For a long time, common knowledge about human migration held that people who crossed over the Beringian land bridge stayed in the far north until around 13,000 years ago, when they began to populate North America, moving gradually into South America. But subsequent discoveries keep pushing this timeline back further. Now a cave in Mexico has evidence that humans lived there least 26,500 years ago.

Chiquihuite cave is perched high in the Astillero Mountains, 9000 feet above sea level and 3,280 feet higher than the valley below. Excavations there were launched when a 2012 test pit unearthed a few stone artifacts that suggested a human presence dating back to the Last Glacial Maximum between 18,000 and 26,000 years ago. More extensive excavations detailed in the new study were carried out in 2016 and 2017, unearthing some 1,900 stone points or possible tools used for cutting, chopping, scraping, or as weapons.

The artifacts were dated by 46 different radiocarbon samples of adjacent animal bones, charcoal, and sediment samples. To the team, they represent a previously unknown technological tradition of advanced flaking skills. More than 90 percent of the artifacts were of greenish or blackish stone, though those colors are less common locally, suggesting to the authors that they were singled out as desirable. The bulk of the material is from deposits dating to between 13,000 and 16,600 years ago, leading the scientists to hypothesize that the humans may have used the cave for more than 10,000 years.

Evidence from this cave and other sites indicate that people traveled from Asia to the Americas either much earlier than previously thought, or else they traveled across glaciers. Read about the implications of these finds at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Mads Thomsen)

Canadian artists Catherine King and Wayne Adams live on an enormous floating island they built out of discarded and recycled materials on the west coast of Vancouver Island. They have lived there for almost thirty years now. The island, dubbed Freedom Cove, is 25 miles (by boat) from the nearest town, and doesn't have electricity, but it has what the couple needs.

The compound has everything you could possibly think of and more: a dance floor, an art gallery, a candle factory, four greenhouses, six solar panels, and access to a small waterfall that provides constant running water.

Read about Freedom Cove and how it came about at CNN. -via Digg

George Miller is the singer for the Kaisers and the New Piccadillys. He's also an artist and production designer. The lockdown meant he had plenty of time, so he's put that to use making marionette puppets of musical legends of the past. Ursula Cleary made clothing for them, and Chris Taylor designed retro-style art boxes for tech.

I’d made some marionettes for a video a few years earlier and since then had been toying with the idea of making one of Link Wray but never seemed to have the time, so lockdown seemed the ideal opportunity. I liked the notion of spending time making something that had no ultimate purpose other than self amusement and no deadline for completion.

Miller had more time than he imagined, and the collection of marionettes grew to a dozen or so. See them all and read an interview with Miller at Dangerous Minds. 

George Orwell published his book Animal Farm in 1945 as an allegory for the political history of the Soviet Union. It's been used ever since then in schools, although not always smoothly. I read it for a junior high English class, which was not coordinated with our history class, as we never studied the USSR at all. World history class never even made it to the 20th century. But Animal Farm has a history of its own, including being shunned by Second World nations.

5. The Soviet Union banned Animal Farm until the Cold War was almost over.

In 1988, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy liberalized the USSR, a Latvian journal called Rodnik published Animal Farm in four installments. The Russian government newspaper Izvestia printed an excerpt later that year, saying: “It is good that the prose of this great English writer reaches our readers, albeit late.”

6. Many other governments have banned Animal Farm.

Beyond the Soviet Union, Animal Farm has also been banned at various times in countries like Cuba (where the book was set on fire by the government), North Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and countries in Africa. In Malawi, government minister Albert Muwalo was charged with treason and hanged in 1977; one alleged piece of evidence was his ownership of Animal Farm, a banned book. And in 1991, Kenya’s government banned a Swahili-language play based on Animal Farm that attacked corruption.

Read the rest of the ten facts about Animal Farm at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Coentor)

A Brooklyn family with a pedigreed French bulldog welcomed five puppies into the world in the summer of 1904. Sadly, the mother dog died only two days later, and the puppies were in dire need. The owners contacted the local pound for a possible canine wet nurse.

According to the news reports, the pound did not have a suitable dog to take on the important job. However, the superintendent remembered a stray cat that had recently been dropped off at the shelter with her newborn kittens.

He explained to Mrs. Fahnestock that all but one of the kittens had died, and the mother cat appeared to be grieving deeply over her loss. He thought she would accept the motherless puppies and nurse them.

Mrs. Fahnestock agreed to the experiment, and welcomed the mother cat and kitten into her home. The puppies accepted their new feline mother right away. The mother cat, in turn, purred joyously and seemed very happy to have these new fur babies.

