Some of the most memorable characters ever were isolationists, who took social distancing to the next level. That means they spent a lot of time alone, some on purpose, but most were merely victims of circumstance. Mel magazine looks into what caused them to be cloistered, how they dealt with loneliness, and whether any lessons were learned, in a list of ten movie and TV characters who spent a lot of time alone. Yeah, the title says ten, but there are more, because there's a bonus roundup of the many hermits of Star Wars.

Harley Quinn was the best part of Suicide Squad, so the producers lost the Joker and made a sequel, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), which was almost always shortened to Birds of Prey. So far, it hasn't made back the production budget, but that could be due to an unfortunate release in February of 2020 -and an R rating. It was released in March to video-on-demand due to theaters shutting down. Some critics liked it, others hated it, so you can watch this Honest Trailer to help you decide whether to watch Birds of Prey. "The link below" reference at the beginning of this video goes to Direct Relief.

People have always been creative when it comes to finding something to eat, and also creative in stretching what you have to feed a family. During food shortages, wartime, or the Great Depression, almost everyone had a hard time obtaining the food they were used to, so they made do. Many of those recipes are still around, like the slugburger.

As you find yourself stretching packs of ground beef, consult the “meat extending” techniques of the Great Depression. When hard times hit the greasy spoons of the American South, restaurant owners supplemented their thinning patties of ground beef or pork with potato flour. Fried, topped with mustard, and slid between buns, the resulting “slugburgers” had perfectly crisp exteriors that gave way to the juicy meat inside. Despite the name, they didn’t contain any slithery creatures. One theory says the snack’s moniker was a reference to counterfeit coins, known as “slugs,” implying that the burger was a sort of culinary impostor.

Today, line cooks tend to use cornmeal, soybean meal, or even crumbled sandwich bread instead of potato flour, and add toppings such as cheese, onions, and pickles.

Funny, when I was a kid, I did not know you could make hamburgers without mixing a whole sleeve of saltines into the ground beef. Then I grew up and found you can save even more money by not buying meat at all. The slugburger is one of the milder desperation recipes you'll find at Atlas Obscura. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Southern Foodways Alliance)

Passover, or Pesach, begins on Wednesday evening at sundown and lasts until April 16th. But how does one celebrate Passover during a lockdown? If you are at home alone, you might have to ask the four questions yourself, no matter how old you are. Finding the proper food may be difficult, but the concept of pikuach nefesh may apply.

Chabad.org has a roundup of information on how to celebrate Passover while social distancing. 

Metafilter has links on how to host a virtual Seder or join one online.

I changed the title to the latest video by Tom Scott, because the title itself changes every time you load it. The number went up by 100,000 views between the time I first encountered it and when I posted it here. That's one of those "whoa" things that he takes only a few seconds to explain, but it's a neat introduction to what he's actually telling us about, which is how computer code makes software communicate with other, totally unrelated software. However, this capability can be used for evil. Still, this kind of code is ephemeral, and won't last forever. He used, as an example, Star Wars weather, which we posted eleven years ago, but I didn't realize Tom Scott was behind it. -via Metafilter

You may have seen some memes going around that draw attention to an anomaly in the Namibian border. The country has an odd "arm" reaching out from its northeast corner over to Zimbabwe, effectively cutting Botswana off from Angola (and not really from Zambia, as the above picture implies).

This border is a leftover from colonial rule, when Namibia was called German Southwest Africa. The Germans negotiated with English colonists for this strip of land so that they could have access to the Zambezi River, and therefore to the east coast of Africa, where they held another colony. Whatever else the British gained in the exchange, they also got the last laugh. Find out why at Amusing Planet.

Remember that Getty Museum challenge to recreate famous artworks at home? You might consider the more difficult paintings, such as those by Pablo Picasso. Picasso's quasi-abstract cubist style presents some challenges, but folks are up for it. Behold, Northern Sparrow's awesome recreation of Picasso’s “A Woman With A Bird.” It required a bird, of course, and some illusion makeup paint. Good job! -via reddit

But that's not the only Picasso recreated. Continue reading to see more Picasso clones, some funnier than others.

