I've never seriously studied Greek mythology, so I was completely unfamiliar with Typhon. This mythological monster was made of snakes and lava and had no father, so of course he was bad news. He was so powerful that he was a serious rival for Zeus, who had to put Typhon in his place. That doesn't mean Zeus killed him, but it does explain volcanos, thunderstorms, and tsunamis. However, the stories of Typhon vary depending on who wrote them. 

Dr. Emily Zarka (previously at Neatorama) explains who Typhon was supposed to be. He's not described as a god, but was powerful enough to challenge Zeus for the title of supreme being. He and his wife Echidna spawned plenty of other mythological monsters that somewhat resemble real and usually scary animals. His later obscurity among laypeople like me may have to do with how he was dispatched relatively early in the Greek mythology saga. 

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, some citizens were vaporized, some escaped, and many were killed and then buried under rock, ash, and lava. Over the years, the soft tissues rotted away, leaving human-shaped voids in the rock. In the 19th  century, Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a method of preserving those voids by filling them with plaster, giving us at least the shape of the victims. But what's inside the plaster? A recent discovery revealed that one man may have been a doctor, because he was killed carrying a bag. CT scans and X-rays found a locking device inside the plaster, coins, and metal instruments of the kind that Roman doctors used. 

But even more interesting is the discovery of how the plaster casts have been messed with over the more than hundred years since they were made. Scientists used the same type of scans to check whether there are bones present in the plaster. They discovered that some of the plaster casts had been reinforced with steel rods for stability, and bones have been removed! Some even had artistic work done to make them more interesting. Read about these discoveries at Ars Technica.  -via Boing Boing  

Project Hail Mary hit theaters about six weeks ago and did really well with both critics and ticket sales. It's a science fiction movie in which untrained astronaut Ryan Gosling (who also produced the film) has to save the world. How could it not be a hit? The movie was lauded for its unique view of what extraterrestrial life could can be. However, I had no idea Project Hail Mary was as funny as Screen Junkies reveals in this Honest Trailer. The pre-release hype gave no clue. Gosling is an intelligent everyman who has to learn how to do everything alone and on the fly, and stays adorably goofy throughout. The special effects and the alien life forms are impressive, too. Honest Trailers rarely rates a film this highly, but they still find the repeated idioms that you would have never noticed otherwise. Altogether this is a much more effective movie trailer than the real ones. Now I want to see Project Hail Mary.

Lord Vinheteiro is a Brazilian musician who originally trained on the piano but is now must famous for his performances on rubber chickens.

In the past, we've seen him play a piano with a typewriter and perform "Flight of the Bumblebees" while using only one finger. After his rubber chicken performances rose to popular acclaim, we highlighted his rubbery renditions of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

In this funny video, his lordship explains how he goes about turning rubber chickens to be musically prcise instruments. He says, "True music does not depend on the instrument, but on the seriousness with which we approach it."

-via The Awesomer

A group of Swedish geologists have been keeping track of how geologists are portrayed on the silver screen. You might think that the profession is rare, and relatively it may be, but they compiled a list of 141 movies with 202 geologists between 1919 and 2023 (available to download). They appear in all genres, but most often in adventure films. These roles are broken down by age, sex, race, era, whether they are "the good guys," and even how they dress. 

However, geologists in movies die at an alarming rate, 34.2%, and often early in the story. Murder is the most likely cause. This may be because the function of a geologist is often to deliver bad scientific news and set up the adventure, after which they are superfluous. The puns just write themselves: Stone cold dead. Exploited for sedimental value. A geologist should join a band because they rock. Gneiss. It was their own fault. The data shows that being a "bad guy" raises the risk of a cinematic geologist's death to 77%. It's still unclear how geologists' survival in movies compares with that of other professions, but this paper was written by geologists for geologists in the magazine Geology Today. As the daughter of a geologist, I was fascinated. -via Metafilter 

In 2020, The Wildcat Sanctuary in Minnesota was called about an animal breeding facility for which the owner had died. They went to rescue four tigers, but found an additional newborn. Tiger Winona had just given birth. She was in poor health, plus she didn't know what to do with a cub since hers had always been removed after birth to socialize the cub and have Winona breed again. The cub was also in danger from his father Marcus, who was known to attack cubs. This was during COVID, so little Dash was isolated and raised by a single volunteer named Tammy. 

