(Photo: Michael Thirnbeck)

Up until 1949, when a member of the Anga people of Papua New Guinea died, his relatives didn't bury or cremate the body. They smoked it--meaning that they cured the flesh. What those of us in the West do to meat to preserve it, the Anga did to preserve the bodies of the dead.

It was an unusual form of mummification. It ended in 1949, but 14 of the bodies preserved this way prior to then are still out in the open and remarkably well-preserved. Ian Lloyd Neubauer, a journalist with the BBC, journeyed into the remote Aseki District of Papua New Guinea to learn more about the practice. He talked to a local man named Dickson:

Most of what’s known about the mummies is based on hearsay, exaggeration or flights of the imagination. Even the locals I spoke to – Dickson, a pastor named Loland and a schoolteacher named Nimas – seemed to offer different stories about the ritual’s past.

The first documented report on the smoked corpses was by British explorer Charles Higginson in 1907 – seven years prior to the start of WWI. Yet according to Dickson, the mummying practice began during WWI, when the Anga attacked the first group of missionaries to arrive in Aseki. His great-grandfather, one of the corpses we saw under the cliff, was shot dead by the missionaries in self-defence.

Dickson said the event sparked a series of payback killings that came to an end when the missionaries gifted the natives salt, with which they began embalming their dead. The practice only lasted for a generation, he added, since a second round of missionaries successfully converted the Anga to Christianity.

Loland and Nimas confirmed that the smoke corpse ritual ended in 1949, when missionaries took firm root in Aseki. But unlike Dickson, Loland and Nimas said mummification had been practiced by the Anga for centuries. The bodies were not cured using salt, they explained, but smoked over months in a “spirit haus”. They were then covered in red clay to maintain their structural integrity and placed in shrines in the jungle.

-via Amusing Planet

Sean Fallon of Fashionably Geek refers to these hairstyles "unicorn braids." That's a great name! Shelley Gregory of Square Salon in Las Vegas is responsible for giving these women enchanted braids look like they emerged from fairy tales.

Sit down inside the plane? That's for the proles. For the ultimate luxury air travel experience, there's the SkyDeck.

Windspeed, an aerospace start-up in Everett, Washington, is developing ways of making air travel more scenic. It has two designs called SkyDeck. One offers an stairwell from the fuselage to an enclosed canopy on the top of the plane. The other is a private elevator that rises all the way up and rotates on command.

Windspeed says that the designs should be completely safe in many planes, from wide-body jetliners to executive transports. The bubble is made with the same material as supersonic fighter jet canopies, so it's safe against air hazards at lower speeds, such as bird strikes.

Would you like to try it?

-via Gizmodo

(Photo: Dan Arnold/WireImage)

Star Wars fans in Sydney, Australia gathered for a huge party to celebrate the release of Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Darth Vader (or a cosplayer--it can be hard to tell) attended in a suit perfect for local conquest. The national flag forms his cape and breastplate. He's eschewed a lightsaber for a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age: a boomerang. You can see more photos of the cosplayers in Sydney at BuzzFeed.

P.S. What kind of beer is attached to Lord Vader's utility belt? I can't make out the logo.

(Photo: Alena Akhmadulina)

Hokusai (c.1760-1849) was a famous artist in the Edo period of Japan. Among other works, he created extraordinarily vivid woodblock prints of the sea, most famously The Great Wave off Kanagawa (below).

These prints are so expressive that they almost seem to leap off the paper. So they've inspired Alena Akhmadulina, a Russian fashion designer, to produce a line of dresses that look like Hokusai's prints. You can see more at Rocket News 24.

(Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

(Video Link)

Dumptruck and Porkchop are best friends, but they're ruthless competitors when they get on the agility course. April Campbell and her father demonstrate this in their video showing the pair navigate a scaled-down agility course at high speed. Dumptruck and Porkchop have to get over the hurdles and the seesaw, then through the hoops, past the hamster walk, and through the weaving poles.

Shon Simpkins, who sounds a lot like Morgan Freeman, provides the sports commentary throughout this thrilling race.

-via Tastefully Offensive

What purpose does that piece of furniture serve? Let's not pretend that you're going to sit in it. It's covered in clothes and other junk and, like your otherwise unused exercise bike, it's going to stay that way.

Birdie Picot and Matt Smith of Thing Industries have perfected a chair design for the purpose that it actually serves. They call it the Sacrificial Chair:

Like a lamb to the gods we give you this chair to sacrifice to your clothes. Designed to replace 'that chair' in your bedroom that is constantly covered in crap, this is specifically designed for that purpose. Feel good about your lazy habits.

