Rufus Weaver was an anatomist of the late 19th century. His specialty was preparing anatomical samples, that is, preserving human body parts and organs for medical classes at Hahnemann Medical Collage. Weaver's most famous project was the retrieval, preservation, and display of an entire human nervous system, which had never been done before. In 1888, Weaver dissected a body and separated out the nervous system: nerves, brain, and eyeballs, and preserved it in the preparation you see here. The specimen is unnerving to anyone who sees it, and you have to wonder who this was in life. It wasn't until 1915 that she was identified as "Harriet Cole," a black woman who worked at the college, and was said to have willed her body to science.    

When another Hahnemann physician, George Geckeler, restored the mounted model in 1960, LIFE magazine devoted a splashy photo spread to the effort. The writer recounted how a scrubwoman who had been ignored by everyone in the laboratory “stared in fascination at cadavers” and “eavesdropp[ed]” on lectures. She osmosed the chatter, the author continued; Harriet supposedly “took to heart [Weaver’s] complaints about a shortage of corpses” and “willed her body to him.” There’s no indication of how the writer gleaned this information—this supposedly intimate understanding of a long-dead woman’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It seems that “no one went back to fact-check” the basic story, Herbison says. “Whoever said it first, that’s the thing that you use.” Details carry over from one story to another like sprawling arithmetic.

One photograph accompanying the LIFE story shows Geckeler stooping so his eyes align with the ones on the preparation. He scrunches his own, like someone puzzling over a painting, studying the canvas as if trying to decipher genius suspended between the fibers. By this point, the myth of “Harriet Cole” had grown to include not just Weaver’s work, but the woman herself—a lowly person made spectacular, in every sense. A fascinating object never quite or fully human, but almost looking the part.

That story is hard to believe, considering that willing one's body to science was not a thing in 1888. Cadavers for medical specimens at the time came from grave robbing and claiming bodies that would otherwise be buried by the state. Alaina McNaughton, Matt Herbison, and Brandon Zimmerman have been trying to track down the mystery of Harriet Cole. Was she a real person, and was she the owner of this nervous system? Weaver left few clues as to how he prepared the specimen, and the identity of the donor was not in his records. Read what the team found out about Weaver's work and the person whose nerves are still on display 130 years later at Atlas Obscura. 

The three young ducklings you see in some Donald Duck cartoons are Huey, Dewey, and Louie in English-speaking countries, but they are adapted to work in other languages in different ways. In some places they are given alliterative or rhyming names that are real names in the local language, and in others they are labeled with nonsense words that sound funny. In a few places, they are named with some variant of "quack."

This map (which you can see much bigger here), along with others that deal with cartoon names, comes from the delightful blog Mapologies, where you'll find maps that answer all kinds of language questions, like how to say "banana" in Latin America, how other countries refer to the Milky Way, and the origins of color words in different languages.  

-via Kottke

Ze Frank has now established himself as a person that people will listen to when he talks about animals. This video, which you might assume is about bats, is really about Batman. His name is Dr. Merlin Tuttle, which you have to admit is a much better name than Bruce Wayne, or at least more suitable for a comic book. But Merlin Tuttle is a real life superhero, going the extra mile to protect the bats who need him. Ze Frank explains, while gently poking fun at Tuttle's mustache. Find out more about Tuttle's work at Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation site.

It’s like a scene from a fantasy novel, or a fairy tale. Photographer Michael Shainblum showcased the grandeur of Yosemite National Park in a new light. Shainblum’s photography exhibits the dream-like quality of the park, cast in thick fog and rainbow mist. The photos were shot in winter after a dusting of snow, further amplifying the fantasy-esque vibes these photos have. 

Image via the Colossal 

Hey, any research that lets you be in proximity of adorable furballs is a good enough motivation for me! Four hundred adorable puppies helped researchers answer the question of understanding body language. The proponents of the study enlisted the help of these puppies to show the canine ability to understand human pointing, which appears to be hardwired in their DNA: 

“Using puppies to answer this question is a great approach,” says Heidi Parker, a geneticist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Dog Genome Project who was not involved with the work. “Behavior is the holy grail of dog genetics,” she says. Before scientists go searching for genes that may have turned dogs into our faithful companions, they need to make sure they’re there in the first place, she says. “I feel like this study shows that.”

