Automotive safety gear is rarely designed to protect your genitals from the impact of a crash that could reduce them to a pulpy, useless mass of bloody tissue. So we should be grateful that the designers at Hyundai are looking after our interests. But its newly patented crotch-level airbag isn't designed specifically to protect our nether regions.

Carbuzz explains that a common problem in car crashes is that people wear their seat belts too high. They're supposed to rest low upon our hips so that the impact of a crash is absorbed by the pelvis. If the belt is too high, a human body in motion tends to slip down or "submarine", driving the seat belt into the belly.

This new airbag deploys at crotch-level to prevent this downward motion, keeping the seat belt at pelvic level.

-via Dave Barry

A boy referred to as Michael was 14 years old when he confided in his parents that he was the son of the devil and had urges to kill people. They were shocked by his sudden mental illness, and took him to the local psychiatric ward. Over the next year, Michael was convinced he was a cat, a bird, a devil, or the comic book character Swamp Thing. He was also convinced that the family's cat was talking to him, trying to control him, or kill him, or convince him to kill his sibling. He talked to his action figures. Doctors tried psychotherapy and a pharmacy of drugs, with no improvement. After other mental illnesses were tested and discarded, Michael was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia, which isn't curable, but can be managed with drugs. But no drugs helped Michael's symptoms. Several months in a premiere psychiatric center in another state didn't help.

Meanwhile, Michael's father set out to research his son's illness on his own. Combing through psychiatric literature and studies, he found a syndrome that fit Michael's symptoms. It had only been identified and described a year before Michael's break from reality. But it seemed so odd- could Michael's illness be caused by an undiagnosed bacterial infection?

The family had already spent more than a year and some $400,000 seeking help for their son, who was no better off. Because the syndrome was so "new" and because of entrenched medical biases, it took some time to locate a clinic that might believe the father's theory. Read the gripping story of the kid who became Swamp Boy at Now This News. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Mado Peña)

Many of the dishes we traditionally serve at Thanksgiving were not consumed by the Pilgrims in 1621 (I have researched this). For example, they didn't have sweet potatoes, but since they are indigenous New World vegetables, they work well in our Thanksgiving feast. But how did we ever come up with sweet potato casserole with toasted marshmallows on top? It makes for a strangely sweet side dish, especially since we already have sugar-laden cranberry sauce.

It turns out this recipe is another of the many examples of food manufacturers creating recipes to use their products. The first mass producer of marshmallows joined Campbell's soup and Jell-O gelatin in concocting cook books showing ways to use their product, in 1917. This even predates s'mores. But it still makes the recipe more than a hundred years old, and in the United States, that's plenty long enough to make a tradition. Read the history of marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes at Mental Floss.

There had never been a set of surviving elephant twins born in the US. But two weeks ago, at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York, an Asian elephant named Mali gave birth to two male elephants, who are thriving well enough to announce the miracle event. Mali produced the first baby elephant at 2 AM on October 24th. That calf was 220 pounds and appeared to be healthy. Then at almost noon, zoo staff were stunned when she had another calf, which weighed 237 pounds and was noticeably weak. They didn't know that Mali had been carrying twins.



Mali is taking good care of the twins, although zoo staff is supplementing the second calf with elephant formula. Their prognosis is good at this time. Mali's placenta was taken to a research lab in order to study EEHV, a herpes virus endemic to elephants that is a leading cause of death in young pachyderms. Mali lost two earlier offspring to the disease in 2020. -via ZooBorns

Yes, it's a bookcase. So it doesn't look that special. From the a cursory glance, it looks like the work product of an ordinary hobbyist. But redditor /u/themaestro152 of Marksville, Louisiana is a master of his craft. Watch the video and you'll see that the dividers in this bookcase slide.

The client who commissioned this custom piece wanted movable dividers, but on an all-wood project. Hidden in the undersides of the shelves are t-track slots that allow her to move the dividers where the wants to fit the organizational needs of her book collection. Careful routing, fitting, and a lot of paste wax resulted in this smooth motion.

