In 1892, a murder case lit up newspapers in Louisville, Kentucky, as it happened in a rather well-known brothel run by Emma Austin. On the morning of September 9, Mrs. Austin made a hearty pancake breakfast. Despite several other people being on the premises, the only ones to eat were Austin and her star prostitute, Eugenia Sherrill. Both women soon felt deathly ill.  

At first, the physician, Dr. Brennan, presumed the women were suffering from nothing worse than a case of severe food poisoning--an ailment sadly common in pre-refrigeration summers--and gave them the medicine appropriate for such cases. However, Austin and Sherrill continued to deteriorate. Their eyes dilated, they were covered in a cold sweat, and, most alarming of all, they had begun vomiting blood. The doctor soon realized the women had been poisoned, probably deliberately.

This shocking development opened up an embarrassing can of worms for everyone involved. As I said above, Mrs. Jackson was left trying to explain why she, a seemingly respectable lady, had spent the last two weeks living in a brothel. Eugenia Sherrill’s position was even more mortifying: prostitution was merely her secret side career. Up until now, she was known to society only as a member of one of Kentucky’s most prominent and respectable families. Even worse, for the past year she had been married to Edward Sherrill, a prosperous traveling salesman. In her agony, poor Mrs. Sherrill was frantic to be brought to her home so she could die without her double life being discovered. Unfortunately, she was far too ill to be moved. Dr. Brennan was helpless to save them. Eugenia died at 12: 45 p.m. Mrs. Austin’s sufferings ended two hours later.

The two women were found to have been poisoned, but it wasn't clear whether either or both were the intended targets. And there was no dearth of suspects. Was it one of Sherrill's clients who had stayed the night? Was it the grocer downstairs? Was it a family member? Or possibly a jealous rival from another brothel, or someone's wife? Was it a suicide? The investigation dragged on, and the local papers printed every scandalous detail, including the names of men who visited Austin's house of ill repute. Read the tale of the Louisville brothel murders at Strange Company.

Phi Compile and his four-year-old son Ollie made a stop-motion video by moving magnets around on their refrigerator! The final result is pretty cool, we are also impressed that he could keep the child engaged through the "few hundred" still photos.

Too long but it kept Ollie off my Switch

— Phi Compile (@phi6) June 28, 2020

See, you never know when an attempt to distract your children might lead to a viral video! -via Digg

Now, this is one weird-looking animal. It's called Thylacosmilus, and it was a South American marsupial that lived around three million years ago. Note the huge saber teeth, as big as those of the saber-toothed cat, or Smilodon, that lived quite a bit after Thylacosmilus. But even weirder is the lower jaw that accommodated those teeth. A comparison between Thylacosmilus and Smilodon reveals that despite the teeth, they were very different animals.  

At a time when South America was still an island, Thylacosmilus did not occupy Smilodon’s apex niche. Large “terror birds,” which could grow taller than a person, with a two-foot long skull that was mostly beak, may have been the dominant carnivores. Thylacosmilus appears to have filled a unique ecological niche, one that even modern scavengers, such as the relatively indiscriminate, bone-chomping hyena, don’t quite fit: a scavenger that was careful with its food, targeting the softest tissues, such as internal organs rather than muscle or bone.

Read about Thylacosmilus and its unique ecological niche at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Jose manuel canete)

Rok Andic made a little wordless cartoon that is less than two minutes long, yet manages to tickle the funny bone just right. Did I say wordless? It's got a punch line that you can see coming, but is still so satisfying. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Scythian culture went all out for burials. High-status people were even buried in underground log cabins, surrounded by artifacts that wold be useful in the afterlife. The boot shown above was worn by a Scythian woman buried in the Altai Mountains of Siberia around 2300 years ago. The permafrost helped to preserve it in amazingly fine condition, but even if it weren't so old, the craftwork and decorations would still impress us.  

The red cloth-wrapped leather bootie, now part of the State Hermitage Museum's collection, is a stunner, trimmed in tin, pyrite crystals, gold foil and glass beads secured with sinew. Fanciful shapes—ducklings, maybe?—decorate the seams. But the true mindblower is the remarkable condition of its sole.

