philosophers, Roman politicians, and rival Christians in his quest for ideological purity and ever-greater power within the early Church. That he was eventually canonized for his characteristic single-minded brutality speaks volumes about the spirit of his age.

Early Life

Source: Classical Christianity

During Christianity’s rough early phase, there was nothing describable as the modern Catholic Church to be found, though men like Cyril were rapidly changing that in the 5th century. When Cyril was born, in about 376, the Christian world was mainly confined to the Mediterranean basin and nearby areas. Within this world were many popes and patriarchs, each reading from his own version of Holy Scripture and perpetually on the brink of open war with rival congregations. Though a broad consensus did exist among Christian bureaucrats, the general disorder of the dying Roman Empire meant that each local pope had a great deal of power, and was sometimes a law unto himself.

Cyril had the great good fortune to be the nephew of one such patriarch, Theophilus of Alexandria. Theophilus, whose name is Greek for “Lover of God,” brought the young Cyril to study with him in Alexandria. Officially, Cyril was to be groomed for a career in the Church, but the politics of the day made it just as likely that Theophilus needed a warm body to offer as a hostage if his rivals turned on him.

Cyril found Alexandria at the height of its glory. Founded seven centuries prior, the city had been consciously designed as the ultimate college town. Alexandria was home to the Pharos, one of the wonders of the world, and to the Great Library, where perhaps half a million books and scrolls were kept, including original copies of Euripides, Sophocles, Democritus (the philosopher who predicted the existence of atoms), and Eratosthenes, who had measured the circumference of the Earth centuries earlier. The city was rich, smart, and virtually the last place in the empire that wasn’t teetering on the brink of collapse. Over half a century, Cyril did what he could to wreck the place.

The post Better Know A Saint: Cyril Of Alexandria appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

When one thinks of the Middle East right now, images of softness and tranquility are often the last things to come to mind–if they do at all. And yet, all soldiers must put down their weapons at some point, as seen in this photo of a Syrian peshmerga fighter taking a moment to bond with a rabbit.

Since ISIS invaded Iraqi Kurdistan in August 2014, peshmerga–or Iraqi Kurdistan’s military–have gone to war against them in both Iraq and Syria. With the aid of US and Iraqi air strikes, the peshmerga were successful in overrunning ISIS militants and reclaiming critical infrastructure in Mosul.

Other Kurdish forces from surrounding areas have since joined, and as of February 2015 over 1,000 peshmerga soldiers have died amid the fighting.

Want to learn more about ISIS and Iraq? Check out our gallery on life under ISIS as well as vintage Baghdad.

The post One Of War’s Lighter Moments appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

Source: The Amazing Medicine

Scientific medicine is one of the nicest things about living in the future. No matter how much fun it is to imagine swinging from the rigging of a pirate ship, if you cut yourself shaving back then, there was a chance the cut would go septic and eat your face until you died. Even 150 years ago, medical care had barely advanced beyond Hippocrates and Galen. If you were shot during the Civil War, for instance, your doctor’s options were basically limited to drugs that got you high, drugs that made you throw up, and cutting things off with a saw that wasn’t necessarily washed between amputations.

In the roughly 125 years since surgeons figured out handwashing, however, medicine has been working overtime to make up for the long dark age it has just come out of. First antiseptics, then antibiotics, and finally a dawning awareness that not every health problem can be fixed with enemas have nearly doubled the Western lifespan and slashed infant mortality to the point that now we’re, frankly, drowning in all the extra people who would never have survived without all the help.

In fact, medical science has lately gotten so carried away with being awesome that the current cutting edge of medicine reads like open mic night at the science fiction comedy club. Modern doctors can shoot your body full of antimatter, carry out germ warfare against designated targets inside your body, and train your own immune system as if it’s a helper monkey. Here are some of the things medical researchers have been getting up to while we weren’t looking.

“Drink This – It’s Antimatter. . .”

Antimatter tracks Source: Free Desktop Backgrounds

The only thing most people know about antimatter is that it explodes when anything touches it. Actually, it does more than explode; it annihilates. Annihilate, used as a verb, is different from an explosion. While an explodey thing, such as dynamite, uses rapid chemical decay to generate heat, and nuclear material, such as plutonium, uses rapid atomic decay to do the same thing about a million times more efficiently, antimatter collisions with normal matter convert 100 percent of the two masses into pure goddamn energy.

