The outrageous characters of the Old West are often found to be the product of dime novels and less-than-rigorously researched newspaper articles written to thrill those back east. One such character is "Cattle Kate," born Ellen Watson. Her life was interesting enough without the extras heaped upon her, but those extras found a willing audience.  

“Cattle Kate” Watson was one of early Wyoming’s most scandalous outlaws. She was a prostitute, a cattle thief, and a mean, aggressive Amazon who would beat you up as soon as look at you. She was, in short, a public menace. In 1889, her harassed neighbors finally had had enough, and resorted to classic rough frontier justice. Watson, along with her equally disreputable husband/pimp, were captured and strung up. No one mourned them.

It is a colorful story, one which made Watson one of the Old West’s most famous villains. There is just one problem: not one of the “historical facts” listed above is even close to being true.

Aside, unfortunately, for the lynching part.

What really happened was more of what we now call "shocking but not surprising." We touched on Cattle Kate's life in a previous article, but you can get the full story of the persecution of Ellen Watson at Strange Company.

Stewart Adams spent a large chunk of his life searching for a cure for rheumatoid arthritis. He failed in that endeavor, a regret he never really got over. But he did invent an effective treatment for arthritis, called ibuprofen, which is known in the US by the brand names Motrin and Advil. That ibuprofen is used for a wide variety of pain relief is Adams' greatest achievement.

Adams began his research by studying how aspirin worked, which no one else was doing at the time. He was interested in the drug’s anti-inflammatory properties and hoped to find something that mimicked those qualities but didn’t cause an allergic reaction, bleeding or stomach irritation like aspirin could.

Adams recruited Nicholson, a chemist, to help him test more than 600 different compounds in hopes of finding one that could reduce inflammation and that most people could tolerate. They narrowed down the field to five drugs. The first four went into clinical trials and all failed. The fifth, though, proved to be successful. They received a U.S. patent for ibuprofen in 1966. Three years later, it was approved as a prescription drug in England and soon became available around the world as an over-the-counter pain reliever.

Which brings us to that day in 1971, when Adams had to deliver an important speech at a pharmacological convention in Moscow. The problem was, he had spent the night before toasting ibuprofen's success with vodka. Read the story of Stewart Adams and the development of ibuprofen at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Derrick Coetzee)

The "internet bench" at Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, UK, was installed in 2001 as a place you can get connected. There was no wifi at the time, so the bench's phone connections could be useful for that, but there were very few laptops, either. You can imagine that it wasn't a big success. But that wasn't really the point. Tom Scott explains.

When animals look into a mirror, they are either frightened, or else they think that what they are looking at is the most beautiful creature in the world.

So relatable 😂

— Ann (@Titsup_Ramble) June 10, 2020

The same pet can be frightened at first, and then make friends with their image, and then fall in love with it (however, these two cats are not the same one). These occasions are all great photo opportunities, as you'll see in an amusing ranked collection of 30 pets looking into mirrors at Bored Panda.

(Top image credit: stationary_nomad)

As restaurants gradually re-open in countries affected by the pandemic around the world, patrons are noticing more and more that menus are more likely to be digital, accessed from your phone or a screen at the restaurant. Or maybe the menu is just a signboard at the restaurant entrance. Handing every diner their own menu listing what's for dinner may be going away forever. So Messy Messy Chic is taking a look at the history of the menu.

Menus actually got their start in special occasion events like weddings, graduations, or various anniversaries. They were costly and time-consuming to make, so it was only the fanciest restaurants that had the luxury of offering its patrons menus in the early days…

Some of the most beautiful 19th and 20th century menus recall times when travel was also considered quite grand. Taking the train? Hopping on an ocean liner, flying in a plane? These weren’t just a means of travel, but an event in themselves. Menus reflected that.

The article features a gallery of gorgeous and interesting menus from all over. You may be most impressed at the prices, which were not included in earlier menus. See them all at Messy Nessy Chic.

In 1945, an ambulance delivered a very ill man to Boston’s U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. The ambulance driver gave the patient's name as Charles Jamison, but then left. The hospital treated the man for a bone marrow infection, which left him a paraplegic. He also had amnesia, and could give no details about himself, his family, or his background. He has been a mystery ever since, but not because of a lack of investigation.

