Astronomers scanning the skies for signals at the Parkes telescope in Australia picked up an unusual radio beam last spring. They've been analyzing it since then, and have not yet found a terrestrial source to attribute it to. The Guardian has more.

The latest “signal” is likely to have a mundane explanation too, but the direction of the narrow beam, around 980MHz, and an apparent shift in its frequency said to be consistent with the movement of a planet have added to the tantalising nature of the finding. Scientists are now preparing a paper on the beam, named BLC1, for Breakthrough Listen, the project to search for evidence of life in space, the Guardian understands.

The beam that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star 4.2 light years from Earth, has not been spotted since the initial observation, according to an individual in the astronomy community who requested anonymity because the work is ongoing. “It is the first serious candidate since the ‘Wow! signal’,” they said.

The “Wow! signal” was a short-lived narrowband radio signal picked up during a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or Seti, by the Big Ear Radio Observatory in Ohio in 1977. The unusual signal, which gained its name after astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote “Wow!” next to the data, unleashed a wave of excitement, though Ehman cautioned about drawing “vast conclusions from half-vast data”.

Cute. The search for the source of the radio wave continues, and before you consider it proof of intelligent alien life, Phil Plait has a broader explanation and some cautionary words at Bad Astronomy.  -via Metafilter


(Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser/CC BY 4.0)

Orchestra conductors all over the world present the music of Beethoven, but even when they are trying hard to reproduce his original work, they almost always slow down the tempo of his written directions. Why did Beethoven want his music played so fast?

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was one of the first composers to start using a metronome, a device patented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in 1815. At that time, he started to edit his works with numerical marks with metronome indications. Doubts about the validity of these marks date back to the 19th century and during the 20th century many musicological analyses were carried out, some of which already pointed to the hypothesis that the metronome was broken, an assumption that could never be verified. In any case, most orchestra conductors have omitted these marks as they consider them to be too fast (Romanticism), whereas since the 1980s, other conductors (Historicism) have used them to play Beethoven. However, music critics and the public described these concerts as frantic and even unpleasant.

A few years ago, scientists posited the theory that Beethoven's metronome might have been broken -or even sabotaged. However, new research says it's possible that the composer suffered from early adopter syndrome, before usage standards were commonly agreed upon. Read about the research into Beethoven's metronome use, and the conclusions so far at EurekAlert! -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Mutatis mutandis)

Belgian animator Soetkin Verstegenused ice for her experimental stop-motion film Freeze Frame. There's ice cubes, ice spheres, ice sculpture, ice as background, ice as water, and melting ice. You can imagine she had to work quickly to take stills of each scene! The result is hypnotic, and kind of cold. -via Nag on the Lake

Going for a hospital stay is no fun, especially if you must travel far from home to do it. Then they serve bland, overprocessed foods that you're not all that familiar with and not inclined to eat. That was the law in Alaska until a few years ago, and those bland foods are frightfully expensive there, too, but things are changing.

You’re not going to find jello cups on the menu at Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, Alaska. Instead, patients and visitors choose between reindeer pot pie, smoked hooligan, birch sourdough biscuits with fireweed jelly, herring roe, salmon-belly or seal soup, and Eskimo ice cream (made with animal fat, fish oil, and berries).

Depending on the season, the hospital’s Executive Chef, Amy Foote, receives boxes of fiddlehead ferns and spruce tips trimmed in the late spring, coho salmon and halibut caught in late summer, cloudberries and blueberries picked and packed in the fall, and whale or other game meat in late winter. They are all donations, sent in by a state-wide network of hunters and gatherers who keep ANMC’s traditional foods program stocked with the ingredients that Alaska Natives have routinely enjoyed for generations.

Chef Foote tells us how the traditional foods program came about and how it works in her hospital at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium)

Footage from a trail cam at a beaver dam just south of Voyageurs National Park shows us a variety of animals using it as a river crossing. Over a year's time, we see wolves, bears, deer, beavers (of course), and other creatures, as well as the changing of the seasons. The dam is so sturdy that vegetation thrives on top, and the resulting pond is calm enough to freeze in winter. Good work, beaver! -via Metafilter

Minnesotastan has been running a series of pictures of his readers' bookcases at TYWKIWDBI. You can learn a lot about someone by looking at the books they keep and how they display them. The picture here of Bruce and Carol's bookcase also drives home how you can interact with people for years on the internet and still not know important things about them.

