Psst! Do you want to see a lot of optical illusions in one sitting? Get ready, because The Paint Explainer (previously at Neatorama) is going to go through forty (40!) of them in this video. See, our eyes are amazing devices, sensing light in all its variations of shade, color, and movement, translating it into signals that go to our brain. Our brains are even more amazing, because they take those signals and translate them back into information we can use, in an instant, so we can negotiate the world around us. To keep up the pace, our brains take shortcuts based on what is familiar to us. The brain relies on the world being consistent in order to make these leaps in perception that give us those shortcuts. When something messes with our brains' "rules" for interpreting visual signals, we get optical illusions. While they can be confusing, they are also fun to see, and even more fun to understand. Still, since there are so many in this one video, you might want to see a few and take a break, then go back for the rest in short sessions.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

The world is full of wonders, but it's also constantly changing. We know of places that changed completely, sometimes before man was ever around to see them. There are also places that we thought were legendary that were fairly recently discovered to have been real in the past. But the most fascinating are those that are documented, and even exist in images, that we will never see again. Pictured above is the Pink and White Terraces of New Zealand. The beautiful natural warm pools and mineral formations were sacred to the Maori, and later brought in a good living for people hosting the tourists who flocked to see them. But that came to an end when Mount Tarawera erupted on June 10, 1886. The Pink and White Terraces collapsed into the volcanic crater, along with a village, never to be seen again.

Read about the Pink and White Terraces and nine other places that no longer exist at Mental Floss. Or you can listen to the list in a video.  

(Image credit: Charles Blomfield)

A really bumpy train ride
byu/not_a_profession infunny

"Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." What you see here is an everyday experience in Myanmar. The train ride from Yangon to Bagan takes around nineteen hours and is notorious for its bumpiness. Getting any sleep is impossible, even if you are in a sleeper car. The video above was posted at reddit to much delight. But then, everyone decided what it really needed was a musical soundtrack.

Through most of the 20th century, parents wanting to go out for the evening would hire a teenager from the neighborhood, or a friend's daughter, to supervise their children. Girls would often start babysitting at about twelve years old, learn responsibility and child care, and earn a small bit of spending money. I earned my first babysitting money at eleven, and had a full time job watching three girls the summer I was 15. I also remember idolizing several teenage girls (and one boy) who babysat me when I was younger.

You don't see much of that these days. Babysitters are expensive, and parents who can afford it prefer to hire adults. Many young teens aren't used to staying home by themselves, much less caring for younger children, and they have fewer siblings to give them experience. Besides, when they are old enough to work, they can get better-paying jobs. Read about the bygone rite of passage of babysitting at the Atlantic. Or if you hit a paywall, at Archive. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jared eberhardt)

Humans treating humans for illness or injury goes back much much further in our history than written records, so we have to study artifacts and the fossil record to learn about ancient medical practices. The oldest surgery we know about dates to more than 30,000 years ago, when a child's lower leg was amputated. The bones show evidence of deliberate cutting, plus healing, indicating that the patient lived for several years afterward. As amazing as that is, it doesn't tell the whole story. We don't have preserved evidence of soft tissue from people that far back, but we do know that early humans harnessed natural remedies even when we were Neanderthals. Still, "medical care" is defined by people taking care of other people, and there is evidence of early humans who wouldn't have survived long with the infirmities they were found to have unless others were caring for them. This evidence involves assumptions, because we don't know what that care involved. These practices could have happened long before we were humans. This video is shorter than it looks, as the last minute and a half are promotional.
 

In the vast realm of science, there's no shame is answering a question with "I don't know." Well, except in a science class when you are tested on things you should have studied. The whole idea of science is to explore those things we don't yet know and we're doing pretty well when we can find any answers at all. But all new discoveries lead to more questions, so it's a never-ending quest to learn all we can about the universe we live in. Vox explores those questions and discoveries in their regular podcast called Unexplainable. While they explain plenty, there are quite a few questions that science has no definitive answer for yet.

