Philosopher Jeremy Bentham believed in using dead bodies for practical purposes, instead of fearing or revering them in a religious sense. When he died in 1832, he willed his body to science, directing that it be used for medical dissection, then preserved for display, difrected by his protege Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith. And so it was, but you know what they say about the best laid plans. The only part of Bentham's body that was salvageable after medical dissection was his skeleton, which was firmly wired together and covered with stuffing and clothing.

But not everything went quite according to plan. The philosopher had asked to have his head preserved in the "style of the New Zealanders," which Smith attempted by placing the head over some sulfuric acid and under an air pump. The result was ghastly: desiccated, dark, and leathery, even as the glass eyes Bentham had picked out for it during life gleamed from the brow.

Seeing as how the results "would not do for exhibition," as Smith wrote to a friend, the doctor hired a noted French artist, Jacques Talrich, to sculpt a head out of wax based on busts and paintings made of Bentham while alive. Smith called his efforts "one of the most admirable likenesses ever seen"—a far more suitable topper for the auto-icon than the real, shriveled head, which was reportedly stuffed into the chest cavity and not rediscovered until World War II.

This "auto-icon" sat in a glass case at University College London for over 150 years. Bentham always wanted to visit America, and that has finally happened, 186 years after his death. The auto-icon is now at the Met Breuer museum in New York as part of an exhibition called Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now). Getting the auto-icon to the U.S. was quite an undertaking, requiring meticulous cleaning, packing, and transport procedures. Read about Jeremy Bentham, his remains, and how they came to America at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: ceridwen)

A hungry corpse in London's Trafalgar Square meets a friendly pigeon. Now, when we think a hungry corpse, the first thing to come to mind is a zombie that is going to try to eat us. In this case, no, all he wants is food, but he is missing the proper organs to consume it. The poor guy just wants a sandwich!

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This lovely animation, despite the subject matter, is from Gergely Wootsch as part of the Collabor8te project.  -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: Flickr user Russ)

How many reams of paper does it take to make a record-breaking paper plane? Its engineer, John Collins, explains.

Let’s talk about the record you broke for the farthest distance traveled by a paper airplane indoors—226 feet, 10 inches.
The previous record was 207 feet, four inches. It stood for about nine years. The [last] guy who set it was only 15 years old. Joe Ayoob and I -Joe is my thrower; he’s a professional football player- set our record in February of 2012.

I didn’t realize this is a team effort.
It was really the first time a team had tried. I realized fairly quickly that I didn’t have the arm to throw anything 200 feet. The old method for breaking the distance record was to make [a paper airplane that was basically] a fancy-looking stick with fins: Fold the paper as compact as you can; the whole wingspan is about an inch. Put the wings at equal angles to each other, so if the plane rolled to one side, it didn’t matter. Throw it really hard at a 45-degree angle, and it would do this parabolic arc because of gravity and crash into the finish line. That’s how I started to do it.

How was your plane different?
I built a real flying machine- a glider.

An architectural oddity that is almost exclusively found in Vermont is the "witch window." These are windows mounted on a slant, just under the roof line of a house. They are sometimes referred to as "Vermont windows" (for obvious reasons) or "coffin windows." The tale told is that crooked windows are harder for a witch to fly into. That doesn't make much sense. There was one witch trial in Vermont, but it was a couple hundred years before the witch windows became a thing. Other explanations don't make sense, either.

“You’ll also hear them referred to as coffin windows,” explains the Historical Society rep, “The idea being that it’s difficult to maneuver a coffin with a body from the second floor down to the first floor in these narrow staircases, so slide it out through the window and down the roof.” Then again, she says, that “does not seem any easier.” At the end of the day, every conclusion drawn about the curious windows ends with a question mark. Why on earth create a completely lopsided, and by all means impractical, window?

The real answer may be that it's the only way to fit a decent-sized window into a room that sits in an offset gable. But that explanation is no fun! And can you imagine trying to hang a curtain in one? Read about witch windows and see more pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Piledhigheranddeeper)

Have you ever seen a slide saxophone? Or a Conn-o-sax? Those are just a couple of the rare saxophones in the collection of Dr. Paul Cohen, who plays, writes about, and collects unusual saxophones. Here he shows off his instruments to saxophone players from the United States Army Field Band.  

