The extent of human creativity/weirdness always baffles me, but I have to say the Internet really won my heart this week. Here are some staff picks of weird, beautiful, smart stories and videos from the interwebs this week.

• Today was the final day to tweet #TornadoWeek to turn up the winds on interns at the Weather Channel. It seems the Weather Channel is embracing climate change with reckless abandon as it turns to an aggressively hilarious editorial strategy. [The Weather Channel] UPDATE: Unfortunately the livestream of the interns getting blasted is over, but you can watch a clip at CNBC »
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• If you were a kid growing up in the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s, or raised a kid during this time, PBS was a testament to the power of good educational television. A satirical trailer-making group called Gritty Robots published a heart-warming video this week of beloved PBS personalities Carl Sagan, Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye the Science Guy (see his TED-Ed lesson above) and Bob Ross as as the Avengers, saving us from bad TV. [Gizmodo]
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• Did you know that being annoyed at the incorrect use of “literally” is about as old as the heinous act itself? Ben Yagoda has a literal breakdown. [Lingua Franca]
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• In response to Amanda Filipacci’s New York Times op-ed piece last week on Wikipedia’s creation of a separate category for American Women Novelists, James Gleick takes a detailed look at Wikipedia’s women problem. [NYRB]
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• New science magazine Nautilus launches its first issue, on the topic “What makes you so special.” We’re excited to see what’s next from this awesome publication. [Nautilus]
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• IBM puts out an animation of epically small proportions, moving atoms with extreme precision. The film holds the Guiness World Record for smallest stop-motion film. [YouTube]
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• How many countries are there in Africa? Answering the question isn’t as easy as it sounds. [Africa Check] Watch Chimamanda Adichie’s classic talk, “The danger of a single story” »
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• A quick, surprising synthesis of an extensive study published by PLoS One, about differences in learning between the sexes. [io9]
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• An inside story on the future of Guantanamo Bay and its history of hunger strikes, by Shihab Rattansi. [Al Jazeera]
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• The painted turtle is on the path to extinction. A sad, strange story of how it may soon become a 100 percent female species, due to the fact that its eggs are more likely to hatch as females if they are in warm nests. [New Scientist]
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• Behold: Nature. Donald Trump. … What? [io9]

TEDxCERN will not be a closed door event. More than 25 universities, laboratories and organizations around the world will be tuning in. In fact, anyone anywhere in the world with a curiosity about how and why the universe exists is welcome to watch through a free webcast.

The webcast begins at 13:45 (CEST) — that’s 7:45am (EST) to anyone living on the East Coast — and will run until 20:00. Watch here »

Below, some TED Talks to get you hyped for the event:

• Brian Cox: CERN’s supercollider
• Tom Whyntie: The beginning of the universe, for beginners
• Garrett Lisi: An 8-dimensional model of the universe
• Brian Greene: Making sense of string theory
• Brian Cox: Why we need the explorers

Still not sure if you want to watch? Read 6 reasons to tune in »

A poignant ode to the city of Boston, its annual marathon and the victims of the April 15 bombings. [NY Review of Books Blog]

Far, far away in another American city, income inequality varies from block to block. The New Yorker has released an insightful data visualization of city income by subway stop. [New Yorker] Find out more »

Andres Lozano: Parkinson's, depression and the switch that might turn them off
Scientists find a new approach to reversing memory loss, with potential benefits for brain disorders like Alzheimer’s. [Sci Tech Daily] Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Andres Lozano and his team are working on very precise deep brain stimulation to correct dysfunction from similar brain disorders.

Galileo’s public condemnation is often invoked to defend new or unverified science. But as Adam Gopnik writes for the BBC, Galileo taught us a more important lesson: the value of the experimental method, the essence of what science is. [BBC.co.uk]

A plan has been approved to build the world’s largest optical telescope in Hawaii. [NY Times] But will it be any match for the awesomely named European Extremely Large Telescope?

JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out
JR and his team bring the project “Wrinkles of the City” to Berlin, with photographs of the elderly pasted on 15 walls throughout the city. [JR-Art] Watch JR make his 2011 Prize wish »

Would you like to go to Mars? Would you like to go to Mars to be filmed for a reality TV show? Would you like to go to Mars to be filmed for a reality TV show, knowing you probably won’t come back? Your dream has come true »

A deeper look at the feats of Felix Baumgartner, everyone’s favorite record-breaking skydiver. [Vanity Fair]

Ron Mueck’s exhibition opened this week at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Watch a fascinating video of him constructing his work »

Some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week:

Super-duper useful mandatory homework: Get a secure password now. As xkcd explains, most people’s approach to secure passwords (a word bastardized with “random” capital letters and punctuation that’s difficult to remember) is wrong. Now go get yourself a good password. If you need to ask why this is important, watch our informative playlist all about hackers.