Scientists have known for more than 2 decades that dogs understand the logic behind a surprisingly complex gesture: When we point at something, we want them to look at it. That insight eludes even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, and helps our canine companions bond with us. But it’s been unclear whether pooches acquire this ability simply by hanging out with us, or it’s encoded in their genes. “It’s the one piece of the puzzle we don’t have evidence for,” says Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona.

Enter puppies. If social intelligence is genetic, dogs should display it at a very young age. And there shouldn’t be any learning required.

That’s what MacLean and his colleagues found. The scientists partnered with Canine Companions for Independence, which breeds dogs to assist people in the United States with post-traumatic stress disorder and physical disabilities. The group loaned the researchers 375 8-week-old Labrador and golden retriever pups: They were just old enough to participate in the experiments, but young enough to have had very little interaction—and thus experience or learning—with people.

Image via Science Magazine 

Talk about having the right timing and luck! A photographer was able to catch a giant manta ray as it leaped out of the water while he was taking a photo of a surfer at a Florida beach. Rusty Escandell didn’t realize the wonderful coincidence until he got home after having fun near Officers Club Beach at Patrick Space Force Base, as CNN details: 

"I kind of saw a splash behind the surfer, but didn't think much of it," he said. "It could have been a fish, could have been anything."

Escandell had taken a burst of photos that showed the ray breaching out of the water.

"It was pretty amazing," he said.

His daughter and her boyfriend are both marine biologists and said they'd seen some manta rays in the water after he took the photo, Escandell said.

Escandell owns an auto repair shop and lives in nearby Satellite Beach, and said he enjoys taking pictures at the beach fairly regularly.

He didn't know the surfer in the photo, but they've talked since the photo went viral.

"He's excited too," Escandell said.

Image via CNN 

It all started in 1785 when Prince George of Wales was lovesick with Maria Anne Fitzherbert. Their story didn't really start well. Their courtship had been disastrous:

Royal laws forbade a Catholic widow like his beloved from becoming a monarch. To make matters worse, the upstanding Fitzherbert had fled the country after the prince’s first proposal, in an attempt to avoid controversy.

Nothing could stop the prince, though! On November 3rd, he begged again for her hand in marriage through a very passionate letter. In the letter, he also attached something.

“I send you a parcel,” George wrote in the letter’s postscript, “and I send you at the same time an Eye.”

This, my friends, started this trend wherein lovers would send jewelry containing a painting of their eye -- intently gazing.

Image Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum, London

No records document how Fitzherbert responded to the eye itself, but “it must have bolstered the prince’s marriage proposal,” as scholar Hanneke Grootenboer pointed out in her 2012 book Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures. Soon after his letter, the star-crossed lovers wed in a covert ceremony. To cement the union, another disembodied eye was painted—this time in Fitzherbert’s likeness, nestled into a locket for the prince to treasure. No matter where his royal duties took him, George could open the jewel and receive his bride’s amorous gaze.

Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Prince of Wales and Fitzherbert weren’t the only ones exchanging eyes in 18th-century England. Eye miniatures, also known as lover’s eyes, cropped up across Britain around 1785 and were en vogue for shorter than half a century. As with the royal couple, most were commissioned as gifts expressing devotion between loved ones. Some, too, were painted in memory of the deceased. All were intimate and exceedingly precious: eyes painted on bits of ivory no bigger than a pinky nail, then set inside ruby-garlanded brooches, pearl-encrusted rings, or ornate golden charms meant to be tucked into pockets, or pinned close to the heart.

Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Meet the magical box that could produce oxygen on Mars! Okay, maybe not magical. The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is capable of pulling oxygen from Mars’ poisonous atmosphere! The golden, breadbox-sized apparatus is tucked away inside Perseverance’s chassis, and the first demonstration of MOXIE will be called in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), as Live Science details: 

NASA has long been interested in ISRU and put out a call for an oxygen-producing experiment when Perseverance was first being conceived, Eric Daniel Hinterman, an aerospace engineering doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the MOXIE team, told Live Science. 

While oxygen is useful for astronauts to breathe, Hinterman said that it's even more important as rocket propellant. When combined with hydrogen, oxygen combusts in a powerful explosion that is used to lift many modern rockets from their launch pads. 

In addition to the propellant needed to get off Earth and fly to Mars, a spacecraft bringing humans to the Red Planet would need between 66,000 and 100,000 pounds (30,000 and 45,000 kilograms) of oxygen to return home, according to NASA. "We can send that oxygen from Earth to Mars, but if we can make it on the surface that potentially saves us a lot of money," Hinterman said.

