Parkinson's Disease affects the nervous system, but it's possible that it begins elsewhere. Scientists think that both genes and environment play a part in determining whether a person will develop Parkinson's, and it's possible that there are several different causes. A study of the medical records of 1.7 million people show a small but significant link between whether a person has an appendix and whether they develop Parkinson's. Undergoing an appendectomy lowers your odds of ever getting the disease by 16.9%.

The international team of scientists reviewed two datasets, including a large registry from Sweden, and found that removal of the appendix was associated with a decreased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. They also found that the human appendix contains clumps of a protein called alpha-synuclein in a form associated with the disease.

Alpha-synuclein is also found in Lewy bodies, which are brain clumps found in Parkinson's patients. That's no reason to go and have your appendix taken out, but the research may lead to further discoveries, and possibly treatments. Read more about this discovery at Gizmodo.

(Image credit:  Viviane Labrie)

In the 13th century, Marco Polo described present-day Azerbaijan as a "land of fire" - and for good reason: there are burning mountainsides with fires that didn't stop burning for thousands of years.

Maureen O'Hare of CNN Travel has the strange story of the eternal flame of Yanar Dag:

"This fire has burned 4,000 years and never stopped," says Aliyeva Rahila. "Even the rain coming here, snow, wind -- it never stops burning."

Ahead, tall flames dance restlessly across a 10-meter stretch of hillside, making a hot day even hotter.

This is Yanar Dag -- meaning "burning mountainside" -- on Azerbaijan's Absheron Peninsula, where Rahila works as a tour guide.

Read the rest over at CNN Travel.

(Photo: Maureen O'Hare/CNN)

Birds can see ultraviolet light, so how they see other birds can be very different from how we see them. For example, in the image above, what humans see is in the upper right-hand corner, whereas what birds see is the large picture on the left.

Nathan Chronister's Ultraviolet Bird Photography website has more neat examples.

In the final months of World War II, Hitler and his generals threw everything but the kitchen sink at the Allied forces, no matter how nonsensical. That included werewolves. No wolves were involved, but the Nazis tried to instill fear in their enemies by infiltration, taking out soldiers one by one when they were alone, and most of all, instilling fear with propaganda that tied the attacks to the supernatural.  

From the start of the war, Hitler pulled from Germanic folklore and occult legends to supplement Nazi pageantry. High-level Nazis researched everything from the Holy Grail to witchcraft, as historian Eric Kurlander describes in his book, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Among those mythological fascinations were werewolves. “According to some 19th and early 20th century German folklorists, werewolves represented flawed, but well-meaning characters who may be bestial but are tied to the woods, the blood, the soil,” Kurlander says. “They represented German strength and purity against interlopers.”

It was an image Hitler harnessed repeatedly, from the name of one of his Eastern front headquarters—the Wolf’s Lair—to the implementation of “Operation Werewolf,” an October 1944 plan for Nazi SS lieutenants Adolf Prützmann and Otto Skorzeny to infiltrate Allied camps and sabotage supply lines with a paramilitary group. Skorzeny had already proved the value of such a specialized strike in 1943, when he successfully led a small group of commandoes to rescue Benito Mussolini from a prison in Italy.

The plan started with an elite group of German soldiers, but did not go all that well. They had more luck by enlisting partisan civilians, who continued to attack Allies even after the war's end. Read about the werewolves of World War II at Smithsonian.

Every year, Josh Sundquist goes all out for Halloween with a costume that incorporates the fact that he only has one leg. We've posted many of them here.

Back in 1995, when Sundquist was battling the cancer that took his leg, he expressed a desire to meet Disney animator Broose Johnson, because he wanted to grow up to do that same job. The Make-A-Wish Foundation arranged for 9-year-old Josh to meet Johnson and take a tour of his studio. It turned out Johnson is a double amputee himself. Oh yeah, Johnson is the animator who brought the Genie to life in the movie Alladin.

For his 2018 Halloween costume, Sundquist collaborated with Johnson and a professional custom fabrication company to turn him into the Genie from Aladdin! Continue reading to see a video of how it was accomplished.

Do you ever read a book and marvel at the errors that you find? Poor spelling, bad grammar, horrific editing, misrepresented facts, outright falsehoods, conflicts, inconsistencies, and the sort? Well, I do. I'm currently going through J.R.R. Tolkien's works line-by-line and am amazed at how many errors, conflicts, inconsistencies, and the like are to be found therein, these in works that have been in print for 65-80 years now.

What to do? Glad that you asked! This site lets you catalog all that you find for all to see and for the author and publisher to rectify in the next edition. It's become a hobby of mine and at least the practice forces you to read every word and pay close attention. As a matter of record, Tolkien never successfully reconciled The Hobbit with The Lord of the Rings, and, boy, does it ever become obvious.

Have a look through the Corrigenda List and see what all has been found wrong with some of your favorite reads.

