The family of two-year-old Unakite Thirteen Hotel did not select her name. Neither did any human. She was born in 2022 in a house in Nebraska and relinquished by her birth mother, who does not have a current relationship with the birth father. The infant was then taken to a hospital, where she was issued a certificate of live birth instead of a birth certificate, with the randomly computer-generated name of Unakite Thirteen Hotel. 

The normal procedure is to file a certificate of live birth with the state, which then issues a birth certificate. But that didn't happen in this case. The girl's father, Jason Kilburn, found out about her, and filed for custody. Meanwhile, without a birth certificate, she couldn't get a Social Security number, and therefore could not be registered at a daycare nor could she get health insurance. And she couldn't change her name, either. 

Her father named her Caroline Elizabeth Kilburn, and had to go to court to get her a birth certificate. When it was finally issued, Caroline's name was still Unakite Thirteen Hotel. But the state didn't follow through with getting her a Social Security number. Only after the story made national news this week was a Social Security number issued for Caroline  ...in the name Unakite Thirteen Hotel. Kilburn is relieved that the number proves his daughter exists, and will seek a legal name change. 

Unakite is a kind of granite, pictured above. The comments at Metafilter make it clear that unidentified hospital patients are often classified by random words to avoid confusing them with other patients, but that does not explain how so many people dropped the ball with Caroline. 

(Image credit: Tom Harpel) 

When you hear of a celebrity who "dropped off the face of the earth," that usually means they stopped getting work, or fell out of favor, or maybe retired. This list means it literally, in that these people were rather well known and suddenly they disappeared even from their friends, family, and co-workers, never to be seen again. That doesn't mean the disappearance was a mystery, or is "unsolved." The sudden disappearance of Glenn Miller is pretty well established to be a plane crash at sea. The reason for the disappearance of a war correspondent can be assumed, even when no witnesses and no remains are found. But others are inconclusive- they may have been murdered, or they could still be alive somewhere, living under an assumed identity. 

You would expect a list like this to have Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart, and indeed they are here. But you'll also learn about many celebrities whose disappearances flew under your radar, or were famous in another country, or who vanished a long time ago. Read about 30 of them at Bored Panda. 

The 2002 movie Bend It Like Beckham inspired little girls to play soccer, made soccer players feel represented, and introduced the rest of the world to women's soccer (which outside of the US is just called football). It was Gurinder Chadha who wrote, produced, and directed that film, and she has announced that she's making a sequel. Why did it take so long? Chadha said she didn't have a story for another football movie, but now she has one. The script has yet to be written. The stars of the original, Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley, are open to returning, but want to see a script before they commit. 

In the 23 years since Bend It Like Beckham was released, women's soccer has gone from an amateur sport with few fans to a global juggernaut. Many of today's players credit the film for some of the sport's rise. Emma Hayes, head coach of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, is one of them. Years after being inspired by the movie, she is collaborating with Chadha to make the sequel as up-to-date and successful as possible. Chadha plans to have the movie ready in 2027. Read more about the Bend It LIke Beckham sequel at Deadline.  -via kottke 

There's an old saying that you can't unscramble an egg. It means that there are some actions that cannot be reversed, like speech. Sure, you can "take it back," but the damage has already been done. But like many old adages, science looked at it and said why can't you unscramble an egg? Because of entropy. Well, that clears things up. 

But Leonard Hayflick responded to a 1990 article in the journal Science by explaining how you can unscramble an egg. Think about it, and see if you can come up with a better answer than his.

Show Answer

The 2004 movie Van Helsing had all the Universal monsters together being pursued by a monster hunter played by Hugh Jackman. The movie was a moderate success, panned by critics, but was a big influence on young Emily Zarka, who grew up to be an expert on monsters. She tells us about the real monster hunters from history that date back to the beginnings of civilization. They were everywhere in the Middle Ages, or maybe they were just better documented then. More likely, death and disease sparked panic in populations that didn't understand what they were up against, and reached out for help with a rash of undead vampires. A few of these supernatural investigators were rather famous, and became the basis for one enshrined in Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the character type thereafter served as a handy hero for monster movies. Dr. Zarka explains how the historical monster hunters inspired fictional heroes like Van Helsing.   