Speculation is rampant on Reddit, as to this bottom layer’s pristine condition:

Maybe the boot belonged to a high-ranking woman who wouldn’t have walked much…

Or Scythians spent so much time on horseback, their shoe leather was spared…

Or perhaps it’s a high quality funeral garment, reserved for exclusively post-mortem use…

I would guess number three. I can imagine this woman spending her own free time preparing the garments she would eventually be buried in. Or maybe there was a local industry dedicated to making burial boots. Read more about Scythian burial practices at Open Culture. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image source: Museum Archive)

Police procedurals, whodunnits, and courtroom dramas are a big part of our entertainment, but that doesn't mean they are all that accurate. Crime fiction uses all sorts of shortcuts and tropes that just aren't so in real life, but they will keep using them as long as they create conflict and move the plot along -and ensure that the "good guys" win.  

See 14 of these myths busted in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

It's enough of a shock to find you are pregnant with twins. It's an even greater shock to find you are carrying twins in two different uteruses! That happened recently to a British woman.

Kelly Fairhurst, 28, only learned she had uterus didelphys, a condition where a woman has two wombs, when she went for her 12-week scan. She was also told she was carrying twins, one in each womb.

“The twins could be identical. The condition itself is quite rare but they went on to tell me that it was a one in a 50m chance for me to conceive twins in each womb,” she told the Sun.

Fairhurst, who was also surprised to be told she had two cervixes, already has two daughters, aged three and four. “With my second baby they said that I might have a bicornuate uterus, which means it’s not fully formed. So when I went for this scan, I was really surprised to learn that I have two of them.

To forestall the possibility that Fairhurst might have two different labor and deliveries, the twins will be born by cesarian section. Read more at the Guardian.  -via Damn Interesting

(Unrelated image credit: David Roseborough)

These guys are experts on skateboards, and they are fearless, too! But the real hero of the day is the guy who always has the ramp at the right place at the right time. Thrasher magazine gives him the props he deserves in this video. -via Digg

The Fourth of July always brings us warnings about keeping dogs indoors, because many of them are terrified of fireworks. It's the loud sounds that spark their fear, which you might also notice during thunderstorms. But some dogs are so nonchalant about booming noises that they can carry out their duties during a bomb attack or open warfare. What makes the difference between the two types of canine reactions?

Dogs that have little to no negative associations with loud sounds can still be found cowering during a storm, while others who had a scary early experience can learn, often through counterconditioning and desensitization, to overcome the fright. One explanation for this can be found in temperament. Unlike personality and mood, which are more fluid emotional states, temperament is a deeper, more hardwired system affected by genetics and early development. Temperament is shaped by epigenetics, or the way an animal’s genes are influenced by external factors, and this can play a significant role in the dogs’ inherent predisposition to stress, anxiety and fear.

For example, studies in humans and animals show that mothers who experience high levels of stress during pregnancy can pass on a propensity for anxiety to their young via the stress hormone cortisol. When signaled by a stress-inducing event, the brain’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) becomes active and produces cortisol, which then travels throughout the body keeping an individual on “high alert.” High cortisol levels in the mother’s bloodstream have subsequent negative effects on the developing baby, or in this case, puppy.

But that's just one factor. There are quite a few others that can determine how a dog reacts to fireworks, which you can read about at Smithsonian. They also have a technique you can try to help your dog become less fearful.

Crime is much more meaningful when you can relate personally to the victim (or the killer, if you are that sort). We may find it hard to personally relate to people who died 8,000 years ago, but at least now we can put a face on one man whose head was erected on a stake after he was killed in a violent manner.

Researchers from Stockholm University and the Cultural Heritage Foundation found the original skull, along with several others, in 2011 at the Kanaljorden site near the Motala Ström river. The remains of 10 people—nine adults and one infant—were found stacked atop a thick layer of large stones. All adult skulls exhibited signs of blunt force trauma prior to death, which may explain how they died. Some skulls, including the reconstructed skull, had evidence of past injuries that healed. No mandibles were found at the site.

Strangely, three adult male skulls displayed signs of sharp force trauma after death, in manner consistent with the skulls having been mounted to stakes. And indeed, one of the specimens still had a wooden stake sticking out of the cranium. This was an odd post-death ritual for hunter-gatherers and not something seen commonly until the Middle Ages.

