Consider this: You manage to steal some things that are extremely valuable because they are unique, historic, and irreplaceable. Only afterward do you realize that you cannot sell those things, because they are unique, historic, and irreplaceable. That may have been the case when a shipment of rare books including first editions by Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, and Francisco Goya, plus 16th-century editions of works by Copernicus, Euripides, Aesop, and Manutius were stolen from a London postal warehouse in 2017.   

Now, after three years of coordinated efforts by the MPS, the Romanian National Police, the Italian Carabinieri, Europol and Eurojust, authorities have finally recovered the purloined papers.

Per the statement, police discovered the trove of books—neatly wrapped and buried in a cement pit—beneath a house in Neamț, a county in eastern Romania, last Wednesday. The individuals responsible for the burglary appear to be connected to a network of Romanian families involved with the notorious Clamparu crime group.

Read about the heist and the recovery at Smithsonian. -via reddit

(Image credit: Metropolitan Police)

We've been upset with our local cable TV companies for so long that we welcomed the advent of streaming services so that we could cut the cord. But which streaming service should you subscribe to? There are differences, and they all have their benefits and drawbacks. The drawbacks are what ScreenJunkies looks at in the Honest Trailer.

In early 1976, several soldiers at Fort Dix came down with an illness that was identified as a novel swine flu. Testing showed 200 recruits carried the virus. The US government swung into action, and President Gerald Ford announced that a vaccine would be developed by fall. And it was. But the program became mired in controversy, scaring Americans away from the needle. When the vaccine was made available in Pittsburgh, three people who got it died of heart attacks.  

The deaths in Pittsburgh would be the start. While there was no causal evidence linking these deaths to the vaccine, they triggered many people to come forward claiming evidence of ill health, falsely blaming the inoculation. Nine states shut down their programmes.

With such a high-profile roll-out, closely attached to the White House, many journalists unused to covering science reported only what they saw and heard from the public, without interrogating whether it was linked. Tabloid journalists gave few column inches to epidemiological nuance. What they should have looked for was “excess mortality” – deaths that would not have happened otherwise – but the daily emerging tales of unexplained heart attacks, distraught nurses, and political failure won more attention.

Was the project worth it? At least we -scientists and journalists, that is- learned a few things from the experience. Read the story of the 1976 swine flu vaccine program at BBC Future.  -via Damn Interesting

In the US, KitKat bars come in milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, and soon, mint flavor. These sweet treats are even more popular in Japan, where they've been made in more than 400 flavors! Would you try a purple sweet potato-flavored KitKat? Gimme a break! Some of those 400 flavors are regional, and some were limited editions, but in any Japanese store, you'll be confronted with a huge variety of KitKat flavors. That's because part of the allure of the KitKat bar is how versatile one can make it. And that "one" is pastry chef Yasumasa Takagi. -Thanks, WTM!

Are you healthy, adventurous, over 21, have a valid driver's license and a social media account, and love beer? Then you are invited to compete for the position of Michelob Ultra CEO. That's Chief Exploration Officer. The duties sound like a lot of fun.

In this case, the chosen CEO will be equipped with a camper van (that has a bathroom and shower), and over the course of six months, visit, hike and photograph several national parks, including Yosemite, Sequoia, Joshua Tree, Saguaro and Big Bend. The job pays $50,000 plus expenses, like gas money for their camper van. The candidate selected will have the opportunity to perform their CEO duties solo, or with a plus-one.

Yeah, that's something you should jump on. However, be aware that there is only one slot, and candidates will be judged on their affinity for the outdoors, photography skills, hiking experience, and enthusiasm, among other things. Read more about the promotional stunt/temp job at Lifehacker.

A Japanese cat named Shiroi (white) was known for her particularly long torso, said to be 65 cm from head to toe. An image of the cat was posted to 2chan in 2004 or 2005, and went viral. She came to be known as Nobiko (stretch) in Japan, and Longcat in English-speaking countries. Her owner Miko explains Nobiko's story. 

According to an interview with PETomorrow from last year, who interviewed Miko, Nobiko was rescued after being discovered on the street back in 2002. Nobiko, who was “thin and messy” after being found, was given a bath and revealed to be a beautiful “snow-white” cat. Upon being adopted, Nobiko lived with Miko and was the oldest of their seven cats. "Mr. Nobiko was deaf and couldn't hear any sound, so she might have slept in the middle of the road," Miko said. "I'm really glad that [we were] able to protect her before she was hit by a car."

