There are many kinds of walls, and even among those built on a country estate, designs vary according to their purpose. One rather ingenious wall design is the ha-ha, possibly called that because that’s what people said when they saw how it worked. From the grounds of well-kept estate, it was barely visible, and what you saw was not only minimal, but aesthetically pleasing. What you didn’t see was a barrier that kept animals out of the yard.  

In those early days, before mechanical lawn mowers, sheep and cattle were often allowed to graze on the ground to keep the grassland trimmed. A ha-ha was typically constructed between the estate's gardens and grounds to prevent grazing animals from crossing over to the manicured lawn and gardens adjoining the house, while generating a continuous vista of the garden and landscape beyond. Unlike an ordinary trench, which may turn into a moat or become overgrown with vegetation, a ha-ha keeps the estate ground in an impeccable state by allowing livestock to graze right up to the stonewall.

Find out how a ha-ha works, and see examples of its use at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Tim Dawson)

A manned mission to Mars entails plenty of challenges that don’t pertain to a trip to, say, the moon. How will we sustain astronauts for years at a time, both physically and mentally? It takes a lot of creativity to figure out these things, so NASA is holding a contest to produce innovative ideas for feeding astronauts during a deep space mission.

The Deep Space Food Challenge will identify food production technologies that can:

    Help fill food gaps for a three-year round-trip mission with no resupply

    Feed a crew of four (4) astronauts

    Improve the accessibility of food on Earth, in particular, via production directly in urban centers and in remote and harsh environments

    Achieve the greatest amount of food output with minimal inputs and minimal waste

    Create a variety of palatable, nutritious, and safe foods that requires little processing time for crew members

Yes, there’s money involved. NASA has budgeted $500,000 to split among the top 20 teams. Get an overview of the program at Popular Mechanics. To take part, you must sign up for the Deep Space Food Challenge by May 28.  -via Digg

Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez/public domain

The serial killers you know are those you either remember or have seen a movie about: Richard Ramirez, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. There were others, most of them operating between the late 1960s and the turn of the century. Then the era of serial killers petered out. Why?  

Criminal justice expert Peter Vronksy, whose new book American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years looks to answer just that question, says that more than 80 percent of known American serial killers operated between 1970 and 1999. “It’s an era that was coined as the ‘golden age of serial murder‘ by Harold Schechter, who was a crime historian,” Vronsky tells Rolling Stone. The reason behind this is manyfold — encompassing everything from sociological changes, to biology, to technology, to linguistics.

Over the course of his work, which began in 1979, Vronsky has deduced that serial killers generally develop the personality and compulsion befitting a killer when they’re young — by the time they’re 14, they’re basically fully formed; they generally start killing in their late twenties. As such, he looked back at what was happening in the world when murderers like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy were growing up, and discovered a link: They were all born during wartime. “In cases like, for example, the BTK killer [Dennis Rader], Richard Cottingham [the Torso Killer], their fathers were returning war veterans with PTSD, which [was not a diagnosable illness until] the Eighties,” he says. In short: These children who were already predisposed to violence were raised in potentially violent, likely broken homes.

Intriguing, but not the entire explanation. Not everyone in that situation turned out to be a serial killer. Society has changed in other ways, and the news media also contributed by focusing on sensational stories colored by the public’s perception of the crimes, the perpetrators, and the victims. Frankly, I’ve written too many articles about historical serial killers to believe the late 20th century was truly an anomaly. Read about the ‘golden age of serial murder‘ and the reasons behind it at Rolling Stone.  -via Damn Interesting

The other day I had a brain cramp and Googled “Hawaiian Disney movie” and the results all came back as Moana. Which isn’t set in Hawaii. How can we possibly forget Lilo & Stitch? I, uh, just forgot the name for a minute. The movie is fairly recent, if you consider 19 years ago “recent,” as I do. Lilo & Stitch was a sweet family movie featuring a charmingly disgusting space alien that causes chaos everywhere. I loved it. The movie’s weirdness made it a hit. Still, Screen Junkies are able to pick it apart without ruining a bit of the charm in this Honest Trailer.   

There’s nothing as relatable as a Star Wars analogy to explain something totally unrelated. Randall Munroe goes back to the original Star Wars movie (now called A New Hope) to show how the newfangled COVID-19 vaccines work, at xkcd.

