After being hunted for a long time, the gray whales' presence vanished in the 18th century leading people to believe that they have gone extinct. But the emergence of this gray whale may be more than just a hopeful sign, as the reason why it appeared in the Atlantic waters after more than two centuries could be because of climate change.
Normally, gray whales would be drifting along the Pacific Ocean. It was quite rare to see one swimming in the Atlantic or Mediterranean seas. Only five have been sighted over the past 15 years. One of those included the one sighted off the coast of Florida last December, and the scientists believe that the one they sighted off New England is the same one.
It is possible that due to climate change, the Northwest Passage which connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has become ice-free, and so paving the way for gray whales to travel to the other side. Although this is a good sign that the Atlantic will once again be populated with gray whales, scientists think it will be gradual.
Despite this sighting, however, scientists still consider the gray whale to be extinct in the Atlantic, as a lone whale is not enough to change its status. There needs to be evidence that a breeding population is present before scientists can say that the Atlantic gray whale is no longer extinct.
Bread is often recommended to be eaten at most within a week after baking, since exposure to air and moisture would cause the growth of molds. If you plan on eating bread beyond a week, it is best to keep it sealed in an airtight container and refrigerated. However, that drastically reduces the freshness and taste, so it's best to eat it right away.
Although bread can be kept from spoiling by refrigerating it, I doubt it would last more than a couple weeks or even a month. So, to discover well-preserved residues of what seems to be bread or some kind of bread-like substance is quite a finding indeed.
That's what archaeologists working at the Cumra district of Konya, Catalhoyuk, in Türkiye found while they were excavating the area called "Space 66". From a Neolithic-era structure which resembled an oven, they found an artifact comprising traces of wheat, barley, and pea seeds.
Analysis of the spongy residue revealed that the substance might have been leavened bread which was left unbaked. Usually unbaked bread wouldn't even last for such a long time, but they found that the residue had fermented which preserved the starches.
Whether the specimen can actually be called bread is up for debate, since it's unbaked, and one can only speculate that the traces of ingredients found in it point to the substance having been in the process of becoming bread. Nevertheless, the researchers believe that there is a high possibility that the artifact is, in fact, bread, and they are considering it possibly the world's oldest piece of bread.
According to Mariana Custodio, the biggest art fraud in the United States was committed by Knoedler, one of the most reputable art galleries in New York. They had sold 60 fake artworks in a span of almost 20 years which were supposedly created by artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, all of which were actually original artworks by the Chinese artist Pei-Shen Qian. It is estimated that the artworks' total value was about $80 million.
But that sum doesn't even come close to what may be considered the world's largest art fraud in history. At the center of it all is Norval Morrisseau, Canada's most famous Indigenous artist, who, in the years before his death, claimed that auctioneers and art galleries were selling fakes. Although he filed affidavits identifying the forgeries, Morrisseau was not able to pursue any lawsuits due to his death in 2007 from complications with Parkinson's disease.
Now, over 16 years after his death, investigators have finally discovered the sheer scale and magnitude of the art fraud. And it took an unlikely group of individuals to get down to the bottom of the scheme, which included Scottish Canadian singer John McDermott, the rock star keyboardist Kevin Hearn, an acquaintance of Morrisseau's relatives Dallas Thompson, and the Canadian homicide detective Jason Rybak.
In 2013, McDermott filed a lawsuit claiming that a supposed Morrisseau painting he bought was a fake after conducting an investigation on the matter. This led him to identify Gary Lamont and David Voss as the ringleaders of the Thunder Bay fraud ring. However, McDermott dropped his claim for unknown reasons. Thankfully, another buyer of an alleged Morrisseau also went to court regarding the fraud. And that was Kevin Hearn.
Hearn, a member of the band Barenaked Ladies, had bought his first Morrisseau painting called Spirit Energy of Mother Earth in 2005 for CA$20,000, which he lent to the Art Gallery of Ontario for a show in 2010. A few days after lending it, he learned that the painting was a fake.
So, he sued the Toronto gallery from which he bought the painting in 2012, but the judge ruled in 2018 that the fake was merely contested, and there was no conclusive evidence that indicated that the painting which Hearn bought was indeed a fake. This was despite Thompson's testimony revealing that a fraud ring existed in Thunder Bay which created thousands of Morrisseau paintings, as well as expert testimony saying that the painting was a fraud.