These questions range from the cosmic to the mundane to the intriguing. How do we define "life"? Or conversely, how do we define "death"? Every time we think we might have an answer, something happens to bend our definitions out of existence. What effect does weed have on pregnancy? That's a sticky area to research, since both drug laws and child abuse laws keep possible subjects from participating. Are there living microbes on the moon? Astronauts who have been there left their poop behind in bags to save weight on liftoff, but we can't yet get there to check on them. Explore 17 as of yet unanswered questions in science at Vox. Each question is explained in text and also has the relevant podcast attached in case you want to learn more about a specific question.  

Experimental medical treatments are scary enough, but imagining you underwent such treatments before we had germ theory or even proper anatomy classes. Someone would get an idea, and they would try it on a patient because the alternative was death. Or they would try it because it just seemed like a good idea, like the time doctors removed some blood from a patient, bathed it in UV rays, and put it back in. It worked, but not for the reasons they thought. The same with using wine in wounds or putting a fish on your head to cure a headache.

One strange treatment didn't last long. Between the development of heart surgery and the heart-lung machine, in 1954, live human bodies were used to keep a patient's blood circulating during heart surgery, taking on the blood-pumping duties for two people. This technique, call cross-circulation, was soon discontinued, not because it didn't work (because it did!), but because the heart-lung machine soon replaced it. Read about five medical treatments that sound bonkers but worked at Cracked.   

(Image credit: Patrick J. Lynch)

Easter traditions vary widely among places that celebrate the holiday, and some can be pretty darn weird. One is the annual bottle kicking competition in the British village of Hallaton. The team from Hallaton competes with the people of nearby Medbourne to carry a "bottle" (actually three small wooden kegs) across two streams a mile apart. There is an old legend that explains the beginnings of the custom involving a miraculous hare that saved two women from a charging bull. Gratitude went to God, and not the hare, which was given to the church to be made into a pie for the poor. What does that have to do with bottle kicking? The story is a bit complicated, but it evolved into the annual competition between the two villages.

The competition has few rules, and resembles a melee. The festival surrounding the competition held each Easter Monday has been going for a couple of hundred years, but may be much older. Some consider bottle kicking to be the origin of rugby, which uses a ball shaped sort of like a keg, that Americans would recognize as a football. Read about the Easter sport of  bottle kicking and see plenty of pictures at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Michael Trolove/Bottle Kicking/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Each letter of the English alphabet has an origin story, and each one could fill a book. We don't have time for that, so linguist Olly Richards gives us the short version of all 26 letters. They start out as pictograms, which often having nothing at all to do with their modern usage. Then they get filtered through other languages, often ending with Greek and then Latin, but not always. And we learn about ancient cultures that didn't have certain sounds in their own language, but used those letters for something else. By the time we got our standard 26-letter alphabet, those origins were left behind in the mists of obscurity. By the time he's finished with all 26 letters, you will have a new respect for the people who dug all this up for us. -via Laughing Squid

A new series on AppleTV+ called Manhunt follows the search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. The first two episodes of the seven-episode miniseries are already available for streaming. The series focuses on John Wilkes Booth, of course, but also on Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was very close to the president and directed the search for Booth, involving both the Union Army and detectives from New York City. Stanton also offered $100,000 in reward money for the apprehension of Booth and two of his accomplices.

Despite the intense efforts of the federal government, Booth wasn't located until April 26, 12 days after the crime. How could a renowned actor, who face was recognizable up and down the Atlantic seaboard, kill the president in front of a theater full of people and evade capture for so long? It was because Booth had plenty of support from Confederates and Confederate sympathizers who were not ready to face the fact that they had lost the Civil War. Read the historical facts behind the show about the hunt for John Wilkes Booth at Smithsonian.

