A few years ago, I posted a link to an article about Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first Black woman to become a medical doctor in the US. The post links to an article on a now-defunct site that displayed a picture of a woman who is not Dr. Crumpler.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler was a groundbreaking figure with an amazing story that's been posted in many places. She received her medical degree from the New England Female Medical College in 1864 and dedicated her career to the care of Black women and children who were denied medical treatment from white physicians. But there are no existing photographs of Dr. Crumpler.

The many photos purporting to be Dr. Crumpler attached to biographies, quotes, and memes are of other women, many who deserve to be lauded in their own right. The photo above is of Dr. Georgia E. Lee Patton Washington, who was born in 1864 and became the first Black woman to be a licensed doctor (and surgeon) in Tennessee. Fake History Hunter collected quite a few images attached to Dr. Crumpler and identifies who they really are. I'm sure you are disappointed that something on the internet turned out not to be true. -via Strange Company

Witness protection is crucial for certain legal cases, when testifying against someone might endanger your life. So we have the federal Witness Security Program to make sure that doesn't happen, and that witnesses don't have to risk their lives to tell the truth. WITSEC has never lost a witness who complied with their rules. It's a lot more serious than what we saw in My Blue Heaven. Half as Interesting goes through how the process works. Going into witness protection is a pretty drastic life change, although for certain people, it's a great opportunity to start over. Although I doubt they would ever put anyone up in Aspen, Colorado, because that town is tiny, very expensive, full of rich and famous part-time residents, and requires altitude acclimation. And we find out that a My Blue Heaven situation actually happened at least once, in Orange County, California. The last minute of this video is an ad. -via Digg

It's been said that you can tell that a photographic image was generated by artificial intelligence if the number of fingers or teeth are wrong. The industry is well aware of that, and recent updates have dramatically improved how many fingers humans have in such images. But they still have a way to go in understanding humans overall.

Dan Leveille has been experimenting with the March 16th update to the AI program Midjourney. While the people generated are more realistic than ever, Leveille noticed it has a real problem understanding spaghetti and how people in the real world eat it. It's as if spaghetti were specifically invented to make a mess. You can see more images at Geeks Are Sexy.

But let's consider how neural networks learn. They are given boatloads of publicly-available images from the internet. Considering that the 'net is a repository of the world's knowledge, that makes sense. But what kind of spaghetti-eating photographs do everyday people post on social media? The times it makes a mess. There is little entertainment value in posting a picture of someone eating spaghetti in a normal manner, and we don't really want to share pictures of ourselves eating. But we love to make other people laugh. Midjourney was most likely inundated with thousands of images of toddlers and drunk people trying to manage a plate of spaghetti with hilarious results. So this is what you get.  

It’s not us. Which is honestly something we’re grateful for. If something is slowly eating up humans, we’d probably gear up for an apocalypse-type scenario, and we’re honestly not ready for that. 

But enough about us. The single giant organism we’re talking about is Pando, a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones. Located in the Wasatch Mountains of the western United States, what looks like an entire forest of individual trees with white bark and small leaves is actually just one organism.

That entire woodland is just 47,000 genetically identical stems from an interconnected root network. Pando weighs around 6,000 metric tons, which makes it the largest single organism on Earth by mass. 

Pando has been around for 14,000 years and was able to support a whole ecosystem of 68 plant species and many animals. Now, its life is being threatened by multiple factors. One of them is the overgrazing by deer and elk. These animals are eating the younger parts of the tree, which means that Pando doesn’t really get to grow. 

The changing climate can also pose a threat to the organism. While there isn't a specific study that looks at aspen, reduced water, and warmer weather can make it hard for trees to form leaves, which has led to plant decline. Learn more about Pando here! 

Image credit: Lance Oditt/Friends of Pando

Well, there are other colors available of course. But we did notice how a lot of artworks incorporate blue into their paintings. It’s not just used to depict the sky or any objects that can be associated with the color. Depending on the theme and idea of the painter, it can be used to depict an emotion or any other theme. 

