With the rising need for land to house the living, many countries are destroying cemeteries to get more space. In return, they are trying to change the way funerary rites are done, and how cemeteries operate, from promoting cremation over physical burial in Hong Kong, to creating columbariums and demolishing family tombs in Singapore. Japan is now promoting tree burial as a thoughtful new way to bury the dead:  

As a scholar who studies Buddhist funerary rituals and narratives about the afterlife, what interests me are the innovative responses in some Buddhist-majority nations and the tensions that result as environmental needs clash with religious beliefs.

The idea of tree burials has proven so popular in Japan that other temples and public cemeteries have mimicked the model, some providing burial spaces under individual trees and others spaces in a columbarium that surrounds a single tree.

Scholar Sébastian Penmellen Boret writes in his 2016 book that these tree burials reflect larger transformations in Japanese society. After World War II, Buddhism’s influence on Japanese society declined as hundreds of new religious movements flourished. Additionally, an increasing trend toward urbanization undermined the ties that had traditionally existed between families and the local temples, which housed and cared for their ancestral gravesites.

Tree burials also cost significantly less than traditional funerary practices, which is an important consideration for many Japanese people struggling to support multiple generations. The birth rate in Japan is one of the lowest in the world, so children often struggle without siblings to support ailing and deceased parents and grandparents.

Image credit: Cebas/iStock

In the early 1850s, two brothers left their home in Massachusetts and decided to build a farm on the frontier near Eureka, Wisconsin. They were twins, unusually close twins, who pooled their resources to buy land, and they built a magnificent home together.

Just outside a small, rural Wisconsin farm town, lay the ruins of a grand mansion. In stark contrast to the flat, surrounding fields and scattered barns, was the peculiar sight of a once opulent home that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue during the Gilded Age. For years, mystery surrounded the empty ruin, with local legends spoken of secret stairways and underground tunnels; some suggesting the decaying manse had been used during Prohibition as a hideout for Al Capone. But the real mystery of the crumbling mansion was even more remarkable. For the house was built in two halves, each side a perfect mirror of the other, inside and out. Enter through the front door and you’d discover two kitchens, four parlour rooms, two dining rooms, and nearly a dozen bedrooms, each half designed and decorated as an exact copy of the other.

Built in 1852, virtually in the middle of nowhere, this mansion was an oddity in its own right – and that was before you even saw who lived there. The unusual Victorian mirrored home was built by identical twin brothers, Argalus and Augustus Foote, who were so inseparable in life, they even married women with matching initials in a double wedding, Augustus to Ann, and Argalus to Adelia. The Foote twins set about building a dream home where each family would live parallel lives in their own half of the mansion. But tragedy would soon descend upon the house, leaving it to fall into ruin. This is the story of the mysterious Foote mansion.

The Foote brothers only lived in the mansion a few years, then moved on to Oshkosh. But the mansion stayed, and outlived the brothers by more than 100 years, without residents for most of that time. Read the story of the legendary Foote mansion at Messy Nessy Chic.

Ana di Pištonja was born in Vladimirovac, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1838, or sometime thereabouts. Later in life, she became known as Baba Anujka. After a disastrous relationship when she was young, Anujka taught herself chemistry, particularly how to make poison.  

Anujka made a laboratory in one wing of her house after her husband died, and she earned a reputation as a healer and herbalist in the late 19th century. She was popular with wives of farmers who sought her help for health problems, and she earned a respectable income which enabled her to live comfortably. She produced medicines and mixtures which would make soldiers ill enough to escape military service, and she also sold poisonous mixtures which she branded “magic water” or “love potions”. She sold the so-called “magic water” mostly to women with abusive husbands; they would give the concoction to their husbands, who would usually die after about eight days.

Anujka’s “love potion” contained arsenic in small quantities and certain plant toxins that were difficult to detect. When told about a marriage problem, Anujka would ask her client, “How heavy is that problem?”, which meant, “What is the body mass of the victim?” She was then able to calculate the dose needed. Anujka’s victims were usually men, typically young and healthy. Her clients claimed at her trial that they did not know that her “magic water” contained poison, but that they believed that she had some kind of supernatural powers to kill people using magic. Anujka’s potions killed between 50 and 150 people.

The reason she is known as "the world's oldest serial killer" is because she was 90 years old when she was finally arrested! Read the tale of Baba Anujka at Vintage Everyday. -via Strange Company

Anthropologists estimate that humans have been around for about 300,000 years. For about 290,000 of those years, there was relative equality in status for everyone. Sure, these small hunter-gatherer groups listened to the wisdom of elders and made allowances for children, but they didn't have chiefs or rulers or wealthy people that bossed the rest around. It didn't take all that long for human society to separate people into the haves and the have-nots, whether we are talking about wealth, power, or status. So what happened?