The arrangement was custom-made for the papers of the time, so the cat, named Lady Gray, along with her kitten Bill Gray and the five French bulldogs became locally famous. The puppies later went on to win awards in dog shows, while always staying affectionately loyal to their cat mother. Read about the interspecies adoption saga at The Hatching Cat.

It turns out that yes, you can print a house. Watch as a computer-controlled printer on a huge (10 meter square) scaffold squirts concrete in a precise pattern to construct a two-story house in Antwerp, Belgium.  

Kamp C, the provincial Center for Sustainability and Innovation in Construction, printed the first house in Europe. This is the first printed two story building worldwide. The house has a floor surface of ninety square meters and was printed with the largest 3D concrete printer in Europe.

The printer only did the basic structure, while craftsmen installed windows and did the finishing work. This house is a prototype, but someday they might take this show on the road. -via Geekologie

Scientists at the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary were just trying to boost production of Russian sturgeon, using hi-tech reproduction technology and an American sperm donor fish, and ended up with a fish that isn't supposed to exist. This story brings to mind two pertinent quotes from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should," and "Life, uh, finds a way." Researcher Attila Mozsár described the experiment.

Russian sturgeons (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii) are critically endangered and also economically important: They're the source of much of the world's caviar. These fish can grow to more than 7 feet long (2.1 meters), living on a diet of molluscs and crustaceans. American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) filter-feed off of zooplankton in the waters of the Mississippi River drainage basin, where water from the Mississippi and its tributaries drain into. They, too, are large, growing up to 8.5 feet (2.5 m) long. Like the sturgeon, the have a slow rate of growth and development puts them at risk of overfishing. They've also lost habitat to dams in the Mississippi drainage, according to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. The two species last shared a common ancestor 184 million years ago, according to the Times.

Nevertheless, they were able to breed —— much to the surprise of Mozsár and his colleagues. The researchers were trying to breed Russian sturgeon in captivity through a process called gynogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. In gynogenesis, a sperm triggers an egg's development but fails to fuse to the egg's nucleus. That means its DNA is not part of the resulting offspring, which develop solely from maternal DNA. The researchers were using American paddlefish sperm for the process, but something unexpected happened. The sperm and egg fused, resulting in offspring with both sturgeon and paddlefish genes.

The picture here shows a sturgeon on top, then three of the hybrid offspring below it, all looking quite different from each other. About 100 of these hybrids, which the scientists call sturddlefish, now live at the institute, and it is not clear whether they can reproduce on their own. Read about the  creatures at LiveScience. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jenő Káldy et al/CC BY 4.0)

In the 19th century, tuberculosis was rampant. The disease attacked the lungs, and could ravage the body for years. TB was incurable at the time; patients either recovered or didn't. The only treatment was clean, dry, mountain air and pleasant surroundings. Sanitariums sprung up around the western US, and Colorado Springs was perfectly suited for tuberculosis patients due to its altitude, sunshine, moderate temperatures, and wide open spaces. The town began to lure TB patients soon after it was founded in 1871.

Tens of thousands of people went to Colorado Springs every year drawn by the lure of tuberculosis treatment. Once they checked into a sanatorium, patients were subjected to a range of bizarre treatment, such as forced feeding, mandatory bed rest, hypnotism, sunbathing and sleeping outside. The routine was torturous.

Each patient was forced to eat twice as much they wanted. A typical diet consisted of three large meals supplemented by raw eggs and several glasses of milk throughout the day. Some patients were fed laxatives to keep all that food moving. The idea was to rebuild the frail bodies of the patients wrecked by the disease. It was not uncommon for those who spent long months at the sanatorium to gain between 25 to 50 pounds.

Fresh air was considered the most vital of treatments, and for this purpose, nearly all sanatoriums had well-ventilated sleeping huts built in the style of teepees.

Those sleeping huts grew by the thousands, and some of them are still around. Read about Colorado Springs and the tuberculosis sufferers who fell in love with it at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum)

The game Operation debuted in 1965, and so generations of kids have tried to remove a patient's funny bone, spare ribs, or butterflies from the stomach. If you screwed up, an electric buzzer and a red nose pointed out your failure. The tasks are not at all realistic ....or are they? Real surgeons love the game, and many of them receive an edition for medical school graduation. Some were inspired by it, or used it for practice for their future profession. Dr. Anthony Rossi of Sloan Kettering said,

I actually played Operation a lot as a kid — I was obsessed with it. From an early age I knew I wanted to be a doctor, and I loved that game because of the precision that you needed. It’s also the rare game where both winning and losing was fun — even hitting the buzzer was fun. I’m left-handed, so I’d play the game left-handed and then I’d try it right-handed just to see how good I was. I love that game so much I recently bought it for my nephews and told them to try it with their dominant hand, and then their non-dominant hand.  