It’s the most efficient conversion that’s even theoretically possible in the universe. Antimatter collisions generate gamma ray photons, which are the most energetic ionizing radiation we know about. If you were in a room with a gamma ray emitter, that puny lead apron the dentist gives you would be less use than a flak jacket made out of toilet paper. Gamma ray photons can penetrate eight feet of cement; that’s how much energy matter-antimatter reactions generate. Also, your doctor might someday ask you to drink some and wait for the radiologist to get back from lunch.

This isn’t going to hurt, but doesn’t it look like it should? Source: WordPress

This is Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and it’s the kind of thing that would be at home in the backstory of a DC Comics supervillain. When you’re sent for a PET scan, you’re given a cup of truly awful-tasting glucose that’s been tagged with fluorine-18, which emits positrons, also known as antimatter electrons. The glucose goes wherever glucose normally does in your body, which is everywhere, and the fluorine it brings along for the ride radiates antimatter the whole way.

Once emitted, the positrons almost instantly connect with an electron and annihilate, emitting two gamma particles. This radiation is detected, and the emission pattern is processed into a three-dimensional image of just about anything in your body. This all but eliminates the messy cutting involved in exploratory surgery.

In case you’re worried about the radiation coming from your body that’s 100 times as powerful as X-rays, relax. The National Institutes of Health explains, with disarming vagueness, that “the radiation is gone from your body in about 2-10 hours.”

The post 3 Amazing Medical Advances That Are Fighting Back Against Disease appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

1. You’re getting dressed to go out on a Friday night. You:
   1. Pop in your best monocle.
   2. Decide this is the night you’re going to finally pull off overalls.
   3. Hope you can find some pants to go with your sweet new wallet chain.
   4. Liebe das Leben Freitag Nacht!
2. Which Golden Girl do you think was best in bed?
   1. Blanche
   2. Sophia
   3. Dorothy
   4. Rose
3. The main reason you smell weird is:
   1. You have the meat sweats.
   2. You recently smoked chewing tobacco.
   3. You bought Axe Body spray. On purpose.
   4. You forgot to brush your teeth last decade.
4. Your last relationship didn’t work out because:
   1. You wouldn’t shut up about Dr. Who.
   2. You were too into scatological porn.
   3. Wife and dog missing. Reward for dog LOL
   4. You kept insisting on playing Apples to Apples at dinner time.
5. Your favorite way to clear a room is:
   1. Talking about a dream you had.
   2. Smelling like actual garbage.
   3. Bringing up a news story you read about at church.
   4. Opening a jar of pickled pigs feet.
6. Your dream job is:
   1. EDM DJ
   2. Female Body Inspector
   3. Actress!!!!
   4. Burt from Mary Poppins
7. Your favorite subreddit is about:
   1. Pocket squares
   2. The Paleo Diet
   3. The classic film Das Boat
   4. Taylor Swift’s armpit

That low calorie ranch you bought on accident.

You’re trying too hard and everyone knows it. You think you “go with everything,” but in actuality you taste like bad breath and have a tendency to form a thick film.

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Sauerkraut.

You are a German condiment made from pickled cabbage.

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Worcestershire sauce.

No one knows how to spell your name or what to do with you, but people keep you around because you seem interesting and British.

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Cousin Jim’s homemade BBQ sauce.

You were a Christmas gift, which confused everyone, mostly because you came in a used plastic bottle. Your label is a piece of masking tape, and you’ve become chunky in recent months.

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The post Which Forgotten Condiment Are You? appeared first on Runt Of The Web.

“Orbit,” a futuristic public art concept by Anish Kapoor. Anish Kapoor

Art (literally) comes in all shapes, sizes, mediums, and perspectives. Similarly, public art fulfills a variety of purposes: it brings color to dark cities, visually comments on important social issues, creates conversation between people and their surroundings, and entertains both locals and tourists. No two pieces are quite alike, as much of the art is in direct conversation with its surroundings. But don’t take our word for it. Here are some of the world’s most intriguing, beautiful, bizarre and historic public art installations.

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While sculptures, murals and fountains make up much of public art, many pieces are interactive or performance-based. Check out this project from Salt Lake City:

Here’s another interactive installation that comes alive at night:

Sometimes people forget how much time, effort and manpower goes into creating the epic public art that surfaces in our cities which include human capital management. This behind-the-scenes video offers a glimpse of what it takes:

Want more public art? Check out the best street art from 2013 and 2014!

The post Bizarre, Wacky & Awesome: Public Art Around the World appeared first on All That Is Interesting.