Galileo Galilei knew that the earth revolved around the sun. But this was Rome at the dawn of 17th century, and the Church didn't see it that way. Galileo argued that scientific study and scripture should be independent of each other, because the Bible was written to be understood by the intended reader of the time. The struggle between Galileo and the Church went on for 20 years. He was ultimately convicted of heresy in 1633, and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. The early correspondence between Galileo and Vatican authorities of the time was hand-copied and redistributed, and is suspected to have been edited- how and by who is a matter of controversy. But the earliest evidence has been found. Galileo's original argument is in a 1613 letter to mathematician Benedetto Castelli. It was returned to Galileo for further refinement, and then was lost.   

The letter has been in the Royal Society’s possession for at least 250 years, but escaped the notice of historians. It was rediscovered in the library there by Salvatore Ricciardo, a postdoctoral science historian at the University of Bergamo in Italy, who visited on 2 August for a different purpose, and then browsed the online catalogue.

“I thought, ‘I can’t believe that I have discovered the letter that virtually all Galileo scholars thought to be hopelessly lost,’” says Ricciardo. “It seemed even more incredible because the letter was not in an obscure library, but in the Royal Society library.”

The newly-found letter contains quite a bit of editing by Galileo himself, and shines a light on the struggle between the scientist and the Church that shook the world. Read about the letter at Nature.  -via Metafilter

There's fandom and then there's FANDOM. Some may devote a Facebook page to a personal interest of theirs, or maybe even create a dedicated website, but you've probably never seen the like of what Tolkien scholar Mark Fisher has created concerning the works of J.R.R. Tolkien - The Encyclopedia of Arda.

This site is comprehensive in its coverage of Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-Earth; no topic is too obscure and no detail is too small. It is an immense reference and repository of knowledge that should interest any devotee of Tolkien's works and I find myself referring to it on a regular basis. Go on, name anything concerning Middle-Earth and see if it cannot be found therein - I dare you.

Check out The Encyclopedia of Arda.

The team from EVNautilus are back, watching the bottom of the ocean for interesting creatures. And here they've found one with their remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) in the deep sea at Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. At first, they don't recognize a gulper eel (Eurypharynx pelecanoides) because they are rarely seen alive and gulping. -via reddit

See more weird sea creatures EVNautilus has shown us previously.

Meet the 558-million-year-old fossil of Dickinsonia, a type of Ediacaran organism, that may just be the first animal species on Earth:

The first large complex organisms – known as the Ediacarans – appear in the fossil record about 570 million years ago, just before the Cambrian explosion of modern animal life. Their alien body shapes have created confusion over whether they were primitive animals, other complex lifeforms like lichen or giant amoebas, or failed experiments of evolution.

Now, Jochen Brocks at Australian National University and his colleagues have found fat molecules in 558 million-year-old fossils of Dickinsonia – a type of Ediacaran – that confirms it was an early animal.

The researchers collected the fossils from sandstone cliffs in a remote area of the White Sea region of Russia. The cholesterol-like molecules preserved in them are found in almost all of today’s animals, but have low abundance in other lifeforms like bacteria, lichen and amoebas. “It tells us this creature in fact was our earliest ancestor,” says Brocks.

Read the rest over at NewScientist.

(Photo: Ilya Bobrovskiy / Australian National University)

I'm loving these wonderful geometric art by Vancouver-based artist Laura Bifano. In her series "Altars," Bifano drew local vistas and mountains of British Columbia, Canada.

via Booom

(Artwork: Laura Bifano)

This is "open carry" in the UK. Etsy seller LeatherHeds created a teacup and saucer belt holster for the tea-loving gentleman who's always ready for high noon ... and high tea.

via Boing Boing

Readers have been enjoying the short stories and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe for almost 200 years. What makes his literature so relatable over time? Scott Peeples dives into that question in this TED-Ed animation. -via Boing Boing

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After 27 years in prison, Valentino Dixon walked free today. With an investigation Golf Digest's Max Adler helped open, an Erie County court vacated Dixon's murder conviction. Adler was there to greet Dixon as he left the courthouse. For more on how Dixon found a passion for golf through art and how that led to Golf Digest raising the question of his innocence, tap the link in bio. (:Twitter/@NewsRadio930)

A post shared by Golf Digest (@golfdigest) on Sep 19, 2018 at 3:44pm PDT

Valentino Dixon loves golf, although he's never played a game in his life. As a young man, he was convicted of murder and sent to prison in 1991, on a 39-year-to-life sentence. He developed a habit of drawing and over the years became a notable sketch artist. A prison employee commissioned him to draw a golf course landscape, and brought a picture to work from. Dixon became fascinated with the scene, and began to focus his art on golf courses from around the country. His reputation for drawing bucolic golf courses spread, and eventually got the attention of the sport's premiere magazine.

It took about a hundred drawings before Golf Digest noticed, but when we did, we also noticed his conviction seemed flimsy. So we investigated the case and raised the question of his innocence.

The case is complicated, but on the surface it involves shoddy police work, zero physical evidence linking Dixon, conflicting testimony of unreliable witnesses, the videotaped confession to the crime by another man, a public defender who didn’t call a witness at trial, and perjury charges against those who said Dixon didn’t do it. All together, a fairly clear instance of local officials hastily railroading a young black man with a prior criminal record into jail. Dixon’s past wasn’t spotless, he had sold some cocaine, but that didn’t make him a murderer.