Scientists reveal a new technique called CLARITY that can render a brain nearly invisible — that is, rid the brain of light-scattering lipids that make it hard to look at in detail. [io9]

A must-watch Frontline documentary on the conflict in Syria, but not like you’ve seen before. A powerful human-interest piece. [PBS]

Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online

Read an eye-opening piece by Gina Kolata on the world of sham academic journals. It’s disturbing that even reputable academics get scammed. [NYTimes] It’s becoming increasingly difficult to parse what’s legitimate on the interwebs, as we learn from Markham Nolan’s talk on false Internet stories. Here’s a useful guide to some predatory open-access journals.

We’re a little late on this one, but The Invisible War is a harrowing, Academy Award-nominated documentary about rape in the U.S. military. (Did you know that 25 percent of U.S. servicewomen don’t report their rape because the person to report to is their rapist?) Watch the documentary »

Become a better thinker by applying Bayesian reasoning. [io9]

A riveting data visualization animation of all the drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004. [Pitch Interactive]

Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!

Download a neat illustrated guide to TED2013 drawn by TED alum and Ford Futurist Sheryl Connelly. Read about her notes or download them from WeTransfer. Sunni Brown, doodle advocate, would approve. Watch her talk on doodling.

A slightly odd story about Rami Abdul Rahman, basically the one-man team behind the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which produces the main casualty reports coming out of the Syrian conflict. [NYTimes]

Completely useless and untimely: The Useless Website generator »

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In 1812, four men met for a “philosophical breakfast” at Cambridge University: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell. Over food and drinks, they debated the state of knowledge –- imagining a world in which thinkers drew conclusions based on data, where research was done for the good of humanity rather than for financial gain, where researchers questioned each other in the name of moving each other forward and where research received outside funding rather than requiring an individual to pay for it themselves.

Laura Snyder: The Philosophical Breakfast Club In today’s talk, historian Laura Snyder gives us an introduction to the discussions of these four men, who eventually became known as The Philosophical Breakfast Club. While their ideas form the basis of scientific inquiry now, their concepts were radical at the time, says Snyder in this talk from TEDGlobal 2012. It would be another 20 years before the term “scientist” would be coined — by Whewell. To hear about the word’s dramatic unveiling, watch this talk.

The Philsophical Breakfast Club members went on to great things. Babbage invented the first mechanical calculator, and the first prototype of a computer. Herschel was an astronomer who mapped the stars – and also invented photography. Jones was an economist who inspired Marx. And Whewell – who also originated the words cathode and ion — spearheaded global research with his work on tides.

Interestingly, groundbreaking work often seems to happen in groups. Throughout history, clubs of writers, philosophers and artists have formed, with thinkers in the same area gathering for discussion and collaboration. For some of these groups, multiple members went on to renown. It begs the question: Can collectivity push talented individuals to greater things than they could achieve on their own?

Below, a few clubs notable for their influence on modern thought.

The Socrates School
Notable members: philosophers Socrates, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle
Time frame: Approximately 400 years BC
Not at all a school with desks and a blackboard, this group was known for asking big questions about politics, human nature, life and reality, and debating the answers in riveting discussions, many of which were captured on paper in texts like Plato’s Dialogues. Socrates devoted his life to teaching the youth of Athens and, together, this group set the foundations for Western philosophy.

The Bloomsbury Group
Notable members: writers Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, economist John Maynard Keynes, critic Clive Bell and painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant
Time frame: 1907 through the 1930s
While it’s clear that they had meetings, often at the home of Clive and Vanessa Bell in the Bloomsbury district of Central London, this circle of thinkers is hard to pin down as they denied being a formal group at all. The network included husbands, wives, siblings, friends and rivals, all exploring concepts of modernity in literature, criticism, economics and art.

Stratford-on-Odeon
Notable members: writers Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, poet Ezra Pound, composer George Antheil, artist Man Ray
Time frame: 1920s
“Stratford-on-Odeon” was James Joyce’s nickname for the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, in Paris’ Left Bank on the Rue de l’Odéon. The store became a hub for British and American modernists, and store owner Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. The store was closed during the German occupation of Paris in WWII — despite Hemingway’s fabled effort to liberate it himself. (A second bookstore, popular with the Beat Generation, continues to exist at 37 rue de la Bûcherie.)

