The gayageum is a Korean zither. Luna Lee  (previously at Neatorama) is a master of the instrument, which you'll hear as she plays Chicago's classic hit "25 or 6 to 4." It really kicks in after about a minute. -via Laughing Squid

One of the things we marvel about journalism of a century ago is how the smallest bit of news could be so newsworthy. Of course, today we have the internet for those small stories. The story of Betty was reprinted in newspapers across the country. She was a train station cat, kept to hunt mice at the Lackawanna Terminal at Hoboken, New Jersey. Betty led the usual life of a cat until January of 1933, when she boarded a train bound for Dover, leaving two kittens behind. Railroad employees up and down the line were alarmed when they realized what happened, and sprang into action to return Betty to her home station.

The press had a lot of fun with Betty’s story. One newspaper suggested the much-married cat galivanted off to Buffalo to visit a boyfriend, who had sent her a cat-o-gram. Thinking she was an employee of the railroad and thus entitled to ride the rails for free, she put on her fur coat and boarded the train.

Another newspaper said that perhaps Betty ran away because she had been wed too many times. She was tired of caring for kittens year after year, and was in search of an adventure all on her own.

Station-master Byrnes came up with his own reason for Betty’s antics. He surmised that the cat was upset that she didn’t get her usual turkey meal on Sunday morning, because the restaurant at the Lackawanna terminal was closed. She may have decided to jump on the train in search of an open eating establishment.

Whatever her motive was, that evening the one-time hobo cat received a turkey dinner fit for a railroad magnate.

Read what happened when Betty got the urge to travel at the Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

The modern disposable hypodermic needle is a marvel- safe, clean, and almost painless compared to the reusable instruments many of us remember from years past. But how did this method of introducing drugs into our bodies start? Earlier physicians would wound the skin, as in variolation, but the first use  of a needle-like instrument was in 1844, when Dr. Francis Rynd injected morphine acetate into the face of a woman who was most likely suffering from the painful nerve condition called trigeminal neuralgia.  

The most interesting thing about this section of the report, however, is the ‘instrument made for the purpose’ of injecting the drug. Dr Rynd did not include a description or illustration of this instrument – probably a mistake, as it was his opportunity to publicise his invention. We do know what it looked like, however, from an article he subsequently published in 1861:

This is not a hypodermic syringe but a novel type of trochar: an instrument with a sharp tip and a cannula through which fluids can be introduced (or evacuated). It had a sharp needle to puncture the skin, but no plunger to propel fluids into the body; instead, the drug was dropped into the cannula, using ‘an ordinary writing-pen’, and then left to infiltrate the tissues by gravity alone.

The injection did deliver relief to the patient. Read about the case, and also the first injection using a syringe with a plunger a few years later, at Thomas Morris' blog. -via Strange Company

Lion dance is a form of traditional dance and performance in Chinese culture where dancers mimic a lion's movements in a lion costume. This is what their moves look like without the lion https://t.co/tIwpwmUib8 [source of the gif: https://t.co/aMLeaPdWxc] pic.twitter.com/ndeg4351Jb

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 14, 2021

The Lunar New Year begins on Friday, February 12 this year. The Lion Dance is a traditional part of the festivities in China. If you've ever wondered what the dancers look like underneath the lion costume, watch these two guys. Their dance looks pretty straightforward until... Well, just watch and you'll see something truly amazing. -via Nag on the Lake

You might only know dire wolves from the TV series Game of Thrones, but they were real dogs that grew up to six feet long in order to hunt the megafauna of North America tens of thousands of years ago. Quite a few of their remains were preserved in the La Brea tar pits. Dire wolves were identified as a species in the 1850s, but now DNA analysis tells us more about them. For example, they weren't really wolves.

After sequencing five genomes from dire wolf fossils between 50,000 and 13,000 years old, the researchers found that the animals belonged to a much older lineage of dogs. Dire wolves, it now appeared, had evolved in the Americas and had no close kinship with the gray wolves from Eurasia; the last time gray wolves and dire wolves shared a common ancestor was about 5.7 million years ago. The strong resemblance between the two, the researchers say, is a case of convergent evolution, whereby different species develop similar adaptations—or even appearances—thanks to a similar way of life. Sometimes such convergence is only rough, such as both birds and bats evolving wings despite their differing anatomy. In the case of dire and gray wolves, lives of chasing large herbivores to catch some meat on the hoof resulted in two different canid lineages independently producing wolflike forms.

