Once upon a time, people suffered from vitamin deficiencies which caused anemia, rickets, and other conditions we rarely hear about anymore. The truth is, the average modern American diet has the vitamins we need. However, half of all Americans take vitamin supplements. Research shows that they aren't necessary, and can actually shorten our lives. An article at the Atlantic cites many studies on vitamin supplements and their effects, but also contains the fascinating story of how we became so enamored with vitamin supplements. All it took was one man advocating their use, because that one man was the esteemed scientist and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling.    

The turning point came in March 1966, when Pauling was 65 years old. He had just received the Carl Neuberg Medal. "During a talk in New York City," recalled Pauling, "I mentioned how much pleasure I took in reading about the discoveries made by scientists in their various investigations of the nature of the world, and stated that I hoped I could live another twenty-five years in order to continue to have this pleasure. On my return to California I received a letter from a biochemist, Irwin Stone, who had been at the talk. He wrote that if I followed his recommendation of taking 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C, I would live not only 25 years longer, but probably more." Stone, who referred to himself as Dr. Stone, had spent two years studying chemistry in college. Later, he received an honorary degree from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and a "PhD" from Donsbach University, a non-accredited correspondence school in Southern California.

Pauling followed Stone's advice. "I began to feel livelier and healthier," he said. "In particular, the severe colds I had suffered several times a year all my life no longer occurred. After a few years, I increased my intake of vitamin C to ten times, then twenty times, and then three hundred times the RDA: now 18,000 milligrams per day."

From that day forward, people would remember Linus Pauling for one thing: vitamin C.

Pauling's 1970 book about vitamin C was a bestseller, and kicked off the supplement craze. Add in consumers who want easy ways to make themselves healthier and suppliers who stand to make profits, and it's no wonder people buy so many supplements. Read more about it at the Atlantic. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Ferenc Szutor)

It's always best to use logic to calm your child's fears. I'm sure he'll sleep just fine now. This comic is from Connor Ullmann at Depressed Alien, who says this panel is based on his own childhood. Link -via reddit

(YouTube link)

Tim Roman and friends pulled out their Wicked Lasers and pointed them at the campfire, producing an eerie psychedelic portal to another world. They used the Spider 3 Arctic blue laser and the Krypton green laser, which aren't your average laser pointers. I don't know much about lasers, but it seems to me the only safe way to do this is to watch it on video. -via Viral Viral Videos

(YouTube link)

A couple in Kostroma, Russia, arrive all decked out for their wedding and are recorded entering the church. But then comes an unexpected interruption. It's obviously nothing personal, but could you blame them for thinking it might be an omen? -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Kittens love snuggling with plush toys if they can't snuggle with other cats, but mine eventually love them to shreds. Redditor  swimmin_in_a_fishbow posted these pictures of his cat, who treats his duck with care, and still sleeps with it 18 months later. Link -via Huffpo Green

At Pizza Hut restaurants in China, the onetime policy was that you got one trip to the salad bar, with one dish. Some customers took that as a challenge, and began to construct artful stacks of food to see how much they could get in one trip. The idea spread, and became somewhat of a competition, with photos posted online of the huge stacks of food -all on one plate. Pizza Hut was not amused, as most of the food was wasted. They announced in 2009 that the salad bars would be removed from restaurants in China. Although a few still remain, the practice of stacking salad towers has mostly died out. But there are plenty of pictures, many of which you'll see at Kotaku. Link -via mental_floss

(YouTube link)

Of course, YOU know theses rules, but have you taught them to your kids yet? So much of navigating one's way in society comes down to being aware of other people and their point of view. This came up in a discussion with my driving student daughter. She asked why so few drivers use turn signals. It's because using a turn signal does not benefit the driver. It only benefits all the other drivers around them! That's why so many people complain about other drivers, yet still don't use turn signals themselves. That's also why a student must use a signal for every turn, so it will become an automatic habit. Link

(YouTube link)

Eric Buss rides around on his bubble wrap bike. Can't you imagine that the noise woke up every child in the neighborhood, who all ran outside and excitedly began to stomp the rest of the bubbles. -via Daily of the Day

Every year I spend about a month using a pressure canner to preserve the bounty of the backyard garden. That's child's play compared to the way Alaska residents do home canning. In a land where store-bought groceries can bankrupt you, the tradition is to shift the jar supply constantly to what's available or in season. Alaskans can everything from bear meat to mushrooms, stocking it away for future meals.

"If it stops crawling long enough, we'll put it in a jar," says Jon Rowan, a schoolteacher in the town of Klawock, on the island's west side.

Rowan hunts, harvests and cans nearly every sort of creature that lives in the diverse, rain-drenched ecosystem of the region. His cellar is crammed with hundreds of jars of salmon, halibut, rockfish, lingcod, deer and even seal, which Rowan can legally shoot because he — like many of the island's several thousand people — has Native American roots.

Seal blubber, Rowan says, is cooked for hours before going into the jar. It may be used for cooking or simply melted over rice — "kind of like how you use soy sauce at a Chinese restaurant," Rowan says.

The meat of local seals is also canned.

