Over a decade ago on an internet forum for mineral collectors, Alysson Rowan stumbled upon a post from another user. The man said in his post that he’s terrified because some of the mineral specimens that he bought were apparently radioactive. Fortunately, Rowan is a radiation safety professional, and, in response to the man’s post, she wrote an article about nuclear safety and the reality of radioactivity. Naturally, Rowan’s article became popular for many radioaction enthusiasts, but with more readers came more follow-up questions. Rowan could have answered these questions one by one, but she followed someone’s advice.

‘Look, forget about these bits and pieces: Just compile this all into a book,” Rowan says. “And so that’s what I did.”

And so, Rowan wrote a book titled Here Be Dragons: The Care and Feeding of Radioactive Mineral Species. The better news? The book is free!

Just like her article which introduced people to nuclear safety, Rowan’s book also became popular and is now the “go-to resource for the radioactive rockhound community.”

Learn more about the book, as well as stories from various collectors, over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Andrey Stoev/ Atlas Obscura)

About 18 years ago, entomologist Andrea Colla received a strange request to survey the secret tunnels under the Italian city of Trieste. The said secret tunnels were a Nazi-raid shelter during the Second World War, and it eventually became a museum managed by cave enthusiasts of the Trieste Alpine Club. But what was inside the now not-so-secret tunnels aside from the usual tourists and school groups? That’s what Colla went to find out.

Colla did not expect much from his investigation. And he was right. What he found out inside the bunker were “standard basement crickets and spiders.”

So he was taken aback in 2019 when one of the air-raid tunnel guides sent him a snapshot of a cartoonishly evil-looking creature — like a cross between a tarantula and a crab, with skin-crawlingly long legs, barbed pincers, and a brownish coat of armor. To Colla, it was unmistakable. This was a harmless arachnid called an amblypygid, sometimes known as a whip spider or tailless whip scorpion, which was neither spider nor scorpion. And it was not supposed to be in Italy at all.

Amblypygids were popping up elsewhere, too. In 2018, an undergraduate in suburban Athens found a few scuttling through his bathroom and kitchen — now he’s credited with uncovering the species’ presence in continental Europe. In 2019, there was the first confirmed record of amblypygids in Jordan, also in a bathroom. In both cases, the person who helped identify the critters was Brazilian arachnologist Gustavo de Miranda. And he’s just outdone himself: Last year he submitted a paper, the publication of which is forthcoming, describing 33 new amblypygid species, one of which has only ever been seen in the pipes and storage sheds of a Rio de Janeiro museum.

The question is, where are these whip spiders coming from?

Learn more about this story over at Undark.

(Image Credit: Graham Wise/ Wikimedia Commons)

Javier Báez.
El Mago.
The Magician. pic.twitter.com/yZX7HgUFCU

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) May 27, 2021

The Pirates infielders were not on their game Thursday. There were two outs in the third inning when Javier Báez of the Cubs got a hit. First baseman Will Craig only had to tag the base, but he did not. The rest of the play needs a Yakety Sax soundtrack! See it from different angles here. If you don't know how baseball works, here's a layman's explanation. 

The Cubs ended up beating the Pirates 5-3. This video induced Mefites to reminisce about the dumbest play they remember from their Little League games.   

Having a cat in your home is good, but having two cats is infinitely much better. Of course, this would mean that your stress, cat food, and your expenses, will be doubled, so don’t keep a second cat if you’re not ready for the commitment. But if you can, then go.

Bored Panda provides us with 50 photos which prove to us why keeping two cats is much better than just keeping one. See them all over at the site.

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

A lot of us spend out whole lives trying to figure out what to do with our lives. Meanwhile, we are growing up, working to make a living, and looking forward to retirement. Sometimes you need to step back and look at your life from another perspective. Kurzgesagt isn't going to tell you what you should do with your life, but they have some statistics to help you understand how important your time really is. -via Kottke

Now that’s a breakthrough! Scientists have managed to partially restore the vision of a 58-year-old man with an inherited eye disease thanks to gene therapy. The scientists injected genetically engineered viruses into his eye. After being blind for decades, the man is now able to see small objects like a staple box when wearing a specialized pair of goggles: 

"These are very exciting results," says Raymond Wong, a stem cell biologist at the University of Melbourne developing treatments for eye diseases who was not affiliated with the study.

While the potential therapeutic benefits are enormous, Wong notes the technique has, so far, only been used in one patient. It forms part of an ongoing clinical trial to test the safety and tolerability of the gene therapy. Continued testing and refinement could see the technique help blind patients navigate day-to-day tasks more effectively. 

How did they do it? By re-engineering cells of the eye to make them more sensitive to light.

To learn more about the in-depth process involved in the man’s eyesight restoration, check the full article here! 

Image credit: Victor Freitas via Unsplash

An international team of over 100 astrophysicists have banded together to create a huge 3D map of the universe (as we know it). The map features details that let us look back at how it expanded and formed its current known state. The project was a result of a 20-year-long survey of the night sky. Not gonna lie, I'm more interested in pivoting around the map and trying to look for different galaxies and clusters that I’m not aware of. Check the full video here. 

Image screenshot via Flipboard 

Do you ever wonder about that one glove you can never find? Redditor Brunson21 spotted a clear case of cat burglary. Esme may have sad memories of when she was a kitten and lost her mittens. With neighbors turning their backs on their gardening gloves for a minute, Esme captured her prey and brought it home. Her owner was not pleased.

The cat owner is making a valiant attempt to reunite the stolen gloves with their rightful owners. But Esme is not unique. Wherever you live, remember to bring your gloves in every time you take a break from yard work.  

