Out of all the mythical creatures in Japan, the most feared might just be the tengu. They are chimeric supernatural creatures with a human form amalgamated with beast-like features. The one most famous tengu is the Great Tengu, represented by the red long-nosed mask, which can be seen atop entrances so as to ward off evil spirits. The lore that makes the tengu quite terrifying is the fact that they are said to abduct humans. While this might be a horrific experience for some, others actually seek out the tengu as they are also said to be masters of the martial arts, and those who seek them aim to learn their secrets.

As the lore of tengu evolved throughout the centuries, many different forms of tengu took shape and people have been interested in ranking which one of these tengu is the most powerful of them all. So, here is a list from Linda Lombardi of Tofugu giving us all the details about the eight most powerful tengu and where they are said to be found in Japan. It also has a more extensive narrative of the legend and its origins as well as references about the tengu in pop culture.

(Image credit: Rui Hao Lim/Unsplash)

When you first look at the collection of sculptures, you might think that the bonsai planted inside these Chinese porcelain vases have grown too big for their vessels and are looking to spread their branches out to get some fresh air. It looks a bit shocking to imagine that a bonsai tree would have enough force to break out of a porcelain vase, but Patrick Bergsma, the Netherland-based artist responsible for these sculptures, actually collected dead or sick bonsai and molded them together with broken porcelain vessels to depict a story.

The collection is part of Bergsma's Expanding China series which was inspired by his interest of antiques and was titled as such since both the porcelain and bonsai used in his sculptures originated from China. Through this collection, he wanted to express the contrast between art and nature, with the fragments of porcelain juxtaposed with the bonsai trees. More on this from My Modern Met.

(Image credit: Patrick Bergsma/Instagram)

You may have heard that a group of billionaires have recently bought tons of land in California near Travis Air Force Base, and apparently, the reason for their doing so was because they wanted to create an ideal city called California Forever. It's no surprise since people have always been looking for ways to build and develop planned communities and cities that would fit the lifestyle, economic system, and sociocultural organization of the people living in that society.

In this JSTOR article by Ashley Gardini, we get a quick glimpse of the design paradigms that societies have implemented in their urban planning from ancient civilizations to today. You may find that certain design schemes like the city grid was taken from the ancient Greek scholar Hippodamus, and to whom the term "Hippodamian plan" is attributed. Other styles emerged throughout the centuries like the utopian ideal of the Renaissance exemplified in the nine-point star pattern of the Venetian Republic. And of course, each of these designs reflect the ideal that people of the time had, as today, the prevalent design ideal is based on the New Urbanism school of thought.

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I'm not a fan of horror films because they gave me nightmares when I was a kid so my parents told me to just avoid them and I absolutely stayed away from them like the plague. When I had grown older, I gained some tolerance for scary movies, and I was able to watch The Conjuring. My threshold is now at films or shows with just enough graphic gore elements like those about the zombie apocalypse. Evil spirits, ghouls, and other dastardly enigmas are still a no-no for me. However, if you are a big horror fan or are interested getting into the horror genre, then you should definitely check out some of the originals.

The Exorcist still tops the list of the scariest film ever created. And it's definitely no joke. Not even the scariest films of today can hold a candle to the film that put horror into the limelight. But apart from The Exorcist, there are many other eerie films that will give you the spooks especially as Halloween is almost upon us. Not everyone might consider some of these films super scary, and in fact, the list by Moss and Fog, actually misses one of the films that always appears on the top three scariest films in history, and that is The Shining. Despite that, it is still considerably a solid list which puts a lot of old horror into the spotlight.

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The 1950s and '60s were the peak of the Cold War, and they were also the peak of the suburban housewife phenomena. A family that had their own backyard fallout shelter in the suburbs was a step ahead of the Communists, and were assured they could stay underground for two weeks and return to the world unscathed. Therefore, these shelters were stocked with a supply of emergency food, mostly canned goods, that would sustain a family during a nuclear disaster.

