There are about 50,000 self-storage facilities in the US. How did that ever happen? Sure, it's a great way to make money, mostly passively, if you have a place to put one of these businesses. But why are they so popular? And why do we have so much stuff that we have to rent a place to put it all? Cheddar explains. -via Digg

The Roman Empire wasn't built in a day, and neither were most other fabulous realms of powerful men in history. But sometimes power is seized in a hurry, and new fortunes are squandered in a hurry. You may recall Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the Republic of the Congo/Congo-Léopoldville/Zaire (now named the Democratic Republic of the Congo) from 1965 to 1997. You are less likely to recall Gbadolite, Mobutu's ancestral home.

Deep in the rainforest, more than 1,000 km from Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of the Congo, lies the decaying city of Gbadolite, home to nearly two hundred thousand people. Fifty years ago, Gbadolite was a just small village of 1,500 with mud brick houses. It wasn’t even marked on maps, until Mobutu Sese Seko became the president. Within a decade, Gbadolite was transformed into a sprawling city with an airport, five-star hotels, supermarkets, hospitals with high tech facilities, and palatial homes for Mobutu. All of these are in ruins today swallowed by the jungle.

Read how the city flourished in a hurry and was wrecked even more quickly at Amusing Planet.

We know that potatoes were developed in South America, and were unknown in Europe before colonization. We also know that Europeans were resistant to consuming them, and had to be tricked into trying potatoes (however, that trick has been credited to two different men). But going back further, we learn that the potatoes of the Andes in 8,000 BCE were actually toxic.

These early potatoes were very different from the potatoes we know today. They came in a variety of shapes and sizes and had a bitter taste that no amount of cooking could get rid of. They were also slightly poisonous. To combat this toxicity, wild relatives of the llama would lick clay before eating them. The toxins in the potatoes would stick to the clay particles, allowing the animals to consume them safely. People in the Andes noticed this and started dunking their potatoes in a mixture of clay and water—not the most appetizing gravy, perhaps, but an ingenious solution to their potato problem. Even today, when selective breeding has made most potato varieties safe to eat, some poisonous varieties can still be bought in Andean markets, where they're sold alongside digestion-aiding clay dust.

We also learn the different methods of making mashed potatoes and how Thomas Jefferson made his from spuds he dehydrated. This history is available in both text and video form at Mental Floss.

The Hood Internet is back with another nostalgic mashup, this one from the year 1990 featuring 60 songs in three and a half minutes. It's nice to hear all this familiar music from 30 years ago and realize that 1990 wasn't yet the point where I no longer recognize what the kids are listening to. -via Metafilter

See also: previous Hood Internet mashups of music from a particular year.

Utmost respect for the cameraman there.

— Gareth🇮🇹 (@ErfinderRotwang) September 30, 2020

When the Nazis occupied much of Europe in the 1940s, they built 10-foot-tall concrete walls along the beaches to thwart invading Allies. To breach these walls, the British military came up with the Panjandrum, a rocket-powered device on two wheels that was filled with explosives. Aim it at the wall, and it would rush up and demolish it. Or that was the idea. A series of tests highlighted all the things that could possibly go wrong. Fortunately, those tests were filmed. Twitter user Dreadnought Holiday tells the story of the Great Panjandrum, illustrated with actual footage of the device plus unrelated memes that make the tale resemble a Three Stooges short. -via Metafilter

Neanderthal DNA is quite rare. Most of the samples we have are from women. But a deep dive into what male DNA is available shows that the Y chromosome from Neanderthal men came to resemble that of modern men more than that of Denisovans, another group of extinct humans that lived in the same era. This implies that when modern humans mated with Neanderthals, eventually the Neanderthal Y chromosome was pretty much wiped out.  

The Y chromosome data—the first from Denisovans and the first high-coverage from Neanderthals—suggest that earlier Neanderthals had a Denisovan-like Y chromosome, but that this was replaced by the Y chromosome of modern humans after Neanderthals interbred with them between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago.

“It’s a really a great surprise,” says Mikkel Heide Schierup, an evolutionary biologist at Aarhus University who did not participate in the study but wrote an accompanying commentary. Only a few percent of the rest of the Neanderthal genome appears to be made up of modern human DNA, yet this study found that three different Neanderthal individuals, unearthed at sites spread across Eurasia and dating to periods tens of thousands of years apart, all carried modern human–like Y chromosomes. This suggests the widespread replacement of the Y across the Neanderthal population, he explains. “It’s a pretty dramatic event.”

There is now speculation that the modern human Y chromosome may have had some advantage in survival or reproduction. The Neanderthals suffered from a low population compared to other human species, which may have multiplied harmful mutations. Read about the study at TheScientist. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: Paul Hermans)

Mac Lethal brought us Alphabet Insanity in 2014, in which he constructed a rap around the letters of the alphabet in order. Yeah, that was awesome, but now he's upped it a notch with a new version with all new words, and yes, he speeds it up as he goes along, getting through all the letters in less than two minutes. Just listening to this made me feel tired, but impressed. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Even if you are a true-crime literature fan, there are plenty of horrific  murderers who were never the subject of a bestselling book or a hit movie. They may have killed long before local news became global news. You've heard of some of them, but I would bet not all of them. For example, there are the men pictured above.

5. Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris (the Tool Box Killers) kidnapped, raped, and killed five teenage girls in Southern California. In addition to those heinous crimes, they also tortured their victims with items found in household toolboxes — like ice picks, screwdrivers, and pliers.

Check out the list of 26 real-life serial killers at Buzzfeed. The list only gives an overview of each, but there are links to read more.

Fumi Higaki taught her cat Ebisu to imitate her actions. It wasn't just a set of actions that the cat learned, it was the act of copying whatever Higaki did. A team of scientists tested the cat with new, novel actions and found that she really was mapping out Higaki's actions and imitating them, in a study published in the journal Animal Cognition. Gizmodo has more.

All told, through 18 trials, Ebisu seemingly proved capable of imitating Higaki’s behaviors 81% of the time. These behaviors included spinning around, touching the same toy, opening a small drawer, and laying down horizontally. What made the mimicry even more interesting was that Ebisu seemed capable of seeing her owner’s not very cat-like motions and figuring out how she would do the same thing as a cat, such as when Higaki raised her arms up high and Ebisu then stood up on her hind legs and lifted both her paws up.   

-via Nag on the Lake

Parkour is a sport that grew out of military obstacle course training- the word parkour actually derives from the phrase parcours du combattant, or obstacle course. It was invented by David Belle in the 1980s, but its origins go much further back, to George Hébert, who developed a physical training regimen he called his "Natural Method" in the early 1900s.

More than a century later, the training discipline Hébert developed has become the standard system of physical education in modern militaries around the world and it’s even been suggested that we can trace modern adventure playground equipment back to his original obstacle designs in the early 1900s.

Hébert himself was influenced by the observations he made untrained native tribes in Africa while travelling the world pre-WWI: “Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skilful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in gymnastics but their lives in nature”, he wrote.

Learn how Hébert's philosophy led directly to the development of parkour, and later the artistic variation called freerunning, at Messy Nessy Chic. The story contains plenty of impressive videos.

Lumberjacks in the forest may fell giant trees whole, but in an urban area, you have to be careful not to take out the whole neighborhood. When a tree gets too tall, the best thing is to take it down a section at a time. This palm tree in San Bernardino, California, got so tall that it was bending over, so it was better to take it down than to wait for it to fall. But the job wasn't without danger, as you can see. -via Laughing Squid 

It has been posited that the extra nutrition that led to the amazing evolution of the human brain came from cooked food, and therefore we owe it all to our ancient ancestors who learned to harness fire. But recent discoveries from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania lead us to wonder about that theory.  

...Olduvai Gorge wasn’t always so dry and dusty—and in fact, it once had something in common with the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. Recently, a surprise discovery by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, geologists, and geochemists suggested that this cradle of our species was filled with soupy, steamy geothermal pools. According to the team, the hot springs might even have been ripe for old-fashioned culinary experimentation by our distant hominin ancestors.

“The major finding is that we contemplate a new resource for humans to process food,” says Ainara Sistiaga, a geoarchaeologist and geochemist at the University of Copenhagen, and the lead author of a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The paper opens a window to stop focusing on there being fire or there not being fire, to say there are other ways to cook and we should be looking for them.”

The hot springs were there along with hominims 1.7 million years ago. What if the first cooked food was boiled instead of roasted over a fire? That could completely divorce the use of fire from the initial growth spurt of human brains- like throwing hot water on the spark of humanity. Read what we've found so far at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Noel Feans)

The guy from the Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) has a Venus flytrap plant, and is willing to use it as a guinea pig. Would it eat a jellybean? That may be a dumb question, but he has reason to think that it might. -via Boing Boing

The Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in Friskney, UK, often takes in parrots that need a home, and they now have around 1500 of them. Recently, they acquired five new African grey parrots from various homes. Park CEO Steve Nichols explains what happened.   

“Every now and then you’ll get one that swears and it’s always funny. We always find it very comical when they do swear at you.

“But, just by coincidence, we took in five in the same week and because they were all quarantined together it meant that one room was just full of swearing birds.

“The more they swear the more you usually laugh which then triggers them to swear again.

“But when you get four or five together that have learnt the swearing and naturally learnt the laughing so when one swears, one laughs and before you know it just got to be like an old working men’s’ club scenario where they are all just swearing and laughing.”

Eventually the birds were put out for display, and they showed off their language skills by abusing visitors. Concerned that children were coming for the weekend, the staff decided to remove the parrots from public view. The parrots were separated from each other and lodged with other parrots in the hopes that they will learn new vocalizations. Or will they teach the other parrots to swear? Read more about the foul language fowls at Lincolnshire Live.

Firefly was a 2002 Joss Whedon TV series that was canceled after only 11 of its 14 episodes were aired. However, later analysis blamed Fox TV for the series' low viewership, as they aired the episodes out of order and promoted it as a comedy, which confused viewers. But Firefly became quite popular when it was released on home video, garnering critical accolades and a growing fandom. It was a case of Fox letting a gem slip through their hands for no good reason, when it could have been a long running series. But was Firefly good? As this Honest Trailer shows, it followed a formula, but it was a formula that works.