-via Swiss Miss

(Photo of unrelated cemetery by James Case)

How are you going to spend your time in your final resting place? In the future, technology will offer so many opportunities! With Wi-Fi access and a charging port, you can amuse yourself indefinitely.

But that's not why some funeral homes and cemeteries in Moscow, Russia plan to set up Wi-Fi access to the internet. The funeral homes want to make it easier for people to locate their loved ones while navigating cemeteries. UPI reports:

Artem Ekimov of Ritual funeral home in Moscow explained that Internet access can make certain needs, such as navigating the funeral grounds, easier.

"Online every person interested in the identity of the buried or the monument of his grave will be able to obtain the necessary information in the network," he said. "In addition, the internet will allow you to download a map of the cemetery."

Cemeteries in Novodevichy and Vagankovskoye had previously been equipped with terminals that allowed visitors to search for the GPS coordinates of certain graves.

-via Dave Barry

(Photos: Brianna Wu)

During your Christmas festivities, remember that our brave stormtroopers are far from home, defending you in the long war to crush the rebellion. Frank Wu, a science fiction artist, found a great way to do that. He built a Christmas tree that looks like a Super Star Destroyer from Star Wars.

-via Boing Boing

(Photo: Quest Loves Food)

Dominique Ansel is the chef who invented the cronut and the edible cookie shot. If there was a dessert category for the Nobel Prize, Ansel would have won it by now. But he's not one to rest on his laurels. He keeps pushing out into the great beyond to boldly go where no chef has gone before.

Recently, that's meant research into s'more development. Ansel is blowing out the borders of our dessert knowledge with this beauty: the caramel black truffle frozen s'more. It looks amazing!

(Photo: Mike Chesworth)

Some Latin American cultures celebrate a girl's fifteenth birthday with a quinceañera--a party that welcomes a girl to womanhood.

In dog years, 15-year old Angel of Phoenix, Arizona was already long past adolescence. But it was only recently that she had her own quinceañera.

The Vulgar Chef (content warning: foul language) once again leads us boldly into a new future.

We've seen that Rice Krispie treat batter can be used like an edible form of clay. It can be shaped into a beer cozy or an ice cream cone. I've personally used it as a pizza crust. Now the Vulgar Chef finds a new use for Nature's greatest building material. In a mere 15 minutes of work, he shaped the batter into a taco form, then added ice cream, Reese's Pieces, and chocolate syrup. It's the perfect breakfast food!

This isn't a pair of scissors, but a clamp and forceps. The Facebook page of the West Virginia Friends of Midwives says that the iconic stork scissors used in needlework began as a clamp. Midwives would use it to tie off the umbilical cord of a newborn baby. This particular example includes forceps. This decorative silver set dates back to 18th or 19th Century France. The snake is a reference to the Rod of Asclepius. The stork is, of course, a symbol of childbirth.

I have been unable to verify the identity of this object through outside sources.

-via The Soul Is Bone

(Photo: Roman Boed)

This is absolutely fascinating!

The classical ethical dilemma goes something like this:

A train is about to crash into a bus full of people. If you do nothing, it will do so and kill them. If you switch the tracks, the train will instead hit and kill only one person. Do you switch the tracks?

Now let's update that dilemma and hand it over to a robot. Olivia Goldhill writes at Quartz:

Imagine you’re in a self-driving car, heading towards a collision with a group of pedestrians. The only other option is to drive off a cliff. What should the car do?

If you're the passenger, then you have a lot at stake in the decision that your robotic car makes. What should you do? I'm not sure, but psychological researchers led by Jean-François Bonnefon from the Toulouse School of Economics surveyed 900 people to ask them what they thought the car should do:

They found that 75% of people thought the car should always swerve and kill the passenger, even to save just one pedestrian.

That's very noble of them. But according to Helen Frowe, a psychology professor at Stockholm University, it can get more complicated:

For example, a self-driving car could contain four passengers, or perhaps two children in the backseat. How does the moral calculus change?

If the car’s passengers are all adults, Frowe believes that they should die to avoid hitting one pedestrian, because the adults have chosen to be in the car and so have more moral responsibility.

Although Frowe believes that children are not morally responsible, she still argues that it’s not morally permissible to kill one person in order to save the lives of two children.

-via Marilyn Bellamy

Arnold Lobel wrote Frog and Toad Are Friends in 1970, which was thankfully a different world at the time. What would the most famous works of children's literature be like if they were written in 2015? Kristi Olberding of Distractify has 9 photoshopped covers to show you. I can't even . . . .