This tornado, guys. This tornado. I mean. I just. I can't. The whole town! The kids! UGH. I am at the point with national tragedies where I just lose my ability to respond in any coherent way. What do we even DO at that point? Well, one approach is to watch heartwarming animal videos, like this one where a shocked tornado victim discovers during a CBS interview that she didn't lose everything -- she just lost everything except her dog.

Public schools increasingly talk a good game about the healthy stuff they’re serving for lunch. But the meals don’t always match the menu, as Zachary Maxwell discovered as a fourth grader. Maxwell sneakily recorded the gross lunches at his school, and from that footage was born his aptly titled documentary, Yuck!

Getting this footage wasn't easy, he told The New York Times:

In Britain, common cranes used to be -- as their name would suggest -- all over the place. But as a species, they fell early to human thoughtlessness. Between hunters and habitat loss, they've been gone from the wild, in Britain at least, since 1600.

Conservationists have been trying to bring the birds back, raising them in captivity for the past three years. Now, one pair has laid an egg! And the conservationists responsible for the birds aren't taking any chances: They're putting that egg under 24-hour surveillance..

Have you ever sat on the subway across from a hot guy or girl holding the book you just finished, trying to peek at their left hand and wondering whether it's kosher to start a conversation? The organization that runs the subways in Prague has a plan that will end these awkward deliberations for good. The company, ROPID, "wants to set aside carriages on some or all of its trains for singles seeking a soul mate," Reuters reports. It'd basically be like Amtrak's quiet car, except instead of sitting in silence, everyone will be scanning the car like they would a bar on a Saturday night.

This time-lapse footage shows yesterday's deadly tornado going from a neat, eerie-looking funnel to a giant clusterfuck of wind and destruction. It's pretty stunning, but still easier to watch than pictures of lost dogs or decimated homes.

Pack up your temperature sensors, your climate-modeling supercomputers, your tree and ice core sample equipment. Sarah Palin has spoken on climate change, and she says it's snowing in Alaska, ergo "global warming my gluteus maximus," Q.E.D. And you know it's science because she used the Latin word for "ass."

Nutella is essentially a perfect food -- delicious, no HFCS, delicious, full of natural ingredients, and fucking delicious. OK, yes, it has palm oil and is packed to the lid with (mostly unsaturated!) fat, but you make some compromises in the name of pure spreadable joy. Unfortunately, if you had any ideas about celebrating this superfood on World Nutella Day, Feb. 5, pack them in -- Ferrero, the company that makes the stuff, has insisted that the organizers cease and desist. Oh Nutella, why won't you let us love you? 

Ira Leifer studies the atmosphere. He also has the geekiest RV ever, set up to measure methane levels on the go. It has, for instance, "a mast that rises up five stories, like a periscope."

This is actually Leifer’s second mobile lab. The first one he set up in a rented camper van in 2010, after driving his equipment down to the Gulf Coast to measure methane in the wake of the BP oil spill. NPR reports:

[A]fter his research cruise ended, Leifer thought, "Why not sample the air on the way back home?" So he jury-rigged a setup for these delicate instruments in the back.

"It involved a lot of work with an air mattress folded in half, a giant tarp filled with Styrofoam peanuts, bungees holding things to the wall and so on," Leifer says. "It really looked like a Rube Goldberg kind of weird device in the back with this gas chromatograph sitting in the middle of it."

It's easy to get paranoid when you're riding a bike alongside drivers who, despite commanding vehicles much bigger and faster than yours, seem uninterested in your safety or survival. Sometimes it feels like they're out to get you. Or at least like they'd be happy if you got hurt.

And apparently, that paranoia is not entirely unjustified. In the U.K., for instance, one driver bragged on Twitter about knocking a person off his bike with her car:

In this case, bike activists who monitor social media for anti-cycling comments alerted the police, who told Way to report having being in a collision. (We can just imagine her whining "but I did report it! I told everyone on Twitter he deserved it!") But it is creepy that anyone would be so excited about potentially injuring another human being.

Gold mining today is far from the charming, if soggy, practice of standing in a river and trying to sift out gold nuggets. Today, miners sift out gold from a river of cyanide, basically: They mine rock with tiny concentrations of gold in it, crush it up, and use cyanide to pull the gold molecules out. This is terrible for the environment, as you might imagine. Mother Jones pulled these statistics together a few years ago:

Mining gold to create a single 1/3-ounce 18-karat ring produces at least 20 tons of waste and 13 pounds of toxic emissions.

Those emissions contain 5.5 pounds of lead, 3 pounds of arsenic, almost 2 ounces of mercury, and 1 ounce of cyanide.

But now scientists think they've come up with a way of extracting gold using a compound much more benign than cyanide. Instead, they think they can use cornstarch.