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The saxes range from tiny little things to the huge 6.5-foot contrabass sax that will make your chest rattle. Dr. Cohen even has some custom-made and one-of-a-kind instruments, such as the saxophone with no keys that you play in the manner of a bugle. You could make an entire band out of saxophones! -via Metafilter

Here's an online generator that lets you put any picture you like on a flag and watch it wave! Try Flag Waver with an image URL from any webpage, or upload your own picture. I don't see any option to save your creation in the generator itself. You could take a screen cap, or use LICEcap to make your own gif like I did. -via Boing Boing

Carden Corts got a assignment in his kindergarten class to make a weather forecast video. His dad, Charlie Corts, helped a little. Charlie's career is in video production. It's adorable, but wait until the subject shifts to spring break for things to really heat up!  

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Kindergarten teachers don't grade on a curve, do they? Even without the awesome video effects, six-year-old Carden does a great job doing the weather. That kid is going places. Like reddit, where his uncle posted this video. And probably The Ellen DeGeneres Show by next week. 
 

Adults head to the emergency room all the time thinking they're having a heart attack when they're actually just dealing with muscle pain, severe heartburn, high blood pressure symptoms or anxiety.

In fact, only 6% of adults over 45 who go to the ER for non-specific chest pain are actually having a heart attack, resulting in a lot of time and money wasted by both the patient and the hospital.

Unfortunately this is all happening because it's extremely difficult to diagnose heart disease, and lots of testing is required to rule out serious conditions, so doctors are seeking a better way- and 22-year-old Peeyush Shrivastava thinks he may have found it.

Peeyush came up with a method of using 3D scanner technology to scan a patient and tell if they're having cardiac or non-cardiac chest pain:

Shrivastava says his company's scanner, called Faraday, can dramatically speed up that process, do it more accurately and make it more comfortable for the patient. It uses artificial intelligence to create thousands of 3-D maps of a patient's heart to tell doctors what is, or isn't, causing chest pain.

Shrivastava's team's method is noninvasive. There aren't needle pricks and blood draws. "The beauty of magnetic fields is, they are undistorted by the lungs, by the skin, so the signal you're getting is very high-fidelity. It's very pure," he said. "So you can hold sensors right above the chest and still get that high-quality signal. No radiation. No contact. No nothing."

Read more at CNN

Have you ever wanted to go on a road trip and have the road to yourself? It might be possible, or at least you can find the road less traveled with this interactive map. Pull up the least-traveled road in your state, and see if it's anywhere near you. GeoTab compiled the least-traveled roads in each state, according to data from the Department of Transportation. They all appear to be paved, which would exclude some very quiet routes I know in Kentucky. The small print says, "The data covers Interstates, US Routes, and State Routes over 10 miles long." Okay then. In addition to the interactive map, there's a list of the ten most scenic of these quiet routes. If you choose to take a road trip on any of them, you will want to gas up, have a spare tire and jack, and maybe take snacks, because some of them cover many miles.  -vias Digg

Bringing a pile of bones to life can be dangerous business, and necromancy is not recommended for young wizards who have never dealt with dark forces.

But if the skeleton is named Lazybones then there probably isn't much to worry about, and if the skeleton you animate is anything like the Lazybones in this animated short they may be of more value to you than any of your real, living friends!

(YouTube Link)

Lazybones is an enchanting animated short created by Casey Alexander and Lizz Hickey for Nickelodeon Animated Shorts 2017, watch it with your favorite undead friend!

The movie Hidden Figures focused on the contributions of NASA mathematicians, engineers, and computer programmers who weren't recognized because they were black women. A literal example of the phrase was found in a photograph taken at the 1971 International Conference on Biology of Whales. The caption identified every person in the picture by name and title, except for one, whose face is partially obscured. She is also the only woman, and the only black person, in the photo. Candace Jean Andersen came across the photograph in her research and wondered who the woman is, and why she wasn't identified. She turned to social media, and clues began to come to light. A couple of men who were at the conference said she was Sheila Minor, who they thought was "support staff." The Smithsonian’s archive reference team unearthed a receipt for the hotel that conference members used for Sheila M. Jones (which was Minor's name at the time).    

The image proved that she was there at the conference. But when the archivists got their hands on Minor’s file this week, they were able to fill in more details to her story. Minor wasn’t there as an administrative assistant; she was a biological research technician with a B.S. in biology. This was her first job with the federal government in what would become a 35-year-long career at various federal bureaus.

She went on to earn an environmental science master’s degree at George Mason University, and collaborated with K-12 schools to improve science education. In the next two years she participated in a two-island study researching mammals of the Poplar Islands, and presented her findings at the American Society of Mammalogists Meeting in 1975.

Shapiro says the fact that Minor was initially dismissed as an administration assistant made the ultimate reveal all the sweeter. “There’s so much unconscious bias—maybe even conscious bias—because she happened to be a black woman in the photo,” she says. “It wasn’t until I got the biofile back from offsites I saw that, no, she was really a scientist and she did research of her own.”

Meanwhile, Andersen found Sheila Minor on Facebook, and she confirmed that it was her in the photograph. Read the story of how a hidden figure was found at Smithsonian. Also read about Sheila Minor's life today. 

(Image credit: G. Carleton Ray)

Sexting is a thing horny people do that involves sending each other pictures of their genitalia and talk about what they want to do to each other with their naughty bits, but sexy textin' is something completely different.

"How so?" you ask shrewdly, to which I reply "sending someone a picture of your junk isn't sexy, but send them a pic of your bookshelf, record collection or an action shot taken while cooking dinner and you're bringing sexy back like J. Tim".

For you see sexiness starts in the brain, and your brain keeps things hot when the naughty bits make an appearance IRL, so skip the D-pics and send some B-pics instead. No, not boobs or butts, brains! (Comic by BarteNERDS)

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

We know cats are liquid, as they take the shape of their container. And cats love any kind of container: boxes, dishes, shelves, closets, bags, or whatever they can get into. A cat's definitinon of "container" is pretty flexible, ranging from mom's purse to a rain gutter. We might even call a cat a "container-seeking liquid."

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Chris Poole has recorded video of his cats Cole and Marmalade ever since they were kittens. Here is a compilation that shows how they like to try on any kind of container to see if they fit. And if they fits, they sits! -via Tastefully Offensive       

It's crazy how many super rare cars are found sitting in barns, hidden and often untouched for decades after a car collector stashed them there for safe keeping.

These barn finds make auto enthusiasts drool, since they get to see a car that's rarely seen, but when they confirm the existence of a mythical automobile the enthusiasts totally blow a gasket.

This is the Ferrari Daytona, a car so rare people didn't believe it actually existed until it was located in a barn in Japan:

Ferrari had, in fact, only ever commissioned one street version of its Daytona with a full aluminum body. Completed in 1969, the car was exported to a Japanese dealership in 1971 and then featured in the January 1972 issue of Car Graphic, a Japanese motoring magazine.

After passing hands several times, it ended up in the barn of its last owner, Makoto Takai, some time around 1980.

The car is in “barn find” condition and is being put up for sale unrestored. The odometer displays just over 22,000 miles. RM Sotheby’s expects the car to fetch up to 1.7 million euros ($2 million), according to the auction catalog.

The car is in remarkably clean condition considering it has been sitting around in a barn for nearly 40 years, and what it lacks in interior comfort it makes up for in old school sports car cool.

-Via design you trust

Lauren Lorenzo of eLL cartoons recorded her family trying to explain how to use the Amazon Echo personal assistant. To activate it, you have to say "Alexa" first. But if you tell that to Grandma, you will activate it yourself, so they are trying to avoid saying the name. But Grandma doesn't get what they are trying to tell her, and she can't remember the name anyway. This video contains some NSFW language.

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Lorenzo has animated her family's interactions before. If you are curious about what they look like, she also recorded their reaction to the above animation. Again, this contains NSFW language.

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"She's using her talents for evil." You can see more of Lorenzo's family in her True Stories series.  -via reddit