Scientists analyze cores taken from glaciers to see what was happening in the atmosphere when that ice formed. One thing they can measure is lead pollution, which spiked during the Industrial Revolution because of so many factories built, and during the 1970s, due to leaded gasoline. But lead pollution goes back much further. The villages of Castelton in the UK is surrounded by medieval castles, and was once a hub of lead mining.

Here, farmers mined and smelted so much lead that it left toxic traces in their bodies—and winds blew lead dust onto a glacier 1500 kilometers away in the Swiss Alps. Loveluck and his colleagues say the glacier preserves a detailed record of medieval lead production, especially when analyzed with a new method that can track deposition over a few weeks or even days.

Lead tracks silver production because it is often found in the same ore, and the team found that the far-flung lead pollution was a sensitive barometer of the medieval English economy. As they report in a study published this week in Antiquity, lead spiked when kings took power, minted silver coins, and built cathedrals and castles. Levels plunged when plagues, wars, or other crises slowed mining and the air cleared. “This is extraordinary—lead levels correlate with the transition of kings,” says historian Joanna Story of the University of Leicester, who was not part of the study.

Most people associate lead pollution with the Industrial Revolution, when lead became widely used in paints, pipes, and ceramics. But researchers have long known that the Romans also absorbed high levels of lead as they smelted silver and other ores. Recently, scientists have identified startling spikes of lead deposited in medieval times in Arctic ice cores and in lake sediments in Europe. A study last year suggested most of the pollution came from mines in Germany.

The new study, however, points to England.

Lead spikes in the Alpine glacial cores correspond to an amazing degree with the recorded history of Britain's rulers. Read the record of pollution at Science magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Mango salsa)

Dixiedo is another fox who lives at Save a Fox Rescue. When she was being recorded on a smartphone, her handler says, "Don't you do anything to my phone." So of course, Dixiedo makes off with it, as fast and as far as she can, laughing all the way. What's remarkable is that she manages to capture the chase from a variety of angles: front view, shadow view, and facial view. -via Boing Boing

The Minneapolis Institute of Art has some rooms from the 18th century for public viewing. Associate Curator of Textiles Nicole LaBouff teamed up with Assistant Curator at the University of Minnesota’s Wangensteen Historical Library Emily Beck to recreate a period-specific alcoholic beverage to serve to visitors in order to give flavor to the experience. They consulted recipe books from the 1700s, which contained plenty of alcohol, often in medicinal preparations. Back then, the line between food, booze, and medicine was pretty much non-existent. Cookbooks contained recipes for "plague water," to ward off or treat bubonic plague.     

The recipe on which Beck and LaBouff hoped to base their recreation, meanwhile, called for two dozen herbs and herbal infusions, including green walnuts, elderflower, juniper berries, and “Venice treacle,” an early-modern apothecary cure that included viper’s flesh, skink bellies, and opium.

When Beck and LaBouff set out to replicate plague water recipes, they realized that—unlike early-modern Europeans—they could not try this at home. Home distillation is illegal in the United States, and the daunting list of aromatics wasn’t available in the grocery store.

The historians turned to Dan Oskey, founder of Tattersall Distilling in Minneapolis, to recreate the drinks. Oskey, LaBouff, and Beck combed hundreds of historical recipes, settling on several sweeter, more straightforward options, such as pear ratafia, a fruity cordial, and milk punch, a rum-based brew that had fortified transatlantic sailors. Plague water was the most complicated. When Oskey encountered the recipe’s old-fashioned language, he says, his first reaction was, “What the heck does that mean?”

But they managed to come up with a nice cocktail using what they could find and reasonable facsimiles for what they couldn't. A couple of years later, the art center is closed to the public, and Tattersall Distilling has switched to making a more modern plague water: hand sanitizer. So Beck and LaBouff have made their Plague Water-Inspired Cocktail recipe public, along with the story behind it, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Tattersall Distilling)

Soooo...I made a thread of animals that should be Pokemon. Please enjoy :) pic.twitter.com/9ORdObii04

— Open Ocean Exploration (@RebeccaRHelm) April 2, 2020

Rebecca Helm is a biology professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She collected images and videos of the most cute and colorful creatures you've ever seen in one Twiiter thread! They aren't Pokemon, but they are just as charming and they have the advantage of being real. Shown above is the blue sea dragon (Glaucus atlanticus), a kind of nudibranch. But that's just the beginning.

