Wilbur and Orville Wright are acclaimed for building the first ever motorized heavier-than-air flying machine. Its first successful flight was on December 17, 1903. While that may seem a huge accomplishment to those of us who know what came after, it was so low-key at the time that they couldn't even get it into newspapers. Even the brothers' hometown newspaper, the Dayton Journal, thought the flight was too short to count. It was pretty short- the distance they flew was shorter than the length of a modern airliner.

So the Wrights kept trying, staging a demonstration for the press in 1904 that didn't go well. It wasn't until they did figure eights in the air in France that the press decided the Wright Brothers were the real deal- in 1908! Why did it take so long for anyone to notice this stunning breakthrough? Because no one believed powered flight was possible. Read about the slow media response to the Wright Brothers flight at Big Think. -via Real Clear Science   

The birthday party invitation above has gone viral. Carys Roberts of Kingston, Ontario, is throwing a party for her twin girls as they turn five years old. Anyone who knows a five-year-old girl can understand that they wanted their party to have a theme of "unicorns but with rainbows and maybe bats but there should be princesses and also Minnie and we need dancing lights" But what's really appealing is that Roberts is trying to lower expectations for the party guests, especially the parents, with phrases like "brought to you by Pinterest fails and the dollar store." It's an appropriate tactic in an age that finds children's birthday parties designed more for social media than for the children.

There's no reason to rent equipment and hire entertainment for young children, although we've seen parties with perfectly matched theme decorations, food, and games for one- and two-year-olds. What children really want is a fun time with their friends and family. Another part of the invitation that caught people's attention is Roberts' polite admission that she could use some help supervising the kids -"adult juice" provided. If you can't read the text in the image above, a larger version and an interview with Roberts can be found here. -via Metafilter

Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys, have played with dangerous things before, but they are serious when they warn us about playing with large neodymium magnets. "They will crush you." But that's exactly what they are doing in their latest video. These magnets are so attractive that you can't work with them before removing all the metal on your body, or you'll be sorry. Getting two of them together is another level- they will rush together so quickly and forcefully that they break! It happens in a blink of an eye, but these are the Slow Mo Guys. They recorded the magnets colliding at 187,000 frames per second, so we can see how it happens. The collision throws parts of the magnets off, but they are quickly sucked back together. That all occurs in the first four minutes; then they try some other experiments and show us how very weird these magnets act when they're trying to handle them.   -via Born in Space

From 1809 to 1927, this strange disease killed thousands of settlers and farmers in the Midwest—including Abraham Lincoln’s mother. https://t.co/GODTnGUwJg

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) June 20, 2023

When pioneers began settling in the United States midwest, they encountered a deadly illness that was eventually dubbed "milk sickness." It could kill a person within days. Calves died from it, and milk cows suffered as well, so the connection with drinking milk lent the illness its name. But no one knew what caused it, until Doctor Anna put her efforts into finding the cause.

Anna Pierce Bixby saw a need in her new Illinois community, and went to Philadelphia to be trained in nursing, midwifery, and dentistry, and returned to Rock Creek, Illinois, as the only medical practitioner for miles around. Besides delivering babies and pulling teeth, she searched and found the cause of milk sickness, with the aid of a Native American woman whose identity has been lost. But while cases of milk sickness waned in southern Illinois due to Bixby's efforts, it continued elsewhere because faraway doctors and officials didn't put much stock in what a frontier midwife had to say. Time and experience proved Bixby correct, yet even today she is more known for a local legend of buried treasure than for her public health work. Read how Doctor Anna fought milk sickness at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

Simone Giertz, the "queen of shitty robots" (previously at Neatorama), went to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan to meet Mohammad Waheed Hussein Asaf, who makes toys for the children of the camp. The aim was to collaborate in making a working helicopter for the children. Their time together is a contrast of old and young, Eastern and Western, man and woman, from different parts of the world who don't have a language in common.  

"He thinks I'm incompetent, and I think he's a stubborn old man."

There had to be a translator there, but the editing of this video is so exquisite that you don't even realize it. Can they come together to build a helicopter from the materials available? That seems to be almost beside the point, as the real story here is the partnership of two makers.

