In March of 2011, miners using heavy equipment in Alberta found a dinosaur. But this was not just any fossil. A nodosaur had been swept out to sea millions years ago and was preserved better than any other nodosaur before. The front half of the animal was recovered in a state that doesn't even have to be reconstructed. Its soft tissue, armor, and even individual scales of its skin were fossilized as well as its bones.

The remarkable fossil is a newfound species (and genus) of nodosaur, a type of ankylosaur often overshadowed by its cereal box–famous cousins in the subgroup Ankylosauridae. Unlike ankylosaurs, nodosaurs had no shin-splitting tail clubs, but they too wielded thorny armor to deter predators. As it lumbered across the landscape between 110 million and 112 million years ago, almost midway through the Cretaceous period, the 18-foot-long, nearly 3,000-pound behemoth was the rhinoceros of its day, a grumpy herbivore that largely kept to itself. And if something did come calling—perhaps the fearsome Acrocanthosaurus—the nodosaur had just the trick: two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders like a misplaced pair of bull’s horns.

Removing such a large intact specimen was no easy task, and the fossil broke in half as it was removed from the rock around it. But six years later, we are able to see the nodosaur, and further research may reveal what color it was and even what it ate for its last meal. Read the story, and see lots of pictures at National Geographic. -via Digg

(Image credit: Robert Clark/National Geographic)

Mother's Day is for celebrating mothers of all kinds. Mom dedicate all their time to teaching their young ones what they need to get through life. Even if that entails jumping off a dock.

(YouTube link)

Yes, you can do it! These dozen or so ducklings trust Mama to know what they are capable of. -via Metafilter

Watch a 3-year-old girl change out a sink tap to stop a leak. She needs a chair to reach the sink, but she gets the job done! And she didn't leave out the part about going to Home Depot …which in most cases turns out to be three trips to get the right part.

(YouTube link)

There are already eight episodes of the Little "How To" Girl series, in which she does things like cut a man's hair, vacuums the floor, fixes a headlight, and replaces a lawn mower battery. -via Nag on the Lake

For hundreds of years, women in several countries would leave "toad votives," candles shaped like toads, at Christian sites and shrines. The symbolism of the toad has to do with childbirth. And the reasons for that association are both numerous and weird.

In the medieval world, toads were charter members of the cabal of slimy, devilish creatures imbued with powers and beloved of witches—tormentors of the sinful mind. In one medieval church sculpture motif, the femme aux serpents, the embodiment of sinful lust, toads sometimes sub in for the snakes that writhe around a woman’s body and occasionally bite her breasts. But toads weren’t as purely evil as snakes; they could be humorous, too. In one German story, a woman loses her vagina and it “is mistaken for a toad as it roams the streets,” writes Blumenfeld-Kosinski. (Eventually, the woman gets her detachable vagina back.) Toads were also thought to have the power of spontaneous generation and resurrection.

Even weirder is the association of the toad votives with toad votive, who is more of a legend than a saint. Read how a miracle saved Wilgefortis from an unwanted marriage at Atlas Obscura. That she became a patron saint of the marital bed is just more weirdness.

For a long time, 350 degrees was the most common oven temperature in cook books. What was the thinking behind that?

The magic of cooking at 350 degrees isn’t magic at all, but chemistry. It is, for example, the level associated with the Maillard Reaction, the chemical process that gives so many foods a complex flavor profile—and an appealing golden-brown hue—when sugar and protein are heated together just so.

“Without Maillard chemistry we would not have a dark bread crust or golden brown turkey,” wrote the authors of a Royal Society of Chemistry book about the reaction, “our cakes and pastries would be pale and anemic, and we would lose the distinctive color of French onion soup.” The Maillard Reaction—which actually entails a series of reactions—isn’t all toasty goodness, however. It’s also responsible for making apples turn brown, which many people find unappetizing “despite negligible effect on flavor,” the authors write.

Well, it turns out that oven temperatures weren't nearly as precise before they had degrees on the dial, and it hardly mattered. They aren't even that precise now. Cooks from bygone eras pretty much learned what worked by experience. If your oven was hotter or cooler, you just adjusted your baking time. An article at the Atlantic tells us about how precise oven temperatures came about, and why recipe publishers chose the settings they did. I use 400 degrees more often these days, since I'm putting something frozen in the oven.  -via Digg

A Sankey diagram is "a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity." The Wikipedia link talks about energy flow, but style of the graph is used for other things. More helpful than a general definition is an example, like the Sankey diagram above made by flashman, named How 52 ninth-graders spell 'camouflage.' You can see exactly how many students diverged in their spelling as the word gets longer.

This may look like it would be complicated to graph, but there is a Sankey diagram generator called the Sankeymatic that will do it for you. You enter the data, and the graph comes alive. See examples of how people are using it at the Sankeymatic Twitter feed.

How votes are expected to split between MACRON and LE PEN in the 2nd round. This according to Ifop polling on Friday: #Presidentielle2017 pic.twitter.com/OzW5EFGXiI

— Hannah Murphy (@MsHannahMurphy) April 23, 2017

-via Metafilter 

We know the story of Narcissus. We've aware of narcissism, the psychological condition of being obsessed with one's self. But do we understand what's wrong with these people?  

