If you’ve always wanted to live on another planet, there is still hope—for your great, great grandchildren. According to a BBC report, Ascension Island, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, might hold the key to colonizing the red planet. The information has been around for a while—it just took us more than 150 years to realize it.

Guess who led the breakthrough? It was none other than Charles Darwin. Darwin gets a bad rap in this country, but the man was brilliant. Evolution? That’s kind of a big deal.

In 1836, Darwin toured the world, searching for the rarest and most interesting examples of life he could find. As he searched through the Atlantic Ridge, he came across a tiny island they called Ascension—1,000 miles off the coast of Africa.

Locals knew it as a terrible place to live. The landscape was arid, filled with dried-up, rock-solid volcanic remnants. Darwin, as people of such intelligence routinely do, saw something that no one else did. He envisioned the possibility of great life. Volcanic regions produce new life, but the island lacked the water it needed. Any rainfall evaporated too quickly.

Darwin realized that if he planted some trees, they would catch more moisture, spread it throughout the island, and create more growth. So, with the help of the British Royal Navy and Kew Gardens, for a few years Darwin planted a diverse collection of plants and trees on the island.

The island’s vegetation grew and kept on growing. Just by planting some trees, Darwin created a thriving community of vegetation. It’s amazing, really. There’s no other place like it, yet no one seemed to care.

British scientist Dave Wilkinson didn’t hear about the island until 2003, but he’s written extensively  about it since. He connected the processes at Ascension with the possibility of colonizing Mars. We don’t need to change the environment. Instead, we can give it a little push and let it develop to suitable conditions.

It’s startling that Darwin just set this island in motion and created an entire ecosystem, leaving it to flourish on its own. It’s an experiment you’d think would be monitored, but it doesn’t seem like it has been.

For all we know, there’s another island out there where bears sit down for a cup of tea every day and fish play basketball. The Earth is massive, and sometimes we forget that. It’s nice to be reminded.

With the recent release of The American, starring George Clooney as a seasoned assassin on his last job, Slate asked the question, “Do hired assassins actually exist?”

The answer: sort of, but they have day jobs, too. Those that exist would likely moonlight as drug dealers, extortionists, thieves and pimps. Renaissance men, if you will. (Hey, a criminal’s gotta keep doors open.)

That said, Slate goes on to say, “Trigger-men are often first-time killers, not well-trained international assassins.” And worse, most hits aren’t particularly well paid. (Around $100 a kill. Ouch.)

Ultimately, most high-profile assassinations are carried out by government agencies (like the Mossad in Israel), but even those agencies wouldn’t include a stable of kill-specialists.

Why, it’s like Hollywood is… exaggerating the truth.

Professors, columnists, politicians, documentarians, and PTA moms have all promised improvement in our beleaguered educational system. Now, a new and unexpected sect has joined the fight: bookies. Ultrinsic, an online gambling website, provokes students at thirty-six universities nationwide to earn better grades, one bet at a time.

Ultrinsic allows students to gamble on their academic performance fantasy football style. To play, a student registers, uploads his semester’s schedule on the website, and bets what grades he will earn (with a cap that starts at $25 each class and increases with use). Ultrinsic then calculates the odds with a formula involving official school records (i.e. determining whether the professor is a pushover) and the student’s grades in the past.

The company also offers a “Freshmen Only” package, in which the new student bets $20 that he will earn a 4.0 GPA for all four years, winning $2,000, enough to start paying loans, or bet on grad school.

Jeremy Galbert and Steven Wolf, two former University of Pennsylvania students, conceived of the idea after Galbert bet Wolf $100 he would earn an A on an exam. “Steven and I quickly realized that lots of other students might like this kind of motivation,” Galbert writes on the website.

Due to popular demand, Ultrinsic will expand this year from just Penn and New York Univeristy to thirty-six other schools, including most of the Ivy League, Texas A&M, Rutgers, and Michigan.

Gambling lawyers have debated the legality of Ultrinsic, some claiming it qualifies as online gambling, which the federal government has banned since 2006. But Galbert and Wolf assert that winning requires skill, not chance.

“It’s completely within their control, what grades they get,” Galbert told The Huffington Post. “If you study harder, you’ll do well.” That may hold true with objective courses like calculus and organic chemistry. But with more subjective liberal arts courses and subjective, human professors, the lines are blurred between a cut-and-dry incentive to earn better grades and a Vegas NFL playoff parlay bet.

Beyond the legality, Ultrinsic entrenches itself in fuzzy morality. The name combines an “ULTerior motivation with the inTRINSIC love of knowledge.” But when you make money the incentive to earn a good grade, where does the incentive to keep the information you’ve learned go once you’ve earned the money? Does it spark a thirst for knowledge or streamline information processing for the sake of money? At least it’s good news for grade slaves: they can now earn wages.

—Zak Jason

Cee-Lo Green (of Gnarls Barkley fame) released his tirelessly catchy single, F**k You a couple weeks back and gained immediate viral status. Now his retro anthem for every guy who’s ever had his heart broken has an equally awesome music video accompaniment.