Blogger's note:  After scanning the rows of books, my eyes were drawn to the top of the photo, where sharp-eyed readers may note on the bookcase the bases of some trophies.  I emailed Bruce back to inquire whether they would be of interest to TYWKIWDBI readers.  The answer startled me...

Yeah, they are Emmys. Seven of them. Read the rest of the story at TYWKIWDBI.

The Knights of Renesmee, from Tauranga, New Zealand, spent three years making a shot-for-shot Sweded version of the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy. You may ask, "why?" but I have no answer for that. It's actually quite funny due to creative prop choices, wardrobe malfunctions, and the world's least expensive CGI. While these guys put their hearts and souls into this, they can't help but laugh at themselves. The 6-hour video includes The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and bloopers. If you don't want to watch it all at once, the YouTube page has a handy linked index for each scene.  -via reddit   

(Image credit: The Knights of Renesmee)

Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker bought an old house in the small town of Ames, New York, and set out to repair and renovate it. The house had once been owned by "Count" Adolf Humpfner, who was rumored to have been a bootlegger, but he died in 1932, so those stories may have been just a legend. Two families lived in the home since then, for decades each. So it was quite a surprise when Drummond and Bakker pulled some wall panels out and found whisky bottles. A lot of them.

“I was in the process of removing this rotted wood skirting that went around the mudroom sort of where the foundation would be if it was a truly finished structure, and as I’m peeling back the boards on one of the sides, all of the sudden all this hay falls out and I was very confused," Drummond said. "And at first, I was like ‘oh this must be insulation’ – of course all this is taking place within a few seconds in my head -- and then I look and I’m like ‘well wait a second, what’s that glass thing? And then I pull it up and I’m looking at this old liquor bottle. And then I’m looking at the other package and there’s these other little tops poking out of the hay. And then I look back at the wall and there’s like the edge of this other package tied up with string and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, this is like a stash of booze.’”

Brown paper packages tied up with string filled with an alcohol lover’s favorite thing.

“I was totally excited and we ended up finding the rest of the mudroom was lined with these packages,” Drummond said.

“At the end of the day we were just sitting, and we were like, ‘We really like the house so much more now,'” Bakker said.

So far, they've found 72 bottles, some empty, but most containing Prohibition-era Gaelic whisky under the name Old Smuggler. The bonanza led them to find out more about Adolf Humpfner, who led quite a colorful life, although much of it is still shrouded in mystery. The house has since been dubbed the Bootlegger Bungalow. Read about Humpfner, the house, and the whisky at the Denver Channel. Find out more at Drummond's Instagram page. -via Laughing Squid

Boston Dynamics gives us a New Year greeting in the form of dancing robots. This is terrifying. If robots can dance this well, is there anything they can't do? -via reddit

Through most of history in general, rich people wore nice clothing and poor people wore what they could afford. But sometimes, an ambitious person from a lower social station could become wealthy and dress in expensive garments. This wouldn't do at all, as it upset the ruling class, who preferred to be identified as separate from the masses. Therefore, in different places at different times, sumptuary laws went into effect to codify who could wear what kind of clothing, in order for everyone to tell what social class one belonged to. China's Ming dynasty tried to encode what everyone would wear. It worked for a while.

As time passed and commerce grew, violations increased. Wealthy commoners dressed in fabrics and styles supposedly reserved for nobler classes. They scorned plain silks and adopted forbidden brocades. They wore off-limits colors, including dark blue and scarlet. They sported gold embroidery. They bought hats and robes that were formally restricted to court officials. "Customs have changed from generation to generation," complained a Ming scholar, writing in the late 16th century. "All people tend to respect and admire wealth and luxury, competing for them without considering the bans of the government."

Nor were commoners the only offenders. Officials and their families dressed above their station. The sons of nobles, themselves in the lowly eighth rank, habitually donned the dress reserved for their high-ranking fathers. "They wear dark brown hats and robes patterned with qilin," a dragon-like creature with cloven hoofs, "tied with golden ribbons, even when they live at home or have been dismissed from official positions," complained another Ming writer. Emperors themselves undermined the rules too, he observed, bestowing robes on favorites without regard to whether their status merited the design.    