Hearn, determined to get down to the bottom of the Morrisseau fraud scandal, continued with his investigation and tapped a filmmaker friend, Jamie Kastner, to make a documentary about the Morrisseau fakes titled There Are No Fakes, which was released in 2019. It was this documentary that brought Jason Rybak to the case.
At the time, Rybak was investigating the murder of Scott Dove, and one of the suspects of the murder was none other than Gary Lamont. On the suggestion of Dove's mother, Rybak watched the documentary made by Hearn's friend, and immediately, he contacted Hearn. Rybak spent the next four years working on the case, looking into Morrisseau's life and all the information available on the lawsuits of fraud victims.
It was only in March 2023 when officials announced that they had arrested eight people involved in the fraud rings, which included Lamont and Voss. Rybak also discovered that Voss started the scheme in 1996 which was then copied by Lamont in 2002, creating two separate fraud rings. Later on, a third came about when a friend of Lamont and Voss began making forgeries in southern Ontario.
Just last December, Lamont pled guilty to one count of forgery and fraud. Police filed 40 charges against him and his other accomplices, and more trials will be conducted this year and the next.
Humans have always been concerned with aesthetics and beauty, as a recent discovery of an ancient lipstick found in Iran shows. The lipstick was found inside a small container made of greenish chlorite bearing an intricate design with fine incisions. The markings on the vial suggest that the lipstick may have been marketed the same way cosmetic products are today, with a particular branding and packaging.
The researchers believe that the size and shape suggest that it might have been held alongside a mirror with one hand while the other free hand would be holding an applicator like a brush. Such a practice was possibly commonplace during that time as evidenced by an illustration on the Turin Papyrus 55001 which showed an Egyptian woman applying lipstick with a similar kind of vial that the team discovered.
As for the formulation of the lipstick, an analysis of the vial and the traces of materials left on it, the team found that several mineral ingredients were used in making the lipstick. These include ground hematite, quartz, braunite, anglesite, and a tiny crystals of galena, a lead mineral. It was the presence of hematite, which accounted for more than 80% of the sample, that suggested that this artifact must have been a cosmetic product as the mineral produced a deep red color.
More than this, the analysis also indicated that vegetal fibers were present in the sample, which could have been used to make the lipstick fragrant. At the moment, no connections have yet been made regarding who might have used the lipstick or in which contexts, but further excavations in the graveyards in the region may reveal such details.
If more evidence can be unearthed showing that these cosmetic artifacts are somehow related to female burials, the researchers say that it might indicate how this technology influenced the social dynamics of those times, and that women may have felt the pressure associated with the changing times.
For years, Charles Darwin's personal library had been rumored to contain around 1,480 books, which was the total of surviving items found in the two main collections preserved by the University of Cambridge and Down House. However, after further digging, researchers have found out that this number only comprised about 15% of Darwin's total original collection of books, publications, journals, and papers.
According to John van Wyhe, the lead academic who took great pains to track down and catalogue all the pieces of Darwin's original collection, there were more than 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes and items, which proves just how extensive a researcher Darwin was.
These include publications in a wide range of subject matters including biology, geology, farming, animal husbandry, geography, philosophy, psychology, and religion among others. Most of the works were written in English, but Darwin also had copies of works written in other languages such as German and French.
It took over 18 years for the Darwin Online project to fully reconstruct the entirety of Darwin's collection, and now, they have an index of more than 9,700 links to copies of the works that Darwin had. Some of the interesting finds that van Wyhe and his team notes is that Darwin actually had copies of works by John Stuart Mill and August Comte, as well as Charles Babbage and Paul Du Chaillu's Explorations and adventures in equatorial Africa.
Although most of Darwin's collection were scientific in nature, he was a wide reader and also had in his possession other works outside the realm of scienctific or academic literature. The team notes that Darwin once had a book on chess which was sold in 1889. Just recently, in 2019, a Darwin family copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's 1880 novel Wives and daughters had been up for auction.
Darwin also had a book about finances titled A treatise on investments by Robert Arthur Ward, which most likely helped him take care of his wealth, investing the money he received from his inheritance and publications into assets like land, securities, and even investing in railroad projects.
