A comb unearthed in 2017 in Israel comes from the ancient Canaanite city of Lachish. It dates back to somewhere around 1700 BCE. An inscription, rendered in the Canaanite alphabet, was only recently deciphered. It contains seven words.

Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

That just goes to show how we've always been keen on labeling our possessions. While it's a pretty mundane thing to write down, this is an exciting discovery, as the written Canaanite language it contains is made up of an alphabet invented not long before the comb was made. Previous written language used symbols for complete words, but the Canaanite alphabet introduced the idea of using symbols for the different sounds of language, beginning a system we still use today. Read about this discovery at the Guardian. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority)

Can John Green distinguish Dr Pepper from other similar drinks just by taste? I certainly couldn't, as I dislike carbonation and I also avoid sugar and cold drinks. I do like sassafras tea, although it's hard to get these days. The first time I drank Dr Pepper, I thought it tasted like a mix of a root beer and a cola. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Cola is cola, but the distinctive taste of Dr Pepper has been copied, with varying levels of success, by just about every soft drink producer we have. Dr Pepper is supposed to be a blend of 23 flavors that only three people are privy to, and not all that many guess sassafras as I do. The company says, however, that there is no prune juice in the drink, as was rumored.   

The last minute of the video is an ad for Dr Pepper socks, which are sold for charity. Be warned the rest of this video could send you running for the insulin.  -via Metafilter

🎂 What in the world is that strange cake supposed to be? You'd never guess the answer.

🔥 Seattle-based artist Sunday Nobody thinks ahead. How far ahead? How about 10,000 years into the future when civilization would presumably no longer know the joy of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. So he created a sarcophagus containing a single bag of the snack to preserve this bit of 21st century food marvel for future generations.

📺 Could you imagine Breaking Bad without Jesse Pinkman? Turns out that the character was supposed to be a temporary one. Find out other temporary TV characters that were so good they became permanent members of the show.

🐎 Three words: world's smallest pony. Warning: extreme cuteness inside!

🎃 This artist takes pumpkin carving into a whole 'nother level.

😈 Love anime? Take a look at these 9 Chainsaw Man fan art tees.

Image: u/I_crave_waffles

The history of human flight is often presented as if the whole idea only occurred to us in the late 19th century, and then the race was on, which the Wright Brothers won when they flew an airplane on December 17, 1903. But there were pioneers of flight hundreds of years earlier, with some successes like hot air balloons and gliders. Yet there were many more failures.

Albrecht Berblinger was one such pioneer in the early 1800s. A tailor by trade, he devoted all his spare time and money to developing flight. He invented what was essentially a hang glider, which he demonstrated in front of royalty in 1811 on the banks of the Danube River in Ulm, Germany. Berblinger knew something was wrong, and hesitated. But the crowd would not stand for him to back out, and the demonstration was a horrible failure. Berblinger's reputation was ruined. However, modern engineers say that his flying machine was soundly designed, and should have worked. Read the story of Berblinger's flight and why it failed at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Draughtsman/Zeichner)

The Turbo-Encabulator is a classic engineering joke that dates back to at least 1944. It's a long, deadpan description of a fictitious piece of new technology. It is, from an engineering perspective, complete gibberish.

In 1977, Bud Haggart, an actor from many industrial training films, produced a now-famous video version of this script, supposedly describing a turbo-encabulator developed by Crysler. At the 1:54 mark of the video, actor Mike Kraft takes over the description of this imaginary machine.

A decade later, Kraft reprised Haggart's role in a sketch created for Rockwell Automation. But this veteran actor wasn't done yet. A few months ago, Kraft created the above video describing even further advances in encabulation with the HyperEncabulator, which was invented by SANS, a professional organization for cybersecurity professionals.

Let us be grateful for the march of progress.

-via David Burge

Nuclear waste products are bad news wherever we put it. But wouldn't it be safer for humans if we got it as far away as possible? Sure, but that's not as easy as it may sound. Kurzgesagt explains why we haven't done it already. First, it would be expensive and we don't have the infrastructure. We might be able to overcome those mundane problems in the future, opening up several scenarios for launching nuclear waste into space. But in every one of those scenarios, the danger involved is terrifying.

The first scenario I thought of is one they don't even address. We launch nuclear waste into deep space, and it is eventually intercepted by extraterrestrials. Their response would be, "You spent years and billions of dollars on space exploration and this is what you send us? This means war!"

This video is 9.5 minutes long; the rest is an ad.

A notice from the National Park Service falls somewhere in between "preaching to the choir" and the Streisand Effect. There is probably a better idiom that I can't think of right now. The Sonoran Desert toad, also called the Colorado River toad, lives in the western US and northern Mexico. Its skin glands secrete toxins, as the park service tells us: 

These toads have prominent parotoid glands that secrete a potent toxin. It can make you sick if you handle the frog or get the poison in your mouth. As we say with most things you come across in a national park, whether it be a banana slug, unfamiliar mushroom, or a large toad with glowing eyes in the dead of night, please refrain from licking. Thank you. Toot!

The "toot" is from the toad's call, described as a low pitched toot. The Facebook post has gone viral for its odd warning, as if droves of people would normally try to lick a toad in its natural habitat. But CNN tells us that the toxin the toad exudes is a powerful psychedelic that causes "euphoria and strong auditory hallucinations." So we know who the warning is for, but those who would deliberately lick a toad in the forest for its psychedelic effects now know what to look for.  

