People living their everyday lives in their everyday homes have no idea that hundreds of years in the future, the everyday items in your everyday home might be historically significant. People move, throw out trash, give away belongings, until there's nothing left for historians to study. And for 99% of places, it does not matter. But priorities change, and sometimes the smallest scraps of paper can be very significant in telling a story.

The rats who lived unseen in the walls of buildings in Colonial Williamsburg for many generations over hundreds of years weren't heroes. They were just doing what pack rats do, which is collecting things for their nests. Many of the things they saved -buttons, utensils, scraps of newspapers, pottery shards, fabric, or anything that caught their eyes- shine a light on what people were doing in those buildings during the early days of the United States. This is particularly important as a new part of Williamsburg is being preserved. The building that once held the Bray School was only confirmed in 2021. It tells a story that has been overlooked in the past, of a school that taught around 400 Black children to read in the late 1700s. Read how the history of the school is being investigated and how the rats who collected artifacts are helping at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: H. Zell)

The San Diego Comic Con was a few weeks ago, and as always, the cosplayers came out to celebrate. We were there to capture the fun and here are some of the most fun costumes we saw this year.

All images by Zeon Santos.

This Mask cosplayer looked simply Smooookin' and he had the personality match.

There were Barbie cosplayers everywhere this year, but we really loved this great cowgirl Barbie.

Here's another great Barbie, who even had perfect matching nails for the cosplay.

Not everyone really seemed to be living in a Barbie World —this Other Mother was delightfully creepy, just like the one in Coraline.

Speaking of creepy, this Sandman crew was downright freaky, especially The Corinthian.

Along those lines, Leatherface is always a bit freaky.

Between growing up to live an extremely online life and surviving a global pandemic that isolated everyone, there's nothing more horrifying for Gen Z than having to confront a real person face to face. It's easier than ever to avoid that. To get food, you no longer have to go to a restaurant, or even a drive through. And since you can pay online, you never even have to talk to the delivery person. But this guy screwed up and clicked the wrong box on his order.

A simple McDonalds order turns into a full-blown horror in the latest video from the comedy troupe Almost Friday TV. The true horror comes at the very end, in a simple number. After you watch it once, a second watch will reveal subtle but amusing details like the familiar jingle in the eerie soundtrack and the homages to Hereditary and The Shining.  -via reddit

Gunpowder, the world's first explosive, was developed during the 9th century in China, and its use spread around the world within a few hundred years. By 1626, Beijing had an enormous stockpile of gunpowder in its Wanggongchang Armory, only a couple of miles from the Forbidden City. The armory contained its own gunpowder factory! It was also a storage facility for armor, firearms, bows, and ammunition. The Wanggongchang Armory was only one of several armories in Beijing, which even then was a huge city of more than half a million people. What could possibly go wrong?

On the morning of May 30, 1626, the Wanggongchang Armory exploded. Everything within a two kilometer sqaure (.77 mile) area was flattened. Further out, buildings collapsed, trees were uprooted, and construction workers at the Forbidden City fell off the roof to their deaths. The force of the explosion was heard and felt in cities miles away. The emperor's infant son died from the shockwave. In all, around 20,000 people died in that explosion, making it one of the largest non-wartime explosions in history. Many more were left injured or homeless. Read about the Wanggongchang explosion at Amusing Planet.
 
(Image credit: vecstock on Freepik)

Kimberly Winter (Kimycola) has always astonished people with her loud belches. She knew her burps were special when she got kicked out of a bar for being too loud. Even as a child, she annoyed her parents anytime her tummy contained gas. But they've come around, as Winter's burps have brought her acclaim. She recently broke a 14-year world record for the loudest burp by a woman!

To break the official record, Winter has to perform in front of witnesses in a soundproof room, at the regulation distance from a microphone. This happened during a live radio show in Rockville, Maryland, where Winter's belch registered at 107.3 decibels. That's louder than some motorcycles! Read Winter's story and how she prepared to break the world record.

The loudest burp recorded by Guinness World Records belongs to Neville Sharp of Australia, who recorded a 112.7 burp in 2021. Winter thinks she can break her own record, or maybe even Sharp's eventually. -via Metafilter

Please. Mr. Poe loves zucchini. pic.twitter.com/6JsyN2zVKJ

— Mr. William Henry Leonard Poe 🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@WadeJo8) August 8, 2023

Some people are celebration National Zucchini Day today, but the full proper title of the holiday is National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Day. August 8 is the peak of zucchini season, when you've already tried every recipe known to man to use up the zucchini from your garden, but every day you get more, and they are growing to enormous sizes. Yeah, you could just offer them to your neighbors, but they would say no thanks, we have plenty already, and that doesn't help you at all.

Gourd to death. pic.twitter.com/2JYZ6CoqHm

— Stan Kelly (@KartoonistKelly) August 8, 2023

The alternative is to just leave a box full of zucchini on their porch when no one is looking, and now it is their problem. And who is to blame for this?

I created this https://t.co/nfDgKeoc1z

— Tom_Roy_SAGAFTRA_actor_broadcaster (@TomRoyActor) August 8, 2023

The zucchini is so big this year, you may need a forklift for your sneaking.

