It's not easy being a member of the French nobility these days. The titles given out by royalty have lost their moneymaking power since France moved away from government by monarchy. Consider this: France has more than 30,000 castles, but many of them are in rundown shape because proper maintenance is so expensive. You can buy one for a song and a promise to restore it, but that doesn't help the poor aristocratic scion who inherited it.

By now you are playing music on the world's tiniest violin for these impoverished aristocrats. But they don't need your help. There is a club for aristocrats to support other aristocrats, called the Association for the Mutual Assistance of the French Nobility (ANF) to save the downtrodden elite from having to live within their incomes. The ANF has helped thousands of people, but those people have to prove they deserve it by documenting their lineage and titles, through their father's side only, and proof that lineage all comes through legal Christian marriages. If you jump through those hoops, you might get support, and even an informal dating service so you don't have to marry into the unwashed masses. Read about the ANF and their serious quest to preserve the French nobility at Messy Nessy Chic.

The winner of the 2023 Nikon Small World in Motion competition is Alexandre Dumoulin of the Department of Molecular Life Sciences at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The first sequence in this video is his winning entry, which depicts 48 hours in the development of neurons in a chick embryo as it develops its central nervous system.

...the footage shows the elongation of axons - projections from nerve cells - between the two hemispheres of the central nervous system. In neurological disorders, axons can be impaired. “By studying these, organisms I aim to enhance our comprehension of how the nervous system functions and identify potential factors contributing to neurodevelopmental disorders,” says Dumoulin.

It's important to understand normal neuron development, as deviations may lead to disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. For complete descriptions of the other prize-winning microscopy videos, you'll have to go to the Nikon Small World in Motion contest site. The Honorable Mentions are pretty amazing, too. -via Nag on the Lake   

Government officials and business owners pay close attention to how many cars are on the roads. High traffic areas need more maintenance, and low traffic areas need to justify their existence. That's where the  AADT comes in- the annual average daily traffic. Geotab gathered and crunched the numbers for both federal and state routes that are at least ten miles long to determine the least busy roads in the country.

You won't be surprised to find the route with the lowest AADT in the US is in Alaska. State route 11 (the Dalton Highway) covers 414 miles from Fairbanks to Deadhorse, and has an AADT of only 196. There are relatively few communities along the route, and people who need to travel from one city to another find it much simpler to fly. Yet the road is crucial for trucks carrying groceries and other supplies to mines, oil rigs, and small northern communities. Alaska, as usual, is an outlier.

Some of the other least-traveled routes are long and lonely, but quite scenic. When someone considers opening a gas station, they take AADT into account. You'll need to start with a full tank of gas, drinking water, and a fully charged phone. You might not have cell service, but you'll want to take pictures. However, lonely routes in the eastern part of the country are shorter and are more likely to provide services. Check your state to see if there's a road less traveled that you might want to check out to take advantage of cooler weather and see colorful leaves at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura  

(Image credit: Karen Deatherage/Bureau of Land Management Alaska)

The first time I ever went to a comedy club, I had a good time, but also an epiphany. The greatest laughter comes from people in groups who've had a few drinks. If a comic bombs in front of people who are already primed to overreact, they've really bombed. Such a club would be the best place to record a laugh track. You may hate that TV shows use laugh tracks, but if they didn't, would you really know where the funny parts are? Watching a sitcom without the laughter is an eye-opener, when you realize it's really not all that funny. Laugh tracks evolved from live shows, where an audience will react not only to what's happening on stage, but also to the laughter around them. Recreating that ambience was easy for TV, all you needed was an audience. But recorded laughter was even easier, so it got to the point where you didn't need feedback to tell you if a joke was funny. Who cares if it's funny or not? The laughter will be there when you push a button.

Take a good look at this picture. If you walked by this tree in the forest, would you even notice something weird about it? An astonishing number of people walked by, completely oblivious to the tree shaped like a woman. The photograph is not altered. This tree is in southern Newfoundland, near the Conne River in the forest of the Miawpukek First Nation community. The tree is right on the walking path, but it still took a Facebook post to get anyone to notice it. The crucial person who saw that post was Colleen Lambert, Miawpukek First Nation’s tourism, culture, and recreation director. She came up with the idea of harnessing this "Lady in the Tree" to get more people out in the woods. A Facebook group was launched, along with a contest for Halloween 2022, and soon hundreds of folks were hiking through the woods to find the lady and take a picture with her.