The DNA study is causing scientists to rethink how and why dire wolves went extinct, and how they should be classified. Read more about dire wolves at Scientific American. -via Metafilter

After last year's Mardi Gras celebrations led to a huge number of COVID cases, the parades are cancelled for this year. But New Orleans is bringing the parade flavor back anyway, by decorating houses as if they were traditional Mardi Gras parade floats! A project called "Hire a Mardi was Artist" is putting artists, float builders, and craftspeople to work transforming homes into colorful art installations. The money raised through donations pays for the work, and also helps struggling musicians and others who are impacted by the Mardi Gras cancellations. -via Boing Boing

Abraham Lincoln's campaign against slavery was revealed in speeches he made between 1854 and his inauguration in 1861. During this time, he had retired from Congress to practice law, but was pulled back into politics by his opposition to Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas' drive to open up new territories as legal slave states. In those years, Lincoln developed possible plans for nationwide abolition.

Lincoln acknowledged how hard it would be to abolish slavery. “If all earthly power were given me,” he said, “I should not know what to do.” He imagined four possible scenarios, only the last of which he thought had any hope of success. “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia.” He referred to the African nation as the “native land” of southern slaves, as if they were an alien presence in the United States despite having been here for generations. Yet however desirable colonization might be, Lincoln went on, “a moment’s reflection” revealed its impracticality. “If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days.” So Lincoln’s first scenario—colonization to Liberia—was whisked aside as impractical. “What then?” he asked.

You can read of Lincoln's other three scenarios for abolishing slavery, none of which involved a bloody war between the states, at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting

The Powerball jackpot now stands at $550 million, and the Mega Millions jackpot is up to $750 million. You can increase your odds of winning ever-so-slightly by buying a ticket. But how much is that $2 investment really worth, and how can we increase the odds of claiming those jackpots for ourselves without having to share with some other winner?

We propose and analyze a practical scheme to increase the likelihood of single winners, or equivalently to minimize the probability of sharing. Paradoxically, this manages to increase the expected value of a lottery ticket without costing the central authorities any additional contributions to the payoff pool. Given that larger potential winnings attract more players, we anticipate that implementation of our scheme would generate increased interest in these games, and enlarge the ostensible benefits for or from the governments running them.

Further, we demonstrate that the number of Powerball tickets bought increases quadratically with pool size, which implies that tickets become increasingly less valuable after the pool passes a critical threshold. This analysis makes it possible to determine the range of pool sizes where tickets have positive expected value. In particular, it establishes that Powerball tickets bought (under the current sales model) with pool sizes between $775.2 million and $1.6656 billion have positive expected value.

What this extremely complex mathematical analysis misses is that the "value" of a lottery ticket lies more in the pleasant fantasy it creates for the buyer than in the actual outcome. And if you win, how horrible is it to have to share a windfall that you'll never be able to spend in your lifetime anyway? In any case, the recommendations are mostly for the system that sells the tickets, in generating numbers that will be less likely to produce duplicates, although there are some tips for buying tickets. Read the calculations at Chance magazine. -via Metafilter

You knew it was coming sooner or later- a game about the year 2020. Now that we've gotten through and made it to 2021, you can relive the previous year with a side-scrolling game that leads you through the major events of 2020, starting with the Australian wildfires. Use your arrows to run and leap, save the baby koalas, and... I don't know what happens after that, because I keep getting killed in the fire. The caption teases that you'll encounter a pandemic, a stock market crash, an election, and more, so if you get that far, let us know how you fare. -via Boing Boing

Most people today carry around at least a trace of Neanderthal DNA, the legacy of reproduction between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis thousands of years ago. Genetic studies show that such interbreeding happened time and again in different populations, and although we don't know the circumstances, we might assume that a variety of circumstances were involved over time. An article at BBC Future begins with a scenario taken from romance novels, but soon gets into the science of Neanderthal-modern human relations, like a study of Neanderthal dental plaque. Anthropologist Laura Weyrich discovered the common oral microbe Methanobrevibacter oralis, but this sample was the human version, not the variety that normally inhabited Neanderthal mouths.

