Eric Fife from Suvie shared a comment his mother made about cling wraps saying that she remembered cling wrap sticking much better than it does today. And so, he went to investigate a little on the topic and found the reason why:

The Dow Chemical Company began selling Saran Wrap in 1949, which at that time was made out of PVDC (polyvinylidene chloride). PVDC is a stretchy material that is mostly impervious to air and moisture, which makes it perfect for long-term food preservation. Unfortunately, however, recent research has shown that PVDC is harmful to the environment and, quite possibly, to your health.

Learn more about the effects of PVDC to your health and why cling wrap brands have switched to LDPE on Suvie. - via Cracked

(Image credit: Kakura/CC BY SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Sometimes, reality isn't too far off from films, especially with Guillermo del Toro's harrowing experience of having his father kidnapped. Now, in this instance, one might probably go to the police for help, but luckily for del Toro, a good friend and fellow director James Cameron came to his aid instead.

In the midst of production for "Mimic," del Toro's father, Federico del Toro, was kidnapped in his hometown of Guadalajara. The kidnappers wanted $1 million in ransom money. There was only one issue — Del Toro did not have the funds.

After learning that del Toro's father had been kidnapped, his old friend James Cameron stepped in, and he took del Toro to a bank and gave him the $1 million he needed.

Read more on Grunge. - via Cracked

(Image credit: Boungawa/CC BY SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons & Gage Skidmore/CC BY SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

In 1927, Thomas Parnell, University of Queensland physics professor wanted to demonstrate the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, and so created an experiment by putting a pitch sample in a glass funnel and waited for it to drip out. The first drop took eight years to fall. The ninth drop fell in 2014, and right now, the School of Mathematics and Physics of UQ has set up a live video stream, called The Tenth Watch, to await the momentous tenth drop.

Currently, the experiment has had three custodians, Professor Parnell being the first, his colleague Professor John Mainstone, was the second, and now, the third is Professor Andrew White. Read more on the Pitch Drop experiment from UQ. -via Cracked

(Image credit: University of Queensland)

Khutulun was the great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan. She earned her title of wrestler princess when she declared that she will only marry her suitor if they bested her in wrestling. In the event that she won, they must give her a horse. And so it is said, that she, in the course of her lifetime, owned 10,000 horses.

Born around 1260 and raised with her 14 brothers, Khutulun excelled at horse riding, archery and wrestling, with the latter arguably the source of her reputation.

Khutulun was a feared fighter, who battled alongside her father against Kublai Khan, protecting the nomadic Mongol lifestyle of his Chagatai Khanate against the Chinese ways adopted by Kublai’s court.

Netflix's Marco Polo also featured Khutulun as her life warranted enough interest for the Italian explorer to mention her in his records. Learn more about Khutulun from SCMP and Rejected Princesses.

(Image credit: Quite Interesting/Twitter)

A strange case of child trafficking came to light in Paris in 1909. A six- or seven-year-old girl approached the police and eloquently told a story in a language no one at the station could understand. When they determined she was speaking Armenian, an interpreter was brought in. The girl said a woman had kidnapped her from her grandparents' home in Syria. Only after the child's picture appeared in the newspaper did the woman emerge. The American woman said the girl was her daughter, who she had sent to her grandparents' home as an infant when she became a teenage widow, and she had recently retrieved her. The woman spoke a combination of English and French, and she and the child had no common language.  

The child, upon hearing that story, expanded her account by declaring she knew her mother, and had seen her only a year before, and that other parts of the woman's tale were untrue. She said her name was Marianne, although the woman called her Annette.

Another newspaper account has more details on the story, although it may be a little hard to read. The American woman's story was investigated, and apparently she had used several different names in her travels, and had drafted a letter to her husband about bringing home a young servant. Her story then expanded to accommodate that discovery, in that her second husband didn't know about her child from her first marriage, so she concocted the servant story. While we still don't know what happened in the end, it is doubtful that Marianne was allowed to leave Paris with the woman who claimed to be her mother.

 

Gravity will have its way, and it controls the way water works everywhere on earth. Water falls from the sky and then flows downward along the slope of the earth. Traditionally, people have respected that, and settled into places where nature provides a water supply. But in the modern era, people often disregard nature's water supplies to rely on technology. Still, there's a limit to how much we can do to overcome the laws of gravity and the enormous geography we have. Half as Interesting take a look at the way water flows in North America, and focuses on a singular anomaly in Wyoming. That's the home of mysteriously-named North Two Ocean Creek. Far from any ocean, this is the one place along the Continental Divide where water can flow to either the Atlantic or the Pacific Oceans! It's not a phenomena we can engineer to bring water to the people who need it; it's both unique and natural.  

The photograph above by photographer Dina Litovsky has gone viral for showing the state of a model's feet during New York Fashion Week. Litovsky has covered Fashion Week for 12 years now, and has always taken pictures illustrating the pain caused by constant changes of high heels on the models working the many shows, but most were not published. However, Litosky keeps them for her personal project Fashion Lust.

The model's wounds were not caused by this particular pair of shoes, but they do allow the damage of the entire week to be exposed. You can see they are too small, as are most of the shoes provided for the fashion shows. They are designed to look good, not to walk in. And that's the story of high heels.

Women unwittingly continue the centuries-old tradition that "beauty is pain" when we buy expensive shoes only to classify them according to the number of blocks they can be worn without causing blisters.

