In the 19th century, people flocked to cities to take new jobs produced by the Industrial Revolution. Poverty and adulterated food left too many school children malnourished, so Boston and Philadelphia were two of the earliest cities to offer school lunches, in 1894. A new exhibition at Philadelphia’s Science History Institute titled "Lunchtime: The History of Science on the School Food Tray" looks at the evolving science of nutrition in school lunches. The chart above isn't identified by the year, but the lunches cost only a penny, so it must be from around the turn of the 20th century. Notice it has no meat and no vegetables, although some fruits are offered.

Scientists tried to determine what an optimum school lunch consisted of, but The Great Depression, wartime rationing, and available food supplies all affected what was served. We still haven't hit on a formula that produces optimum nutritional value at a cost that schools can manage, but we've come a long way from crackers and milk for lunch. Read more about how school lunches developed at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Science History Institute)

The habu (Protbothrops flavoridis) is a venomous snake common to the Ryuku Islands, which includes Okinawa. They measure about four feet long and their bites, if left untreated can result in death. They don't prey on humans, but humans do prey on them, often by infusing them in local liquors.

Sora News 24 found that they're good eating. The publication sent a reporter to the island of Amami Oshima, where restaurants offer habu meat on the menu. This serving of fried habu sells for ¥2,000, which is about $13.98 USD. The reporter says that it tastes like fried chicken, albeit with a chewy texture.

Arieh Smith, who goes by the online pseudonym of Xiaomanyc, is a polyglot who picks up languages incredibly easily. Among other languages, he has a nearly native command of Mandarin Chinese. He teaches it online using his sophisticated knowledge of the way that languages work.

In this video, he first delivers a speech to high school students using Gen Alpha slang, which is helpfully subtitled for Gen Xers like me. Then he gives another speech, also in Gen Alpha slang to language education students at the Ohio State University. Gyatt, Xiaomanyc's rizz is no cap sigma and mad lit.

-via Laughing Squid

There is a charming scene in Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers in which Wallace is slung out of bed, dressed, and served breakfast in a mere few seconds by his dog Gromit with the aid of some mechanical shenanigans. Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama) saw this as something right up his alley. Can he recreate the scene in real life without resorting to animation or special effects?

The fact that this video exists means the answer is yes, but it wasn't easy. This time, we get to see the process of building one of Joseph's machines, despite his trepidation about falling from a great height. The jelly made a mess, the bed broke, and there was no plausible substitute for training a real dog to initiate it all. You can skip to 7:39 and see the finished stunt, or you can enjoy all the hard work and bruises that went into making it. -via kottke

During the Age of Exploration, it wasn't uncommon for ships to lose the majority of their crews to scurvy. While there were many theories as to what caused scurvy, a lot of people suspected it was a dietary deficiency. After all, long ocean voyages required foods that could be preserved and stored a long time, which meant they were pretty plain. Ship captains tried various kinds of supplements, and several found that citrus fruits or sauerkraut could fend off scurvy, yet neither scheme was well communicated nor adopted in the shipping industry. After all, provisioners had to keep costs down, and vitamin C wouldn't be discovered until 1912.  

Then in 1747, Scottish naval surgeon Dr. James Lind selected 12 sailors suffering from scurvy to test six different treatments. Besides the experimental treatment, they were all kept in the same conditions and fed the same food. The two men who were given oranges and lemons improved quickly, one going back on duty in just six days! The men who were given vinegar, seawater, sulphuric acid, or other treatments shows no significant improvement.

Unfortunately, since this was the first clinical trial of its kind, Lind didn't have enough confidence in his methods or results. It would take several more decades before citrus fruits were widely adopted as a scurvy preventative. Read the story of that first clinical trial at Amusing Planet.

(Cropped image credit: Robert Alan - Parke, Davis & Company)

When you're young, you might think of your brother as merely a companion who has always been there, and you don't really appreciate him until something goes very wrong. Caleb got himself trapped inside a video game titled Leftover Pasta. His little brother Frankie can save him only by completing the game. But Frankie is younger and this mission (and the game) is making him very nervous. The game itself is hard to crack and nonsensical to those of us not familiar with this kind of challenge. But that's not really important to the plot. It's really about the love these brothers have for each other.

