Quebec Comiccon is wrapping up tonight at the Quebec City Convention Centre, right in the back yard of our friends at Geeks Are Sexy. That means we have a gallery of the best cosplayers who made their way to the con. A rather large gallery, too. Above you see superheroes that look rather familiar. It's Wolvebling and Blingpool, or what Wolverine and Deadpool would look like if they were women and fell into a rhinestone depository. I bet those costumes are heavy! And the Ghostbusters showed up, too, with their own sidekick Slimer.   

It's hard to stand out when you are surrounded by cosplayers who put their heart into their presentations, but Princess Batman managed to get a lot of attention among the superheroes, TV and movie characters, folklore figures, comic book heroes, video game game characters, and villains, too. 

See 55 photos of the best cosplayers at Quebec Comiccon at Geeks Are Sexy. Click on each photo to see a full-size version. 

What is the difference between a doctor and a witch? Or between a physician and an alchemist? During a large part of our history, those distinctions often came down to gender. If an illiterate old woman mixed up strange herbs and used it to alleviate someone's illness, it had to be magic, or worse, witchcraft. But that deep knowledge of plants and chemical processes that was handed down orally was actually science, although it appeared to be supernatural to people who didn't understand it. And it's hard to prove these days because most of it wasn't written down. 

But from analyzing the few of these "magic potions" and "spells" that were written down, historians and scientists can see why many of them worked. You don't need a formal education to remember that St. John's wort was good for inflammation, or that some plants had to be distilled to isolate the active ingredients. If it worked, you were a witch. If it didn't, well, then you were an evil witch. Read about some of those ancient potions and poisons that really did work as intended, and the people who managed to harness them at Chemistry World.  -via Strange Company 

The saying is that something is worth exactly what someone else is willing to pay for it. We know that from looking at real estate listings, where the list price is usually far more than what a home will eventually sell for. Nevertheless, we keep looking at those listings and dreaming. How good are you at guessing the asking price of a house? Find out in the game Curb Value, You'll be shown a picture, and the challenge is to guess the listing price within 5%. You get five guesses, and they will tell you if you should go higher or lower after each guess. I won the first three rounds, and one was exact in three guesses. I think they might round off the numbers a bit. I don't know how many houses are on the game each day, because I decided to quit while I was ahead. 

Anyway, you will think that the one picture doesn't have enough information. That's true, but click on the image to find it on Google Maps, with a Street View (that might be an interior) and the exact location. That should help- if you know where the houses cost too much. -via Nag on the Lake 

I mean, technically, a regular clothes washing machine or even a dishwasher can be a human washing machine if it's suffiiently large and the bather is really committed to the project.

But this product concept by the blandly-named firm Science Co. Ltd. is designed to wash and dry a human in 15 minutes without risking the bather's life. Spoon & Tamago photographed it at a recent tech show in Osaka.

This product concept isn't just a vision of the future, but also a reflection of the past. It harkens viewers back to a similar product on display at a world's fair in 1970 in Osaka.

Like flying cars, we never got this retrofuturistic visions to become reality. We did get X, though.

-via Nag on the Lake

The bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus) is, in our time, found most commonly in Central Asia. But as recently as 70 to 130 years ago, the species could be found in southern Spain. These birds' nests in isolated, mountainous locations include man-made objects that the vultures found. They function as unintended time capsules. Smithsonian magazine reports that archaeologists have studied these materials in long-abandoned vulture nests.

Among the 200 human artifacts are a sandal that dates back 650 years, a crossbow bolt, a slingshot, and horse tack. Radiocarbon dating permits scientists to establish when these organic materials were produced.

-via David Thompson | Photos: David Ruh and Ecology, respectively

Wildlife trafficking a $20 billion per year global business. The US Fish and Wildlife service investigates an average of 30 cases a day. These smugglers are caught by customs agents, federal investigators, or even local police. They run the gamut from rare spiders to infant monkeys to alligators, and what are the cops supposed to do with them? Despite having no expertise, they used to take them home with them until they could talk a zoo or wildlife shelter into taking them in. Or they turned to euthanasia. Then in 2023, the Wildlife Confiscations Network was established by a partnership between the Fish and Wildlife Service and the  Association of Zoos and Aquariums. And Mandy Fischer became the go-to person for exotic animals stranded nationwide. 

Fischer only has jurisdiction in California, but she's assembled a nationwide network of experts, shelters, zoos, and volunteer organizations that can step in and rescue a wide variety of creatures and get them the care they need. It's a complicated setup. Fischer once had to deal with a duffel bag full of baby spider monkeys, which normally would go into quarantine, but needed round-the-clock care immediately. The closest facility that could handle them was hours away, but the infants were saved. Read more of Fischer's rescue stories at Smithsonian.    

(Image credit:  Elba Benabe-Carlo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) 

Tom BetGeorge's annual Halloween light show for 2025 features a medley from the Netflix musical KPop Demon Hunters. The songs are "How Its Done," "Golden," "Takedown," "Your Idol," and "What It Sounds Like." But this medley is just one song from the show. It also includes Alien Ant Farm's "Smooth Criminal, a remix of "Zombie" by Zombic & Felix Schorn, "The Kill" by Thirty Seconds to Mars, and "Defying Gravity" from the musical Wicked. If you want to see the full 23-minute show, continue reading.

I was surprised to see that lighters weren't invented until 1823, so I looked it up. Döbereiner indeed invented the first lighter of its kind, but there were other lighters before that. Matches are actually ancient, but the "first successful friction match" was indeed developed in 1826 by John Walker. The factoid above is clever, yet it also requires context. It's from a list of things from history that "everyone gets wrong," but keep in mind that some debunking only replaces one myth with another. Some of these busted myths are things you are already aware of, since you do read Neatorama. Some have been debunked, like the story that Swedish meatballs originated in Turkey. Some are still being disputed. But some have sources that you can check, like how the authorities at Ellis Island didn't change people's names as has been assumed. There was one fascinating Ellis Island story that made the news and gave rise to the myth, but the truth is that the idea grew because it was a handy frame for name jokes. 

