While it's not true that pasta first came to Italy from China with Marco Polo, it did travel across the world due to its portability. It was in Italy that pasta was made into an art form, and there are way more pasta shapes than most Americans have ever heard of. Each of these pasta shapes has a story, although some are old and historically murky and others are recent and well-documented, such as Celentano and cavatappi.   

Cavatappi didn’t arrive on the scene until the 1960s. That’s when the Italian pasta brand Barilla introduced a new tubular, corkscrew-shaped pasta called Cellentani. The name is a reference to Adriano Celentano, an Italian pop singer whose energetic stage presence earned him the nickname moleggiato, or “springs.” Barilla writes on its website: “As the shape resembles a coiled spring, it all made sense.” The name cavatappi was actually coined later as a generic term for the pasta shape because Celentano was trademarked by Barilla.

You are probably already familiar with Adriano Celentano. Read the stories behind 14 other pasta shapes, and a brief history of pasta in general at Mental Floss. While the list will introduce you to new pastas, the origin stories are not totally comprehensive. For example, Wikipedia tells us exactly how Cellentani came about.

This particular shape was born in the 1970s at Barilla in Parma[2] when a set of pasta dies had been mistakenly made with a spiral (instead of straight) set of lines. These produced pasta in a spiral or spring (molla in Italian) shape.

So consider the list at Mental Floss to be a portal that may take you down the internet rabbit hole. That's what happened to me.

(Image credit: Francesco Foglieri)

Milan-based architecture firm LCA Architetti designed a simple farmhouse-style home in a small village in Italy. The home, called The House of Wood, Straw, and Cork, is a two-story building that exhibits modern sustainable architectural design. The farmhouse has an exterior made of cork, and is insulated with straw, as Yanko Design details: 

The home is further insulated through the use of straw, which is traditionally used as an insulator for other rural dwellings like barns and henhouses. The straw insulation consists of repurposed discarded rice plants handed over by nearby farmers in the area.

Sustainability was a top priority in constructing The House of Wood, Straw, and Cork, and the house’s commitment to energy-efficiency is exhibited through the recycled material used for insulation, as well as the cluster of solar panels found on the home’s roof. Coupling the use of recycled straw and cork for insulation with photovoltaics for solar energy, The House of Wood, Straw, and Cork stands as a self-powered home, decreasing the overall consumption of energy and emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2.

Image via Yanko Design

Building and cultivating a personal art collection can be a difficult and tedious feat. From picking the real (and right) art pieces for your collection to finding the right platforms or access to purchase these artworks, the processes involved in creating a collection can be intimidating. An art buying and discovery platform aims to make the job easier for young art enthusiasts, as Apartment Therapy details: 

That’s essentially the ethos behind Salon 21, an art buying and discovery platform for young art enthusiasts with a focus on democratizing art by providing access to makers through digital artist talks and curated events. Founder Alex Bass knows a thing or two about building a collection with limited resources; she outfitted her prewar West Village studio with a mixture of her own artwork and personal pieces by friends, artists she admires, and even a piece from the famous street artist Trevor Andrew, aka Gucci Ghost, which she won in an Instagram contest… but more on that later!).

To see tips on starting your personal art collection, you can check the full piece here. 

How does one make a human face from a huge number of pipes? Well, Korean sculpture Yi Chul Hee  is known for using tightly stacked metal pipes cut at interesting angles to create stunning pieces. The artist is basically amazing! From human forms, to life-sized animals, to abstract art pieces, the sculptor utilizes the material and light and shadows that breathe life to his artworks, as My Modern Met details: 

“Pipe sculpting does not consist of sculpting the pipe but the cylindrical space in the pipe,” the artist explains. “This space takes on a new shape each time the surface or the cutting line of the pipe changes and the different shapes thus created give rise to the creation of unique works with a black hole pattern. They are called pieces of pipes but in reality they are pieces of space (the black hole) in the pipe. The charm of my work lies in these pieces seen in three dimensions which give an original and refined rhythm, variable according to the angle of view.”

This insight into Yi’s work may help one better appreciate the incredible detail made of a single material. It is interesting to think that the void is more important than the solids as he describes his process. As you scroll through the photos of each incredible structure, try to focus on the void, or black hole as he describes them, and the range of shadows you can find within.

Image via My Modern Met 

Hermes’s Birkin Bags, which sell for $200,000 each at auctions, have a possibility of getting devalued. Material science company MycoWorks has revealed that it spent three years collaborating with Hermes to create Sylvania, a sustainable material that looks and feels like leather. Sylvania, made from mushrooms, is the company’s attempt at swapping traditional leather with eco-friendly alternatives: 

For thousands of years, people have used leather to create everyday objects like footwear and bags, prizing the material for its durability and beauty. But over the past century, the fashion industry has mass-produced leather to churn out billions of shoes, purses, and accessories, with the global market for leather goods valued at more than $400 billion. This has come at a terrible cost to the planet.

