A grave discovered in 2003 near Prittlewell in Essex County, UK, has finally been completely excavated. Dated to somewhere between 580 and 605 CE, it may well be the oldest Christian burial found in Britain yet. The large burial chamber held accoutrements that make archaeologists pretty sure the man buried there was wealthy, and might even have been royalty. King Saeberht was the first Anglo-Saxon ruler to convert to Christianity, but the dates aren't right for this to be his tomb.

It’s quite possible, however, that the tomb belonged to one of the king’s relatives—perhaps even a prince—as the tomb’s contents indicate that the individual was of wealthy and noble status. (All that’s left of the body is some tooth enamel, which tells us only that the individual was older than six when buried.) Researchers were also able to identify the individual as male based on the presence of weapons and a triangular, gold belt buckle within the tomb. They could identify him as Christian, finally, by the two gold-foil crosses by the head of the coffin, where they likely rested over the man’s eyes.

Read about the discovery at Atlas Obscura, and explore the find in an interactive website about the tomb.

(Image credit: MOLA)

Why is a reservoir in Los Angeles covered with 96 million floating balls? To keep the sunlight from affecting the water. But lakes and reservoirs exist all over the world with sun shining on them! Veritasium host Derek Muller went there to find out what the story is. While the balls were an idea to solve a chemistry problem, they turned out to have other benefits, too. -via Laughing Squid

There have been numerous complaints all over Seattle about the increasing amount of garbage littering their streets, from household appliances just left on street corners to more hazardous waste. But it seems that the local government aren't doing anything about it.

Christopher Rufo from City Journal investigates the reasons for this growing public health crisis and why no actions have been taken to resolve them. And as he found out, it's not that no actions have been taken, there were but it's just, now, nobody can take action about it.

Only a few years ago, while Jenny Durkan, now mayor, was campaigning for office on a centrist policy platform, city government responded to growing public discontent and made an honest effort to clean up the streets.

From 2017 to 2018, municipal cleanup crews picked up 8.6 million pounds of trash from illegal homeless encampments. Since then, however, the numbers have fallen off dramatically, partly because of pressure from activists to “stop the sweeps” of homeless encampments, which they call inhumane and unconstitutional. In the first four months of this year, municipal crews have cleaned up only eight sites.

(Image credit: Public Domain Pictures/Pixabay)

Australia's most widely circulated banknote, the $50 has a spelling error. And it took about 2 months for it to be noticed. The word responsibility is missing an 'i'. Approximately 400 million of the banknotes entered circulation in October 2018.

According to an article at CNN:

The mistake -- which would be hard to spot with the naked eye -- is in microprint beside Edith Cowan, the first female member of an Australian parliament. The microprint next to her features excerpts from her maiden speech to the Western Australia state Parliament.

The RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) said it became aware of the issue last December, and the spelling would be corrected for the next print run around the middle of this year.

"These banknotes are legal tender and can continue to be used as normal. It does not affect their validity and functionality in any way," a spokeswoman said in a statement to CNN. "We have reviewed our processes to remove the likelihood of such an error occurring in the future."

An updated $20 bill is expected later this year. I would assume it'll be checked very closely before being released into ciruclation.

Image Credit-Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images via Bloomberg

Jesse Jordan, of Northern Ontario, assigned one job to his dog Brickleberry (or Brick for short). The job was to secure the garbage from bears during the night. Unfortunately, Brick put his self-interest first instead of doing the job. The mastiff-hound mixed breed allowed the bear to rummage the garbage in exchange for some deer bone treats.

“My idiot furry son has one job at night – bork at things and make them go away. Easy, right? HOWEVER, a bear has learned that my furry son can be bought,” he wrote. “This is the THIRD TIME he’s been gifted deer bones in exchange for being allowed access to my trash, AND HE KEEPS DOING IT.”

Well, I think the bear just made an irresistible offer for Brick. What do you think? 

(Image Credit: Jesse Jordan)

There was a big gap between the time communities developed specialized labor to the time of refrigerated transport. In between, dairy farmers had to get creative in order to deliver their goods to customers before it spoiled. Ian Spellerberg collects antique milk cans, and knows a lot about that history. He has milk cans from 20 different countries, and his book, Milk Cans: A Celebration of Their History, Use, and Design, has just been released in the US.

Naturally, Spellerberg also devotes a fair amount of his book to the myriad ways in which milk cans were moved from Point A to Point B. He begins with a section on “manual” transport, beginning with the milkmaids of 18th-century England and Europe, who carried unlidded cans on the ends of yokes like beasts of burden. It’s thought that milkmaids carried more than 100 pounds around their necks, several miles, every day. By the 19th century, milkmen had largely replaced milkmaids, but concurrently, the manual transport of milk was itself being replaced by carriages, carts, and customized hand trucks, each of which was designed to hold particular styles, sizes, and shapes of milk cans so that they could be rolled easily through the streets. Sometimes these devices were pulled by humans, sometimes horses provided the literal horsepower, but there are also examples of milk-can carts being pulled by harnessed dogs.

As the means of moving milk cans improved, the size of the cans increased, reaching peak milk can, if you will, around 1867 with the railway milk churn, which takes the last part of its name from its resemblance to traditional wooden butter churns. Railway churns were wider at the bottom to make them less susceptible to tipping over and spilling their 17 gallons of liquid, which, Spellerberg tells us in Milk Cans, is equivalent to 8 “barn” gallons or 68 quarts. However you measure it, when you add in the weight of the metal churn itself, a full railway churn weighed as much as 150 pounds. To move this milk-filled monster, dairy and railway workers alike would “reel” the churn by grabbing its top or handles and turning it on its bottom edge rather than lifting it.

Read about the history of milk delivery and see milk cans ranging from 25 gallons down to an eighth of a pint, at Collectors Weekly.

(Image from Milk Cans)

Redditor snoopclog brings to our attention his school, the Belmont Hill School, outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Since the 1920s, this school has required all graduating seniors to carve a 12x12 inch piece of mahogany into something meaningful to them. These are added to an ever-growing wall of about 3,000 panels. A 2004 article in the Boston Globe explains:

"It's a social history," says Headmaster Richard I. Melvoin. "From the time boys arrive, they know they'll leave a piece of themselves on the walls, and so there's a sense they're part of something larger."

The wall of panels is an ongoing work of social history. Melvoin continues:

"One from the 1970s shows a nut and bolt alongside a symbol of infinity and an arrow pointing down," says Melvoin. "It was designed to hang over a water fountain, and the message is that people of color always get screwed. The carving was moved from the fountain because, while some said it should remain as a statement of artistic license, students and faculty of color said it made them not want to drink at the fountain, so it was an interesting dilemma."

Later, in the cafeteria, Melvoin points to a panel carved in 1972 that shows symbols of the Soviet Union, China, a Nazi insignia, and Belmont Hill.

"I'm not sure what that boy was thinking of," says Melvoin, "but it engenders discussion.

"I teach an ethics class, and we talk about the power of symbols, and about racism and the incident at Harvard when a student hung a Confederate flag and people said the flag was racist. So, that set up an opportunity to talk about racism and when symbols are racist and offensive. Comparing a Confederate flag to a Nazi flag is interesting, because most boys, when they see a swastika, will say you can't show that because it's offensive.

"But then if you ask, well, why a Confederate flag? Is it because some people do not find it offensive? Inevitably, a boy will say, `Didn't I see a swastika in a panel in our dining hall?'

"And I say, `Well, yes, you did, and we need to talk about that.' "

This is snoopclog's lovely contribution to the wall.

Cyber security is a very lucrative business. In a world where online transactions are becoming more of the standard than the minority, it would stand to reason that data should be protected and kept in a safe storage space. Not accounting for the fact that big tech companies sell user data to third parties, we can assume that most of our data are secure.

We want to guard our private and confidential information as much as possible so we avail of products and services that offer secure storage for our files and data. And when you hear that something is "unhackable" you might want to check it out, right?

There was a Kickstarter project that claimed that they had developed an "unhackable" USB flash drive. They based this on the fact that their device uses iris recognition to access the files in the drive. However, recently a few researchers tested out this claim and found one big loophole in the device that allows anyone with the right tools to "sniff USB device traffic".

Lodge had picked, picked, picked apart components until reaching an understanding: "What we have here is, literally, a USB stick with a hub and camera attached. That means most of the brains are in the software.

Lodge stated that "obtaining the password/iris can be achieved by simply sniffing the USB traffic to get the password/hash in clear text."

-via Phys.org

(Image credit: artverau/Pixabay)

The US has some of the wealthiest people in the world. In fact, 7 out of the 10 richest this year according to Forbes come from the US. On this list compiled by USA Today on the other hand, we will get to see who are the richest in each state. You will see that there are also huge gaps among the wealthiest.

According to Forbes’ ranking of global billionaires, 15 of the 26 wealthiest people on Earth are American. While most wealthy people tend to live in or near major economic centers in states with large economies, the extremely wealthy live where they please and can be found all across the country. All but six states have at least one billionaire, and all but one of those six have people with a net worth of at least $500 million.

(Image credit: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr; Wikimedia Commons)

Invent something to help a child sleep, and the world will beat a path to your door. There's been no shortage of attempts to come up with something workable -and marketable- to give a little relief to tired parents dealing with a fussy infant. These include everything from the classic rocking cradle to a planned "smart crib," in which the child is monitored by automation. There have been some truly disturbing contraptions that came and went along the way.  