Apart from the collections maintained by Cambridge and those kept at Down House, the Darwin Online team also traced and located the original sources of thousands of clippings, pamphlets, and other titles which were referenced in the Darwin Archive but whose author, publication, or date was unknown.
In the days of yore, Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. Then in the 19th century, the lake in what would become Kings County in California was drained by agricultural farms as the fertile soil was used to grow nuts, cotton, tomatoes, and safflower. In its place was a small lake that reappeared during rainy times, but most of the acreage went to farmland. Then in 2023, winter storms dumped enough snow and water to resurrect Tulare Lake to more than 100,000 acres of water! Farmers found their fields underwater and orchards drowned. Tourists flocked in, but they couldn't swim in the lake because the water was laden with agricultural chemicals and had irrigation equipment in it.
This July, thousands of young, healthy athletes from all over the world will converge on Paris for the Summer Games, and the City of Love is getting ready to welcome them. Olympic organizers have ordered 300,000 condoms for 2024, to be distributed free to the athletes in the Olympic Village. We've come a long way from pretending that hookups didn't happen among the participating athletes. After all, back when the modern Olympics began in 1896, women didn't compete at all. But even before the free condom distributions began, on-site pharmacies stocked plenty of them at the Olympics for those who wanted them.
The first Olympic condom giveaway was in Calgary, Alberta, for the Winter Games in 1988. Organizers stocked 6,000 of them. The number has been raised exponentially since then. In 1992, they came in the colors of the Olympics rings at Albertville, France. There have been attempts to charge money for them, and vending machine have been tried over the years, but it's just easier to hand them out free. The 300,000 condoms for the 2024 games isn't even the record number, either. Read up on the history of condom giveaways at the Olympics at Mental Floss.
It's March Madness time, when college sports outshine everything else, so how about an Honest Ad for the NCAA? This video puts the sponsor message at the beginning, so you can skip to 1:12 to see the skit. Then Roger Horton does his thing exposing the seedy underbelly of the exploitation of the student athlete. The NCAA is the NPAA here, for obvious reasons. The controversy about "amateur athletes" in the Olympics was that some countries followed the rules while others didn't, and we eventually had to change the rules to make the competition more fair. For college athletics, the problem is that everyone in the business makes oodles of money, from coaches to administrators to TV networks to bookies to scalpers to hotels, everyone except for the college players who actually do the work to make the system worth watching. For them, college sports is like an unpaid internship, where their future is a gamble and they might or might not have time to actually earn a degree. This video contains NSFW language.
Almost 150 years after the fact, future neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard his father talk about the shopkeeper in his hometown of Djúpivogur, Iceland, who was a Black man named Hans Jónatan. Jónatan wasn't born in Iceland, but he settled there, married, became a valued member of the community, and fathered descendants who still lived nearby. Later biographies pieced together the story of Hans Jonathan, who was born into slavery in the Caribbean, was brought to Denmark, walked away from his enslaver and joined the Danish Navy, became a war hero, and then had to fight for his freedom in court more than once. After losing the final court battle in 1802, he simply disappeared. There was also the story of a teenager named Hans Jónatan, who arrived in Djúpivogur on a merchant ship in 1802, and who spoke Danish and played the violin. He was also ready to settle down, and worked at the local general store and trading station, which he later ran.
The story of Hans Jonathan is quite compelling in itself, but there was a new chapter in the 21st century, when Kári Stefánsson, now a neurologist, began a vast DNA study in Iceland to investigate the genetic markers of multiple sclerosis. Since Iceland is quite genetically homogenous, mutations would stand out from the crowd better than with other populations. But the study also yielded intriguing information from Hans Jónatan's 788 verified living descendants. By studying the DNA of these descendants, Stefánsson's team was able to reconstruct large parts of not only Jónatan's genome, but that of his mother as well -two centuries after they lived, with no trace of their own DNA. Read the intriguing story of Hans Jonathan and his legacy in Iceland at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to it in podcast form. -via Strange Company
Warning: do not watch this video while you are enjoying a meal, because you won't be enjoying it so much. Sam O'Nella Academy (previously at Neatorama) runs down several dishes that are considered delicacies in various places or at various times in the past, but aren't allowed to be imported to the US or are else a really bad idea for one reason or another. Some have to be prepared just so or they are dangerous, others are infringing on species that we should be protecting, and some are just contrary to what we expect to eat. These include casu martzu, shark fin soup, ackee, bird's nest soup, and ortolan. The ones you've heard of may make you curious about the ones you haven't, or maybe you dread learning about them. This video contains a little NSFW language and some gross drawings.
