Nature is brutal. About 50 species of ant engage in keeping slaves of another species. The most efficient and ruthless of them is Polyergus. Their main activity is raiding nests of Formica ants to take their babies and put them to work. Or at least the ones they don't eat. Sometimes they take over an entire colony of ants to make them slaves. Their two-tiered colonies consisting of a relatively few cruel bullies that don't even get along with each other and the many more who do their work may remind you of some human societies we've heard of. However, ants, lacking any kind of agency, are doomed to continue this because that's how they evolved. Kurzgesagt explains how Polyergus acquires and maintains their slaves. We also learn some pretty interesting, if disturbing, things about ants along the way. The last two minutes of this video is a promotion.

The Tasmanian tiger is no more, and it was never a tiger. The thylacine was the world's last predatory marsupial, and there were 5,000 or so of them in Australia, mostly in Tasmania, when Europeans colonized that country. Blamed for livestock deaths, the settlers hunted them in the 19th century until they went extinct in the 1930s. We have film footage of a thylacine supposedly named Benjamin at the Beaumaris Zoo, who was thought to be the very last Tasmanian tiger. But now we find that there was another.

A female thylacine was sold to the Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. This thylacine was not documented at the time because the transaction was illegal. But she was there, and she outlived Benjamin. When she died, a taxidermist preserved her skin and bones for educational purposes. No one knows how long it's been since those bones were seen, as they were stored at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and only recently uncovered. The discovery is important, but the fate of the Tasmanian tiger is no less sad for knowing one specimen lived a little longer. Read about this new discovery at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting 

Why buy Christmas yard decorations when you can use what you already have? Wild Bill Knowles has a spare Chevy S-10 that most likely doesn't run anymore, but he knew it would come in handy for something someday. The same with that garage door opener, which still works but isn't needed for the garage. He used the truck for a unique Halloween roasting spit display that you saw on Spooky Daily a couple of months ago, and he promised the truck would be back for Christmas. Bill is good to his word, and it looks like the neighbors didn't mind too much, because the pickup is now floating above his yard, flying some unnamed green Christmas character around. It doesn't matter that the truck doesn't run, as it's being pulled by a reindeer on a John Deere. I suspect there might be skeletons underneath those costumes. If you are near Berkshire County, Massachusetts, be sure to look it up! -Thanks, Bruce!

Whether it's a huge federal government or a small village, democracy brings us the never-ending tension between following rules and procedures and actually getting things done. The yard of the municipal animal shelter in Manteca, California, has grass, weeds, and thorns growing out of control, as well as gopher holes. Volunteers have been bringing their own lawn mowers to cut the grass, but they are urging the city to do something about it. The problem is that the city's public works department doesn't have a small lawn mower appropriate for the job. After months of waiting for a solution, the shelter again requested action. City staff assured shelter volunteers that they are working on specifications and will hire a contractor to do the work. But the real kicker in the news article comes here.

The fire department has a residential style -lawn mower such as the one the animal shelter needs to cut grass at the Powers Avenue station.

The station, however, currently doesn’t have grass to cut as the city let it die to comply with its drought rules not to water ornamental grass.

There doesn't seem to be an easy solution to the problem. Maybe the shelter could confiscate a goat. -via Fark

(Image credit: DuffDudeX1)

My local hospital recently installed a system of pneumatic tubes. They send test samples to the lab and deliver drugs from the pharmacy with it, all in one building. This is a quantum leap above that. Tom Scott is at the University of British Columbia, where he's investigating the Rabbit Line that sends radioactive materials from a particle accelerator to a hospital a couple of miles away. Since these isotopes have a very short half-life, they are sent by underground pneumatic tubes because they'd never survive a car ride in Vancouver traffic. We find out what these isotopes are about and how they are used. It's a pretty neat system.

But what threw me was Tom's question that no one could answer, he says. Why is it called the Rabbit Line? Duh, has he never seen a Bug Bunny cartoon? The ones where the rabbit digs underground so fast he misses the left turn at Albuquerque? Makes plenty of sense to me.

By 1933, it was clear that Prohibition, the national experiment with outlawing the transport and sale of alcoholic beverages, was a failure. Although it was never illegal to drink, it had been illegal to provide alcohol since the 18th Amendment was passed in 1920. In the 13 years since, the country had plunged into the Great Depression. Without liquor taxes, both state and federal governments were suffering economically. Organized crime had taken over the business of supplying liquor, and public corruption ran rampant. Women had won the right to vote. Many thought that in itself that would doom the repeal of Prohibition, but mothers saw their children growing up without respect for the law, and women who flaunted the law were learning the joys of socializing with men over an illicit drink. Congress proposed the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution on February 20, 1933 to repeal Prohibition.  

The 21st Amendment is an outlier among the constitutional amendments because, for one thing, it is the only amendment that repealed a previous amendment. It is also the only time that state ratifying conventions were used instead of a vote in the state's legislatures. This idea alone would slow ratification down in the 21st century, as organizing a convention and selecting delegates would now take months at the earliest. But in this case, Michigan held their convention a mere 19 days after the amendment was proposed in Washington. In 1933, 36 states were required to ratifying an amendment, and the 34th, 35th, and 36th states held their conventions on December 5th (Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah). Just a few decades prior, it would have taken weeks for the results of those conventions to get back to Washington. But with instant communication by telephone, the amendment moved with astonishing speed. Utah's ratification, the 36th, came at 3:32 PM local time, 5:32 in Washington. It was only a few moments later that Under Secretary of State William Phillips signed the amendment's certification. One hour later, President Franklin Roosevelt issued a proclamation ending Prohibition.

Then it was party time. Bars had pre-applied for state liquor licenses to be triggered by repeal, and had been stocking up in anticipation of the 36th state ratification. See a gallery of images documenting the celebrations that ensued here. 

In 1628, the Dutch East India Company launched their new flagship the Batavia on a journey to, believe it or not, Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). The ship carried sailors, soldiers, and passengers, 330 people in all, as well as stores of silver coins to trade for spices, and provisions for the journey. Several of the men aboard longed for riches and adventure beyond the company's plans. There was an attempted mutiny on board, right before the Batavia crashed against a reef 70 kilometers off the coast of Australia. Most of the survivors were were evacuated to the nearby islands. The ship's commander Fransisco Pelsaert, skipper Ariaen Jacobsz, and 50 others set out on a longboat to find help. They left 225 people on the islands. The ship's officers would not return for three months.

With Pelsaert and Jacobsz gone, the highest-ranking officer on the islands was none other than Jeronimus Cornelisz, who, despite having no sailing or military experience, appointed himself leader and assumed command of an elected Council of survivors. While this might have made sense at the time, there was the minor problem that Cornelisz was a raging psychopath and would soon turn the tiny islands into hell on earth.

Cornelisz was paranoid about the mutiny, and set about eliminating all witnesses. But first, he exiled the remaining soldiers to a different island under a ruse, which eventually turned into a full-blown war between the islands. Only 92 people were left when their rescue arrived, and even fewer by the time they were all transported to civilization. Read the horrifying story of the Batavia at Today I Found Out.  

(Image credit: Gouwenaar)

Notice: Read the description before watching this video.



We often read about the US citizenship quiz and how most Americans from birth wouldn't be able to pass it. That's concerning, because it's a rather short test. Encyclopedia Brittanica has a much bigger quiz about US history, geography, and government. Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond (previously at Neatorama) took Brittanica's United States of America Quiz to see how much he's learned about the US since he moved here. To compare, you'll have to take the test yourself before watching the video.

I took the test and scored 52/60. I would have scored 53, but I didn't realize that it was timed until I missed one due to hesitation. You have ten seconds to answer each question. I would have known that if I watched the video first, but I also would have learned a bunch of the answers, too, and that's not fair. But rest assured that you'll get some of them right by just guessing, and if you're quick, you can get some answers right by process of elimination. Good luck!

William Lewis Moody Jr. bought a fine mansion in Galveston, Texas, just after the devastating 1900 hurricane. Moody and his family members lived there until Hurricane Alicia in 1983. The mansion has been restored and is now a museum. I'm sure our erstwhile Neatorama author WTM could tell us a lot more about it. The curators of the museum's treasures are a creative bunch.

Kerry Clark visited the Moody Mansion and was impressed by the "do not touch" signs. These are worth reading, and certainly get the idea across that it's not your home and it's not cool to mess with the furnishings. Many of them are accompanied by images of the previous residents of the house to drive the point home. Clark took pictures of about twenty of these signs and shared them with the Facebook group Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Signage. The problem is that these signs are useful, successful, and entertaining. -via Boing Boing

(Images credit: Kerry Clark)

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is an ugly bug that is rendered as strikingly artistic in an animation from Maastricht University in the Netherlands. They explain what happens from the time a single virus particle invades your lungs until it spews out the many copies of itself it has reproduced. The chemical reactions went over my head at times, but never lost my interest. Keep in mind this is the "general version." They go into much more detail in the "scientific version," which you can see here. 

What really amazes me about this video is how anyone ever learned so much about a virus. They are tiny compared to the individual cells of our body, which are already, well, microscopic. Here we see individual proteins working in tiny parts of a single virus, and in technicolor no less. The teams of virologists and molecular biologists working on COVID-19 research deserve every bit of respect for figuring all this out.  -via Kottke

In the 1860s, separate railroad companies worked to connect the eastern US railroad system with the west coast. The Union Pacific Railroad began work at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and built westward. They employed Irish laborers along with Civil War veterans and formerly enslaved workers. The Central Pacific Railroad Company, building from California to the east, employed Chinese laborers. These immigrants blasted tunnels through the mountains and hauled tons of rock, in freezing conditions they weren't accustomed to. They were generally treated abysmally.     

Union Pacific provided their laborers in the east with free meals. The Chinese workers, by contrast, were forced to procure, prepare, and pay for their own meals. While this cut into the workers' meager pay, it paradoxically worked out better in the long run, because left to their own devices, the Chinese teams ate much better food. Archaeological evidence left behind during the construction tells the story of the Transcontinental Railroad workers' diet and how it fueled the massive project. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.   

Walt Disney and animator Ub Iwerks created the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 1927 for Universal Pictures. They produced quite a few Oswald cartoons, which proved to be highly popular. Oswald introduced the idea of a cartoon character with his own personality, which was neither all good nor all bad, but made audiences relate to him as well as laugh at him. Disney made enough money from the Oswald cartoons to buy land for his new animation studio. But Disney and Universal parted ways in 1928, and Universal owned the character. So Walt and Ub came up with a different character of their own they eventually named Mickey Mouse. Universal cranked out Oswald cartoons until 1938, then relegated him to comic books.

In 2006, Disney regained rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and 95 years after his debut they have a brand new Disney animated short featuring Oswald's classic physics-defying rubber hose humor, with the dialogue-free black-and-white style of the 1920s. Read more about Oswald and what he means to Disney at Gizmodo.

An unconventional shade for an unconventional time:
a new vision. Color of the Year 2023: PANTONE 18-1750 Viva Magenta

Vibrating with vim and vigor, a shade rooted in nature descending from the red family demonstrating a new signal of strength.https://t.co/vxEQlBykRT#Pantone pic.twitter.com/pRIP6bI2NH

— PANTONE (@pantone) December 2, 2022

The Pantone Color Institute may or may not have any influence on an everyday person's style (honestly, did you ever recall seeing a lot of their previous colors of the year?), but they still pick one color they predict will be big for the coming year. They've made that announcement for the year 2023, and it's #18-1750 Viva Magenta. Pantone's Executive Director Leatrice Eiseman said,

In this age of technology, we look to draw inspiration from nature and what is real. PANTONE 18-1750 Viva Magenta descends from the red family, and is inspired by the red of cochineal, one of the most precious dyes belonging to the natural dye family as well as one of the strongest and brightest the world has known.

Cochineal dye, also known as carmine, is made from the cochineal insect, a tropical cactus parasite. Pantone lauds the color as promoting joy and self-expression. NPR says,

Some skeptics would point out that magenta doesn't technically exist, since there's no wavelength of light that corresponds to that color.

Of course it exists. There's already a range of products Pantone is promoting with the color.  

As always with these kinds of lists, your mileage may vary. I am known for loving cherry cordials, but the brand makes a big difference. I love the ones with liquid centers, and cannot abide the ones with white cream in them. They aren't that difficult to eat, but it's a hoot (and a mess) to watch a kid try one for the first time. Mefites have a bone to pick with the chocolate orange, as the critics at Candystore.com got one with a cream center, and the classic Terry's chocolate orange is delicious orange-infused chocolate. I agree that Peeps and reindeer corn are just out of their league and should stay in their own holiday. It's been many years since I've even seen Christmas nougat. How about you? Do you love some of these candies that others hate? Read the justifications for the worst Christmas candies at Candystore.com. -via Metafilter

The No Shave November guys (previously at Neatorama) are back, with their annual cosplay photo to show off the beards they grew during the month. Every year since 2013, five friends (originally six) from Ventura, California, get together to grow beards during November to support cancer awareness among men, and every year they end the month with a different themed photoshoot, where they have portrayed lumberjacks, firemen, Vikings, and everything in between. This year they went with fantasy, dressing as a jester, wizard, king, warrior, and executioner. And they made a video of their photoshoot!



A good time was had by all. Yes, this completes ten years of No Shave November pictures. As one redditor noted, two more and they'll be able to put out a calendar. Too bad every month will be November.  

Too small? You can see an enlargeable gallery of all ten years of pictures here. -via reddit