British prime minister Winston Churchill loved collecting exotic animals for his menagerie, and decided he wanted six platypuses. Australia did not export platypuses, because they knew they rarely survived any kind of travel. But this was 1943 and they needed Britain's help to repel the encroaching Japanese. So arrangements were made to send Churchill one platypus, which they named Winston Churchill. The animal was to be delivered without fanfare, which was all for the good because Winston the platypus died en route.  

Churchill, the man, had Winston Churchill stuffed, and the whole incident was kept from the press. But leaks occurred, and eventually the story became known that a German U-boat attacked the delivery ship and the platypus was shaken to death. Was there any truth to that story? Last year, a team in Britain and another team in Australia went to work to uncover the truth. Read what they learned, plus the story of three platypuses that made it to Brooklyn a few years after the war at BBC.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Charles J. Sharp) 

Kiki was born paralyzed, due to a mosquito-borne virus. She was rejected by her mother, but was taken in by Don’t Forget Us…Pet Us, a sanctuary for neglected or disabled farm animals in Massachusetts. There she was pampered with plenty of attention, walks in a stroller, toys, music, and even a TV in the barn! Kiki showed how intelligent she is by learning to work the controls on her electronic toys, so they built her an electric cart with a joystick she can control. Kiki has since become an ambassador for the sanctuary and for those with disabilities of any species. Kiki has developed a special bond with the sanctuary owner's mother, Barbara, who suffers from Alzheimers disease. 

Since Kiki learned to drive her own vehicle, other barnyard animals have joined in, like Kashu, a goat who is also learning to steer with a joystick. You can keep up with Kiki and the other animals at Instagram and Facebook. -via Boing Boing 

Astronaut James Arthur Lovell Jr. was the oldest living former astronaut for a couple of years. He died Thursday at the age of 97. 

While Neil Armstrong is the most famous astronaut for being the first person to step onto the moon, he was just doing his job. Lovell, on the other hand, never walked on the moon, despite traveling there twice. But he commanded the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. When an oxygen tank exploded, the mission was scrapped and the world thought the three astronauts aboard were doomed. But Lovell, along with Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, moved into the Apollo Lunar Module and cobbled together the technology they would need to survive and return to earth. The fact that they did makes Lovell a hero of the space program.

Lovell also flew on the Gemini 7, Gemini 12, and the Apollo 8 missions. Lovell's total time in space flight was 715 hours and five minutes, a record that stood until space stations were developed. Along with Haise and Swigert, Lovell traveled further from the earth than any other human beings.   

In 1994, Lovell wrote the book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. A movie came from it, but the book is so much more, and I highly recommend it. Before Apollo 13 was filmed, Lovell thought Kevin Costner should play him. Costner looked more like Lovell, but Tom Hanks did a fine job. Lovell appeared in the movie as the captain of the ship that picked up the returning astronauts. Hanks posted a tribute at Instagram. Rest in peace, space hero.     

-via Metafilter 

We are all familiar with things that our distant ancestors considered true that were later proven to be just myths, mainly because we developed science to explain things. The sun doesn't revolve around the earth, even though it looked that way to ancient people. Illness doesn't happen because the body's humors are out of line- but that was the best explanation they had before germs were discovered. 

But the inverse also happens. Many things that ancient folks didn't believe turned out much later to be true! These are things that people couldn't believe because it was so outlandish, or because they didn't trust the source, or because they thought their own ancestors were less capable, or because they lacked context. Chill Dude Explains tells us about eight such "myths" that were eventually proven to be real. It will make you question the things we believe today. As you should. 

The last one is so wild, you might want to read more about Heinrich Schliemann. 

-via Laughing Squid 

Ashcroft Fire Rescue in British Columbia responded to a brush fire last week and found locals already fighting the blaze. The fire was extinguished with no trouble, leaving a scorched area of about 60x90 meters. But what caused the fire? The answer is in the image above. The site is about three kilometers away from the nearest river. The firefighters determined that an osprey had taken the fish and then dropped it into power lines, causing falling embers that sparked the blaze. Ashcroft Fire Rescue had fun reporting the incident, using every pun they could think of. Here's a sample. 

We do suspect by the size of the fish and the heat of the day probably caused the rather tired bird to drop its catch. Or another suspicion could be that it’s tired of raw fish and wanted to give cooked a try. 