Yep, that one checks out. You can see all 27 historical myths in a pictofacts list at Cracked. 

Jörg Hillebrand is the greatest living Star Trek scholar. We've previously noted how he's proven that Patrick Stewart exists within the Star Trek universe. This conclusion is the work of Hillebrand's meticulous research of encyclopedic scope and perfect organization. To us Trekkies, Hillebrand is a colossus bestriding Ten Forward.

So I follow him on X for the connections that he draws. Today, Hillebrand noted that Captain Picard's dress uniform tunic gets shorter as the series progresses. The uniform fortunately includes pants, so we fortunately don't see anything improper. But viewers should remember to look Picard in the eyes and not cast their vision downward.

A street organ is the instrument used by organ grinders going back to the 15th century. They became more elaborate, and the Dutch street organ (draaiorgel) is an entire wagon with a full set of pipes in a wide array of voices and often percussion included, yet it is still all mechanical, powered by air. We assume it's compressed air, because you can imagine grinding one will exhaust you. James the Mechanical Music Man has a hundred-year-old draaiorgel named Blauwtje. The music is recorded digitally on folded and perforated cardboard, fed into the mechanism much the same as a music box or a player piano. But it's not just old music- these "music books" are still being made to play familiar modern tunes like Guns 'n' Roses' hit "Sweet Child O' Mine." Read about how the draaiorgel works, the history of street organs, and how you can hire Blauwtje or another antique mechanical instrument at The Mechanical Music Man website. -via Everlasting Blort 

Yesterday, I watched a YouTube video, thinking I might be able to use it at Neatorama. The story was interesting, it was fairly recent, and less than ten minutes long. The narrator's voice wan't annoying, and it had images instead of just a talking head. But about three-quarters of the way through, he mispronounced a common word and then there were a couple of instances of mashing two words closely together. Oh, this is artificial intelligence. It's an improvement over previous AI narration, but still, I got a creepy sensation that I'd been fooled for several minutes. I lost all interest. 

I'm just a blogger, but I spent years as a commercial voice artist, and I know how it's supposed to be done. How does an actual artist feel about the rise of AI? Matthew Inman brings us a long form comic about what AI-generated art has done to artists, the creative process, and how the rest of us regard art. Sure, it's an essay, but with Inman's delightful and sometimes gross illustrations, it goes by fast. Read the whole thing at The Oatmeal. -via Metafilter, where opinions vary wildly. 

Pay one price, eat as much as you want. The early all-you-can-eat buffets were loss leaders, meaning the establishment lost money, but they did it because it brought people in which paid off in others ways. That works in a casino, but when the idea spread to restaurants, management had to carefully keep up with the economics and adjust prices to avoid losses. That's important, because people can and will eat an astonishing amount of food. Most buffets don't have much in the way of expensive seafood. 

Then there's Red Lobster, which offered all-you-can-eat crab legs and then was astonished that they lost money. So what did they do? They switched from crab legs to endless shrimp on limited days. Then the days went unlimited. When that lost money, they did everything else they could before they rolled back on the shrimp. Red Lobster is still there, but the chain is a shadow of what it once was. However, most folks agree that it wasn't the shrimp that did them in, it was a leveraged buyout by venture capitalists who pulled some pretty skeevy tricks to make a quick profit. That doesn't always work the way you think it will. 

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists, Shimon Sakaguchi, Mary Brunkow, and Fred Ramsdell, for their work in studying the balance of our immune systems. That balance in immunity cells is between ferociously attacking the body's invaders and not attacking the body's own cells. We have trouble fighting our own cancers because the immune system identifies cancer as our own cells -which they are, but we'd like to change that. Organ transplants would work better if we could stop attacks from the immune system, but not destroy our immunity completely. And that balance sometimes fails. Autoimmune disorders like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis occur when the immune system identifies our own cells as invaders and attacks them. 

Our bodies attempt to sort out immune cells that will attack our own bodies when they are first generated, and then other cells police them after they are released into the system, but it doesn't always work perfectly. The Nobel-winning scientists discovered the genes that regulate these self-defense systems within our immune systems. Read about what they've found, and how it could change the world, at the Conversation.  -via Geeks Are Sexy 

(Image credit: Gwilz) 

When Optimus Prime orders his Autobots to transform, he comes across as bold and commanding. He speaks like a leader decisively addressing challenges that they face. But he's actually being conflict avoidant. It's a form of escape, not engagement.

This is true especially when Optimus is in couples' counseling. Here, he is more vulnerable than in combat and more fearful than in a duel with Megatron. On the couch, Optimus must face who he has not been in this relationship. New Yorker cartoonist Adam Sacks illustrates our hero's failure.

My kids once rigged up a pulley to take their clean laundry upstairs. However, after they inched a basket up, they still had to walk up the stairs to put it away and were just as tired. Maybe if they'd studied how to use a pulley a bit more, they'd have tried it a little differently. 

A pulley is one of the basic simple machines, those that harness physics so people can do more work than they could without them. How a pulley works seems really intuitive, until you examine them closely. Single pulleys will transfer work from down to up, but once you multiply them, they transfer work from weight to length. You can balance weight with two pulleys, but once you cross the ropes, you get different results. 

James Orgill of The Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) shows us some of the weirder effects of a pulley. The weirdest is the floating table, which seems like a cool idea until someone bumps into a corner and your dinner goes flying. This video has a 65-second skippable ad at 2:00. -via Damn Interesting