Photographer Kendra Smith sent pictures and a video of a white raccoon to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. This is not an albino raccoon, which would be white with a pink nose and paws. This one has black paws and a black nose, so it's not completely devoid of coloring. It is instead a leucistic raccoon, meaning it lacks pigment from the parts we would expect color. Like its mask. Which makes it hard for us to recognize as a raccoon at all, but apparently other raccoons know.

So, how rare is this? It’s difficult to say. There are probably many leucistic raccoons, but with this type of coloration, few would make it to adulthood. But enough do to keep it popping up in raccoon populations from time to time. No, really, how rare is this? In short, nobody at ODFW has seen a nearly completely white raccoon in the wild before.

The Department calls this particular raccoon Moby Rick. Click to the right on the image above to see the other pictures; the last image is a video. -via Laughing Squid

In the grand scheme of things, it hasn't been all that long that Western women were "allowed" to wear pants. It was only in 2013 that a French law forbidding women to wear trousers was repealed! (True, it hadn't been enforced for a long time.) A women wearing pants was scandalous until the 20th century, but the desire for practical clothing was always there. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went to Constantinople in 1716 as her husband was the British ambassador, and was struck by the trousers worn by Turkish women.  

Lady Mary returned from her trip with trunks of clothing worn by the Muslim women she encountered, sharing them with members of her social circle, even posing for public portraits modelling the garments.

She wrote about her experiences and observations, creating intrigue amongst the fashionable elite. Her letters and firsthand accounts invoked honest conversations about freedom of dress, property rights, and other social, economic, legal, and marital freedoms that women were denied in Europe. As more women began to travel and discovering foreign cultures, it seemed Western society, which held a strong Eurocentric bias, was falling behind the East regarding women’s rights issues.

It was a couple of hundred years after Montague's travels before women in pants became common in the West. Read the ups and downs of the fashion at Messy Nessy Chic.

Ze Frank has now established himself as a person that people will listen to when he talks about animals. This video, which you might assume is about bats, is really about Batman. His name is Dr. Merlin Tuttle, which you have to admit is a much better name than Bruce Wayne, or at least more suitable for a comic book. But Merlin Tuttle is a real life superhero, going the extra mile to protect the bats who need him. Ze Frank explains, while gently poking fun at Tuttle's mustache. Find out more about Tuttle's work at Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation site.

The three young ducklings you see in some Donald Duck cartoons are Huey, Dewey, and Louie in English-speaking countries, but they are adapted to work in other languages in different ways. In some places they are given alliterative or rhyming names that are real names in the local language, and in others they are labeled with nonsense words that sound funny. In a few places, they are named with some variant of "quack."

This map (which you can see much bigger here), along with others that deal with cartoon names, comes from the delightful blog Mapologies, where you'll find maps that answer all kinds of language questions, like how to say "banana" in Latin America, how other countries refer to the Milky Way, and the origins of color words in different languages.  

-via Kottke

Rufus Weaver was an anatomist of the late 19th century. His specialty was preparing anatomical samples, that is, preserving human body parts and organs for medical classes at Hahnemann Medical Collage. Weaver's most famous project was the retrieval, preservation, and display of an entire human nervous system, which had never been done before. In 1888, Weaver dissected a body and separated out the nervous system: nerves, brain, and eyeballs, and preserved it in the preparation you see here. The specimen is unnerving to anyone who sees it, and you have to wonder who this was in life. It wasn't until 1915 that she was identified as "Harriet Cole," a black woman who worked at the college, and was said to have willed her body to science.    

When another Hahnemann physician, George Geckeler, restored the mounted model in 1960, LIFE magazine devoted a splashy photo spread to the effort. The writer recounted how a scrubwoman who had been ignored by everyone in the laboratory “stared in fascination at cadavers” and “eavesdropp[ed]” on lectures. She osmosed the chatter, the author continued; Harriet supposedly “took to heart [Weaver’s] complaints about a shortage of corpses” and “willed her body to him.” There’s no indication of how the writer gleaned this information—this supposedly intimate understanding of a long-dead woman’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It seems that “no one went back to fact-check” the basic story, Herbison says. “Whoever said it first, that’s the thing that you use.” Details carry over from one story to another like sprawling arithmetic.

