When Europeans colonized the Americas, they found corn, an easily-grown and inexpensive grain. Eventually, many of the poorest people in Europe were eating little besides corn, made into polenta in Italy, and began to suffer from a disease called pellagra. For hundreds of years, no one knew what caused pellagra, but some suspected it was caused by a fungus or insects associated with corn. Only in the 1920s did they realize it was a nutritional deficiency, and in the '30s it was found to be a lack of niacin (vitamin B3). The poor folks who consumed mostly polenta suffered from skin rashes and diarrhea, and if it went untreated, they developed dementia, called pellagrous insanity.

During those hundreds of years, Italian sufferers could end up at San Servolo or San Clemente, two islands off of Venice with hospitals for the mentally ill. Treatment of these inmates varied according to their social status and the medical philosophy of those in charge of the hospitals. It took way too long for authorities to figure out why an improved diet would "cure" individuals, only for them to return later after eating little besides polenta in their home towns. Read about the mental hospitals of San Servolo and San Clemente at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Kasa Fue)

Do you remember the pet rock craze of the 70s? How about the invisible pet fad of the 80s? These were playful bits of counterculture in a bygone America. China is evidently experiencing a similar phenomenon.

Channel News Asia reports that young people in China are acquiring unconventional pets, including the aforementioned rocks, blobs of used toothpaste, sprouting mango seeds, and, most inventively, yeast cultures.

These novel pets get names and personality descriptions. Owners show them off online. Can a yeast culture be one of those Instagram pet influencers? I haven't found one yet, but surely that trend is coming soon.

-via Dave Barry

This is a slice of vinegar pie prepared by food blogger Southern Bite. It's a type of pie sometimes called "desperation pies" associated with by not necessarily originating in the Great Depression, when hard economic times required creative substitutions in popular foods. In this case, when a pie requires a certain tartness but citrus juice isn't available, vinegar will do.

This pie is one of 18 old fashioned and largely forgotten pie flavors rounded up by The Takeout. Others include water pie (another desperation pie), mock apple pie, pineapple pie, and grasshopper pie, the last of which is named for the cocktail, not the insect.

Zurich, Switzerland is historically a rather bike-friendly city. It's moved even further in that direction with the opening of tunnel made exclusively for the use of bicycles. Canadian Cycling Magazine reports that the city spent approximately $47 million USD to build this tunnel which is just over a quarter mile long and as wide as 20 feet.

There's clear signage, lighting, and video surveillance in the system. To facilitate its use, the tunnel is adjacent to a bicycle parking complex that can accommodate 1,240 bikes. City officials hope that this tunnel and its amenities will decrease road congestion during high-traffic times.

-via TYWKIWDBI

The mythical dragon as a reptile that can fly and breathe fire is astonishingly universal. Ancient stories of dragons are found in all corners of the earth. How did such an iconic yet mythical creature find its way into such diverse cultures?

According to history as it is written, the first dinosaur fossil was discovered in 1677. Actually, it was the first such find that was studied and illustrated, and naturalist Robert Plot didn't know what it was. The idea of dinosaurs didn't take root until the early 19th century. But we can be sure that dinosaur fossils were discovered by plenty of people long before any of that, even before written language. People just called them dragons.

Still, that doesn't explain all the features of a dragon, like the fire-breathing part. For that, we may have to consider what the earth was like when people looked to stories to explain the more mysterious and frightening parts of their lives. This TED-Ed lesson looks at some of those stories and how they may have contributed to our idea of dragons.  

Alligators are everywhere in Florida. In fact, I actually proposed to my wife next to an alligator pond when we lived there. That wasn't the plan; it's just that alligators are so prolific that we happened to be next to a pond of them at the time.

For the most controlled alligator experience (I'm not a fan of free-range alligators), go to Gatorland, the alligator-themed amusement park in Orlando.

Among the resident gators is Jawlene, a young lady who has no upper jaw. Gatorland posts on Facebook that she was rescued from the wild in 2023. Although she was severely malnourished at the time of rescue, she's recovered her proper weight and is a popular attraction.

-via Massimo

Human beings are sometimes described as the apex species of earth, which you would assume from the way we've taken over. But it wasn't easy getting here, and the way we make more humans is real crapshoot, evolutionarily speaking. This is true of all mammals, in comparison to insects or birds, but humans have a harder time and a much higher failure rate than other mammals. For every fertilized egg that makes it to actual birth, two are failures and are discarded along the way, most even before a woman knows she is pregnant. About half of these miscarriages are because the fertilized egg has the wrong number of chromosomes. Another way that human reproduction is so fraught is because of the huge demands a human fetus put on the mother, leading to conditions like gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, which can be fatal.

What makes humans so uniquely bad at reproduction among mammals? There are plenty of theories, but the evidence points to the fact that we developed large brains that demand more resources, and to the fact that such a brain, and other features that define us as human, developed when the world's population was so low that mutations weren't selected out early. Read how the human gene system went strangely wonky at the Conversation.

When Sigourney Weaver kicked ass in the movie Alien in 1979, it set off a tsunami of sequels and loosely related films. That was because the alien xenomorph scared the daylights out of us. It was only a matter of time before this universe was brought to television. The series Alien: Earth debuts on FX on August 12th.