An exhibition in Galerie Koch, located in Hannover, Germany, aims to showcase and explain why and how these talented people use blue in their art. The event, Blau: Von farblichen Akzenten bis zur Monochromie V (Blue: From Color Accents to Monochrome V) shows 40 works by 26 international artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Each of them, as the exhibition name suggests, features blue either as the only color in their work or applied to accents that are central to their composition.

Blue, according to the Gallery, is considered the color of vastness, longing, and internalization. “In the Romantic period, the color blue then became a symbol of ideal, spiritual ideas, in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries it finally became the expression of a metaphysical striving in art, as a metaphor for the spiritual. But it also serves as a means of expressive expression and thus as a carrier of meaning,” they wrote. 

Image credit: Galerie Koch via artnet 

Geologists have confirmed that the continent of Africa is slowly splitting apart. The lands are making way for a whole new ocean to run through the space being left by the continent. According to experts, Zambia and Uganda could one day have their own coastlines should the continent fully split. 

The crack in the continent, known as the East African Rift, was pinpointed to be on the borders of three tectonic plates, which are the African, Arabian, and Somali plates. Millions of years from now, the consistent movement of these plates would lead to a new body of water. The rift currently runs 35 miles long and appeared initially back in 2005. 

Geologists believe that the Arabian plate has been slowly moving away from the African continent for the past 30 million years. Ken Macdonald, a marine geophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of California explained that they were able to measure the rates of movement to a few millimeters per year thanks to GPS measurements. "The Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea will flood in over the Afar region and into the East African Rift Valley and become a new ocean, and that part of East Africa will become its own separate small continent," he confirmed.

Image credit:  Africa Infohub / YouTube

No, this is not a magical portal into the feywilds or any other dimension outside of the place we’re living in. It does certainly have that vibe.

The photo of a gothic-looking gate was taken in a school in Vienna, Austria. It appears to extend much farther down the path, even though it’s actually smaller than how we might perceive it to be. This mind-bending gate leads to the Theresianum Academy, a private boarding and day school founded in 1746 by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. 

Thanks to an optical illusion, the gate provides a good lesson in perspective for the students of the institution. It shows that only one point is needed to trick our eye into thinking that something is either larger or further away than it is. 

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Scientists nominated them, a jury narrowed them down to five finalists, and then the public voted. The overwhelming favorite was Concholepas concholepas, also known as the Chilean abalone, locally called locos. The Chilean abalone has been crowned the International Mollusc of the Year for 2023. This abalone, found in Chile and Peru, is a murex snail that develops a spectacular seashell. It is culturally significant, but is now endangered because it is also delicious.  

As the International Mollusc of the Year, the Chilean abalone has won an important prize. Its genome will be sequenced as an aid to studying these sea creatures and how they adapt to polluted ocean conditions. This will be particularly useful, as the abalone's haemocyanin (an alternative to hemoglobin that makes the abalone's blood change colors depending on oxygen level) contains properties that appear to fight cancer in humans.

Read more about the Chilean abalone, plus the four other finalists in the International Mollusc of the Year contest. They include a giant deep-sea oyster, a leopard slug, and two lovely nudibranchs. -via Metafilter

The gravestone of George Spencer Millet tells a sad tale. The boy worked at the New York Metropolitan Life Building in Manhattan. On February 15, 1909, he mentioned to his co-workers that it was his 15th birthday. The young ladies in the office said they would give him kisses for his birthday. That wouldn't be proper during work hours, so they waited until the office closed at 4:30. Then at least six women descended on young Millet in a frenzy.

The problem was that Millet had an ink eraser in his pocket, a sharp instrument resembling a knife. As he was knocked down by the women set on kissing him, the ink eraser pierced his heart, and he died soon after. One of the women was arrested, but charges were dropped after the exact cause of death was determined. Read the story of the boy who was kissed to death at Amusing Planet.

