The candles shown above were used in the Victorian era, and they are kind of genius. The box they came in had a hole just the right size to be a candle holder. The candles themselves sometimes came with a phosphorus coating on the exposed wick, so that they could also be their own match. They are described as "brothel candles," because they were used in Victorian houses of ill repute as a timer. Light a candle when you go behind doors with a client, and when the candle is completely melted seven minutes later, his time is up.

Except that there is no truth to those last two sentences at all. Victorian prostitutes had their own watches and clocks that didn't need to be replenished. Besides, seven minutes is a long time when there are others waiting and money to be made. The brothel candle is a myth, a sexy story to tell, but that doesn't mean these candles aren't interesting in their own way. Read the real purpose of what were once called pocket candles at Fake History Hunter. -via Strange Company

In an excerpt from his new book, entomologist Frank Nischk tells us the story of that time he was alone at the research station at Reserva Otonga in the Ecuadorian Andes and battled a horde of army ants. He wasn't all that concerned for himself, but wanted to protect a collection of crickets he had spent two weeks finding and identifying. His weapon against millions of ants? A broom.

But interspersed with the fighting, Nischk explains the impact of army ants (Eciton burchellii) on some of the 559 identified other animal species that have evolved to rely on the ants for survival. If army ants went extinct, so could those other species. Several dozen species of birds follow army ants on the march, to scoop up the insects that the ants frighten out of their hiding places. Butterflies also follow, to feed on the bird droppings. Parasitic wasps also follow to find the scurrying insects. Other creatures feed on the carcasses of animals that army ants kill but can't carry with them. There are beetles that evolved to look like army ants and hide in plain sight right in an army ant's nest, for protection and to take advantage of the bits of food they bring in to feed their larvae. Come for the battle of human vs. army ants, and stay for the fascinating ecosystem they create, in the book excerpt at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Geoff Gallice)

Pretty sure this one was just TR's regular daily look.

— Timothy Smith (@tjsnh) March 1, 2023

Cam Harless gives us a gallery of digital images of the American presidents sporting mullet haircuts. They are hilariously strange. One reply summed it up: "Plenary power in the front, executive privilege in the back."

15. James Buchanan pic.twitter.com/QBaXOadETD

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

Some of the presidents are rendered much hotter than they really are (or were): Biden, Trump, W, Buchanan, Lincoln. Harless doesn't say, but one might suspect that artificial intelligence is involved here and automatically gave quite a few presidents a model's square jaw. Some others came out uglier than their photographs: Bush the Elder, Nixon, Eisenhower, etc. The earliest presidents don't look all that different from their portraits, because they rocked that long haired look in real life with their powdered wigs.

34. Dwight D. Eisenhower pic.twitter.com/1Ffrsk1TW5

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023

John F. Kennedy looks more like his brother Bobby. Or his son, JFK Jr. In the comments, we learn that LBJ really grew his hair out after leaving the White house, and even wore a ponytail in retirement.

He actually did look like this in old age.

— John Sipher (@john_sipher) March 2, 2023

I rather doubt LBJ ever wore an earring. After showing us all the presidents, Harless added mullet portraits of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Hilary Clinton by request. All the presidents' images are available on a poster titled Mullet America at Etsy. See the good, the bad, and the ugly in the Twitter thread or at Threadreader.   -via Metafilter

Try to guess what would be the loudest sound on record for the earth we know. Those qualifications discount prehistoric events and celestial events like exploding stars. Would it be a nuclear explosion? A Who concert? The Tunguska Event? Your toddler throwing a tantrum? How about none of the above? Great Big Story reveals what experts consider to be the event that caused the loudest sound in recorded history, an eardrum-splitting 310 decibels that really did split eardrums for some folks who managed to live through it. More than 39,000 people did not.

But first they explain the decibel scale so we can get an idea of how very loud it was. Spoiler for those who can't wait for a two-minute video: you can read more about the deadly event at Wikipedia.  -via Laughing Squid

For more than a thousand years, the church had inordinate power over the lives of Europeans. When someone died, they had to be buried under consecrated ground in the parish cemetery. But that could be quite a long way from the small villages across the parish. Therefore, paths were made to get the deceased to the church in the straightest line possible, even if it cut through farms and forests. Even better if such a road could avoid passing by houses, because a funeral procession might bring bad luck to a household. These are called corpse roads, and there are many of them still in existence. Britain alone has 42 documented corpse roads.

