The culture of beekeeping in Slovenia is serious business, and neighborhood beekeepers have developed systems for making honey production easier, more efficient, and even beautiful. Most use a type of beehive known as the AŽ hive. This involves a particular design for each hive that allows them to be stacked together. The bees come and go from the front, and the beekeeper takes the honey from the back. Stacking those hives builds walls, which become a building, sort of a bee shed, which shelters the hives (and the keeper) from the weather and allows them to stay warm.

The particular Slovenian innovation that really draws our attention is the custom of painting the front of each hive. This began so that the bees will recognize their own hive among the dozens stacked together. We now know this is not necessary, but it has become tradition. These painted front panels, called panjske končnice, sport bold primary colors with folk art added. They are quite unique, and are often sold as souvenirs. Some are hundreds of years old. See more of these beehives and read their story at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: strudelt)

A new world record has been broken for the fastest time a person has traversed a greased pole. The record is now 3.04 seconds, set by Antonino Papa of Italy. Papa is a second-time record holder, since he bested everyone else in 2014 as well. Now, I'm sure that you want to see that, but even more, you want to see all the folks who didn't make it across, because that's much more entertaining. And that's what they show us first in this video. People fell off every which way, but you have to agree that it's better to fall off the pole than to fall on it. By the time we get to the guys who are actually good at this, we have some appreciation for the difficulty of the stunt. This is not something I'd ever want to try, but you had better believe I'll watch it any day. -via Boing Boing

It would probably be much easier to believe that once you throw your plastic waste into the bin, they will all go to the same place where they get recycled and put back to good use at some point of their useful lives. Waste management systems in the West have been so efficient that people don't even notice what happens to their garbage after they throw them away. Well, they get picked up by the collectors and off they go, to who knows where? Actually, those plastics go into large containers where they are shipped to countries in Central America and Southeast Asia.

Living in one of those countries, I know that those wastes don't get disposed of properly. Without the proper technology to deal with them, a less organized system of segregation, and no proper backing from the government, those wastes are just piling up somewhere.

If I could do something about it, I would suggest that we just incinerate them. I learned in university that, though the process may release fumes into the atmosphere, it would solve our waste problem. At least, it's better than burying all that non-biodegradable material under the earth where it would take centuries if not millennia before they break down. Not even the whole population of plastic-eating worms will consume all the plastic we have built up.

For more on this story, check out Holly Hogan's article on The Walrus.

(Image credit: Marc Newberry/Unsplash)

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has discovered a planet that, by all stretch of the imagination, shouldn't be there. It's called 8 Ursae Minoris b, and it's orbiting a red giant star which, scientists say, should have engulfed the planet. Marc Hon suggested two possible scenarios that might explain why the planet is still there.

The first is that when two stars, about the size of our sun, were orbiting one another, one star accelerates its expansion, becoming a white dwarf, a relatively smaller but denser star, before it collides with the other star, thus mitigating the impact and leaving the planet unscathed.

The second theory is that when the two stars had merged and exploded, a copious amount of debris scattered and those remnants coalesced to form the planet that we see today. If the second scenario were the case, then scientists say that this might give a deeper insight into planetary formation and destruction.

(Image credit: Javier Miranda/Unsplash)

Police officers from Palos Park have reported sightings of clusters of these so-called "jack-o'-lantern mushrooms" (Omphalotus olearius) growing in the forest preserves in Palos. They have bioluminescent properties which make them glow in the dark at night, so for any nature lovers walking around the area, be careful not to eat them. Despite only being of medium severity, its poison can lead to a serious case of vomiting, cramps, and diarrhea. Commonly found in midwestern and eastern United States, they usually sprout in late summer and well into fall. 

(Image credit: Jan Hearer/Unsplash)

However, do not confuse them with the chanterelle mushrooms which are completely edible. One marked difference between the two is that the jack-o'-lantern mushroom has true, sharp, non-forking gills while the chanterelle has false gills like ridges; and when the stem of the jack-o'-lantern is peeled, the inside is orange, as opposed to the paler hue of the chanterelle.