Litovsky tells the story of this image and what it says about the lives of everyday women at In the Flash. -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: Dina Litovsky)

Two brides, porcelain wedding cake toppers Val and Mara, are unsatisfied with the grooms they are paired with. Val's designated groom turns abusive, and his bride is injured but not destroyed. The other couple, Mara and Jesse, come to the rescue and the whole cake shop turns into a war scene. After the violence dies down, Val and Mara really only want to be with each other. It's a touching tale, but the real story is revealed in still shots shown during the credits. I had to laugh when the shopkeeper arrived the next morning. As Marvel has taught us, never leave before the credits roll. The award-winning short film Piece of Cake was written and directed by Sophie Feher and produced by Emma Goeas at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

As soon as Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in an electrical storm (and didn't die) and then invented the lightning rod, the idea was appropriated by the fashion world. Electricity was such a modern concept that it became the next big thing for a while. Lightning rod fashion reached its height in fashionable France, where one could purchase a lightning rod hat (le chapeau paratonnerre) equipped with a grounding wire dragging behind the wearer, or carry a lightning rod umbrella (le parapluie-paratonnerre). If it worked to keep a house safe from lightning, why wouldn't it also work for a pedestrian on the streets?

That was just the beginning of electrical fashion. As soon as the battery was invented, the trendiest people rushed to wear jewelry or decorate their clothing with lights. You could even hide the battery in your bustle! Read about the 18th-century fad for electric fashion at Messy Nessy Chic.

Warning: this video may induce a little queasiness. We've seen heart-stopping POV videos of mountain bikers wearing helmet cams. The next iteration of this type of videography is from the view of a FPV (first person view) drone. In this sequence, we follow champion racer Kade Edwards down the Red Bull Hardline downhill mountain bike race track in Wales, an extreme track if you ever saw one. Can Edwards stay upright on this terrifying run? Can the drone keep up with him? Can the drone navigate through thick groves of trees? (Spoiler- not in the first attempt.) Can we keep our stomachs from leaping while watching? Edwards makes the run look easy, although we all know that it takes both skill and daring, and the drone pilot did a fantastic job, drawing kudos from professional FPV drone pilots. Any of us would have crashed and burned in either role. -via TYWKIWDBI

The search for life in other planets or an inhabitable place outside Earth has been one of the missions of astronomers studying the vast expanse of our solar system and beyond. Exoplanet K2-18b has been on their radar since 2015, but it wasn't until recently when NASA's James Webb Space Telescope finally observed and measured the atmosphere of the exoplanet.

The new study found a lot of carbon dioxide and methane. This is interesting as this is like what is found on Earth, Mars, and Venus in our solar system—rather than Neptune.

However, it also found a small amount of dimethyl sulfide. Dimethyl sulfide is an interesting molecule, made up of carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur.

On Earth, it’s generally a bit smelly. But it’s also closely linked to life.

The only process we know that creates dimethyl sulfide on our planet is life. In particular, marine life and plankton emit it in the form of flatulence.

Is this potentially one such place which can be inhabited by future humans? It's tough to say, but scientists are hopeful that the presence of dimethyl sulfide could be a sign. -via Singularity Hub

(Image credit: ESA/Hubble, CC by 4.0/Wikimedia Commons)

Nature TTL is a collective of photographers with a passion for nature photography and their annual Photographer of the Year contest has seen thousands of entries that showcase the marvel of nature taken by photographers from all over the world. The contest started in 2020, and this year's crop of winners is truly outstanding.

Chosen from more than 8,000 submissions, the winners of this year’s Nature TTL Photographer of the Year competition capture both the immense beauty of our planet and the threats we face with a changing climate. Thomas Vijayan took home the top prize for his heartbreaking panoramic of the Austofonna Ice Cap cracking and emitting gushing waterfalls into the sea.

You may check out the complete winners gallery from POTY 2023 on Nature TTL's website. -via The Colossal

(Image credit: Thomas Vijayan/Nature TTL)

Recently, Kraft Heinz recalled 83,000 of its Kraft Singles as it potentially posed the risk of gagging or choking due to an issue with one of its wrapping machines. Read more about it on The Cut.

(Image credit: Martylunsford/CC by SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons)

We were also bamboozled. These areas might look directly lifted from a set in Star Wars, Star Trek, or any popular science fiction novel that has been on mainstream media. These stunning locations are very much of Earthly descent. 

As you can see from the photo above– that’s not edited or generated by a computer. That is a snapshot of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone, in the western part of the United States. The area’s hottest spring has a wild rainbow pattern that is naturally created by thermophilic algae and bacteria along a temperature gradation. At the center of the spring, which is colored in blue, is the hottest part of the body of water. Nature is honestly amazing! 

Learn about the other places on Earth that feel otherworldly here! 

Image credit: Mariana Bobina

What you see is what you get, or so the adage says. But, according to a study, that statement can be truer than just a passing observation, especially when we are making decisions:

A recent study demonstrated that our eyes can reveal decisions we’re making, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. This eye-brain connection, especially the subtle eye movements known as saccades, gives away clues about our cognitive processes.

Eye movements aren't just telling of our cognitive processes. They also play a significant role in our purchasing choices, especially when it comes to understanding consumer behavior.

I can tell from experience that there is some credence to this observation. Generally, the more we look at something, the higher the chance that we grow to like it and justify our need for it. However, at the end of the day, whether or not we buy it will depend on our budgets. But it's clear that the visual stimuli have already factored into our decision. And it will only be a matter of time before we check out that stuff from our online carts.

Read more about this interesting study on Psychology Today.

(Image credit: Ion Fet/Unsplash)