When a grizzly bear breeds with a polar bear, the result is a hybrid called a grolar bear. They've been spotted and studied in Canada's western Arctic. All nine identified grolar bears are descended from one polar bear mother. As far as we know, the first hybrid was born in 2000 to a polar bear mother born in 1989. She mated with two different grizzly bears and produced four hybrid offspring. Her only hybrid female offspring also mated with two grizzlies and produced five more grolar bears which are 75% grizzly and 25% polar bear.

When the first grolar bear was discovered, scientists thought that more would follow, as climate change brought the territories of the two types of bear closer together. However, no other grolar bears have been seen outside of the nine hybrids in this family. The concern is that the lineage of grolar bear has become more brown and less white with the second generation. The grolar bear mother in the first generation of hybrids was raised by a white polar bear mother, and also raised her second-generation hybrids, who are even browner, to act like polar bears as well. It cannot be easy to sneak up on a seal on an ice cap when your fur is brown. Read more about the lineage of the grolar bear family at CBC, including a family tree chart that makes it more clear. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Samuell)

William Judson Moon was away from home when his wife Molly committed suicide in 1904. By the time he returned to Caddo, Texas, she had already been buried. Moon was so distraught that he enlisted some local women to help him dig Molly back up and dress her in a new dress he had bought her, and then she was reburied. But Moon would, in a short time, insist that she be disinterred again, bathed, and redressed. This happened so many times that Moon eventually could get no one to help, so he built a mausoleum to keep Molly's corpse in, where he had access to it anytime he wanted. Chris Woodyard of The Victorian Book of the Dead brings us Mr. Moon's story from an account in the newspaper Enquirer.

The introduction to the story mentions the macabre case of Carl Tanzler, who you might recall from this post.

In double-checking the story, I found the story of the rest of Mr. Moon's life, which is almost as odd. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Gena Forsyth via Find-a-Grave)

Randall Munroe's What If? project (previously at Neatorama) received a question about draining the oceans. The original question specified a hole 20 meters in diameter for the drain. That seems big, but the draining would be too slow to even notice, especially considering the melting glaciers. Where would the water go? This is a theoretical question, so it may as well go to Mars. But if we made the hole big enough to really drain seawater, the map of the world would start to look rather weird. Since this theoretical drain is located in the Mariana Trench, it couldn't take all the earth's seawater, because there are geological formations that will trap some ocean water in large lakes. Of course, there would be mass extinctions of ocean species. But for humans, Munroe figures the Dutch will take care of controlling the diminishing water. Munroe collaborated with Henry Reich of Minute Physics to paint this picture for us. -via Laughing Squid

The headline at Mental Floss refers to "interpretations" of Shakespeare's works, so I expected them to tell us how The Lion King is based on Hamlet and 10 Things I Hate About You was an interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew, which we all know by now. But this list goes into some deep thinking that people have been doing about the relationships and motivations of Shakespeare's characters that aren't spelled out in the stories, but extrapolated from small clues in the scripts. Yes, some people have more time on their hands than you or I do, but these theories do make sense.  

For example, why does Iago so badly want to ruin Othello's marriage? Was it because he himself desired Othello? That makes more sense than just retribution for a professional slight. Was Ophelia pregnant? And MacBeth's soliloquy -the only long passage from Shakespeare I can still recite- were those words from one character or two? Then there's the Unified Antonio Theory. Read up on ten intriguing theories about Shakespeare's characters and plays at Mental Floss.

Yep, some plants are kinda shady. That's the kind of humor you can expect in this video. Ze Frank's True Facts series (previously) is almost always about animals, but now he's veered into the world of plants. See, plants reproduce by making seeds, but keeping your offspring close by when you are rooted in the ground can become way too crowded. Plants have developed a lot of different methods of spreading their seeds far and wide. Being carried off or eaten by animals is a valid method, but throwing them out by explosive force is a lot more fun to watch. It's such a useful way to spread the next generation to new soil that many species have developed this power independently, and in many fascinating forms, from spring-loaded seeds to seeds that are designed to move around on their own and even dig their own holes! Meanwhile, Ze Frank has fun providing the sound effects for the explosions, and giggling at plant names like sphagnum, hairy wild petunia, and squirting cucumber. Some things never change. This video has a one-minute skippable ad at 3:15.

