(Photo: WerDu)

Step right up and let me tell you about the latest all-purpose, cure-everything household tool: the horse skull.

Colm Moriarty is an Irish archaeologist. When he was a young boy, his aunt’s home was renovated. Moriarty remembers that the workmen found two horse skulls beneath the floor of the old house. The purpose of their presence was a mystery.

Now Moriarty has a good idea why they were there. He recently excavated two medieval houses near Dublin. He found horse skulls beneath the floor. Why are they there? Sonja Hukantaival, a doctoral student who is writing her dissertation on materials left in household foundations, thinks that the horse skulls served two purposes. The skulls were used in witchcraft to protect or inflict curses and their hollow chambers helped the acoustic qualities of the home. Matt Soniak writes at Atlas Obscura:

Like the horse shoes that some people keep in their homes, the horse skull was thought to bring luck and expel evil. A horse skull foundation deposit, Hukantaival explains, would have ensured fertility, health and a good crop, and guarded against sickness, death, fire and lightning. In the folklore of some countries, like Finland, horse skulls and other foundation deposits were also said to protect against witchcraft when placed at the borders of a house. They could also be used in an act of witchcraft instead of protection against it, Hukantaival says, a deposit secretly placed under someone else’s house would curse the building or steal luck from it.

The other explanation is that they were part of a macabre sound system. The cavities in the skulls amplify and echo ambient noise, and archaeologists think that in some places they were buried under floors to improve the sound when people danced, sang or played music. In the British Isles and southern Scandinavia, presumed “acoustic skulls” have been found in home and churches. In Scandinavia, they also often turn up under threshing barns, where, Hukantaival says, “it was considered important that the sound of threshing carried far.”

-via Marilyn Terrell

(Image: Universal Pictures)

John DeLorean’s DMC-12 was in production from only 1981 through 1983. The Back to the Future film trilogy made it famous. Now, more than 30 years after the last DMC-12 rolled off the assembly line, it’s back. The DeLorean Motor Company, which has been rebuilding and restoring the old cars from its small facility in Humble, Texas will resume production.

Internally, the car will be different. To Marty McFly, it would look like something from the future. The Dallas Morning News describes it:

John Espey, vice president of DeLorean Motor, said the replicas will be substantially upgraded from the cars in the ‘80s – including the engine

The company is in discussions with a couple of manufacturers to use a modern, emissions-certified V-6 with “300 to 400 horsepower,” Espey said.

The cars will also get better brakes, upgraded interiors and amenities such as Bluetooth, navigation systems and heated seats.

New DMC-12s will be available starting in 2017 and be priced at less than $100,000.

-via Ace of Spades HQ

Martin Creaney made his enormous and enormously detailed model of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars out of 3,000 pieces of wood and using more different types of wood than he can now remember. And that's just the beginning of what he can do . . . .

(Photo: Smile Always)

There are 26 characters in the English alphabet. But Chinese has a radically different writing system. If you want to be able to read a newspaper, you need to know about 2,000 characters. If you want be able to read a novel successfully, you'll need another 1,000 or so. And some comprehensive dictionaries have over 85,000 characters.

One practical result of this writing system is that creating a new font is an extraordinary feat of labor. A typographer can't whip up the next Helvetica in a week. Nikhil Sonnad describes this character building process in Quartz:

“It all starts with research,” says Winston Su, co-founder of Justfont, a Taiwanese startup that focuses on delivering fonts through the web. In most cases, the research phase lasts an entire year.

The goal of this year-long process is to take a fuzzy idea for a hypothetical new typeface, and develop it into a set of a few hundred “representative characters.” These set the tone for the thousands of characters to follow. Latin typefaces are designed in a similar way, but the scale is entirely different. In an interview with Fast Company, venerable designer Steve Matteson said he always starts a new Latin typeface with just a handful of glyphs—capital H, O, and V, and lowercase n, o, and d.

The research phase is part design, part calligraphy, part grammatology, part market research.

Everything may begin with some vague notion of the feel a typeface should have. In his interview, Matteson adds that a typeface generally starts with an adjective, like “approachable, friendly, feminine, masculine. All of these adjectives play into the detailing that we would do to the letter forms to help emphasize those attributes.”

Similarly for Chinese; “modern but not boring” is how Su described the idea behind JinXuan, Justfont’s first font designed in-house, still in development. The difference is that, because of the vast amount of work involved, a Chinese typeface cannot be created by a single designer with a singular vision, as is often the case for Latin scripts. Instead a collaborative team has to start with this fuzzy notion and then settle on a uniform design. That’s what the research stage is all about.

