It's already May the eighth in Britain, and so Sir David Attenborough is celebrating his 100th birthday. Born on May 8, 1926, the British broadcaster and naturalist joined the BBC in 1952, when it was fairly new and few people had television sets. He himself had never seen television before. Attenborough worked on several shows, then became the host (what the British call a presenter) of the show Zoo Quest in 1954. Since then he's brought us dozen of shows on the world's animals in their natural habitats. He also became an executive at the BBC.

Attenborough's nature documentaries have inspired children to become scientists, filmmakers, and conservationists. His shows, from Zoo Quest to Life on Earth to Blue Planet have given us a new way to see the world around us. Read about Attenborough's influence on what a nature documentary can be. 

Tributes to Attenborough's very public and inspiring career are rolling in, and he took time to record a message of appreciation for his fans. 

Specialized employment, or working a job for money, has existed for only a few thousand years of human history. Before that, people were pretty much all farmers, and before that, we were hunter-gatherers. We think of that as a hard life, but studies show that procuring enough food to eat didn't take up nearly as much time as you might think. YouTuber Axen illustrates how ancient people really spent their time, and you might end up being jealous. Just remember, today we have ice cream.  

But there are a couple of caveats here. This was from a time when there were fewer people and plenty of resources. Living in a warm climate meant you didn't have to spend a lot of time storing up firewood, building warm homes, and making warm clothes. That changed when humans used their free time to wander into new territory for new resources when the world grew more crowded. As that happened, they eventually had to spend more time defending the community from enemies as well. And no matter what time period you target, women still had the added burden of reproduction and child care.

In the past few weeks, Americans under 50 have been looking up the siege of the American Embassy in Tehran to understand the tensions between the US and Iran. Meanwhile, other incidents that have nothing to do with the US were happening at the same time, because groups of people have always been horrible to other groups of people.    

On April 30, 1980, six gunmen from the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA) stormed the Iranian Embassy in London. They were Iranian Arabs opposed to the new government, supported and armed by Iraq. They took 26 hostages, mostly embassy employees, but also British and international contractors, visitors, journalists, and one policeman. The terrorists demanded the release of Arab prisoners in Iranian jails and safe passage out of Britain. Margaret Thatcher refused to promise safe passage. The siege went on for six days, until the British SAS staged a terrifying but brilliant raid to end the standoff. Read what led to the crisis, what happened behind the scenes day-by-day, and the fallout afterward at Utterly Interesting. 

When I started watching this video, I thought it was going to be a rehash of the Lutz family story that inspired The Amityville Horror. But this is one I'd never heard before- it's far less supernatural and therefore scarier. Derek and Maria Broaddus bought a house in Westfield, New Jersey, in 2014. They immediately started renovations to get the house ready for them and their three children to move into. They also started getting eerie letters from an anonymous writer. The letters revealed that someone had them under surveillance, and intended to keep watching them. The letters continued and became more threatening, and the Broaddus family delayed moving in. 

Their story was published at a blog in 2018, and was eventually made into a TV show, The Watcher, which ran for seven episodes in 2022. Weird History gives us the rundown on what happened and some speculation about why it happened. No perpetrator has ever been identified. But you might want to watch something a little more benign to clear your head after hearing what the Broaddus family went through.      

South Africa in 1982 was at the height of the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela was in prison and the revolutionary organization ANC operated in secret from surrounding countries. South Africa was also preparing to put its first nuclear power plant online. Rodney Wilkinson seemed like the last person you would suspect of being a political saboteur: he was white, a former national fencing champion, a veteran, and a contract employee at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station. But Wilkinson's unwilling experience in the "secret" war with Angola had turned him against the South African government. 

In December of 1982, Wilkinson managed to plant four bombs in the Koeberg plant, which detonated and caused $500 million in damage and set the nuclear plant back 18 months. Wilkinson bicycled away and wasn't identified until 1995, after Mandela was freed and the apartheid government had fallen. Read about the years of ANC planning that led to the Koeberg bombing and what happened to Wilkinson afterward at the Guardian. -via Metafilter 

The What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) tackles submitted theoretical questions seriously, no matter how dumb they seem on the surface. In list of fun facts, we often run across how bananas are radioactive. It's true, but how radioactive are they? And if we could extract that radioactivity, how many bananas would it take to power, say, a home? 