The rest of us cringe at the idea of handling a wild animal, much less licking its skin. The real value in the warning is for parents, to keep children from trying to pet toads -or any wild animal, for that matter.

(Image credit: Wildfeuer)

They taught us that animals can be divided into warm-blooded or cold-blooded categories, depending on whether they generate their own heat or depend on the sun to provide it. But it turns out that the divide is not so clear, and that different species have varying methods for staying warm enough to thrive. While many animals can be described as one or another, there are also many species that fall somewhere between, which tells us that heat-generating strategies are really a spectrum. Or maybe not, because the word "spectrum" suggests a straight line of gradients, while animal species are really all over the chart.   

This video is only 2:40 in length. The rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The City hall in Perth, Scotland, is being transformed into a museum. City officials launched an online poll to come up with a name for the museum, and more than 450 people submitted their ideas. When the dust settled, you would expect that Museumy McMuseumface would be the winner, but that's not the case.

More than 60% of respondents voted for a name they believed encompassed both the history of the building and the stories of the community.

That was Perth Museum.

While it seems like a wasted opportunity to those far away, Perth residents are happy with the results. While the name campaign was waged online, one thinks that maybe the actual voting was limited to those with a local address. Now that's the way to run a serious internet naming poll. Perth Museum in the old City Hall will open in 2024. -via reddit

(Image credit: Perth and Kinross Council)

Shomphole Wilderness Camp is a private getaway to nature in Kenya's Rift Valley. Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas (previously at Neatorama) is one of their favorite visitors. He teamed up with camp management to build a watering hole for wildlife in the very dry valley. For Burrard-Lucas, it was an opportunity to make taking pictures of animals easier for himself and for other visiting photographers.

The process involved not only digging a pond, but running five kilometers of pipe to supply the water. They also erected a relatively luxurious hide for photographers, with beds and a toilet, so they can observe creatures who came by without being seen. There is also carefully-designed lighting for nighttime water hole photography. When the project was ready, it didn't take long for wildlife to show up. Read about the project and enjoy the lovely images that resulted at Burrard-Lucas' blog. -via Digg

In his latest video, Tom Scott visits this unique ferry design in Denmark. The Udbyhøj Cable Ferry across Randers Fjord is a cable ferry in the sense that motors pull the ship along undersea guide cables back and forth between its destinations. But it's also a cable ferry in that it's powered by an electrical power cable that gradually unrolls on a drum mounted on the side of the ship.

The ship carries 70,000 people per year with an average of 88 trips per day. Occasionally, it must stop to slacken the guide cables and allow deep-keeled traffic to pass--as all cable ferries must. But the electrical cable just rolls up on the ship.

Imagine taking the most terrifying novel of existential horror that was made into a classic movie monster franchise, and make it into ... no big deal. Here, Dr. Frankenstein encounters the corpse he put together and reanimated and they just have an everyday conversation. Trent Lenkarski and Joel Haver (previously at Neatorama) appear to have turned the camera on while they were free-associating and then rotoscoped it into a Frankenstein movie. This was for some Halloween project, which Lenkarski admits is late. That's the wages of procrastination. It's still worth your time for the recipes. -via reddit

#IdahoDidYouKnow In 1928, Idaho became the first state in the nation to feature a graphic on a license plate by proudly displaying an impressive Idaho potato that filled the entire plate. pic.twitter.com/g1ii2TGWfB

— Idaho Commerce (@IdahoCommerce) July 16, 2019

Every state wants to have a distinctive license plate design for their vehicles. Trying to be different, however, can backfire, as several states have learned the hard way. In 1928, Idaho decided to feature a potato, the state's biggest cash crop, on their plates. A large, long, tan potato was embossed right on the otherwise green plate with the numbers inside. Idaho residents thought it was ugly, and they didn't feel like advertising potatoes on their cars, so the design only lasted a year. Tourists kept stealing them anyway. Strangely, they tried such advertising again, going with the slogan "world famous potatoes" in 1948, and since 1957, they've said "famous potatoes."

This is just one of several stories about license plate failures from different states you can read about at Smithsonian.

Not included: last year's Ohio plate design.

We've all learned an amazing amount about viruses, immunity, and vaccines over the last two years, thanks to COVID-19. Even if you are are up-to-date with the latest COVID vaccine, you still need to get a flu shot, because influenza mutates like any widespread virus, and different strains come around every year. Some years the flu shot is more effective than others, because they are designed to battle whichever strain our health experts predict will be big that year, and they aren't always right. Keep in mind that "just the flu" is not a thing, because influenza is highly contagious and it's dangerous for many people. But what if we were to develop a flu shot that fights any possible strain of influenza? Immunologists are working on different ways to tackle flu viruses no matter how they have mutated, as explained in this TED-Ed lesson. And now any time I hear the word hemagglutinin, I will think of Napoleon Bonaparte. -via Geeks Are Sexy

YouTube maker Scott Prints created this gag for his car. No, it doesn't actually eject the passenger, but it is a wired button that does activate something.

Specifically, it's wired to a garage door opener. The device lodges into a cubby in his car. This video shows his step-by-step process for designing and building the gadget.

Scott Prints hopes that his next passenger asks about it. He already has a few lines prepared:

• "It came with the car. I've never actually pushed it." (while reaching for the button)
• "It's for my other job."
• "We'll get for that. But first, who did you vote for?"
• "Eh, don't worry about it. Also, don't push it."

He asks that viewers suggest their own lines to feed to unwary passengers.

-via Hack a Day