Ben Knight made this short film for his BFA degree at CalArts. From the credits, it appears that his family did the voices. They did the music, too. -via Metafilter

Sometimes you see a display of ancient history and all you see is rocks. But they are labeled as ancient stone tools. Have you ever wondered how anthropologists can tell they've been deliberately shaped, as opposed to just breaking that way? To tell the difference, you need to be somewhat familiar with the art of flintknapping, or shaping rocks by breaking off pieces.  

Flintknapping requires a basic understanding of physics and geology, plus skills that only come with practice. Those who have tried it know that it's not easy, and our ancient ancestors most likely took years to perfect the skill, and then passed it down to the next generation. Picking just the right stone and finding the right place to apply force to knock off flakes left behind telltale clues to those who know how it's done. Read up on those clues and how the deliberate shaping of rocks differs from random breaking at the Conversation. You might even pick up a new hobby.

(Image credit: Gary Todd)

KaplaBen has an awful lot of wooden Kapla blocks. His ultimate goal is to build a 50-meter (164 feet) tower of Kapla blocks. Meanwhile, this is his third prototype to test out his design. He estimates that he used about 18,000 blocks to build this tower over the last six months. It is clear that he has no children or cats, or he wouldn't have ever gotten this far. I was impressed when he pulled out the scissor lift to reach the top and still didn't knock it down. He doesn't say, but the finished tower looks to be around 25 to 30 feet tall.

But all things must come to an end. KaplaBen built a staircase around the outside, and I wondered what that was for, but the plan becomes apparent when he lines up blocks like dominoes to begin the controlled demolition. He had cameras ready everywhere, including the floor inside. It was only a miracle that camera wasn't covered up with blocks as soon as the first blocks came down, and the resulting fall is quite satisfying.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

The latest game from Neal Argawal (previously at Neatorama) is a road trip with a few hundred random internet players. In Internet Road Trip, you're just driving along, currently in Salem, New Hampshire, as I write this. Do you want to go straight ahead, make a turn, or honk the horn? It's not really up to you. You can vote on the next move, but everyone else gets to vote as well. Personally, I keep trying to turn right because we are driving in the left lane right into oncoming traffic. But if you can get over that, the trip can be a lot of fun. Check the map on the left to see where we came from, and turn on the radio to hear local stations in the lower right corner. Join in the group chat, or you can just check back tomorrow to see if the crowd has made it to the next town or state. Since I took that screenshot, we've moved on to Wilson Corners, New Hampshire. -via Metafilter

You've probably already seen a few versions of Star Wars as a silent film, because YouTube is full of them. In fact, it was a hot trend around twenty years ago. We assumed that the idea worked so well because everyone knew the story already. Danny Boyd, also known as Cinemastix, explains how it's much more than that. George Lucas himself said he designed Star Wars to work as a silent film, but he meant that the dialogue is not as important as other elements of the films. The driving force behind the rhythm of Star Wars is the music -and that's anything but silent.

The exposition in this video gives us plenty of examples of how music and action power the Star Wars movies -and other films, too- which makes the dialogue less important. And we can see here how Hayden Christensen comes off as a much better actor in the prequels when he's either silent or overdubbed. Boyd also refers to the re-editing of Star Wars, a subject that was explained in a previous video.

HSHS St. Vincent Hospital is reporting a baby boom. https://t.co/5KFgusbcwD

— WBAY-TV 2 (@WBAY) May 6, 2025

You would expect there to be a lot of babies at a hospital's Women and Infant's Center, but in that unit at HSHS St. Vincent Hospital in Green Bay, Wisconsin, it's the staff who is hard at work adding to the number. Right now, there are 14 nurses in the maternity unit who are all pregnant! They were able to gather eleven of them at once for this picture. But it's not a record, because this has happened  before.  