The video is a project of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, to celebrate World Refugee Day on June 20. The UNHCR's mini-documentary series called We Are Here has four episodes available on YouTube.  -via Metafilter

If you were to go by pop culture versions of Viking feasts, a meal would be laden with whole animals roasted over a spit, accompanied by plenty of alcoholic beverages. While that may be appropriate for a celebratory dinner after a successful pillaging, it's not what most people of the Viking era ate. Daniel Serra is the world's foremost expert on Viking cuisine, and has published a cookbook of Viking recipes. He also gives demonstrations of historic cooking in recreated Viking villages in Scandinavia. But how do you recreate meals from a culture that didn't write anything down?

Serra studies a combination of sources, such as archaeological digs, mentions of food in orally-preserved Viking sagas, and extrapolating back from later written recipes. He cross-references his findings with the science of what the area was like in the Viking age, what resources were available, and what the culture was like. Then he tests his recipes and cooking methods to see if they work.

Serra describes the everyday "comfort foods" that Viking communities would produce, and even shares a recipe for Traveller's Fish Porridge at BBC's World's Table. -via Digg

You might think that someone messed up the instructions for assembling their IKEA cat, but this is Gulliver, and he's just weird. That's how he got featured on the subreddit WhatsWrongWithYourCat.

Then there's sangu811's cat, who can sleep in what would be a most uncomfortable position for humans. Honestly, there's usually nothing wrong with these cats, it's just that cats are open to new experiences, exceedingly flexible, and they don't care what you think. If you enjoy cats caught on camera being all weird, check out 50 of them in a ranked list at Bored Panda. 

Red velvet cake wasn't on the table for the first Juneteenth celebration in 1865, because it wasn't all that widespread, or all that red yet. But other red foods were there, like watermelon for dessert, and became symbolic of the holiday. So it's no mystery why red velvet cake is served at modern Juneteenth celebrations, and at Christmas, too. Besides, it's delicious!

The first velvet cake was a deluxe chocolate cake, and the faint red tinge was a byproduct of how the cocoa reacted with the leavening agents. The cake was a hit, and people liked the red tint as much as they liked the flavor. Yes, you had to use the right kind of cocoa to produce the red color, but if you wanted to make sure, you could add food coloring. A recipe for red velvet cake was even used to promote the sale of food coloring in the 1940s. The shockingly bright red color with the additive proved very popular, and now you don't even need chocolate to have a festive red cake. But don't forget the cream cheese frosting!

Read how red velvet cake came about, and try a recipe for the classic Velvet Cocoa Cake that produces the natural reddish brown color, posted at Atlas Obscura. I made a set of red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting Friday for an office gathering, and I will be eating my sole portion today in honor of Juneteenth.    

(Image credit: I made this.)

Throwing a cable across a ravine is easier than building a bridge. Actually, throwing a cable across is the first step to building a bridge, but sometimes the project stops there, because people can cross with just a cable if they are brave enough. Slovenia has several manual cable cars strung across some of its more inaccessible ravines, but Tom Scott found only one that is regularly maintained. When you see it, you'll have your doubts. But Tom watched other people use it, and was game to demonstrate it for us. There's no way on earth you'd get me in that thing, even if I were being chased by some bad guys out of an Indiana Jones movie, and I grew up in the land of rickety swinging footbridges. Would you ride a rusty 70-year-old zipline? If heights make you queasy, be warned that they do show images of what Tom is crossing over.

From the early days of photography, here's a story of a torture that became a badge of honor. Born in 1799, Captain Jonathan W. Walker was an avid abolitionist. He worked with the Underground Railroad, and helped those who escaped slavery settle in Mexico. But in 1844, he was on a boat taking seven escapees to the West Indies when they got into trouble and were rescued by a ship with a pro-slavery crew. Walker was arrested, and a US Marshall branded his right hand with "SS," which stood for "slave stealer." He was jailed in Florida for eleven months.

The incident didn't slow Walker down at all, and he continued his abolitionist work lecturing and arranging for escapes after his bail was paid by an abolitionist group. Not long after, he commissioned a photograph to be made of his branded right hand. The image, however, is reversed and appears to be his left hand- notice that the Ss are backward. Read Walker's story that left us a lasting image of the fight over slavery at Vintage Everyday.  -via Nag on the Lake

At its most basic level, cancer is when our own cells decide to grow out of control. Yes, it's much more malignant than that sounds. Your body will recognize and fight the danger, but if it gets bad enough, your immune system will need outside help.

In this video, Kurzgesagt describes the immune system's battle against cancer in an analogy of a city and its emergency systems going up against a chaotic gang of dangerous troublemakers, some of them with malevolent supernatural power. That makes it easier to understand, but I also see another analogy here in the story of drug-resistant bacteria. If you spread antibiotics out too widely, such as treating entire livestock herds before any infection is present, or using antimicrobial soaps, you risk allowing some surviving superbugs to evolve and flourish. So who wins the battle? It's hard to say, because this can all go on without us ever knowing it. But concerning the cancers that become bad enough for us to detect them, we are learning more and more about building more powerful weapons against these malignant cells all the time.

Archaeologists studying an excavation in Nördlingen, Germany, have uncovered a sword in a grave that contained a man, a woman, and a young boy. It was among other weapons and artifacts included in the burial, which is considered around 3,000 years old. But the sword has been uniquely preserved, and looks only a few years old. The sword is bronze, made by the applied bronze casting method, which is labor intensive and requires quite a bit of skill. Scientists don't know where it was made. But you might wonder how it was preserved so long in such a pristine condition. It's all about the cuprous salts.

3/
Copper-based artifacts create exceptional preservational circumstances because copper salts ward off microbes and copper doesn't corrode the same way that iron does. This can often lead to artifacts looking practically brand new, like this 400 year old chafing dish fragment. pic.twitter.com/BYTzX4yqrZ

— Bill Farley, Chafing Dish Enthusiast (@ArchaeologyGame) June 15, 2023

You can read more about the chemistry involved in the Twitter thread. We don't know if the sword has been removed from the site yet, but there's a possibility that whoever lifted it from the rock after all this time is now the rightwise king born of somewhere.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dr. Woidich)

The ESA spacecraft carrying the James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas morning 2021 from the Centre Spatial Guyanais in the city of Kourou in French Guiana. You may wonder what a European spaceport is doing in South America. The French space agency CNES was established in 1961 with a spaceport in Algeria, which was then part of the French empire. Algeria fought and won their independence in 1962, and the space agency had to start all over. They selected French Guiana because it was already a French territory and had good conditions for space launches. They built Kourou specifically for the space center, evicting around 600 villagers to do so.

But French Guiana, and particularly the Salvation Islands off its coast, has a sordid history. Until the mid-20th century, it was France's penal colony. After slavery was abolished in France, the country sent prisoners to South America to serve out their sentences- and to harvest crops and build infrastructure. Of the 80,000 or so prisoners sent to French Guiana, the majority never made it back to France even after their sentences were up. This was the setting of the book and movie Papillon. Read about the space centre built overtop a notorious penal colony at Supercluster. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: Adèle Roncey)

Fathers Day would not be complete without Darth Vader jokes. Star Wars fans of a certain age still haven't gotten over the twist in The Empire Strikes Back, the one that turned a single space adventure into an epic family saga. Too bad that was the peak of the series. (Dragging Leia into the family didn't happen until The Return of the Jedi, and never made much sense anyway. I think Lucas just did that solely so we wouldn't feel bad for the hero who didn't get the girl in the end. But I digress.) You'll have to recall what was said during that battle, because this video only has grunts, but I suspect you know what happened.

In this holiday vignette from LEGO, we finally see what caused Darth Vader to do a sudden turnaround and decide his loyalties were with his son instead of the Emperor. A simple gift causes Vader to think about all the things that might have been if he had spent his time as a dad instead of a Sith Lord. Send this post to your Dad to give him a smile for Fathers Day. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The 2009 Disney Princess movie The Princess and the Frog is loosely based on the Grimm's fairy tale The Frog Prince. But the character of Tiana, the "princess," was inspired by a real person. Disney wanted to place a fairy tale in the United States with a Black protagonist, and after a lot of changes to the project, focused on the real-life story of Leah Chase of New Orleans, “the Queen of Creole Cuisine.” The parts of the story that were not from The Frog Prince are Chase's.

According to Leah Chase's daughter Stella Chase, it was always her mother's dream to open a restaurant. She fell in love with a New Orleans musician whose parents owned a po-boy stand. They married, and Chase worked in the kitchen, honing the cooking skills she brought from her large family. When she and her husband Edgar inherited the restaurant, she expanded it and introduced an extensive menu of Creole cuisine. Now named Dooky Chase's Restaurant, the establishment became a meeting place and a refuge during the Civil Rights Movement. Read about Leah Chase and how her legacy figures into The Princess and the Frog at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Disney Parks/Sabina Graves/Gizmodo)