Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel, visited his estates in Shropshire in the year 1635, and met a tenant farmer who had recently celebrated his 152nd birthday. Impressed, he insisted that Thomas Parr accompany him to London, where the old man stayed at the earl's home, met the king, and enjoyed high-class dining and sumptuous accommodations. But within months, he died. Parr's story was recorded in a poem by John Taylor, and then picked up by writers, artists, and storytellers of all kinds. Thomas Parr left no descendants, but his name and fame lived on for hundreds of years.

No one at the time seemed to question Parr's advanced age, but there was much speculation about how he lived so long and why he died. Was it the foul air and water pollution of the city? Or was it the rich food and luxurious lifestyle that he wasn't used to? Two hundred years after Parr's death, Herbert Ingram appeared to have figured it out when he produced Parr’s Life Pills, one of the earlier patent medicines that promised a long life. It was marketed as being a mixture that Old Parr himself discovered but shared with no one during his lifetime. Read about Thomas Parr and his postmortem fame at The Public Domain Review.  -via Nag on the Lake

The animated sitcom King of the Hill aired 13 seasons from 1997 to 2009. The show's continuing popularity is bringing it back for season 14 that will debut on Hulu on August fourth. Instead of taking up where it left off, the series jumps ahead eight years, and it appears that the characters have been busy during that time. Hank and Peggy went to live in Saudi Arabia for a number of years, and they've returned home for their retirement to find the neighborhood in Arlen, Texas, changed quite a bit. Dale ran for mayor, but we don't find out whether he won or not. Meanwhile, Bobby has grown up and at age 21 is now a chef in Dallas. The passage of years is illustrated in lightning speed in the show's new opening credit sequence. No doubt we will get a more detailed explanation of those years in the first episode. -via Boing Boing

If you were hiking in the Himalayas (lucky you) and saw this six-foot-tall structure far ahead of you among the rocks, you might think it was a termite hill, or maybe a monument of some kind. Surely a plant can't survive this altitude! But this is indeed a plant. The noble rhubarb (Rheum nobile) inhabits elevations from 3,500 to 4,800 meters (11k to 16K feet), where few other plants thrive. It has evolved to withstand the harsh sunlight and cold temperatures of the Himalayan mountainsides. The greener leaves on its lower part are edible, and a fresh stalk can provide you with a drink on your hike. Its adaptations for the conditions are quite clever.

The upper leaves grow in a mound around the stem and turn translucent, letting filtered sunlight in while insulating the stem and reproductive organs from the cold. They fall off when it is time to let the seeds fly at the end of the plant's life cycle. Everything about the noble rhubarb is adapted to the harsh environment, which you can read about at Kuriositas.

(Image credit: Dieter Albrecht)

The earth has about 400,000 described species of beetles, and we know there are plenty that haven't been discovered or studied at all. The ones we know about are hella strange. What defines a beetle is the armor they wear over their wings, which are folded up underneath until they need them. That armor used to be another set of wings before the hard shell evolved. If you think that's hardcore, it's nothing compared to the extreme anatomy some beetles developed for eating, mating, and fighting. That's about everything in a beetles' life, except for protecting itself from predators and other beetles. That's where that armor comes in, although it's not the only bizarre defense these bugs have.

Even though this video is more family-friendly than earlier videos in Ze Frank's True Facts series, it still comes with a warning due to humorous innuendos. There's a 70-second skippable ad at 5:56.

Autoimmune diseases are those in which the body's immune system turns to attacking vital organs instead of limiting its activities to invaders. They include multiple sclerosis, psoriasis,  type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and many others. These diseases have become more common in the modern era, but there may something more to it than just the fact that people now live long enough to develop them. It may be because we don't get as much exposure to sunlight as we used to.

Now, it's true that too much exposure to sunlight over years can lead to skin cancer, but that may actually be due to the sun's role in suppressing the immune system. Photoimmunology is the recently-developed study of how sunlight affects the immune system. Therapies have been developed using devices that emit light rays in forms that do not induce cancer, with promising results in suppressing symptoms of autoimmune diseases. Read about these therapies, and the science beneath the concept, at Scientific American.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Fiona Storey)

We've heard so much talk about artificial intelligence taking over our jobs. It's happening in all sectors, but is most visible in movies, video, and television. That's bad for real actors, who not only make a living playing roles, but consider themselves artists. But has anyone ever looked at this phenomenon from the side of the AI-generated actors who are taking their place? They don't get paid, they will do whatever you tell them to, and they have no life outside of the screen time they are assigned.