In 2018, 16 nurses from the intensive care unit of the Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, Arizona were pregnant at the same time. In 2019, 36 NICU nurses at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, were simultaneously pregnant. That could be a record. In 2022, there were 14 nurses from the NICU and Labor & Delivery department of Saint Luke's East Hospital in Lee's Summit, Missouri, expecting at once. In 2023, 11 nurses in the 2 West Inpatient Surgical Unit at the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans' Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, were pregnant at the same time.

However, there are a few things that make hospital nursing crews different from the general population.

1. Hospitals are overwhelmingly staffed by women nurses in their 20s and early 30s, many of them right out of nursing school. As they gain experience, nurses tend to move on to doctor's offices, clinics, and specialties, so their hospital hires more young nurses.  

2. These professionals have already put off having children while they finished school, and now they have insurance.  

3. Three out of these five stories involve nurses working with infants, and that tends to make you want one of your own.

4. We know how many women were involved, but we don't know how large the total nursing staffs of these units are. The size of some of these hospitals is astonishing. Still, we can assume the percentage is remarkable enough for the local news to cover it.      

-via a comment at Fark

It's not easy being queen. Sure, it often comes with a pampered life and fabulous fashions, not to mention power, so it appears enviable. Who wouldn't want to be a queen? But there are downsides to being at the top, like an arranged marriage to someone you don't even know, pressure to produce heirs, total lack of privacy, political and family drama, and enemies lurking around every corner plotting to take your place. Plus a queen is expected to present a regal image and a brave face even when her world is falling apart. Many queens died at the hands of their closest relatives, or the effects of being a political pawn. Others succumbed to enemies of the throne. And some died from natural causes, which could be pretty horrific in previous centuries. Weird History explains the deaths of ten queens of the past who died under rather strange circumstances.

On May 9, 1955, a new TV series debuted on WRC in Washington, DC. Sam and Friends logged in around 1,000 episodes over six years, even though each episode was only five minutes long, and was tagged onto the beginning of the local news. Even if you've never heard of Sam and Friends, looking back, it was a historic day, because that was the first TV show produced by Jim Henson, and is considered as the founding of the Jim Henson Company.

Henson had been working in TV and making puppets since high school. Sam and Friends was his baby, though, and he made some new puppets for it. They weren't any particular species, but one with ping pong ball eyes named Kermit had a particular charm about him. Kermit eventually became a frog and hosted his own TV show, The Muppet Show, beginning in 1976. So today can also be considered Kermit's 70th birthday! Read up on the origins of Jim Henson's television career at Cracked. Videos are included.  

The Secret Polish Army was a group of underground resistance fighters who schemed against the Nazi occupation of Poland. Witold Pilecki, a military veteran, held a rather high position in the organization, and would do anything to aid his country. That included volunteering to get himself arrested in order to investigate what was going on at the Auschwitiz detention camp. That was in 1940, before the camp became a facility to kill as many inmates as possible, but it already had a reputation for brutality.

For two and a half years, Pilecki observed the transformation of Auschwitz into a death camp, and he managed to smuggle out reports to the Polish resistance and the Allies. He eventually urged the Allies to bomb the camp, but those who received the messages had a hard time believing the horrors that Pilecki reported. Their inaction convinced Pilecki that he had to escape on order to get their attention. Read the story of Polish resistance hero Witold Pilecki at Smithsonian.

Vampires in folklore were originally just corpses that came back from the grave to terrorize the living. You didn't need to actually see one to be afraid of them. When these monsters entered literature, they began to be more attractive. In the cinematic age, they are downright sexy. Well, literature, theater, and movie producers know they attract bigger audiences with a sexy antagonist. But even more than that, the story is easier to tell when a monster can draw victims into his clutches. That's the easy answer. But it's even more than that- an attractive and charming vampire makes the story closer to real life, because most people have encountered a sexy and charming love interest who then turned out to be a monster of some sort. Dr. Emily Zarka of Monstrum goes deep into the evolution of vampires from obvious monsters that we would all run away from to seductive shape-shifters that we are drawn to -with some notable exceptions.