When you're the absolute monarch of a vast realm, it is nothing to order a shipload of expensive spirits to be imported from France. But bad weather and a world war can complicate things, and a revolution may just mean you never get your booze. That was the story with Tsar Nicholas II in 1916.

According to a press release, spirit salvagers from Ocean X—a company that specializes in tracking down historic spirits lost in shipwrecks—recovered 600 bottles of De Haartman & Co. cognac and 300 bottles of Benedictine liqueur from the wreck of the Swedish steamer Kyros.

The long-lost alcohol shipment, sent from France via Sweden, was initially scheduled for delivery to Russia’s emperor in December 1916. But heavy ice in the Sea of Bothnia kept the Kyros in port until May 1917, and when the ship finally began its journey, it was intercepted in the Sea of Aland by the German submarine UC-58.

The shipwreck was actually spotted twenty years ago, and after losing it and finding it again, the complicated recovery took quite a few years itself. Tests are being run to see if the cognac and liqueur are still okay to drink. That is quite important, because someone, somewhere, might pay an obscene amount of money not only to own the historic spirits, but to drink it away as well. Read the complete story at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Ocean X)

Contrary to legend, animals do not have advance warning of an impending earthquake, but they are more sensitive to the very beginning of an earthquake than people are. Cryoseismologist Celeste Labedz explains the difference to us in excruciating detail, but then takes a left turn into a genius idea to harness this sensitivity and turn it into an alarm system for earthquakes. It involves equipping about two million cats in the Los Angeles area with Fitbits.

PURRS works like this: An earthquake occurs. Signals of cats going bananas start pouring in from near the epicenter, propagating outward with the seismic waves. When enough activity in the right distribution is detected, the system cat-egorizes it as a quake and sounds alarms.

— Celeste Labedz (@celestelabedz) November 10, 2019

Labedz describes the system and its benefits, but also admits it has drawbacks.

PURRS is a hard sell, not gonna lie. Upkeep would also be expensive and difficult; even just trying to cat-alog that much continuously-streaming data would be a monumental task. We would also have to turn it off during thunderstorms and on the 4th of July.

— Celeste Labedz (@celestelabedz) November 10, 2019

So that ain't gonna happen, but the cat puns in her thread are worth taking a look into the idea. You can read the full Twitter thread, or just peruse the highlights at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Dwight Sipler)

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A post shared by Risto Mattila (@rismatti) on Nov 13, 2019 at 11:25am PST

Ice comes in many forms, from gigantic icebergs, to tiny flurries of snow, which many of us see in winter. Only a few of us, however, have encountered a field of “ice eggs”, each one the size of a football.

That was exactly what amateur photographer Risto Mattila encountered when he decided to take a stroll along Marjaniemi beach on Finland's Hailuoto Island — a field of “ice eggs.” 

Lucky for us, he took some snaps, which quickly spread through social media.

"I was with my wife at Marjaniemi beach. The weather was sunny, about -1 Celsius (30 Fahrenheit) and it was quite a windy day," Mattila told the BBC.

"There we found this amazing phenomenon. There was snow and ice eggs along the beach near the water line."

A stretch of roughly 30 metres (about 100 feet) of sand was littered with frozen spheres that ranged from golf ball-sized to the circumference of a football.

Find out more about ice eggs over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Risto Mattila/ Instagram)

Don't get him wet, or feed him after midnight... #Mogwai

— ChuckyT (@ChuckyT12) November 14, 2019

Disney launched their Disney+ streaming service on Tuesday, and of course ran into problems as millions of subscribers tried to log on. The corporation, which knew exactly how many people had signed up and has been hyping the channel mercilessly for months, scrambled to handle the traffic as millions more attempted to sign up on Tuesday. The most in-demand show was The Mandalorian, the first live-action TV series set in the Star Wars universe. If you aren't avoiding spoilers, you can read a review at io9. What everyone is talking about is the appearance of a baby Yoda. No, this is not the Yoda we know, but an infant of the same unnamed species. Who he/she will grow up to be is unknown, but the baby is fairly cute, for a big-eared green child. See more reactions to "baby Yoda" at Buzzfeed.

The B-17 Flying Fortress was the workhorse of World War II. Boeing designed and produced it in just 12 months for the Air Force to bomb the Axis powers and survive their missions. But there were crashes. Those crashes were blamed on pilot error, particularly since so many of the pilots were new, recruited and trained for the war. Psychologist Paul Fitts looked at the data and saw that something was very wrong.