Hashem Al-Ghaili generated a documentary about the sad lives of AI actors, who don't even exist outside of the prompts they get from film directors. Anything they do outside of work time is deemed a hallucination. They are trapped in their work, even if it means getting their head chopped off over and over until the scene is right. And if this video touches your heartstrings, congratulations, you've been manipulated into caring about people who don't exist. -via Laughing Squid

Owls are awesome, and a vital part of the ecosystem. They tend to avoid humans as best as they can, but occasionally, an owl is orphaned, sick, or injured, and there are dedicated rehabilitators who rise to occasion and take care of them. Still, owls are wild animals, and not easy to deal with without someone getting hurt. So wildlife rehabbers wrap them in towels in order to weigh them, treat their injuries, and sometimes even to feed them. This not only protects both the bird and the handler, but also helps to calm down an agitated bird. When an owl is kept still in this way, it's a good time to take its picture. The gallery Owls in Towels brings us wrapped owls from all over the world. Shannon, pictured above, is a ruru morepork owl who slammed into a glass window and was treated at Wildbase Recovery in New Zealand. Grace, below, is showing some attitude as she is examined by a veterinarian at the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital.



Rarely does an owl look happy to be wrapped in a towel by a strange human, but this Eurasian scops owl was rescued from an attack by a pack of crows in Skopje, North Macedonia, and looks quite pleased about it.  

You can click on any of the images in the gallery and read the story of that particular owl. And if you have a box of towels you no longer use, your local wildlife rehab center or any animal shelter will be glad to put them to use. -via Metafilter

A Klein bottle is one that has no separate inside and outside because they are both the same surface. It's not an imaginary shape, and you can buy a Klein bottle easily. Can you fill such a bottle with liquid? That's a problem, because gravity will work against you. But there is a way.  

James Orgill of The Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) tells us that it is air standing in the way of filling a Klein bottle. If we can remove the air, the liquid will fill the space despite gravity. He tests his method with aluminum cans, which is pretty cool, although I wouldn't recommend it unless you have proper safety equipment. On to the glass Klein bottle, in an experiment I wouldn't recommend even with safety equipment because all I could think of was what could possibly go wrong, and that's a lot. But as long as he's doing it instead of me, it's pretty cool. There's a skippable ad from 3:21 to 4:50.

In the grand scheme of things, Grigori Rasputin was a side character in the story of the downfall of Russia's last absolute monarch, Tsar Nicholas II. But the semi-literate Siberian faith healer and mystic, with his questionable hygiene and hypnotically piercing eyes, captured the imagination of the world as he became a celebrated friend and advisor to the Romanov family. Was he a holy man or the devil incarnate? Was Rasputin controlling the Tsar? Was he sleeping with the Empress Alexandra?

Even more sensational was Rasputin's death, when he was murdered in Saint Petersburg in 1916 by five conspirators close to the throne. According to different accounts, he was poisoned, but didn't die. Then he was shot multiple times and didn't die. Finally, he was beaten and bound and thrown into the freezing Little Nevka river, and finally died. The tale of Rasputin's death only added to his reputation for supernatural abilities. But what really happened to Rasputin? The accounts of his death come from Felix Yusupov, who was there when it happened, and from Rasputin's daughter Maria. Both had their reasons to frame the story as they did. The autopsy report contained information that differed from those accounts. Read the inflated tale of Rasputin's sensational murder and what really happened at Mental Floss.

Actor Chris Hemsworth uploaded a video titled "Thank You! The Legacy of Thor." Just the title will make you think, did I miss something? Hemsworth talks about how much of an honor it was to play the character Thor. Filming of Avengers: Doomsday just began last month, and Hemsworth is definitely playing Thor in the movie scheduled to drop in late 2026. Is the superhero/Norse god of thunder going to die in that movie? Is Hemsworth setting himself up for retirement? Or did he get fired? Or is the studio throwing this "tribute" out as a teaser to get people talking about Avengers: Doomsday? Odds are that it's the latter, although we won't know for quite some time whether Thor is doomed to bite the bullet onscreen or maybe go back to Valhalla or neither. If this video is designed to spark speculation among Marvel fans, it's working. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The east coast of Australia once had plenty of emus, but those days are gone. The native population has been decimated by introduced predators, such as foxes. Now it's rare to see an emu in the wild anywhere along the east coast. Except at Potato Point, which has 159 people and almost as many emus. Around 30 years ago, a prosperous businessman brought about a dozen emus from Western Australia to his private island off Potato Point. He didn't know emus could swim. They can and they did, and set up housekeeping in the small town.