The various parts of the analogy are broken down at Explain xkcd. You’ll learn even more in the discussion at Metafilter.

(ImageCredit: Randall Munroe/xkcd/CC BY-NC 2.5)

The game City Guesser has the same premise of GeoGuessr in that you are to guess where in the world you are. But City Guesser gives you clues in the form of video instead of a still picture. I tried the US only version, and was presented with quite a few towns that I’d never been to. The best strategy in that case is to look for clues like street signs, area codes, and native plants. They aren’t all big cities, either. But it’s a lot of fun! It’s not a competitive game, and I don’t think you are judged on how long you let the video play. The answer key tells you how many miles off you are, which is embarrassing when it’s thousands of miles, but if I got within 100 miles, I considered that a win. I did a lot better after I realized the map you use to guess has a zoom feature! Try it out yourself- you may become addicted to City Guesser.

When you feel you’re pretty good at the game, you can step up to versions at the bottom of the main page that limit your movement and your time, or even a multiplayer version.   -via Kottke

How many pop culture characters can you portray in claymation (stop-motion with clay) if you only have green clay? Filmmaker Trent Shy shows us eight of them. After the short animation, we get a fast-moving version that shows the work he put into it. But what if you only had blue clay? That video was his next project.



There are 14 blue characters! Do you know them all? -via Laughing Squid

JRR Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings was published in the 1950s, which made it the perfect fantasy fodder for young Baby Boomers. Some of them went on to become songwriters and entertainers who used the world of Middle Earth for inspiration. It wasn’t just Led Zeppelin, although a list of 11 songs could be dominated by the group. No, this list only features one song per artist, and for Zep, that one song is “Ramble On.”

   “’T was in the darkest depths of Mordor
    I met a girl so fair
    But Gollum, and the evil one
    Crept up and slipped away with her.”

If Plant’s Middle-earth references in “Ramble On” seem a bit too blatant, he has a ready-made defense: “I just want to hold up my hand and say, ‘OK, I was 21 when I wrote that,’” he told the Santa Barbara Independent in 2013. Plant has also expressed some regret that he didn’t leverage his rocker chops for important causes more often during the band’s heyday. “My peer group were writing substantial pieces of social commentary, and I was willowing along the Welsh borders thinking about Gollum,” he told Planet Rock Magazine in 2019. He still likes “Stairway to Heaven,” though.

The list has songs from Joni Mitchell, Rush, Megadeth, and more, all with music videos. You’ll find it at Mental Floss.

In a valiant attempt to produce a Valentines Day feature on a subject they haven't already covered, Smithsonian introduces us to animals that are naturally pink. Silly Smithsonian, we don't need a holiday to enjoy these fascinating creatures! There are pink animals among insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. No flamingos this time, nor humans. Above is a Hopkins’ rose nudibranch.

Despite looking more like sea anemone or some kind of squishy, spiky stress ball, Hopkins’ rose nudibranch (Okenia rosacea) is actually a sea slug—and please don’t give it a squeeze. Aptly named, this North America-based, one-inch-long sea critter is as impossibly pink, save for its white-tipped papillae. Nudibranches use their colors to warn predators that making a meal out of them would lead to toxic consequences.

Unlike other sea slugs, nudibranchs feast on certain creatures, and the Hopkins’ rose variety gets its beautiful color from its choice prey: tiny pink bryozoans, or moss animals. Bryozoans are colonial animals, meaning they live in colonies where individual organisms connect in units called zooids. These Lego-like animals are no match for the Hopkins’ rose nudibranch, however, which has hook-like teeth made to pierce through bryozoans and gobble up the pink delicacies.

The other animals range from katydids to bats to naked mole rats. See them all at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Flickr user Robin Agarwal (ANudibranchMom on iNaturalist))

For the last few weeks, everyone and their brother has suggested I post about the charming snowplows of Scotland. I resisted doing so, because we featured them here three years ago. However, some may have missed it. The snow trucks are called gritters because they spread sand behind them for traction. Each Scottish gritter has an imaginative name, and you can find them on the Gritter Tracker. Their punny names include:

Snowbegone Kenobi
Spready Mercury
Megameltasaurus
Sled Zeppelin
The Great Grittish Flake-Off
You're a Blizzard Harry
Gritly Come Dancing

London also got into the game by naming one gritter Blizzard of Oz, which is a poor attempt at Scottish-level punry. Read more about Scotland's gritter armada at The Herald.