But the responsibility of caring for the family would "naturally" fall to the woman of the house, as in everyday life. The women's magazines of the period had plenty of tips and recipes for making creative meals out of fallout shelter supplies. These magazines didn't expect women to ponder the implications of nuclear annihilation, but instead gave them instructions on the more mundane details they dealt with in everyday life, from making something appetizing out of deviled ham to giving birth in a fallout shelter. Read about the advice housewives received for keeping up appearance during nuclear war at Atlas Obscura. Yes, there's a recipe included.

Do you want to drive a scientist completely insane? Then give him/her a Nobel Prize! It's not a sure thing, and most Nobel Laureates are just fine, but a surprising number of scientists who won a Nobel have gone on to going off the deep end, or at least some weird places, in the years afterward. This phenomena even has a name, although it's tongue-in-cheek: Nobel Disease.

Sometimes a Nobel Laureate is considered a genius, and is drawn into discussions of subjects outside their field, where they may not be so knowledgable. In that position, it's easy to say dumb things that get a lot of publicity. Sometimes a Nobel Laureate becomes stuck in the position of being considered the world's best in their research, which makes continuing the same work difficult. They may feel they now have to either do something better or nothing at all. That's a particular problem for someone who wins a Nobel with decades left in their career, something like "peaking too early" syndrome.

An article on Nobel Disease at Big Think has examples from history, but it doesn't mean to imply anything about this year's winners, since it was written before they were announced. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Adam Baker)

In the US, and most places, you can buy land, but you can't buy air. What about water? Different nations treat water, water purity, and water rights, differently, but Australia is, so far, the only country that ever monetized their fresh water through private companies. In other words, it's up for sale through the free market. What could possibly go wrong? What happened was that water shifted from a shared public resource to an investment. When big finance is involved, it matters less that everyone has the water they need, and more that a profit can be made.

Well, that was bad enough, but Australian farmers who were doing without water learned a clever workaround that the investors couldn't monetize. And that just caused more problems. It's a really complicated subject, but Half as Interesting explains the mess better than anyone else can. This videois only 5:30 long; the rest is an ad.  -via Digg

Tom Scott, the famous world traveler who shows us amazing places around the world, is concerned about becoming "that weird elevator guy" because he has made many videos about unusual elevator designs. But his fans have insisted that he explore a particular elevator in Hanover, Germany. The shaft of this elevator is curved.

The town hall is unusual because it has a dome, which is not the norm in Germany. The elevator and the building were constructed in 1913, but I gather that the architectural plan did not call for an elevator. So the builders had to find a way to locate a shaft in a convenient place.

That meant the cupola, which has a curved shape at the top. The track bends and the elevator follows this track precisely, sometimes coming within 5 mm of the walls. 

The beautifully animated short film Chasse Galerite is a 17th-century folk tale of a talented hunter trying to win a fair maiden's hand in marriage. It's a charming and fantastical story involving flying geese, a peach pit, and a literal version of treebeard. The award-winning video by Brian Hawkins was made with water color on cut paper.

You'll have to read the subtitles, because the narration is in Missouri French Creole, a variation of French that few speak anymore. The audio was recorded almost a half-century ago by Pierre Aloysius Boyer, a French Missouri storyteller who was born in 1910. Since Chasse Galerite cannot be embedded, watch it at Vimeo.  -via Metafilter

Remember when you made faces as a kid and your mother warned that your face might freeze like that? For some, it can pay off. Jovante Carter is a TikTok star under the name HolyGxd. He is also now the world record holder for gurning.

The word "gurning" is simply the art of making funny faces, and there are even competitions for it. For the Guinness Book of World Records, gurning is specifically the act of pulling your lower lip up over your nostrils. You can't breathe while gurning, so the record is for the longest one can hold a gurn. Carter recently held that face for 62 seconds in Milan, Italy, breaking the previous record set in 2012 at 53 seconds.  