The Algonquin Round Table
Notable members: writers Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kauffman, Franklin Pierce Adams, Marc Connolly, Edna Ferber
Time frame: 1920s
This New York City writers group formed as a lark, convened to share wisecracks and snide remarks among a group of humor writers, critics, columnists and playwrights, many associated with the young New Yorker magazine. The group ended up meeting almost daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel.

The Inklings
Notable members: writers J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Roger Lancelyn Green, Adam Fox, Nevil Coghilland
Time frame: 1930s and 1940s
A literary discussion group at Oxford, the Inklings would read and discuss each others’ work — most famously helping Tolkien shape The Lord of the Rings. While meetings were generally held in C.S. Lewis’ room, some were held at an Oxford pub called The Eagle and the Child.

The Factory
Notable members: artists Andy Warhol and his stars Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga, artist Salvador Dali, writers Allen Ginsburg and Truman Capote, musicians Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, designer Betsey Johnson
Time frame: The 1960s
The Factory was the name of Andy Warhol’s 1960s studio in New York City. The aluminum-foil-covered space became a gathering spot for artists, filmmakers and musicians, many who were pioneering experimental art. The Factory was also famous for wild parties and sexual exploration – and for being the place where many of our modern ideas of fame were formed.

It’s just a teeny, tiny question: How did the universe begin?

Today, TED-Ed has unveiled a new lesson that answers this in less than four minutes, “The beginning of the universe, for beginners.” This is the first of five animated lessons developed by CERN scientists and brought to life by TED-Ed’s talented animators. The other four animations – which tackle the topics of Dark Matter, Anti-Matter, Big Data and the Higgs Boson — will premiere at TEDxCERN on May 3rd and will be shared on TED-Ed that same day.

The lesson above, “The beginning of the universe, for beginners,” was conceived by CERN physicist Tom Whyntie. It explains how cosmologists and particle physicists explore questions like, “How is the universe expanding?” by replicating the heat, energy and activity of the first few seconds of our universe — immediately following the Big Bang.

To see the premiere of the next four lessons in real time, tune in to the TEDxCERN live webcast on May 3rd, from 14:00 to 20:00 (CEST). It will be available to the public here »

TEDxCERN will feature talks from scientists and big thinkers of all kinds. For more information on TEDxCERN, visit their website, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

Some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week:

First: Dragonflies are beautiful, deadly and have weird sex. [NY Times] While you’re at it, check out our playlist Insects are awesome!, above.

The clap-o-meter was yesterday’s Big Data. [The Atlantic]

Dimitar Sasselov: How we found hundreds of potential Earth-like planets Scientists now estimate the number of Earth-like, habitable planets in the Galaxy to be around 100 billion. [Sci tech daily] Watch Dimitar Sasselov’s talk from 2010 on his own work with Kepler to look for these kinds of planets.

We all have unique fingerprints and genomes — and breathprints? [New Scientist]

What does linguist Ben Zimmer read? A question you never thought you’d ask, yet you’re glad you found the answer. [The Atlantic]

Weird but fascinating article on how breeding pigeons in New York City is becoming a representation of the American melting pot/tossed salad. [NY Times]

Willard Wigan: Hold your breath for micro-sculpture
Tiny, tiny, tiny gorgeous paintings of Istanbul by Hasan Kale. [Huffington Post] They remind me of Willard Wigan’s awesome micro sculptures.

Neat. Fourteen words that are their own opposites. [Mental Floss]

Whole Foods announces a new partnership with Gotham Greens, co-founded by TED Fellow Viraj Puri, to build a greenhouse on the roof of its forthcoming location in Gowanus, Brooklyn. [Grocery Headquarters]

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In 1995, Kees Moeliker heard a loud bang coming from the Natural History Museum Rotterdam’s new wing. He knew exactly what it was. Kees Moeliker: How a dead duck changed my life A curator at the museum, Moeliker had gotten used to the sound of birds hitting the glass exterior of the new wing, and had even taken to stuffing the dead birds for the museum’s collection. But, as Moeliker explains in this humorous talk from TED2013, the duck that met its death on this particular day “changed his life.”

Just how the duck qualified as a life-changing event sounds like an April Fools’ Day joke. It is not.

Soon after the male mallard duck died, a live male duck from the same species approached it, mounted it, and — to put it in layperson’s terms — humped it for over an hour. Amazed, Moeliker did what any curious biologist would do: he grabbed his camera and his notebook, and recorded what happened. Moeliker described his bizarre observations six years later in a paper aptly titled “The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae).”