As they say, dress for the job (or social class) you want, not the one you have. Meanwhile in Italy, legal dress codes had to do with keeping people from showing off, which didn't work as intended, either. Virginia Postrel looks at the rise and fall of sumptuary laws at Reason magazine. -via Digg

If 2020 were a movie, this is what it would be. And the critics would have a field day with the believability factor. Screen Junkies takes movies we've seen and tells us everything that's wrong with them in their Honest Trailer series -although they are often much longer than a normal movie trailer. They also do the same thing with TV shows and video games, so why not a year? Now that 2020 is almost over, there's plenty of material to go over and illustrate with movie clips. In this case, a lot of horror movie clips, of course. Patton Oswalt steps in to help describe the carnage.  

In the Roaring Twenties, boxing was huge. There were reputations and money to be made, and people came out of the woodwork to watch their favorites go at each other. In Shelby, Montana, real estate developer (and the mayor's son) James “Body” Johnson Jr. was looking for a way to invigorate his town after an oil boom had crested, and was taken with the idea of staging a fight with world champion Jack Dempsey. Johnson and his associates arranged a fight between Dempsey and an upcoming boxer named Tommy Gibbons, although it would cost the town several hundred thousand dollars it didn't have. Up front.

Rather than despair, Johnson’s gang decided to bluff their way through, arranging lines of credit through the town’s three banks: the First State Bank of Shelby; the Stanton Trust & Savings Bank; and the First State Bank of Joplin. Lumber was bought with promissory notes to the tune of $82,000, agents launched a haphazard promotional campaign on the East and West coasts, and hundreds of locals began to swirl around the town in the excitement of the run-up. To accommodate the expected 40,000 attendees, makeshift hotels were hastily thrown up by enterprising locals sure of a healthy profit. The match was scheduled for 4 July 1923, in the hopes of capitalizing on patriotic fervor and the promise of a fight to remember. This was to be a boxing match for the ages.

Well, it was, in the respect that it became a huge story for the town of Shelby, but it didn't turn out the way Johnson hoped it would. Read about the championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons and what it did to Shelby, Montana, at Damn Interesting.

Rik Villanueva posted a Star Wars timeline that corresponds with earth years. These aren't the years that these movies actually happened, because we were told right off that it happened "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." It's all about order and perspective. Villanueva apparently used 2019 (the year we saw The Rise of Skywalker) as a starting point and counted back, but some fans are disappointed he didn't use 1977 (when the first Star Wars movie was released) as the anchor year.

While this timeline can be useful, particularly in pegging when The Mandalorian occurs, it still leaves us wondering how Obi-wan Kenobi looked so young when played by Ewan McGregor and so old when played by Alec Guinness. The adventures of the space wizard in Disney's upcoming series may have aged him. That series is supposed to be set ten years after Revenge of the Sith and nine years before A New Hope, which would put it at 1975 in this graph. -via Boing Boing

I don't know what they expected, riding bikes down a ski slope, but you know what to expect, you just don't know when. When it starts, it's all downhill from there, so to speak. You can see the long version here.

Held annually at the Les Deux Alpes ski resort in France, the Mountain of Hell pits 700 racers against a 15-mile course of snow, ice, rocks, and singletrack. The riders descend 8,530 feet in the process. And what’s best is they all start at the same time. So when one rider loses it on the slippery glacier, well, it becomes a pinball machine at full tilt.

-via Bits and Pieces

This time of year you'll find tons of lists of the best and worst things of 2020, but the most interesting are the ones that focus on the odd, strange, and bizarre. A list at LiveScience will entice you to read all ten stories, because they are medical reports of the weird things that can happen to someone's health. Maybe not you. We hope.  

The 54-year-old man suddenly lost consciousness after experiencing a life-threatening heart rhythm problem, according to a report of the case, published Sept. 23 in The New England Journal of Medicine. His family said that the man had a poor diet, and in recent weeks, he had consumed one to two large packages of black licorice every day. Despite receiving multiple treatings in the intensive care unit, the man died 32 hours after arriving at the hospital, the report said.

Black licorice often contains a compound called glycyrrhizin, which is derived from licorice root, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Consuming too much licorice root or candies flavored with licorice root can be dangerous because glycyrrhizin lowers the body's potassium levels. This, in turn, can lead to high blood pressure and abnormal heart rhythms.

So how much licorice is too much?

The FDA says that eating just 2 ounces of black licorice a day for two weeks can cause heart rhythm problems, particularly for people ages 40 and older.

This is the only case in the list in which the patient died. Read more of the strangest medical cases of the year, like the man with green urine, another man with three kidneys, and a woman who shed infectious particles of the novel coronavirus for 70 days straight, at LiveScience. -via Digg

(Image credit: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration)