Before we had government regulations to set safety standards for food, the American consumer was pretty much at the mercy of those who sold what we ate. In the late 19th century, the dairy industry was particularly egregious in selling low-quality and even dangerous milk to consumers. There were three basic problems. First, lack of sanitation led to bacterial contamination, causing the spread of disease. Second, milk was diluted with cheaper ingredients, such as water and chalk, or even calf brains.

Finally, if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde, an embalming compound long used by funeral parlors, to stop the decomposition, also relying on its slightly sweet taste to improve the flavor. In the late 1890s, formaldehyde was so widely used by the dairy and meat-packing industries that outbreaks of illnesses related to the preservative were routinely described by newspapers as “embalmed meat” or “embalmed milk” scandals.

Indiana's top public health officer John Newell Hurty fought for safer milk, but strangely, he was okay with adding formaldehyde for a time because it killed bacteria. Read about Hurty's part in the fight for safe milk at Undark.  -via Digg

See also: Swill Milk, parts one and two.

Conference badges are usually ho-hum affairs ... but not at Def Con! At the world's largest hacking conference, there's an underground culture based on creating intricate badges out of circuit boards.

From Daniel Oberhaus of Motherboard:

At Def Con, attendee badges are never just a token of admission to the conference. Each year’s conference badge is a printed circuit board (PCB), the same type of mini computers you’ll find embedded in most modern electronics. For more than a decade, these circuit boards have served as a ticket to an underground social club whose members are all obsessed with solving the puzzles baked into the badge’s hardware. The stakes of the game are high—the first attendee to crack the puzzle wins an “uber badge” that will grant them free access to Def Con for life. But according to most of the attendees I spoke to, it’s the social aspect of the badges, not the prize, that drives their obsession.

(Photo: 2018 Mr. Robot Badge - Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard)

This is one tough cop.

Police Commissioner Krisna Murti posted a video on his Instagram about an unidentified riot police officer who calmly walked away from a riot with an arrow sticking out of his eye socket!

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Going, going, gone...

A post shared by Banksy (@banksy) on Oct 5, 2018 at 6:45pm PDT

An auction at Sotheby's Friday night featured a Banksy work titled Girl With Balloon. It was a final sale of the night, and the framed work was bid up to slightly over a million pounds before the gavel went down. As soon as it did, however, the painting was partially ejected through a shredder installed in its frame!  

It is unclear whether the prank will have destroyed or enhanced the value of the work.

Sotheby’s said in a statement to the Financial Times: “We have talked with the successful purchaser who was surprised by the story. We are in discussion about next steps.”

The auction house declined to reveal the identity of the buyer.

The identity of the artist has yet to be revealed, either, but Banksy is known for audacious pranks. We can assume that the extent of Sotheby's involvement will be revealed sooner or later. -via Metafilter 

Hyperallerigic has an eye witness account.

The Gilbert, Minnesota Police Department is warning local citizens on their Facebook Page that they've received reports of birds "flying under the influence". Birds have been observed flying into windows, cars, and acting confused. They are becoming inebriated from berries that have fermented earlier than usual due to an early frost. Robins, cedar waxwings and thrushes are the ones most likely to be affected species as they eat more berries than other species of birds.

Read the article at Huffington Post.

How bad is the state of healthcare in the United States right now? How about this: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman had to sell his Nobel Prize gold medal to help pay for medical expenses.

Washington Post has the obituary, which is worth a read for Lederman's many accomplishments:

Sometimes called the “Mel Brooks of physics,” Dr. Lederman was known for his humor and engaging lecture style. (“I’m so old,” he said when he won the Nobel, “I can remember when the Dead Sea was only sick.”) He brought an innovative spark to science beginning in World War II, when as a soldier he helped develop the Doppler radar.

“It was a cruel blow when I got caught speeding years later with a Doppler radar gun,” Dr. Lederman told Smithsonian magazine in 1993, “and the judge didn’t care when I explained that I’d helped create the thing.”

