Friday Fun Blog: Going Young Edition

Welcome back to the Internet’s favorite link dump—The Friday Fun Blog! Each week, we round up our favorite links, stories, and videos from the week and give you something to do while watching the clock! As always, we’re totally not brought to you by Dave & Buster’s!

On to the links!

If you’ve been watching the Daredevil series on Netflix, one of the most intriguing (and awesome) characters they’ve introduced in the second season has been The Punisher, played by Walking Dead’s Jon Bernthal.

Photo Credit: mashable.com (linked below)

Bernthal lit up the screen as the overly-violent but somewhat-morally-justified Frank Castle, and now Netflix has announced that the character will get his own spin-off series. If the season two jail scene is anything to go by, expect A LOT of blood.

When nature attacks, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Especially if it involves a weasel shutting down the Large Hadron Collider. According to reports, the LHC suffered a power outage due to the hunger of a weasel who chewed through a 66-kilovolt power cable. 66-kilovolts is a lot of power, so I’m sure they can use the uncharred particles of the weasel and throw them into the collider as part of a weird experiment, or something.

People dunking basketballs while swinging from bridges? People dunking basketballs while swinging from bridges.

Obligatory Space Post of the Week: Meet the James Webb Space Telescope—a joint venture from NASA, the European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency and Space Telescope Science Institute—the telescope is the successor to the Hubble Telescope. The JWST, when launched in 2018, will use infrared imaging to see glimpses of the earliest galaxies in our universe.

Eighteen mirrors comprise the 21ft face of the telescope, dwarfing Hubble’s 7.9 ft façade, allowing the JWST to collect 7 times the light that Hubble does, allowing for dimmer galaxies—those created in the beginning of the universe—to be found.

And finally…

Ya know—I always applaud companies or individuals that stand firmly behind the products they sell, because you’re not just shilling for sales, but it’s something you actually believe in and that’s important. Take, for instance, Elizabeth Parrish, the CEO of the biotech company BioViva, who recently went to Colombia to test a controversial age-reversing gene therapy treatment on herself.

Photo Credit: arstechnica.com (linked above)

That’s brand loyalty. Not surprisingly, she said that after taking numerous tests, they “reveal that her blood cells’ telomeres have extended from 6.71 kilobases of DNA to 7.33 kilobases. The difference, she estimates, equates to a cellular age difference of 20 years.” It’s worth noting that this woman has zero scientific or medical background, and that one of the company’s scientific advisors, George Martin (not the author), resigned saying that there needed to be more pre-clinical studies of the treatment.

I look forward to either the upcoming obituary of Ms. Parrish, or the eventual shrine being built in honor of her immortal highness.