A few months ago we wondered exactly how McDonalds could claim that their burgers are made with “100% pure USDA inspected beef; no fillers, no extenders [and] prepared with grill seasoning (salt, black pepper),” when over a period of 127 days, one photographer captured one disturbingly unchanged Happy Meal.

Well, thanks to J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and a much more generous helping of the scientific method, we now know: the reason why McDonalds burgers don’t grow much mold is not because of chemical preservatives, high salt levels, or a sterile manufacturing process. It’s because “The small size of a McDonald’s hamburger is allowing it to dehydrate fast enough that there is not enough moisture present for mold to grow.”

To solve, for ever and always, the severe confusion surrounding the genders of Super Mario Bros.‘ two egg laying dinosaur characters, can we just remind the class that all the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park are female?

Except the ones that aren’t.

We expect your crossover fics on our desks by Monday.  They should include at least one instance of Muldoon riding a velociraptor.

(via Geeks are Sexy.)

As part of a campaign to be on the PlayStation Network show The Tester, this video shows us how Kratos, brutal murderer of most of the pantheon of Greek gods, makes lunch. Aside from being funny and the guy in the video happening to have scary-looking knives on hand for some reason, the video actually displays a very sophisticated understanding and familiarity with the God of War quick time events, from the camera angels, to the zooms, right down to Kratos’ struggles.

(technabob via Kotaku)

This is very hopefully just a crap Internet rumor socially engineered to enrage us; if so, mission accomplished. Zac Efron, the Tiger Beat fixture who starred in High School Musical, has supposedly been “offered the LEAD role in Allen and Albert Hughes’ AKIRA adaptation.”

How 1,000 people live in tunnels below Las Vegas (Daily Mail)

How to go Flash-free on Mac OS X (Daring Fireball)

Nixon’s prepared speech in the event of an Apollo 11 “moon disaster” (Letters of Note)

Using genetic algorithms to find the best Mario strategy (TIGForums)

Meet the mad scientist of musical instruments (Flavorwire)

Students develop a fully recyclable laptop that can be disassembled with no tools (Gizmodo)

Comics teach us what to expect from a career in the arts (ComicsAlliance)

(title pic via Reddit)

New Zealand’s national rugby team, the All Blacks, performs the “Haka,” a traditional Māori dance before all of its games. It is quite intimidating.

Can you imagine two opposing teams of football players, helmets off, staring at each other at midfield before a game, then suddenly breaking into a war chant? So cool.

>>>Video at SportsGrid.

A pair of conjoined twins named Tatiana and Krista Hogan, who were born four years ago in Vancouver, partially share brains: There’s a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, which could allow them to share sensory information and more.

One scientist who conducted tests on them concluded that “Their brains are recording signals from the other twin’s visual field … one might be seeing what the other one is seeing.”

Their grandmother is convinced that they can even share thoughts:

Adding to the conundrum, of course, are their linked brains, and the mysterious hints of what passes between them. The family regularly sees evidence of it. The way their heads are joined, they have markedly different fields of view. One child will look at a toy or a cup. The other can reach across and grab it, even though her own eyes couldn’t possibly see its location. “They share thoughts, too,” says Louise. “Nobody will be saying anything,” adds Simms, “and Tati will just pipe up and say, ‘Stop that!’ And she’ll smack her sister.” While their verbal development is delayed, it continues to get better. Their sentences are two or three words at most so far, and their enunciation is at first difficult to understand. Both the family, and researchers, anxiously await the children’s explanation for what they are experiencing.

Full fascinating profile on the Hogan twins and the implications their case has for neuroscience at Macleans.ca.

(Macleans.ca via Kottke via Boing Boing. pic via Macleans.ca)

The screwiness of the iPhone’s autocorrect function for text is a regular source of annoyance for Apple customers and mirth for people on the Internet, so it only makes sense that some single-subject site should pop up to turn iPhone users’ tears of frustration into a delighted public’s cheers of veneration. (Though I’m surprised that Cheezburger Network, whose Failbook blog of fake-seeming but funny Facebook conversations is enormously popular, hasn’t tried this first.)

Damn You, Autocorrect! is just that blog. Just a few of the weird iPhone autocorrects it has documented:

• “Shortcuts” is corrected to “anorexic”
• “Homie” is corrected to “homoerotic”
• “Retweets” is corrected to “retarded”

(Damn You, Autocorrect! via Daring Fireball)

Disney has officially announced a long rumored animated series based on Tron, to debut in the summer of 2012, so, only a year and a half after the movie comes out. But the news here really is not really the what. It’s the who. By the off-screen credits alone, Tron: Uprising will have Baconesque connections to Dexter’s Laboratory, Animaniacs, Ren & Stimpy, Batman: The Animated Series, Tiny Toons, and Lost.

And then there’s the cast.

Apparently, a Nicaraguan military commander led his troops into Costa Rican territory because he was following Google Maps. Once there, the Nicaraguan team supposedly replaced a Costa Rican flag with a Nicaraguan flag, cleaned up a river, then dumped the river’s sediment onto Costa Rican land. The real story, you know, aside from the whole invasion thing: Military commanders apparently use Google Maps.

Microsoft’s motion control peripheral Kinect only released yesterday, but like with the Wii’s sensor bar, people are already finding neat things to do with Kinect other than use it. Videos have been popping up on YouTube showing that when one turns on Kinect and views the surrounding room with night vision goggles, all of Kinect’s tiny little sensor lights blanket everything within the peripheral’s range.

The Price is a wonderful ghost story of sorts from Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors collection, about a father who finds that the stray his family has adopted is protecting their home from something terrible and wild, and that somehow his family’s happiness is directly dependent on the black cat’s ability to defend them from it.

Filmmaker Christopher Salmon read the story and was enough enamored by it to want to make an animated film of it. And fortunately for him, Mr. Gaiman was also enough enamored of his concept to give him permission. The project is currently seeking funds through Kickstarter, but you can watch a video spelling out the basic visual style of the eventual movie, featuring many shots from his animatic below.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota mother of four who has fought the RIAA for the past four years over 24 songs that she illegally downloaded and shared over P2P network Kazaa and has become something of a high-profile figure due to her refusal to settle, was handed a stiff verdict on Wednesday: A jury ruled that Thomas-Rasset should pay Capitol Records $1.5 million for those 24 songs, breaking down to damages of $62,500 a song.

While the RIAA, which can on rare occasions smell PR poison before it drinks it, has said that it doesn’t intend to make Thomas-Rasset pay the full fine, having previously offered to settle for “$25,000 and an admission of guilt,” this latest ruling, which marks the third in Thomas-Rasset’s case and is subject to further appeal, shows that the days of astronomical piracy suit valuations are far from over.

This unbelievable video of a hailstorm has been circulating around the ‘Nets for the past few days. The video above says that it happened in Georgia on October 25th; another version says that it happened in Arizona on October 5th. It seems likely to me that this video was taken in Oklahoma City when they were hit with an unbelievable hailstorm in May, but it’s unclear. Wherever this is … wow.

(h/t Doobybrain)

At a glance, the elderly man in the above picture seems like a real life person, which is what allowed the young man in the above picture to board an international Air Canada flight on October 29, from Hong Kong to Vancouver.

Air Canada Corporate Security released information about a possible impostor on a flight that looked to be an elderly Caucasian male but had “young looking hands.” During the flight, the elderly man went to the bathroom and a young Asian man came out instead.