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The Hungarian Angel Makers

The small, quiet, Hungarian village of Nagyrev had no doctor or clinic or even a midwife. In 1911, Zsuzsanna Fazekas arrived and offered midwife services, and so she became the village's only medical practitioner. No one knew much about her, but she ministered to the women of Nagyrev for years, and gained their trust. Fazekas listened to their problems with their husbands, and she knew how to perform abortions. In a time and place in which marriages were arranged and divorce was almost impossible, she could help the women of Nagyrev with a supply of arsenic.

Fazekas' reputation quietly spread until women from the surrounding villages began coming to seek her advice. When Fazekas' activities came to the attention of authorities in 1929, the extent of her crimes was astonishing. There may have been as many as 300 deaths. Read about Zsuzsanna Fazekas and the Angel Makers of Nagyrev at Amusing Planet.


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Comparing Words in Four Germanic Languages

Four native speakers allow us to compare words in English, German, Dutch, and Afrikaans, all languages that descended from old German. Yes, Afrikaans is an offshoot of Dutch, but it's still in the same family. The words are very similar, but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to follow a string of them in conversation outside of a language you know. It seems to me that English is the outlier in these words, but that may be because I am a native English speaker and do not know any of the other languages. Or it may be because English has incorporated so many words from other language families. As it is, the biggest complaint about this video is the use of an American flag for the English language. Do you think they should have used the Canadian flag or the New Zealand flag? The speaker is definitely American. -via reddit


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Food for Humans, from Fancy Feast



Fancy Feast canned cat food is like crack for cats. It has taught my cats how to tell time. And now Fancy Feast wants us humans to experience the joy its products give our feline friends. The cat food company is teaming up with New York City trattoria Gatto Bianco to serve a special Fancy Feast-inspired dinner for two nights. To people. But only a few people, as the trattoria only has four tables, and only eight couples will be served on August 11 and 12. The promotion is to introduce the company's new line of cat food flavors called "Medleys."   

But since the restaurant is so limited, Fancy Feast has released the recipes for the dinner for everyone to try at home. The options are salmon and vegetables, beef short ribs and mashed potatoes, and two desserts. The recipes were developed by Fancy Feast's in-house chef Amanda Hassner and restaurateur Casare Casella. Spoiler: cat food will not be found among the ingredients in these recipes. -via Metafilter


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The Accidental Carbonated Geyser



Well, whaddaya know, Tom Scott is in the United States, which means a lot more videos to come that will feature some Neatoramanaut's home town. He sends us a report of a strange geyser in Soda Springs, Idaho. It's not a natural geyser, but an accidental side effect of drilling a well to supply a city pool. And it shoots seltzer water into the air! I guess you've have to expect that kind of thing in a town named Soda Springs, which sits on top of a reservoir of carbonated water. No one there feels the need to buy a SodaStream. At any rate, the geyser at Soda Springs erupts more regularly than Old Faithful, but that's not natural, either. The story of Soda Springs is a strange tale of a natural wonder regulated by human intervention.

As an aside, there's a shot at one minute into the video of some buildings, and one building in the middle has an extention that looks like a cartoon chicken to me. Can you see it? Or is that just me?


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Conjoined Twins with Fused Brains Successfully Separated

Bernardo and Arthur Lima are three-year-old craniopagus conjoined twins, meaning they were joined at their heads. They have never been able to stand, walk, or look directly at each other until now. The Brazilian boys have been completely separated after a 27-hour operation headed by surgeon Noor ul Owase Jeelani and assisted by a team of nearly 100 people, including surgeons from the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London via virtual reality. Bernardo and Arthur have been living at Instituto Estadual do Cerebro Paulo Niemeyer for more than two years preparing for separation, and surgeons have been practicing by virtual reality.

The Lima twins are now the oldest twins with fused brains to have ever been successfully separated. That they survived the surgery is remarkable, but their heart rates and blood pressure surged after the operation, and only returned to normal when the boys were reunited with each other days later. They are now recovering together, and face at least six months of medical therapy. Read more about this case at BBC Tech.


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The World War II Airdropped Minibike

During World War II, Britain wanted to ensure that its special forces troops who parachuted behind enemy lines had the ability to travel quickly away from the drop zones and to their mission destinations. In The Famous James Military Lightweight, motorcycle historian Peter Miller explains that the folded-up Welbike motorcycle had to fit inside a 15-inch wide drop container and weigh only 70 pounds. A trained soldier could get it working within 11 seconds.

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was eventually dissatisifed with the utility of the Welbike, but it soon became popular with airborne troops and saw use during Operation Market Garden in 1944. Various British firms produced 3,853 Welbikes. One is on display at the Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.


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Hootie & the Blowfish Play a BBQ Restaurant



Jonathan Dickerson shared a VHS home movie of his family's bluegrass band playing at a restaurant in Houston more than a quarter century ago. On one particular night, some strangers from the audience were invited to perform for the crowd. Dickerson told the story when he posted the video to reddit.

This was 1994 or 1995 at a place called Hickory Hollow Bbq in Houston, TX. Tootsie was the lead singer/string bass and throughout the night she noticed a group of guys that seemed to really be into the show. She guessed they were musicians and invited them up, having no idea who they were. Even when Dean Felber (I think?) told her they were Hootie and the Blowfish it meant nothing to her or to anyone there except maybe one or two in the audience.

Fast forward a week or so later. My aunt, uncle, and cousin came home for a visit. We were all sitting around my grandparents' house when they put this tape in the VCR. I grew up around bluegrass, old country, and folk music. Practically everyone in the family is musical, something us kids took for granted. So when the video started we rolled our eyes and made fun of their flame outfits. Everyone else mostly talked over it when suddenly there's that unmistakable voice of Darius Rucker (who we all assumed was named Hootie at the time).

This was a time when you couldn't go anywhere without hearing them and it blew my mind that my uncle and cousin didn't understand how big this band was. It's not that we were fans, but we certainly knew them and probably had their songs memorized just from them getting constant airplay. My cousin is the goofy one who backs them up with the mandolin. If I remember correctly, he felt they weren't getting a good reception at first so he thought he'd help them out. My uncle is the one who loans his guitar to Darius.

That's about it. I'd nearly forgotten about it but was at my parents this weekend digitizing some of their old home movies and I thought it was interesting enough to share.

Yeah, a brush with fame like that is way more interesting when it's almost purely accidental. Rucker and Felber were just having supper before performing at another Houston venue. It also says something about the fleetingness of fame that some of the commenters at reddit are too young to know who Hootie & the Blowfish are.   -via reddit


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An Autonomous Snack Car is Making Its Rounds

It's the convergence of three modern innovations: self-driving vehicles, temperature-controlled vending machines, and food delivery. Kyocera Communication Systems has launched an automated snack vending vehicle in Chiba City, Japan. The small automobile carries neither driver nor passengers, but machines full of hot and cold beverages and snacks such as candy and gelatin through the city that already loves the convenience of vending machines. So far, it is moving during business hours around shopping centers, office parks, and condominium complexes in Chiba City, ready to take your money via smartphone. The vending machine on wheels travels at nine miles an hour, and does not yet have a specified schedule, because you never know when a large crowd of people will want to get something to drink, and the little robot car will have to go restock. Read more about the innovative vending car and see more pictures at SoraNews24.  -via Fark


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RIP Nichelle Nichols

Trailblazing actress Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek, passed away Saturday of natural causes.

When “Star Trek” began in 1966, Nichols was a television rarity: a Black woman in a notable role on a prime-time television series. There had been African-American women on TV before, but they often played domestic workers and had small roles; Nichols’ Uhura was an integral part of the multicultural “Star Trek” crew.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called it “the first non-stereotypical role portrayed by a Black woman in television history.”

In fact, it was King who convinced Nichols of the importance of her work on Star Trek. Nichols also broke ground for television's first scripted interracial kiss. After Star Trek, Nichols worked for NASA to recruit women and minorities as astronauts, engineers, and administrators.

Nichelle Nichols was 89.


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This Architect Wants to Use Molten Lava for Construction Projects

Arnhildur Pálmadóttir hails from Iceland, a nation that is volcanically active and has plentiful sources of low-viscosity lava. It's an abundant natural resource on an island nation with otherwise limited natural resources.