This series takes place before the events of the original 1979 movie (but after Prometheus and Alien: Covenant), so you know that what happens will be held tightly wrapped from the public on earth. The premise is that a spaceship from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation crash-lands on earth. As you might guess, there is facehugger on board. But there are also four other alien species brought back from who-knows-where! We may never find out, but we know that these aliens are not benign, and present a lethal threat to earth. -via Geeks Are Sexy

How can I get my dog to poop promptly, ideally on command, accepting that one place is as good as another?

This birthday cake simulates what an ideal dog would be able to accomplish in the morning before we have to get to work. The woman uses a cigarette lighter to release of the cake/dog's digestive tract. Something that is technically edible releases into a pile. Good dog!

-via Born in Space

The Original Series prompted the creation of some very strange merchandise. Most notably, the notorious Spock helmet never appeared in the Original Series, although it did make an appearance in the more recent comedy Lower Decks.

Like the Spock helmet (officially "Space Fun Helmet"), the Astrotank was clearly created by a design team that had never watched Star Trek or did not care about product topicality at all. It had Star Trek written on the side and a sticker vaguely resembling the Starfleet logo. Tanks made only two appearances on Enterprise and none of them looked like this . . . thing.

Still, you can buy an Astrotank if you wish. They're occasionally listed on eBay, albeit for steep prices.

The Astrotank and Space Fun Helmets are only two bizarre items of Star Trek merchandise produced. You can see 7 others at Star Trek's official webpage, including a Star Trek V marshmallow dispenser.

-via @TheMekon_Venus

There's an issue that we need to talk about--something that we've all known about for a long time but have avoided addressing directly.

We're talking about the elephant in the room. Specifically, we're talking about this wild elephant that walked into a grocery store near the Khao Yai National Park in Thailand.

The elephant is named (by humans, we don't know what he calls himself) Plai Biang Lek. The Associated Press reports that shop owner Kamploy Kakaew recorded the elephant shoplifting rice crackers, dried bananas, and a sandwich.

As I said, Plai Biang Lek shoplifted these items; he made no attempt to pay for them. Although he left without attacking any humans, he did steal from them.

Shameful.

Legends have come down to us from ancient times about dead bodies that rise from the grave to terrorize the living. That's where we get the concept of vampires, zombies, and revenants. But fear of the dead goes back much further, to the Neolithic era, as we find more burials that have been engineered to keep a body from rising again. As these finds get older and older, we have to think about why we bury the dead in the first place. Deliberate burials go back at least 100,000 years, although archaeologists still argue about how deliberate some of these graveyards really were. And burial practices of ancient humans are hard to discern. Were stones placed on top of graves to keep animals from digging them up, or to keep the dead from coming back to haunt us?

Different burial sites have vastly different customs, which come from the dominant culture, but some graves even in the same graveyard appear to have extra steps that make this one burial different from those around it. What do these burial customs say about the way that person was regarded? Or were they "pinned down" so that they couldn't rise up and spread the disease that killed them? Read about the research into the long history of our fear of the dead returning at Aeon.  -via Real Clear Science   

(Image credit: Alissa Mittnik, Chuan-Chao Wang, Jiří Svoboda, Johannes Krause)

The sixth film in The Karate Kid franchise is in theaters now. Karate Kid: Legends brings Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan together. Chan's character was also in the 2010 movie The Karate Kid, starring Jaden Smith, which was a remake with the same plot as the 1984 original, except it took place in China. The movie did well, but you might be surprised to learn that it was the highest grossing of all the Karate Kid films. That's because it was not only set in China, it was a hit in China.

But what was shown in China was not quite the same movie. Knowing how lucrative the Chinese market could be, the producers of The Karate Kid bent over backwards to get the film in Chinese theaters. For one thing, there is no karate in China, it is kung fu, so the movie was titled Gong Fu Meng (Kung Fu Dream). It was edited differently from the American version, with the spotlight on Chinese movie stars who got little screen time in the American version. Some plot points were changed, too, to please Chinese censors. Read up on how The Karate Kid was changed for the Chinese audience at Den of Geek.

I never thought about the fact that Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" didn't have a music video. See, in 1973 when the song was new, music videos weren't a thing. It was another ten years before MTV came along, and by then we had concert footage and memories to go with the song. Well now, the band has an official music video for "Free Bird." It's nothing like what you thought of the song at the time, but it's perfect for 2025.

If there were a music video produced for the song back in the 1970s, it would probably have had a visual representation of the lyrics, about a guy who couldn't stay in a relationship because he was had to fly away and enjoy his freedom. Instead, this video evokes the emotions and memories that people of a certain age (like the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd) have when they hear the song. "Free Bird" was a part of the soundtrack of your life 50 years ago, a rather magical time for those who were there. -via Laughing Squid

In 1973, Gary Gygax and Don Kaye founded the firm TSR -- Tactical Strategic Rules. The next year, this company created Dungeons & Dragons.

This cultural phenomenon had humble origins. Those origins include a hobby shop named the Dungeon Hobby Shop which Gygax established in 1976 at 723 Williams Street in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. TSR went through varied fortunes before Wizards of the Coast purchased the company in 1997. So did the hobby shop, which eventually became a museum about Dungeons & Dragons. It closed several months ago.

Now the building is for sale. You can see more photos of this magnificent historical landmark at the realtor's website.

-via @DungeonNoir