During the heyday of the sideshow, performers came in several categories. There were those who were born as physical oddities, those who became so through injury, those who merely displayed an exotic background (which was usually exaggerated), and those who worked hard to perform amazing feats. Martin Laurello had no exotic background, but he combined the other three categories to become "the Human Owl." He could turn his neck until his head was completely backwards!

Laurello was born flexible, and was a contortionist in a circus act. There is some evidence that he suffered an injury that left his neck even looser than before, and while recuperating, he trained himself to turn his head 45 degrees, then 90 degrees, then 180 degrees, although the last part needed his hands to achieve. Laurello worked for Ringling Brothers, then at Coney Island, then for Ripley's Believe It or Not. He was also an activist inside the community of human oddities, working to change the demeaning language of his time away from calling such people "freaks." Read about the life of Martin Laurello at Mental Floss. The article includes a video of Laurello doing his thing. -via Strange Company

(Image source: Txemari. (Navarra).)

Americans are pretty unique among the countries of the world in the way we love to display our country's flag. They are everywhere! And we are so familiar with the sight that when we see a different version of it, we immediately notice that something is off. The truth is that while our flag has had a constant design since 1960, it was changed a lot before then. In the early days of the United States, quite a few very different flags were tried out, and colonies and local regiments all made their own flags. The stars have had five, six, seven, or eight points and various stripe placements. Some looked nothing at all like the flag we fly today. But the basic design was set in 1777, and only the number of stars has changed since then. Weird History shows us some of the many flags that were tried out on the way to the stars and stripes.

Jen Yates at Cake Wrecks takes a break once a week from hilarious cakes that went all wrong, when she posts remarkably beautiful cakes on Sundays. This week was all about Disney Princess cakes, the kind ordered by adults, that go beyond pink frills to illustrate the essence of the character.

The intriguing cake above featuring Merida from the movie Brave was designed and crafted by Spanish cake artist Floren Bastante, who makes amazing portrait cakes. The Brave cake was made for his niece's 10th birthday, and you can see it from all angles here.

This Little Mermaid cake went viral for Karine Jingozian of Farine in Los Angeles. Of course it did, just look at it! You'll also be amazed at cakes featuring Cinderella, Jasmine, Elsa, Snow White, Belle, Mulan, and Rapunzel. See lots more lovely Disney Princess cakes that look too awesome to eat in a list at Cake Wrecks.

Newgate prison was built in 1188, and for 700 years it was a place of dread. Criminals were sent there, but also people following the wrong religion or political philosophy, and even people who couldn't afford to pay their debts. Life on the street in the Middle Ages was pretty tough, but inside Newgate it was much worse. There was overcrowding, little food, and no beds, but supervision was minimal, so life inside Newgate could only be described as chaos. The worst part of the facility was an unlit dungeon underneath the prison, where prisoners condemned to death were kept until their execution. It was no wonder that some convicts prayed to be sent to Australia rather then to Newgate. While conditions changed somewhat over the centuries, Newgate was always the worst prison in London. It was rebuilt twice after being burned. It was finally closed in 1903, and demolished a year later. -via Digg

It's not easy being Russian these days. Ukraine has pressed into Russian territory past Crimea, which is only expected after the Russians invaded Ukraine more than two years ago. Russian soldiers in Kursk often find their vehicles being chased down by attack drones. Understandably, they throw their vehicles into high gear when this happens in order to escape. If they do escape, there's a good chance that they will be issued a ticket for speeding. Police refer to these tickets as "letters of happiness." Being a soldier in an active war zone does not allow a driver to escape the many speed cameras in Kursk.

Some soldiers are trying to avoid the speeding tickets by papering over their license plates, but police will pull them over for doing so. Kursk police say they are sympathetic to the plight of military members fleeing for their lives, but the police are not military, and they have their own mission to uphold law and order in the region, and fund their department. They say that soldiers can come to court and try to fight the tickets.