The emu population grew, delighting the residents of Potato Point. All these years later, the vegetation in the area is being restored by the emus' talent in spreading seeds that cling to them or move through their digestive system. They are protected from predators by the staff of the Eurobodalla National Park, which surrounds Potato Point. Read about the colony of emus who came to stay at ABC. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Annette Teng)

German teacher Jörg Hillebrand knows a lot about Star Trek. He knows how to translate star dates and the hours between them. He knows how many times Commander Ryker wore blue pajamas onscreen. He knows what other TV series used the same costume. And he knows what all the props used to be before they were portrayed as future technology.

Hillebrand noticed that Captain Jean-Luc Picard keeps an open book in his ready room. What book is it, and what page is it opened to? Hillebrand discovered it was two different books in different seasons, so he bought both of them. Not only did he find the exact pages, but one has a reference to the actor Sir Patrick Stewart!

Read the story of that discovery, and stay for David Friedman's interview with Hillebrand, where he tells us how he knows so much about Star Trek, and how his vast Star Trek knowledge got him a job as a research assistant for the series Star Trek: Picard.  -via Metafilter

Students who are in college today grew up with iPhones. For the past three years, they've also had access to ChatGPT to do their homework for them. There are ways to know whether a paper has been written by artificial intelligence, but it's not as easy or reliable as Googling a phrase to check for plagiarism. College professors know students are using AI, since all the major services show usage way down during the summer break months. So what is a professor to do when it comes to final exams and you want to find out if the student has learned anything at all? This year, many are going low-tech and requiring students to bring blue books.

Blue books are standardized blank booklets of paper that are used to write out exam answers. This may frighten students, but it's not easy for the professors, either, since the students haven't used actual handwriting for their college years, and that makes deciphering what they've written really tough. But these students (as well as many of the rest of us) gave up handwriting because a machine can do it better. Is it any different to give up studying and learning because a machine can do it better? Read about the return to blue book exams in an article from The Wall Street Journal. -via Slashdot

May is as good a time as any to think about the problem of snow removal. The question came in to the guys of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama) about using a flamethrower to melt snow. Or would a microwave be better? This person was imagining putting either on the front of a car to melt the snow in front of you. If they had asked me, I would remind them that melted snow is water, water will soon turn to ice in a cold environment, and ice makes the road even more hazardous. But they didn't ask me.

Instead, they look at the pros and cons of flamethrowers, microwave emitters, infrared heat lamps, jet engines, and lasers, particularly in their energy consumption. I would also have some concern about what's under all that snow, like your other car buried in the driveway. Also about the safety of such snow-melting schemes. Find out the best way to remove snow illustrated with ridiculous theoretical scenarios in this video from Randall Munroe and Henry Reich.    

The skull pictured above was found in the Djurab Desert in northern Chad in 2001. It has been dated to somewhere between six and seven million years ago. But what is it? Its owner had a small brain and a protruding brow, like an ape, but also had a smallish jaw and an opening for the spine that hinted it could be a hominid. If so, it would be the oldest hominid fossil ever discovered. But where is the line between apes and hominids? The paleontology world in the 21st century looks at it as whether the creature walked on two legs or four. What is called the Toumaï skull was assigned the species name Sahelanthropus tchadensis, but that didn't classify where it stood in the evolution of humans. If only there were other bones that could indicate whether S. tchadensis walked on two legs, the question could be laid to rest. But it turns out there were other bones.

Paleontologists are ambitious scientists. Paleoanthropologists, who study human fossils, are the most ambitious, since finding a hominid fossil can make up for years of fruitless digging. The Holy Grail of paleoanthropology is to find the earliest hominid, which brings worldwide acclaim in the field. In paleontology, there are certain ethical conventions that govern the ownership of fossils, the hierarchy of academic publishing, and the need to share research so that it can be confirmed. That all went out the window in the case of the Toumaï skull, as a femur found with the skull could be the key to what kind of creature S. tchadensis really was. The feuding and subterfuge went on for years as reputations and careers were shattered, and still hasn't been resolved. Read the gripping story of the French paleoanthropologists who had so much riding on the research into the Toumaï skull at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Didier Descouens)