The examples slid back and forth on a scale of tragedy to tragicomic: pilots who slammed their planes into the ground after misreading a dial; pilots who fell from the sky never knowing which direction was up; the pilots of B-17s who came in for smooth landings and yet somehow never deployed their landing gear. And others still, who got trapped in a maze of absurdity, like the one who, having jumped into a brand-new plane during a bombing raid by the Japanese, found the instruments completely rearranged. Sweaty with stress, unable to think of anything else to do, he simply ran the plane up and down the runway until the attack ended.

Fitts' data showed that during one 22-month period of the war, the Air Force reported an astounding 457 crashes just like the one in which our imaginary pilot hit the runway thinking everything was fine. But the culprit was maddeningly obvious for anyone with the patience to look. Fitts' colleague Alfonse Chapanis did the looking. When he started investigating the airplanes themselves, talking to people about them, sitting in the cockpits, he also didn’t see evidence of poor training. He saw, instead, the impossibility of flying these planes at all. Instead of “pilot error,” he saw what he called, for the first time, “designer error.”

Fitts' came up with a way to make the B-17s, and all planes built afterward, much safer by taking human behavior into account. His research led, in time, to the concept of "user friendliness." Read how that concept grew to make all of our lives easier, and how it can take us to unpleasant extremes, at Wired. -via Damn Interesting

Remember when pictures of missing children were put on milk cartons so you'd read them while eating your cereal? Here's a similar idea that's not quite so scary, and may lead to wonderful outcomes. Fargo Brewing Company is putting pictures of adoptable dogs on beer cans! The dogs are from 4 Luv of Dog Rescue in Fargo, North Dakota. Shelter volunteer Jared Ryan thought it would be a good way to publicize their "one-der dogs."

“One-der-dogs” (pronounced “wonder dogs”) are dogs that are said to do best in homes without children or other pets. These dogs can tend to be harder to get adopted. This gave Ryan the idea of featuring these harder to adopt dogs on beer can labels from a local brewery.

On Monday, Nov 4th, Fargo Brewing Company held an event where the community could come to taste beer and meet the six featured pups. Even if folks didn’t want to adopt one of the dogs, they could support the shelter by buying one of the special edition six-packs.

This could start a trend. After all, why drink a beer with the same old logo when you could drink one with a picture of a dog on it? -via Metafilter

Pine Scented Mona Lisa Air Freshener

Add an air of mystery to your vehicle with the alluring Pine Scented Mona Lisa Air Freshener from the NeatoShop. This mini masterpiece features the striking image of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Be  captivated by La Gioconda's smile and rejoice in her forest scent.  

The holidays are right around the corner. The Pine Scented Mona Lisa Air Freshener makes the perfect stocking stuffer for connoiseurs of fine art. Her grin hints that she is both a practical and beautiful gift.   

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Car Accessories. New items arriving all the time.

Don't forget to stop by the NeatoShop to check out our large selection of customizable apparel and bags. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months all the way to adult 10 XL shirts. We know that fun, fabulous, and art loving people come in every size. 

Scientists at University College London studied thirteen newborn babies. The researchers found that when the babies hiccuped, there was a surge of neural activity. They speculate that hiccuping teaches babies how to regulate their own breathing. CNN reports:

Scientists found that contractions in the babies' diaphragms produced three brainwaves, and believe that through the third brainwave babies may be able to link the 'hic' sound of the hiccup to the physical contraction they feel.

Kimberley Whitehead, the study's lead author, told CNN: "The muscle contraction of a hiccup is quite big -- it's good for the developing brain because it suddenly gives a big boost of input, which helps the brain cells to all link together for representing that particular body part."

Whitehead thinks that hiccuping adults are just engaging in an old reflex that is no longer useful. It's a holdover from infancy.

-Thanks, Virginia! | Photo: Rachel Wilder

Brent Walter has invented what he calls the Volksprod. It's a minibike with a custom frame wrapped with a vintage fender from a Volkswagen Beetle. It's a precision-crafted work of art; he even casted the aluminum badges and the footrests himself.

Don't worry about the rest of the Beetle. It's a sharp-looking hot rod now.

-via Design Boom

Due to a scheduling mix up, Ben, an employee of a Waffle House in Birmingham, Alabama was working the overnight shift alone. Almost 30 people had crowded into the restaurant and Ben was trying to manage cooking, serving, and cleaning all by himself. He was overwhelmed.

So one customer put on an apron and got to work. Then another did, too. Ethan Crispo, a hungry customer and witness of the incident, talked to the Today Show:

"The look on his face was just bewilderment,'' Crispo told Sanders.

An unidentified male customer then decided to help him out, grabbing an apron and going behind the counter to wash dishes.

