You'd think the world's largest plant would have already been "discovered," but this one is in the ocean. Also, it's been seen quite a lot, but scientists have recently discovered that a field of seagrass is all one connected plant. The species of seagrass is Posidonia australis, also called fibre-ball weed or ribbon weed. The single plant with its millions of blades covers 200 square kilometers, or 77 square miles! That dwarfs the previous record holder, a quaking aspen called Pando that has 47,000 stems covering less than a square mile.

The seagrass is in Shark Bay off the coast of Western Australia. The enormous plant is believed to have started with a single seedling some 4500 years ago, and has spread by sending out shoots of rhizomes. Genetic studies show that its DNA is identical from one end to the other. The plant has yet to earn a nickname, and I think we can do better than Pando this time. Read more about the largest plant in the world at the Guardian. -via reddit

(Image credit: Rachel Austin/University of Western Australia)

Imogene Rechtin was horrified by the idea of germs. Germ theory was still relatively new when Rechtin decided people were just plain kissing each other too much, and spreading germs to everyone they met. Women often greeted each other with a short kiss on the lips, and some people even kissed both cheeks when they met! At a party in 1910, Rechtin's revulsion at a reception line in which the hostess kissed all attendees inspired her mission to stop such promiscuous germ sharing. She began a movement, and an organization called the World Health Organization (really) to push for less kissing, even in the privacy of one's home.

Rechtin's campaign was ridiculed in the press. It was seen as just another of many public reform campaigns of the time, like women's suffrage, temperance, or the strange ideas of health gurus like John Harvey Kellogg. The campaign to end kissing only lasted a year and a half. But Rechtin's story is worth remembering, because she was right. Promiscuous kissing is a surefire way to transfer germs. Beyond that, her efforts highlighted the lack of body autonomy for women. Read about Imogene Rechtin and her campaign against kissing at Smithsonian.

Borzah Yankey has a TikTok channel dedicated to making people smile. Yankey has been told he has an infectious smile ever since he was a kid. The Winnipeg, Manitoba, resident started posting smile videos on TikTok to give people something to smile about during the pandemic. He's been quite successful at that. Not only does he have a nice smile, he's got a mouth full of bright white teeth that you can't miss. The effect of his videos, particularly on babies, has sparked a TikTok challenge called “try not to smile.” It's pretty near impossible. But it's spawned a huge number of reaction videos, particularly from parents of babies, who use Yankey's face to brighten their children's moods.

Watching these kids catch a smile will make you smile, too. Someone mentioned that the five seconds of black screen at the end was so that people can see their own faces reflected in their phone screen... smiling. -via reddit

I cut 24 traffic cones into small pieces and joined them together to make armor that I could wear. pic.twitter.com/rTAp1msxrd

— 安居 智博 (@kami_robo_yasui) May 27, 2022

No, it's not the world's worst Transformer, but an impressive suit of plastic armor (+2 to AC, -3 to Dex) cut and assembled by Kami Robo, a Japanese artist famous for making robot figures out of anything, as well as robot-themed art in a wide variety of media.

24 traffic cones went into this suit, which is remarkably flexible. I'm not sure how the user breathes and it's likely to get very hot quickly. Here's a photo of Kami Robo standing next to the suit, which appears light enough to carry easily.

Kami Robo's other creative robots include one made of rubber ducks, Halloween pumpkin toys, and Christmas tree stars.

-via The Awesomer

Oh my. This newspaper announcement might bring up a vision of the bedroom sign we featured a couple of months ago. And this is for a couple who isn't married yet! But there's more here than meets the eye. When I saw this clipping from Bad Newspaper, I tried hard to figure out where the typo was, and what it's supposed to say. There is no typo.

An Old Fashioned Pounding is a real thing. Today we would call it a food shower, when friends and community come together to stock a pantry with staples like flour, sugar, cornmeal, beans, and spices. The name comes from the fact that a lot of these goods were sold by the pound. It's a great idea for a newly married couple, or for someone who is establishing a new home. Traditionally, churches did it when a new pastor took up residence in a parsonage.  

Considering the way the term "pounding" is used in the 21st century though, you might want to call your party a food shower, just to keep the prurient puns to a minimum.

(Image credit: Togekriss)

You know how you see something on the internet and you think "I could do that!" Maybe you can, or maybe your first attempt is nothing at all like the posted artist's 100th time doing that thing professionally. The cakes above were all supposed to recreate the cake in the middle, with some attempts coming close, and some failing spectacularly. I bet they all tasted good, though. Sometimes a recreation is nothing like the original, but it turns out to be wonderful in its own way.

(Image credit: lolosun)

No one would recognize these as llamas, but they are adorable in their googly-eyed glory. See a roundup of 50 projects that didn't come out quite as planned at Bored Panda.

When archaeologists dug out the ancient city of Pompeii, they found the remains of hundreds of people trying to flee the destruction wrought by Mt. Vesuvius. But they also found two skeletons crouching in a corner of their dining room. Why weren't they trying to run away? They weren't elderly. New research gives us a clue.    

An international team of scientists took a piece of bone from the male skeleton and sequenced his DNA. They found that he suffered from spinal tuberculosis, which probably meant that he was unable to run, or possibly even walk. The man, who was about 35, was doomed from the beginning of the eruption. Was his companion also afflicted with some disability, or was she just unwilling to leave without him? The study also gives us clues as to the man's origins, as he wasn't a native of Pompeii. Read about this discovery at Engadget. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità)

We've featured the giant mechanical figures of Les machines de l'île, in Nantes, France, a few times before at Neatorama. These impressive behemoths are like something out of a science fiction film -by Jules Verne, of course. The animals are both technological wonders and works of art. Now we can take a look inside the place where they are built, stored, and used. And if you're ever in the neighborhood, you can ride one yourself for less than ten euros! If not, take a ride with Tom Scott on a 40-foot-tall steampunk mechanical elephant in this video. It might be a little loud, and maybe a little wet, but you'll never forget it.

