It's not quite the Manhattan Project or Area 51, but the Swiss take their cheese very seriously and want to protect the trade secrets that make their cheeses famous and sought after around the world.

As a consequence, Tom Scott wasn't able to see all or possibly even most of the Agroscope facility. But he was able to pry out of the food scientists why Swiss cheese has (or at least used to have) many holes inside. It's not because of the traditional explanation: bubbles of carbon dioxide formed during the fermentation process.

The Swiss scientists were able to discover the reason why their cheese were gradually become less hole-y about thirty years ago. In short, the milk was too clean and a certain contaminant wasn't getting into the milk and flavoring the resulting cheese. Now that particular contaminant has not be added in intentionally.

Wow, I didn’t expect them to sink even lower. We can’t believe that we will confirm the existence of this team of mercenaries thanks to Magic The Gathering. This was totally not on our 2023 bingo card.

But what are we talking about? Well, a YouTuber showed off new and unreleased Magic cards in a video. In response, Wizards of the Coast, the owner of Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, decided that this internet personality, Dan Cannon, deserved a more… aggressive response. 

The company sent Pinkerton agents to retrieve the unreleased cards, believing that they were a leak. In an interview with Kotaku, Canno shared that the agents showed up at their house and frightened him and his wife before getting the cards. He was also threatened with jail time and up to $200,000 in fines if they did not cooperate, and they wanted to search their entire collection of cards for stolen property.

Wizards of the Coast did confirm that they hired Pinkerton in a statement. Learn more about the issue here. 

Image credit: Amazon

An anonymous owner brought a David Hockney painting in an episode of BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. This artwork was created during the early years of the artist’s career, so there was a lack of his iconic use of vibrant colors in his contemporary artworks. Instead, viewers were treated to a vintage landscape made with a muted green color palette, as well as a rough, textured, surface. 

The painting was appraised by art specialist Ruper Maas. The anonymous owner shared that this artwork fell into their hands because his grandfather met Hockney in Trimley St. Marty way back in 1957. His relative then purchased a painting from Hockney and his companion. “This is not at all what I'm used to seeing by David Hockney,” Maas comments upon first seeing the picture. “I have this idea that they only had green and brown with them because they were broke.” 

The owner initially believed that the artwork was worth $15,000. However, Maas corrected him and said that the picture can be worth well over $35,000. “One of the things about David Hockney is that he is so instantly recognizable to most people that when you see one that isn't, you question it really hard,” Maas adds. “That's the problem with that picture. But…I now know what an early Hockney looks like.”

Image credit: BBC

Oh, dear. 

Wheel of Fortune was bashed online after a recent episode, where a contestant attempted to guess a bonus puzzle for the chance to get the grand bonus price of $45,000. The game show player, Angela, was asked to guess the letter "M, H, D, and O"  with the prompt "_ O _ N _ N _ THE _ R _ _." 

This bonus question was under the “What Are You Doing?” category. Angela did try her best, to the point that she almost cursed. "Joining the cramp, joining the cra-, oop!" she answered. "Joining the brag?!" 

Unfortunately, she was incorrect. Longtime host Pat Sajak revealed the answer to be ‘joining the fray.’  "You got joining…that was a really nice try," the host laughed encouragingly.

While the host and the audience were quite tame in their reactions, people online sang a different tune. "#Angela on @WheelofFortune got a piece of CRAP bonus round. I have NEVER heard of 'Joining the Fray' before in my ENTIRE life. Can we get some kind of sponsor to give this woman a prize?" one Twitter user wrote. "What the hell kind of puzzle was that??? Come on now. Ridiculous!!"

Angela, who was a good sport, said that her incorrect guess was no problem at all. She still took home a whopping price of $20,563.

Image credit: ABC

It’s not a supernatural object, definitely. Apparently, this is a weapon. 

A vampire straw was found in a traveler’s bag when it passed through security at Boston’s Logan Airport. The unusual item was made of titanium, and while they function as straws, their structure allows them to also be used like a dagger. Some sellers also advertise these items as very effective tire deflators. 

The state police and troopers confiscated the item from the 26-year-old man. He was also charged by the state as vampire straws are banned travel items. 