Brett Berk borrowed a 2023 Cadillac Escalade with two purposes in mind. He was taking a week-long vacation, and he was going to review the car's hands-free highway driving system. That system is mind-blowing, but the real story happened when Berk stopped to fill the car. He automatically put a whole tank full of unleaded gasoline in. They drove along for another 250 miles before the car conked out and he discovered that it required diesel fuel. You can imagine how he felt at the realization, but he was also puzzled at how it survived as long as it did. GM engineer John Barta explains what will happen when you put gasoline into a diesel vehicle.

“Diesel actually lubricates the pump,” Barta said. “Gasoline is basically a solvent. So when you remove that lubricant, and then wash it away, you end up with a significant amount of wear in that pump.” After just a few miles in this state, draining and flushing the entire fuel system is necessary.

Without the usual lubrication, metal shavings start to gunk up the entire engine. Read about that experience, and what the damage was. Keep in mind that Berk showed a great amount of courage in admitting his mistake online.  

(Image credit: Cadillac)

If it's worth nearly $4600 for you to be super-fashionable this winter, Nordstrom is selling this lovely Oversize Down Cape Coat from designer Rick Owens. The puffy quilted down jacket will reach your knees, but the "cape" is two narrow sleeves that drag the ground behind you. These sleeves have an opening you use for your arms that doesn't quite cover your elbow. Even on a tall model in six-inch heels, they drag the ground. How would you keep them clean? Easy- anyone who can spend this much on a coat that doesn't cover your arms can hire someone to carry that cape behind you. Or stay inside. Otherwise, it's dry-clean only. The reviews at the product site are a hoot, and the comments at Fark include images of various pop culture characters (aliens and robots) that have super long arms and could use this coat. It's also reminiscent of the wavy-arm guy outside your local car dealer. -via Fark

You look like you could use some mindless fun for a few minutues. Yokohama creator saharan of the website iomo made a web toy that blows bubbles for you. No soap to buy and no sticky mess! You'll get a fan, a bubble wand, and a pin in case you want to burst some or all of your bubbles. All of these things can be manipulated. If your bubbles gets past the pin, they will tend to clump together, but you can manipulate the bubbles and clumps to separate or join them. If you leave them long enough, the clumps will rearrange and combine to form larger bubbles, just like they do in the real world. I recycled my bubbles by feeding them through the fan!

If you enjoyed that, you'll also like the jelly web toy, and splashing in the water. This is just the thing to while away a cold day inside this weekend. -via Metafilter

If you put the proper amount of sugar and spices in it, no one will know there are carrots in your carrot cake. Or zucchini in your zucchini bread. But you might be shocked if you found out that delicious chocolate cake you just ate was made with sauerkraut. The recipe for sauerkraut cake has been published many times, at least once under the title Don't Ask Cake. That one leaned on the habit of cooks serving the cake first and then daring the guests to identify the secret ingredient. Who came up with the idea of putting sauerkraut in chocolate cake? There's one origin story that reminds me of how we were served sauerkraut at least twice a week at my school cafeteria, but it may well be apocryphal. Bakers have long used vegetables, like carrots, to boost a cake's nutrition, and acids such as vinegar were used to make a cake rise before baking powder was invented. The history of sauerkraut itself is just as murky. We get both in an article at Atlas Obscura, as well as a recipe for sauerkraut cake, which they say is really tasty. In a good way.

The world illustrated in the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever centers on the fictional nation of Wakanda, which has a Pan-African culture that takes its cues from many parts of the continent. The story, as well as that of the previous movie Black Panther, is a work of Afrofuturism, in which elements of African culture that were destroyed by colonialism are recovered and celebrated. The new movie adds another lost culture to the mix. While the underwater society called Talokan brings to mind the lost city of Atlantis, the particular vision of this culture is derived from Mesoamerica: the Maya, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations of Central America and Mexico before the conquistadors arrived in 1502. Read how Black Panther: Wakanda Forever celebrates lost cultures on both sides of the Atlantic at The Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Talokan society and their leader Namor are based on the Marvel Comics character Sub-Mariner of Atlantis, based on Greek mythology. The movie version is changed to Talokan to move away from the colonial implications of the Atlantis legend, and to move Mesoamerican influences in. Read the specific ways Talokan is based on Mesoamerican civilizations at Smithsonian. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is now playing at a theater near you.