Malcolm Gladwell is a public intellectual famous for his novel takes on human society. His books, which include Outliers: The Story of Success and Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, are widely-discussed bestsellers.

Gladwell is a busy man, so he has personal assistants. In a recent blog post, he says that for many years, he would ask applicants for that position if they could drive a car with a manual transmission. If the answer was no, then they were disqualified.

Why? It's not because they will need to drive stick while on the job. It's because he's looking for the type of 22-year old person who would want to learn that "marginally useful skill." Gladwell explains that the young person who can use a manual transmission has certain useful personality traits:

One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things.

It's an interesting idea, but as one commenter at Ann Althouse's blog points out, it assumes that the average 22-year old has access to a car (let alone a sports car) with a manual transmission, which I think would be fairly unusual in the United States. Gladwell would certainly be disqualifying a lot of otherwise capable 22-year olds who could have other ways of demonstrating the same characteristics.

Photo: Ed Schipul

Remember when we discovered that cats are frightened by cucumbers? We still don't know why, but it's probably just the appearance of a novel item they aren't familiar with. That meme went viral, so everyone had to try it. But this one is real- male mice go into high stress in the presence of bananas. I guess that's good for banana trees, but this particular fear developed for a different reason.

Mice from different experiments happened to be in the same lab at McGill University, and researchers noticed a stress response in male mice when they were in the presence of pregnant or lactating females. Wanting to find out why, they designed other experiments to see what chemical may have caused it. They narrowed it down to a compound called n-pentyl acetate in the pregnant/lactating mice's urine, which induces a stress response in male mice, particularly virgin male mice. That's an adaptive strategy, as male mice tend to kill baby mice.

But wait a minute. It turns out that n-pentyl acetate is the chemical that makes a banana smell the way it does! So of course the researchers went to a supermarket and bought some banana oil to check their work. Sure enough, the male mice were terrified when they were exposed to banana oil in the room. It you don't have a cat, you might be able to deter at least some mice by sticking cotton balls soaked in banana oil around the house. Maybe. The chemical also induced an analgesic effect in the mice. You can read more about these experiments at LiveScience. -via Damn Interesting 

An old saying says that behind every great man, there's a hard-working woman. The adage was always meant to point out that women rarely get the respect they deserve for what they do behind the scenes, but in the Mongol Empire, some of them got plenty of respect. While the warriors were out conquering the world, the women who were kept in place by childrearing responsibilities were also tasked with holding territory and making society work. They supervised not only the home, but activities for the entire camp, like resolving disputes, meeting with traders, overseeing livestock workers, and planning migration. Women who weren't restricted to home by children were likely to become warriors themselves. Some estimates say that up to 20% of Chinggis Khan’s forces were women!

Chinggis Khan’s daughter-in-law Töregene became so powerful that she engineered the succession of the new Khan after her husband died, even though she wasn't even his head wife. She reigned as regent for her oldest son with the support of the warlords and advisors. Read about the roles of women in the Mongol Empire at Atlas Obscura.

Just a few decades ago, heart transplants were scary, futuristic procedures that produced miracles. They still are. It's just that now we have more of them and know more about them. Well, at least doctors know more about them nowadays. To the rest of us, a heart transplant is still in the realm of magic. This TED-Ed lesson takes us through the procedures involved in a heart transplant to make it more understandable. But even when you know how it's done, it still seems like a scary futuristic miracle.

Jules Verne wrote the novel Around the World in Eighty Days in 1872, in which Phileas Fogg makes a wager that he can travel around the world in just eighty days. Fogg did precise calculations to gauge his travel, and although he ran into complications, completed the trip in time. Can someone do that today? There have been a few people, mainly celebrities, who recreated Fogg's feat, one even on a bicycle. But can an ordinary person using ordinary travel methods do it? Yes they can! You don't even need a private plane.

There are a few trick involved, though. Rail travel is still feasible in many parts of the world, and your route should take you through nations that aren't at war or hard to enter. The real trick is to book passage on cargo ships. Read how, with a bit of planning, you can circumnavigate the earth in eighty days at The Travel.

Back when all humans were nomads, they would do their business and move on. Then when people started to settle down into stable communities, we had to figure out our shit. In the Bible, God told the Hebrews how to treat the promised land. Outhouses became a thing, and many societies recognized the fertilizer value of our waste, either on a household scale or as an industry. Larger cities posed a problem, though, and that's how we ended up with modern sewage systems. While we've created a world where we never have to think much about human feces, seven billion pounds of excreta every day is a problem.

Lina Zeldovich, author of the book The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health, tells how her grandfather would ceremoniously clean out the septic tank once a year and use the sludge as fertilizer for trees, garden soil, and to activate the compost. She also goes through a short history of how people have utilized human waste over millennia and why we should go back to using our gross domestic product more sustainably instead of paying to treat it as a problem. Read The Power of Shit at Aeon. Oh yeah, it contains the proper amount of puns for the subject. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Myotus)

Dogs naturally want to protect their homes and families, but some are better at it than others. Some need only their reputation, while others have to actually make a move to scare a stranger off. And some are just plain lousy in both intimidation and home protection. Jonny Devaney acts out a range of reactions when a burglar confronts a few different dog breeds. Do you have one of these breeds? Let us know how accurate he is. -via reddit