Although people with land have always buried their pets, the first urban pet cemetery was founded in London in 1881 when a distraught family asked if they could bury their small dog Cherry in the garden of the gatekeeper's house at Hyde Park. The gatekeeper, Mr. Winbridge, agreed, and soon other people asked for the same dignified rites. The pet cemetery at Hyde Park is still there today. But the US has many more pet cemeteries, and there are others sporting gravestones and memorials all over the world. Historian, photographer, and author Paul Koudounaris visited many of those cemeteries over the last ten years, taking photographs and talking to grieving pet owners for his new book Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves and Eternal Devotion.



Koudounaris even worked for a time as a grief counselor for pet owners to gain insight into the love people have for their pets. After all, the memorials they use to honor those pets aren't so much about the pets themselves, but about our memories of them and the love and appreciation that continues after death. Read about the book and the many memorials for beloved pets at Smithsonian. And get a preview of Koudounaris' book by clicking to the right on both images above.

Warning: this video will make you hungry. Pasta is an amazing food. It's made of wheat, like bread, but can be stored for a long period without going bad. It's easy to cook, and it fills you up. But most important, it can carry a full dish of flavor depending on what sauce or other ingredients you combine it with. It can help a small amount of meat or soup feed an entire family. It's no wonder pasta is popular all over. We consume it in a variety of forms, from ramen to lasagna to Kraft Dinner. But where did it really come from? How was it developed? And how can we get some right now?

Weird History Food takes us through the history of pasta, as much as we know, plus the many different shapes it comes in and why they exist at all, and also the process for making pasta in a factory. Now excuse me, I have to put on some water to boil.

We already knew that hummingbirds are pretty extreme. They are the world's smallest bird, their wings flap at 50 times a second, they have tongues that wrap around their brains like woodpeckers. But that's just the beginning of how these tiny, beautiful creatures push the envelope among bird species, and frankly, among animals. 

For example, hummingbirds are the only bird that can fly upside down or backwards. At certain times of the year, they can spend 13 hours a day flying, searching for nectar. They have amazing metabolisms that they can change at will, so that their energy expenditures while sleeping or in winter are barely above what will sustain life. They can fly at altitudes that a helicopter won't attempt. The sugar water they consume causes them to have blood sugar levels six times that of a human, but they've developed ways to deal with that, and with the relatively massive amounts of fluids they consume. How do they do it all? Several scientists who are hummingbird experts have put in the work, and they tell us how it's done at Knowable Magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Paul Danese)

The New Zealand filmmaking group AFK is producing a Star Wars fan film series on YouTube called For the Empire. You can see all the episodes so far in this playlist. It's an epic saga, but occasionally an episode stands alone rather well. In this one, the stormtrooper TK-FNG gets busted for incompetence and demoted. His assignments deteriorate until he finds himself guarding a Clone Wars fan convention. Then as his shift ends, he encounters his own cosplaying son, TK-FKU, attending the con. The two get a chance to catch up with each other even though they are quite different. In other words, it's a weird family bonding night.

This episode has a callback to one we posted earlier, in that TK-FNG finds himself on an elevator with Darth Vader and his wheezing on the worst day of his life. The stormtrooper has come a long way since then, and he handles it bit differently this time. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The pop culture idea of witches that make up our Halloween decorations and costumes is pretty benign, but the real historical women who were accused of witchcraft are tragic tales. These were women who stood out in some way, who caused trouble or else were a scapegoat for superstitious fears. They were shunned, tortured, or even executed in gruesome ways.

Even after the era of witch killings, women who didn't fit in or upheld the standards of respectability were labeled as witches, and that reputation can follow one beyond death. The graves of some women have carried their reputations and are considered haunted. Meg Shelton's grave has a huge boulder laid atop, to make sure she never comes back. Susan Gavan’s grave has a small fence around it, but is that to keep people who get too close from being cursed? Bathsheba Sherman was accused of killing her infant, and a movie franchise grew up around her story.