One photograph accompanying the LIFE story shows Geckeler stooping so his eyes align with the ones on the preparation. He scrunches his own, like someone puzzling over a painting, studying the canvas as if trying to decipher genius suspended between the fibers. By this point, the myth of “Harriet Cole” had grown to include not just Weaver’s work, but the woman herself—a lowly person made spectacular, in every sense. A fascinating object never quite or fully human, but almost looking the part.

That story is hard to believe, considering that willing one's body to science was not a thing in 1888. Cadavers for medical specimens at the time came from grave robbing and claiming bodies that would otherwise be buried by the state. Alaina McNaughton, Matt Herbison, and Brandon Zimmerman have been trying to track down the mystery of Harriet Cole. Was she a real person, and was she the owner of this nervous system? Weaver left few clues as to how he prepared the specimen, and the identity of the donor was not in his records. Read what the team found out about Weaver's work and the person whose nerves are still on display 130 years later at Atlas Obscura. 

When you're feeding the opossum in the window some tasty jam, you may as well sing a song about it. Eric Stix adapted the tune of "The Wellermen" sea shanty to fit the occasion. The clever lyrics are enhanced by the animal's pleasure and Stix's obvious affection for his visitor. -via Digg

Crochet has had a bit of a renaissance lately, with crafters making adorable amigurumi figures and Halloween costumes and sharing them online. Before that, crochet was seen as something to keep a woman's hands busy while her husband flipped through the channels (I've been there), slightly less useful than knitting, because knitting produces clothing. However, there was a time during the late 1960s in the early '70s when colorful crocheted clothing became quite popular with the young, hip crowd. And it was all because of a Swedish crochet artist named Birgitta Bjerke.

On December 11, 1968, Eric Clapton stepped onto a low stage inside Intertel (V.T.R. Services) Studio north of London to play a few tunes with John Lennon and Keith Richards; the occasion was the taping of “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” for the BBC. At the time, Clapton was the most revered electric guitarist in rock, even amid the incendiary ascendancy of Jimi Hendrix. A few weeks earlier, Clapton had performed his last two shows as a member of Cream at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall, and by the summer of 1969, he would team up with Steve Winwood of Traffic to form a “supergroup” called Blind Faith.

Normally, none of this would have anything to do with crochet, but on that particular December day, Clapton was wearing a brightly colored, predominantly orange crocheted jacket, in which grids of traditional granny squares on the garment’s front, back, and cuffs were paired with bold stripes of alternating colors circling up the sleeves; Clapton’s red tennis shoes and cherry-red Gibson ES-335 completed his ensemble.

Handmade for him by a 27-year-old Stockholm native named Birgitta Bjerke—who was recently arrived in London from New York via Athens, and sold her fashions under the label “100% Birgitta”—Clapton’s jacket reflected the anything-goes fashion ethos of London’s trendy King’s Road. That’s where Bjerke worked, hung out, and was introduced to the city’s music and fashion scenes by another Swede, Ulla Larsson, who dressed some of the biggest names in British rock from a vintage-clothing stall she managed in the Chelsea Antique Market, across the street from Carlyle Square.

“It wasn’t a store per se,” Bjerke tells me over the phone, “more like a booth. It was like being in an Aladdin’s cave draped in magnificent textiles. It was fabulous.”

Bjerke dressed other rock stars in her crocheted creations as well. Her life and her art took her across Europe and to the United States. Read about the fabulous life and art of Birgitta Bjerke in an interview at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: Karl Ferris)

Scientists in Israel have broken a record by growing mice embryos in an artificial environment for 11 or 12 days. This may not seem like a long time, but it is half the animal's normal gestation period. The embryos were five days old when they were taken from pregnant mice. The breakthrough appears to be a system for forcing oxygen into their cells.

It’s record for development of a mammal outside the womb, and according to the research team, human embryos could be next—raising huge new ethical questions.

“This sets the stage for other species,” says Jacob Hanna, a developmental biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who led the research team. “I hope that it will allow scientists to grow human embryos until week five.”

Growing human embryos in the lab for that long, deep into the first trimester, would put science on a collision course with the abortion debate. Hanna believes lab-grown embryos could be a research substitute for tissue derived from abortions, and possibly a source of tissue for medical treatments as well.

Scientists have already done experiments that involve creating artificial human embryos (called blastoids) by coaxing generic skin or stem cells into forming what looks like an embryo. However, there are international standards and laws in various countries that limit how long scientists can grow human embryos. Read more about this research at MIT Technology Review. -via Damn Interesting

(Unrelated image credit: Pazit Polak)

Christopher Nolan's breakout film Memento came out in 2000, and introduced a generation to the reverse-chronology plot. That's a storytelling method very different from sci-fi time travel tales or the device of inserting flashbacks when appropriate. Reverse-chronology is when you begin a movie in the present, and then go backward to explain what happened. The narrative only makes sense when the beginning of the story is revealed at the end of the movie. It's very hard to pull off, but when it works, it's remarkable. Mel magazine has a list of eight movie and one TV show that use the reverse-chronology format to tell a tale, some better than others, that will intrigue you even as they confuse you. The movies are appropriately listed in chronological order, beginning in 1927. -via Digg

Rina Jones' mother often traveled from Vermont to visit her daughter and Rina's husband Brandon in Baltimore. On every trip, they would eat at Ekiben because Mom loved their tempura broccoli. She jokingly mentioned she wanted to eat it on her deathbed. But then Tina's mom fell ill with cancer, and decided to decline treatment. Rina and Brandon prepared for the six-hour drive to Vermont, and wanted to take something that would make Mom happy.

How on earth could they make that tempura broccoli from Ekiben for her? Surely it would turn soggy on the drive.

Brandon, a 37-year-old engineer, emailed Ekiben’s owners and co-founders, Steve Chu and Ephrem Abebe, hoping they could offer some tips. He added one caveat: He’s not a great cook.

Reading his message, Chu thought to himself: “Well … you’re not cooking this.”

Chu wrote back with an offer. He and Abebe would meet them in Vermont. They would cook it themselves.

And so they did. The restauranteurs made the 12-hour round trip to Vermont and set up their fryers outside in the cold Vermont weather. Read the rest of the story at the Baltimore Sun. -via Fark

The first season of Disney+'s Wandavision is complete. Should you jump on the boat and binge-watch it? Get an idea of what the show is like from Screen Junkies and their Honest Trailer. Be aware that it contains spoilers, but nothing that would deter you from watching. To be perfectly honest, this video is liable to leave you completely confused if you haven't been watching Wandavision.

The world's only successful slave rebellion was the Haitian Revolution, ending in 1804, which led that nation to be the first on earth to abolish slavery. Haiti paid an enormous cost for its independence from France. Immediately after the revolution, there was a power struggle between the new nation's founding fathers: a president, an emperor, and a king.

