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The Mary Sue: “Physics Lets Us Know How Many Fish Gollum Needs to Live, We Now Sleep Easier at Night”
One of the great pastimes of geekdom is adding some degree of factual feasibility to works of fantasy in all its forms. With the release of The Hobbit this Friday, audiences everywhere will be reunited with a much younger, more energetic Gollum than the one they’ve come to know in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But a haunting question that fans have tried to wrap their heads around for years is how has Gollum managed to be so long lived in spite of the fact he dwelled within the perpetual darkness of the Misty Mountains, dining purely on fish. Using assumptions on Hobbit physiology and his working knowledge of Gollum’s subterranean home, Rhett Allain—an associate professor of physics at the Southeastern Louisiana University—has crunched the numbers and deduced how many fish the little guy needs to eat to function.
The Mary Sue: “Electrocute Slime Mold Long Enough and It’ll Apparently Make Music”
With enough time and patience, research has proven that you can get slime mold—specifically Physarum polycephalum—to do pretty much anything you want it to, such as finding its way out of simple mazes and other talents that make you forget the little critter doesn’t even have a brain to begin with. Recently, man’s obsession with slime mold has led them to once again test the capabilities of Physarum polycephalum, namely whether or not it’s able to produce sound. And as it so happens to turn out, you pump enough electricity into the slime mold and they’ll, in a fashion, start to produce “music.” That is, of course, if you find its tiny, anguished screams of pain melodious.
The Mary Sue: “Research Sheds Light on How Fins Became Limbs, One Step Closer to Creating Fish People”
It is at this point fairly well uncontroversial to state that yes, man evolved from apes. What many don’t know, though, is that evolution goes much further[,] further back, to when one fish-like common ancestor rebelled against the status quo, hauled itself up onto terra firma, and[—]over the course of generations[—]grew limbs, consequences be damned. A study[,] led by Dr. José Luis Gómez-Skarmeta and Dr. Fernando Casares of the CSIC-Universidad Pablo de Olavide-Junta de Andalucía in Seville, Spain[,] suggests that the administration of an extra copy of the gene Hoxd13 in the fin of an embryonic zebrafish yielded the same sort of fin-to-limb development that would likely have [been] seen during the evolution of ancient fish into land-based vertebrates.
The Mary Sue: “Lolz: FCC Sez W3 Can Text 911 by May 2014 =D”
Well now, this is certainly an ironic development. According to an article distributed by the Associated Press, the FCC is working to give mankind the ability to reach emergency services at 911 via text messaging. You read that correctly, the very same distracting activity that has led to so many vehicular tragedies and other lethal mishaps will soon become our lifeline. You know, for those moments when we find ourselves trapped under rubble or are about to be mauled by a grizzly bear. Only after you text your friends first, naturally.
The Mary Sue: “If You Build It, They Will Come: Google Offers Businesses Private Android Apps Outlet”
In an age where the ownership of mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, and BlackBerry smartphones is becoming more commonplace and, somewhat proportionally, used at the workplace for various job-related purposes, the IT departments of most businesses are constantly developing and offering in-house apps to their workers as opposed to relying on similar ones created by third-party developers that may or may not be up to par in relation to the needs of the business. Sometimes, however, these developers lack a proper channel to offer these apps and are forced to distribute them on app marketplaces open to the general public. Internet powerhouse Google declares “no more” with the unveiling of Private Channels on Google Play.
The Mary Sue: “Rich Nerds Only: Original Metropolis Movie Poster Up for Bid”
An unsettling quality about bankruptcy auctions is that there’s always an underlying crisis of conscience to the whole affair, since your gain came at the financial loss of another. Essentially, you can’t walk away, new acquisition in hand, without feeling like the absolute scum of the Earth, but sometimes you just have to buck up and kick those qualms to the curb if you really want that worthwhile item, like, say, an original copy of the Metropolis movie poster. Next week, this poster and eight others will be up for auction, with rabid nerds willing to pay hand over fist for this piece of cinematic history.
The Mary Sue: “Only in Canada Can One Smell Like Freshly Made Pizza”
The borders to our Canadian cousins are so close, and yet we tend to do things oh so differently. You see, in the United States, it’s frowned upon to reek of the processed and entirely unnatural fast food we tend to scoff down on a regular basis. A scarlet letter indicative of a poor diet and even poorer hygiene, if you will. Canada, on the other hand, views the musk of such edible delights as a badge of honor and [a] mark of loyalty for one’s restaurant chain of choice. To reward such unwavering devotion, Pizza Hut Canada handed out bottles of Eau de Pizza Hut—a pizza-scented perfume—to 110 lucky Facebook fans after reaching a momentous 100,000 likes on their fan page.
The Mary Sue: “Pygmy Mole Crickets Can Jump From Water’s Surface, Can’t Turn It Into Wine”
While they certainly aren’t capable of curing lepers of their grievous affliction, restoring the sight of the blind, or other supernatural deeds—insects just don’t make ideal religious messiahs—pygmy mole crickets might as well be some creature of the divine since the little buggers can actually jump from the surface of the water just as adeptly as if they were on dry land. While pond skaters are hoarding all the recognition due to their being more universally recognizable, pygmy mole crickets may soon change all that once they take aquatic insect locomotion to the extreme!
The Mary Sue: “Nefertiti the ‘Spidernaut’ Dies Shortly After Returning From 100 Days in Space”
Ladies and gentlemen, today we mourn the loss of a real hero. With lump[s] in our throats and tear[s] in our eye[s], the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History announced that their resident space-traveling red-backed jumping spider, Nefertiti, passed away yesterday, five days after returning from a 100-day and 42-million-mile journey to the International Space Station. We promised ourselves we wouldn’t cry, but here come the waterworks.