American cheese is loved for its role in delicious macaroni and cheese, cheeseburgers, and grilled cheese sandwiches, but it's also been dragged through the mud for not being cheese. So what is it, then? It's a food product that contains cheese and other ingredients. While there are regulations on how it can be labeled, calling it "not cheese" is like saying sparkling water is not water because it has carbon bubbles added to it. You can argue amongst yourselves about the quality of American pasteurized process cheese, which is a matter of opinion. You can't argue with the fact that it melts into sauce very nicely before it burns.

The video gives us the science of how cheese melts or doesn't, and explains how to make your own melty cheese out of a variety of cheeses by using sodium citrate. I recently came across a recipe that does this using Alka-Seltzer, which is made of sodium bicarbonate and anhydrous citric acid plus aspirin, so you have to find the kind that doesn't contain aspirin. It may be easier to just order some sodium citrate. Or buy some Velveeta.  

With NASA planning to return to the moon, and with long-range plans to build a base of some kind there, the moon needs to keep time. Physicists at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology have created Coordinated Lunar Time, or "Moon Time," for the purposes of timekeeping on the lunar surface. The time will have nothing to do with the length of a lunar day, which is a month long, and there will be only one lunar time zone. So why do they need a special time system for the moon? Wouldn't it just be easier to coordinate the time with Houston?

It's because timekeeping is about a lot more than just scheduling a wakeup call from ground control. Clocks on the moon will be used to calculate locations, like GPS does on earth. Despite the fact that satellite clocks are some of the most precise clocks ever developed, they still lose a little time relative to earth because of their speed and the influence (or lack thereof) of gravity. In other words, time moves slower in space. Low-orbit satellites are launched with software that takes these effects into account, but the moon's distance will require a different system to keep lunar time working the way it should. The importance of Coordinated Lunar Time is explained in greater detail at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Airwolfhound)

We already know that the human body cannot survive being ejected into the vacuum of space. We've seen it in the movies, and it's not pleasant. But that's where this TED-Ed lesson starts, because they want to cover all the scenarios. With a spacesuit, a body is much safer, but still not safe because we are exposed to conditions that don't occur on earth, like unshielded radiation. So astronauts travel in spaceships, to a space station that's built to keep them safe. But is it really safe? Even with strict environmental controls, astronauts must deal with microgravity in bodies that evolved to work properly in earth's gravity. It takes a while, but even that will damage the human body in surprising ways. These findings might put a damper on your desire to volunteer for interplanetary travel. Find out more in our previous posts on NASA's twin study of a year in space. -via reddit 

Ask people why they love fall, and you'll get plenty of different answers. There's Halloween, which is always fun. Apple cider. The temperatures drop to a comfortable level. Turkey and dressing. Beautiful leaf colors. Pumpkin spice. Football. Harvest festivals. The kids finally go back to school. You have to admit, there's a lot to like about autumn.    

But you can make lists of why all the other seasons are nice, too. Winter is cozy and has the biggest holidays. Spring brings warmth and the renewal of nature. Summer is leisure time. Still, people are just plain excited to welcome autumn, and scientists have conducted experiments that point out three specific ways autumn makes us feel good. They are the colors of nature, the feeling of starting a new year, and the nostalgia of holidays and traditions. Read the science behind how these things make autumn special for us at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Darb02)

Twisters is the sequel to the 1996 movie Twister, but 28 years later, who cares about that. The only thing people recall from the earlier movie is the flying cow, and the new one doesn't have that. While the new movie has better special effects, that seems like a missed opportunity. Twisters was released last month and received generally favorable reviews, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have all kinds of weirdness that Screen Junkies can pick apart in an Honest Trailer. But what about the science? Scientists who were consulted for the film have politely distanced themselves from it, or else tell us that the solution in the movie is not at all feasible at the scale it's portrayed. But if you can let the fast-paced science explanations wash over you, you might enjoy Twisters. Then again, you might feel like you've seen the whole thing after you've watched this. -via Geeks are Sexy 

Redditor Sabrine_Heester_2001 was told she was getting a 10% raise at work. The next paycheck she received didn't make any sense, so she emailed the HR department and received this answer. She was making an hourly rate of $26.35, which is nice, but with a 10% raise, it was boosted to $26.38! While any raise in pay is something to celebrate, it's not a 10% raise. Can you see where the math went wrong?