Dash was the first newborn big cat raised by the sanctuary, and his progress was documented thoroughly on videotape. The Dodo compiled lots of clips to show us how Dash grew up to be a big strong tiger. He'll never be released into the wild, but he can live his best life possible under their care.

One thing we all know about cassowaries is that they are very territorial, and can be dangerous to humans, which is why it is hard for scientists to study them. They have casques made of keratin on their heads, which resemble helmets. What they are for is still a mystery. They could be for fighting, showing off for the opposite sex, or maybe even to amplify sound. And lately we've found out that these casques are fluorescent as well! In a paper published in Nature,  scientists reveal that cassowary casques will glow in different colors and patterns that vary between the three existing species. They even vary somewhat between individual birds. Not only that, but the patterns displayed by biofluorescence are different from the pattern shown by their ultraviolet reflectivity. Therefore, under the right light, every cassowary has a distinct fluorescent color pattern that could be as individual as fingerprints. 

We still don't know how well cassowaries can see each other's fluorescent patterns, and how they use them. But we may be able to use the patterns to tag the birds for study. Read an explanation of this research at Refractor. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Todd L. Green) 

As a Kentucky native, I can tell you that in the 1960s and '70s, Kentucky Fried Chicken was something to behold- quick, delicious, and fairly local. It may have been "fast food," but it wasn't a burger to eat in your car. Rather, you picked up a bucket full of chicken to take home to the family, along with potatoes, gravy, and rolls. Instant Sunday dinner! Then Colonel Sanders sold his creation and spent the rest of his life complaining about what the corporate bean counters did to ruin his signature dishes. The quality of the food sunk item by item, and the name changed to KFC. The chain decided to be real fast food, and concentrated on a range of new items you could eat while driving. The prices soared and the portions shrunk. 

Of course, there was a lot more involved than that, and hardly any of my opinions in the above paragraph are addressed in this video from Weird History Food. KFC suffered from corporate trades and mergers, over-expansion, ridiculous promotional stunts, and most of all, competition from other chains that specialize in fried chicken. Yet they still make money, and this video explains how.

Southeastern Texas is alligator country. They are both numerous and bitey. Gator Country is the name of a wildlife rescue organization that specializes in protecting these modern-day dinosaurs and showing them to adventurous tourists.

KHOU 11 News reports that an employee named Kat recently graduated from McNeese State University across the border in Louisiana. She arranged for a photoshoot with Laura Obelsbee Photography which showed the happy graduate snuggling with her favorite animals.

-via Jonathan Kentrick

I believe Halupedia got its name from the word hallucination. You can jump from any link in the existing articles to another, or do a search, and if it didn't exist before, the algorithm will write something for you to read. The main page has a few suggestions, like The Great Pigeon Census of 1887, The Ministry of Terribly Wrong Maps, or The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Tuesdays. They are all nonsense, but they are surprisingly well-written nonsense. 
  
I clicked on the words Inter Municipal Hydrology Commission in an article titled Greater Bellevue, and I had to wait a few seconds while this encyclopedia wrote an article for me. The Commission, located in several fantasy towns including Vernal Drip, has a complete history that is grammatically correct and makes plenty of sense on the surface, but may remind you of Grand Fenwick or a Monty Python sketch. Really, the Commission was de-commissioned after their 700-page report on fog. This can be a lot of fun if you just want to revel in verbiage. You can leave comments, but you can't use your own name. If you get caught in a loop of links, reddit has some suggestions for more AI generated Halupedia articles. -via Nag on the Lake 
  

  

Dutch YouTuber Strange Inventions found a real deal- 65 little bottles for just €6.50. What to do with them? How about designing a digital clock, using bottles of colored water for pixels? It sounded like a good idea at the time, but this project ended up taking 210 hours of work and €580 ($680) in parts. The finished product is pretty, and impressive because it actually works, but as a timepiece it's pretty hard to see the numbers unless you squint. The real entertainment value is in the part of these projects that you usually skip- the build. 