This has even happened to a couple of gravesites in which the deceased had never been considered a witch in life -or may have never existed at all. It's a common story: someone approaches a gravesite, becomes spooked by a sound or a gust of wind, and has to tell someone. Urban legends grow up around these sites, and every encounter gives someone else a story to tell. Read about eight graves allegedly haunted by the witch buried there at Mental Floss. Six of them are in the US, in case you want to plan an autumn road trip.

Every once in a while, you have to pass a CAPTCHA test to use something on the internet. This is supposed to prove you're a human user, and not a robot or an algorithm trying to introduce spam, malware, or misinformation. Sure, we understand why these are sadly necessary, but they can be enraging. You may be instructed to check all boxes that contain a traffic light, for example, but they don't tell us whether the pole holding it is included. Or the indicated object is too far away to see. Or you may miss a tiny corner. Bingo- you've been labeled as a 'bot and cannot access what you came for. Requesting a different image may or may not improve your chances, but you get the feeling that just the request causes a bias against you. Who comes up with these things?

It takes an entire team, but the photographer is Landra Fontaine, who loves her job because she's a sadist. And a trickster. A professional troll. You might even call her the scum of the earth. The next time you are confounded by a CAPTCHA, you will know who to blame. -via Laughing Squid

The Grumman F6F Hellcat was used in many dogfights in World war II, but afterward was considered obsolete. The US Navy made use of them, as drones to serve as targets for testing new battle aircraft and weapons. On August 16, 1956, a Hellcat equipped to be controlled by radio launched for just such a test. But the drone took matters into its own hands, or wings, and stopped responding to the RC pilot's commands. Instead of heading out to sea, it circled back to Southern California. The Air Force dispatched two pilots in F-89D Scorpions loaded with missiles to shoot it down. Their equipment, while thoroughly modern, did not cooperate either, and one failure led to another. It was a comedy of errors in the sky, but on the ground below, residents of Palmdale and Santa Clarita were dodging missiles.

The drone managed to avoid all 204 missiles fired at it, but was eventually brought down. The missiles on the ground started fires that burned hundreds of acres and involved around a thousand firefighters. It was only luck and coincidence that no one was killed. Read about the drone that embarrassed both the US Navy and the Air Force at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: US Navy) 

Jeff Letendre encountered a fawn who was too young to be away from her mother, but there was no sign of a mother, and the fawn was very hungry. So he provided her with milk and named her Fairy. These cases are sometimes pretty sad because a baby wild animal adopted by humans often has to live in captivity for the rest of their life. But Jeff was well aware of that and kept Fairy outside and encouraged her to meet other deer once she was weaned. Fairy lucked out and met a deer family with a mother that had enough maternal instinct to let a strange fawn join the family. Now Jeff has the best of both worlds, knowing that Fairy is happy and healthy living in the woods, but coming back to see him every once in a while. That makes him a Disney princess. You can see more of Jeff and his woodland friends at Instagram.

People somehow get the idea that America's national parks are safe places. If they weren't, why would they encourage people to visit? But that's not the philosophy of the parks. They operate under the idea that people should see and experience the wonders of nature, and they have set up rules, guidelines, and warnings to keep people safe. It's up to us to heed those warnings. Yellowstone National Park has two million acres of natural wonders, and some of them can kill you, but that mainly happens when people disregard the rules and the warnings.

The most dangerous things at Yellowstone are not the bears, nor the bison, although people have been killed by them. The thermal vents have killed more people than all animal attacks combined. And the difference is even more stark when you consider serious injuries. Just last week, a woman fell into near-boiling water when the ground gave way, because she was hiking off the marked trails. Read up on the history of injuries and deaths due to disregarding the guidelines near Yellowstone's hot springs and thermal vents at Outside Online. Keep in mind those deaths and injuries are still rare. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory)

The word "we" in the post title doesn't mean me or you, because I haven't got a clue, but rather scientists who know what temperature many species of dinosaur had when they were alive. I didn't even know those had been discovered at all, much less how they did it. All we have left of those dinosaurs are fossilized bones and a few impressions from skin, feathers, and footprints. But chemical analysis has detected a chemical called bioapatite, which sounds like something that makes you hungry. The study of this molecule tells us that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, or at least many dinosaurs that we know about. That makes them very different from the reptiles we studied in grade school, and more like the birds we barely studied at all. Minute Earth explains the importance of molecular chemistry to the study of paleontology and how some scientists took the temperatures of long-extinxt diosaurs.   