Here are the key players to know: founding fathers Jean-Jacques Dessalines (who became Emperor Jacques I), Alexandre Pétion (who became President) and General Henry Christophe, (who later became King Henry I). Like all burgeoning nations throughout history, there was a power struggle between the three, and within just a few years of independence, Haiti’s new Emperor, Jacques I, had been assassinated by his own generals. His death led to the country’s temporary partition, with Henry declaring himself King the north and Pétion, leader of the south. And with that, the building of King Henry I’s Haitian Kingdom in the north began…

Six richly adorned châteaux, a massive citadel and eight beautiful palaces were constructed to rival the most opulent structures in old Europe during his short reign between 1811 and 1820. Haiti’s “Sans-Souci Palace”, meaning ‘Carefree’ – was the largest of the palaces commissioned. Its gardens were immense, complete with artificial springs and a system of waterworks. Inside, there was said to be mahogany floors throughout, flowing silk curtains and at the top of the grand staircase, a fountain with a gilded sun inscribed with the motto “Je vois tout, et tout voit par moi dans l’univers” (I see everything, and everything in the universe is seen by me”).

Messy Nessy Chic gives us a look at Sans-Souci Palace, with the short version of Haiti's royal history included.

(Image credit: Iconem)

Antarctica is unique in a lot of ways, like being cold, hard to put on a world map, and fairly uninhabitable. It defies successful colonization for a variety of reasons -even mapping the continent is difficult because every direction is north. In this video, comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones go into the sticky question of continent "ownership," but also the history and geography of Antarctica, in a rather entertaining way.  The video is less than seven minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Laughing Squid

Through most of the 20th century, the Barbizon Hotel in Manhattan was a place where single women, mostly those new to New York City, could live in safety. Historian Paulina Bren has published a book on the history of the Barbizon and its illustrious residents, The Barbizon, The New York Hotel That Set Women Free, for which HBO has already secured the TV rights.   

In the 1920s and 30s the Barbizon advertised its role in protecting young working women from predatory men, the “wolves of New York”, capitalising on the influx of women to Manhattan after the First World War, but after the Great Depression it offered a different kind of sanctuary. “Working women were considered deeply suspect for taking a job away from a ‘real breadwinner’,” explains Bren. “If you were walking around New York and you looked like you were going to work, it could be a pretty hostile environment.” Nevertheless, some persisted. The respectable Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School took over three floors of the hotel for its students, as it filled up with young women “determined to type their way out of small-town America”.

But it was the 1950s, the hotel’s “dollhouse” era, when hundreds of young, aspiring models and actresses found their way to the Barbizon, that Bren most enjoyed exploring. “It was an era when women were supposed to be so prim and proper, but there was a bubbling sexuality,” she says.

Notable Barbizon residents included Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, Jaclyn Smith, Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, and Tippi Hedren. While the hotel opened to men in 1981 and was converted to apartments in 2007, there are five women from the hotel's mid-century heyday still living there. Read an overview of the Barbizon's history at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Dmadeo)

While it's not true that pasta first came to Italy from China with Marco Polo, it did travel across the world due to its portability. It was in Italy that pasta was made into an art form, and there are way more pasta shapes than most Americans have ever heard of. Each of these pasta shapes has a story, although some are old and historically murky and others are recent and well-documented, such as Celentano and cavatappi.   

Cavatappi didn’t arrive on the scene until the 1960s. That’s when the Italian pasta brand Barilla introduced a new tubular, corkscrew-shaped pasta called Cellentani. The name is a reference to Adriano Celentano, an Italian pop singer whose energetic stage presence earned him the nickname moleggiato, or “springs.” Barilla writes on its website: “As the shape resembles a coiled spring, it all made sense.” The name cavatappi was actually coined later as a generic term for the pasta shape because Celentano was trademarked by Barilla.

You are probably already familiar with Adriano Celentano. Read the stories behind 14 other pasta shapes, and a brief history of pasta in general at Mental Floss. While the list will introduce you to new pastas, the origin stories are not totally comprehensive. For example, Wikipedia tells us exactly how Cellentani came about.

This particular shape was born in the 1970s at Barilla in Parma[2] when a set of pasta dies had been mistakenly made with a spiral (instead of straight) set of lines. These produced pasta in a spiral or spring (molla in Italian) shape.

So consider the list at Mental Floss to be a portal that may take you down the internet rabbit hole. That's what happened to me.

(Image credit: Francesco Foglieri)