Cows generate methane, a greenhouse gas significantly more potent than carbon dioxide, thereby accelerating climate change. Tanning and dying leather requires chemicals that go on to pollute waterways. Then there’s the animal rights component: Last November, Hermès came under fire from animal rights activists for its plans to build one of the biggest crocodile farms in Australia to produce exotic leathers for its bags.

Scientists and fashion companies have spent decades developing sustainable and humane alternatives to leather. Some brands have created “vegan leather” from plastic, but this is also problematic since the material does not biodegrade and sheds microplastics that end up in our food chain.

Image via Fast Company

Researchers have discovered that a seafood fraud is happening on a global scale. From an analysis of 44 studies, 36% of seafood samples from restaurants and supermarkets in more than 30 countries were mislabelled. Thankfully, no ‘fake’ fish was made from plastic or other materials. The Guardian has more details: 

Sometimes the fish were labelled as different species in the same family. In Germany, for example, 48% of tested samples purporting to be king scallops were in fact the less coveted Japanese scallop. Of 130 shark fillets bought from Italian fish markets and fishmongers, researchers found a 45% mislabelling rate, with cheaper and unpopular species of shark standing in for those most prized by Italian consumers.

Other substitutes were of endangered or vulnerable species. In one 2018 study, nearly 70% of samples from across the UK sold as snapper were a different fish, from an astounding 38 different species, including many reef‐dwelling species that are probably threatened by habitat degradation and overfishing.

Still other samples proved to be not entirely of aquatic species, with prawn balls sold in Singapore frequently found to contain pork and not a trace of prawn.

Fish fraud has long been a known problem worldwide. Because seafood is among the most internationally traded food commodities, often through complex and opaque supply chains, it is highly vulnerable to mislabelling. Much of the global catch is transported from fishing boats to huge transshipment vessels for processing, where mislabelling is relatively easy and profitable to carry out.

Image via The Guardian

Men became friendly with wolves and began to selectively breed them, leading to domestic dogs that range from Irish wolfhounds to teacup chihuahuas. But cats are still pretty much the same as their wild ancestors, the European forest cat (felis silvestris silvestris) and Southwest Asia/North African wildcat (felis silvestris lybica). Experts believe this is because their association with humans was initiated by the cats themselves. They hung around where humans stored food, because that’s where the mice and rats were. Humans accepted the cats as they were for their pest control services, while wolves needed to be improved in order to safely mingle with people.

A study from 2017 looked at the genetics of over 200 cats, from all five wild subspecies, along with cat remains from stone age Romania, and even Egyptian cat mummies, and found that f. lybica in the Near East in 4,400 BCE, and in North Africa around 1,500 BCE, gave rise to the domestic cat, likely because it was here where the earliest agricultural civilizations occurred.  

Still, cats existed unchanged through thousands of years—essentially until the Middle Ages, before selective breeding, the typical activity of domestication, began to give rise to more unique types of cats.

“I think that there was no need to subject cats to such a selection process since it was not necessary to change them,” said evolutionary geneticist and study coauthor Eva-Maria Geigl to National Geographic. “They were perfect as they were.”

Agree or not, you’ll find out more about the domestication of cats at Good News Network. -via Strange Company

(Image credit:Flickr user Cloudtail the Snow Leopard)

It’s time to make your predictions for the men's NCAA basketball tournament! You can get a bracket to fill out here. The tournament bracket is handy for keeping up with games, and for understanding how teams are eliminated along the way. But when did this kind of bracket come about? The first one was organized in the 19th century by chess master Howard Staunton.  

For a chess tournament in 1851, Staunton had 16 players draw lots for random pairings, called brackets because they resembled the punctuation marks of the same name. The eight winners would then draw lots for pairings, and the four winners from that round would do the same, leaving two finalists. The idea, Staunton said, was “to bring the two best players in the Tournament into collision for the chief prize.” The reality, however, fell short: Random drawing after every round led to complaints that some players had easier matches. As a result, chess tournaments shifted to a round-robin format.

Brackets were used again—and have been ever since—for the Wimbledon tennis tournament in 1877, and they found a home in college basketball in 1939, when the National Association of Basketball Coaches had an eight-team tournament. The University of Oregon beat The Ohio State in what is regarded as the first NCAA Tournament.

The science of constructing a tournament bracket has evolved quite a bit. The NCAA ranks teams for seeding to make sure the top teams don’t meet each other in the early rounds, and in most years, there are geographic considerations (but not this year). Read about how the tournament bracket came about and how March Madness took over the country, at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Pete Souza)

The dinosaur won’t pull a Jurassic Park on us, thank goodness. Paleontologists have identified a new genus and species of a bird-like dinosaur  from a single foot bone found in Catalonia, Spain. The creature, designated as Tamarro insperatus, existed roughly 66 million years ago, as Syfy details: 

“During the late Cretaceous (77-66 million years ago) in the run-up to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, Europe was a series of islands populated by diverse and distinctive communities of dinosaurs and other vertebrates,” explained lead study author Dr. Albert Sellé and his colleagues from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafon at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Museu de la Conca Dellà in their report published in Scientific Reports.

