Bella Burton was born with Morquio syndrome, which affects bone development. Bella also has a service dog named George, her beloved great Dane who not only offers physical support by keeping Bella upright and protected, but also emotional support that gave her the confidence to try things beyond what was considered possible for her. You can follow Bella and George at Facebook. -via Laughing Squid

An interesting list at Cracked tells us about the early versions of some of our modern conveniences, when they weren't so modern or convenient, but that's all a matter of opinion. The oldest of these is a story of how the Cherokee used turtle shells for calendars. It turns out that a turtle shell has 13 segments on the inside, and 28 segments on the outside. That corresponds well to 13 lunar cycles in a year, and 28 days in each lunar cycle.

A First Nations legend describes how the unassuming turtle received its divine temporal cognizance. Many moons ago, long before Creator peopled the Earth, the animals could talk. One day, Turtle and Raven exchanged pleasantries, and Turtle, lamenting his terrestrial limitations, wished to taste some of that sweet sky for himself.

So Turtle bit onto a twig, and Raven lifted him high into the heavens. But when Turtle opened his mouth to express his pleasure, he fell to the ground and shattered his shell. Creator took pity on Turtle and put its shell back together with the purpose of tracking the moons. Creator also bestowed long life on Turtle and made it the Keeper of Knowledge.

Read the rest of that story, plus four others at Cracked.

(Image credit: Pierre5018)

Okay, what we need to take our minds of the problems of the real world is a combination of three fantasies: Halloween, LEGO, and Star Wars. Disney+ is jumping into all that with both feet with a special called Lego Star Wars Terrifying Tales.

This fall, Poe and BB-8 will return in Lego Star Wars Terrifying Tales, an animated Halloween special set after the events of The Rise of Skywalker that follows the legendary pilot and his droid as they travel to the volcanic planet Mustafar. When Poe (Jake Green) and BB-8 are forced to make an emergency landing there, they happen to encounter Graballa the Hutt (Dana Snyder), the newest owner of Darth Vader’s foreboding castle, which is being transformed into a themed resort.

A tour of the castle is an opportunity to tell scary tales, plus there's a monster of some sort lurking inside. The special streams beginning on October first, and you can read more about it at Gizmodo.

The most entertaining thing that happened at the Yankees-Orioles game Monday was that a cat wandered onto the field and found himself the center of attention. The grounds crew made a lame attempt to remove him, but the crowd was cheering for the cat. -via Digg

How would you remove tree stumps before internal combustion engines created automated options? One way is with a stump puller, like the one owned by the family of Guy Temple. He donated his old fashioned tool to the Pasto Agricultural Museum at Pennsylvania State University. In this video, Mr. Temple explains how a team of horses is able to gradually lever a stump out of the ground using a tool anchored to another tree.

-via reddit

Remains of a "giant vampire bat" were discovered in an Argentinian cave. The fossil remains are of a species called, dramatically, Desmodus draculae after Bram Stoker's vampire.

Their study, published in Ameghiniana, says that fossils of the giant vampire bat were found inside a cave located near the city of Miramar and date back 100,000 years ago. Research indicates that this cave was a burrow used by giant sloths that were nearly five metres tall, which were possibly prey of the giant vampire bats.

The researchers estimate that the giant vampire bat was approximately the size of a computer keyboard. The fossils that were discovered include a lower jaw bone and currently reside in the Paleontological Laboratory of the Miramar Museum of Natural Sciences.

Um, yikes? My keyboard is 11 inches long, which is only about twice the size of the little mosquito-eating bats that hang out in my chimney. Some fruit bats have 16-inch bodies. Then again, some keyboards may be 16 inches long. So how big was the giant vampire bat? It turns out that the find in Argentina is not a newly-discovered species. Wikipedia tells us more about Desmodus draculae.