Photo: FNAL/Wikipedia

When you think about nuclear fission reactor, you probably thought of man-made nuclear energy power plants (the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant from The Simpsons, perhaps).

But did you know that Mother Nature actually had set off nukes on Earth about 1.7 billion years ago?

Ethan Siegel of Stars with a Bang wrote about Earth's First Nuclear Reactor:

The Oklo fission reactors are the only known examples of a natural nuclear reactor here on Earth ... For approximately 30 minutes, the reactor would go critical, with fission proceeding until the water boils away. Over the next ~150 minutes, there would be a cooldown period, after which water would flood the mineral ore again and fission would restart.

This three hour cycle would repeat itself for hundreds of thousands of years, until the ever-decreasing amount of U-235 reached a low-enough level, below that ~3% amount, that a chain reaction could no longer be sustained.

Read more about the Oklo Mine natural nuclear fission reactor over at Wikipedia

Photo: US Department of Energy

Dr. Claire Simeone is a veterinarian and the director of the Ke Kai Ola Marine Mammal Center in Hawaii. Yesterday she, and quite a few other people connected with the facility, began getting silent phone calls, over and over. They were coming from the center, so complaints came to Simeone.  

Simeone says that Hawaiian Telecom, the center’s phone company, confirmed that “a bazillion calls” were indeed coming from a single line inside the hospital and asked her to look around to find the problem phone.

When she finally found it, however, the issue wasn’t hardware or software, but footwear—that is, the toe pads on a tiny gold dust day gecko.

Yes, a gecko had climbed onto a phone at the center, specifically onto the touch screen, where his tiny suction-cup feet had originated the phone calls. He was not a regular resident at the Marine Mammal Center, but is suspected of attempting to cold-call potential customers about insurance coverage. You can read the story at Gizmodo, or in her illustrated Twitter thread.

(Image credit: Dr. Claire Simeone)

Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska is celebrating Fat Bear Week. Part of that celebration is a tournament-style competition to crown the title of Fattest Bear.

But there’s no fat shaming here. In brown bears, large amounts of body fat are indicative of good health and strong chances of survival. The bears need stores of fat to help them survive hibernation, which can last for up to half of the year. Over the course of winter hibernation in the den, a bear could lose up to one third of its body mass. In preparation, this time of year the bears are entering hyperphagia, a state in which they eat nearly non-stop.  Since July, the bears have seen dramatic and transformative weight gain that will be on full display during Fat Bear Week.

The voting happens each day at the park's Facebook page. You'll see a couple of pictures of each bear in competition to show how well they've gained weight over the summer. The winner will be crowned after the championship round closes next Tuesday. Go, bears! -via Metafilter

Update: And the winner is... Beadnose!

Elizabeth "Ellen" Nugent Wharton was a prominent member of Baltimore's high society in the 19th century. She had married well, raised two children, and for all anyone knew, was quite wealthy.

Sadly, her personal life had more than its share of tragedies. In the late 1860s, her husband, Major Henry Wharton, died suddenly and mysteriously. Not long afterward, her only son, Harry, joined his father in the grave, leaving Mrs. Wharton with no consolation except the large life insurance policies she had taken out on her unfortunate menfolk. When her brother-in-law Edward Wharton and his daughter also passed away during a visit to her home, her friends greatly sympathized with poor Elizabeth. Mrs. Wharton's only remaining close family member was her daughter, Nellie. Nellie Wharton's health also took a dramatic downturn during this period, but fortunately, she survived.

In late June 1871, an old friend, Eugene Van Ness, paid her a friendly social visit. Van Ness, a bookkeeper, kept the records of Mrs. Wharton's accounts at the banking firm of Alexander Brown & Sons. On June 28, another of Mrs. Wharton's friends, General William Scott Ketchum, also came to spend the weekend at her home. The object of his visit was not just pleasure, but business. Some time back, the General had loaned Mrs. Wharton $2,600. He wanted the loan repaid before she set out on a voyage to Europe which was scheduled for the following week.