Of course, when the purpose of the road is to transport the dead, there will be superstitions that grow up around them. There will also be stories of lights and apparitions. Messy Nessy Chic tells us about those traditions and superstitions, as well as the "rules" for building and using a corpse road. Oh yeah, there are plenty of pictures, too.

(Image credit: Alan Cleaver)

In the  image image above, your eyes tell you that you are looking at two bowls and a wooden cutting board. But your brain instantly recognizes recognizes Johannes Vermeer’s painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring." This version is by digital artist Emil Schwärzler. Vermeer's masterpiece is so iconic that mere shapes and colors bring us back to the original. Artists all over the world have reinterpreted the painting in many different ways, with different models, different themes, and even different media. The original normally resides at The Mauritshuis in the Hague, Netherlands, but is out on loan right now. So the museum is hosting a different exhibit called My Girl with a Pearl, featuring 170 modern interpretations of the painting, which are shown on a loop in the spot where Vermeer's masterpiece is normally displayed. My Girl with a Pearl will run until June 4, even after the original is scheduled to return to the museum on April first. But you don't have to go to the Netherlands to see the artworks- you can peruse 89 of them at your leisure at Instagram. -via Colossal

Wouldn't it be cool to be granted a super power? But then you find out that power of "superpropulsion" is the ability to fling drops of urine at high speeds. Comic book editors are going to love that. Although they've come up with worse.

The glassy-winged sharpshooter is a kind of leafhopper and an agricultural pest. It sucks fluids out of plants. Since the sap is 95% water, they drink a lot to get the nutrients they need, and have to expel a lot of water. Lucky for them, they have an anal catapult that expels a drop of water, and when it reaches a certain size, flings it away with a lot of force for a tiny insect. The physics and fluid dynamics of this pee-shooter are explained at Ars Technica. The upshot of this complicated mechanism is that it actually uses much less energy than just streaming urine like civilized animals. Flinging urine far away makes it harder for predators to smell their exact location. A study out of Georgia Tech gives us the visual above.

Other insects are "frass-shooters," "butt-flickers," and "turd-hurlers," but the glassy-winged sharpshooter is the only insect we know of that is blessed with superpropulsion.  -via Fark

Mussels are shellfish that spend almost all their lives attached to rocks and filtering the passing water for food particles. But before that, in their larval stage, they are parasites, and grow up inside a fish that their mother has caught for them. Yeah, nature is metal. Some species of mussel mothers snatch up a fish for this purpose, while others arrange their eggs and/or larva into a sort of pod that's shaped like something a fish would want to eat, which achieves the same purpose in the end. There's no one better to explain this weirdness than Ze Frank in his True Facts series. I mean, admit it, you wouldn't be exploring the reproductive habits of a mussel if it were from any other source. There's a one-minute embedded ad at 4:30.

Redditor Ok_Journalist120 presents us with a mystery. His father keeps bees in Florida, and one honey harvest was green! How did that happen?

The most common reason for odd colored honey is sweet industrial waste that the bees feed on. You might remember the 2012 story in which French bees produced green and blue honey. It was discovered that the bees had been feeding on uncovered candy waste from a nearby Mars plant that was making M&Ms. Then there was the 2015 case of Arthur Mondella, whose marijuana growing operation came to light after bees started producing red honey by eating illegally discarded syrup from his maraschino cherry factory.

Redditor Steadyandquick found all kinds of examples of green honey. Honey can be green if the bees have been consuming the nectar of yellow star thistle, which flourishes in California.

An expensive honey from Borneo is green due to chlorophyll in the exotic flowers found on the island of Banggi. Another study on the same type of claim for green honey from the Palawan forest of the Philippines found no hives, hinting that this type of honey is faked.

Beekeepers in Greece found their honey green in 2016. They believed it was because of kiwi plants, but kiwi plants do not produce nectar, which is what honey is made from. An investigation found that the bees had been feeding on the juice of mature kiwi fruits that were unharvested after a hailstorm damaged the crops. What bees make can't officially be called honey unless it is made from flower nectar. While the "fruit juice honey" was delicious, it was not good for the bees, and they didn't survive the next winter.  

As for the honey pictured here, Ok_Journalist120 has been eating it a little at a time for a year now, and hasn't suffered any ill effects. But there's no definite answer yet for this particular case of green honey.