-via Nag on the Lake

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Violinst Jeffrey Ding He built 4 lighsabers (Jedi are supposed to build their own, you know), and used them to play the Force theme from Episode IV. It's beautifully sad, majestic, and moving. The violin is a more elegant instrument for a more civilized age and He is its master. I definitely want him playing at my next colonoscopy.

-via Laughing Squid

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Have you ever seen someone show you self-tying shoelaces? It's not a great invention, but a clever bit of prestidigitation. Dave Hax shows you how this illusion is done so that you can fool other people. You'll need a bit of string, an extra shoelace, and a willingness to wear pants.

Hax is one of the best treasures of YouTube. He's filled with great household tricks and tips like this one, including how to burn a candle underwater, set up a pretty flower arrangement, and steal pizza without getting caught. Hax does not disappoint in his latest offering.

-via 22 Words

(Image: The Verge)

Do you need to fill up your car but don't have time to stop by a gas station? There's an app for that.

WeFuel is a new startup in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, two towns in the Silicon Valley area of California. Install the WeFuel app on your phone. Then, with a few clicks, the company will send a fuel truck driven by a hazmat-certified driver to your car and fill it up. The process takes about 30 minutes and costs $7.49 plus the cost of fuel. You can also get a monthly subscription that costs $19.99 plus gas per car. 

That's just the beginning. WeFuel hopes to roll out a service that will sense when your fuel tank is low and automatically dispatch a truck and driver to refill it. You can read more about the company at The Verge.

-via Marginal Revolution

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CONTENT WARNING: NON-STOP FOUL LANGUAGE IN THE ABOVE VIDEO (BUT NOT BELOW)

James Ross-Munro and Kane Wiblen, who are very Australian, had been out drinking and partying most of the night. They decided to stop at an Oporto convenience store for some noodles. As they walked up, they saw two masked men leap out of a car and run into the store. Ross-Munro then opened the door of the getaway car and took the keys out of the ignition.

They caught the entire hilarious incident on camera. Their video (above) has gone viral and the pair have become celebrities. They then went on a morning news show and gave one of the most extraordinary interviews in journalism history:

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One reporter commented that, shirtless, Ross-Munro looked pretty muscular. Did he go to the gym? "Mate, I don’t go to the gym, haven’t been to the gym in years. The only gym I go to is Jim Beam, that’s about it."

Ross-Munro came away from the encounter unscathed except, News 9 (auto-start) notes, for his broken thong.

-via Lost at E Minor

Your baby hasn’t been born yet, but he already has a lot to talk about. And he has a phone. Morgan Shanahan of BuzzFeed composed 17 text messages that unborn babies would send if they could. From lived experience your child knows more about the internal workings of your body than anyone else. And he has no filter for his feedback.

(Photo: Ogiyoshisan)

Some people call Lake Yamanaka “Swan Lake.” This beautiful lake within sight of Mount Fuji in Japan is the home of many birds highly sought by birdwatchers, especially whooping swans. City dwellers in search of nature come here and ride on swan-shaped paddle boats or take the enormous swan-shaped excursion ship across. Or, if you’re a bit more daring, you can take an amphibious bus into the water. You can read more about the lake and its amenities at Atlas Obscura.

I know: when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. But when the snow melts, someone will have to clean up your mess.

Twitter user @MagTecht_fuka spotted this snow sculpture in Saga Prefecture in southern Japan.

-via Brian Ashcraft

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The little newborn foal filmed by Sammi Hill experienced his first sneeze and went for a tumble. Either he’s a bit unsteady on his legs or he’s discovered a superpower. Get back up try again, little foal.

-via Tastefully Offensive

Ah, Vegemite! The yeast extract that is a popular food in Australia is less well-known in the United States. What does it taste like? Food blogger Ben Starr says that “a fingerful of Vegemite is like a meaty, salty punch in the face.”

So it would therefore make the ideal basis for a cheesecake. Chef Billy Law made one. He says that you shouldn’t judge it until you’ve tried it because “salt brings out the sweetness in food, and this works the same way: the salty Vegemite enhances the sweetness of the cheesecake.”

-via Lost at E Minor

A kotatsu is a piece of furniture from Japan. It’s a table with a heater under the bottom and a blanket along the edges. You can sit at the table to warm yourself during chilly winter.

That’s what these cats doing. Caroline, a maker of candy cats whose work we’ve featured previously, made these adorable and edible kittens (translation).

During the winter, I would like to have a kotatsu, but one large enough to live in.

Cat Georgi is a hair dresser from Abkhazia. He’s overcome a brutal childhood devastated by the ethnic wars of the Caucasus region to become a fabulously successful hairdresser. Georgi can do anything with long hair, which is the marble from which he sculpts elaborate shapes. His works include this hairstyle that has a built-in hat. You can watch a brief video of its composition here.

-via Everlasting Blort