But what you really want to know is how a tree root looks so much like a woman. Her body is all tree. Her head, on the other hand, has its own story. Her head wasn't there, then it was, then it wasn't again, but it has returned for Halloween. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Roberta Buffett Collier)

Tom BetGeorge has unveiled his Halloween light show for 2023! This year, BetGeorge (previously at Neatorama) decided to go what he calls "old school" and concentrated on computerized moving lights. I don't know how "old school" that really is, and we see some short sequence of projection lights in his shows. But there are no drones like last Halloween, probably because that's an awful lot of work to do every night for a month. The sequence above uses the song "GrimGrinning Ghosts" from the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disney parks. But there are other shows with other songs this year, some that use a flamethrower. Continue reading to see them.

Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Rankin flew his F-8 Crusader on a trip from from the Naval Air Station in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, to the Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort, South Carolina in July of 1959. His plane never made it. Cascading malfunctions happened one after another, including the lever that would turn on auxiliary power coming off in his hand. There was nothing to do but eject.

On the lucky side, the ejection seat worked. On the downside, he was at 47,000 feet, where temperatures can bring instant frostbite and the air pressure is so low that Rankin's body immediately began swelling up painfully. He started bleeding from his ears, nose, and eye sockets. At least he was going down. Rankin's descent seemed too slow, but his parachute automatically deployed -at the wrong altitude. Then he fell into a raging storm cloud, with lightning, thunder, rain, and hail- but worst of all was the wind that kept him bouncing around in the air for 40 minutes!  

Against all odds, Rankin survived to tell the tale, and you can read all the horrific details at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: GerritR)

History classes in the US only have time to skip across the highlights of history, which is too bad. Later on we found that history is way more interesting, and we would have enjoyed those classes more if we had wider subject matter instead of repeating stories of wars every year. And if our text books had added in some really weird and obscure trivia, we would have paid attention.

No matter what era you study, there are small facts that you've never heard before, mainly because they are too small to make an entire article of, so Cracked put them together in a list of 30 Eyebrow-Arching Historical Facts. You, being a Neatorama reader, will encounter some you know well, like the Demon Core and the St. Louis. But many will be new to you.

And I just realized that two of the three examples I selected to show you are things that wouldn't have been in my history classes at all. That's the thing about history; there's always more of it being made.

This opening sequence for the Star Wars TV series Ahsoka seems familiar. A real Gen X TV viewer will instantly recognize it as The A-Team, with some elements of other action show openings mixed in. Explaining the cast of characters used to be a thing for TV show intros, which helped set people up for the show, even if they'd never seen it before. If you recall, The Six Million Dollar Man had a three-minute origin story before every episode! That time now goes to ads. Some commenters say this video from Craven Moorhaus and Zak Koonce of Auralnauts makes it clear what is happening in Ahsoka for the first time to them, and the show has already completed its eight-episode first season. Even if you didn't watch Ahsoka, nor plan to, this opening scene will set you up for nostalgia, even though the only thing nostalgic about it is the style. -via Laughing Squid

Before the advent of ChatGPT, there was an AI startup who had a chatbot named Annie, whose role was to help people looking for rental properties find an apartment suited to their preferences and book appointments for ocular visits. However, the chatbot wasn't sophisticated enough to handle the different situations clients were facing. So, the company hired human writers to operate the chatbot whenever Annie encountered an inquiry that was not part of her algorithm. Through machine learning, the engineers had hoped that Annie would become advanced enough to render human help unnecessary. And so writer Irina Teveleva's life as an AI chatbot operator began.

As anyone who has been into the real-estate business before or went looking for apartments themselves, each prospective client have their own situations that require a tailored approach. So, operators had to give Annie that human touch, to be able to relate with the clients, and to sound as human as possible. The idea was that clients were more at ease when they believed they were talking to humans. However, along the way, the AI startup was bought by a real-estate software firm, and directions shifted. Instead of trying to make Annie sound as human as possible, operators were instructed to be as efficient possible. In the end, Annie had succeeded in doing what humans generally fear about AI - she rendered them unnecessary.