Golf Digest published an article about Dixon in 2012, and the publicity led to the dominos of Dixon's murder case falling, one by one, over the next six years. Wednesday, the conviction was vacated, and Valentino Dixon walked out of prison, an innocent man, ready to resume his life at age 48. Read how it all happened at Golf Digest.  -via Metafilter

All clothes sure look good on a buff model, but what would it really look like if you've got a dad bod?

Thankfully, there's now a dad bod mannequin like in this pic by u/tanzki012.

University of Washington conservationist Samuel Wasser noticed that elephant tusks from ivory seizures have been getting smaller. That means that poachers are running out of adult elephants to kill and are targeting younger pachyderms. It also means his research in the fight against poachers is becoming more important by the day.  

Elephant poaching really took off during the last decade, and it’s estimated that 111,000 individuals—up to a fifth of the full African population—have been killed since 2006. The slaughter is a local problem, but it eventually ties into organized crime networks that ship the plundered ivory around in huge containers that weigh half a ton or more. Once they leave port, these shipments are very hard to find. “There are so many containers on cargo ships that even the most sophisticated ports can inspect just 1 to 2 percent of them,” Wasser says. “If you’re a transnational criminal, you really just have to get your contraband into a container on a ship, and there’s a very low chance someone will find it in a search. We need to stop the trade before it enters into transit.”

To do that, Wasser first needed to find out where the ivory is coming from—and he began with poop. By collecting elephant dung from across Africa, and extracting DNA from them, he and his colleagues created a genetic map of the continent’s pachyderms. By cross-referencing the DNA from an unknown tusk to this map, Wasser can pinpoint the tooth’s source to within 200 miles. In this way, he showed that almost all the ivory that’s been seized in the last decade has come from just two poaching hotspots—one that includes Gabon and the Congo, and another centered in Tanzania.

DNA sequencing is just one way modern sleuths are working to thwart elephant poachers. Read more about the global ivory trade and what's being done to fight it at the Atlantic. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Bernard Gagnon)

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Fire tornado destroyed our line. It threw burning logs across our guard for 45 minutes and pulled our hose 100 plus ft in the air before melting it. That's definitely a first. #firenado #startthepump #wildfire Note: It got over 200ft tall but the smoke was too think to see it clearly on video. Sorry for the profanity.

A post shared by M. C. Schidlowsky (@mar.lowsky) on Sep 15, 2018 at 1:32pm PDT

When a whirlwind sucks up flames from a fire, you have a "firenado." The British Columbia Wildfire Service found out how powerful a firenado can be when one took the firehose they were using and sucked it up in the air! 

Fire tornado destroyed our line. It threw burning logs across our guard for 45 minutes and pulled our hose 100 plus ft in the air before melting it. That’s definitely a first. It got over 200ft tall but the smoke was too think to see it clearly on video.

The forces of nature are definitely seeking revenge on us mere humans. -via Laughing Squid 

Some folks like to watch bad movies just to laugh at them, but most of us don't want to sit through the whole thing. That's why this supercut is a treasure- only the most outstanding, inexplicable, badly-acted scenes are here to laugh at. Watch actors who've never taken an acting class ham it up in drawn-out death scenes! Watch clueless extras try to interact with special effects that won't be added until later! Watch terribly-written lines delivered in terrible ways! All without having to sit through any exposition or interminable pauses. Note that this video contains NSFW language. -via Tastefully Offensive 

Usually, when you know how an illusion works, it stops being an illusion.

But not the Ames Window illusion. In this YouTube clip by CuriosityShow, they show you exactly how the Ames Window illusion works ... and your brain will still insist that you're seeing the impossible.

Previously on Neatorama back in 2009.

Back in 2008, archaeologists discovered a set of rounded stones in the high desert near the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. They thought that the stone tools were used to grind nuts and seeds - but intriguingly, the stones didn't have the right grinding marks.

Fast forward a decade, when archaeologist Marilyn Martorano identified them as something else completely ... they're actually musical instruments!

Brad Turner of Colorado Public Radio has the story:

The stones were clearly shaped by human hands but didn’t have the right wear marks around the edges to indicate they’d been used for grinding. So she set out to find a better explanation. About a decade later, Martorano believes she’s identified some of the earliest musical instruments ever played in Colorado.

“You really have to hear them,” said Martorano, who grew up in the San Luis Valley where the dunes sit. “That’s when you believe it.”

(Photo: Brad Turner/CPR News)

Fred Rogers was all about love and gentleness on his TV show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. But Rogers could get angry, and the thing that made him the angriest was adults who would mislead young children. This is why Rogers hated the concept of superheroes. The subject came up as he and David Newell (Mr. McFeely) were traveling in the late '70s.

In a taxi to the speaking engagement, Rogers was lost in thought about his upcoming speech. Newell recalls: “In the newspaper, I came across this little blurb that a child had jumped off a roof with a towel — the Superman thing.”

Newell interrupted Rogers’s reverie to tell him the shocking news that a little boy who’d watched Superman on television had decided he would try to fly, and was terribly injured falling from a rooftop. One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was willfully misleading innocent, impressionable children. To him, it was immoral and completely unacceptable.

Rogers had never used characters with super powers on his show before, but in this era of the series, he wanted to tackle difficult subjects on a child's level. This led to a week-long series of shows on superheroes, aired in February 1980, in which Mister Rogers explained the dangers of believing one can have super powers. They even went behind-the-scenes of the TV show The Incredible Hulk to explain how those stories are constructed. Read how Fred Rogers dealt with superheroes, and how that fit in with his philosophy of education, at Longreads.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Tate English)