Weyrich explains that one possible route for the transfer is kissing. “When you kiss someone, oral microbes will go back and forth between your mouths,” she says. “It could have happened once but then sort of been somehow magically propagated, if it happened that the group of people who were infected went on to be very successful. But it could also be something that occurred more regularly.”

Another way to transfer your oral microbes is by sharing food. And although there is no direct evidence of a Neanderthal preparing a meal for an early modern human, a romantic meal could have been an alternative source of M. oralis.

Such studies also give us insight into Neanderthal-human transfer of sex-linked chromosomes, cancer, STDs, and immune systems. This much sharing may eventually lead us to conclude that humans didn't wipe out the Neanderthals so much as we just absorbed them. -via Digg 

(Image credit: Trougnouf/Benoit Brummer)

The United States has been swearing in presidents since 1789. While there has been an effort to make the ceremony consistent and traditional, each one is slightly different. Of course, when a president dies, his successor may take the oath of office in strange circumstances: one in an airplane, another oath administered by the president's father. But even the public ceremonies have had their moments, like when Andrew Johnson showed up drunk. Believe it or not, two different inaugurations had to contend with dead birds! Then there's the story of two Founding Fathers and their on-again, off-again friendship.

For many years, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been close friends. Together, they’d helped create the Declaration of Independence, worked in Europe as fellow diplomats, and had even stolen a piece of Shakespeare’s favorite chair. (Seriously.)

But as their political careers diverged, the two became rivals. When Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, Adams was nowhere to be found. Eight hours before the big event, he’d left Washington and started making his way back to his family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. This made Adams the first president who chose to skip his successor’s swearing-in ceremony. (History repeated itself 28 years later, when John Quincy Adams boycotted Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. Like father, like son.)

Adams and Jefferson eventually made up when, in 1811, Adams casually told some houseguests, “I always loved Jefferson, and I still love him.” Mutual friends forwarded this comment along to Monticello. Jefferson was thrilled. “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards [Adams] all of the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives,” he proclaimed. Over the next 15 years, the two ex-presidents exchanged more than 150 friendly letters. They both died within hours of each other on the same day—July 4, 1826.

Read the details of the 35 weirdest stories Mental Floss dug up about presidential inaugurations.

One that didn't make the list, but was certainly memorable, was the drunken brawl following Andrew Jackson's inauguration.

Four different species of praying mantises watch a small scale TV set made from a phone in their comfy living room. You might rightly assume that they have their preferences in subject matter- in this case, a cartoon of tasty, tasty butterflies. -via Laughing Squid

Mood-altering drugs are not all the same. Opium is plant-based, LSD is synthetic (although often adulterated), and mushrooms are fungi. A fungus can go through a lot and still survive enough to grow. A yet-to-be-published report tells of a 30-year-old man, an experienced opioid user, who injected himself with a "tea" made from magic mushrooms, which led to a serious infection.  

Days before the ER visit, he had decided to use mushrooms by first boiling them down into what he called “mushroom tea,” then filtering the mixture through a cotton swab and intravenously injecting it. Soon after, he developed symptoms including lethargy, jaundice, diarrhea, and nausea, along with vomiting up blood.

By the time he was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit, multiple organs had started to fail, including his lungs and kidney. Tests revealed that he had both a bacterial and fungal infection in his blood, meaning that the mushrooms he injected were now literally feeding off him and growing. Among other treatments, he was given an intense course of antibiotics and antifungal drugs.

The man spent 22 days in the hospital, and even after discharge is taking antimicrobial drugs. Read more of the story at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Alan Rockefeller)

It’s not often that Screen Junkies gives us an Honest Trailer for movie that’s still in theaters. Or scratch that, let’s say a new movie, because Wonder Woman 1984 is both in theaters and on HBO. Still, you’ve wondered whether this movie was worth seeing. The critical reception wasn’t all that great, but we’ve suffered from a real lack of blockbuster superhero movies lately, and we’ve become used to them. So strap in and see what WW84 is all about. Be mindful that this Honest Trailer is full of spoilers, as they all are.

Bella Rose gets really excited when the horses leave the gate! According to her owner Madison Coates, Bella is a fan of all animal activities on TV, although horse racing is her favorite. -via Laughing Squid