Read more about the serious business of Alaskan canning practices at NPR's The Salt blog. Link -via Digg

(Image credit: Alastair Bland/for NPR)

Labros Hydras of Washington, D.C. was vacationing in Greece when he caught an octopus. It only had six legs -not because of injury, but because it was a "hexapus," which only grew six legs. Such an octopus is so rare that only one other specimen has ever been documented. Hydras did not know that when he killed the octopus and took it to a taverna to have it cooked.

The chef refused to cook it for him because it was so rare and told Labros he should have let the octopus live.

But the hungry father-of-two went and fried it for his supper anyway and served it up with a slice of tomato, lemon and a solitary salad leaf.

After finishing it off he decided to check out what the chef had said – and felt sick when he realised what he had done.

No-one had ever heard of a six-legged hexapus until five years ago when one nicknamed Henry was found off the North Wales coast.

Hydras then took photographs to Greek scientists to help document the hexapus. Scientists say it is not a new species, but a rare yet natural anomaly. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: SWNS)

Charm City Cakes has unveiled their latest masterpiece: the Sharknado cake! It's a miracle of engineering and confectionary delight. What kind of party would one order a Sharknado cake for? It doesn't matter -I want to be invited! Link

The following is an article from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader. (Image credit: Greg Williams)

Readers have been asking us to tell this story for years. It was so weird even we had a hard time swallowing it …but it's true.

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

On September 10, 1945, Mike the rooster was making his usual rounds in the Olsen farmyard in Fruita, Colorado. He paused for a moment to join the other Wyandotte chickens as they hunted and pecked for grain outside the chicken coop. Mike didn't notice the dark shadow that fell across his path. It was Lloyd Olsen.

Clara Olsen had sent her husband out to the chicken coop on a mission: catch the rooster and prepare him for dinner. Lloyd Olsen grabbed Mike and put the rooster on the chopping block. Remembering that his mother-in-law (who was coming for dinner) loved chicken necks, Lloyd took special care to position his ax on Mike's neck so a generous portion of neck would remain. He gave that rooster one strong whack and cut off his head.

Mike the now-headless rooster ran around in circles, flapping his wings. At this point, most chickens would have dropped dead. Instead, Mike raced back to the coop, where he joined the rest of the chickens as they hunted and pecked for food.

Lloyd Olsen was flabbergasted. He kept expecting the rooster to keel over. It never happened. The next morning he checked again and found the feathered fellow -minus his head- asleep in the henhouse with the hens.

Note: Continue reading for actual pictures of Mike.

(YouTube link)

The Alberta Parks Department trained a camera trap on a particular tree to see what happens. The results are shown in this time-lapse video. You'll see plenty of different animals, but one bear decided this was the best tree in the world -and told all his friends!  -via Metafilter

The following is from the magazine The Annals of Improbable Research.

Compiled by R.G. Briskett, AIR staff

Yawning has induced tremendous enthusiasm among scientists. These particular scientists are small in number, partly because funding for yawn experiments is rather limited. Despite the dearth of laboratories, equipment, professorships, or prize money dedicated to the subject, yawning can be of great appeal to an experimentalist. A yawn is rather mysterious-- a gaping, black hole that invites anyone -- anyone of a certain sensibility, that is -- to come, take a look, and take a poke at teasing out some of its secrets.

Here are a few of the many experiments that have been documented.

Yawning in Church and in School

Joseph E. Moore of the Jesup Psychological Laboratory at George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee conducted several key experiments more than a half-century ago:

“Some Psychological Aspects of Yawning,” J.E. Moore, Journal of General Psychology, vol. 27, 1942, pp. 289-94. Moore’s key findings are revelatory:

In this investigation trained yawners apparently stimulated college students in assemblies and libraries to yawn as well as church goers in both the morning and evening services.

The phonograph record stimulated some of the blind subjects but few of the graduate nurses to yawn.

Motion pictures of a girl yawning seemed to initiate the yawning reflex in several students taking general psychology.
 

Yawning at Temple

Ronald Baenninger is a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a former engineer, and is now editor-in-chief of the research journal Aggressive Behavior. Professor Baenninger has conducted a number of yawning experiments. Much of this yawning occurred in Temple students. One of Baenninger’s most basic experiments reflects an engineer’s appreciation of proper measurement. Because later experiments would depend on having students observe,
record, and report their own yawns, he performed a calibration. This gave him a gauge that was useful in later experiments. Details can be found in:

“Self-Report as a Valid Measure of Yawning in the Laboratory,” Monica Greco and Ronald Baenninger, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, vol. 27, no. 1, January 1989, pp. 75-6. The basic assessment technique was simple:

30 undergraduate students were assigned to 1 of 2 groups that recorded their own yawns either in complete privacy or videotaped through a 2-way mirror.

Having ascertained how much he could trust what his students would report about their own experiences, ProfessornBaenninger, together with his colleagues, threw himself into a full-bore examination of when, where, and why students yawn. The trio of Greco, Baenninger and Govern published its results in 1993:

I've never seen building components share their emotions this way. Have you? Is there some way we can assure them that everything will be okay? Link  -via Geeks Are Sexy