Any additional oxygen produced through ISRU technology could go into life-support systems for astronauts while on the surface of Mars, Hinterman said. 

In order to reach the ground, Perseverance had to go through a complicated sky crane maneuver and the famous "seven minutes of terror" that subjected all of its components to some fairly extreme forces. A few days after landing, the MOXIE team put the instrument through a series of what are known as "aliveness" tests to make sure it was in working order. 

Image via Live Science 

The Bayeux Tapestry is believed to be commissioned as an apology gift for the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The tapestry captures how people and events looked in medieval Europe in stylized detail. For the first time, enthusiasts and curious minds alike can view and zoom through a digital version of the artwork at the Bayeux Museum’s website, as Open Culture details: 

The museum “worked with teams from the University of Caen Normandie to digitize high-resolution images of the tapestry, which were taken in 2017,” says Medievalists.net.

“A simple interface was created to access the digital version, which allows users to zoom in and explore it in great detail with access to Latin translations in French and English.” Made of 2.6 billion pixels (which brings it to eight gigabytes in size), the online Bayeux Tapestry lets us zoom in so far as to examine its individual threads — the same level at which it was inspected in real life earlier last year in anticipation of its next restoration.

Image via Wikimedia Commons 

Crochet has had a bit of a renaissance lately, with crafters making adorable amigurumi figures and Halloween costumes and sharing them online. Before that, crochet was seen as something to keep a woman's hands busy while her husband flipped through the channels (I've been there), slightly less useful than knitting, because knitting produces clothing. However, there was a time during the late 1960s in the early '70s when colorful crocheted clothing became quite popular with the young, hip crowd. And it was all because of a Swedish crochet artist named Birgitta Bjerke.

On December 11, 1968, Eric Clapton stepped onto a low stage inside Intertel (V.T.R. Services) Studio north of London to play a few tunes with John Lennon and Keith Richards; the occasion was the taping of “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” for the BBC. At the time, Clapton was the most revered electric guitarist in rock, even amid the incendiary ascendancy of Jimi Hendrix. A few weeks earlier, Clapton had performed his last two shows as a member of Cream at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall, and by the summer of 1969, he would team up with Steve Winwood of Traffic to form a “supergroup” called Blind Faith.

Normally, none of this would have anything to do with crochet, but on that particular December day, Clapton was wearing a brightly colored, predominantly orange crocheted jacket, in which grids of traditional granny squares on the garment’s front, back, and cuffs were paired with bold stripes of alternating colors circling up the sleeves; Clapton’s red tennis shoes and cherry-red Gibson ES-335 completed his ensemble.

Handmade for him by a 27-year-old Stockholm native named Birgitta Bjerke—who was recently arrived in London from New York via Athens, and sold her fashions under the label “100% Birgitta”—Clapton’s jacket reflected the anything-goes fashion ethos of London’s trendy King’s Road. That’s where Bjerke worked, hung out, and was introduced to the city’s music and fashion scenes by another Swede, Ulla Larsson, who dressed some of the biggest names in British rock from a vintage-clothing stall she managed in the Chelsea Antique Market, across the street from Carlyle Square.

“It wasn’t a store per se,” Bjerke tells me over the phone, “more like a booth. It was like being in an Aladdin’s cave draped in magnificent textiles. It was fabulous.”

Bjerke dressed other rock stars in her crocheted creations as well. Her life and her art took her across Europe and to the United States. Read about the fabulous life and art of Birgitta Bjerke in an interview at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: Karl Ferris)

There’s still some water on Mars, apparently! According to a new NASA-backed study, a significant portion of Mars’ moisture is trapped in its crust. Caltech PhD candidate Eva Scheller, the lead author of the study, looked at models that quantified the amount of water on Mars over time, as CNET details: 

They found that the atmospheric escape theory could not completely account for conditions seen today above and below the surface of our neighboring world.

"Atmospheric escape clearly had a role in water loss, but findings from the last decade of Mars missions have pointed to the fact that there was this huge reservoir of ancient hydrated minerals whose formation certainly decreased water availability over time," explains Bethany Ehlmann, CalTech professor of planetary science.

When water and rock interact, a chemical weathering process can occur that creates materials such as clays that contain water within their mineral structure. This process happens on Earth, but the geological cycle eventually sends moisture trapped in rocks back into the atmosphere via volcanism. Mars, however, appears to have very little if any volcanic activity, leaving all that water stuck in the crust.

