In 1904, Charlotte Bleakley was under chloroform when she gave birth to a premature baby girl in St. Louis. She was given a dead infant to bury. But the baby had been switched with another premature girl born to an unmarried woman, possibly for nefarious reasons. That woman, who'd unknowingly had a stillbirth, left the child to be adopted. But since the baby was premature, she was sent to the World's Fair. What? The St. Louis fair had an exhibit of those newfangled "incubators" that kept premature babies alive, like the one we've posted about at Coney Island. The infant was labeled as Emily Darwin, because she looked like a chimpanzee. But she got better.

Bleakley found out her baby was alive, but allowed the wealthy Stella Barclay to adopt her. She later changed her mind, and wanted the little girl back. She kept taking the girl over and over as the lawsuits over the child went all the way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, all the details of the custody dispute were in the papers because of the bizarre baby switch and the notoriety of the child displayed at the World's Fair. At one point, the little girl's actual relation to Bleakley was questioned, but there were no DNA tests at the time. The girl went from being Emily Darwin to Thelma Barclay to Marian Bleakley. Read about the notorious case of the incubator baby kidnapping at The American Scholar. -via Strange Company   

We know that Mount Vesuvius erupted on August 24, 79 CE, and buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We've been digging through the rubble for almost 300 years, documenting the deaths of their residents. But what about the people who survived that disaster? Pompeii had 30,000 residents, and we've only uncovered a small fraction in excavations. There is evidence that many people fled. Where did they go?  

Professor Steven L. Tuck has spent the last decade tracing down the residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum who did not perish when Mount Vesuvius blew its top. The Romans kept pretty good records, considering that was almost 2,000 years ago. Many of the refugees were wealthy tradesmen and merchants, and settled in nearby towns to continue their lives, and there are records of not-so-wealthy survivors, too. Read how they coped and made new lives elsewhere, where their descendants may still live, in an article at the Conversation.   

(Image credit: Matthias Süßen)

The US battle against the New World screwworm involves breeding screwworms in a Panamanian factory so we can carpet bomb that country with bioengineered screwworms that, well, screw other screwworms. Panama is a long way from the US, yet we worked our way down there in an amazing story of parasitic species eradication that took decades and does not involve dumping tons of chemicals into the environment. And it's working! You might be squicked out by the thought of hiking the Darién Gap and the one danger you didn't prepare for being worms falling from the sky (which might make a great movie). But you will also be charmed by learning that deer love to eat doughnut holes. The program costs about $15 million a year, in case you are wondering where your couple thousand in income tax goes, but the benefits are that we get to have a livestock industry, and our booboos don't get infected with flesh-eating maggots. The video ends at 7:30; an ad follows. -via reddit

Stride of New Zealand: ancient ‘walking tree’ wins tree of the year https://t.co/EUu97CaBK1

— The Guardian (@guardian) June 5, 2024

The third annual Tree of the Year award, sponsored by the New Zealand Arboricultural Association, has been won by a 32-meter tall northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta) tree growing near Karamea. It garnered 42% of all votes in an online poll. This local favorite has earned the name "The Walking Tree" because it resembles an Ent from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings saga. Why does it grow like that? The northern rātā starts out as a type of parasite that grows on another tree. As it matures, it sends roots down to the ground, which then resemble trunks. So this tree grew down as well as up!

The Walking Tree is massive, and very old. When the land was cleared for farming in 1875, the farmer decided to leave this one standing. Read more about The Walking Tree and see the full photo in all its magnificence at The Guardian. -via Nag on the Lake

In 1977, Signet Books published a YA novel titled Rage by Richard Bachman. The author was really Stephen King, but publishers at the time thought it was unwise to print more than one book a year from any one author, so King used the pen name. Rage was pretty popular, and it was an engaging, well-written story. However, when you, here in 2024, find out what the plot involved, you will immediately see the problem. King himself eventually turned against his own novel. The author can't help that his scary stories appeal to young readers, but since then he has mainly stuck to supernatural terrors, such as drain-dwelling clowns and telekinetic prom queens. Rage has been out of print for a long time, which just drives up the price for used copies. Maybe those high prices will keep it from young, alienated, and impressionable students. Weird History explains the weird case of Rage and why it's no longer available in bookstores.  