Rossi and two other surgeons are quite familiar with Operation, and take us through the various organs included in the game, explain how it builds fine motor skills, and describe what happens when you "touch the sides" in real-life surgery, at Mel magazine.

(Image credit: PaRappa 276)

The title of this point-and-click game is, I believe, a pun on the term six feet under, because there are actually a dozen cats involved. Anyway, the premise of Six Cats Under is that you are a cat lady who has died. As a ghost, you try to free all your cats from the apartment, but you don't have enough strength to open the door. You must manipulate what you can to get the cats to free themselves. This is not easy, and you might drive yourself crazy clicking on everything in the home. But give it a shot, because it's fun as well as maddening. It might be easier as a group project. If you become seriously stuck and want to give up, here's a play through video that will reveal all.  - via Metafilter

If you love the taste of KFC chicken nuggets, but regret that they come from chickens, maybe you'll want to eventually try some nuggets that are 3D printed, or to be precise, "bio-printed." KFC is taking the plunge, in collaboration with a Russian company called 3D Bioprinting Solutions. From the KFC press release:

KFC is taking the next step in its innovative concept of creating a "restaurant of the future" by launching the development of innovative 3D bioprinting technology to create chicken meat in cooperation with the 3D Bioprinting Solutions research laboratory. The idea of ​​crafting the “meat of the future” arose among partners in response to the growing popularity of a healthy lifestyle and nutrition, the annual increase in demand for alternatives to traditional meat and the need to develop more environmentally friendly methods of food production. The project aims to create the world's first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets. They will be as close as possible in both taste and appearance to the original KFC product, while being more environmentally friendly to produce than ordinary meat. Receiving a final product for testing is already planned for the fall of 2020 in Moscow.

3D Bioprinting Solutions is developing additive bioprinting technology using chicken cells and plant material, allowing it to reproduce the taste and texture of chicken meat almost without involving animals in the process. KFC will provide its partner with all of the necessary ingredients, such as breading and spices, to achieve the signature KFC taste. At the moment, there are no other methods available on the market that could allow the creation of such complex products from animal cells.

You probably won't be able to travel to Russia to try them out yourself, unless you are already there, but if all goes well, 3D printed nuggets could become part of the menu of the future. I think I'll just have a salad. -via Boing Boing

The small village of Linby in England had no strategic value in World War II, but it ended up on the radio as a Luftwaffe bombing target. Or did it? It made for a good story, and maybe that's all it is. Tom Scott discusses the accuracy of historical accounts and whether it really matters in the long run. -via reddit

Russian cosmonauts are pretty tough. They always return from their space missions on land, which can be a pretty bumpy ride even when everything goes perfectly. They used to carry guns, to protect themselves from bears they might encounter before the search team reaches them. I looked up Boris Volynov, and he walked away from this crash with some broken teeth. He also went into space again after that incident. I also looked up Linda Morgan.

However, every one of these 21 pictofacts about amazing survival stories comes with a link to the original Cracked article they came from, so you have some extra reading ahead if any of them intrigue you.   

Early in 2019, reddit artists got hooked on a painting and made a spontaneous recursive project of painting the previous artist holding the painting. One of those artists was seamuswray. This past weekend, he's found himself stuck in another recursion loop, this one of his own making. First he did the self-portrait above, and submitted a photo of himself painting it. That was Friday. Saturday, he posted another, of himself painting the top photo.

Sunday, he couldn't help but post another photo, this one again showing himself drawing the previous photo. I guess he was in too much of a hurry for paint.

Will he have another picture ready for Monday, or will he have to stop and sleep or maybe even change clothes? You can check seamuswray's profile to find out. Or Instagram.

Update: Yep, there he is.

Well this ever end?

A puzzle recently posted at 3 Quarks Daily will make you think. Or at least it should make you think.

There are two boxes on a table, one red and one green. One contains a treasure. The red box is labelled “exactly one of the labels is true”. The green box is labelled “the treasure is in this box.”

Can you figure out which box contains the treasure?

Now, before you decide that you know, pay attention to how the question is asked. The answer and an explanation is at The Universe of Discourse. The author also addresses the many ways you could ague that you are right, even if you aren't. -via Nag on the Lake