IHC forums are now open to everyone!

Legendary TV cooking show personality Julia Child was well known for her French onion soup, but in this film from 1976, she cooks up a batch of primordial soup to illustrate how the building blocks of life might have formed in the nasty hot chemical cauldrons of a young Earth. This film was done for the Smithsonian's Life in the Universe gallery.

Much like many other farms across the northern hemisphere, it's weed harvest time in Mendicino County in northern California. In recent years, Mendicino has become notorious for its massive weed-growing operations, much of it used by medical marijuana and all of it ignored by local law enforcement.

Physicist Axel Mellinger spent nearly two years traveling 26,000 miles across South Africa, Texas and Michigan and what does he have to show for it? Well, he's cobbled together a stunning 648 megapixel panorama of the Milky Way as seen from Earth, using 3,000 individual photographs. The Central Michigan University professor wants to make the image available for planetariums, as it's large enough to serve educational purposes. It even shows stars that are 1,000 times too faint to be seen by the human eye, so this is a Milky Way like you've never seen.

Recently discovered in Montana by a husband and wife paleontological team, Tatankacephalus cooneyorum was a plant-eating beast built like a tank, able to take almost whatever punishment came at it and keep going.

From LiveScience:

Other than people and a couple other primates, not a whole lot of other animals like going down on each other. But fruit bats do, apparently, and this habit has been recently studied to find out more not about not only the mating habits of fruit bats, but the possible evolutionary advantages to oral sex in genital general.

From io9:

The University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center has put together a great little Flash presentation showing the scale of things as big as a coffee bean all the way down to the size of a carbon atom. The world... IT'S SO TINY! Click here to view things you can't see with your human eyeballs.

Exactly how many universes are out there in the vast expanse of space? Are we the only one? The idea of multiple universes, possibly with their own set of natural laws, coalesced into a giant multiverse has been gaining ground recently-- only it's not something that at this time is more than just speculation. Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California calculate that the number of universes dwarfs the 10⁵⁰⁰ universes postulated in string theory, and raise the provocative notion that the answer may depend on the human brain.

So you guys know I surf the net and look for weird crap to either talk about on the show or bring to you here or add to MWRTV.

This is I guess what you could call a mini documentary about our evolution. It's kinda funny...The narrator plus the imagery made me chuckle.

Plastic surgery is something we more or less take for granted these days. Boob jobs, nose jobs, skin grafts, liposuction, facial and skin reconstruction-- these are things that are safe and tested and there when we need them. This wasn't the case in 1917, when Walter Yeo, a British sailor in WWI was injured in the Battle of Jutland while manning guns on the battleship HMS Warspite. He's the first person to have benefitted from plastic surgery, if by benefitted you mean that he didn't die and he went around the rest of his life with a permanent superhero mask.