(Image credit: Mohamed Hassan/Pixabay)

For those of you who are experts in baking, you may know that unsalted butter is a must as it allows you to have more accurate measurements of how much salt you should put into your recipe. And you may also know that there has been this discussion about which butter should be used - American-style or European-style butter. Without having to go into the details, if you are planning on baking an American recipe, then it would be best to use American-style butter as the ones who made the recipe most likely used American butter.

Now, the question is, where should you buy your butter? Food52 looked into it and compared butter sold from five different places: Breakstone's, Cabot, Land O' Lakes, Trader Joe's, and 365. And they were surprised which butter was best. Which do you think is the best butter?

(Image credit: Sorin Gheorghita/Unsplash)

Rickshaw pulling is one of the growing tourist attractions in Japan, where you can take a leisurely stroll around the streets on a two-wheeled cart pulled by a driver. Rickshaw pullers were mostly men but a surging number of Japanese women have also entered the profession, and Tokyo Rickshaw, the company operating within the Asakusa district, reports that women comprise about a third of their pullers. This sudden interest can be attributed to social media as rickshaw pullers post videos of their trips online to promote themselves, attract more customers, and gain repeat customers.

It might seem like a dangerous job for women, since it's physically demanding and there's always the risk of sexual harassment from customers or discrimination. However, the women themselves find it engaging and fulfilling, and so they continue to work. Moreover, popular drivers can earn over 1 million yen a month which is twice the average salary of a typical Japanese employee, and ten times that of the minimum wage.

(Image credit: Felix Luo/Unsplash)

Traffic laws differ from country to country, although some rules might be similar such as rules against running a red light, speed limits, and rules on where to park. In the UK, they have what is called The Highway Code which lists the rules that govern the road for motorists, cyclists, and even pedestrians. There are 307 rules categorized by the type of road user as well as additional guidelines for light signals, traffic signs, road markings, and vehicle markings.

A survey conducted by Scrap Car Comparison found that thousands of people had been breaking the rules listed in The Highway Code without even knowing it. One such rule that almost 90% of respondents said they had broken was flashing their headlights in order to give way to another driver, which The Highway Code prohibits. Nottingham Post lists the other nine UK road laws people unknowingly break.

(Image credit: Aleksandr Popov/Unsplash)

Located near Norway's border with Russia, Kirkenes has become a town where everybody knows someone who has been involved in spy activities, or has been approached by the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) for seemingly innocuous requests, until Russian Intelligence suddenly arrests you while you're in the middle of an errand, and charges you with espionage. That was the story of Frode Berg, who was unknowingly sent by the NIS to deliver a memory card that tried to look into Russia's submarine weapons systems. He was caught, and after seven months, sent back home through a prisoner exchange. That would be the last he'll take on a request from the NIS.

Berg isn't the only one, it seems, as many locals of Kirkenes have experienced a similar encounter. Many of those being approached by the NIS were business owners and people with personal connections in Russia who risk being seen talking to the NIS as Russian spies lurked among the people of Kirkenes. When Berg had been arrested, he shared that the intelligence officers showed how much they knew of the town, its residents, and even the goings-on in the town. This has stirred unrest and paranoia among the residents and understably so, after news of Berg's arrest spread. Everybody became suspicious that the person they were talking to might be a spy.

Ian MacDougall visits the town to investigate further and recounts the spy stories he heard during his stay in Kirkenes.

(Image credit: Killian Cartignies/Unsplash)

This video from Weird History is titled "Major Medical Discoveries That Happened By Mistake." That's really a misnomer, as most of these breakthroughs are anything but mistakes. It would be more accurate to say they were made by accident. Medicine and devices that were developed for one reason ended up being very successful for a different application. There's no real "mistake" in that! These ten stories cover some things you read about before, and a few you probably haven't. I was tickled to learn where vaseline actually came from, although that story really has no mistakes or accidents involved in it. I'd never heard the false story about Fleming's sandwich leading to penicillin, because we had the real story here years ago. The story about Edward Jenner doesn't appear to be an accident at all, but we all need to know it anyway. Overall, if you take this as just a list of medical breakthroughs alone, it's both edifying and enjoyable.