So, Fast Company reports, Pálmadóttir proposes digging precise trenches out of soil in lava fields so that when eruptions happen, the lava flows into these channels to form walls and foundations. When the lava cools, construction workers can remove the soil to expose the cooled and solid volcanic rock.

At this point, the project is speculative since it's expensive and predicting volcanic eruptions is an imprecise science. But with sufficient funding, Pálmadóttir may be able to test her idea at the Krafla vocano system in the northeastern region of Iceland.

-via Weird Universe | Photo: Arnhildur Pálmadóttir


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How the Tylenol Killer Got Away with Murder

Anyone who was around in 1982 will remember the Tylenol murders. It was terrifying to think that someone was tampering with products on store shelves that might affect anyone at random. But 40 years later, how much of that case do you recall? In September of 1982, seemingly healthy people in the Chicago area began suddenly falling dead. Most had no connection to each other, although three people in the same family were killed. They had taken Tylenol from the same bottle. Seven people died of cyanide poisoning after taking Tylenol, which set off nationwide warnings about the product, a recall of all Tylenol, and a massive police investigation. A break came when a letter demanding a million dollars was sent to Tylenol's parent company, Johnson & Johnson.  

The Chicago Tylenol murders are the reason we have tamper-proof packaging on all kinds of products today, but no one was ever charged with the murders. The number one suspect was sentenced to ten years for extortion, and he's been out of prison since 1995. Read the story of how police tracked down James William Lewis and how he avoided murder convictions in two different cases at Truly Adventurous.

(Image credit: Mrbeastmodeallday)


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The Beauty of Hip-Hop Tango



Can you mix modern hip-hop music with ballroom dancing? A video of Sara Grdan and Ivan Terrazas dancing an exhibition at the 7th Belgrade Tango Encuentro in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2016 has gone viral because they do just that. Watch them dance a sultry tango to Eminem's song "Lose Yourself." It's more than just finding a beat; they incorporate modern dance elements seamlessly into the choreography. Watch the interplay of their four feet and marvel at how they don't get tangled in the tango. No wonder people have become enchanted with their performance! -via Digg


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During World War II, RAF Crews Had Compasses Concealed as Uniform Buttons

This tiny button is actually a compass. During World War II, Royal Air Force crews were often equipped with these buttons in their uniforms. If they were shot down at night and needed to figure out their directions, they could remove the buttons and balance them to on pins and see which way the buttons turned.

Some of these buttons were on jackets, but this one was on a trouser fly. The Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity explains that dots marked on the buttons provided a marker that would point north. Doreen Galvin writes in Arts to Intelligence that the Germans eventually discovered the nature of these buttons, so RAF designers switched the direction of the indicator dots.


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The Elephantine Colossus of Coney Island

James V. Lafferty made a name for himself in 1882 by building an elephant-shaped building in New Jersey known as Lucy the Elephant. In 1885, he built a second elephant almost twice as tall as Lucy in Coney Island that became known as the Elephant Colossus. This building was 122 feet tall and contained a 31-room hotel as well as various shops in the lower levels. The interior rooms were named after the corresponding elephant organs, which was a novelty and probably aided in navigating the building. The building became a rather well-known brothel during its short life, and inspired the phrase "seeing the elephant" for a stop there. After standing empty for some time, in 1896 the elephant suffered the fate of so many Coney Island attractions and burned to the ground.

You can see more pictures of the Elephant Colossus here. The story of the Elephantine Colossus is just one of the 11 Fun Facts About Coney Island you can read at Mental Floss.


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The World's Most Complex Way to Pass the Wine



We've come to expect the most ridiculous Rube Goldberg contraptions from Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama), but this one takes the cake. Passing the wine from one end of the table to the other involves stunts that couldn't possibly happen in the real world, could they? In many of the events, nothing happens that would advance the sequence the first time around, but maybe the second or third time around. In some places, you are sure you can see what's going to happen, but you are wrong. And then you find yourself becoming more invested in one little piece instead of the overall process, like wondering when that wine glass is going to break (because you just know it will eventually). Or worrying about the welfare of that mouse. Joseph gets his wine in about four minutes, after wrecking the entire table. The rest is Patreon credits. -via reddit


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