(Image credit: Timothy Dykes/Unsplash)

The idea of a book club is simple enough: on a regular interval, the group decides to read a particular book, and when they convene, they talk about it. However, one particular book club has been talking about the same book for over 28 years, and they are only about to finish reading it. That book is James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake which many consider one of the most difficult novels to read because of its unconventional storytelling. And the book club, the Venice-Wake group, is a project launched by filmmaker Gerry Fialka out of curiosity. He says of the origins of the book club:

"I thought, 'Well, the only way I'm gonna learn 'Finnegans Wake' is by diving in. I'm not a scholar. I'm not an academic. I haven't even read any other Joyce. And I just said, 'Why not?' So it's been 28 years and it really blossomed into a lot of things."

The reason why it has taken the book club 28 years to finish reading the book stems from their choice to read it at a slow pace. Fialka quips that they would read one page and proceed to talk about it for two hours. Considering that the length of the book is 628 pages, it's no wonder why it took them almost three decades to go through the whole book. Now, that they're about to finish, one wonders what book they will read next, to which Fialka cheekily replies:

"No, we're never done. The same thing will happen next month," he says. "We'll read page three again next ... There's nothing different really."

- via Dave Barry's Blog

(Image credit: Burst/Pexels)

I remember distinctly when I was in freshman year of high school that the very first assigned reading we had for English class was Mark Twain's The Prince and The Pauper. It took me three days to finish reading the 300-page story. At that time, it was the most daunting task to do and a chore to read, especially as I was unacquainted with the older English prose. For the most part, I only understood about 25% of what was written, and I had to look up notes and guides online to help me fill out the rest. However, that began my curiosity about books, and I swore that I will learn to read such complicated books enough to not make me fear them.

Now, I love reading books of all kinds, and the only thing that will deter me from tackling any book is its availability to me, which is no longer a problem with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and e-books. There are a few books that might still be intimidating even for the most seasoned readers, not merely because of their length, but at times due to their narrative style, structure and chronology, word choice, symbolism, and imagery.

One such book which I struggled a bit is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. His style of infusing magical realism in telling the narrative perplexed me at times, but it was an enjoyable read nonetheless. Along with that, here are nine other of the most difficult books you'll ever read.

(Image credit: Seongho Jang/Unsplash)

An awful lot of us were introduced to the concept of American history in the lower grades, when we learned of the hero named Christopher Columbus, who "discovered" America. This was when our history began, regardless of the millions of people who already lived here, and had for thousands of years. Columbus wasn't the first European to visit the New World (that was the Norsemen) and he didn't set foot on the mainland (John Cabot did that in 1497). For a couple of hundred years after his voyages, he was rarely mentioned and little remembered. But by the time the 20th century rolled around, Columbus was not only a hero of American history, but a hero of science as well, for proving the world was not flat.

How did that happen? It was a deliberate move, almost like a public relations campaign, although it had no organized sponsors. It began during the American Revolution, when the colonists needed a hero to define their history, and it was most important that the hero had nothing to do with the British. Read how the cult of Columbus began, and came to define American history as it was taught in schools for hundreds of years, at Smithsonian.

Those are some gorgeous photographs, and better yet, they have dogs and cats in them! There were so many entrants in this year's International Pet Photographer of the Year competition that they decided to show us the top 100 of them in a video. The top photographer award was earned by Sanna Sander, whose images of good dogs in nature are breathtaking. But there are also top winners in the categories of Action, Creative, Documentary, Pets and People, and Portraits. You can see the winners and finalists in each category with a pulldown menu at the competition website. Or you can see a selection of the winners in a bigger format at My Modern Met. -via Fark

Ancient Egyptians preserved human corpses with a convoluted process that involved a variety of natural substances, including aromatic resins, beeswax, oils, and bitumen. When Europeans discovered this in the Middle Ages, it set off a fascination for all things Egyptian. That included owning a little piece of those preserved ancient bodies -as medicine. They told themselves it wasn't cannibalism, since the bodies were ancient, dried, made into powder, and had plenty of other ingredients. Or maybe they didn't think about it at all.

We can't blame people for wanting to be as well-preserved as those mummies, but they were already dead when it happened. How people came to believe mummies could be medicine was because of the word that eventually gave us the term "mummy." Mental Floss explains why the craze for ingesting mummies came about and how it played out during the Middle Ages, although that part is rather gross.

(Image credit: Zinnmann)

The Balmoral Castle and Estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland is open to the public and popular with bicyclists and hikers. A couple of weeks ago, YouTuber Andrew McAvoy and his friends were riding over the rocky trails. They saw armed guards around the area, which was fitting, as the place is a royal residence.

What they did not expect was to see King Charles III himself hiking alone along a trail. They chatted with the king for a bit about hiking, bicycling, and the estate and then went their separate ways.

These two women are literally living life to its fullest. The first is a woman from Chicago, Dorothy Hoffner, who, at 104, has become the world's oldest skydiver. This actually marks the second time she went skydiving. The first was when she was at 100 years old, after which, she had commented that the next jump would be different, and it was as it is unofficially a record-setting one. Before Hoffner, the title of oldest skydiver belonged to Rut Linnéa Ingegärd Larsson at 103, which she had achieved in May 2022.

The other woman is Kim Emmons Knor, an 84-year-old native of Cadillac, Michigan who has been parachuting since she was 20 years old, has competed in international events for parachuting, and is now aiming to make 1,000 jumps. Currently, she is at 600 jumps, and once she accomplishes 1,000 jumps, she will earn her Gold Wings.

(Image credit: Ricardo Gomez Angel/Unsplash)

I would like to think that the British monarchy, despite their lives being constantly observed and scrutinized by the public eye, still kept secrets about themselves or their family that nobody would know. And apparently there was one such fact about King Charles III that nobody else had known which the royal family had just recently revealed. To learn what that fact is, check it out on Bustle.

(Image credit: HM Government/OGL 3, coronoation.gov.uk, Wikimedia Commons)

When we think of placebos, normally we would imagine a drug that generally doesn't do anything that would directly target the symptoms of an illness. And the placebo effect is the result of believing that the said drug will do what it was intended to do, despite not knowing that it was an inert substance, or a pill that did not have any active ingredients toward the desired effect. Usually, placebos are used to conduct clinical trials of new medicines or treatments to determine the real effect they are supposed to have.

Recently, the FDA announced that phenylephrine, a common decongestant ingredient found in drugs like Sudafed and Nyquil, didn't work. In relation to this, Science Friday had wanted to understand what placebos really are and what is the science behind them. They invited professor and placebo research specialist Ted J. Kaptchuk to talk more about the thing we call placebos.

One thing I learned from their conversation is that there is a nuance in placebos. They are not actually the drug or inert substances themselves, but rather all the rituals, symbols, and acts of human kindness surrounding the placebo. Which begs the question, how does it actually work, since there are cases when placebos are believed to have the desired effect they were supposed to have even though they had no active ingredients that would work toward that effect. Moreover, in their conversation, they also talk about the concept of the honest placebo.

(Image credit: Julia Zolotova/Unsplash)

Concerned with how plastics are generally recycled, Eleonora Ortolani attempted a rather strange project. She thought of making ice cream flavoring by using recycled plastic. Inspired by the idea that some worms were able to consume and digest plastics, Ortolani wondered whether it was possible for humans to do the same. Despite the difficulty of finding a scientist who would help her turn the project into reality, she searched and found a food scientist from the London Metropolitan University, Joanna Sadler. The two successfully converted plastic into synthetic vanillin which is a cheaper alternative to vanilla.

Vanillin mainly consisted of crude oil, which is also used to manufacture plastic, so the idea was simply to break down the plastic into its simplest form and then use an enzyme to synthesize vanillin. Despite successfully creating ice cream with recycled plastic as the source for its flavoring, neither one of its creators has tasted it yet, as it still needs to be analyzed by the food regulatory bodies before being considered safe to eat.

(Video credit: Inside Edition/Youtube)