Food Insider gives us a glimpse inside the Akshaya Patra Foundation's central kitchen in Bangalore, India. Every day, they feed 75,000 school children a freshly-made hot meal. Watch them turn tons of rice, dal, tomatoes, squash, and other ingredients into a tasty lunch in wholesale fashion. Four hours of cooking and delivery, then they prep tomorrow's ingredients, then wash everything down, every day. This goes on in 65 kitchens across India serving two million children. The Akshaya Patra Foundation is the world's biggest free school meal provider. Contrast this operation with pre-packaged ultra-processed food from Aramark or Sodexo warmed up for American schools that produce tons of packaging waste.

There are those arguing in the comments that there is no such thing as vegetable biryani, because biryani has meat. Without meat, it is called pulao. That might be a case of making the narration easier for the audience, since the term biryani is more familiar to a global audience. -via Digg

Beatrice Wood was right there at the birth of what we call modern art. In the early 20th century, she rejected her parents' high society plans for her and ran off to France, where she began a life as a painter, illustrator, sculptor, actress, potter, writer, and groundbreaker. Wood was the last surviving member of the American Dada art movement, where she earned the nickname "the Mama of Dada."

But the most surprising fact about Beatrice Wood was that she was the inspiration for the character Rose in the 1997 movie Titanic. James Cameron saw a documentary about Wood and was determined to get to know her better. Wood was not on the RMS Titanic, but the character had her personality. Before Wood died at the age of 105, she ascribed her longevity to "art books, chocolates and young men." Read about Beatrice Wood's life and how Cameron used it for an immortal fictional character at Messy Nessy Chic.

The John Lewis Christmas ad has dropped! The video is titled The Beginner. A middle-aged man is determined to learn how to use a skateboard, and of course he's having a hard time. Yet he soldiers on, risking injury and embarrassment to master the sport, or at least stay on the board. Be prepared to have your heartstrings grabbed when it starts to make sense. It all has to do with the reason why the guy is putting so much effort into skateboarding. The story is simple but effective.

John Lewis is a British department store we Yanks only hear about around Christmas time, because they have a history of touching ads that work to benefit a different cause every year. You can find out more about this year's public service campaign here. Watch a behind-the-scenes video here. And see John Lewis ads from previous Christmas seasons in our archives. -via Fark

You've heard jokes about octopuses who become baseball pitchers, but that's just because they have so many arms. Sea creatures don't really throw things, do they? It turns out they do, indeed. The act of throwing an object at a target had only previously been observed in primates, birds, elephants, and mongooses. But octopuses in the wild do it, too, and they most often do it underwater. An octopus will use its tentacles to throw debris out of a nest, or to defend against unwanted mating behavior, or to argue with another octopus (they are not social animals).

These creatures have a unique method to their throw, to overcome the difficulty of tossing objects underwater. They use their tentacles to gather up objects, such as seashells, and lob them in the right direction. As they release, they also send a jet of water from their siphons to propel the object through the water. Throwing behavior is more often seen in darker colored octopuses, and in females. Such tossing has been captured on video. -via reddit

(Image credit: Peter Godfrey-Smith et al)

The more you look into fungus, the bigger that kingdom is. Mushrooms are only a small portion of the many funguses that exist all around us. But there are more mushrooms, and more types of mushrooms, than we'll ever see. Mycologists know them, and how they develop strategies for survival. The war between death-eating mushrooms and sap-sucking mushrooms is waging all around us, but we'd never know about it if it weren't for mycologists who study such things and Minute Earth who is glad to tell us about it. The ruthless competition between these types of mushrooms has benefits for the world at large. Death-eating mushrooms break down organic material and capture nitrogen runoff, and sap-sucking mushrooms benefit the trees they live off by extending their ability to draw nutrients from the soil. The scientists studying this phenomena, who are introduced at the end of this video, are looking into how the mushrooms in this war can be harnessed to repair some of the damage we've done to the environment.