Photographer Alex Rivest has made a habit of creating beautiful timelapse films. Some are very popular, but others have been seen by only a handful of people. Here are some of my favorites from Rivest's collection; there are more on his Vimeo page. Amsterdam Scenes of life in Amsterdam, July 2011. My favorites are the water closeups. Lava in Hawaii File under: beautiful to look at, glad I wasn't... READ ON

Toilet image via Shutterstock File under "News to Me": you know that old story about how northern hemisphere toilets flush counter-clockwise, and southern hemisphere toilets (and buckets, drains, and such) flush clockwise, due to the Coriolis effect? It's bogus! Today I learned that while the Coriolis effect is significant for hurricanes, it's not strong enough to make toilets flush in different directions at different points on the Earth. The real cause of "backwards"-flushing toilets is just that... READ ON

In this eight-minute talk, marine biologist Dave Gallo talks about the world's oceans -- how vast they are, what's down there (that we know about), and why we should care. While it's a brief talk, there's a lot of great material here, including some discussion (and video) of the vampire squid, an octopod-looking guy nicknamed "Dumbo," and beautiful footage of extremophiles. According to Gallo, we've explored (meaning visited at all) about 5% of the ocean -- it is truly the final frontier. This is... READ ON

It was bound to happen: you can now access the Dead Sea Scrolls online. Well, some of them. The scrolls as a collection include over 900 texts, many of them fragmentary, so what we've got here is a starting point. In a collaboration between the Israel Museum and Google, five of the most significant scrolls have been digitized and presented online in a unique Google browsing format -- you can mouse over lines of text and read translations, zoom in, and learn more about any given passage. There are also... READ ON