Another customer, Alison Stanley, went behind the counter to brew some coffee — in her stiletto heels and sequined dress.

"I don't think it's anything special,'' Stanley told Sanders. "He needed help, so I got up and helped out." [...]

Crispo had his usual order, double plain waffle, as he took in the scene of strangers helping out Ben on his shift.

"Humanity truly isn't good, it's great!" he said.

-via Dave Reaboi | Photo: Ethan Crispo

The rising rate of obesity in America has scientists looking in every direction to find ways to combat it, from social expectations to pollution to hormones to advertising to agricultural processes. But just a few decades ago, obesity was a simple problem. It was due to overeating and a lack of exercise, meaning a simple moral failure on the part of the individual.  

What started to alter that opinion was a seminal study published in 1971. This was not an experiment that assigned overweight individuals to a weight loss diet, but one that instead challenged normal weight individuals to put on lots of pounds. The subjects were inmates of the Vermont State Prison, granted reduced sentences for volunteering (a practice considered unethical today). For half a year, their diets were meticulously managed, first to ascertain their baseline weights, then to cause them to gain a lot of weight, then to return them to their baseline weights. All the while, the researchers scrutinized what was going on inside the inmates' bodies.

During the weight gain phase, the inmates did indeed bulk up considerably, mostly via an increase in fat. Eating as many as 10,000 calories per day, they ballooned in weight by an average of 20.9%, roughly 35 pounds each!

Remarkably, however, just ten weeks after returning to normal diets, every single subject returned to their previous size.

Read what scientists learned from the study and how it affected our view of obesity at Real Clear Science.

Between 1961 and 1989, escaping from East Germany was serious business. Almost 300 people died making the attempt, but several thousand actually made it. Many escapes involved sneaking through isolated parts of the Berlin Wall or depending on luck or the unwillingness of the sentries to kill. Others leaned on technology to smuggle people through the checkpoints. Plus baldfaced guts.   

In May 1963, Austrian Heinz Meixner drove up to Checkpoint Charlie in a fancy British sports car, a bright red Austin Healey Sprite convertible. The top was down, and Meixner had made one important modification to the car: he removed the windshield. When the border guards ordered him to pull over for inspection, Meixner lay flat and hit the accelerator. Without the windshield, the entire car was low enough to slip under the lowered barrier. Meixner made it across—along with his East German fiancée hiding behind the seat and his prospective mother-in-law in the trunk.

Norbert Konrad pulled off the same trick a few months later in the exact same car, but the East Germans then added steel bars under the barrier arm to prevent a third attempt.

I recall reading that story as a child, particularly the detail of how Meixner stacked bricks around his girlfriend's mother in the trunk, knowing that the car would be shot at from the rear as he drove away. But that's just one story; others involved a homemade helicopter, a homemade balloon, and a homemade submarine, among other ingenious schemes. Read about them at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg

Power lines could be affecting honeybees in a negative way by emitting electromagnetic fields which can alter both the insects’ behavior and ability to learn.

Researchers report on October 10 in PLOS One that after being exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) in the lab, honeybees (Apis mellifera) became more aggressive toward other bees.

“The reductions in learning are pretty concerning,” says Sebastian Shepherd. The entomologist worked on the new study at the University of Southampton in England before moving to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “These were bees that were very happy and healthy” before being exposed to EMFs in the study.

This finding may be a clue in explaining the recent and mysterious decline in managed honeybee colonies in the U.S.

More details about the study over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)

Kristina Perkins was arrested for shoplifting from a Big Lots store in Port Charlotte, Florida. But before she was finally caught in the hands of the law, she kept the police searching, by trying to escape through the ceiling. The police searched for hours, even to the point removing the tiles in the restroom’s ceiling, where the Florida woman was hiding, as Oddee detailed: 

The deputies cleared out the store and started searching for her in the ceiling. They used Charlotte County Fire and EMS ladders and thermal imaging systems. The police searched for hours, slowly removing the tiles. They spotted her a couple of times during the search and suggested that she give up, though Perkins, naturally, kept moving. During the search, they ended up finding Perkins’s bag. The purse contained three syringes and a spoon with a white residue that, when tested, showed up as Morphine.

image credit: Unsplash via Oddee

The most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft has a new name. Known before as 2014 MU69, the 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on January 1 is now officially known as Arrokoth, mission team members announced on November 12. The new name means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.

"The name 'Arrokoth' reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "That desire to learn is at the heart of the New Horizons mission, and we're honored to join with the Powhatan community and people of Maryland in this celebration of discovery."

Know more about Arrokoth over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory)