Leeches were used for hundreds of years in treating patients will all kinds of conditions, from cancer to mental illness. It was an offshoot of bloodletting for curing what ails ya. Today we tend to look at leeches as medical treatment in the same way we see bloodletting- they didn't have anything better back then. But the more we learn about leeches, the more useful they become.

Leeches live by drinking blood, so they've developed some specific chemicals to enable their diet. Leech saliva contains an anticoagulant called hirodine, plus other anti-inflammatory agents, antibiotics, and pain relievers. All these things help a leech stay attached to their host and digest their blood. Using these chemicals straight from a medicinal leech can target a specific area on the patient, such as a finger after it's been severed and reattached, without having to flood the whole body with medicine.

The reintroduction of leeches as a medical treatment has a problem, though, in that medicinal leeches (Hirudo medicinalis) are a threatened species. Read about the usefulness of medicinal leeches and the efforts to breed them for the purpose at the Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: GlebK)

Around fifty years ago, a skeleton was unearthed from a 2nd century Belgian cemetery. It was stored since the 1970s somewhere that archaeologists could study it, and only recently was this skeleton subjected to carbon dating and DNA analysis. Dr. Barbara Veselka of the Free University of Brussels noticed that the femur was too big for the pelvis, and the vertebrae didn't all match. What was going on here?

Advanced tests recently discovered that the skeleton buried all those years ago was made up of seven different unrelated individuals who died between 4212 to 4445 years ago -except for the skull, which belonged to a woman who died only 1800 years ago! However, the skeleton was found buried in a common manor for the recently dead in that area. While the discovery is important, the question is why? We can almost imagine a retiring teacher taking home various bones from anatomy class and assembling them, and after his death the unidentified skeleton was found and buried with all possible dignity. But that's only the first scenario that comes to mind. The skull was fairly contemporary; could the family have tried to assemble a body for the burial after the woman's original body was destroyed? Could there be more such "Frankenstein" skeletons in the area? Could the burial have been a long-haul prank? Or did someone really try to reconstruct a human body from random parts? Read about the unusual discovery at Daily Grail. -via Strange Company  

(Image credit: Paumen, Wargnies and Demory/Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles)

The things you know about ancient Rome from the movies involve the elite, the movers and shakers, and certainly didn't apply to everyone. And those movies also tend to incorporate modern values and customs, so they don't necessarily reflect the accepted values of the time. Sex in ancient Rome was unconstrained by the monotheistic religions, which either didn't exist yet or were relatively obscure to the Romans. But there were rules, mainly in place to maintain social status, because status was everything. Those with social status followed those rules, unless you were royalty, for which all the rules went out the window. After all, what can indicate status better than being above the rules? If you were poor, working class, from a conquered nation or ethnicity, a woman, or a slave, you were sure to get the short end of the stick, so to speak. Weird History explains the rules for sex in ancient Rome and who broke them the most.

Spikeball is a recently-invented game that developed from volleyball. A webpage from Southern Arkansas University summarizes the rules. Two teams of two players each surround a circular let. Each person bounces a ball toward his/her partner. The partners can touch the ball up to three times before it must be served again at the net.

As you can see, this is similar to volleyball. But one core difference is that there are no fixed sides. Players can move around each other, seeking the best angles to serve and receive the ball. When one team loses control over the ball, the other team receives a point.

-via Massimo

Artist Li Jiayue of China's Sichuan province paints optical illusions, like the sidewalk chalk artists who create 3D worlds on pavement, but on columns, poles, and trees (and sometimes buildings). His artworks are painted onto wrap-around canvas or onto the columns themselves, and he sometimes combines those techniques to enhance the illusion. Like the sidewalk art, Li's illusions can only be seen from one angle, but they create the mind-bending illusion that the column is bisected, with an open space between the parts. The background is painstakingly recreated to cause the viewer to see right through it, except for the interesting parts that float in the space between.

Li Jiayue's works have gone viral on Chinese social media, and are starting to leak out to the rest of the world. See a collection of his illusion artworks at Design YouTrust. -via Moss and Fog 

The more we learn about top secret Cold War weapons, the more insane they seem. The race to build bigger nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union was furious, until we had the capability of destroying the entire world many times over. The ultimate step was to design a weapon that would annihilate the earth and everyone in it in one fell swoop. Why would we do that? Just to have a bigger nuke than the Soviets.

Project Sundial was a project to develop just such a bomb. It, of course, could never be tested. And it didn't even have to be built, because the rumor of such a weapon was all we really needed. See, the arms race itself was based on fear of the terrifying weapons of the other side. Once we achieved weapons that assured suicide as well as offensive power, those in charge started to think that maybe we'd gone too far. Ya think? But while we don't have a one-bomb apocalypse ready to go, we still have enough nuclear weapons to do the same thing if we used them all at once.

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In 1945, defeated Germany was divided between the Allied countries of the Unites States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Berlin was also divided, although it was deep within the Soviet sector. By 1949, the countries of East Germany and West Germany were established, with East Germany under communist control. Barriers were put up to keep East Germans from leaving. The West German sector of Berlin was enclosed by a wall in 1962. In most places, this Berlin Wall was 100-300 feet wide, marking a "no man's land" where East Germans could be shot trying to cross over to the West. The wall finally came down in 1989, and the two Germanys were reunited in 1990.  

The people who rose up to bring the wall down destroyed much of it quickly, and authorities were keen on obliterating it entirely. West German legislator Michael Cramer wanted to preserve parts of the wall as a memorial to its history, but only a few small sections remain today. They do not indicate the wall's route, nor its size -wrapped completely around West Berlin, it was 100 miles long! Cramer spearheaded a project to make the former site of the wall into something to benefit the city and still mark that period of history. The result is Mauerpark, a public space with a 100-mile bicycle and pedestrian trail called Berliner Mauerweg, or Berlin Wall Trail. It winds through city streets, forests, and green space, with historical markers and memorials along the way. Read how Mauerpark came about and what it means to a united Germany at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Karen Mardahl)

We mentioned a few years ago that Japan planned to build and deploy wooden satellites. The first of these, dubbed LingoSat, arrived on Tuesday at the International Space Station on a SpaceX vehicle. Space.com describes it as a small cube--just four inches on a side. It's a substantial innovation in space exploration because that it is made of wood.*

Most satellites are made of aluminum, which causes environmental damage when satellites burn up in the atmosphere at the end of their use. The designers at Kyoto University and a Japanese logging firm hope that wood components can offer practical alternatives to metals.

-via Marginal Revolution

*This is, by the way, why witches burn.

The Campuestohan Highland Resort is a lovely venue on the Philippine island of Negros. Standing at the summit of the hill that is at the center of the resort is a building shaped like a massive chicken. This modern Colossus of Rhodes stands over 114 feet tall and contains 15 hotel rooms. That size has secured it a Guinness World Record, as well as the awe of all who survey its majesty.

Astonishingly, from concept to groundbreaking took just six months and the total construction under a year and a half, thus displaying the can-do attitude of the Filipino people. Look upon these works, ye mighty, and despair.

-via Dave Barry | Photos: Guinness World Records

Randall Munroe of xkcd and Henry Reich of MinutePhysics have made a cottage industry of answering stupid questions in a way that makes them ridiculously interesting. This is the What If? series. The question this week is whether we could change the color of the moon by shining a laser pointer on it if everyone on earth participated at once. The short answer is "no." But from there, these guys looked at the question as a challenge: what kind of light would actually make it to the moon? So they go through the various kinds of powerful lights we have, starting with a one-watt laser, which is already dangerous. Then we learn about all kinds of powerful lights we have developed but don't use that much because they suck up so much energy and can be deadly. Too much light isn't good for us, anyway. But certain powerful lights can actually reach the moon if we use enough of them! Sure, it's a dumb scenario, but I learned quite a bit about light technology in this video.

The celebration of Christmas is a blend of very old winter solstice traditions and the celebration of Jesus' birth, plus all the music, rich food, parties, and fun that people need in the darkness of winter. Either the fun or the religion have caused the whole thing to be banned in six countries and one well-known community. When Stalin banned the celebration of Christmas in the Soviet Union, he aimed to obliterate the Christian part, but the rest was too much fun, so people moved those traditions to New Year's Day, which continues today. In Germany, the land that gave us the Christmas tree, Adolf Hitler was okay with celebrating Christmas, but it couldn't be about Jesus, because, well, he was Jewish.

Several other countries, at one time or another, were okay with keeping the religious observation, but wanted to do away with the parties and fun and a day off work because those things were either too decadent or too Catholic. Workers in Scotland didn't get December 25th off for hundreds of years -until 1958! Read about seven historic Christmas bans and the reasons behind them at Mental Floss.

Yuki Kojima is a Japanese musician who specializes in the street organ--a hand-cranked instrument that uses bellows to pump air through pipes. I don't think that it takes advanced skill to operate one--it's a sort of music box that uses cardboard segments as a control mechanism. But probably creating the cards is a demanding task worthy of a skilled artisan.

Kojima's YouTube channel has many popular tunes from video games, such as Chrono Trigger and Super Mario Bros. But classic hard rock is my preference and music doesn't get any better than "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC.

-via Laughing Squid

Did you go see Joker: Folie à Deux? If so, that makes you special, because not that many people did. It was a sequel to the critically acclaimed 2019 hit movie Joker. Director Todd Phillips decided to make it a love story and a musical since they got Lady Gaga to sign on, but that wasn't what Joker fans for waiting for. Or anyone else. However, Screen Junkies managed to find a lot more to dislike about Joker: Folie à Deux. Namely, it's boring, depressing, and the most exciting shots from the trailers aren't even in the movie. No wonder it was a box office bomb. The film opened in the US a month ago and was on home video three weeks later after making less than half its expenses back at the box office. But if you still want to see it, be warned that there are spoilers in this Honest Trailer.  

Dindin, a guinea pig who lives in Paris, has the same reaction that I do when listening to Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune." It's incredibly soothing for my skittish soul that is always looking around for predators to avoid and food to eat. Watch him sit on his human's piano and enjoy a private performance.

-via Massimo

Hospitalization is especially stressful for children, which is why children's hospitals search for means to maintain the emotional well-being of their patients. To that end, Glasgow Children's Hospital in Scotland has a "gamer-in-residence" who plays video games with children.

BBC News introduces us to Steven Mair, who is a full-time, professional gamer who wheels gaming consoles into kids' rooms and plays with them. Donations raised by the local community and the gaming industry pay his salary, permitting him to focus on the needs of the children. This program provides social interaction and entertainment to kids in often dire medical conditions.

-via Kottke