In 2003, this work earned Moeliker the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology. A parody of the Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobels honor research and work that “first make[s] people laugh and then make[s] them think.” In other words, just because research sounds ridiculous doesn’t mean it has no merit. As Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams tells the TED Blog over email: “Science is the continuing quest to discover — and to not overlook — things beyond or outside what we expect. The truly unexpected is surprising, sometimes funny, and, who knows, might even turn out to be important.”

Even Moeliker’s dead duck research has a practical side. Each year on June 5^th Moeliker and the victimized duck, which he naturally had stuffed, co-lead a public discussion on how to prevent birds from hitting windows — a major cause of bird death worldwide. As Moeliker shares in his talk, it could be that the mixed-up sexual behavior of animals points to something larger — that our continuous morphing of landscapes may have an affect animal behavior and species’ ability to thrive.

For a full list of past Ig Nobel winners, head to their website. Or read on for a few of our favorites…

Category: Entomology
Year: 1994
Winner: Robert A. Lopez “for his series of experiments in obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear, and carefully observing and analyzing the results.”
Why he did it: Sounds uncomfortable, and it was by all accounts. Still, as Marc Abrahams reports in The Guardian, Lopez’s itchy experiment helped him prove that Otodectes cynotis mites could infect humans, which he suspected was the cause of at least one rash in a young girl who liked cuddling her mite-ridden cats.

Category: Public Health
Year: 2009
Winners: Elena Bodnar, Raphael Lee, and Sandra Marijan “for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.”
Why they did it: The concept for this invention may seem silly, and the drawings in the team’s patent don’t help, but during a biological or chemical terror attack you probably wouldn’t care.

Category: Safety Engineering
Year: 1998
Winner: Troy Hurtubise “for developing, and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears.”
Why he did it: Well, to see if he could survive a grizzly attack. But, according to Wikipedia, the suit may also have applications in riots, explosions and other dangerous situations in which you’d want protection.

Category: Peace
Year: 2000
Winner: The British Royal Navy “for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout “Bang!”
Why they did it: According to the BBC, the Navy decided to forego live ammunition for the childlike verbal “bangs” after the government drastically cut military budgets.

Category: Biology
Year: 2002
Winners: N. Bubier, Charles Paxton, Phil Bowers and D. Charles Deeming “for their report ‘Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain.’”
Why they did it: According to the authors, an increase in ostrich farms and a lack of knowledge on how they breed in captivity spurred the research. Anecdotal evidence showed the birds got frisky whenever people were nearby, so the researchers decided to confirm whether it was true. It was. The authors concluded: “Courtship behaviour towards humans may be important in the reproductive success of ostriches in a farming environment.”

Category: Engineering
Year: 2010
Winners: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin “for perfecting a method to collect whale snot using a remote-control helicopter.”
Why they did it: Being a whale doctor isn’t easy, especially when your patient weighs multiple tons and is swimming in the ocean. One way to monitor health is to check the microbes living in and on the whale to see if they may be causing disease. As these winners have shown, it’s possible to collect at least some of those whale microbes with the marvels of modern technology.

Category: Physics
Year: 2003
Winners: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams “for their irresistible report ‘An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.’”
Why they did it: As this Abrahams Q&A with Wired explains, the research took place in Australia, where sheep shearing is a major industry. Dragging the sheep to the equipment is difficult and dangerous and the scientists researched various floor configurations and materials to see what which surfaces made the job easiest.

Kees Moeliker proudly displays a dead mallard at TED. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Kees Moeliker: How a dead duck changed my lifeIn the days leading up to TED2013, we at the TED Blog revealed the best props at TEDs past and showed you the speakers who’d brought animals on stage with them. Little did we know that, on the day two of the conference, we’d meet a speaker who’d combine both.

In today’s talk, given at TED2013, Kees Moeliker illuminates how finding a dead duck one summer day changed the course of his professional life. It’s an incredible, hilarious and unexpected story. And to highlight the importance of said duck, Moeliker physically brought it on stage with him. Dead for nearly eighteen years (Moeliker found this duck outside of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, where he works, in 1995 and had him stuffed for posterity), Moeliker took the taxidermied duck out of a plastic bag and passed it to a brave audience member.

Below, see the hilarity that ensued as this odd artifact made the rounds.

An audience member cradles the dead duck. While some in the audience appear disturbed, others glow. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Richard Turere, who gave the talk “My invention that made peace with lions,” cracks up at this surprising talk.