The Beakfasteur is a doctor and a mother. She makes anatomical models out of Playdough and other materials to show her little boy (and the rest of us) how surgery is done. In the video above, she does a Lichtenstein tension-free mesh repair on an inguinal hernia. No bleeding and no stitches, because it's Playdough! Still, it may be disturbing for the squeamish. If you'd rather see a cochlear implant, thyroidectomy, cesarian section, gallbladder removal, cleft palate repair, or coronary artery bypass, she has those videos, too, all using homemade anatomy. In fact, you can find a very wide range of the Breakasteur's Playdough surgeries at both YouTube and Instagram. Those who know will warn you that the knee replacement surgery is the most likely to squick you out. The lumpectomy video shows a Playdough breast, but if you aren't at work, it's worth watching for the child's comments at the beginning. -via Metafilter

We've posted about the fear of being buried alive, and the schemes people went through to ensure that it wouldn't happen to them. It seems like an irrational fear, but the possibility is there. We can assume that most cases will never be found out about, but there have been a few instances of someone surviving a burial.

Angelo Hays was 19 years old when he wrecked his motorcycle, crashing face-first into a brick wall. This was in 1937; today this would be a case of prime organ donation. Hays' face was so mangled he had a closed casket funeral three days later. However, his insurance company investigated his death, and requested that his body be exhumed for examination. His casket was dug up two days after the funeral. But his body was warm- Hays was still alive, five days after the accident!

Read what happened to Angelo Hays and three other cases of premature funerals at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Antoine Wiertz)

You're going to love this anime short from Corridor Digital. Someone call John Farrier!

We have the unlikely scenario of an old king dying on the throne without a clear line of succession. While that may be acceptable in a fantasy, this story gets even crazier as it goes along. The king has two sons, who are twins, good and evil of course. They don't look much alike, but since they are twins, it only stands to reason that they have a telepathic link. The evil twin challenges the good twin for the throne by throwing hands, but not in the way you'd expect. His choice of weapon is a game of rock, paper, scissors. It turns into the most dramatically over-the-top game you've ever seen, with twists and turns leading to an astounding climax with all the action-packed spcial effects that anime is all about. Even while you are giggling, you have to admit it's a pretty good story. -via Geeks Are Sexy

New Mexico's Chaco Canyon holds the ruins of many pueblos and great houses built by Chacoans more than a thousand years ago. These houses had up to 700 rooms, and were built with stone and timbers that were brought in from up to 70 miles away. How did they transport those logs without draft animals or even wheels? Rodger Kram and James Wilson theorized that they might have used tumplines that enabled humans to carry larger loads for further distances than we would normally consider possible.

To test the theory, the two scientists "put their money where their mouth is," or rather, put their time and effort where their scientific theory is. They spent the summer of 2020 getting into shape and then carrying logs over miles of landscape using tumplines. First they trained for 45 days, then they went for distance. Kram and Wilson managed to walk in sync with each other up to 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) in a day carrying a 60-kilogram (132 pound) log together. Their conclusions, reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science, state that this method was entirely feasible for a sizable community to build these huge constructions. Read about their ordeal in testing that feasibility at Ars Technica. It includes a video so we can see how they did it. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: National Park Service)

Laurence Brown usually makes videos comparing British and American language, customs, and geography. But so much has happened to him suddenly over the past few months that his slice-of-life videos are even more compelling. He has become an American citizen, bought his first house, and his father died. All these things crashed into each other and Brown had to get a passport in a hurry. This could have been a nightmare, but the worst part of it was Brown's anxiety. A couple of months after the fact, Brown explains the procedures and the trepidation he felt in obtaining his first US passport in order to attend his father's funeral. It wasn't so long ago that we were told to get passports at least six months before travel, so it could have been much worse.

Railroad crews were doing maintenance work on the Staplehurst Bridge in Kent, England, on June 9, 1865, and had taken up some of the rails. A train wasn't warned in time to stop, and only partially crossed the rail-less bridge when the middle cars of the train plunged to the river below. Renowned author Charles Dickens was in the third car, which was being pulled downward by the car behind it. However, the coupling snapped and left Dickens' car hanging precipitously.

Dickens ran to the fallen cars to help the injured and the dying. The bridge wasn't high, but the fallen cars were smashed. Ten people died, and more than 40 others were injured. Dickens had come very close to dying himself, and the experience horrified him. He was probably also at least somewhat concerned about the publicity, since he was traveling with his mistress. Dickens hated riding trains for the rest of his life, and he died five years later to the day. Read about the Staplehurst rail crash and what it did to Charles Dickens at Mental Floss.