The most bizarre crib in the patent category with bedside co-sleepers (“Children's beds capable of being suspended from, or attached to, window frames or other articles”) is the window crib. The first, but certainly not only, patent for such a crib appeared in 1919, not too long after American pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt insisted in his book The Care and Feeding of Children that “fresh air is required to renew and purify the blood” and that “those who sleep out of doors are stronger children.” So what were city-dwelling parents to do? Why, put baby in a cage suspended out the window, much like an air conditioning unit, of course! Eleanor Roosevelt used one in their townhouse window for their daughter, Anna, until a neighbor threatened to report her for child cruelty. “This was a shock to me,” Roosevelt wrote in her autobiography, “for I thought I was being a most modern mother.” Though they may not have been common in New York, they were quite popular in London. Thankfully, we aren’t “airing” babies out of windows anymore, but you can buy infant tents for naptime at the beach.

Read about some of the stranger inventions that have been patented for baby-rearing at Smithsonian.

American filmmaker and artist Doug Aitken will launch a mirrored hot-air balloon in Massachusetts from July 12 to 28. This is Aitken’s latest major project — “New Horizon”, which “will concern some of the most iconic properties in the region that are part of the protected area by the US Landscape Conservation Organization, as part of a project to revitalize the territory and local arts.”

(Image Credit: fubiz)

In 2012, Swedish company IKEA made an apartment inside the Auber Metro Station in Paris. Five people even volunteered to live there for a week. Now, 7 years later, the company pulls yet another unusual stunt, this time in Madeleine Station, still in Paris.

The Swedish retailer opened its new concept store in the district of La Madeleine on May 6. According to the company, it’s the first of a new type of Ikea store in Paris–one that is specially designed for city centers rather than the giant blue buildings of the suburbs. To announce the launch of the new retail strategy, Ikea transformed the nearby metro station, hanging 1,500 individual products on the walls. From chairs to curtains to kitchen gear and even plush toys, they turned the station into an overwhelming bazaar of Ikea design, complete with typical black-and-white Ikea signage showing their unpronounceable names and their prices.

(Image Credit: Charlie Boillot/ Twitter)

It pays off to have pimples. Or, to be more precise, social scientists found, under certain circumstances, positive correlations between academic and financial earnings success and the incidence of acne. The abstract by Hugo M. Mialon and Erik T. Nesson in the journal Human Capital asserts:

We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to investigate the association between having acne in middle to high school and subsequent educational and labor market outcomes. We find that having acne is strongly positively associated with overall grade point average in high school, grades in high school English, history, math, and science, and the completion of a college degree. We also find evidence that acne is associated with higher personal labor market earnings for women. We further explore a possible channel through which acne may affect education and earnings.

-via Marginal Revolution

Photo: Caitlin Regan

Imagine a world where years are not numbered. Would you know, or be able to explain how old you are? Could you imagine how long it will be before your future grandchildren could take over your job? How would you tell your community's history to someone from another culture? That's the way the ancient world was. Each culture had a different way of explaining when something happened.

In ancient Mesopotamia, years could be designated by an outstanding event of the preceding 12 months: something could be said to happen, for instance, in the year when king Naram-Sin reached the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates river, or when king Enlil-bani made for the god Ninurta three very large copper statues. Alternatively, events could be dated by giving the name of the holder of an annual office of state: something happened in the year when two named Romans were consuls, or when an elite Athenian was chief magistrate, and so on. Finally, and most commonly in the kingdoms of antiquity, events could be dated by counting the throne year of the monarch: the fifth year of Alexander the Great, the 40th year of king Nebuchadnezzar II, and so on.

Each of these systems was geographically localised. There was no transcendent or translocal system for locating oneself in the flow of history. How could one synchronise events at geographical distance, or between states?

You have to admit that our system of assigning year numbers that don't reset is much handier for understanding history, for planning the future, and for communicating. So how did that start? Hint- it was a long time before the BC/AD system was introduced. Read how the first universal linear year numbering system began at Aeon. -via Digg

(Image credit: Massimo Finizio)

One of the reasons people avoid theaters is because it's so inviting to watch a movie from your bed. But what if the theater had beds? Pathé Schweiz cinema in Switzerland opened a new theater experience on May 9 with an auditorium outfitted with double beds! For 49 francs (around $48.50) a ticket, you get to recline with your date on fresh sheets and enjoy unlimited snacks delivered to your seat, er, bed. Other auditoriums in the theater have features such as reclining sofas, IMAX screens, and there's a special theater with bean bag seats and toys for children. However, the American response to the idea of a theater with beds is what you might predict: they are either wary of people having sex near them, or they are afraid of falling asleep during the movie. Read about Pathé Schweiz and see pictures at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Pathé Schweiz via Facebook)