Particle physicist Sarah M. Demers shares her experience of being a woman in science, and why it’s a problem that she doesn’t see gender equity around her yet. Image: Thinkstock.com

I just might have the best job in the world. As a particle physicist and professor at Yale, I am a happy cog on the wheel of humanity, trying to understand the universe. I collaborate with brilliant people, young and old, from all over the globe. But while I love my job, the truth is I am part of a system that is rigged.

We have come a long way since the day in 1900 that suffragist Susan B. Anthony pledged her life insurance policy to the University of Rochester on a fundraising deadline. This desperate move clinched a deal with trustees that allowed women to enroll. I was admitted there as a graduate student in physics almost a century later.

I remember reading the orientation materials with excitement. I looked over the roster of my classmates and my enthusiasm dimmed a bit as I counted only six women out of thirty. (And when I finally met one of the six, Marion, “she” turned out to be a man from Romania.) How, in 1999, could I be joining a club that was so small?

First, for the good news. The club may be small, but at least it exists. Pioneers like Anthony, Marie Curie and Bernice Sandler (the “Godmother of Title IX”) have opened institutional doors, modeled scientific brilliance and changed the climate. Women can now build up their credentials and compete for the same careers in science as men. Reports from my younger colleagues of being steered away from the labs because some misogynist says, “Women shouldn’t do science” are still coming in, but less often.

Even claims about men having more innate scientific ability are becoming rarer. It just doesn’t fit the evidence. Girls outperform boys in science exams sometimes, and sometimes it’s vice versa, depending on the country in question. From Columbia, where boys scored 4% higher on average, to Jordan, where girls scored 9% higher on average, the data do not jibe with a gender explanation, as this New York Times infographic shows. (Intrigued? This country-by-country data comes from Andreas Schleicher’s PISA test; watch his TED Talk to learn more.)

And yet, despite this progress, this data, women still only account for about one in ten physics professors in the U.S. As much as scientists talk about eradicating bias from our experiments, we sure haven’t done a great job eradicating it from our profession.

A framework to produce good scientists on an equal playing field requires objectivity. Students take tests, receive grades and apply for the next phase of school. Researchers submit papers and grant proposals that are returned with the feedback of peer review. We apply for jobs, and if we get them, funding. Only the highest rated work is funded and published.

Susan B. Anthony made an unusual deal to get women admitted to the University of Rochester. About 100 years later, gender bias in university science departments continues.

In this environment, even a small bias will have a huge ripple effect on the quality of scientific results that emerge and the make-up of the researchers left employed and standing at the end of the day. Unfortunately, we have a growing body of evidence that subconscious bias is alive and well. A few of my colleagues at Yale conducted a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that shows gender bias among science faculty members. They sent an application for a lab manager position to hundreds of science professors at six leading research institutions. Half of the applications were labeled as coming from John. The other half, in all other ways identical, came from Jennifer. The professors were asked to rate the application they received and suggest a starting salary.

The results? Jennifer was rated as less competent than John, though she was viewed as more likable. Jennifer was less likely to be recommended for hire and less likely to be considered worth mentoring. Her average suggested starting salary was lower ($26,508 compared to $30,238). The bias against Jennifer showed in both male and female faculty members, both younger and older professors, across the fields of physics, biology and chemistry.

I have been around the block and back on the topic of women in science. I would much rather be writing about the Higgs boson, the physics of music, or what we know about effective science education. But subconscious bias against women in science is real, it is damaging and while the studies we see suggest that it is almost universally practiced, it is far from universally acknowledged.

In a recent Time Magazine article about a prominent woman in physics, the reporter wrote, “Physics is a male-dominated field, and the assumption is that a woman has to overcome hurdles and face down biases that men don’t.  But that just isn’t so. Women in physics are familiar with this misconception and acknowledge it mostly with jokes.”

It is difficult to solve a problem that we won’t admit we have, but good science demands that we stamp out subconscious bias. Luckily, raising awareness and continuing the conversation is much less of a sacrifice than signing over a life insurance policy. A century from now I hope that identical work from Jennifer and John will receive, on average, identical marks. I hope that our great-grandchildren will not be scratching their heads asking, “Why so little progress?” And I hope that an article by a physicist will be about her latest discovery, not gender.

Sarah Demers is an assistant professor of physics at Yale University. She wrote this piece through The OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowship Program.

Want to learn about more women in science and tech? Watch today’s talk from mechanical engineer Katherine Kuchenbecker, who is exploring the “technology of touch.” And check out our list of 70+ TED Talks from female physicists, biologists, engineers, doctors, technologists, oceanographers, roboticists, and astronauts »