Set in a 50s diner with Motown-style backup singers, the video highlights include a lackadaisical lip-synching kid as the adorable elementary-aged singer and Cee-Lo himself in a flaming red plaid jacket for the college stage. (Because that’s what you wear in college.)

In any case, it’ll have you humming “I guess he’s Xbox and I’m more Atari” until you can’t stand it anymore.

Magazine: Details
Issue: September 2010
Story: The Agony of Zac Efron by Andrew Goldman

This month’s issue of Details features a lengthy cover story on Zac Efron, the peripherally grating, perennially grinning star of High School Musical whom we’re all more or less resigned to glumly stare at in the check-out aisle at Wal-Mart.

But what I assumed was going to be yet another teeth-rottingly saccharine profile turned out to be an engaging, insightful glimpse not only into Efron’s head but also into how his particular cog turns in the world’s movie-making machinery. As author Andrew Goldman describes it: “Hollywood, like everything else, is just an extension of high school, with the burnouts and the jocks coexisting uneasily. Burnout Sean Penn drinks and smokes too much and will always be cooler than jock Tom Cruise, whom one imagines doing lots of crunches and high-fives.”

The article follows a day-in-the-life of Efron, who seems to blithely wander  through pool hall brush-ins with Bryan Singer, blinged out Soho penthouse set-ups, and spontaneous motorcycle lessons from Tom Cruise. Yet, Goldman manages to capture the subtle—and yes, often saccharine—moments in which Efron seems downright relatable.

Reported right after the young star had his first run-in with poison oak on a camping trip, the story is peppered with itchy, human scenes where Efron bashfully agrees to show Goldman his pustule encrusted back—“I look like a zombie from Dawn of the Dead“—or meekly offers his name to a club hostess as she looks for his reservation… as though she wouldn’t recognize him.

Goldman also managed to capture Efron’s geekiness. “Zac Efron is not cool,” he proclaims in an affectionate way. He then goes on to detail how the young actor practiced for weeks to master spinning a basketball on his pinky for his film, 17 Again, as well as his sheepish admiration for the irreverence of actors like Shia LaBeouf who “disses Spielberg and flips pickups and just gets bigger.” (In contrast, Efron makes appearances at Bar Mitzvahs as favors to industry friends.)

In short, this was an article that accomplishes what seems impossible: it makes you like Zac Efron. Like the classic kung-fu move that uses one’s opponent’s momentum to destroy them, Goldman takes Efron’s sweetness and throws the reader head-first into a headlock.  And whether or not your teeth are rotten at the end of the article… you find yourself craving more.

What happens if you’re a city, named after a rock, where a buffalo runs around a football stadium filled with drunken college kids? You become the smartest in the United States, that’s what.

The Daily Beast released its list of the 20 most intelligent metro-areas. Boulder topped the list, with San Francisco, Boston, and D.C. all placing nicely in the top ten.

Shockingly, no city on the Jersey Shore made the cut.

In one of the oddest mash-ups I’ve seen in a while, artist James Hance has produced a lovely series of prints re-casting Star Wars characters in Winnie the Pooh roles. Hans Solo plays Christopher Robin, R2D2 takes on Piglet, and (of course) Chewbacca is the lovable Pooh Bear. (My favorite is probably the AT-AT as Eeyore.)

Definitely take a stroll through his cartoon page to really appreciate the detail and “relentless cheerfulness” of his work.

I’d been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the latest JCrew catalog for the past few weeks. I couldn’t wait to see the season’s newest threads.

With my copy yet to arrive, I was shocked to find out, from Slate, that a hippie has infiltrated the walls of the American institution that is the JCrew catalog. A warm-blooded, greasy-haired, scraggily-bearded, meticulously unkempt hippie is now a JCrew model. I am outraged, steaming mad.

I go to JCrew to buy belts with crabs on them and pants that look like a quilt, not to see disgusting, long-haired heathens. JCrew was a place where everything was how it should be: rich and preppy as all hell. It’s little kids in $500-worth of clothing, jackets that cost more than my life savings, sweaters tied around the neck, and no hippies.

I don’t even know what to think anymore. Maybe it’s time for Vineyard Vines or Banana Republic?

Created by John Boswell, a musician based in Washington D.C., the series is a strangely hypnotic hybrid of Daft Punk and those washed out VHS documentaries you were forced to watch in high school science class.

This one’s one of the best, ft. Attenborough, Sagan (as in Carl), and MC Jane Goodall.

Have you ever wondered how the earliest cannibals behaved? Me neither, but it turns out they were pretty interesting—and frightening.

Discovery News reports that the first cannibals ate each other for the nutritional value, not out of necessity. They had other feeding options, but they chose to snack on themselves as part of the daily diet.

These cannibals, Homo antecessor, are distant relatives of humans. They hunted out other members of their species and ate them, just like they would any source of meat. The process is known as gastronomic cannibalism.

Scientists also believe the cannibals ate their enemies for political gain. Maybe this is what the “Tea Partiers” mean when they talk about “getting back to our roots.” Politics are screwed up enough as it is, so why not have everyone try to eat each other? If you want his senate seat, it’s simple. Eat him for dinner and the spot is yours. Dick Cheney would’ve loved this.