There are two developments in mobile forager cultures that tend to set the stage for the establishment of inequality. One such scaffold to inequality was the emergence of clan structure. Clans have a strong corporate identity, built around real or mythical genealogical connection, reinforced by demanding initiation rites and intense collective activities. They become central to an individual’s social identity. Individuals see themselves, and are seen by others, primarily through their clan identity. They expect and get social support mostly within their clan, as the anthropologist Raymond C Kelly writes in Warless Societies and the Origin of War (2000). Once storage and farming emerged, incipient elites used clan membership to mobilise social and material support.

The second development was the emergence of a quasi-elite based on the control of information, which created a hierarchy of prestige and esteem, rather than wealth and power. This was originally based on subsistence skills. Forager life depends on very high levels of expertise in navigation, tracking, plant identification, animal behaviour, and artisan skills. The genuinely expert attract deference and respect in return for generously sharing their knowledge, as the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich argues in The Secret of Our Success (2015). As the social anthropologist Jerome Lewis has shown, this economy of information can include story and music, and the same can be true of its ritual and normative life. Indeed, there might be a fusion of ritual with subsistence information, if ritual narratives are used as a vehicle for encoding important but rarely used spatial and navigational information. There’s some suggestion of this fusion in Australian Aboriginal songlines, and the idea is expanded from Australia and defended in detail by the orality scholar Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies (2015). So there can be expertise and deference not just in subsistence skills, but also with regards to religion and ritual.

So the elites tended to rise based on who you know or what you know. But none of that would have led to the world we live in if it weren't for one crucial development: agriculture. Read how these forces came together to produce stratified societies at Aeon. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: David Hawgood)

Alright, she’s been all over the Internet during the promotional campaign for Resident Evil: Village. The 'big-tiddy' monster vampire that almost every gamer wanted to be with when the demo for the game was released created a huge noise in the gaming community. Lady Alcina Dimitrescu can be both menacing and enchanting. Did you know that she was based on a real-life Hungarian noblewoman? GG Recon has more details: 

Born into noble stock in 1560, Bathory ruled her family estate with an iron fist. While her husband was away at war, Bathory apparently took control of the estate. Although his name was Count Ferenc II Nádasdy, Bathory's higher social standing meant she kept her maiden name, and he even changed his to Bathory. These days, Elizabeth Bathory is often referred to as The Blood Countess or Countess Dracula, and is said to have been the inspiration behind Bram Stoker's Dracula. 

According to sources, Bathory tried to retain her youth by bathing in the blood of virgin women. The bowels of her home were reportedly found filled with dead or dying women (usaully between the age of 10 and 14), who Bathory and her conspirators would kidnap and torture. It's claimed that girls would attend the castle for etiquette lessons and were then subjected to horrors. Some say they were burned with hot tongs and then dunked in icy water, while others were apparently covered in honey and live ants. Accounts of Bathory bathing in blood come from after her death, so it's unclear whether they were factual or just added to folklore to make her more of a local boogeyman.

Image credit: Jyinnovbsoce1m from i.ytimg.com via Blogspot

Jen Yates introduces us to a new trend in cake decorating that may seem a treat, but one might also suspect it's a shortcut to a "decorated" cake. It's the practice of adding well known candies on top of the iced cake. In their original wrappers. Now, a candy wrapper is useful for identifying the brand and flavor of a candy bar, and to keep the candy clean inside. But you don't expect the outside of the wrapper to be all that clean.  

And digging through icing with your fingers just to unwrap a piece of chocolate that is covered in chocolate and then smooshed into chocolate sounds about as appealing as... ooh, look!

Chocolate!

You can see plenty more examples of this trend at Cake Wrecks.

Let's be honest: ticks are awful. Ze Frank tells us all about ticks, and he doesn't sugarcoat anything, so be warned. That said, there are plenty of things to snicker at in his entertaining explanation if you aren't too squicked out over the subject matter.

No, that crazy price Carvana offered for your car isn't too good to be true. https://t.co/acxaFwjNM5 pic.twitter.com/4xzdKaXVGM

— Road & Track (@RoadandTrack) June 9, 2021

Online car sellers Carvana and Vroom have automatic apps through which you can get an offer on your used car, whether you're serious about selling it or not. Some of those offers have gone viral because people cannot believe how much some cars are worth to them, more than the car was purchased for, and sometimes more than the price of a new model!

The strangeness is most visible on social media, where it’s easy to find reports of online-only retailers like Carvana and Vroom offering stratospheric buyout prices for everyday used cars. Often prices for extra-hot used vehicles, like the Jeep Wrangler and Toyota Tacoma, approach or exceed the suggested retail price for their new counterparts. Clearly, one might naturally assume, someone is losing money here. “Disrupting” the market by burning investor cash is a classic Silicon Valley play, one that defined the rise of Uber. It wouldn’t be surprising to see online retailers using COVID-19-related market shifts and piles of VC money to gobble up market share while taking substantial losses.