The company Figure has a robot that is powered by artificial intelligence, Open AI to be exact. Meet Figure 01. Now, we've seen humanoid robots perform some impressive feats, and we've held uncanny conversations with household assistants. But this robot combines both those abilities with super-smooth dexterity guided by his own vision, and logical reasoning when conversing with a human. You will notice a few things. This robot has learned to use the human "uh" in its language when there is a pause caused by information loading -just like we do. There's also a stutter at one point, which is just too human, especially when partnered with a natural inflection. Also notice that when it puts all the dishes together, at about 1:34, the robot shows a slight hesitation when the plate wobbles, and gives the rack a tiny shove to make sure it falls into place. It was a snap decision, probably unnecessary, but a much faster reaction than most decisions in the video. The only real "mistake" I see is that he identifies the dishes in the rack as a (singular) plate and (multiple) cups. If pluralizing nouns is its only language flaw, it's doing better than most humans.

Throughout the video, I was waiting for Figure 01 to say, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." But it did all the things, and seems almost human. The guy talking to him does, too. -via the Awesomer

The classic drinking bird toy is probably the closest thing we have to a perpetual motion machine, except that it will eventually run out of water. The action of the bird constantly dipping its beak in the water and then standing back up and then dipping again are due to the design of its glass body and the fluid dynamics of the methylene chloride inside. That's explained in the linked article and in this video. Pretty cool, huh?

But listen- there's also a gadget called a triboelectric nanogenerator that harvests electricity from a static charge that happens when two materials are rubbed against each other, like when you pet a cat or comb your hair. A team led by Professor Hao Wu of the South China University of Technology linked two triboelectric nanogenerator modules to the sides of a drinking bird. The movement of the bird, powered only by evaporating water, caused the materials to constantly rub together and produce electricity. The drinking-bird triboelectric hydrovoltaic generator, or DB-THG, ran for 50 hours straight and generated output of up to 100 volts, which is enough to power a range of electronic devices. This little miracle gadget is explained and shown in a video at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: RobinLeicester)

Wow, I forgot all about Smashmallow until this incredible read about "the Theranos of marshmallows."https://t.co/IRhuxYIJ6J

— Molly Longman (@MollLongman) March 15, 2024

Everyone has a story about a friend who ran a store or a service and had more customers than they could handle. You ask why they don't hire assistants or open a second location, and the answer is usually "I don't want to work that hard." That wasn't the case with Jon Sebastiani. He was born into mass market business and wanted to make his own mark and to change the way people ate. One of his big ideas was to sell artisanal marshmallows, the kind he saw in France, and make them an upscale snack with a variety of flavors.

It was difficult enough to find a small bakery to make his marshmallows by hand, but they were a hit. Sebastiani wanted to move into large-scale manufacturing. But there was no way to scale up hand-made marshmallows, and there was no factory or equipment that could handle large batches. That equipment had to be invented. Still, a deal was made, and he fired his small bakery. What could possibly go wrong?

The story of one business that went wrong is also the story of many other businesses that scaled up too soon and too fast. Read about the rapid rise and explosive bust of Smashmallow and find out why staying small is sometimes for the best.  -via Nag on the Lake

Since I avoid sweet drinks, carbonated drinks, and cold drinks, one soda pop seems the same as all the others to me. People who drink soda pop would consider that sacrilege, since everyone has their favorite. Apparently, Diet Coke is particularly popular. Weird History Food explains why by going through the entire history of soda, especially diet sodas. The upshot is that a product's name is more crucial than what's in it.

Working at NASA back in the day we destroyed a $10k gold plated mirror trying to drill a hole in it for a Herriot cell.

— Josh McBee (@JkMcBee) March 6, 2024

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and it also appears that you can't have a career in chemistry without an embarrassing experience of breaking some expensive laboratory glass. Keith Hornberger is the chemistry director at a biotech firm, and he knows the feeling. His son felt bad about breaking a beaker in his high school chemistry class, so Hornberger wanted to make him feel better about it by showing him that it happens to everyone. More than a hundred stories rolled in of expensive lab whoopsies.

Yikes!

— Miss Cellania (@misscellania) March 17, 2024

It's not just beakers, either. Respondents have dropped and broken Geiger counters, microscopes, and thermometers. Or an entire rack of expensive glassware they just cleaned. Plus even the cheapest dropped beaker could be holding something very expensive that spilled, or something dangerous that caused a lot of damage. You can read the entire thread at Twitter, or X, or just the best of them at Chemistry World. -via Real Clear Science