Bananas, as you know, are safe to eat. The reason their radioactivity is a meme is a story in itself. Here we find out why bananas (and other foods) are technically radioactive. Still, radioactivity is a matter of scale. This video looks at that scale, and determines that the radioactivity from them isn't worth the hassle of harnessing. You could produce more energy by burning the bananas. But the best way to get energy from a banana is to eat it! Just be aware of the danger- and don't slip on the peel. 

L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, and followed it with 13 more books about Oz. The first book is the most familiar, although it isn't the only Oz story that was made into a movie or a TV series. We're not really sure how many adaptations there have been; things like the 13-minute 1910 silent movie don't get seen much anymore. Some are based on later Baum books, and some have nothing to do with the books. Mental Floss gives us descriptions and ranked the quality of the eight best known Wizard of Oz adaptations. Some you may have never heard of, like the anime series that covers the first four books. Some you are well familiar with. They range from the 1925 movie that some consider the worst silent film in history, to number one, which you'll be able to guess pretty easily. Along the way, you might find another version you want to seek out and watch.  

What happens when a formerly peaceful household is invaded by a cute kitten? Dorothy is a sharp-tongued little old lady who lives with her grandson Adam and a cat named Trigger. I believe they must have named him Trigger because he triggers Dorothy's ire. He gets in her hair, into everything in the kitchen, and on her last nerve. In other words, he's a typical house cat. From the beginning, Dorothy didn't want to have anything to do with him. Or so she claims. 

Dorothy has a repertoire of colorful phrases for Trigger, delivered perfectly. Her yelled commands and constant insults bounce off Trigger's back, but her lines are priceless. The best one is "the damage is done." Will no one rid her of this turbulent feline? She has to be poked and prodded to say anything nice about the cat, but the Dodo manages to pull it out of her. Just a little.

WKRP in Cincinnati was a hit sitcom about a radio station that ran from 1978 to 1982. It inspired me to seek a career in radio, which I kept up for 24 years. WKRP was a fictional station, with call letters designed to invoke the word "crap." But WKRP in Cincinnati is fictional no more. 

The call letters WKRP were owned by a low power FM station in Raleigh, North Carolina, broadcasting since 2015. Earlier this year, they announced they were auctioning off the call letters as a fundraiser for the nonprofit that runs the station, and invited Cincinnati stations to make a bid. WOXY (the Oasis) in Mason, Ohio, serves the Cincinnati area, and won the bid. Beginning Monday morning at midnight, they played the WKRP TV theme until the morning show began. Now people in Ohio and Kentucky can listen to the real WKRP in Cincinnati on three FM frequencies. You can also listen online.  -via Metafilter 

Anything new and different naturally scares some people. Not all people, but enough people so that Something Had to Be Done. That was usually a ban. Chill Dude Explains brings us ten goofy stories about things we take for granted today that totally frightened everyone when they were new, and were made illegal in one place or another at one time or another. If you've followed Neatorama for a long time, you will be familiar with many of these stories. 

It's not always an overreaction. The first blood transfusions were deadly, because the scientists who tried them didn't know enough about blood yet. Lucky for us, they eventually figured it out. At least one is completely political- the printing press was a great leap forward in information and literacy, but those in authority fear a well-informed populace. Scary new ideas eventually become everyday things, and we all get used to them. Still, you'll have to get past how Chill Dude Explains pronounces "margarine" to get into the video. He's probably only heard it called "spread." 

Oklahoma State Court of Appeals judge Kenneth D. Bacon loved to fly in his open-cockpit Starduster II. On a summer day in 1976, he flew to Kansas alone, and was caught in a bank of black clouds that suddenly appeared, although the forecast was for a completely sunny day. Bacon looked for a place to land, and was shocked to see an enormous airport with runways that looked 7,000 feet long! It was labeled as Habit Field, but he couldn't find a radio frequency, and heard no signal from the tower. Nevertheless, he finally landed and found no one there at all. He described it as an extremely eerie experience. At the next airport over, he was told that "no one lands there." Then they found damage to Bacon's plane that shouldn't have been possible. Read his account of that strange day at Strange Company.  