It is the largest-known vampire bat to have ever lived. The length of its skull is 31.2 mm (1.23 in), and its humerus length was approximately 51 mm (2.0 in), as compared to the extant common vampire bat at 32.4–42.4 mm (1.28–1.67 in). Its skull was long and narrow, and its face had an upturned snout.[6]

So while the giant vampire bat wasn't all that big, it was much bigger than the puny vampire bats we have today. They would have to use quite a bit of artistic license to make a horror film about Desmodus draculae. Still, you have to give credit to a monster that sucked blood from a 20-foot-tall sloth. Read more about the latest discovery at the Weather Network. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Miramar Museum of Natural Sciences)

Yeah, there's nothing random at all about the number they issued you. Considering how many times people cancel a credit card number due to losing the card or suspected fraud, I'm surprised that they haven't had to add digits like crazy already. Warning: this video involves math, but you don't have to do it yourself. Just be impressed at the way computers can validate a credit card number in an instant. The video is only four minutes long, the rest is an ad. -via Boing Boing

Captain Montgomery Scott, a Starfleet officer of great renown, will be born in the town of Linlithgow, Scotland about two centuries from now. Civic minded citizens of that town are justly proud of their native son and so marked the local museum with a commemorative plaque. Atlas Obscura has photos of it.

Box Butte County, Nebraska, was born in 1886 when it separated from Dawes County. Its first county seat was the village of Nonpareil, then Hemingford, then Alliance, all moves that county residents voted for. But when Alliance became the county seat, there was some question of what to do with the courthouse that had been built in Hemingford. It was less than ten years old, and quite substantial.

As you know the building is fifty feet long by forty wide[,] two full stories in height with a heavy truss roof and constructed with a heavy hard pine frame. As there were two cuts to pass through the building was raised on timbers high enough to clear the banks and when ready to start it was fifty feet from the railroad track to the top of the deck on the building. The weight of the building was estimated at 100 tons.

The decision was made in 1899 to move the courthouse. The first attempt was a disaster, moving the building only 15 feet in ten days. Then the railroad was mentioned. Read the story of moving the Box Butte courthouse at Amusing Planet.

Alas, one has to wonder how much stress the move put on the building, since they built a new Box Butte County courthouse in 1913.

A lot of new ideas that inventors consider revolutionary come and go for one reason or another, and we tend to forget about them when they aren't successful. In contrast, the Segway was unveiled in 2001 and became a spectacular failure for many reasons, one of which is because it was so overhyped. Its development was pretty much an accident that engineers considered a lot of fun. But keeping the project a secret (known internally as Ginger and publicly only as IT) meant that there was no real-world beta testing, no marketing research, and no devil's advocate, while the speculation over a vague leaked proposal went unexpectedly viral and sent expectations sky high. Engineers loved it, venture capitalists loved it, but everyone else expected something cool and useful.

Inside Magazine’s debut issue published in February. On the cover: “WHAT ‘IT’ IS.” The author of the story, a freelancer named Adam Penenberg, had combed domain-name registrations and public patent records, and was positive he’d figured out the answer: IT was a hydrogen-powered scooter. “I was on, like, every show for a week,” Penenberg told me. “I was on the Today show with Katie Couric. I don’t know how many hundreds of interviews I must have done that week.”

Dean Kamen hadn’t been careful enough for the new world of the internet. All those patents he filed? His inventor’s paranoia backfired. In an earlier time, a journalist would have had to do a lot more legwork to dig up those patents, but now they were all right there on the patent office’s website.

Penenberg may have basically worked out that Ginger was a scooter, but plenty of people didn’t believe it. Or maybe it was just more fun to speculate like crazy. Some of that speculation happened on sites like Slashdot, where one poster, for example, correctly pegged that the name Ginger was meaningful—but then declared authoritatively that IT was a hoverboard, because the Ginger in question was the heroine of the animated movie Chicken Run, who is convinced she can teach chickens to fly.

After all this, the actual Segway was a letdown- bulky, expensive, and not at all cool-looking. Read the story of the Segway's unintentional rollout from the perspective of a journalist who was part of it at Slate. -via Digg

(Image credit: Richard)

Around 541 million years ago, the diversity of life on our planet suddenly exploded. This period is known as the Cambrian explosion, and it lasted for 13-25 million years. It is said that fossil records of major animal phyla first appeared in this time period. Recent research, however, suggests that there could have been animals older than those in the Cambrian explosion. This research has found what seems to be sponge fossils that are 890 million years old, about 350 million years older than the animals of the Cambrian period.