Ten percent can be rendered as 0.10, or it can be rendered as 10/100. Unfortunately, this calculation included both, therefore ten percent was taken of ten percent, so her "raise" was a thousandth of her previous pay, or 2.63 cents. They generously rounded that up to three cents. Most calculators will do percentages for you, but a pencil and paper is all you need to move a decimal point one place to the left and add that to the original pay rate. Doing it quickly in my head gave me $29, but it's actually $28.98. Sabrine_Heester_2001 tells us that reporting this messy math to her boss got everything straightened out quickly, but you have to wonder about the HR department and their history of calculating raises.  

Unitree Robotics has announced that its G1 robot is going into mass production for consumer sales. You can buy one for only $16,000! Let's see what this little (4' 4") robot can do. I see he can dance. It can walk on uneven terrain. But why would I spent $16K for a robot to do that? Can it reliably load my dishwasher? Can it drive? We see from the video that teh G1 can manipulate things with its hands, because it gives us the example of crushing nuts. If that's supposed to be a metaphor, it's not going to sell robots. Besides, if you look at that scene slowly in full-screen mode, you'll see that the nuts are already cracked. CNET gives us a review as best they can, considering all they have to go by is a promotional video. They mainly compare the price of the G1 to other much more expensive robots that you may be more familiar with. I don't believe they will sell a lot of humanoid robots until they can be seen doing something we need them to do. We already have robots to do heavy lifting and manufacturing; they just don't look like humans and don't dance so well. -via Born in Space

What we know now as England was part of the Roman Empire for a few hundred years until the Romans withdrew around the year 300 CE. When they left, the natives were speaking a Celtic language, and some knew Latin. By the year 700, the people had their own language, Old English, and were spread over the countryside tending farms. We know that the English language owes a lot to Germanic influence, and that many Germans and Danes had moved to England. But was that a matter of conquest or just old-fashioned immigration?

Only the stories of royalty were chronicled, and even those accounts are spotty and often inaccurate compared to Roman records. But we don't know much about the everyday people of early England. Archaeologists keep digging them up, but until fairly recently, could not identify who they were or where they came from. That changed when advanced DNA analysis enabled us to trace which parts of Europe these long-dead people descended from. Add to that new isotope analysis techniques that tells the story of where an individual lived at different stages of their lives. These tests have been opening doors to the lives and ancestry of early medieval Britons who made England into, well, England. Read their stories in an article from the September issue of Smithsonian magazine.

(Image credit: Duncan Sayer)

Warning: this video is bloody and can be traumatic until it get really silly in the second half.

Have you ever been doing something normal like flossing your teeth and a tooth, or part of a tooth, just falls out? It's happened to me, and it was not at all fun, but in my case, it was only one tooth at a time. Or maybe you've had nightmares like that. At any rate, that's what happens in the award-winning horror short Tooth. Director Jillian Corsie was inspired to make it after the weird feeling she got when her mother gave her the baby teeth she had saved. We all know losing baby teeth isn't nearly as horrific as losing them as an adult, because they won't be replaced like baby teeth, and you can't just stick them back in. That said, if we could turn our nightmares around to make them less believable like this scenario, they might not be as scary. -via Nag on the Lake

Check out this bug with the long neck! It's not only long, but it's jointed in the middle. This is the giraffe weevil  (Trachelophorus giraffa), native to Madagascar and only studied since 2008. So why the long neck? Only the males have this long neck, and they use it for mating dances and fighting over short-necked females of the species, although such fights are rarely deadly. In that they resemble their namesakes, but African mammal giraffes also use their long necks to reach food at the tops of trees. The giraffe weevils live in the trees they eat, a species called the giraffe beetle tree for some reason.

Giraffe weevils have a cousin native to New Zealand, but only the Madagascar species has a bright red carapace covering their wings. The insects are sold as souvenirs in Madagascar, and are sometimes used in art. See more of these long-necked bugs at Ark in Space.

(Image credit: Axel Strauß)