Chinese archaeologists have been excavating an ancient cemetery in northwestern China since the year 2000. They've unearthed 167 graves, some reaching back as far as 3,600 years. Some of the oldest mummies recovered had a substance sprinkled on their heads and necks. Modern chemical analysis and DNA tests have revealed that this is cheese.

The origins of cheese have always been murky, but it is assumed that it was developed on the Eurasian steppes, where livestock farming always did better than agricultural crops. The ancient cheese is kefir, made by introducing bacteria and yeasts from kefir grains into milk. They've found that the burial cheese contains Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Pichia kudriavzevii, which are still used to make kefir today. The milk was from both cows and goats. What does it taste like? So far, no one has admitted to trying 3,000-year-old cheese from a grave, but if it weren't good, they wouldn't have put in the work to make it. Read about the oldest cheese yet found at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: 罗布泊)  

The Peruvian desert has massive geoglyphs that aren't visible from the ground. These 2,000-year-old drawings, called the Nazca Lines, were only discovered after the airplane was developed, and we still don't know their purpose. But we now have a lot more of them. Around 430 of them were discovered by flying overhead over the last hundred years, but a new study by scientists from Yamagata University in Japan using artificial intelligence software has revealed 303 more. The computer programs can detect older, more blurry lines than human eyesight can, and much faster, too. Some of the new images were investigated, and slowly they were confirmed by scientists who spent 2,600 hours studying the sites on the ground.

The new images show llamas, orcas, fantasy creatures, and humans, including a beheading. It will take years to investigate them all, but we have a preview in images posted at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Masato Sakai et al./PNAS, 2024)

Today we have an unlimited number of colors at our fingertips thanks to modern chemistry. But it was once very difficult to find, isolate, and use pigments for paints, dyes, and ceramic glazes. Each pigment has a story behind it, and some of those stories are pretty interesting.

Egyptian blue was the first synthetic pigment we know about, used as far back as the 3rd millennium BCE. It was made by baking quartz, copper, alkali, and lime at very high temperatures, but the formula was lost until it was reverse-engineered in the 19th century. Egyptian blue turns out to have unique properties that the Egyptians who made it had no concept of, but are now being used in communication technology.

The story of Egyptian blue and nine other historical pigments are told in an excerpt from the book The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature, just released today, at Mental Floss.    

(Image credit: Djehouty)

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

As far as I know, flipping tables doesn't happen all that much in real life, even when people are very angry. The most well-known example is Jesus flipping the tables of the moneychangers at the temple, which is a great display of anger. In modern times, someone is more liable to punch a wall, if not a person. But the sight of a table flipping over is perfect for movies. It's easy to do, since tables are not as heavy as they are big, and spilling the contents makes for a messy, colorful visual. Much more spectacular than punching a wall. It's also surprising, telegraphs the idea of sudden anger quite successfully, and can be cathartic for the audience. 

Yoni Wagner made a supercut of table flips in movies to show us how often it's done, and frankly, to entertain us. This video contains NSFW language. As you'd expect, there are at least a half-dozen clips of Jesus flipping tables. Now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can put things right again. ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) -Thanks, Brother Bill!

When someone makes a tense encounter worse, we say they have escalated the situation. When we ride on an escalator, we could say that we escalated to the second floor (but we don't, because that just sounds pretentious). You might think that both actions use the same word because it means going one level up. The word might mean that now, but the word "escalate" didn't exist until 1900 when "Escalator" was trademarked for a moving staircase device. Yes, it's a brand name. See, we already had a term for going higher, and it was "elevate." But you don't see charges of a provocateur or police elevating a situation because that sounds like they are making it better.  

This is just one of several words for things that you think are named for another thing, but it's actually the other way around. Read about escalate and six other examples of names of things that didn't come from where you thought at Cracked.
 
(Image source: Know Your Meme)