The ancient discovery is igniting debate among palaeontologists, who have long contested when complex animal life first evolved.

“If I’m right, animals emerged long, long before the first appearance of traditional animal fossils,” says study author Elizabeth Turner, a sedimentary geologist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada. “That would mean there’s a deep back history of animals that just didn’t get preserved very well.”

However, some scientists, like geoscientist and fossil reef specialist Rachel Wood, argue the validity of Turner’s suggestion, saying that “It’s such a big claim that you really have to eliminate all the other possibilities.”

Sometimes crystals also grow in a way that looks like patterns formed by living organisms, she says, meaning that the rock samples Turner found might not be fossils at all.

Turner, however, argues that there are no known reef-building organisms that existed 890 million years ago. Other scientists see the possibility of Turner’s claim.

Whatever the case, Turner’s research creates a stir in the debate about the age of animal life here on Earth.

More about this over at Nature.

(Image Credit: Elizabeth C. Turner)

Want to get better at night photography? Stuart Palley has some tips for you. And if you’re wondering who he is, he is a seasoned photographer who has spent nine years taking photos of wildfires in California at night. He is, as he says, “well-versed in long exposures, adverse conditions, and dealing with weird light sources.” In this video, Palley provides us with practical tips on how to stabilize your smartphone, as well as how to change the camera exposure. He also encourages us to take advantage of the phone camera’s features.

Watch the video over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: Outside Online)

Light that goes into the black hole becomes trapped inside and is unable to escape. However, in spite of this, the enormous gravity around the black hole can heat up material to millions of degrees, which could result in the release of waves and X-rays. 

Astrophysicist Dan Wilkins and his colleagues were observing this release of x-rays from the supermassive black hole located at the center of a galaxy, when Wilkins spotted small flashes of X-rays behind the black hole. This is the first time scientists witnessed such a phenomenon.

Because the light is trapped inside the black hole, seeing what’s happening behind the black hole would be impossible. So how did Wilkins notice it?

"The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself," he said.

[...]

Einstein's theory, or the idea that gravity is matter warping space-time, has persisted for a hundred years as new astronomical discoveries have been made.

The findings of Wilkins and his team prove that Einstein’s prediction is true.

"Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists starting speculating about how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein's general theory of relativity in action," said Roger Blandford, study coauthor and the Luke Blossom Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor of physics at Stanford University, in a statement.

Einstein indeed was ahead of his time.

(Image Credit: Dan Wilkins)

If you've ever wanted to go to the bottom of the ocean in a diving bell, then you should head to the coast of Germany, where they actually have a few, and tourists are welcome. But if you can't go right now, Tom Scott will show you what it's like. Personally, I'd recommend waiting until they build these in spots with a better view. -via reddit

Archaeologists unearthed a couple dozen burials in a Bronze Age cemetery found near Budapest, Hungary. Most of them were urns filled with cremated remains, one of which stood out from the rest: the urn contained the cremains of three people! One was a woman of high status who had died in her 20s, and the other two were her twin fetuses.

Skeletal analysis confirmed that the woman was originally born outside the community, possibly in central Slovenia or Lake Balaton in western Hungary, per Live Science. The researchers came to this conclusion by scrutinizing the strontium signatures in her bones and teeth. Comparing strontium isotope ratios found in enamel, which forms in one’s youth, with those present in a specific region can help scholars determine where an individual grew up.

The woman’s isotope ratios indicate that she was born elsewhere but moved to the region between the ages of 8 and 13, likely to be married into a noble Vatya family. She eventually became pregnant with twins, only to die between the ages of 25 and 35. Researchers are unsure whether the mother died before or during childbirth, but the fetuses’ gestational age was about 28 to 32 weeks.

You may find it astonishing that scientists could determine all that from cremated remains. The methods described in the original science paper go into much more detail on strontium levels across Europe 4,00 years ago, the parts of the teeth and bones that pick up those isotopes at what age, and how they extracted that information from bone fragments. Or you can read the short version at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Claudio Cavazzuti et. al./PLOS One)