He had no previous project to draw from, and had to figure out each component on his own. That meant failure after failure, and buying more parts at each step. And since he was working with water, there were constant leaks that had to be fixed. Each successful step only revealed problems in the next step. But once he had invested some time and money, he couldn't stop until he got it right.   

This is YouTube, and around here, we appreciate stupidity and esthetics. 

By the end of the video, you feel so sorry for the guy that you have to applaud. Kind of like the way you applaud your child at their awful first band concert because you don't want to destroy their enthusiasm after they've worked so hard. -via Born in Space 
    
    

There were many ways to get around the laws against alcohol during Prohibition, but for the poor, those workarounds could come at a high price. Jamaica Ginger was a patent medicine that had been around for a hundred years already when Prohibition began. Like many medicines, it contained a high percentage of alcohol, and you were only supposed to take it a spoon at a time for whatever ailed you. But when there was no other alcohol, you could get a two-ounce bottle of Jamaica Ginger for fifty cents and have the equivalent of around three shots. The popular medicine came to be called Jake for short. Government authorities took notice, and so required Jamaica Ginger manufacturers to add enough ginger to make Jake unpalatable.  

Some manufacturers looked for a way around the regulation, which included testing. They found that tri-orthocresyl phosphate (TOCP) could make Jamaica ginger pass the test without ruining the taste of the medicine. The only problem was that TOCP is a powerful neurotoxin that caused paralysis. Beginning in 1931, doctors were confronted with cases of muscle failure and paralysis among poor men that couldn't be explained. Even when the cause was found, assistance was egregiously absent, and men who displayed symptoms of "Jake Leg" were ridiculed. Read the story of adulterated Jamaica Ginger and what it did at Deranged LA Crimes. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Deltabeignet) 

BagelFest is an annual competition of bagel baking. The Wall Street Journal reports that 2,000 competitors converged at Citi Field in New York City to see which bakery produced the best example of this iconic bread of New Yorker cuisine.

A Texan bakery won, of course.

Starship Bagel is a small chain of bagel-centered restaurants in the Dallas area. The bagel pictured above is dubbed the Millennium Falcon. It has tomato, avocado, alfalfa sprouts, pickled red onions, red pepper, and your choice of schmear.

The WSJ article examines in depth how a bagel can be defined and how that definition has changed over time. There is a great deal of innovation in bagel development in recent years, of which the Millennium Falcon is only one example.

-via Instapundit | Photo: Starship Bagel

I don't know about younger viewers, but those of us who watched all the Star Wars movies in order of their release have always been baffled by the implications of retconning. It was bad enough that the secrets kept in the first movie, then revealed in the second and third, made it clear that Lucas was making it up as he went along.

Every time a new prequel came out, the effort to bring familiar characters back only screwed with the timeline and ruined the logic of the first movie that captured our imaginations. "New" characters turned out to have been there all along. More implausible connections between them were revealed. Sure, Lucas explained that the droids had their memories wiped between the prequels and the original trilogy, but that doesn't work for a Wookiee. Or for Obi-Wan Kenobi, who knew everything all along, but refused to reveal anything actually useful. Matthew McCleskey gives us the spoiler version that might have been. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

On a long drive this week, I heard three different reports on NPR about a Neanderthal tooth that has been discovered with a deliberately-drilled hole in it. The tooth also shows evidence that it was used for chewing after the hole was drilled! A bioarchaeologist described the tooth and the stone drill used to make the hole, which tells us that Neanderthals not only had the skills, but the cooperation and trust to perform such surgery. A modern dentist said that the problem was probably terrible pain from infection and swelling. He said it would have taken at least an hour to painfully drill into the tooth, but the patient must have understood the relief to come afterward. The tooth, from a cave in Siberia, was dated to 59,000 years ago. We don't know what, if any, pain relief was available to Neanderthals.

The drilled hole extends into the tooth pulp, which would have destroyed the nerve and is somewhat analogous to a root canal. In most early human dentistry, the normal cure would have been to pull the tooth. Read about the tooth and what it tells us at NPR. 

(Image credit: Zubova et al./PLOS One)