Tomorrow is

Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbour’s Porch Day

Plan accordingly pic.twitter.com/XMSynl8BxQ

— Halifax ReTales (@HalifaxReTales) August 7, 2023

My husband and his grown-ass friends ding dong ditched a zucchini on their friend’s porch this weekend.

This behavior is why I married this man. pic.twitter.com/djdujdhIEi

— StabbityDoom (@StabbityDoom) August 7, 2023

Some people have already posted the "gifts" they have received.

It’s National Sneak Some Zucchini Into Your Neighbor’s Porch Day!

I’m in for Brady, so our photographer Dorothy brought me a gift to celebrate the day in style! 😂 pic.twitter.com/L9MZ2F4Bfg

— Everett Lau (@elau_weather) August 8, 2023

But seriously, if you have more zucchini than you can eat, it can be frozen, or pickled, but the best way to get rid of it is to take it to your local food bank. Food banks often have no way to store fresh food, but check their operating hours, and give them a call. They might be able to distribute all your extra garden produce that very day!

I thought Kentucky had some weird place names (Tyewhoppety, Big Beaver Lick, Booger Branch), but those are nothing compared to the place names around the world that are rude, crude, and socially unacceptable in other languages. Fan y Big makes plenty of sense in Welsh, but is hilarious to those who speak British English, and induces a small giggle in those who speak American English. Rottenegg and Kilmacow are funny whichever type of English you know, but both make perfect sense in their local languages. Scratchy Bottom is just plain English, and a wonderful place to proclaim you are from. It sounds like a fungal problem. Rob Watts of RobWords takes us on a tour of places that might surprise or embarrass you. Yeah, I know, there are even naughtier place names that you can think of, but he never said these are the worst. In fact, he held back on explaining the very rudest place names. There's a skippable ad from about 3:20 to 4:30.  -via Laughing Squid

A shark that glows in the dark? That's just swell! The swell shark (Cephaloscyllium ventriosum) got that name because of its odd defense method. It ingests a lot of water in a hurry to swell its body up, making it too big and round for predators to eat! But the way these fish recognize each other is even weirder. They harness bioluminescence to give themselves a pattern of green glowing spots, which neither humans nor other fish can see. But the swell shark can see and recognize other swell sharks because they developed a special yellow lens in their eyes. The Tennessee Aquarium has swell sharks, and can see their glow by shining blue light on them and looking through yellow glasses, which mimic the way the sharks see. Or they can just shine a blacklight on the sharks.

The Tennessee Aquarium recently had a breakthrough in that they hatched a swell shark from an egg, the first captive facility to do so. The baby shark already has its own green glowing dots. Read about the swell shark and see videos of its bioluminescence at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Tennessee Aquarium)

Stack Rock is a small, rocky island in the Milford Haven Waterway, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Its strategic location prompted Thomas Cromwell to consider building a fort on the island in 1539. That didn't happen for another 300 years, but Stack Rock Fort was built in 1850 and completed in 1852. It was built to be a defense against the French forces of Napoleon III. The fort was decommissioned in 1929, and has been sitting abandoned for almost 100 years. Nature has invaded, and the moss, vegetation, and wildlife make the fort look as if it really were built 500 years ago.

In 2021, a community interest group named Anoniiem purchased the island. The company aspires to preserve the fort as a "living ruin" and open it to the public. They invited a group of photographers to visit the island and take pictures of the inside. Photographer Steve Liddiard, who took the above video, was among them. Liddiard shared his photographs and his impressions of Stack Rock Fort with the BBC, and you can see them as well.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Gina Reneé Finnesen)

We don't know what bumps and trauma this tree went through as it grew, but the result is a cute bunny rabbit. Pareidolia is the human tendency to see faces in things that aren't faces. We are programmed to respond to facial expressions because they convey important information. So anything we see with two eyes tends to look like a face. Bonus if there's a line for a mouth. But pareidolia is not limited to faces- it pertains to any familiar shape we can recognize in something that's not that at all, like the blobs in a pet's fur coloring that look like a heart or brand logo. Even sprouting plants can have a recognizable shape, like a mother Groot instructing her Baby Groot.

(Image credit: Kirsty Louise)    

A Facebook group called Things With Faces collects examples to share. See a roundup of 30 of their best images ranked at Bored Panda.

Cities, and even small towns, would be much more user-friendly if we didn't have all this traffic. Cars take up a lot of room, both in the roads we drive on and in the parking lots where we store them. They are dangerous to pedestrians and to each other, and are the main reason we don't walk everywhere and get to know our neighbors. They are also noisy and pollute the air. But we have become so dependent on our cars, how could we ever change this?

Zermatt, in Switzerland, didn't have to change hearts and minds, because the Alpine village never had cars to start with. Now that they have roads, they've decided they don't want gasoline-powered vehicles on their streets. Small, slow, electric vehicles are allowed, but are greatly restricted for use as taxis and for deliveries. And all of Zermatt's vehicles are custom built locally by a ten-man crew! Tom Scott shows us how it's done in a town that knows what it wants.

