Ora Lee was a young woman who worked in a match factory in Ohio. In 1908, she discovered she was pregnant, and begged her boyfriend Guy Rasor to marry her. Rasor purchased a marriage license, but the next day, Ora Lee was found dead, shot through the head and dumped on the side of the road. Rasor was arrested, but the only evidence linking him to the crime were some bloodstains on his coat. He said it was pig's blood. Could anyone prove otherwise? Immunologist Paul Uhlenhuth had developed a technique for distinguishing human from animal blood, but that was in Germany, and the research wasn't well known in the US. However, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence Dr. John Spenzer of Ohio Wesleyan University's medical school had studied in Germany. Spenzer was contacted about the case. After conducting several tests of the blood, he proceeded with Uhlenhuth’s “precipitin reaction.”

Precipitin tests rely on an unusual property in blood serum that “repels” any foreign substances. When a foreign body like a protein is introduced, the antibodies in the blood form a cloud of precipitated substance. Immunologists were interested because antigens—proteins that produce antibodies—would lead to better vaccines and blood typing. For Spenzer, how and when (and if) the reaction occurred would allow him to determine what sort of animal the blood came from. The original procedure involved a great deal of effort, however, and a strong stomach, because the chemist must first prepare the antibody serum in a process that reads more like witch-doctoring than scientific method.

Warning: the 1908 test described involves animal cruelty. The results were introduced into the murder trial of Guy Rasor, and it is anyone's guess whether the jury understood any of it. But the Orc Lee case introduced blood expertise into American crime investigation, and you can read the entire story at Crime Reads. -via Damn Interesting

(Unrelated image credit: SpicyMilkBoy)

We've been posting videos from Tom Scott for twelve years now. Personally, my favorite is still this one. They have become so familiar that Matt Colbo made one, too. While the information about the subject is perfectly useless, his impression is amazing. -via Laughing Squid

Meanwhile, the real Tom is overdue for a haircut.

The Tower of London has been home to ravens for hundreds of years. Legend has it that if the ravens ever vacate the tower, the kingdom will fall. Accounts of the origin of the legend vary. It was just last year that we posted about ravenmaster Chris Skaife successfully breeding a new raven in the tower. But this is 2020.  

Summer visitor numbers would usually exceed 15,000 but because of the coronavirus pandemic, they have fallen to fewer than 800 a day. As a result, the birds are restless for more company.

With a lack of regular tourists, the birds have been venturing away, according to those who work there.

Christopher Skaife, a raven master, told the Sun: “If the ravens were to leave, the tower would crumble to dust. The tower is only the tower when the people are here.

Is this an ominous omen or just a sign of the times? Why not both? Read more about the ravens at the Guardian. -via Strange Company

When the song “Your Body Is A Wonderland” was created, the composer John Mayer probably did not think about the body in a scientific way. But the body really is a wonderland in its own way. It is full of wonders that will surprise you and weird you out.

Cracked.com compiles 22 of these amazing body trivias. See them over at the site.

(Image Credit: Cracked.com)

When this groom said to his wife that “2020 has not been the best year”, he wasn’t expecting Mother Nature herself to react to his statement, as if to ask, “what did you just say!?”

(Image Credit: u/about6140ninjas/ Reddit)

With over 95 percent of the population vaccinated against the dreaded disease, the Africa Regional Certification Commission (ARCC) has finally declared the continent free of wild polio last August 25. It is a historic day for the region, indeed.

Polio, short for poliomyelitis, is caused by the poliovirus and spreads through person-to-person transmission via contact with fecal matter and, less commonly, droplets from a cough or sneeze of an infected person. It largely affects children under the age of 5. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "1 in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis. Among those paralysed, 5 percent to 10 percent die when their breathing muscles become immobilized."

[...]

According to the WHO, global wild poliovirus cases have decreased by over 99 percent since 1988, when the World Health Assembly decided to eradicate the disease worldwide. Two of the three strains are now completely eradicated. Wild polio type 1 now remains only in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“This is a momentous milestone for Africa. Now future generations of African children can live free of wild polio,” added Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. “This historic achievement was only possible thanks to the leadership and commitment of governments, communities, global polio eradication partners and philanthropists. I pay special tribute to the frontline health workers and vaccinators, some of whom lost their lives, for this noble cause.”

Now this is good news!

(Image Credit: CDC/ Wikimedia Commons)

It seems that surgical masks can not only be used to keep dangerous particles away from your mouth and nose, as they could also be used as hammocks for baby bunnies.

A man in Ottawa, Canada recycled his used surgical masks into adorable little hammocks for the rabbit babies living at his home. The tiny, fluffy bunnies happily relaxed inside the safety of the dual layers while hanging out in mid-air.

Creative!

Via Laughing Squid

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube/ Laughing Squid)

If you’ve watched Doraemon when you were a kid, then you probably are familiar with the dorayaki (known as “yummy buns” in the English dub), a pancake-like pastry with red bean paste filling.

YouTuber Nino’s Home shows us how to make this Japanese pastry in this video.

Yum!

(Image Credit: Ocdp/ Wikimedia Commons)

He nailed it!

A 14-year old Parson Russell Terrier, “Sunny”, suffered a seizure at her lovely and nurturing home on June 20, and heartbreakingly died in her owner’s arms.

She was just the happiest little dog in her youth, one of the most playful, smart, obedient, and loving dogs you could ever have the pleasure of being around.

Sunny was restricted to many health problems in her last year on earth, but she stayed strong, lived on and continued to put a reassuring smile on her owner’s face. Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with diabetes last year, a devastating blow to her family. But what made matters even more heart-wrecking is the troubling news received from their veterinarian: “Sunny has only 12–15 months left to live”.

Although Sunny lived a full and happy life, it was just hard for the family to accept that their little Sunny would die in about a year. Lucy, 19(Sunny’s sister and part owner) had enjoyed the presence of Sunny since she was 11 years old: playing Frisbee and hide and go seek; taking long jolly walks in the park and face smooching every single loving chance that she got.

The family had to inject Sunny with insulin for about 13 months; Sunny’s health started to get even worse at this point, and it showed.

Read the rest of the story

Kurtis Baute set up thousands of dominoes in order to tell the story of the universe. The more you watch this, the crazier you realize it is. Not only does he set up and topple 13,799 dominoes, he also narrates a timeline of the universe as it happens, with each domino representing a million years. The timing had to be precise, the props along the way had to work without disturbing the dominoes, and a screwup would come with a high price -that's a lot of dominoes to reset! I believe the sparkler didn't work right, but he didn't stop, and they edited it nicely. Just designing this idea had to be a ton of work! But don't get distracted by overthinking all that, or by his obvious nervousness and heavy breathing. The story Baute is telling is fascinating in itself. -via Geekologie

When a man marries three women and they all die, one starts to question the circumstances. Was it really spinal meningitis, or something more nefarious? Still, you would think that anyone with a lick of sense would space the murders out so that they didn't form an obvious pattern. The third death occurred in 1907.

Poseyville, Ind, April 1. Zack Watson, of Wadesville, has undergone a peculiar experience. On March 15, two years ago, his wife was seized with convulsions and died in a few hours. He soon remarried and last March, a year almost to a day from the death of the first, Mrs. Watson, the second wife, died of the same disease. Then he married the third time and yesterday his wife died of the same illness and almost in the same manner.

However, it wasn't all that long after the third Mrs. Watson died that the true cause of death was determined. The answer to this real-life riddle is even stranger than murder. See if you can guess what happened before you read the conclusion to the story at Strange Company. You'll find further information in the comments.

While online classes are the safest way to get an education in 2020, it's not like being there. Administration and faculty members at colleges and universities have their hands full trying to deliver online classes, so it falls to students to deal with a social life -or lack thereof- during a virtual school year. One team at the Stanford Women in Computer Science Innovation Challenge jumped at the opportunity to create Club Cardinal, an online version of the Stanford University campus that students can inhabit online and meet up with each other through both avatars and video chat.

“We made Club Cardinal as a project to allow students to experience university life again when so many campuses were shutting down and sending us home due to Covid,” says Allison Zhang, one of Club Cardinal’s creators and a sophomore at Stanford.

Club Cardinal is a free website designed to look like a game version of “the Farm,” Stanford campus’s affectionate nickname. After registering with a stanford.edu email address, users choose avatars and are assigned dorm rooms, which they can decorate with furniture and other items from a virtual store. They can explore the virtual Stanford campus via a map featuring campus landmarks, such as the Oval, Meyer Green, Main Quad, Green Library and the late-night eatery known as TAP. Each location has its own Zoom room for video chatting with other users whose avatars are nearby. Club Cardinal users accumulate money for decorating dorms by spending time on the platform and can store those savings in a virtual bank.

Students at other schools are setting up virtual campuses in Minecraft and other virtual reality platforms. Read about the new way to wander through a college campus at Smithsonian. Now if they could just do something about the tuition costs...

Lead is a substance that is very harmful to humans, especially to children. This is why many institutions have implemented guidelines to help monitor the lead content in food and water, as well as children’s toys. It is difficult to do so, however, as laboratory-based tests take days. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way in the near future.

Rutgers researchers have created a miniature device for measuring trace levels of toxic lead in sediments at the bottom of harbors, rivers and other waterways within minutes…

"In addition to detecting lead contamination in environmental samples or water in pipes in homes or elementary schools, with a tool like this, someday you could go to a sushi bar and check whether the fish you ordered has lead or mercury in it," said senior author Mehdi Javanmard, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

More details about this over at TechXplore.

Amazing!

(Image Credit: Azam Gholizadeh/ TechXplore)

Most of us fear death. But is death something that we should fear? After all, it is a natural process. Everything that we see in this universe is finite — all of them have an end. In other words, death is something that shouldn’t be feared, but rather accepted. It will be hard, however.

With these things in mind, how do we, at the very least, decrease our fear of death? Jane Wu has some tips for us over at QDT.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)