The local newspaper went all in on the alliteration potential for this story.  -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Ashcroft Fire Rescue) 

Eighty years ago today, the first nuclear bomb was deployed over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb was dropped by the B-29 named Enola Gay, piloted by 30-year-old Col. Paul W. Tibbets. Six other planes participated for reconaissance, escort, scientific analysis, and photography. The mission commander was William Sterling Parsons, who worked with the Manhattan Project under Robert Oppenheimer. Parsons decided to join the mission on the Enola Gay to arm the nuclear bomb after takeoff to protect the US base on Tinian Island in the event of a crash during takeoff. 

The crew members of the various planes later described what the mission was like and their impressions of the nuclear explosion. Despite being miles away by the time the bomb detonated, they were rendered speechless. One crew member thought they had missed their target, because he couldn't see any city remaining. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, leading to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II.   

Although none of the Americans who participated in the mission are alive today, Garrett M. Graff compiled quotes from military archives, memoirs, speeches, and other sources for his new book The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. Read an excerpt published today in the Washington Post.    -via Damn Interesting 

The small hamlet of Torrington, Alberta, (population 239) is proud of their history. You can learn about it at the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, which boasts 82 dioramas illustrating events in Torrington history, populated by taxidermied gophers. The museum is operated by volunteers and is open daily in the summer and on weekends the rest of the year. Admission is by donation, because "We will never let finances get in your way of the joy of seeing dead gophers!"

The origin of the museum is quite a story. In the 1990s, Torrington received a small grant from the province to create a tourist attraction. At a brainstorming meeting, one woman suggested a museum of stuffed gophers. It was a joke, but it became real. Five people volunteered to learn taxidermy, and the whole town got involved in making the displays. PETA heard about it, so by the time the museum opened in 1996 it had become world famous. You can see a short video about the museum here, and see more pictures here. -via Fark 

Remote control LEGO vehicles can do some amazing stuff. Can they climb walls? You have to design them specifically for the task. In this video, the guys at Brick Technology start small, but then attempt to climb ever taller walls. For each LEGO wall, they begin with failure. But we see how they quickly identify the problem, and redesign the vehicle to fix it. Bigger wheels. Lower axles. Greater length. Adjustable weigh distribution. Success comes only when the vehicle climbs to the top and manages to land on the other side without toppling over, and be able to drive away. For each extra layer in the wall, the vehicle gets bigger and more elaborate, until the later models look more like robots than vehicles. The last version, challenged to climb a wall 40 bricks tall, might remind you of a medieval war machine. They had to pull out all the stops for that one! -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Pics or it didn't happen! It's always been that people tend not to believe something until they see it for themselves. In the 19th century, thousands of New York residents lived in overcrowded tenement slums with crumbling walls, dangerous staircases, and no plumbing. They did piece work in their homes, took in boarders for extra money, and raised so many children some had to sleep outside. Jacob Riis arrived in New York from Denmark in 1870 and had to deal with crushing poverty until he got a job as a journalist with for The New York Tribune. He covered the police beat, and described the conditions in the tenements as best he could, but reading about it wasn't nearly as effective as seeing it. That's why Riis incorporated photography into his reporting. He was a pioneer in flash photography because the tenement apartments were so dark inside. In 1890 he published his book How The Other Half Lives, full of pictures of the poor people of New York. 

The book made an impression on the public, but more importantly, on the city's Police Commissioner, a man named Theodore Roosevelt. That's when housing standards began to rise. Read about Jacob Riis and the photographs that brought poverty to light at Danny Dutch.  

Ekstremsportveko (Extreme Sports Week) 2025 was held in June in Voss, Norway. It is the world's largest extreme sports festival, taking advantage of the region's snowy mountains, wild rivers, lakes, and the high cliffs that loom over the fjords. Those cliffs are perfect for extreme BASE jumping. These adrenaline junkies had looked forward to Ekstremsportveko all year for the chance to soar through this beautiful natural world. Lifted by helicopter, they eagerly jumped off a cliff that you and I would be afraid to approach the edge of. I think there was a rule that they all had to have cameras attached. Some used parachutes, others used wing suits, and one guy did his jump suspended under another guy using a wing suit! I kept thinking "Don't let go! Don't let go!" And then he let go. But no one was hurt, and a good time was had by all. -via Kuriositas