Big Ben is a word search game. You start off with all the letters it takes to spell out the current time, old fashioned style (hence, Big Ben). Then they scramble in some lesser-used letters to make a complete grid of 49 letters. Find as many words as you can by connecting adjacent letters in any direction, even several directions in a word. You rack up points by finding words, and more points by finding longer words. I got 36 points with my first word in the game pictured above! Yes, I can already see "just," "who," and "sex." When you complete a word, all those letters fall off and change the grid. There's no time limit; you end the game when you run out of options, or vowels. As a beginner, I just ran through words as I saw them, but I can see someone calculating how other letters will fall to maximize their score. Either way, it's a fun little distraction for a break in the midst of doing real work.  -via Everlasting Blort

Seventy-eight years ago today, on August 6, 1945, the US military dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima from the B-29 Superfortress named Enola Gay. Nagasaki was bombed three days later by another atomic weapon dropped from a Superfortress named Bockscar.

The powerful B-29 bomber had been in the works since 1933, when American war planners contemplated a possible conflict with the Japanese Empire. No bomber at the time could fly far enough to attack Japan. Existing bombers had a range of 650 miles with a payload of 2,000 pounds. Boeing and Martin both went to work to design a plane with a much longer range. Although several were designed, bigger planes had a problem in that they couldn't even fly 200 miles per hour, not nearly fast enough to carry out a bombing mission. Douglas and Sikorsky also got involved, but the funding for a superbomber ran out in 1938. However, Boeing believed in the research they had already done, and continued development at the company's own expense.

When war broke out in Europe, funding was restored and four aircraft companies: Consolidated Aircraft Company, Lockheed, Douglas, and Boeing were recruited to commence developing a plane that could deliver 2,000 pounds of bombs 5,333 miles away at 400 miles per hour. Boeing had a head start, since they never stopped their program. The military was so impressed with Boeing's B-29 design that they ordered it in 1940, even before the prototype was ready, and before the US was attacked by Japan. Read about the bomber program that began in 1933 and the many designs that were tried before the B-29 Superfortress at Military History Now. -via Strange Company

What's it like to get a doctoral degree? Or, to be more precise, what's it like to try to get a doctoral degree? Mianzhi Wang, a graduate of a doctoral program in electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, created a text-base simulation game that shows you. Make good choices, but be aware that your time and money are finite resources that must be used prudently.

It is not a Kobayashi Maru game, which was my expectation. You can definitely win and I did so on my first try.

The game is designed to reflect the norms of STEM fields. It would be interesting to try a similar game for the humanities, which would, of course, end in poverty even if successful.

-via Book of Joe

(Image credit: Ehsan Kamali)

The critically endangered Asiatic cheetah once ranged across many nations from the Arabian peninsula to South Asia. The subspecies Acinonyx jubatus venaticus diverged from African cheetahs somewhere between between 32,000 and 67,000 years ago, according to genetic studies. Rulers in Asia once captured cheetahs to use them as swift hunting dogs. But the cheetah population declined drastically in the 20th century due to habitat loss, hunting, lack of prey, and traffic accidents. The only population of Asiatic cheetahs left in the wild are in Iran, where there are thought to be only nine males and three females left as of last year. 

(Image credit: Azadeh Torkaman)

Cheetahs are notoriously hard to breed in captivity. Attempts to breed the Asiatic cheetah have seen dismal results. The only Asiatic cheetahs born in captivity were three cubs delivered via cesarian section in Tehran, Iran, in 2022. The mother (named Iran) had been rescued from a trafficking situation and was raised in captivity. Iran rejected the cubs, most likely due to the lack of a birth experience, and the cubs had to be hand-fed. Two of the cubs died within their first few weeks. The third, named Pirouz (pictured above) became a symbol of national pride for Iran. However, Pirouz died of kidney failure at the age of ten months.

Reintroducing Cheetahs to India

One response to the drastic decline in Asiatic cheetahs is a program to reintroduce cheetahs to India, where they declared wiped out in the 1950s. Twenty cheetahs from Namibia and South Africa were relocated to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh over the past year. Since March of 2023, six of the original cheetahs and three cubs have died. None of those cheetahs died by human hands, but one succumbed to malnutrition. Prey animals in the park have declined since the cheetah program was proposed. The others died of infections that may have stemmed from poor species management, and have to do with the fact that African cheetahs are genetically and environmentally different from Asiatic cheetahs. These cheetahs grew in their winter coats just as the rainy season began in India, leading to fungal and parasitic infections taking hold around wounds and tracking collars. Cheetah experts in Namibia and South Africa blame inexperienced veterinarians and project mismanagement. They are offering advice, as they know how fragile cheetah populations can be.  

The cheetah reintroduction program in India has had deleterious effects on the human population, too. The Sahariya people who lived in the forests of Kuno before it became a national park depended on harvesting chir, an expensive fragrant resin, from the forest's salai trees. The Sahariya villagers were relocated from the area that became the national park due to a program to reintroduce the Asiatic lion, which never came to fruition. The villagers kept returning to the forest to harvest chir, but the cheetah reintroduction program has made large swatches of the park completely inaccessible to them.