Jean-Yves Blondeau invented the roller suit, consisting of body protection and 32 wheels distributed over the body, as a design student. He introduced it to the world in 1995, and custom-builds them for skating enthusiasts ever since. As you might guess, they are very expensive. You may have seen these suits in movies, variety shows, or the occasional public relations stunt. Now you can not only learn the story behind the suit, but watch the Rollerman show it off. Yes, even at age 52, Blondeau takes the suit out buggyrollin. Make sure you watch at least until the night time version is shown, and the new self-propelled version. I would say something like "don't try this at home," but I don't know anyone who could afford to, much less be able to survive it. -via Nag on the Lake

In 1923, Viennese author Felix Salten published his novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods. It was a coming-of-age story about a young deer. Walt Disney later obtained the rights to it and produced the 1942 animated movie Bambi. That movie is now a children's classic, although is often remembered as traumatic for the offscreen death of Bambi's mother at the hands of a hunter. That trauma doesn't hold a candle to the original novel.

Bambi, a Life in the Woods was not a children's book at all. The novel did not depict forest creatures as particularly cute. The main plot follows Bambi as he grows up and learns to live in fear of man, the biggest danger for deer. His relatives and friends are, one by one, shot and killed by hunters. Even Bambi suffers a gunshot wound. It was well understood in Austria that Salten's novel was an allegory for the pogroms against Jews in pre-Nazi Europe. In 1935, the Nazis banned Salten's novel and its sequel Bambi's Children, and included it in public book burnings. Original editions are therefore quite rare.

So how did Bambi go from a terrifying allegory to a cute young Disney character? That's part of the story of Bambi's first hundred years, as told at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

When you read the place name Cleveland, which place do you think of? The big city on Lake Erie where the river used to catch on fire regularly? Me, too.

But there's also a Cleveland, Tennessee and a Cleveland, Mississippi. There's even a Cleveland, Texas (I've been there), five different Clevelands in Wisconsin for a total of twenty-seven Clevelands across the United States.

But which Cleveland do you actually think of when you read or hear the name? Pudding has crunched the numbers for towns in the United States with the same name. I'm skeptical of their methodology for answering the question, which appears to be driven by the length of Wikipedia articles about these various towns. Explore the site and see if you agree with the familiarity ranking of your town.

-via Kottke

When NASA astronauts return to the moon with the Artemis space program, they'll be wearing all new moonwalk suits by Axiom Space. The contracting company calls these suits Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Units, or AxEMUs for short. Axion unveiled the prototype for these suits last week, although the finished product will be white for temperature control. The suit you see in the images above actually has a gray cover over it, to protect the prototype during training and keep some details secret from competitors.  

What we know is that this suit comes with an attached life support system worn like a backpack and headlights on the helmet. It is sized to fit 90% of American men and women. And it is designed to allow a range of movement far beyond what was available for the Apollo missions. The AxEMU will be NASA's first new spacesuit in 40 years, and should be ready by the time Artemis 3 launches for the moon in 2025. Read more about the space suit at Smithsonian.

Matt Dawson is a painter who lives in Louisiana. He recently became Internet famous when he published on Instagram a photo of his latest painting: Starry Waffles. It mimics the style and background of Vincent Van Gogh's iconic Starry Night, except that it shows a Waffle House restaurant instead of the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France.

Dawson explained to Fox 35 News Orlando that his painting shows a specific Waffle House in Sorrento, Lousiana. It has special memories for him: when his wife was sick, he frequently took her to medical appointments. They'd stop at this Waffle House on their way back home. It was a refuge in time of stress, which is exactly what an American diner should be in the middle of the night.

-via Boing Boing

In the 19th century, there was a race between various explorers and their nations to be the first to reach the North Pole. That quest was finally accomplished by Robert Peary in 1909, or possibly it was Matthew Henson, or even Frederick Cook in 1908. Those expeditions followed many others that were unsuccessful. The luckier of those failed expeditions turned back at some point. In 1897, S. A. Andrée had the bright idea to just fly to the North Pole using the only available air vehicle of the time, a balloon. What could possibly go wrong? Andrée was not a seasoned explorer of the Arctic or anywhere else. He was a balloonist, and was very enthusiastic (and naive) about the possibilities of flight. The three-man Arctic balloon expedition set off from Svalbard in July of that year, determined to bring glory to Sweden by reaching the North Pole. They were not seen again until 1930.