Posts from the artefactporn
community on Reddit

Last year, researchers in Egypt discovered the cemetery for senior officials and priests of the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BC) in Minya. They uncovered the coffins of two distinguished women, one of them identified as Tadi Ist, daughter of the High Priest of Djehouti in Ashmunein. Pictured above is the inside of her coffin lid. This art seems familiar, doesn't it? A woman wearing a pale green strapless dress and a tall blue headdress. Who could it be?

Redditors, of course, saw Marge Simpson right away. The red shoes and necklace are modern touches. The long-running series The Simpsons has become legendary for predicting the future, mainly because creator Matt Groening is very good at detecting trajectories. But this one goes backward in time. Who knew that when Groening designed the character, he took inspiration from the inside of a coffin lid buried thousands of miles away thousands of years ago? It only makes sense if you believe Groening is a time traveler, which some people have posited over the years. -via Cracked

If you want to build a cult around yourself, you have to learn to communicate like a cult leader. We have plenty of examples from history, and they have some common ways of speaking. First, you have to talk a lot, meaning more than anyone else. That might draw attention, but it doesn't make you a cult leader. For that, you have to learn specific techniques of communication. You have to overwhelm your followers with what you want them to believe, cut off uncomfortable questions or disagreements, and separate your followers from unbelievers psychologically. By then you'll be able to manipulate each member individually in accordance with their weaknesses, or train your most loyal officers to do it. In this episode of Otherwords, linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) explains the regular formula for building a cult with language. Please don't try this at home. Nor should you fall for it.

If you live on the internet like I do, you are familiar with the "Cake or Fake" meme, also known as "Everything is Cake" or "Is It Cake?" It came with the rise of talented cake decorators who can make a cake that looks very much like something else. What I didn't know was that it has been made into a TV show called Is It Cake? on Netflix. It's a game show and a cooking show combined, and I suspect there may be some comedy involved. Joel Veitch has obviously been watching it, and he takes the opportunity to turn it into a horror story.

If you don't recognize the name Joel Veitch, he's the one who gave the world Viking Kittens about 20 years ago and the Quiznos Spongmonkeys that frightened people away from the sandwich shop. Veitch turned that twisted sense of humor into a real career, and it's rare to see him doing a video just for fun these days, but it's reminder of how weird his brain is. -via the Awesomer

While we are going into official summer with temperatures in the 90s, we might cool off a bit by thinking of Yakutsk, in the Yakutia region of Siberia. It's the coldest city in the world. But on the Summer Solstice, Yakutsk will double its population of 200,000 people as many others around the region join in celebrating Yhyakh, which marks the new year.

When we are celebrating a new year on January first, Yakutia only has a couple of hours of daylight and it's too cold to go anywhere. But in June, the Summer Solstice brings all-day sun and the couple hours of night aren't even all that dark. For hundreds of years, maybe even thousands, people of the Sakha culture mark Yhyakh as the new year, the start of the short summer season when laying in supplies for the winter has to be done in a hurry. People join together to sing, dance, light a fire, and make offerings to the gods. Yhyakh is also a time for young people to "meet, court, and marry." The revelry goes on all night and ends only with a sunrise celebration. Celebrating Yhyakh was forbidden during the Soviet era, but is making a comeback, both in Yakutia and in Sakha enclaves elsewhere. Read about this holiday at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Dziulita05)

If you saw the trailer for the upcoming movie Alien: Romulus directed by Fede Álvarez, you might have thought, "Who?"  Some are familiar with Álvarez' work on the movies Evil Dead and Don't Breathe, but the Uruguayan filmmaker was first noticed by the American film industry for the short Panic Attack! (Ataque de Pánico!), in which giant robots invade Montevideo. The short was made in 2009 on a reported budget of $300. A dollar must go further in Uruguay. Just a few weeks after Panic Attack! was shown at a film festival, Álvarez got a call from Ghost House Pictures and was soon on the slate to direct Evil Dead.

Álvarez remastered the short (less than four minutes if you don't count the credits) and re-uploaded it yesterday. He must have received a few requests since he was announced as the latest Alien director. Read more about Álvarez and his breakthrough film at Gizmodo.

Come on Olympic Phryge, all the other Olympic mascots are with you! #Phryge pic.twitter.com/2CK15ixKWU

— Paris 2024 (@ShanaeJoyc92133) May 12, 2024

The Olympic mascot is usually some kind of animal, or more rarely, a pop culture character that means something to the host nation. For the 2024 Paris Olympics, the French went with a fashion statement. That seems appropriate for Paris, but the hat that is the branding image of this year's games is more than fashionable. It's a symbol of France's revolutionary history. The Olympic Phryge is designed to resemble the Phrygian cap, a conical cloth hat with a peak that could flop forward or back.

The design goes back thousands of years, and is recognizable in ancient art. Colonial Americans adopted the hat as a symbol of their struggle for freedom, called the "liberty cap," which gradually fell out of favor after the French Revolution. It was the French who made the Phrygian cap their own, in red wool, as a political symbol. They not only used it as a symbol in art and communication, but actually wore those hats when they stormed the palace.  

Using a hat for the Olympic mascot may seem strange at first, although no stranger than other Olympic mascots have been, but there is plenty of history behind the design, which you can read about at Smithsonian.

We've been following the developments of Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot for years, but even I didn't know when that research began. It appears that that they have been working on the development of a walking humanoid robot for more than 40 years now! Maybe it's because Atlas doesn't develop grey hair or wrinkles, just more muscles. World Data Center put together a compilation of research videos showing Atlas starting out in 1983 and running through 2022. The video starts with a bouncing baby robot who later learns to walk on two legs, and gradually grows into a dancing, flipping athlete made of titanium and electronics. We shouldn't be verklempt about watching a robot grow up, but we feel like Atlas is a friend. He is, after all, friend-shaped. Besides that, he's taken a lot of abuse to get where he is today. Too bad it doesn't include the latest version, although that one is kind of creepy. -via Laughing Squid

The short version of the story is that a group of human ancestors left Africa and went to Europe, and later to the rest of the Old World. These were the Neanderthals. A half million years later, modern humans left Africa and settled all over the world. They interbred with Neanderthals for a few thousand years, and then the Neanderthals went extinct, except as a minor part of our Homo sapiens DNA. The only humans around today with no Neanderthal DNA are descended from the people who never left Sub-Saharan Africa.

Geneticists have found that snippets of Neanderthal DNA can be found in any part of our genome, except for the Y chromosome. What happened to the Neanderthal Y? Its demise could have been coincidental, or luck. Probably not, but that always needs to kept as a possibility. Or it could have been that it was always modern human men breeding with Neanderthal women, but since we haven't found any Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in modern humans, which is only passed along by females, that doesn't seem likely. There are other scientific possibilities, which are explained at the Conversation.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Clemens Vasters)

She’s got Spirit
byu/1q8b infunny

For maximum enjoyment, watch the video first, before you read the description below. Let your suspension of disbelief take over!

When she's done up in this illusion face paint, artist Mariam Marks would not take it as an insult to be called a horse face. It's very deliberate. But this is not only an artful painting, it's performance art, too, as she lip-syncs to "Here I Am" by Bryan Adams, from the 2002 movie Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Her exaggerated tooth exposure and tongue action lends so much realism to the singing horse, it's like watching a cartoon without a TV. You don't even have to be familiar with the movie to appreciate the performance (I have never seen it).   

See a lot more of Mariam Marks' face painting animations at Instagram and YouTube.

-via reddit

Zach Anner broke through onto the pop culture scene in 2010, and we posted plenty more of his riotously funny videos. But it's been a couple of years since he posted anything at YouTube, and even longer since he abandoned other social media outlets. He's still active on Facebook, and has been doing TV appearances and writing shows. Then, surprise! Today he came out of his YouTube "retirement" to tells us an important story. Yeah, there are funny parts to it.

Zach has spent his life doing things he was told were impossible for him (and even wrote a book about it). He's worked hard at overcoming muscle control issues to do all those things he wasn't supposed to be able to. But in this instance, even he didn't realize that he was the victim of assumptions. Sometimes, it's not a matter of ability at all; it's a matter of proper education.