“Many of these animals exhibited peculiar features that may have been generated by lack of space and resources in their insular habitats.”

Tamarro insperatus belonged to a family of animals known as Troodontidae, a group of unique theropod dinosaurs whose sizes vary from between 1.7 pounds for Mei long up to the 100-pound Troodon formosus.

According to the research paper, the existence of European troodontids has been controversial and subject to debate for decades, mostly due to the absence of any sizeable fossil record except for a few discovered teeth. 

Image via Syfy

It’s not what we view as monsters, worry not. Researchers have just confirmed the details of a collision that occurred in 2016, when the IceCube Neutrino Observatory was able to detect the most energetic antimatter particle ever. The ultralight particle smacked into the Antarctic ice with the energy of 6,300 mosquitos, as LiveScience details: 

This antineutrino, an antimatter counterpart of the wispy, difficult-to-detect particles known as neutrino, collided with an electron somewhere in the ice of Antarctica at nearly the speed of light. That collision created a shower of particles detected by the buried IceCube Neutrino Observatory — a facility responsible for much of the important high-energy neutrino research of the last decade, as Live Science has reported. Now, IceCube physicists report that that particle shower included evidence of a long-theorized but never-before-seen event known as "Glashow resonance."

[...]

It's usually difficult to wrap one's mind around the numbers involved in high-energy particles. A single neutrino has a mass of about 2 billion-billion-billion-billionths of a gram, and thousands of low-energy neutrinos from the sun pass through your body every second of the day without noticeable effects. A neutrino with 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) of energy is another beast entirely. According to CERN, the European physics laboratory, a teraelectronvolt (TeV) is equivalent to the energy of a single mosquito flying at 1 mph (1.6 km/h). And 6.3 PeV is 6,300 TeV. So turn that single mosquito into a swarm of 6,300 (or accelerate it to Mach-8.2, more than four times the top speed of an F-16) and you've got the energy of the single infinitesimal particle required for Glashow's resonance.

Another way to think of 6.3 PeV: It's 450 times the maximum energy that the Large Hadron Collider — CERN's 17-mile-long (27 kilometers), multibillion dollar accelerator responsible for the detection of the Higgs boson — should be able to produce by the late 2020s following ongoing upgrades.

Image via LiveScience 

School buses in the United States are almost always yellow with black lines down the side. ClawBoss is a school bus driver who is happy to explain what they are for. This short and to-the-point video ends up being more interesting than it has any right to. -via reddit

It’s hard to see the big picture when you are a small, specialized part of a film. Still, it’s fun to see how surprised actors, producers, and directors can be by a huge success coming from what they considered to be a small film they only worked on for a paycheck. Donald Sutherland didn’t think much of Animal House because he only had a cameo role, but his negotiation for compensation was a big miscalculation.

On the other hand, while DC might have had little hope for a Batman film, Michael Uslan had been working for that chance all his life. You can read his story in a previous post. See the other pictofacts about actors and filmmaker who had little faith in their movies at Cracked.

When tourists visit Pisa, Italy, they usually prioritize visiting the famous leaning bell tower there. Likewise when tourists flock to Groom, Texas (population 574), they seek out the leaning water tower.

Atlas Obscura tells us about Ralph Britten, the owner of a truck stop along Route 66. In about 1980 (the date is uncertain) he bought an old water tower and had it erected next to his facility. He intentionally tilted it so that passerby would think that it was about to fall over:

This helped his business immeasurably. It would catch the eye of every passing motorist on the route for years, many of them becoming terrified that the tower was in the process of collapsing. This played right into Britten’s hand. Worried route-takers often swerved off the road and into his truck stop, shouting “watch out! That tower’s about to fall!” Britten responded that it had been like that for years, and then asked them to sit down and buy food and a drink. 

Britten’s manipulation of the tower did, however, require sufficient knowledge of physics. If the water tower were completely empty or completely full, its center of mass would be directly in the middle of the can, making it topple when slanted. So Britten filled it only partially, so that the low level of water would place the can’s center of mass near its base, directly above the two supporting legs, keeping it aloft.

Photo: Steve Hardy

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Alternative title: How to Start a Kitchen Fire.

Mackenzie Carpenter plays a cooking guru who will burn down your house if you follow her instructions, especially the suggestion that you walk away after starting the toaster.

I'm curious about an egg packet, though. Perhaps this could be done in a toaster oven.

-via Swiss Miss

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Mia Stålnacke, a photographer, lives in Sweden---an ideal location for photographing the aurora borealis. Her Instagram feed is filled with many images of the Northern Lights and, occasionally, the more terrestrial wonders of Sweden.

This photo suggests a celestial horse riding through the sky. Who shall attempt to ride it?

-via Astronomy Picture of the Day