The poem “The Rainbow Bridge” has long comforted animal lovers who are mourning a pet. But for decades, its author remained a mystery. https://t.co/i8YqEkvWaZ

— Mental Floss (@mental_floss) June 6, 2024

When a pet owner tells you that Fluffy has crossed the Rainbow Bridge, you know in an instant what that means. It is a reference to a poem that has been posted and reposted for thirty years, since Dear Abby published it in 1994. She did not have the author's name, and it remained a mystery for decades. But the first sentence in this post, while in common usage, doesn't fit with the source. If you read the full poem, a pet does not cross the Rainbow Bridge to heaven immediately, but enjoys playing with other pets, all in good health, until the person who loves them joins them to cross the bridge together. If you are tearing up thinking about it, you are not alone.

It was only last year that author and historian Paul Koudounaris tracked down the author and the real story behind "The Rainbow Bridge," which was originally written in 1959! Read how the tear-jerking poem came about at Mental Floss.

Summer officially begins, astronomically, with the summer solstice, which this year will occur on June 20, at 20:51 UTC (4:51 PM EDT). Yes, we are used to the solstice being on June 21st, but not this year. In fact, the last time the solstice was this early was when George Washington was the US president!

An explanation of this phenomena starts out pretty dense and confusing, but it's actually pretty simple. First, we get an explanation of the solstice as it pertains to earth's orbit. Then there is an explanation of how calendars work, with a history that we've covered here at Neatorama a few times. It all boils down to leap years, when we add an extra day to the year to make our calendars fall more in line with the earth's orbit around the sun. An actual year is 365.242189 days, so we add an extra day every four years to straighten it up. Every leap year makes the solstice earlier, but then non-leap years make it later again. But you can see by that fraction of a day that more adjustments were needed after a few hundred years.

In the late 16th century, more rules about leap years were added, so that century years (1800, 1900, etc) are not leap years, unless that century year is divisible by 400. The year 2000 was a century year divisible by 400, so it was a leap year, the first century leap year since the Gregorian calendar was finalized. Therefore, we have now had a long string of leap years every four years, making the solstice earlier than ever. This is all explained mathematically at Big Think.

(Image credit: Jfishburn)

This video contains NSFW language.

My high school math teacher once offered a bonus question for extra credit on a test. It was "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Explain." I think I was the only one who bothered to answer it. I just wrote "I Am the Walrus." That 1967 song from the Beatles was hard to memorize because the lyrics didn't make any sense, and most of us chalked it up to the band's drug use. Did John Lennon really write the lyrics to deliberately be nonsensical, or was there a hidden meaning underneath? Noah Lefevre of Polyphonic takes a deep dive into how the song was constructed, which has more to do with a potpourri of rhymes designed to illustrate the melody than any one idea or theme. However, there were ideas behind some of the lyrics. The video is only eight minutes long, the rest is promotional -via Laughing Squid

The actual title of the article is ‘If Not Friend, Why Friend-Shaped?’ which speaks to the quirkiness of human perception. Have we been influenced by Paddington Bear, Yogi Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Smokey Bear? Maybe, but the reason bears have been turned into so many pop culture characters is because they look so friendly in the first place. Experts were asked why we look at bears this way, and have a few ideas. Bears resemble dogs, which are man's best friend. Bears remind us of humans, too, since they live where we do, eat like we do (anything from honey to pic-a-nic baskets), and sometimes even walk like we do. Also, they tend to appear rotund, which signals harmlessness to humans who aren't that familiar with real bears. Bear cubs are adorable for their own reasons, and grow up to retain some of the baby features we find attractive. And there is at least one kind of bear that isn't all that dangerous and is also infinitely cute- the vegetarian giant panda bear. Read about the factors that make bears "friend-shaped" at Scientific American.  -via Metafilter

On June 6, 1944, Allied forces landed on the shores of Normandy in what was called D-Day. The 80th anniversary of the invasion that turned the tide of World War II is being celebrated in France by dozens of world leaders and surviving veterans from all over. In Lower Peover, Cheshire, UK, the commemoration is quieter, but the people are proud of the part their village played in the operation. General George Patton and General Dwight Eisenhower spent two days eating at the local pub called the Bells of Peover, and used the time to finalize plans for the Normandy invasion in the pub's dining room. A diary from an unknown soldier was later found in the pub, and is framed, open to entries for the dates of June 5th and 6th, 1944. A map of the invasion is also on the wall. British and American flags are displayed at the front door.

The citizens of Lower Peover still talk about the Americans who were based there during World War II, and about the villagers who proudly served in the war, including those who participated in the D-Day invasion. Read about the Bells of Peover and its place in history at BBC.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Dave.Dunford)

The original Star Trek TV series ran for three years and was canceled. The final episode aired on June 3, 1969. That episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” was not written as a finale, since back then that's not how TV worked, especially when a series was canceled. It was the one where Captain Kirk was the victim of a body-switching scheme launched by a vengeful ex-girlfriend. Inverse explains how that episode didn't live up to Star Trek standards, which weren't all that high to begin with. While Star Trek was notably progressive in most areas, it was still quite sexist.

But then we find out that the plot of the final episode wasn't what saved "the fandom and the franchise" at all. That had to do with the person who was on set while the episode was filming, and spent the next few years making Star Trek into something more than a short-lived science fiction series. Fifty-five years later, read about "Turnabout Intruder" and what it led to at Inverse.

(Image credit: CBS/Paramount)

Chet Phillips (previously at Neatorama) has created a plastic-coated poker-size deck of cards that features 58 different illustrations of cats. The cats include stereotypical themes like "crazy cat lady" and "scaredy cat," but others are puns like "cat call" and "catalyst." There are pop culture cats, too, like "Dracatula" and "Clockwork tabby." The royal cards are illustrated as cats see themselves -as regal. Wait, 58 cards? That's a standard deck plus two jokers and four extra wild cards, because Phillips apparently had that much inspiration. I can see these being repurposed as a tarot deck for some people. Let's see a few closeups.



Caution: when playing a game with this deck, keep your eye on the values in the corner. Laughing at the illustrations can distract you into losing the game, and prolong play to a ridiculous degree. That goes double when you are playing a card game with children. The Cat's Meow deck can be ordered at Phillips' website for $15. -via Laughing Squid

The seventh movie in the Alien franchise is coming. Alien: Romulus is set between the 1979 movie Alien and the 1986 movie Aliens. A spaceship crew is exploring a derelict space station and finds that there is life aboard, just not any life form they understand. Here, the only people familiar with the alien creatures are the audience, so the crew learns what is going on the hard way. Fede Alvarez directed this film, and takes it back to the gradually unfolding terror of the original movie. He also insisted that the trailer not show too much monster, but what they show us is plenty. We don't know what "Romulus" is, but I suspect it may be the name of the space ship or the abandoned space station. This trailer contains NSFW language. Alien: Romulus was originally slated to go straight to Hulu, but the finished product was judged worthy of a theatrical run, so it will be released in theaters on August 16.

They say that all's fair in love and war. Or they used to, because we know better now. But back in 1781, as the American colonies were fighting the British Empire for their freedom, there were few tactics the ill-equipped Americans wouldn't try. Both sides had occasionally staged a kidnapping of high-profile hostages already. Then word came of the first member of the British royal family setting foot in America. Colonel Matthias Ogden of the Continental Army discovered this through his spies, and wrote to Commander-in-Chief General George Washington, recommending the kidnapping of a British Admiral and a 17-year-old midshipman- who happened the be King George III's third son.

Washington approved the plan for taking the two from the HMS Prince George, and laid out how Prince William Henry was to be treated. They were not to offer "insult or indignity" to the prince nor the admiral, but they could order them around as needed. Circumstances of the war meant that the royal kidnapping was never carried out, but you have to wonder how later relations with the British could have been affected if it had happened. Read the story of the revolutionary kidnapping plan at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Brown University Library)

A couple of weeks ago, we learned of a startup trying to perfect a brain transplant, or more specifically, a body transplant. You might be surprised to learn it's been done before -but not on a human being. A spinal cord can not yet be connected to a brain in a manner that would make the body controllable, but 54 years ago, Dr. Robert White thought that paralysis might be a worthwhile price to pay for continued life. He put his extensive neuroscience research to work on transplanting a monkey's head to the body of another monkey. And it worked -for a few days. You don't want to think too much about that monkey's quality of life for those few days. All these years later, there are still doctors and scientists willing to try body transplants, despite the major ethical concerns. You can read more about Dr. White's career here.