Nobiko lived a long and pampered life, but crossed the Rainbow Bridge on Sunday.

Hong Kong-based pro-democracy website Stand News reported that Longcat had been rushed to the vet after being found in a weak state on Sunday morning. The cat eventually passed away at around 2pm local time.

See a roundup of Longcat images and tributes at CNET. She was at least 18 years old. -via Metafilter

(Image source: @aerosubaru)

Nine years ago, we posted about the building of a 10,000-year clock. The project by the Long Now Foundation got a real boost in 2016 with a $42 million donation as well as some land in West Texas from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Now the clock is there, tucked underneath a mountain. It's not quite complete, but it's ticking, very slowly.

It ticks once a year, the century hand advances once every 100 years, the cuckoo comes out on the millennium, and it will keep time for the next 10,000 years. In the belly of a Texas mountain, picture a huge clock, hundreds of feet tall, and as you read this, it’s quietly ticking away against Doomsday. Over thirty years in the making, and now bankrolled by the world’s richest man, it’s a Jules Verne-worthy project that Jeff Bezos himself had to be a part of. The goal is to create an icon of long-term thinking, something that can keep time without human intervention and survive several millennia in the process. Got a minute to find out why?

Read about the philosophy behind the Long Now Foundation and its giant slow clock at Messy Messy Chic. You'll even find out how you can visit it ...although it won't be easy.

Tom Scott begins this video by telling us all the problems with monorails and why they never really caught on. So what good are they? There's a specific place for a monorail system where it works perfectly for its purpose. The secret was to make them small, and not use them to carry people. The upshot is that a failure in one industry could be just the thing for another industry. Oh yeah, James Bond figures in this video, too.

Polly Pockets are small dolls introduced in the 1980s that come in tiny cases that are their homes. They've grown since then, but the idea is still the same as it was when the first such doll was presented in a house made from a face powder compact. Now, ToyZone has collaborated with artist Jan Koudela to reimagine some of our favorite pop culture characters living in such compact cases. Click to the right on the image above to see the Byers residence from Stranger Things, Monica’s apartment from Friends, The Simpsons' home, a Hobbit house from Lord of the Rings, the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, and the home of the Royal Tenenbaums. These are computer-generated renderings, but you never know what can happen if the demand is there. Read more about them -and see closeups- at the ToyZone.  -via Laughing Squid

In Douglas Adams' novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a very powerful computer named Deep Thought is asked to calculate the answer to  “Life, the Universe and Everything.” The answer is 42. Obviously, this is a very important number. Now if we could only figure out why.

Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to calculate the answer to the ultimate question. The characters tasked with getting that answer are disappointed because it is not very useful. Yet, as the computer points out, the question itself was vaguely formulated. To find the correct statement of the query whose answer is 42, the computer will have to build a new version of itself. That, too, will take time. The new version of the computer is Earth. To find out what happens next, you’ll have to read Adams’s books.

The author’s choice of the number 42 has become a fixture of geek culture. It’s at the origin of a multitude of jokes and winks exchanged between initiates. If, for example, you ask your search engine variations of the question “What is the answer to everything?” it will most likely answer “42.” Try it in French or German. You’ll often get the same answer whether you use Google, Qwant, Wolfram Alpha (which specializes in calculating mathematical problems) or the chat bot Web app Cleverbot.

Adams has declared that the number 42 was a joke, a relatively small but meaningless number. Yet we see it everywhere, and not just because of the Hitchhiker's Guide. Find out how important the number 42 has always been at Scientific American. Warning: the article gets geekier and geekier as it goes along. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Martinultima)

Marvel Studios is introducing a new series for Disney+. WandaVision follows superheroes Wanda Maximoff and Vision as a young couple in 1950s suburbia. It comes across as a sitcom in some places, and a supernatural comic book adventure in others. It would probably help to have some knowledge of the charactes from the comic books, but Den of Geek has a breakdown of what we can learn from this trailer. WandaVision will debut in December. -via Metafilter

Today, we have self-heating cans of soup, that use a chemical reaction to produce heat. It's not a new idea. In fact, a recipe from 13th-century tells us how to do it.

