When we think of a coat of arms, we think of nobility, wealth, and power, passed along through generations. A family coat of arms should be a symbol to be proud of, at least until we learn that there were far more of these symbols than we ever realized, and someone had to make them up to begin with. And through modern eyes, they didn't put enough thought into some of them.

It seems that the immortal symbols of nobility don't all hold up to the same aesthetic scrutiny. The above heraldry is taken from the pages of Konrad Grunenberg's Wappenbuch (Book of Arms), a comprehensive collection of coats of arms commissioned as a gift to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, in 1480. The book is a real Who's Who of the HRE, listing the arms of its nobles, important burghers but also foreign kings. It's also a collection of who could think up the goofiest symbols, like a fish with a trumpet for a nose ...

There is some speculation that Grunenberg's index is not altogether accurate, and many of the entries could have been made up of whole cloth, for political or comedic reasons. Who knows? It appears that his depictions all contain the same helmet, as if he had a medieval version of copy-paste and just drew pictures around them from someone's description. You can flip through the Wappenbuch yourself here. Or see the highlights, meaning the weirdest examples of coats of arms from the book at Cracked.

The Incas ground peanuts into paste thousands of years ago, but who invented the modern incarnation of peanut butter? If you had to guess, you'd probably say George Washington Carver, but it was John Harvey Kellogg who filed the patent in 1895. Yes, the same guy who developed modern breakfast cereal at his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan.  

A Seventh-Day Adventist, Kellogg endorsed a plant-based diet and promoted peanut butter as a healthy alternative to meat, which he saw as a digestive irritant and, worse, a sinful sexual stimulant. His efforts and his elite clientele, which included Amelia Earhart, Sojourner Truth and Henry Ford, helped establish peanut butter as a delicacy. As early as 1896, Good Housekeeping encouraged women to make their own with a meat grinder, and suggested pairing the spread with bread. “The active brains of American inventors have found new economic uses for the peanut,” the Chicago Tribune rhapsodized in July 1897.

Kellogg's peanut butter had its problems, though, and the product went through changes as it became tastier and more amenable to mass production. Throughout the 20th century, peanut butter gained popularity as a protein alternative to expensive meat. Read the history of peanut butter, plus a look at the work George Washington Carver did to promote peanut crops at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: PeanutButter1046)

Last month, a truck driver in British Columbia witnessed an oncoming vehicle run over a cat in the road. The truck driver stopped and found that the small cat was not only injured, but was frozen to the road! He took her to the nearest veterinary clinic, and she is now in the custody of the SPCA.

It’s believed the female cat had been wandering and became hypothermic before collapsing in the middle of the road, where she became frozen to the pavement.

Once in the care of BC SPCA in Fort St. John, where the cat was given fluids and placed in a warming tent, she gradually became bright and alert, allowing the staff to continue their assessment of her other serious injuries which include a severely fractured knee, skin wounds and road rash. The estimated cost for ongoing care is $2,500.

The cat, which doesn’t have a name yet, is “extremely friendly and was purring and kneading the vet’s smocks as soon as she began to recover from her hypothermia,” the BC SPCA said.

A public request for funding the cat's care has far exceeded its goal by raising $15,000. For now, the SPCA is calling her the Ice Road Kitten, and asked the public to suggest a name. The finalists are "Elsa" and "Miracle." You can read the story of the ice road cat rescue at the Aldergrove Star. -via Fark

Lake Baringo in western Kenya has been the home of eight Rothschild’s giraffe for years. They lived on a peninsula that reached out into the lake, but rising waters turned it into an island. The giraffes needed to be moved to a new home in the 44,000-acre Ruko Conservancy. That's a big project, involving a custom-built barge, but how do you get the animals onto the boat? David O’Connor of the organization Save Giraffes Now tells us of the hurdles they faced.

The initial hope, O’Connor said, was that they’d be able to coax the giraffes onto the barge by putting mangoes and other treats there. But because of the rainy season, there’s been an abundance of food on the island. The treats would not be enough.

That meant the giraffes would have to be hit with a tranquilizer dart — and that is an especially dangerous proposition because of their anatomy. O’Connor said that when giraffes go down on the ground, they can choke on their own saliva, or their brains can be damaged by the changes in blood pressure. So it’s important that once the giraffe falls, a vet is there to immediately counteract the drug with a reversal drug.

“It's not like an elephant or a rhino where you just dart it, it flops over and it's fine,” he said. “The giraffes, they're kind of like a Formula One car. You can't mess with their innards too much or they really have problems.”  