Yet that’s not what’s happening. It may defy surface-level logic and stun onlookers, but the trade-in values and used car prices at online retailers aren’t outliers.

“The market is absolutely on fire,” Jonathan Banks, J.D. Power vice president and general manager of vehicle valuations, told Road & Track. “Dealers are going to pay you perhaps even more, depending on where you’re at. Especially if you have a Tacoma. Gosh, if you have a Tacoma it’s like a gold mine. Your Tacoma, your Wrangler, your F-150, dealers are going to pay you top-dollar price as well. So this is not a Carvana phenomenon.”

What's behind these crazy prices? You guessed it: a shortage of new cars. The reasons are a combination of what happened to toilet paper last year and what happened to real estate this year. Read about the factors feeding a red-hot used car market at Road and Track. -via Digg

In Japan, the need for immediate, effective protection from earthquakes is great. Designer Kota Nezu offers this chair to help. When the ground begins shaking, remove the back and put it on your head to protect your skull and spine.

-via Toxel

Meet  Ngoc Like Tattoo, a Vietnamese tattoo artist that conceals unwanted marks or scars in the body with detailed and intricate artworks. She inks colorful floral designs and large animal-inspired motifs over scars caused by cesarean sections, wounds, or operations. The cool thing about her body art is that they are well-designed to hide the scars underneath: 

Ngoc’s work is particularly noteworthy since tattoos have long been frowned upon in Vietnam. “It is my hope that our stories can give people a new perspective about the art of tattooing, about it's not only superficial but also spiritual healing power,” Ngoc writes on Facebook. “I am extremely delighted that I am able to help reduce the stigma of tattooing in Vietnam as well as inspiring so many people struggling with their scars to step up, take charge, close their wounds with a meaningful piece of art and live the happy and fulfilling life that we all deserve to have.”

Image credit: Ngoc Like Tattoo

Andrea Love animated the process of making lemonade with tiny needle-felted miniatures. Cute! You have to love that tiny honey bear. -via reddit

Tilly, a border collie, was thrown out of a car that crashed in northern Idaho. He was found two days later at a nearby sheep farm, where he was busying himself by herding the resident sheep. KHQ News reports that he had lost weight, but Tilly was otherwise fine.

That's the kind of attitude that we need today. Although Tilly had lost his job, he immediately went out to find a new job and got right to work.

-via Dave Barry

Don’t worry, it’s not malware or applications that can secretly get your personal information. These easter eggs are a bit of fun, some of them are hidden in code just to say ‘hi’ to the user who was bored enough to read through many lines of code. Some companies sneak job ads into their HTML: 

Companies like Yahoo and eBay have spent years sneaking job ads into the HTML that makes up their websites in the hopes that curious coders would find them. Other sites might have unicorns, guns, or obscure, cryptic messages. Even if you’re not particularly web-savvy, it’s not hard to crack open your favorite site’s source code and comb through it for a bit. If you’re also a diehard Chrome user, then all you need to do is type “view-source:” before a website’s URL. You can also access these codes in any browser by right-clicking on a webpage and hitting “view source.”

Check Gizmodo’s full list of fun Internet easter eggs here! 

Image credit : Shoshana Wodinsky

YouTuber Creezy designed a "Squirrel Feeding Machine" for squirrels, of course, but he had to defend the loaded Rube Goldberg contraption from other critters. To get it started, he glued nuts to a domino, but then had to wait 14 hours for a squirrel to trip it. What follows is glorious, ending in a bountiful meal for the squirrel, plus a chipmunk, blue jay, and a raccoon. -via Boing Boing

People who read the works of contemporary scientists online have probably run into a few archaeologists who were inspired to go into the field by Indiana Jones. I know I have. Real life archaeology turns out to be quite different from the adventures onscreen. Yeah, we've read biographies of quite a few men who were said to be "the inspiration for Indiana Jones," and Harrison Ford's portrayal may have been relatively accurate for the time period, but what went on before and what came after are different worlds.

Forty years after Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered to the public on June 12, 1981, the outsized shadow of Indy still looms large over the field he ostensibly represented. Over three movies in the 1980s, plus a prequel television series and a fourth film that came out in 2008, Harrison Ford’s portrayal of Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr., became indelibly tied to American archaeology. Despite it being set in the 1930s, an homage to the popcorn serials of the 1940s, and a cinematic blockbuster of the 1980s, Raiders of the Lost Ark is still influential to aspiring and veteran archaeologists alike. Even in the 21st century, several outdated myths about archaeological practice have endured thanks to the “Indiana Jones effect.” And contemporary archaeologists, many of whom harbor a love/hate relationship with the films, would like to set the record straight.

Even though the real work is not an Indiana Jones movie, the archaeologists who were inspired by the character enjoy their work, or they wouldn't still be doing it. Read about the work of modern archaeologists and how they compare to the cinematic version at Smithsonian.