"All of this water was sequestered fairly early on, and then never cycled back out," Scheller says.

The team found that 4 billion years ago, Mars had enough water to cover the entire planet with an ocean between 100 and 1,500 meters (328 and 4,920 feet) deep, and that between 30% and 99% of that water is now trapped in minerals in the crust.

Image via wikimedia commons

Social reality is our way of embracing and making sense of our environment. This reality involves people attributing meaning and labels to the objects we see around us. Alternatively, our social reality can simply make something up and communicate it and its meaning to other people and be treated as a real thing, as Science Focus details: 

Brexit is also social reality. Even your own name is social reality. Someone just made it up, and you and other people treat it as real. In fact, most of us spend most of our time in a real world of serious make-believe.

How do human brains create social reality? To answer this, let’s consider it from a brain’s point of view. For your whole life, your brain is trapped inside a dark, silent box called your skull.

Your brain constantly receives data from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sense organs. It also receives a continuous stream of sense data from inside your body as your lungs expand, your heart beats, your temperature changes, and the rest of your insides carry on their symphony of activity.

All this data presents a mystery to your brain-in-a-box. Together, the data represents the end result of some set of causes that are unknown.

When something in the world produces a change in air pressure that you hear as a loud bang, some potential causes could be a door slamming, a gunshot, or a fish tank toppling to the floor. When your stomach unleashes a gurgle, the cause might be hunger, indigestion, nervousness, or love.

To learn more about how our minds shape reality, check the full piece here. 

Image via Science Focus

Scientists in Israel have broken a record by growing mice embryos in an artificial environment for 11 or 12 days. This may not seem like a long time, but it is half the animal's normal gestation period. The embryos were five days old when they were taken from pregnant mice. The breakthrough appears to be a system for forcing oxygen into their cells.

It’s record for development of a mammal outside the womb, and according to the research team, human embryos could be next—raising huge new ethical questions.

“This sets the stage for other species,” says Jacob Hanna, a developmental biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who led the research team. “I hope that it will allow scientists to grow human embryos until week five.”

Growing human embryos in the lab for that long, deep into the first trimester, would put science on a collision course with the abortion debate. Hanna believes lab-grown embryos could be a research substitute for tissue derived from abortions, and possibly a source of tissue for medical treatments as well.

Scientists have already done experiments that involve creating artificial human embryos (called blastoids) by coaxing generic skin or stem cells into forming what looks like an embryo. However, there are international standards and laws in various countries that limit how long scientists can grow human embryos. Read more about this research at MIT Technology Review. -via Damn Interesting

(Unrelated image credit: Pazit Polak)

Video game development gets bumpy and rough sometimes, and there’s a chance that games in development will be left there forever. Video games are a source of income and profit, and publishers will opt to cancel a game instead of putting more money in developing something that may not return their money or isn’t working out. Digital Trends lists some games that never got published along with the reason why they got stuck in development only. Check the full piece here. 

image via Digital Trends

Thanks to Amazon’s recommendation algorithms, conspiracy theorist David Ickle’s book The Answer is now on the site’s top 30 bestseller list for Communication and Media Studies. Other COVID conspiracy theory books are also being suggested to people who are searching for information about the pandemic. Buzzfeed News has more details : 

The problem highlights how Amazon’s search and book promotion mechanisms often direct customers to COVID-19 conspiracy titles. Tuters does not advocate for banning the books but says Amazon needs to follow the lead of other platforms and elevate reliable information about COVID-19.

For roughly a year, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and Twitter have placed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines at the top of results pages when people search for information about the pandemic, and removed coronavirus misinformation from their platforms and their recommendation systems. This stands in stark contrast to Amazon, where researchers found that COVID conspiracy books have appeared on the first page of search results for basic terms like “covid,” “covid-19,” and “vaccine.” Amazon also recommended conspiracy books when the researchers browsed non-conspiratorial books about the virus and related topics.

An Amazon spokesperson said that beginning in February 2020, the company placed a banner with a link to resources about COVID-19 when people search for terms related to the pandemic. It began doing the same for vaccines this January.

“We’ve added links to these sites (ex. the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization) at the top of the search result pages if a customer searches for books related to vaccines or the coronavirus,” they said.

But this feature is not consistent across Amazon’s international stores. 

Image via Buzzfeed News