Swedish forensic artist Oscar Nilsson reconstructed the man's face from the blues in his DNA, evidence from the archaeological site, and what we know of the area's history. Read how he did it at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Oscar Nilsson/S. Gummesson et al., 2018)

Steve Martin performs his song "Office Supplies" from his new album The Long-Awaited Album, in collaboration with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who don't have anything else to do today. Cue the banjo jokes! -via Everlasting Blort

Bob Geldof organized the charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas" in 1984 to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. It raised more than $28 million, but it wasn't enough, so he decided to go bigger the next summer with an all-star concert. Thirty-five years later, Live Aid is still considered to be the biggest music event ever, featuring 50 of the music industry's biggest stars on two continents. It wasn't easy to pull off.

“He had to call Elton and say 'Queen are in and Bowie's in,' and of course they weren't,” production manager Andy Zweck told The Guardian of Geldof’s tactics. “Then he’d call Bowie and say 'Elton and Queen are in.' It was a game of bluff.”

With the help of producer Michael C. Mitchell, Live Aid sold broadcast rights to 150 countries, at least 22 of which aired telethons. Both MTV and ABC carried the feed in the United States, the latter in the form of a primetime special hosted by Dick Clark. All told, Live Aid raised approximately $140 million.

Read about the production of Live Aid, some of its unique stories, and its lasting legacy at Mental Floss.

Walter Murch was contemplating bar-headed geese. These geese spend their summers in Kazakhstan or Mongolia, and their winters in India. To migrate, they must fly over the Himalayan Mountains. That's a feat that requires world-class lungs, so Murch decided to write a story for his granddaughter explaining how they work.

All mammals, including us, breathe in through the same opening that we breathe out. Can you imagine if our digestive system worked the same way? What if the food we put in our mouths, after digestion, came out the same way? It doesn’t bear thinking about! Luckily, for digestion, we have a separate in and out. And that’s what the birds have with their lungs: an in point and an out point. They also have air sacs and hollow spaces in their bones. When they breathe in, half of the good air (with oxygen) goes into these hollow spaces, and the other half goes into their lungs through the rear entrance. When they breathe out, the good air that has been stored in the hollow places now also goes into their lungs through that rear entrance, and the bad air (carbon dioxide and water vapor) is pushed out the front exit. So it doesn’t matter whether birds are breathing in or out: Good air is always going in one direction through their lungs, pushing all the bad air out ahead of it.

How did birds get such great lungs? They inherited them from dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs! When I was growing up in the 1940s, there was a category in biology called Aves, which meant birds. But scientists have now folded Aves into a category called Dinosauria, and those dinosauria, like pigeons and seagulls and geese, are flying all around us today. If you want to know what a dinosaur probably tasted like, eat some chicken!

But how did dinosaurs evolve the great lungs they eventually bequeathed to birds? The answer involves plants, gravity, fungus, and oxygen. Oh yeah, and dinosaurs. The entire story, delightfully told at an understandable level, is at Nautilus.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Rodrick rajive lal)

Magnus Egerstedt of Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering watched sloths in Costa Rica and was inspired to create a robot that was just as energy-efficient, if a bit slow. The result is SlothBot, a robot that slowly monitors the environment at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

Built by robotics engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to take advantage of the low-energy lifestyle of real sloths, SlothBot demonstrates how being slow can be ideal for certain applications. Powered by solar panels and using innovative power management technology, SlothBot moves along a cable strung between two large trees as it monitors temperature, weather, carbon dioxide levels, and other information in the Garden’s 30-acre midtown Atlanta forest.

All that, and it's cute, too! -via Laughing Squid

For thousands of years, men wore hats in public, first for protection, but soon after for decoration. The hat design signaled a man's status and fashion sense, but could also broadcast his profession, affiliation, wealth, or ancestry.  

So how is it that mens hats, after playing such an active, evolving role on both cultural and political levels, seemed to virtually disappear from everyday society? There are a few facts, stats, and theories that come together to explain their gradual retreat from popularity. For one, the rise and evolution of the automobile meant men didn’t need to cover up their heads as much for protection from the elements.

The Hat Research Foundation (HRF), which was apparently a real thing, also found that 19 % of men in 1947 who didn’t wear hats said it was because they triggered the trauma of war associated with their uniforms.

There were other reasons, but the real point of the article is to celebrate the history of men's hats in all their former glory, in pictures that span more than a century, at Messy Nessy Chic.