Jamison was around sixty years old, with graying hair and brown eyes. He was six feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds. There was a two-inch scar on his right cheek, the index finger of his left hand was missing, and both arms were covered with tattoos. His appearance was so distinctive that it was thought it might help identify him, but that failed to be the case.

The tattoos were a mixture of flags and hearts. Some of the flags were American, others British. One faded tattoo had a scroll that seemed to say “U.S. Navy.” This led to the assumption that Jamison had been a sailor in the naval and/or merchant service, a belief bolstered by the fact that he had been brought to the only hospital in Boston that specifically treated seamen. There was a theory that Jamison had been aboard a freighter that had been shelled and torpedoed by a German submarine, but that could never be verified. However, after being sent Jamison’s fingerprints, both the FBI and the military replied that they had no record of him, which would not have been the case had he served in either the Navy or the merchant marine. His photo was sent to missing persons bureaus across the country, but that proved to be just as futile as every other effort to identify him.

Over next 30 years, many possible leads were chased down. Jamison contributed some details he recalled, but they led nowhere useful. Read the story of Charles Jamison, or whoever he was, at Strange Company.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Allan C. Green)

Even if you never eat a Kit-Kat bar, you know the song. You'd have to be pretty young to not know it. Now we learn the story behind the ear worm from the man who wrote it. -via Digg

The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the oldest and the most intact of them all. Constructed in the third millennium BC, we marvel at all the labor and time it took to build it. We know it was constructed over a period between ten and twenty years, but the number of people who worked on it has been the subject of intense speculation for, well, forever. Since we don't know, maybe a better question would be how many workers would have been actually required to build such a massive pyramid.

We must start with the time constraint of roughly 20 years, the length of the reign of Khufu, the pharaoh who commissioned the construction (he died around 2530 B.C.E.). Herodotus, writing more than 21 centuries after the pyramid’s completion, was told that labor gangs totaling 100,000 men worked in three-month spells a year to finish the structure in 20 years. In 1974, Kurt Mendelssohn, a German-born British physicist, put the labor force at 70,000 seasonal workers and up to 10,000 permanent masons.

These are large overestimates; we can do better by appealing to simple physics. The potential energy of the pyramid—the energy needed to lift the mass above ground level—is simply the product of acceleration due to gravity, mass, and the center of mass, which in a pyramid is one-quarter of its height. The mass cannot be pinpointed because it depends on the specific densities of the Tura limestone and mortar that were used to build the structure; I am assuming a mean of 2.6 metric tons per cubic meter, hence a total mass of about 6.75 million metric tons. That means the pyramid’s potential energy is about 2.4 trillion joules.

Vaclav Smil crunches the numbers to come up with way fewer required laborers, in a very workable ratio of Egypt's population at the time. However, we all know that no work crew operates with 100% efficiency, because they are human. Read how the pyramids could have been built with smaller numbers than we assumed at IEEE Spectrum. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: L-BBE)

Sure, you can make a gourmet macaroni and cheese casserole that contains several types of artisanal cheeses lovingly blended into a Béchamel sauce and baked for an hour, but you probably have some Kraft mac and cheese in the cupboard all the same. Despite its reputation as a kids’ food, many of us keep boxes of macaroni and cheese (Kraft dinner to Canadians) around in case we need some quick comfort food. You might wonder where it came from. People have been eating cheese with pasta for hundreds of years, but the box the with orange powder is a 20th-century development, an offshoot of research into preserving cheese for longer periods of time.    

Credit for inventing processed cheese should go to a pair of Swiss food chemists named Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler who, in 1913, were looking for a way to improve the shelf life of Emmenthaler cheese using sodium citrate. When they heated up the treated cheese, they noticed it melted better as well. But Chicago cheese salesman James L. Kraft was awarded the first patent for processed cheese in 1916.

Kraft understood the spoilage problem and had tried various solutions to it. He tried putting it tin foil packages, sealing it in jars, even canning it. But none of these solutions caught on with the public.

He eventually realized that the same bacteria that made cheese age nicely was also the bacteria that ultimately caused it to go bad. So he took some cheddar cheese scraps, heated them to kill the bacteria, ground them up with some sodium phosphate as an emulsifier and voila—Kraft processed cheese was born.

Still, it was another 30 years before processed cheese was made into a powder to reconstitute with macaroni. Read the rest of the story of boxed macaroni and cheese at Smithsonian.

Imperator Cuts took the 2002 film Attack of the Clones and edited it into a trailer for a Star Wars movie in the style of the 2016 movie The Nice Guys. Or that is the idea. I am not familiar with that movie, but even so, this re-edit makes Attack of the Clones seem like a movie you might actually want to see, which is quite a feat. The soundtrack music is particularly satisfying.

David L. Glover is also known as the Bartlett Bee Whisperer. Just this past week, he shared the story of the biggest beehive he’s ever removed. It was in a house that was built in 1924, and there had been bees reported in the walls for 50 years. Glover thought he might see as much as eight feet of honeycomb, but before he was through, he had found 30 feet!

“No one is aware of the size of their honey beehive,” The Bee Whisperer told us that people are shocked by how big the hives are. “They are all surprised because they are expecting something the size of a wasp nest or hornet’s nest. The infrared gives them the first clue, but that’s only the brood combs of the hive. The babies are incubated at 94.5 degrees Fahrenheit [34.7 degrees Celsius]. Any honeycombs in the hive are cooler and usually don’t show on the IR.”

To get to the hive, Glover had to remove the outer clapboard of the house. Once he did, clues led him to finding more and more of the hive. Read the story of the 30-foot beehive at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Mrs. Joey Parker)

Seasickness has been plaguing mankind since we first took to the seas, tens of thousands of years ago. The stability of the body in relation to the boat is in conflict with the motion of the ocean, and our bodies react to that disconnect, sometimes violently. And it's not just the sea, as modern life can give us the same reaction to air travel, space flight, self-driving cars, and virtual reality experiences.

Motion sickness, as many point out, is not a sickness or a disorder by definition. Clinically, it’s “a natural response to unnatural conditions.” There is a point where it’s no longer “natural” and becomes an actual illness: if you can’t adapt, even after many exposures, and you feel sick for a long time after motion ceases, it’s a problem and an illness. However, unlike a fear of heights, and maybe even hiccups, the motion sickness reaction has no practical meaning. Evidence suggests it’s really just one big misunderstanding.

“The best explanation is that motion sickness is a bit like other sicknesses: to clear out poison,” says John Golding, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Westminster, England, presenting the most widely accepted reason for seasickness in his keynote speech at the conference. The poison-detector theory posits that dizziness and vomiting are backups, in case the taste buds or the gut’s chemosensory system fail to pick up on a poisoned meal—the wrong kind of mushroom, say, or too much alcohol. In a mobile environment, the part of the brain processing movement interprets the action as dizziness and, through neural pathways, alerts the “vomit center” located in the medulla, a part of the brain above the spinal cord. And with luck, there are a few moments before the signal kicks in so that you can consider the direction of the wind.

Remedies have been offered throughout history, with varying results, and scientists are still studying motion sickness to treat or prevent it. Read up on seasickness and what it really means at Hakai magazine.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: lienyuan lee)

A Gömböc is a shape that always rights itself, which we introduced you to in 2008 (before the umlauts were added). The Action Lab has a concise and easy-to understand explanation in this video. Gömböcs don’t happen in nature, but the shape of one animal comes close. You can probably guess which animal it is. -via Digg

What does a travel photographer do when travel is restricted? In Erin Sullivan's case, she got creative at home. For her photo series called Our Great Indoors, Sullivan built landscapes using food! Pancake mountains, broccoli forests, and gelatin lakes stand in for natural landscapes.



In the photos here, click to the right, and the last image will show you how it's done. See more of Sullivan's work at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid

French comedian Michel Lauzière has a unique act he calls Les Klaxons, performed in a suit covered in horns. You don't need to understand French to follow along as he performs several classical tunes with his body movements at Patrick Sébastien's Plus Grand Cabaret Du Monde. -via The Kid Should See This