To cook meat without fire....

Take a small earthenware pot with earthenware lid of the right size. Then take another pot, also earthenware, also with a suitable lid that fits well. This should be five fingers deeper than the first, and three fingers bigger round. Then take pork and chicken, cut them into nice pieces, get good spices and put them in, and some salt. Take the little pot with the meat in and put it inside the big pot. Set it upright, cover it with the lid and seal with damp, sticky soil, so nothing can come out. Then take lime that has not been slaked [quicklime], put it in the big pot full of water, but take care that no water gets into the small pot. Leave it alone for as long as it takes to go five to seven leagues. Then open your pots, and you will find your meat well and truly cooked.

The part about timing the cooking hints that this method might be used while traveling, in a wagon or boat, when no fire would be possible. The same technique, with differences in technology, has been used in the centuries since, which you can read about at Old & Interesting. -via Metafilter

(Image source: Google patents)

The popular view of Roman Emperor Nero is that of Peter Ustinov’s performance in Quo Vadis. People who know nothing else of Nero know that he fiddled while Rome burned. While that might be true, it doesn't tell the entire story. We think of Nero as a cruel sociopathic tyrant because of the stories that followed him all these centuries. Most of them are quite embellished, if not totally made up.

But what if Nero wasn’t such a monster? What if he didn’t invent the spectator sport of throwing Christians to the lions in the Colosseum? What if he wasn’t the tyrant who murdered upstanding Roman senators and debauched their wives? Indeed, what if the whole lurid rap sheet has been an elaborate set-up, with Nero as history’s patsy? After all, we have no eyewitness testimony from Nero’s reign. Any contemporaneous writings have been lost. The ancient Roman sources we do have date from considerably after Nero’s suicide in A.D. 68. The case against Nero, then, is largely hearsay, amplified and distorted over two millennia in history’s longest game of telephone. Besides, no one really wants to straighten out the record. Who wants another version of Nero? He’s the perfect evil tyrant just the way he is.

John Drinkwater is the author of a new Nero biography, in which the Roman emperor appears to be a run-of-the-mill ruler, a young man who preferred to write poetry and sing than deal with politics. He did have his mother killed, but the story of Nero obliviously letting Rome burn was nonsense. Nero was no angel, but neither was he the despot he's been portrayed to be. Read what the historians say about Emperor Nero at Smithsonian.

The Victorian era was when colonialism and the Industrial Revolution collided, and the fashion was to collect interesting objects, or any objects at all, to stuff one's home with. Disposable income led to rampant consumerism, and an obsession with "things." The Sambournes were an example, if not the epitome of this consumerism.

One of Punch’s best-known cartoonists and illustrators, Edward Linley Sambourne, and his wife, Marion, occupied a house at 18 Stafford Terrace in London’s Kensington and Chelsea Borough. They moved in as newlyweds in the 1870s and lived there until their deaths four decades later. Preserved as a museum, 18 Stafford Terrace stands as a temple of well-appointed late-Victorian comfort, most of its original objects still in situ. Marion’s diaries chronicle the life of the house and keep a running list of its contents, including more than 550 pieces of furniture. Her art- and furniture-loving husband spent a lifetime adding to the domestic load. The museum website suggests his acquisitive tendencies caused his spouse agitation: The master of the house attended auctions and sales until he died, a habit that added “ever more objects to the interiors, often to Marion’s despair.”

One detail, plucked from Marion Sambourne’s diaries by Shirley Nicholson for her book A Victorian Household, staggers me: The family owned 66 upright chairs. Many were used in the dining room and drawing room, as one would expect, but ten found their way to the master bedroom and another ten more occupied the day-nursery.

This apparently wasn’t considered over the top for the time.

While Britain was the prime example of consumerism at the time, and the reason we call it the Victorian Era at all, examples of runaway acquisition could be found all over the world. Read about the rise of "things" at Literary Hub. -via Strange Company

This footage of a smoke screen was taken around 1923. A plane dropped a curtain of titanium tetrachloride to obscure the ship's exact location and movement from the enemy. In World War II, this was used to protect Allied ships from enemy fire, as Japanese naval radar technology was only in its infancy. Meanwhile, American ships were more likely to employ radar to locate target ships that were out of sight. -via reddit