(YouTube link)

No, we don't have to be tolerant of people who are arrogant, selfish, and oblivious to the welfare of those around them. But it might help if we understood what is going on with them. If we can't help them, avoiding such people may be the best thing for your own mental health. This video is from The School of Life. -via Laughing Squid

Redditor makenzie71 has an 8-year-old son. He somewhat misinterpreted the instructions on this assignment. Well, he thought he was doing the right thing, but it's not what the teacher wanted. Still, he ended up doing way more work and the the answers were perfect considering what he was doing. If I were a teacher, I'd give him full credit!

If you draw the usual family tree, you can potentially go back too far, where there are more people in your family tree than there were people on the planet at the time. Yeah, this family trees can't grow exponentially forever, and yes, some of our ancestor were related to each other. But that's no reason to panic.

(YouTube link)

The YouTube channel It's OK to Be Smart explain how human ancestry and DNA diversity really works. -via Geeks Are Sexy

You may or may not be old enough to remember the horror of Thalidomide, a drug that caused thousands of birth defects in Britain, Canada, and West Germany in the late 1959s and early '60s. It didn't do much harm in the U.S. because the drug was never approved by the FDA. Therein lies a story, much of it the work of Frances Oldham Kelsey. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was passed in 1938, in no small part due to Kelsey's work.

Kelsey was first introduced to the dangers of mass marketed unsafe pharmaceuticals in 1937, when the FDA enlisted Geiling to solve the mystery of Elixir of Sulfanilamide. Sulfanilamide effectively combated infections, but it came in a large and bitter pill that needed to be taken in large dosages. To make the drug more appealing, especially to children, manufacturers added it to a solvent with artificial raspberry flavor.

The problem was that the solvent they chose was diethylene glycol—commonly known as antifreeze. Between September and October, the drug killed 107 people.

Geiling and his lab of graduate students, including Kelsey, set out to determine what exactly in the elixir was killing people: the solvent, the flavor or the sulfanilamide. Through a series of animal studies—which at the time were not required by federal law for a drug to go to market—Geiling and his lab were able to determine that it was the diethylene glycol that was the cause of death.

Kelsey went to medical school and joined the FDA in 1960. Read her story, and how her research on Thalidomide saved American babies, at Smithsonian.

The stories of supernatural happenings in the Harz mountains of Germany, and in particular the highest peak called the Brocken, have been around forever. Harry Price found those beliefs ridiculous. The skeptic Price had studied the supernatural for some time, and even owned a book of old German spells and rituals, which got him invited to the Brocken in 1932 to create some magic.

Price’s attempt at a magical ritual atop the Brocken came about thanks in part to the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe famously had an interest in the occult, and visited the Brocken peak, hiking a path that is still memorialized as the Goethe Way. Inspired by the mysterious atmosphere of the Harz region, Goethe set portions of his most famous play, Faust, there, including the surreal walpurgisnacht scene where the devil Mephistopheles leads Faust around the Brocken, observing witches and even a gorgon. “Paganism died hard in the Harz country,” Price would later write.

In 1932, the region was celebrating the centennial anniversary of the Goethe’s death, and that's why Price went to the Brocken, along with fellow philosopher C.E.M. Joad, to perform a magic ritual that was supposed to change a goat into a boy. He had to take a fair maiden and a goat, too, along with a bunch of journalists and spectators. Read the story of that ritual and how it turned out at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: German Federal Archives)

You don't have to break the bank to enjoy a great steak, but you do have to treat your meat purchase right to get the best flavor. How much you spend determines the cooking method, and there are things you van do to make a relatively cheap steak truly delicious.

(YouTube link)

Of course, if you insist on buying the bottom-of-the-barrel meat at your local butcher's counter, you might be better off to make stew or something. -via Digg

Ivan Garland and his family run Garland Sugar Shack, a small maple syrup manufacturing business in Vars, Ontario. In this video, they show us how the syrup is collected, processed, and packaged.

(YouTube link)

The entire video is charming and strangely soothing. Oh yeah, and interesting, too. -via reddit

These guys were just having a great time biking through the Malinô Brdo bike park in Slovakia, when a bear decided to assert his territorial rights.

(YouTube link)

You know the answer to "How fast can you (run, drive, ride)?" is "It depends on what is chasing me." These cyclists could have set a record if they needed to. -via Viral Viral Videos

Sometimes you teach a young student scientific theory and they run with it …into the history books. Not only do students need to do experiments to show what they've learned, they often think outside the box, and bring enthusiasm to experiments that lead them into unknown territory. And sometimes it's just good observational skills and luck.

Kevin Terris couldn’t have asked for better luck during a field trip he took as a 17-year-old. While scanning the ground for fossils at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, the student spotted a baby dinosaur skull poking out of the dirt. Once the rest of the remains were uncovered, paleontologists concluded they belonged to the smallest and youngest duck-billed Parasaurolophus dinosaur ever recorded. They nicknamed the specimen “Joe.”

Terris and his classmates visited the dig site as part of a paleontology program at their California high school. The field had already been surveyed by experts when the students arrived, which makes the discovery even more impressive. After receiving his high school diploma, Terris went on to study geology in college. Joe, meanwhile, is on display at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California, after providing important insight into the development of duck-billed dinosaurs.

Read about six other times elementary, middle school, and high school students made scientific or engineering breakthroughs at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology)