When we first saw the binary stars of Tatooine, it was hard to wrap our heads around how that worked. Since then, astronomers have found plenty of binary star systems, in which two stars revolve around a common center of gravity. The system called GW Orionis (in the Orion constellation) is a young system with three stars, two that form the normal binary and another revolving around the two a few hundred million miles away. There are three rings of dust surrounding GW Orionis, one with an unusual tilt.

Now, a closer analysis reveals that the rings may hold more than just dust; according to two recent studies, published today (Sept. 3) in the journal Science and May 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, there could be a young planet, or the makings of one, bulging up inside the rings and throwing off the whole system's gravitational balance. The presence of such a planet would not only help explain why the system's inner ring appears to be wobbling around wildly like a broken gyroscope — but, if confirmed, the distant world would also become the first known example of a single planet orbiting three suns at once, the researchers said.

"Our simulations show that the gravitational pull from the triple stars alone cannot explain the observed large misalignment [in the rings]," Nienke van der Marel, an astrophysicist at the University of Victoria in Canada and co-author of the May 21 study, said in a statement. "We think that the presence of a planet … has likely carved a dust gap and broken the disk [where the inner and outer rings meet]."

Read about the rare planet and how it was discovered at LiveScience. -via RealClear Science

(Image credit: Kraus et al., 2020)

We know flamingos have upside-down beaks because they feed upside-down, but have you ever seen them do it? This underwater footage captures them in the act at the San Diego Zoo.

These pretty in pink birds feed by sucking in water and mud at the front of their bills, then pumping it out at the sides. Briny plates called lamellae act like tiny filters, trapping shrimp and other small water creatures for the flamingos to eat. Everybirdy loves seafood!

Read more about the flamingos at the zoo's website. -via Everlasting Blort

In April of 2019, fire ripped through Paris' Notre Dame cathedral. Its magnificent pipe organ was not burned, but it was covered with smoke and toxic dust, and then exposed to the elements. So the organ and its 8,000 pipes are in the process of cleaning and restoration -which is expected to take five years.  

To see an organ being dismantled is to watch men work in the belly of a colossal beast. Pipes of wood or metal come out like ribs and must be carefully placed and ordered in containers for storage and transport. At Notre Dame, the largest pipe is 32 feet long (representing the lowest bass note), and the smallest about half the length of a pencil. The organ is essentially based on medieval technology; the earliest incarnations at Notre Dame date as far back as the 14th century, though the current instrument dates to 1733 and has undergone a number of modifications since.

But the music that comes from such an organ is not only reliant on the pipes. The architecture around it, the organist who plays it, and even the care that goes into its maintenance all affect the sound. Read about the ins and out of the world's greatest pipe organs at Atlas Obscura.

Usually scheduled for the first Saturday in May, the Kentucky Derby will finally take place this weekend, albeit with no spectators at Churchill Downs. Part of the tradition of the derby is the singing of "My Old Kentucky Home," the Kentucky state song. The Stephen Foster song has been considered problematic for decades, even though the original racist terms used in the lyrics have been altered. What you may not know is that the song was originally meant to be an abolitionist composition!  

“My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight,” as it was originally titled, was written by Foster in the 1850s as an anti-slavery song, inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and following the same story arc as Stowe’s title character. His initial working title was “Poor Uncle Tom, Goodnight.”

The song emphasizes the humanity and close family ties of the enslaved population at a time when African Americans were routinely dehumanized and caricatured. The opening scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin features a slave trader explaining that black people do not have the same tender emotions as white people, a rationalization for selling their children for profit. “My Old Kentucky Home” is a rebuke to that racist thinking.

In its many years of performance, the later verses were dropped and lyrics were altered, until the entire meaning of the song was pretty much forgotten. "My Old Kentucky Home" went from abolitionist to racist to traditional over its long history, which you can read at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: squirrel83)

Like London, Paris, and other large European cities, Lisbon grew from a small village over centuries until it was a huge village with narrow, winding streets and no citywide infrastructure. Portugal was led by the ineffectual Dom José I, but the real power was the Catholic church. Then came the earthquake on November 1, 1755.   

Around 9:30 a.m., tremors rumbled beneath the city, ringing Lisbon’s many church bells in unison. Some people recalled a “horrible subterranean noise” right before the ground began to shake in a six-minute-long upheaval that crumpled cathedrals and buried neighborhoods. Within the hour, a six-meter tsunami plowed into the waterfront and killed hundreds who had gathered there seeking safety. Meanwhile, hundreds of small fires, spread by overturned cooking hearths and votive candles, were building into what would become a five-day firestorm. This last blow was the most destructive and razed what was left of the jewel in Portugal’s crown.

The king had no idea what to do in the aftermath of the disaster, so his Minister of State, the Marquis de Pombal, took charge and rebuilt Lisbon with science and an iron hand. Read about the resurrection of Lisbon into the modern world at Hakai magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Jurema Oliveira)

Matt Shirley has published a followup to his map of the worst attraction in every state, this time mapping the best attraction in each state, also according to a poll of his Instagram followers. It's very noticeable that the best attractions are overwhelmingly natural resources, as compared to manmade attractions in the map of the worst. It's sad that a few states have nothing to boast, at least among those who responded. I've been to quite a few of these, how about you?

Like many couples who have trouble producing children, Jake and Maxine Young pursued both adoption and fertility treatments. In 2017, they accepted an emergency placement of four foster children. Then Maxine became pregnant. They pursued the adoption of their foster children, which became final two years later, but their life went into overdrive soon afterward.  

“It was chaos,” she said. “We went from zero to five within less than a year.”

The family took things day by day, never expecting to add any more children to the mix, but mere weeks after finalizing the adoption in December 2019, Maxine and Jake were in for the surprise of a lifetime.

Maxine was pregnant – with quadruplets.

“I didn’t even think that I could get pregnant without doing IVF [in vitro fertilization] or IUI [intrauterine insemination], which we had to do with our son. I remember texting him and was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Maxine said.

You know what they say, when it rains, it pours. The quads were born in August, and are in a neonatal care unit. Read more about the family at WDBJ.  -via Fark

Kids say the darnedest things, and if you spend a few years as a teacher, you'll end up with a few quotes you'll never forget. With all the words they have to learn, it's not surprising that some get mixed up or misunderstood, sort of like the kid who thought a whorehouse was a mental facility. Heres a sample:

9. "We had a kid who kept saying his dad drove an 'Asstank.' We couldn't figure it out until his dad drove up to school in an Aztec."
Warner Bros.

—Monica Stricker, Facebook

10. "I was teaching eighth grade when there was a strange knock on the classroom wall. One of my students cried, 'Ahhh! It's a polygamist!' I quickly figured out that he meant 'poltergeist.'

"Though, when I explained why I was laughing so hard, my students decided a polygamist would have been just as scary.'"

—Sarah Flame, Facebook

But it's not all misunderstood words. Some are just kids hilariously acting like adults, whether it's kindergarten or high school. Read a roundup of the funniest things teachers ever heard in class at Buzzfeed.

(Image credit: horizontal.integration)

Forensic anthropologist Amelie Alterauge was unfamiliar with corpses being buried face-down until she found such a grave herself in 2014 in Switzerland. Burials in the prone position are exceedingly rare. Since then, she has compiled 100 cases of prone burials over a 900-year period to study them. In the early Middle Ages, some nobles and priests were buried face down to show humility even after death, and their graves show a great deal of respect. But things changed in the 14th century, which was when the plague began to ravage Europe.

As medieval Europeans tried to explain what they were seeing and hearing, they might have seized on ideas about the undead already circulating in Slavic communities of Eastern Europe: “We don’t have [the concept of] vampires in Germany,” Alterauge says, “but there’s this idea of corpses which move around” that is imported into western Europe from Slavic areas to the east not long after the first plague outbreaks take place in the mid-1300s.   

Before the 1300s, medieval stories in German-speaking Europe described helpful ghosts returning to warn or help their loved ones. But in an age of epidemics they took on a different shape: revenants, or the walking dead.

“This shift to evil spirits takes place around 1300 or 1400,” says Matthias Toplak, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved with the study.

Turning to medieval folklore for clues, Alterauge and her co-authors found tales of nachzehrer, loosely translated as corpse devourers: restless, hungry corpses that consumed themselves and their burial shrouds, and drained the life force from their surviving relatives in the process.

Lacking understanding of disease, it only made sense that someone who died of the illness returned to kill family members, because they often developed the same disease. But how would burying someone face down help? Read the theories behind these discoveries at National Geographic. -via Damn Interesting

Agnieszka Ciszyńska has three beautiful white Swiss shepherds named Walkiria, Fenris, and Björn. She recently took them to a sunflower field for a photo shoot, but the dogs were more interested in the sunflowers than in posing, so the outtakes turned out better than the portraits! Normally, the dogs, who go by the name White Valhalla Wolves, are magnificently photogenic.



See more of the sunflower pictures at Bored Panda, and see the many travels of the White Valhalla Wolves at Instagram.

In 2006, Liam Kyle Sullivan went viral with the song "Shoes." It became an internet classic. Fourteen years later, he's back with a song along the same lines about masks. His character Kelly is still not her parents' favorite, and shopping is her defense mechanism. -via Digg

The New Guinea singing dog was considered to be extinct in the wild since the 1970s. There is a captive population of these dogs, about 300 of them, which have been bred in conservation centers. Those dogs are descended from a small population that have been in captivity for decades. But New Guinea has another wild dog, called the Highland wild dog. And the study of genetics has come a long way since the '70s. Recently, genetic samples were taken from three Highland wild dogs, and have been studied to see whether they are the ancestors of the singing dog, or related in some other way.     

According to the researchers, the genomic similarities between the New Guinea singing dogs and the Highland Wild Dogs suggest that we’re dealing with the same breed.

Since all New Guinea singing dogs have been raised in captivity, there’s been a lot of inbreeding that reduced variations in the group’s DNA. But, essentially, the Highland Wild Dogs are the wild and original population of New Guinea singing dogs, this new study suggests. It’s just that the latter lost the genetic variation present in the wild population due to inbreeding.

Read about the research, and hear what the the singing dogs sound like, at ZME Science. -via Fark

(Image credit: New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation)

Every Tuesday this month @massivesci will be publishing an article about the butt. Welcome to #ButtMonth. Today, @darcy_shapiro on why human butts even look like that. Featuring art from @melissa_k_nigrohttps://t.co/U1plWTb3Dz

— Dan Samorodnitsky (@d_samorodnitsky) September 1, 2020

Even if you think you have a flat butt, it's certainly rounder than most other animals outside of homo sapiens. That Corgi is cute, but its butt is all hair. A cat will gladly show you its anus, which is right at the surface, like most animals. So why do humans develop round buttocks? It wasn't for sitting.

Take a look around the animal kingdom. Even our closest living relatives among the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas), don’t have proportionally as big butts as humans do. The main reason for this probably comes down to our unique style of locomotion. We’re the only mammals alive today whose primary way of getting around is walking on two legs. And becoming upright bipeds has had some important consequences for our derrières.

But(t) it's not just standing up that makes those big muscles necessary. The mechanics involved in walking on two legs meant we had to bulk up the butt. Read how at Massive Science. -via Damn Interesting

Tom Scott went snorkeling in Silfra, a spot in Iceland where tectonic plates are moving apart. That is said to be where the North American and Eurasia meet, but it turns out that tectonic plates aren't as cleanly delineated as national borders on maps. Still, it's a lovely place to go snorkeling, no matter what those plates are really doing.

An artist who works with a medium at 200 degrees Fahrenheit is certainly brave, but a skilled Amezaiku artist can turn hot sugar into something exquisite. Using various tools, including one's hands, the molten candy is converted into a realistic, if somewhat transparent, animal.   

Amezaiku is an ancient Japanese tradition dating back to the Heian period (794 to 1185 CE), when people would leave the hardened taffy creations as temple offerings. In the Edo period (1603 to 1868), the confection became more popular thanks to traveling street vendors, who would regale passersby with candymaking, stories, and music. Songs and poems celebrated the art; however, they offered little in the way of detailed descriptions that allowed future generations to carry on the craft.

Shinri Tezuka is a modern day Amezaiku artist trying to keep the tradition alive. Read about his craft at Mental Floss.