So far, two giraffes have been moved to the sanctuary. Follow the delicate and grueling process in plenty of pictures at CNN. -via Nag on the Lake

Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear first performed the song "Movin' Right Along" in the 1979 film The Muppet Movie. Now, 42 years later, they've reprised it with a socially-distanced video to welcome in 2021. Kermit plays banjo while Fozzie illustrates the places they would go if they were really going somewhere. Meanwhile, they keep breaking...  well, not the fourth wall, but the one between them.  -via Laughing Squid 

Parasitic worms of multiple species can infect you by penetrating through intact skin and often don't even lead to a rash. They then develop for months and the adults or their eggs cause disease. Also pin worm eggs can be airborne and can survive machine washing with detergent.

— Molecular Worm Dude® (@JRHagerty) December 31, 2020

Harvard professor Michael Baym asked Twitter users to share an "uncomfortable" fact that they know because of their professional expertise. Since many of his followers are academics, we have a lot of cringeworthy facts in the replies.

Jesus christ I'm stunned that didn't happen in 2020

— Doctor TAS (@tas997) January 1, 2021

While it's nice to know how the world works, some of these bits of knowledge explain the old adage that ignorance is bliss. As a commenter at Metafilter put it, "Seems like most of them boil down to, there are no adults in the room, and you are far less safe from nature than modern living leads you to believe."  

About 2 degrees Celsius of our body heat comes from the metabolism of microorganisms helping us digest our food.

— Rob Young (@DoubtTheWorm) December 30, 2020

Read a lot more of these facts (and they aren't all science-related) in the Twitter thread.  -via Metafilter

The work of paleobiologist George Poinar Jr. inspired Michael Crichton to write Jurassic Park. Poinar's latest published research introduces us to a tiny flower found embedded in amber 100 million years ago in what is now northern Myanmar.   

The discovery is a type of angiosperm flowering plant and has been named Valviloculus pleristaminis. The stunningly well preserved specimen is a male flower which Poinar notes displays amazing detail.

“Despite being so small, the detail still remaining is amazing,” explains Poinar. “Our specimen was probably part of a cluster on the plant that contained many similar flowers, some possibly female. The male flower is tiny, about 2 millimeters across, but it has some 50 stamens arranged like a spiral, with anthers pointing toward the sky.”

What's really groundbreaking about this flower is how it shows our timeline of continental drift may have to be adjusted. Poinar explains how at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: George Poinar Jr.)

There’s a perfectly nice house for sale in Guildhall, Vermont, boasting four bedrooms. These are bedrooms on the second floor. However, there are actually seven more that aren’t as prominently advertised. When you look through the photo gallery, you get the image 30 before you see the jail cells. The cells are mentioned only at the end of the realtor’s description.

This home is situated on nearly an acre of land offering a large private back yard for gardening, and a detached barn with plenty of additional storage. The main house served as the Jailer's residence and attached to the north wall of the house is the former Essex County Jail (discontinued in 1969).  The Jail still exhibits the prison cells with barred windows & the Jailers Office.  Bring your own ideas on what this 28' x 40' wing could be!

This is not the same house as the one we posted back in August, but the story is pretty much the same. The town jailer lived there, and having your work so close to home means you don’t have to have a 24-hour schedule of guards. But now you can purchase a home for only $149,000 that will sleep many people if you aren’t too choosy about where to put the kids. -via Boing Boing

When Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped and killed in 1932, news media covered the story extensively. Newspapers, radio, and newsreels gave us details from the crime to the ransom to the arrest and conviction of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. While many books have been written about the kidnapping, Tom Doherty focuses on the journalism around it in his book Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century. Doherty gives us an overview of the ways the kidnapping changed how news outlets cover crimes and how we consume those stories.  

One of the things that happens at the trial, which is sort of true forever on, is the forensic evidence becomes fascinating to people. You don't have shootouts or dramatic confrontations. There are no fingerprints, there's no gun. Nobody can really place Hauptmann at the crime scene.
 
So, you've got to follow the forensic trail. And what you have is this sort of relentless accumulation of forensic detail, which together leads unmistakably to Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Things like ransom money bank records, handwriting analysis, analysis of the wood grain of a ladder. People are obsessed with these details. They are reading three thousand words a day in The New York Times on the case.
 
This is something you see in the true crime genre today with these 15-part series that lead you through every little nook and cranny of the investigation. Some of that starts with the Lindbergh case.

There are other ways the Lindbergh case changed news media, which you can read at BrandeisNOW. -via Strange Company

You’ve heard about the revolutionary MRNA technology that makes the COVID vaccines different from traditional vaccines. However, if you’re like me, you’ve never had someone explain it to you in terms that only require a high school understanding of science. The guys from AsapSCIENCE are quite good at doing just that. -via Digg

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