The San Francisco Gate reports that officers in the California Highyway Patrol pulled over a gentleman driving his car alone in the carpool lane on Interstate 880 near San Francisco. A shirt and hat took the place of an actual person in the front passenger seat. The driver, though, said that the setup represented an imaginary friend.
The express lane system allows for reduced tolls for cars with multiple occupants. This driver, the police allege, was attempting to trick cameras into reading a passenger. This is not permissible.
What about an anime hug pillow if it depicts your waifu? I'm asking for a friend.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: California Highway Patrol
Imagine one day you see your roommate, and his face looks like a demon or something out of Star Trek. That was the experience of Victor Sharrah when he began to suffer from a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia. Other people with the condition may see faces with features in the wrong places, weird textures, or other distortions, but only on actual faces they encounter. Pictures of faces appear normal to them, which allowed an artist to recreate what Sharrah sees in the images above. Prosopometamorphopsia is so rare that only around 100 cases have been identified since 1904. However, it is probable that people who suffer from it do not seek help for fear that they will be diagnosed with schizophrenia or other mental illness. Yet the problem in perceiving faces seems to be the only symptom. Scientists don't know what causes it, but the effects are often temporary, and if not, there are ways to treat it. Farrah is able to see faces as normal with the help of color-shifting glasses. Read more about prosopometamorphopsia at Smithsonian.
Jeremie Carrier demonstrates a "15 note poly tempo pendulum." He describes it as "an amazing sweep of the rythmic subdivision spectrum!" I didn't understand those words, either, but I'll try to explain.
What he did was record himself 15 times, each time playing a steady beat of one note, but each recording is of a different note and a different beat. The tempos vary by only two beats per minute from one video to the next. Then all the videos were edited together. What we get is a beat that becomes more discordant, but then several of the notes will play a tune of sorts, then veer off from each other, and another set of notes will then stand out as if they were playing a tune. It's no symphony, but it gets more interesting as it goes. Carrier rang a bell to show us where a new "movement" begins. At five minutes and five seconds, all the notes and beats line up again as they were in the beginning. Cool.
As I listened, this started to sound familiar. The very first post I ever published at Neatorama was for a geometric music generator called the Whitney Music Box that produced this same effect.
You know about The Year Without a Summer, when the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora caused crops to fail around the world in 1816. People couldn't afford to feed their beasts of burden, and that threw a damper into transportation, which relied on horses. But necessity is the mother of invention, and a young German named Karl von Drais invented a machine to make walking faster and easier. His device that he called the laufmaschine (running machine) consisted of two wheels connected by a frame with a saddle. The rider pushed off the ground with his feet, and propelled himself further and faster than was possible by just walking. Von Drais patented his invention in France as the vélocipède. In England, the invention was called a draisine, or a hobby-horse. It wasn't long before other engineers found a way to propel the running machine without running, leading to the modern concept of a bicycle. But without a volcanic explosion, we might never have have had them. Read about the laufmaschine at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company
According to the respected Pew Research Center, which conducts public opinion polling on many topics, 12% of young Americans can operate a SSBN, which is one of these:
The SSGNs are US nuclear-powered submarines that, instead of firing nuclear missiles, fire non-nuclear cruise missles at land-based targets. Navy nuke school is famously demanding, passing only the most focused, intelligent, and physically fit people into the ranks of American submariners. Yet, despite the negative reputation of Generation Z, fully 12% of them have qualified. This percentage far outstrips that of older generations.
What's going on here? Pew does not actually think so many young people have actually earned their Dolphins. Rather, Pew conducted this study to illustrate that opt-in polling produces unreliable results. Opt-in polling means that the study designers do not restrict who can participate in a poll and thus cannot argue that the participants are a representative sample.
The study found that young people and Hispanic adults were especially likely to affirm absurd claims, although I don't see an explanation of why this is the case.
Anyway, when you see the results of an online poll that says that an alarmingly large number of people believe in something profoundly disturbing, such as Holocaust denial, realize that extremely faulty survey design may be the cause of these numbers. The population has not gone completely insane yet.