Science has codified what many cat owners already knew. You can't force a cat to love you, but if you're a nice person in their eyes, they will come around. But first, you have to know what "nice" is to a cat. If you already know this stuff, then it's a video full of nice cats.

Researchers have found an ancient henge in the Preseli Hills of west Wales which is missing some stones that line up with the dimensions of the bluestones of Stonehenge. The newly-discovered henge, called Waun Mawn, is rather close to the quarry from which the bluestones were unearthed. It appears that the residents built a henge from local rock, then for some reason up and moved to what is now Salisbury, and took their massive stones with them.   

At 360 feet (110 meters) wide, both Waun Mawn and the ditch surrounding Stonehenge have similar diameters, and both monuments were oriented to align with the midsummer solstice sunrise, according to the research. What’s more, a bluestone from Stonehenge features a distinctive cross-section that nicely matches an empty stonehole found at Waun Mawn. Rock chips found in the same hole were also found to match those found at Stonehenge.

The discovery also helps to explain some unanswered questions about the people who lived in west Wales at the time. Preseli Hills was an important and densely populated region in Neolithic Britain, but evidence of these people from 2000 to 3000 BCE is practically non-existent. It’s “as if they just vanished,” said Pearson in the statement, adding that these people possibly migrated, “taking their stones—their ancestral identities—with them.”

The next question is why they moved. Taking the stones meant it was clearly a permanent migration. Read about the research and how the connection between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge was made at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Flickr user thegarethwiscombe)

We all know the story of Sgt. Alvin York, mostly because of the 1941 Gary Cooper movie. York killed 25 enemy soldiers and captured 132 more in one day in France. For his efforts, he received the Medal of Honor and legendary hero status. He was not the only one who displayed heroism on that day in 1918. You can read an account of the battle in which quite a few of York's comrades performed in exemplary fashion, in supporting roles, you might say. But it was York who became the face of the US efforts in World War I.  

It would be nice to say that York et al went on to live happily ever after, and in some instances that was approximately so. But even as the S.S. Ohioan carrying York’s company arrived in New York, a whispering campaign had begin casting some doubt on York’s reputation as a “one-man army.”

The New York Times reported as much in May 1919, saying that while the men on the ship were “unanimous” in their praise for York, “several officers expressed regret that other members of York’s patrol squad which surprised the Germans at Hill 223 in the Argonne Forest, had not won recognition.”

In fact, Beardsley, Konotski, Wills, Sacina, and Donohue were cited for their “splendid conduct” by the 164th Brigade. Missing from the equation, though, was Bernard Early, who had led the patrol into that ravine and taken the initial surrender of the Germans, and Otis Merrithew, a.k.a. William Cutting.

Both were recovering from their wounds while the army performed its investigation of the Oct. 8 action; both would, to different degrees, become thorns in the side of York and cast doubt on the army’s official line about York’s heroism.

Jealousy? Maybe somewhat. The other men didn't so much begrudge York's acclaim as they resented the relative lack of acknowledgment of their own actions. Read what happened to the men who fought with York at Military History Now.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Frank Schoonover)

New love may be all giddy with hearts and flowers and declarations of undying devotion, but when you've been in a committed relationship for a while, real love boils down to making your significant other's life easier. You'll get points for trying, and even noticing these things is a sign of love. It's still best to follow through. The Holderness family has plenty of examples in this medley of love song parodies. Happy Valentines Day!

(Image credit: BeExcellentToEachOtter)

This picture from December made an impression. These dresses at Target evoke memories of Little House on the Prairie, which is a trend no one asked for, but they inspired some Facebook users, particularly the group BYC (BackYardChickens), to use them for historical recreations. The pictures were so good that they went viral, and now the #targetdresschallenge has leaked out and gone viral.



Target must be ecstatic that they are selling so many dresses, even if it's for comedic purposes. See lots more of these images at #targetdresschallenge or a representative roundup at Buzzfeed.