You've probably never heard of the disease called chlorosis, because we don't deal with it anymore. But in the 1890s, it was quite common. Chlorosis gave the sufferer a host of symptoms, but the most baffling -and the one responsible for the name- was a green tint to the skin.  

For centuries, chlorosis was a constant — though the diagnoses behind it shifted with the societal and medical norms of the time. First described in 1554, it was known until the mid-1700s as the “disease of virgins,” and the best cure was thought to be intercourse (bloodletting was also a popular treatment).

“Chlorosis was absolutely seen as a women’s disease, which meant, as it still often means today, that it got little attention and was easily dismissed with absurd cures,” says Anna Scanlon, director of the writing center at Illinois Wesleyan University and an avid researcher of chlorosis. Other treatments included telling women to conceive, exercise or abandon education. While there were physicians who believed that men could also contract chlorosis, such cases were thought to be extremely rare, and those men diagnosed with it were usually described as effeminate. The disease was predominately associated with the upper classes until the mid-19th century, when the medical establishment realized that poor women could also lack adequate nutrition and exposure to sunlight.

Luckily, since then medical science has figured out what caused chlorosis and how to treat it. But the reason for the green tint is still somewhat of a mystery. Read about chlorosis at Ozy. -via Digg

If you've been cooking and baking the past months and you ran out of ideas, here's something you can try: a 4000 years old Mesopotamian meal consisting of 4 intricate dishes and a loaf of bread.

This meal was tried by Bill Sutherland, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Cambridge. Bill shared his journey on Twitter.

Bored Panda reached out to Professor Bill Sutherland to find out more about his Mesopotamian cooking experience.

Bill heard about the recipes from Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid, who’s “a real expert on Mesopotamian culture.” He bought the book about the Yale Collection and thought “it would be fun to try and cook them.“

This was about an hour of planning and a couple of hours cooking,” said Bill. But in no way did he expect so many to take interest in his peculiar Twitter thread. “Currently, 3.7 million people have seen this,” the professor said in disbelief.

Image Credits to Bored Panda and Professor Bill Sutherland

This was the very first TV ad for Pizza Hut, produced in Wichita, Kansas. It was posted to YouTube years ago by the son of the producer. They didn't really need to give you a reason to select Pizza Hut over all the other pizza joints in town, because there weren't any others in most places. But they did make the ad funny, and introduced an earworm. -via Boing Boing

Rich McCor, also known as Paperboyo, is a paper artist. While he normally travels the world to find inspiration, lately he's been stuck at home like the rest of us, watching a lot of movies to fill the time. Those movies inspired him to start a new project- making paper scenes using paper silhouettes combined with the things he has around the house. A little imagination and some real talent goes a long way!

“I usually work with architecture and forced perspective, so translating my ideas to a much smaller scale was a challenge but a fun challenge,” McCor tells My Modern Met. “I realized that there were plenty of opportunities to create images around the house with the same sense of humor and surprise as my exterior photos, so I used the theme of movies as a starting point and then let myself get carried away with it.” From Indiana Jones using a phone charger as his bullwhip to a herd of paper-cut Jurassic World dinosaurs charging across a cheese board, McCor’s indoor series showcases his boundless imagination.

See a gallery of the movie scenes at My Modern Met. Follow McCor's art at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid

In December of 1944, a unit of Germany's First SS Panzer Division overwhelmed a group of US troops near the Belgian city of Malmedy. The GIs surrendered, and were rounded up as POWs. The Germans then killed 84 of them, which is a war crime. After the war, the American military tried 75 Germans for murder for the Malmedy massacre and related war crimes, convicted all but one, and sentenced 43 to death. But that didn't happen. In 1949, the Army convened a senate investigation to determine whether US military investigators and prosecutors had tortured, coerced, or otherwise mistreated the German defendants in the name of retribution. The senate investigatory subcommittee officially had three members, but the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was allowed to sit in and observe.

At the time, McCarthy was less than halfway through his first term in the Senate, and he hadn’t yet launched the reckless crusade against alleged Communists that would turn his name into an “ism.” Relegated to the status of a backbencher after Democrats took control of the Senate in 1949, McCarthy was thirsting for a cause that would let him claim the spotlight. The cause that this ex-Marine and uber-patriot picked—as an apologist for the Nazi perpetrators of the bloodiest slaughter of American soldiers during World War II—would, more than anything he had done previously, define him for his fellow senators and anybody else paying close attention. But so few were paying him heed that no alarms were sounded, and in short order his Malmedy trickery was overshadowed by his campaign against those he branded as un-American, an irony that lends special meaning to this forgotten chapter in the making of Joe McCarthy.

McCarthy did not sit in and observe. He questioned, accused, and bullied those involved, as if he were trying out an early version of the tactics he later used to smear opponents and galvanize the public against perceived communists. In short, McCarthy dominated the proceedings. Read the story of Joseph McCarthy and the investigation into the Malmedy trials at Smithsonian.

(Image source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

I'm a stained glass artist from Montreal and I just wanted to share my latest piece. I had been wanting to make this window for over a year but other bigger projects kept coming up (which is great!). It's 25" x 16" and made with the Tiffany style copper foil technique. Almost every piece here was carefully painted and went through multiple kiln firings, took about two weeks to complete. Follow me on Instagram to see other stuff I've made!

Redditor jimmythecraftguy calls his creation the "Spin Cycle." Hack-A-Day describes this remarkable machine that can reach 68 MPH:

The drive train of this bicycle starts with a brushless DC motor from a washing machine. It has been slightly modified to run on 48 volts, and is installed inside the triangle of the bike’s frame. It has a chain driving the bike’s crank, retaining the original chain and gearing setup [...]The crank has also been specially modified to include a freewheel, a necessary feature so that the motor can operate without spinning the pedals. Everything except the motor has been custom fabricated including the mounts and the electronics.

Here's Jimmy riding the Spin Cycle at a leisurely 40 MPH.

A Twitter user shared a photo of a plushie hanging from the car, easily stained and drenched from travel. The plushie, a character from the anime series Madoka Magica, looks cute as hell, so for the first time I saw the picture, I asked myself, “why would the owner do that?” Scrolling through the comments, I see some people say that the plushie got what it deserved. Do you think so? 

image via Twitter

A woman in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil has spotted this particular snake on her farm three times. It's actually the snake's farm and he's raising humans, who are apparently now ripe for harvest.

-via Born in Space

Let us grant that Griffin the African grey parrot did not crush his competition (after all, he's just a Texas A&M graduate), but he did as well or better than Harvard University undergraduate students in memory tests. And he did much better than 6-8 year old children. The Harvard Gazette describes the research led by Dr. Irene Pepperberg:

It worked like this: Tiny colored pom-poms were covered with cups and then shuffled, so participants had to track which object was under which cup. The experimenter then showed them a pom-pom that matched one of the same color hidden under one of the cups and asked them to point at the cup. (Griffin, of course, used his beak to point.) The participants were tested on tracking two, three, and four different-colored pom-poms. The position of the cups were swapped zero to four times for each of those combinations. Griffin and the students did 120 trials; the children did 36.

The game tests the brain’s ability to retain memory of items that are no longer in view, and then updating when faced with new information, like a change in location. This cognitive system is known as visual working memory and is the one of the foundations for intelligent behavior.

So how did the parrot fare? Griffin outperformed the 6- to 8-year-olds across all levels on average, and he performed either as well as or slightly better than the 21 Harvard undergraduates on 12 of the 14 of trial types.

-via Marginal Revolution | Image: Harvard University

You may have seen a strange Korean ad that went viral about a week ago promoting Green Onion Chex cereal. The limited edition cereal is the culmination of a story that began 16 years ago. It started when Kellogg's had a great idea for a marketing stunt to promote Chocolate Chex in Korea.

In 2004, Nongshim Kellogg launched an online “election” for the president of Chex featuring two candidates, chocolate-colored character Chekkie and green-colored character Chaka. Chekkie promised to make the cereal more chocolatey while Chaka promised to put green onion in the cereal. When internet communities heard about this election, they started voting for Chaka, to Kellogg Korea’s horror.

With Chaka bound for victory, Kellogg deleted over 42,000 votes, citing “security reasons.” With Chaka still winning by a few thousand votes, Kellogg added offline votes and ARS call votes, in a blatant manipulation of the result, to make Chekkie the winner.

See, they couldn't accept Chaka as the winner, because there was no such product, but the vote manipulation left a bad taste in the public's mouth. Inexplicably, Kellogg's repeated the disaster in Japan in 2012, pitting Chocolate Chex against a wasabi flavored rival. But 16 years later, Green Onion Chex is a reality. They should remove the sugar and release it in the US, where savory Chex Mix is as popular as the cold cereal version. Read more about the promotion that went wrong at the Korea Herald. -via Metafilter

Wild birds often sing one song their entire lives. It's most likely the same song that other nearby birds of their species sing, although there are geographical variations, as if they had developed a local dialect. But a new song has gone viral over the past couple of decades, and has spread to Canadian white-throated sparrows across the country.    

Birds sing to mark their territories and attract prospective mates. Traditionally, white-throated sparrows in western and central Canada sing a song distinguished by its three-note ending. The new song, which likely started off as a regional dialect at some point between 1960 and 2000, features a distinctive two-note ending, and it’s taking the sparrow community by storm. What makes the new ending so viral is a mystery to the study authors, led by Ken Otter from the University of Northern British Columbia.

“These songs are learned—otherwise new variants would not arise or spread,” Otter told Gizmodo. “Where it started could have been a single bird, but it then gets learned by others, and they would form tutors for other birds. It wouldn’t spread from a single bird.”

Scientists have been tracking the prevalence of the new song with help from birdwatchers who share birdsong on an online database. Read about the research, and hear the song, at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: PookieFugglestein)

An odd-looking bird was standing outside Shinjuku Station, catching the attention of passersby and train passengers. The biped stood at the entrance of the station, looking like a shaggy half-bird, half-salaryman. Twitter user @rukikikikiki photographed the bird and posted the photo on the Internet, asking if people knew what type of bird it was, as SoraNews24 details: 

Avian enthusiasts were quick to identify the bird as “mizogoi” in Japanese. In English, mizogoi is commonly known as the Japanese night heron, a species found in East Asia which breeds in Japan — although it’s also been spotted in in Korea and eastern Russia — and spends its winters in Indonesia and the Philippines.

The bird is rarely seen in downtown Tokyo, if at all, as it prefers to live in a dense, damp, forest-like habitat. Furthermore, the Japanese night heron is listed as an endangered species, making the reason for its appearance outside Shinjuku Station even more of a mystery.

image via SoraNews24

Lari Tammivuori and Viljami Juutilainen were only expecting to get bottle caps and nails while they were magnetic fishing. What they got was an usual object: an old hand grenade! The boys brought it to Juutilainen's mother, Maarit, to examine the item, as UPI details: 

"It was old-fashioned looking and pretty rusty. I said it could be a grenade. His aunt is a police officer so I sent her a few pictures [of the grenade]. We were given clear instructions to step away from it and wait for police to arrive," Maarit Juutilainen said.

Police cordoned off the area and a Defense Forces team was summoned to take the object away. Officials confirmed it was an explosive device, but did not disclose how old the object was or whether it still was live.

image via yle

Man, I wish I could pose as fast as she does and have my photos look as equally great! This model from eastern China can strike two poses a second. She also models a whopping 485 outfits a day. Now that’s skill!