Jovante first realized he could contort his face when he was in the third grade. “I was eating lunch and my classmate told me that when I eat, my whole face disappears,” he recalled.

-via Boing Boing

Remember back in the day when you could grow a pumpkin weighing several hundred pounds and become a local, or even worldwide, hero? It seems like only yesterday when a pumpkin weighing more than a ton was unthinkable, but that line was crossed in 2014. This year, the world record has been broken by a pumpkin weighing 2,749 pounds, entered into the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California.

Travis Gienger of Anoka County, Minnesota, grew the pumpkin, but who knows what he went through to transport it to California. Gienger is a rockstar pumpkin-grower, having won three of the last four championships. He named this pumpkin Michael Jordan, because it was perfectly round, like a basketball. As you can see, that didn't last. The previous world record was held by an Italian who grew a 2,703-pound pumpkin in 2021. Read about Michael Jordan the pumpkin and how Gienger brought the record back to the US at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Miramar Events)

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2023 is Laurent Ballesta, who won for the above image titled The Golden Horseshoe. The photograph, along with others on the same subject submitted for the Portfolio Award, was taken in the Philippines. This is the second time Ballesta has taken the top prize in the competition, after he was awarded the title in 2021. Golden horseshoe crabs are an endangered species, one of only four horseshoe crab species left in the world, even though horseshoe crabs have survived for hundreds of millions of years.

The title of Young Photographer of the Year was awarded to Israeli photographer Carmel Bechler, for this image titled Owls' Road House. You have to look closely to see the owls who have taken up residence in an abandoned building. The winning images from the competition will go on exhibit at the Natural History museum this Friday. See more photographs from the competition at the exhibit page. Be aware that some images may be disturbing.  

An archaeological dig at Gough’s Cave in southeastern England revealed human bones that are 15,000 or so years old. They showed evidence that they had been gnawed on, and skulls were turned into cups. For some time, archaeologists thought the scene was unique, but more and more sites along northern Europe have revealed that the practice of eating humans was quite widespread among the Magdalenian culture of the Upper Paleolithic era. These people were homo sapiens, and it appears that this cannibalism was a funerary practice, and not war tactic or a defense against starvation. To them, it was just what you did when someone died. At the same time, the Epigravettian culture, mostly in southern Europe, burned or buried their dead.

Genetic studies show that the Magdalenian culture didn't just switch to burying their dead, but were actually replaced by people of the Epigravettian culture. We don't yet know what kind of beliefs led to funerary cannibalism, and it's possible we may never know. Read about the ritual cannibalism of Stone Age Europe at the Natural History Museum.  -via ScienceAlert 

(Image credit: Ethan Doyle White)

Halloween is nearly upon us, so many people are carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns. Later, we'll make pumpkin pie. But in the heartland of America, people engage in a more daring seasonal pumpkin activity: boating.

Until yesterday, the Guinness World Record for paddling a pumpkin as a boat was 37.5 miles down the Missouri River in a pumpkin weighting 846 pounds. Steve Kueny of Lebanon, Missouri has broken that record record by paddling the same river for 38.4 miles in a pumpkin weighting, depending upon the report you credit, either 1,208 pounds or 1,299 pounds. Either way, Kueny has gained fame and the adulation of the American Midwest.

-via Dave Barry

The way this video begins will make you think it's about Lucretia Borgia, but that's just setting the scene for the real story. Even if Borgia were guilty of all the crimes she's been accused of, she still wouldn't hold a candle to Giulia Tofana. Tofana made a good living manufacturing cosmetics, but her real talent went into her signature product, Aqua Tofana. It's a perfect product name that will stick with you because it's fun to say. Aqua. Tofana. While the concoction was officially a cosmetic, those in the know could use it to obtain an old-fashioned divorce... if you know what I mean. And if you don't, you should read the many posts we've shared about arsenic. In other words, Giulia Tofana was a 17th-century professional poisoner, and a prolific one, too. Weird History tells her story with a bit of snark, since that's the only way to make it palatable.