Image credit: TSA New England

Oh, these are amazing! 

The photo you see above was taken by photographer Paul Seibert. He was so high up in the sky to take these gorgeous shots, that he was required to wear an oxygen mask to fly the aircraft legally. “This particular shot has never been taken before,” Seibert told PetaPixel. “I wanted to do the highest open-door helicopter flight over NYC.”

These awe-inspiring images were taken at 15,000 feet above New York City. He took the photos at dawn, showing the densely-populated areas of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Staten Island, Roosevelt Island, and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. “At these heights, there are not only atmospheric conditions to fight with but also physiological responses to a lack of oxygen in an unpressurized aircraft. The pilot was on oxygen to safely pilot the helicopter,” Seibert shared.

The photographer used a Canon R5 with a 15-35mm lens attached. He also shared that he had to use a different zoom lens (70-200mm) to take detailed shots of some of the skyscrapers in the city. He attributes the dream-like quality of his images thanks to being able to take some of the photos at dawn and after sunrise.

Image credit: Paul Seibert

The Galactic Menagerie is a parody trailer for a Wes Anderson Star Wars film. I have honestly never seen a Wes Anderson film, but I have read enough of the internet to know that his visual style is formal, symmetrical, pastel, and a bit art deco. Oh yeah, it's quite pretty, with unexpected humor in places. The casting is sublime, too. It's been a long time since we've had a memorable Star Wars comedy, like Hardware Wars, Spaceballs, or The Star Wars Holiday Special. The Galactic Menagerie would certainly be a movie worth going to the theater for. -via Geeks Are Sexy

When a clergyman is kicked out of the priesthood against his will, we say he has been "defrocked." That term came about in a very literal way. In Medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic Church was extremely powerful and priests were the local authority, although still subject to the church hierarchy. When one was rejected from the clergy by the higher-ups, he underwent the "rite of degradation," which sounds bad enough, but the ceremony entailed having him take his clothes off. When a man became a priest, he was dressed in layers of holy vestments, and the reverse was stripping him of his frock. He would also have his hair cut and his hands scraped.  

The procedure was first chronicled in the 14th century, but may have borrowed the process from an earlier similar ritual to degrade a knight by publicly removing his armor. The rite of degradation could backfire, however. If the priest was popular, lay people could see the ceremony as analogous to the treatment of Christ before his crucifixion, and transform him into a martyr if he was deemed to be treated unfairly. Read about the rite of degradation at The Public Domain Review.  -via Strange Company

You can tell someone important information using a lot of numbers, but you're liable to put the majority of your audience to sleep. Showing people the relationship between those numbers without having to do even the simplest math is way more effective, and that's the value of graphs and charts. Presenting dry data in visual form can make a trend very clear when the numbers don't, and sometimes those visualizations have an impact that changes the world.

The Royal Society shows us how these charts and graphs made information available to many more people than would have otherwise learned of the data they contain. Of the five examples explained here, I had only never heard of the fictional Kallikak family tree, used for nefarious purposes. But as soon as that section began, I thought of the family tree at the beginning of the movie Idiocracy. Also fictional, of course. -via Kottke


See also: Florence Nightingale’s Statistical Diagrams and John Snow's Cholera Map.

Absinthe, sometimes referred to as "the green fairy" became quite well known among the artistic elite of Paris and elsewhere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Artists who illustrated the drink and authors who wrote glowingly of the joy it brought made absinthe oh-so fashionable and gave it the cachet that still mesmerizes us. Never mind that these same artistic types of the era were also indulging in opium, laudanum, cocaine, and other various drugs that were legal medicine at the time. Absinthe was their muse, and it eventually caused a moral panic.