Of course, I had to know more. Naval Air Station Hutchinson was created in 1942. What was the navy doing in Kansas? Well, it was wartime. The airfield was built on 2,565 acres and the runways indeed grew to 7,000 feet. After the war, the airfield was shuttered, and went into private hands briefly, but then was repurposed for naval training. It became a Kansas Air National Guard Base in 1957. It was closed in 1967. Then it became a commercial airport called H.A.B.I.T. (Hutchinson Air Base Industrial Tract). In the late '70s, it was used for a commercial skydiving operation called Sunflower Field. By the end of the century, it was an oversized glider airport. You can read an extensive history of the airport at this site, with lots of pictures. 

When Reyn Guyer invented the game Twister (originally called Pretzel), he wasn't thinking of the unspoken taboo on touching other people's bodies. He was concentrating on the novelty of a board game where the players become the playing pieces. He might have envisioned it as a family game. Either way, it was hard to market. Reviewers thought it was too risqué, and it was even called “sex in a box.” 

But then an executive at Milton Bradley got the idea to give a game to Johnny Carson to play on The Tonight Show. Twister was still very new, and Carson tried it out with his guest Eva Gabor on May 3rd, 1966 (60 years ago tonight). They had a good time and plenty of laughs. That appearance not only introduced the public to Twister, it gave them permission to try it themselves. After all, it was played on broadcast TV! Never mind that The Tonight Show was the most risqué part of the TV schedule at that time. Sales took off the very next day, and Twister became a lasting hit. Read the history of Twister and how it took hold in American culture at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: NBC News/YouTube) 

The urge to make a baby laugh, and the joy we get from it, is no accident. It's a adaptation that makes us rear children in a way that helps them develop the skills they need. At only a few months old, babies laugh when you play peekaboo because they are learning about object permanence. At first, you are performing a magic trick for them, and it takes some time before they get that straightened out. Their laugh is reinforced when you keep doing this pleasurable activity, so they learn to laugh at what they enjoy. But their brains are also forming important concepts that build upon each other, step-by-step. Children will continue to laugh at peekaboo for years, but the game later grows into more complicated forms of play that also expand their brains' understanding of the world. This TED-Ed lesson doesn't really go into that pleasurable feedback loop, but spending a weekend with my grandchildren drove it home for me.  

Once thought to be impossible, two runners finished the London Marathon in under two hours on April 26th. Sabastian Sawe of Kenya clocked in at 1:59:30, while Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia followed at 1:59:41. If those two hadn't participated, the third place finisher, Jacob Kiplimo of Uganda, would still have set a world record. Such accomplishments require talent, dedication, and training. But what kind of East African training brings such results? 

There's a big difference between marathon training in Ethiopia and the US, which harness completely different athletic philosophies. In the US, training relies heavily on science, using the latest technology to monitor the physiology of runners, leading to custom-tailored training regimens for each athlete. Although it's called the Norwegian style, this training uses the philosophy of rugged individualism America is noted for. In Ethiopia, training focuses on community, leadership, and mentorship. No one runs alone. The idea is that endurance can be taught, and the secret of long distances lies in knowing when to hold back and let the body recover, and when to push harder. This method also keeps runners going because they enjoy doing it together. Read about the differing philosophies of marathon training at Aeon. You can also listen to it as a podcast. -via Nag on the Lake 

This trail cam footage shows a mother cougar with three half-grown cubs visiting a stash of deer meat. And purring and squeaking. They look healthy and well-fed. But the surprise is where this happened. It was near Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota! We think of cougars as residents of the American West, but they once roamed the entire country. Over the last couple of decades, there have been sightings in Minnesota, mostly on trail cams, of solitary cougars, but this sighting is the first of cubs in Minnesota in more than a century. 

When an electronically-tagged deer died in March, it was found covered in leaves, raising suspicions that a cougar may have killed it. Researchers planted cameras near the carcass, hoping that the cats would return to feast again. They were surprised to see four cougars return to the site, meaning that cougars are once again reproducing in Minnesota instead of just passing through. Read more about this discovery at MPR. -via Metafilter