Blue button jellies. They will hypnotize you with their floating tentacles. Can also trap tiny crustaceans. Excellent distraction during Pokemon Multi Battle. Can be defeated by blue sea dragon. Do not mix. https://t.co/7p9IjA4CFX

— Open Ocean Exploration (@RebeccaRHelm) April 2, 2020

Oh, there are a lot more of these in her Twitter thread, and they aren't limited to ocean creatures. There are birds, insects, land animals, and even a plant or two. Just the thing to make you appreciate the diversity of the world's wildlife. -via Digg

I'm not at all clear on how movie marketing is done overseas, but there are apparently incidents in which poster art is delegated to a crew who has never seen a trailer for the film, or even stills. Poland in particular must have some kind of law until recently that no information other than the title could be shared with the marketing staff.

See 18 movie posters that will give you a whole new, if inaccurate, image of the movie at Cracked.

If you've never heard the term aquafaba before, you're in good company. It is a vegan secret, used to make a light, fluffy meringue without eggs. It is the liquid you drain from a can of chickpeas!

The starchy liquid is a great binder directly from the can, but what really makes it magical is that it whips and creates a foam. Aquafaba is therefore able to trap air, giving items structure at the same time it delivers a fluffy crumb and lift.

Whipped aquafaba can be added to recipes, such as muffins, to make them light and fluffy, or you can add sugar and vanilla and make a meringue for pies and candies.

As it does with egg whites, adding a stabilizing ingredient improved the structure of whipped aquafaba. In sweet recipes, we usually used sugar. But there’s another ingredient we often whip into egg whites to add stability: cream of tartar. But why?

Cream of tartar is acidic—when added to egg whites, it prevents the egg proteins from bonding too tightly to each other and denatures them so they can create a foam that traps air bubbles and water more quickly and holds them in place for less weeping.   

America's Test Kitchen whipped up some aquafaba meringue made with only aquafaba, with sugar, and with sugar and cream of tartar to compare the results. They also tested the juice from other kinds of beans to compare with chickpea aquafaba. Soy milk, coffee, vanilla extract, and now meringue -is there anything bean juice cannot do? Read about aquafaba and its properties at America's Test Kitchen. -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Hagar Or Ringel Maman (הגר אור רינגל ממן))

In 2017, researchers aboard the RV Polarstern drilled through and pulled up sediment from the ocean off the coast of Antarctica. When they examined the core, they were surprise to find a layer of a very different color at about 30 meters down. Geologist Johann Klages from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, describes the discovery.

"The first analyses indicated that, at a depth of 27 to 30 metres (88 to 98 ft) below the ocean floor, we had found a layer originally formed on land, not in the ocean."

They were in uncharted territory, in more ways than one. Nobody had ever pulled a Cretaceous Period sample out of the ground from such a southern point on the globe. Even so, the researchers can't have been prepared for what closer examination with X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans would reveal.

Back on land, scans described an intricate network of fossilised plant roots. Microscopic analyses also found evidence of pollen and spores, all pointing to the preserved remains of an ancient rainforest that existed in Antarctica approximately 90 million years ago, eons before the landscape was transformed into a barren province of ice.

The find was surprising, as plate tectonics calculations put the sample even closer to the South Pole than it is today. The next step is to figure out how Antarctica was warm enough to support such an environment 90 million years ago. One theory says it had to do with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Read about the discovery at ScienceAlert. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Alfred-Wegener-Institut/James McKay/CC-BY-4.0)

Servals are wildcats, although they act a lot like a house cat, hunting for birds and rodents. A house cat with long legs and big ears that make their faces look tiny. Yeah, sometime people keep them as pets, but it's not a good idea.