For the annual Halloween Parade in Kawasaki, Japan, last weekend, students from The Amazing School of Special Effects dressed as famous works of art! Surely you recognize The Scream, Mona Lisa, and Vincent Van Gogh's Self Portrait, but art doesn't have to be great to be famous. Notice the restoration of Ecce Homo by Cecilia Gimenez, also known colloquially as "Beast Jesus." The students' makeup was done by their teacher, Amazing Jiro.

Fantastici. pic.twitter.com/vhRSBvDtWc

— Antonio (@blusewillis) October 29, 2018

A good time was had by all. -via Laughing Squid

Millions of school children use the iconic Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil every day, and the company has fiercely sought protection from the US government to preserve it as a domestic industry:

In 2000, lawmakers passed the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act, which allowed American companies to collect some of the duties paid by importers of their competitors’ products. Dixon repeatedly made claims, saying it was a domestic manufacturer, and the government sent the company payments over 10 years totalling almost US$5 million, according to US Customs and Border Protection records.

But where are all those pencils actually made?

The company says that, worldwide, it makes nearly 500 million pencils each year, but it would not release any details about its US production. It denied a request to tour the facility. Photographs of the Macon distribution centre, posted by employees on Facebook, offer only a limited view of its operations, showing a number of cardboard boxes marked, “Made in China.”

Damian Paletta explains the intricacies of making something as simple as a No.2 pencil in this intriguing article over at South China Morning Post.

(Photo: Scaredpoet/wikipedia)

It looks like a shard of Kryptonite, but it's actually a massive emerald discovered at Kagem, the world's largest emerald mine in Zambia.

The Inkalamu emerald was named in honor of the wildlife conservation group that Gemfields, the mine's co-owner, collaborates with. It was discovered by geologist Debapriya Rakshit and miner Richard Kapeta.

Gorgeous!

(Photo: Gemfields)

Remember last spring, when we posted so much about the TinyKittens webcam? Then you'll recall the kitten Aura, who was born with a severe cleft palate and had to be tube-fed until she learned to eat solid dry food. Aura and all the other kittens have been adopted into permanent homes, and Aura was taken by Shelly Roche, the kittens' main caretaker. The plan was to wait until Aura's permanent teeth came in, and then have her palate surgically repaired.

This is brilliant! Harry Potter fan annamarie_bro wrote: "Lmao. Just to clarify, he cried for about 3 seconds while we got this photo. We had our Halloween party right around his bedtime so he was very grumpy that he wasn’t in bed and started crying. So we snapped a pic and put him to bed."

The picture above is of two different men. Do you know which one is Joseph Stalin and which was his body double, Felix Dadaev? Dadaev was very good at his job, but it wasn't like he had a choice.

Perhaps Dadaev was so good at the gig because he was already a seasoned performer, albeit as a juggler and dancer. Like so many of his peers, however, he found himself on the brink of death during WWII. When NKVD forces rescued him from death, it was under the guise of transforming him into Stalin’s next decoy, despite his being over twenty years younger than the dictator. All the government had to do was declare Dadaev dead, and pull him into an extensive training process to take on Stalin’s looks and mannerisms.

Read Felix Dadaev's story and those of other body doubles, who stood in for Elizabeth Taylor, Howard Hughs, Andy Warhol, and Adolf Hitler at Messy Nessy Chic. Hitler's double was filmed for posterity, although he didn't live to see it, in a video some might find disturbing.

Halloween has long been considered the time when the veil between the known world and the supernatural is the thinnest, and spirits can communicate with us. Once upon a time, young women celebrated Halloween by indulging in magical rituals that would reveal who they were to marry. One of these was the "dumb supper." The word "dumb" was used to convey that no words were spoken during the meal -or afterward, when the magic was to happen.  

Young women typically held dumb suppers, but men sometimes attended as well. The setting was usually an isolated place free of disturbances, such as an abandoned or otherwise empty house. In Frazier’s account of a dumb supper, two teenage girls in turn-of-the-century Kentucky “prepared a supper backwards in every respect. The tables were set as wrongly as possible; the chairs were turned backwards; the meal was to be served dessert first.” If anyone spoke a word, the spell was broken. When everything was prepared exactly right, then, at midnight, the spirits of the husbands-to-be would walk through the door, or even arrive in person.

Ah, but there was the danger of a coffin showing up instead of a man, which was a portent of death. And sometimes real people -maybe suitors, or often pranksters- would appear at midnight. Read about dumb suppers and other supernatural love rituals at Atlas Obscura.

Cyriak Harris already makes the creepiest animated videos on the 'net, so when he makes skeletons dance and releases it the day before Halloween, you know you're in for a really weird treat! His latest animation is called RIP. -via Laughing Squid

See more from Cyriak in previous videos.

Whatever you do, don't tell him any jokes ... oh, what the heck: "What do you call a three-humped camel?"

Photo snapped at the Clairemont DMV in Southern California - via BagelTiger