water

Ah, the Jetovator. Of all the frivolous inventions over the past century, you might be the best. These hydro-power jetpacks and bikes have made for some fantastic YouTube videos, from that news anchor who crashes immediately upon take off to now, this real-life speeder bike chase from Star Wars.

In celebration of the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the team over at the Devin Super Tramp recreated one of the most famous scenes from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, the speed bike chase. And yet, they managed to bring it to the next level: They did it on water.

via Popular Mechanics

Using the Jetovator water bike, Devin Super Tramp and a team of adults and toddlers (playing the adorable Ewoks) recreated the whole speed bike chase on water. It’s actually pretty startling how close they come to topping the original and makes you wonder why they don’t make all those dang Star Wars movies on water. Why they could just call them Star Waters? Wait, that won’t do. Maybe Water Wars? I don’t know. We’re workshopping it.

Devin Super Tramp actually has a bunch of cool videos of real-life recreations of fantastical stuff, like “Pokémon GO meets PARKOUR in REAL LIFE!” Heh. They should just call that one “Parkour-man GO!” Right? We’re still workshopping that one too.

"Being right and being alone is a challenging existence."

Most everyone was pretty excited, or at least mildly interested, in the announcement NASA made yesterday about the likely possibility that there's liquid water on Mars.

Not Rush Limbaugh, unfortunately.

He's got his own ideas about just what NASA is doing up there.

According to him:

I said 'look at the temperature data, that has been reported by NASA, has been made up, it's fraudulent for however many years, there isn't any warming, there hasn't been for 18.5 years. And yet, they're lying about it. They're just making up the amount of ice in the North and South Poles, they're making up the temperatures, they're lying and making up false charts and so forth. So what's to stop them from making up something that happened on Mars that will help advance their left-wing agenda on this planet?'

So there you have it. Finally, the truth.

Well, Buzz Aldrin must be thirsty.

Though we've long known that Mars has ice, it was not yet strongly believed that liquid water could exist on the surface of the red planet. Well the newest evidence, released Sept. 28, points strongly to that possibility.

As reported by the New York Times:

In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Dr. McEwen and other scientists identified waterlogged molecules — salts of a type known as perchlorates — in readings from orbit.

"That's a direct detection of water in the form of hydration of salts," Dr. McEwen said. "There pretty much has to have been liquid water recently present to produce the hydrated salt."

Though young Mars was inundated by rivers, lakes and maybe even an ocean a few billion years ago, the modern moisture is modest. Scientists have long known that large amounts of water remain — but frozen solid in the polar ice caps. There have been fleeting hints of recent liquid water, like fresh-looking gullies, but none have proved convincing.

Liquid water on Mars has been theorized for a while, with many scientists pointing to dark streaks on the surface that would appear seasonally. This most recent evidence is validation for the theory that those streaks are rivers and streams of water.

So what does this mean?

Many things.

It might ease the burden when considering Martian colonization, helping to grow plants and and food on the surface. With that it could also mean possibly helping to oxidize the atmosphere, which is currently mostly made up of carbon dioxide.

And The Verge sees it as a promise for extraterrestrial life:

[T]hat strengthens the possibility of finding microbial life on the Red Planet. The presence of liquid water on Earth is intimately linked with the formation of life, so the odds are better than ever that extraterrestrial organisms are nearby in our Solar System.

This is mind-blowing, eye-popping news.

What began as an innocent bit of Instagram belligerence over asparagus water, turned into Internet gold this week.

Marielle Wakim, an associate editor at Los Angeles magazine, uploaded the picture to social media with this comment: "Somewhere in L.A., Whole Foods executives are laughing at all of us."

Of course, the Internet tore it apart. Like it do.

for $5.99, that asparagus water from Whole Foods better be straight from God's tears

— Omar Munoz (@rvinman_) August 3, 2015

White people got some real nerve throwing some reject asparagus in tap water and trying to charge me a pack of cigarettes for them.

— kid (@MamboNoir) August 3, 2015

asparagus water: for the times u want ur pee to stink but dont want to go the trouble of chewing

— (❍ᴥ❍ʋ) | (• ◡•)| (@puretoria) August 3, 2015

"Asparagus water" just sounds like another name for pee

— Silvia Killingsworth (@silviakillings) August 5, 2015

Only a day later, Whole Foods decided to pull the absurd product.

Whole Foods Market Senior Media Relations Specialist Liz Burkhart said "It was meant to be water with the essence of vegetables and/or mushrooms (similar to bone broth), which is typically made over a long period of time soaking in water. It was made incorrectly and has since been removed."

Suuuuuuure.

Of course, Gawker thought it was the American Dream.

Exploiting the poor has and will always be categorically wrong, but ripping off the rich and dumb—for whom uncooked asparagus is put in water bottles—is the American dream. Just like one cannot step in the same river twice or kick a dream, it's impossible to "exploit" the rich; they are the ones who exploit. They can, though, be ripped off and fleeced, and should be, as much as is possible and legal. Six dollar Whole Foods asparagus water is one such legal means of taking money away from people who have six dollars to spend on Whole Foods asparagus water and moving it somewhere else in the economy.

While on some sort of star-studded holiday with Liam Hemsworth's family, J Law got herself a hand tattoo. And it's an inaccurate one at that.

Let her tell you the rest.

Faa Sai the elephant was recently rescued from a life of labor and now lives happily at the Elephant Nature Park sanctuary in Thailand.

In the facebook video you can see the young pachyderm playing in a sprinkler, and then breaking said sprinkler because a beast this big needs a bigger stream, obviously.

Italians who can't pay their utility bills are getting help from an unlikely source: Super Mario.

Wearing Mario masks and blue overalls, a group of vigilante plumbers from Rome have been turning the water back on in homes after utility companies turn it off.

They are fighting for underemployed citizens' "right to water" and investigate each case before deciding to take action, according to Vocativ.

About 25 percent of homes are late on payments, and they reportedly get about 200 requests a day.