Look, some people love adding extra ingredients to their coffee. For example, some like adding cinnamon - which is good for brain health (and it makes coffee taste better). For Morgan Osborne however, she likes to add something unexpected in her coffee -- hot sauce. You read that right, the condiment we usually add to tacos- and with its spicy and slightly sour taste, you really won’t expect it to be added to coffee, right? Well, the director of culinary development at Archer Daniels experimented with it:  

Part of Osborne’s job is experimenting (read: playing around) in the kitchen, and the idea of adding hot sauce to coffee was something she cooked up alongside her colleague and fellow chef John Stephanian. “I’m not going to lie. I was very apprehensive to try hot sauce in coffee at first,” Osborne says. But at the same time, she had a hunch it could be downright delicious. “The concept of combining decadence and heat in places has been a consistent trend in the food industry, such as Mexican hot chocolate and jalapeño margaritas,” she says.

After many hours of experimentation and taste testing, Osborne drilled down a few guidelines that are key to keep in mind when blending hot sauce in coffee. The first step, she says, is choosing the right beans. “I recommend using a light roast, medium roast max, because you don’t want the bitter notes found in darker roasts to overpower the hot sauce,” she says.

Osborne also likes incorporating a few other warming ingredients to the mix for a rich, robust flavor. Specifically, she recommends two to three teaspoons of roasted cardamom seeds and a touch of vanilla. “You can either buy cardamom seeds pre-roasted at the store or you can roast them yourself on the stove,” she says. Cardamom is also good for gut health, so this step is actually making your morning coffee even more nutritious.

Image credit: Devin Avery via Unsplash 

Researchers from Flinders University in Australia have discovered two Viking ship burials thanks to a combination of modern technology and drawings by antiquarian Ole Worm. These drawings, which showed more than 20 ship burials, are dated to be over 400 years old. For reference, at the present time, only ten of those burials have been found:

“Our survey identified two new raised areas that could in fact be ship settings that align with Worm’s drawings from 1650,” said Dr. Erin Sebo, lead author of the study published in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology.

“One appears to be a typical ship setting and the second remains ambiguous but it’s impossible to know without excavation and further survey.”

The recent survey is the first study of the Kalvestene site since the National Museum’s research in the early 20th century. It is the first to pair Ole Worm’s drawings with on-the-ground research.

Sebo and her colleagues used several approaches to survey the site, from studying relevant medieval records and taking aerial photogrammetry to scanning the island of Hjarnø with laser imaging, detection and ranging (lidar).



Image credit: Flinders University  via All That’s Interesting 

Now you can learn how to play the game. Meet the Egyptian Senet, one of the most popular board games of the ancient world. Senet is a game with deep links to the afterlife, played on a board that represents the underworld. The game was featured in tombs, showing the dead playing against friends and family. Senet was loved by Egyptian royals, as Open Culture details: 

“Beloved by such luminaries as the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramesses II,” Meilan Solly notes at Smithsonian, Senet was played on “ornate game boards, examples of which still survive today.” (Four boards were found in Tut’s tomb.) “Those with fewer resources at their disposal made do with grids scratched on stone surfaces, tables or the floor.” As the game became a tool for glimpsing one’s fate, its last five spaces acquired hieroglyphics symbolizing “special playing circumstances. Pieces that landed in square 27’s ‘waters of chaos,’ for example, were sent all the way back to square 15 — or removed from the board entirely,” sort of like hitting the wrong square in Chutes and Ladders.

Senet gameplay was complicated. “Two players determined their moves by throwing casting sticks or bones,” notes the Met. The object was to get all of one’s pieces across square 30 — each move represented an obstacle to the afterlife, trials Egyptians believed the dead had to endure and pass or fail (the game’s name itself means “passing”). “Because of this connection, senet was not just a game; it was also a symbol for the struggle to obtain immortality, or endless life,” as well as a means of understanding what might get in the way of that goal.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a really unique way to tour the United States from a different perspective. If a drop of rain fell anywhere in the US you choose, what path would it take to the ocean? River Runner will show you! I dropped a raindrop in Kentucky and followed it downstream through hills, farmland, cities, and around numerous bends to the Ohio River and into the Mississippi River. Since I live on a river bank, I then went back in and found my home and the path that water takes.   

Explore the waterways of America with this cool application, but keep in mind there are a few places in the US where a raindrop will not make it to the ocean. -via Metafilter

On April 17, 1961, a small army of 1,500 Cuban exiles backed by the US government landed at the Bay of Pigs in the hope of overthrowing the Castro regime. To prepare for this great event that would doubtlessly be the start of a successful military campaign, the CIA struck commemorative coins.

Alas, for the Cuban exile troops and the people of Cuba, Castro's forces knew about the invasion and quickly defeated it. This silver coin was, as a result, never circulated.

-via Super Punch | Photos: CIA

It may seem hard to BEElieve, but a couple of busy BEES were seen working together to remove the lid of a Fanta soda bottle in Brazil. Is this the start of a zomBEE apocalypse? I think I'll not worry and BEE happy since their teamwork is a BEEautiful sight to behold. -YouTube Video Via Viral Hog.

Bee Happy by Tobe Fonseca . Check out the NeatoShop for more bee themed shirts.

Enjoy this amazing lip-sync performance by The Divas In Drag Italian Opera Company. The company is only two guys, who were bored during lockdown and created this video. From their "about" page:

ARE YOU A REAL OPERA COMPANY?

We're as much a real opera company as Maria Callas was a nuclear physicist... not at all.

-via Boing Boing