But what is absinthe, anyway? It is green because it was steeped in a mixtures of natural herbs, which included the classic toxin wormwood. Wormwood was reportedly what caused hallucinations. Its flavor came from anise, which made the liquor taste like licorice. And its kick came from between 45% and 90% alcohol (that's 90-180 proof). The one ingredient that was missing was sugar, which led to the performative serving of absinthe with a sugar cube. Learn what absinthe was all about, and why it gained a reputation as the downfall of humanity at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Viktor Oliva)

The evolution of birds has always seemed puzzling to me. There were once dinosaurs with feathers that didn't fly. There were once reptiles that flew (pterodactyls), and if they had feathers they didn't use them for flight. Why would an animal grow feathers if not for flying? And why did dinosaurs start to fly, anyway? A fossil discovery in 2007 shows us a weird transitional dinosaur/bird that illustrates how feathers really had nothing to do with the urge to fly. Birds developed the wing first, and in fact some resembled bats more than they resembled the reptiles they were. Or were they? The boundary between dinosaur and bird was blurred for an awful long time while they decided what they would use those feathers for. The fact that they ever got it together long enough to develop true wings and become flying birds is an astonishing turn in evolution. PBS Eons explains this strange transitionary species. This video is only eight and a half minutes long; the rest is an ad.

Where do you find gold in the United States? I know! Fort Knox! But you can't just go there and take that gold. And if you think that you can strike it rich by prospecting, remember the lesson of the California Gold Rush- the people who made the most money off of it were the ones who bought city property, shipped people and supplies to California, made jeans for, and sold tools to those prospectors. But there are people today who see prospecting for gold as a hobby, and one with the potential for excitement. Some use the classic panning method, while most use metal detectors. They know where to go for gold, and you can, too.    

You might never find the equivalent of the Comstock Lode, but there are places where you can give it a try, and not only enjoy prospecting as a hobby but take in awesome scenery and commune with nature. You might even pick up some nuggets, too! Read about five of those places at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: US Forest Service) 

Some birds inspire respect, if not awe. We Americans revere the bald eagle. Owls are associated with widom. Cardinals are beautiful. Peacocks are lovely to behold. Chickens are tasty.

There is a place for all birds in a human-dominated world.

Except for the seagull, of course. They're sometimes referred to as the "rats of the sea." They have unpleasant associations with stealing human food and pooping on us and our property. There's even a zoo in the England that is hiring people to drive them off.

But some people like seagulls enough to imitate them and imitate them perfectly. The Dutch Review proudly informs us that a Dutchman has won an annual seagull imitation contest held in Belgium. In this video, you can see a costumed Jarmo Slutter sing the song of the sea while in costume.

-via Marginal Revolution

In 2023, I’m creating an illustrated tiny sci-fi story every day. Here’s 001/365: pic.twitter.com/ofK2PkISSh

— small worlds (@smllwrlds) January 1, 2023

The Twitter account small worlds began 2023 with a pledge to post a tiny science fiction story in one image every day for an entire year. As of April 27, there are already 117 of these. Some of them will grab you where you least expected.

In 2023, I’m creating an illustrated tiny sci-fi story every day. Here’s 036/365: pic.twitter.com/0N8QgsSRcO

— small worlds (@smllwrlds) February 5, 2023

Yes, they are tiny, but that's the point. You'll want to say, "But what happened then?" That's completely up to you. These setups could serve as a writing prompt where you fill in the details.

It's still 42 https://t.co/Wr3AFwCvQ6

— σπιρκοτο* (@SookiCookie) April 12, 2023

This is particularly harrowing and I love it https://t.co/iITeHpXiUx

— MaxwellsDeamon, blm, 😷 (@MaxwellsDeamon) April 23, 2023

It might take you a while to read all 117 of them, but they are nested in order under this Tweet. You may want to bookmark it because there will be 365 of them by New Year's Eve. -via Geeks Are Sexy

If you've been around Neatorama for a long time, you know we've posted a lot of stories of parasites that turn animals into zombies, whether the parasites are from the plant, animal, and fungus kingdoms. Now we have Ze Frank bringing us up to speed on fungal parasites that do that to insects in his inimitable style. He starts off with fungal parasites in general before he moves onto how they've adapted to cause zombification. He shows us three types of fungal infection that take over and control the behavior of insects to their own ends. Yes, cordyceps is there, as you would expect. Beware that nature is metal, and what the fungus does to an insect can easily squick you out. In other words, this video may be disturbing for anyone who has empathy for insects. Also this video contains NSFW language. There's a one-minute internal ad at 5:17.