You can see where this is going. Both men fell ill, but Van Ness recovered. The general survived the weekend, but he never left Mrs. Wharton's home alive. Suspicion fell on Mrs. Wharton, and previously-unknown stories about her earlier life came to light. Read about Elizabeth Wharton and her unsavory habits at Strange Company.

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What’s your favorite breed of dog? . . . #comic #kittens #funny #pets #dogs #meme #funnymeme #comicartist #puppy

A post shared by Ben Hed (@pet_foolery) on Sep 8, 2018 at 4:08pm PDT

A cute kitten named Pixie suddenly gets a roommate that's a battled-scarred retired military dog named Brutus in a comic series by cartoonist Ben Hed. See the adventures of Pixie and Brutus (so far) at Bored Panda and more of Hed's stories at Instagram. My favorite is the Halloween costume.

The glaciers atop Les Diablerets in the Swiss Alps make for a wonderful skiing experience. But workers at the ski resorts are seeing changes. Glaciers move and grow and melt, and recently they've been melting and moving faster than anyone can remember. That means hustling to keep the resorts in place. It also means long-dead bodies uncovered.

People have been disappearing on glaciers for as long as people have been walking on glaciers. And for most of human history, they were simply gone, vanished, entombed in a hopelessly deep, dense river of ice, carried away by a slow, grinding current. How many, no one knows, because that number is lost to time. For a benchmark, though: Since 1925 (when records first began to be kept), almost 300 people have disappeared in Valais alone, though not all, of course, on a glacier.

And maybe none of them would have ever been seen again. Except then the world got hotter, and the glaciers got smaller, thinning and retreating, and now, after decades, centuries, millennia, they're slowly surrendering the dead. This is not peculiar to Les Diablerets, obviously. Glaciers all over the planet are receding at alarming rates, some more than others. The thaw is catastrophic, and global.

Last summer, Jan Theiler found two mummified bodies revealed by the thawing ice. An article at GQ follows the story of the victims, the recovery, and the glaciers that are giving up more and more secrets as they melt. The article contains one image of the remains as they were found. -via Digg

(Image credit: Zacharie Grossen)

On September 22, Sukiri, a cheetah at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, gave birth to her first litter of cubs. The three baby cheetahs are doing fine under Sukiri's care, and have bonded well with their mom. That makes ten cheetah cubs born at the facility this year, and has biologists breathing a sigh of relief.

Biologists were initially worried Sukiri would struggle adapting to motherhood. Her own mother aggressively handled her and her two brothers, wounding the cubs’ necks when she carried them. Concerned by this, SCBI biologists made the decision to hand-rear Sukiri and her brothers apart from their mother. Following several surgeries, the cubs made a full recovery and have all survived into adulthood.

“We always want moms to raise their own cubs because it increases the probability that those cubs will breed and raise their own cubs as adults,” Crosier says. “Sukiri was clearly able to adapt and being hand-reared has not affected her ability to raise cubs at all.”

Read more about Sukiri and her three cubs (and their father, too) at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: National Zoo)

Can't remember something? Write it down!

Still can't remember? Use this font to write it down.

The Sans Forgetica typeface, which was designed by a team of designers and scientists from RMIT University using the principles of cognitive psychology to help you remember.

From DW:

RMIT Behavioral Business Lab's Dr Janneke Blijlevens said normal fonts were very familiar.

"Readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created," Blijlevens said in a statement, but warned that if a font is too outlandish the brain struggles to process the text and the information is not retained.

"Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention."

The modifications force readers to spend longer on each word, allowing the brain to engage in deeper cognitive processing.

It's no mystery that people love chocolate and English actor Benedict Cumberbatch, so I suppose it's only elementary, my dear reader, that someone would put the two together. Behold, the Chocolate Cumberbunny by the Chocolatician!

This one above is the limited edition white chocolate one, with an edible 22 carat gold bow-tie.

via BB-Blog